I've been having email contact with the Poor Clare Colletine Community lately, whom I spent almost twenty years growing up next to in North Wales. I initially emailed them because I visited their Convent earlier this year when I was home to see Mum in the nursing home, and the experience affected me deeply; it was very healing. It's been lovely to have the contact with them, and keep up my connection with St Clare and St Francis, and feel there are presences and people out there who are praying for Mum, for all my family really. It makes holding the hugeness of our situation easier to bear.

Today, they sent me some pictures, which was touching, and I've included them in this post as it was St Clare's Day on Saturday.



Here is the dormitory where she lived and died.



And here's a picture of Mum before her last stroke, opening presents on her 69th birthday. I haven't been able to look at photos of her for a while now, it's been a bit too much to take. So it's good to look again, and see her in all her loveliness and with her hair in plaits.

Sunday Morning

First of all, apologies to all who are still reading my blog for the ridiculously long time since I last posted. I've been caught up in other things, mainly making music. I seem to find it hard to keep up both music and writing equally, so either one or the other tends to suffer.

I'm just back from Mary Magdelen's church. It's an eccentric church, so it doesn't surprise me that I was drawn, via various links, to that one. The priest isn't exactly run of the mill, and the congregation - well, they're a motley crue of oddballs, eccentrics, underprivileged young people and addicts.

I rarely leave church without having shed at least a few tears. It's powerful on many levels, and some of those levels are in fact a strong sense of alienation from some of what Catholicism teaches and preaches. This, combined with quite an overwhelming sense of devotion and my heart feeling moved in ways it hasn't before, makes it potent and unsettling.

I was talking to a Buddhist friend last night about Catholicism, and he was talking about his views on the Christian God. In his mind, God is a powerful force, but one which is essentially still an other power, and therefore ultimately limited. On the other hand, in Buddhism, sunyata or emptiness, the Buddhist vision of reality, transcends all dualistic notions of self and other. Therefore, the notion of a God being somehow outside of ourselves, or something/someone to worship no longer makes sense within this Buddhist framework, because there is nothing to worship and no one to 'do' the worshipping. I guess that follows then that there is no sin, no sinner, no saviour, no heaven or hell.

However, I'm not so sure about this. To be honest, I don't think I've yet met a single person who seems to have transcended this 'dualistic' state of mind. And I think inevitably, even within Buddhist thinking, non-duality, like everything else becomes a concept, one we can talk about, even debate or argue over. It can become as clear in our minds as God can be to a Christian. Buddhists have their beliefs just as Christians have their beliefs, noble beliefs, I think, by which they can structure their lives, but I personally feel it is very hard to talk about such subtleties and mysteries of reality at all, and once I get into the realms of what my friend was talking about, I'm not entirely sure how relevant it is to me at this point in my life, or how easy it is to work out.

The sense I have during Holy communion, despite not even being able to take it myself, is of a power or spirit or divinity coming through. And yes, these terms, spirit or divinity and so on are limited in a way by their language of 'otherness'. But my personal experience of what one might call God has felt profound and mysterious, in some respects even more so than any experiences I've had through meditation. I've felt such a powerful element of surrender in Catholic Mass, and of something else stepping in which does not enter through one's own will or effort, but simply by being open to it. A force of love entering oneself, and purifying all that it comes into contact with.

I have said to some of my Catholic friends that my interest and intrigue in Catholicism has nothing to do with wanting to feel like I belong or needing a sense of community with others. I've already got that in my life in so many ways. I'm not looking to have a conversion, I've already had that when I first discovered Buddhism over twenty years ago. Some Catholics have said to me that when they came to Catholicism it was a coming home, and that they find supreme comfort in it. For me, I've felt like the last thing I want from Catholicism or any other spiritual path is to 'come home'. I'm more and more wandering away from 'home', away from the places I thought were the answer, because as soon as I feel like I've arrived, like I'm home, I get comfortable and want to put my feet up and stop searching. Once I think I know the answer, generally, I'm in danger of becoming a bit blinded. However, as I kneeled in church today on that hard wooden block, and Fr Ray lifted the bread high into the air and muttered, I realised that I'm not sure that this is totally true.

When Mum had this last stroke which brought her near death and has kept her in a perpetual near death state for the last year, nothing really could touch the vastness of that situation. And I wanted Buddhism to be the thing that came along and took hold of my grief and gave me a sense of something that could meet this huge event. And I guess, in some ways it did. But really, it was, by various turns of events, Catholicism that offered itself up and somehow met that need in me for something that could hold what was happening to my Mum, to my family and to me. It wasn't dwelling on sunyata that did it, it was experiencing God in some funny convent chapel with a load of eccentric nuns, next door to the house I grew up in. It was in the feeling that came upon me when I left church one evening and was walking down my street, that I was truly loved, and that this love was greater than anything I've been able to imagine before, which made me almost fall to the ground. And when I go up to the priest and receive a blessing, when I pray, when I witness communion, I have to say, yes, I do feel comfort, a deep comfort, a comfort I never thought I needed. And it does help me to be able to get on my knees and just pray for my Mum and for my family, for myself in a sense, because I realised in Mass today - my family and I need all the help we can get at the moment. It does bring me some consolation, and I don't think that is a bad thing. In fact, I think consolation is a beautiful thing.

The situation with Mum is so heart-breaking on some level, it doesn't really help me ultimately to think in terms of karma, or the four noble truths, or even impermanence. To an extent it does, but the truth is, on some level I'm starting to more deeply understand what life is, what death is, and it's a fucking hard one to face, but I'm facing it. Impermanence is there at every turn. What I really need is love, a love that knows no limits, that seeps into every crack in every broken heart and eases the pain. I want my Mum to be prayed for, given consolation, a balm upon her weary forehead, and I want holiness to surround her. At the moment, going to Mass puts me in contact with a much needed sense of benevolence.

I don't see God as outside or within. I don't know if it's both or neither. It is a mystery I cannot explain. I'm happy for now to leave it like that. This mystery they call the Holy trinity, the body and the blood, crucifixion and resurrection, the wounding and the healing, this brings me comfort at a time when I thought comfort was gone forever, and that it was a luxury or privilege for those who haven't yet had to contend with the reality of death.

Mother's Day

They are selling cut-price flowers in Tesco's, for this special day, for all those last minute sons and daughters.

I came back from Wales yesterday, on a long Pendolino train which arrived at 11 o'clock in the evening, then I caught the last bus home. Today, I am shattered, and have been attempting to cultivate a pottering state of mind - one which concentrates only on the unpacking of tea cups, the re-aligning and colour-coding of books on shelves, and the playing of crap bubble-bursting logic games on my mobile phone.

I knew at some point today I would need to sit myself at my computer and attempt to recapture the last few days, and I knew it wouldn't be easy. My heart feels like it has been pumped with helium, so swollen with life, it is, so engorged with feeling, I fear it might just sail right out from under my tee-shirt, out of my living-room window and into the dark rainy night.

I arrived in Shotton at lunch time on Tuesday, tired from the train journey, the early start and the lack of sleep I've become used to in these recent weeks of late night music and writing sessions. I have been wanting to see my sister for some time, we met jubilantly on the station platform, caught the train together to our village and walked home.

As I sat in my Mum's old bedroom, which looks out over the playing fields, I could see, through the trees in the distance, the partly hidden walls of our old sprawling family home, the house I grew up in from the age of four until I moved out at eighteen. With its vast tangle of bushes, trees and flowerbeds, its large echoing rooms, the endless driveway, it is still very much a mythical place for me, a place I still dream about, I still think about. It is a house of so many memories, and I'm still trying to understand and come to terms with what went on within its four walls.

I've known for a while that I needed to go and have another look at the old house. I hadn't seen it close up in some years, I've avoided going up our old road. Right next to it stands the Poor Clares Convent, just on the other side of the wall. I hadn't been back to the Convent since I was a little girl. I have known for a while that I've needed to return here aswell. I've wanted to see what it was like on the inside, as I can't remember from all those years ago, and I've needed some answers in order to piece together the missing pieces of a puzzle that is my childhood. So I have needed for a long time to go and visit the Poor Clares. This week felt like the right time.

I can't locate much in my memories of childhood that, looking back, seem normal or ordinary, if there is such a thing. At the time, I thought that was just how things were in family life, it was all that I knew. But I so longed to be normal and ordinary, in an ordinary house, with an ordinary family, ordinary friends, ordinary wishes and an ordinary experience. The more I look at it, though I know that the idea of a normal family-life can only largely be myth, the more I think what an extraordinary existence in some ways my childhood and teenage years were.

However, when I remember, it is usually the bad that I remember, the darker parts, the shadowy overhangs of branches in our gardens, the crawling in the undergrowth. It is the creaking in the loft above my head, it is the white statue on the lawn that, in the night, always seemed to be moving. It is the death of the bumble bee in the spider's web next to our back steps, it is the crying in the night. We kept the back door locked tight and the front door gleaming with red gloss paint and a brass knocker.

This is what stays with me most, the feeling that someone was always hiding in those tall poplars that lined our long driveway, that there were forces out there, surrounding us that me and my family didn't want to know about. We were all haunted.

But then there was the Convent, with its clock that chimed on the half hour, with its Cross that stood tall above all our heads. I would hear the nuns singing in the morning at dawn, as my mother took me by the hand and gently led me down the front lawn when I was little and I couldn't sleep, and the sun was just beginning to shine and birds were just waking.

There was something about the Convent that I didn't understand, but which has affected me all my life. I am only just realising why. The nuns would come and visit my Mum and they would bring us hand-carved Crucifixes and tiny painted nuns made out of wooden clothes pegs. I would keep the prayers of St Francis on my head board, stuck with blutack, and I would pray every night and feel the kindness of those words trickling down my forehead.

..Lord .. grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life..

A thread has run through my veins and through my life from as far back as I can remember. I still don't quite understand it, and it is still unravelling. It runs all the way back to my childhood, to the old house and to those closed Convent walls.

A history of my Religion

A couple of Saturdays ago, I went with a friend to Catholic Mass at a local Brighton church. The yearning to go there had started before Christmas, when feelings of grief over my Mum's condition peaked, and I couldn't see any real point in existence, if where it was to lead ultimately was simply dissolution, pain and death. The need for something big enough to hold this experience came to a crisis point.

What actually moved things on for me was listening to a talk by a Buddhist Order Member, Danavira, on death and dying. I sat, lights out, in my front room for two hours listening to the recording. The impact of it went directly into my veins and bones. It took on the horror, the devastation, the messiness and complexity of death, and ultimately, its utter profundity. Danavira's words were big enough to meet the immensity of my insights and emotions over what it means to live and to die, to be born and to decay.

Months earlier, in October, I walked up Snowdon with Bob, the first time I have ever hiked up a significantly large mountain. I found, in the climbing, that, having seen my Mum in hospital just days before, this was a mountain huge enough and powerful enough to take my grief, big enough even to hold Mum herself in her dying state. So tiny, I was, climbing the vast expanse of its stomach, I knew that the mountain understood and held me fast. Now, I am not speaking symbolically or poetically here when I speak of the mountain holding me, I mean it absolutely literally. I tangibly felt that presence and character of the mountain surrounding me. Because of that, all my grief and sorrow turned to amazement. That one primal, unanswerable question that I ask myself in every moment of grieving, "How come?" returned to me in the single voice of the mountain, not through words, but through a sound. It was a resonating hum, that the peaks and the valleys and the woodlands and birds and the small climbing bodies of hikers were all making. This is it. This is my answer. Everything I need is here.

I was surprised, then, when it was talking about Saints and Catholic Mass with some Catholic friends of mine that aroused such a strong feeling of yearning in me, rather than Buddhism. After over eight years of Buddhism being almost my whole world, in terms of way of life, friends, commitment and philosophy, I have drifted from it over the last few years, in order, I think, to go more deeply into my own experience of how things are and who I am, through writing, poetry and making music. Language, specifically poetry, and music, unlock realms of reality and experience I've never known before, and I can only seem to experience them through creating in this way.

And when I had what might be called mystical experiences some years ago, which totally tore down and rearranged my life, it wasn't Buddhist teaching that I felt was being revealed to me directly, but a direct and non-rational experience of healing, grace, and the presence of angels. This disturbed me greatly at the time, as it didn't fit with what I believed of reality, and not many people around me seemed to know what I was on about; only the the reiki healers, the lost shamans, the acid casualties, the people who had found God on the roadside.

I have always been attracted to the imagery of Christianity, to the blood and redemption, the wounds of Christ, the choirs of angels and the Saintly lineage. But there is more to it than that. I am drawn to the lineage of Christian mystics in the same way that I am drawn to the lineage of Nyingma cave-dwellers, or the seekers of Divine union in Sufism. The practice of direct communion with God, if you call it that, or with Reality or The Divine, if you call it that instead, feels like the truest form of practising any religion for me personally. It is helpful at times for someone to tell me about God or The Buddha or the holiness of existence, but ultimately, I have to plug into that directly myself. And that is never easy. But I relate to the convulsions and stripped back wonder of certain Saints, the fighting of demons in the mountains, the visions, revelations, hallucinations, the manifestation of stigmata, the terrible angels of beauty descending. And I relate because it feels like a world that I already live in.

Going to Mass that day blew my mind. The ritual blew my mind. No wonder the Spanish go to the bullfight on the Saturday and then take Communion on Sunday. The two seem inextricably entwined, to me, bullfighting and Catholicism. And the Mass spoke to parts of me that even Buddhism has not reached. It is poetry to me, amazing, cataclysmic poetry. And, if I look at it it as anything but poetry, in the biggest sense of the word, my fear is that it is also quite possibly a form of madness. In this way, I am still scared of Catholicism, rightly or wrongly, in, as one overseas friend described it, its strange rites of supernatural cannibalism. But then I have always been attracted to things that dwell in equal shares of darkness and light, and poetry did always tread those pathways between the sane and the crazily lost.

I was scared at the thought of returning to the Convent. I was scared that I would be disappointed by what I found there. I was scared that I would not be disappointed and that it would show me all I hoped for and suspected was there.

When I rang the Convent bell, an old nun came to the door and invited me in. I said to her "I used to live in the house next door, for over twenty years. But we moved out years ago." I had no idea if she was even at the Convent during that period, as I know that most of the nuns from then have either moved on or died. She smiled at me and said " Are you Clare?"

Constanza and The Nun

Ever since watching a programme about it last Friday, I can't stop thinking about Gianlorenzo Bernini and his sculpture The Ecstasy Of St Theresa. I feel haunted. In the most transient moments - sipping a cup of tea, throwing a bag over my shoulder to go out the door, turning over in my bed in the early morning, slicing potatoes on my plate, I see the image of St Theresa's enraptured face, turned upwards, her mouth open, the fine point of an arrow entering her, a spray of golden light behind, her robe in swathes around her like liquid sunshine.

It is almost a cliche now to talk of the greatest art as being created by the most messed up people. And true, there is much powerful art that is, and has, been created by men and women where neither mental illness nor egomania is the driving force. But equally as true, genius springs from what is incomplete, flawed, sordid, neurotic, stupid, disparate and ugly. From the gutters of despair, in the midst of crashing disillusion, loss, sorrow, hatred and violence (I wonder if life itself is only as beautiful as its own despair, only as pure as its worst filth, only as strong as the weakest, most despised runt of the litter).

I think of this when I look at the Ecstasy Of St Theresa, and when I remember Bernini's torrid life story, and his dramatic depiction of this woman, a holy woman, and, in particular, of her physicality, her face and body as the meeting place or conduit for divine revelation and bliss.

I think a woman's body, in all its variations, is to me one of the most beautiful forms there is on this planet. It is one which has been, and still is the site of devotion, adoration, violation, reverence, contempt and horror in our world. Exalted, degraded, ridiculed, feared, controlled, desired in a million different ways, a woman's body is as complex as life itself, as death, as dying, as growth and decay, as desire, wanting and repugnance.

Sitting here now, under my clothes, I can feel the skin of this body that I breathe through, I can sense the blood circulating my veins, hear my heart beating in my ear if I press it to my shoulder. My breasts, my hips and vagina, my neck, legs, skin, hair, eyes, buttocks, feet, my back are all realities in and of themselves, but they're also the vehicle for a thousand different projections, some dazzling, some shimmering, some comforting, some lit up in the crudest red light or beset by howling laughter.

Some of these have been handed down to me through time, some are of my era, some through art, through philosophy, religion, culture, literature. Some are inside my own head, most surround me from the outside, from the voices of men, from the voices of women talking to men, from the voices of women who do not care what men have to say. From my mother, from my father.

Am I ever my own woman, I ask myself, can I ever escape this hall of mirrors, know my body beyond its own symbols?

I think of it split and ripped by giving birth, a cell multiplying inside it, growing into foetus, forming, enlarging, holding the blueprint for its own destiny, forming hands and feet, a nose, a throat. A life being born - my body as toil, violent music playing through a crackling stereo. A child moving through me, pushed out by labour and agony through the birth canal, ripped from my flesh, out into cold open air. The uncut umbilical cord, the bloody placenta.

Inside and through this female body, life is formed and grown and expelled with massive effort and incredible physical, mental and emotional intensity. And this intensity, this force and power is there, whether realised or not, in every single woman as part of her physical being.

To me, this force inside a woman is beautiful, and messy. It is complex and it is also the simplest force in the world. A force not different from that of the uncovered grave, a corpse peeping out at us from under the soil. Or from a puja on the Ganges, in a blazing light of candles. Or the baby floating past, its head, a bloated shrine. Its skin, grey.

And yes, it is The Ecstasy Of St Theresa, hovering in the air. But it is also Bernini, the artist who carved it, a year before its conception, sunk to the floor, a nobody, a nothing, the memory of the failure of his greatest architectural ambition ringing in his ears.

As it is the epilieptic nun, scissoring in divine rapture across the wooden floor, eyes rolling in the back of her head. She is not pretty. She is not even beautiful. Only a coarse woollen robe, two pairs of old hands holding her spindled tattered frame in the sunlight that pours through the stained convent windows, too bright to bear without her palm across her face.

And this same force is also Bernini's illicit lover, Constanza, in marble, the loop of her cotton blouse pulled slightly undone, her eyes like wildfire in a forest at night, or a tiger esaped from the zoo, once leashed and captive, now, more than untamed: out of control, hunting, hunting down.

And it is Bernini's servant with a sword, slashing at Constanza's face in retribution until it is ribbons, the pillow soaked in her blood, the colour of her most beautiful dress, of her lust. She will never again have a face that can be immortalised in sculpture. The Muse becomes damaged goods, fallen from ecstatic grace, imprisoned for fornication, disfigured.

So it is Constanza who pays the greatest price for passion, and after nearly killing his own brother and scarring her face for life, the real perpetrator goes free: Bernini, the great hero of Rome becomes an even greater hero, the great hypocrite, scoundrel, egomaniacal amour, liar, destroys and violates in the name of love all that he once created and revered as beautiful, as divine. This woman who was his Muse, who became marble, who fired one of the greatest sculptors in history's world with a blaze of signifiers. Who torched it all with her own betrayal. Whom he will never want again. Whom he will never again watch sleeping through the night, holding his breath lightly so as not to wake her. Whom he will never long to press her small head into his chest as though she were his own restless child.

And now her face is a map of stars, all traced in blood, her honour a withered flower, her wildfire burnt out beyond all reason. Where is left for the woman to go? At Bernini's command she is again caged, this time in a damp prison cell without light, in rags and humiliation, taught the lesson that all women who play with fire must learn in 17th century civilisation, the image of her passion, her beauty, her womanhood, consigned to a sunless locked vault.

This same man conceived and gave birth to the remarkable, transcendent Ecstasy Of St Theresa, long after the light had left his eye, long after such tragedy and violence, after his own sudden descent into failure and his turning to God. And this same woman, Constanza, also gave birth to it, and is enfolded within the creases of St Theresa's robes, in the openness of her mouth, her half closed eyes, though almost certainly neither she or Bernini will have ever known, will ever know this.

Woman, Muse, sister, daughter, mother, virgin, slut, truth, beauty, warfare, corruption, fertility, deceit, the earth, the stars, the moon, the fields, the tether, the breaking of all mundane bonds, the higher, the lower, animal, angel, divinity, a flower, a rose, the scent of death...these words and images haunt me, as the Ecstasy Of St Theresa haunts me, as Constanza and the nun haunt me, as a woman who, like every other woman, is all of these things, who is Constanza and St Theresa, Bernini and the ecstasy itself, and, who, in the middle of the night, or when sipping tea, or throwing a bag over her shoulder to go out of the door, slicing potatoes, is none of them, never has been, and never will.




(top image: 'Eve', Rodin's studio, 'Cain' in background.)