...

Yes, I thought I could lure you in with my karate-chopping nun picture; it never fails. Of course, this was a deliberate ploy - my thinking is that by showing you a picture from my new Nuns Having Fun calendar, somehow it'll make up to my more avid readers for the fact that I haven't written in over two weeks.

Secondly, I'm doing what I do every few months - and trying to convince readers that I'm not just some morbidly obsessed, writer-y-type, always banging on about her mother dying and how life is full of loss and disappointment and mediocre television game shows such as Deal-Or-No-Deal (though one day I'll share with you the esoteric side of D-O-N-D).

No. I'm also a fun-loving, light-hearted kind of gal, who can take pictures of quirky things around her flat and share them with you, dear reader, and therefore is always capable of more than just long blog posts full of beauty and woe. So here's a picture of some sweets. Aren't they lovely? Straight from the mouth of God. Well, Elephant and Castle, to be precise.



Jesus Sweets. Mmm, Strawberries and Cream. Oh, ok, I've just spotted the words 'mourn' and 'burden' in there, so... ok, here's a picture of a Basset hound instead. This is a dog I hope to one day own (after I have all my other dogs), and whom I aspire even more, in old age, to becoming like. Yes, it sounds fucking weird, I know, but I want nothing more than to become like a Bassett hound. Ohh, the saggy nobility of it.

Friday

Tonight I cycled along the seafront. It was late and the air felt still, the sea was dense. There was a pressure in my head which made me speed up on the concrete and my mind feel like it was richocetting off the balustrade.

That's alcohol for you. Inhibitions left to the wind. Thought processes unsteady and darting, like a hundred shoals of tiny fish; full with fleeting feeling, reason empty.

I sped along, unaware of how fast or slow I was going, but at the same time, sure of myself. It was then that I saw them, emerging, ghostly from the recessed darkness of the beach; a man and a woman dressed entirely in white, their robes billowing out like they were two brides. As I sped along, a police car cruised further up the seafront to where more men and more women were dressed in white, emerging from the dark sea. It was a strange sight, stranger still for I remembered then that I'd seen them here before.

In the pub tonight, we spoke, as we always seem to do, of religion and spirituality, each of us, it felt, desperately trying to gather some truth in for ourselves, each of us missing some part of ourselves that we were trying to find, yet telling others that we had already found it.

I shirked at my own feelings on meditation and Buddha and God and finding inner peace. Almost ten years on, I have to ask the question, have I found it? Have I got those answers which seem so integral to positing oneself to others as a 'spiritual' person? No, the questions just get harder. The more I learn, the more and more I get out of my depth and then am forced to swim.

The inner peace I sought in the past, well, now it seems fanciful. Because peace to me used to mean the end of all this tiring, endless shit. But it doesn't. The endless tiring shit goes on and on, for as long as I go on and on, for as long as the world turns in its sleep.

So the question has become one of, do I want reality, or do I want comfort? I ask myself over and over this question, and I still can only answer: both. I want reality and I want truth, but I want that truth to be palatable, not painful. In the words of that great band, Of Montreal, I want my film to be beautiful, not realistic.

But nine times out of ten, reality whoops my ass, so to speak. I was told for years that the only way to happiness is to 'be here, now'. And I can talk like a jaded old thing, but the truth is, they are right; but the question remains, well, how much do I really want to?

I felt blessed by seeing those strangers in their white robes; glad they weren't in their houses tonight watching TV. Glad for the fact that they seemed so strange and unearthly in this all too often one-dimensional world, where spirit is absent too much of the time. And I'm glad I am cycling, using my legs, using my lungs. I want to cycle more, so that my legs ache and I am caught for breath, so that I am finally worn out with effort. Perhaps that is what they talk of when folk talk of peace; it is when you are finally done with trying, and the wind catches in your throat as you breathe it in.

thursday

Enough is enough. That's something, ironically, I often have to say to myself a number of times before I finally believe it myself. Today, as I pulled the lid from the old pan of pea soup that's been lying in wait in the corner of my kitchen and I swear I saw something move in there, I realised, enough is enough.

The stench of it was an amalgam of shit and vomit. It fizzed and spluttered as I poured its remnants down the sink, trying desperately not to breathe through my nostrils, gagging at the merest hint of the smell. And I couldn't help thinking somewhere, my life has got out of kilter here, I shouldn't be pouring half alive green sludge down my plughole, I shouldn't be ignoring the hair on the carpet until it looks like it is growing a second rug on top of it. I shouldn't find myself wearing the same socks for the however-many-days running because I haven't been able to face the launderette. But I have, and now I realise, enough is enough. Somewhere, in the midst of my life, I've been losing myself.

And as for the technology which has been bringing my life to a halt and corrupting all simplicity and grace in it, well, it has to stop somewhere. I find myself these days unable to exist without checking emails at least several times a day, but worse, without checking the various 'friending' and networking sites which I find myself having joined.

Although I know it's a valid way of keeping in touch with friends near and far, a way of getting my music out there and making connections for gigs and poetry submissions, I find that recently, instead of using that way, I'm posting people UFOs and aliens, and getting into needless arguments because of stupid privacy settings on my goddamn Facebook profile. Technology has become another thing to get addicted to, to become enslaved by; a way of keeping out the cold, of plugging the silence with noise and chatter; of not, finally, having to be alone.

I've got to cut this clutter out. And, yes, here I am, on my blog, writing when I could be outside in the cold damp air, feeling alive, taking in the waves across the sea, feeling the seagulls swooping over me, treading the pavement towards some form of rest and recuperation for my soul. However, this blog is one place I have no trouble justifying using, in fact, I cast it aside far too easily for more inane forms of communication.

Out, I need to go. Further than the seafront, further than the shore, further than where the horizon meets the deep, wet blue. I can't live for long unless I can penetrate the blue itself, go further, to where clouds swallow me and the air is frozen. It's not enough, this place; this city; this land; with its concrete walls and its TV sets, its motorways that always lead somewhere; its cups of tea to warm my hands against the winds that blow in from a cold, uncertain future.

Sometimes it's hard to bear the crushing weight of this sky we all live under. Sometimes, we must break up into pieces in order to let it touch us; to feel the grace of emptiness; the perfection raging in our souls. I feel like a woodland animal hunting out a warm burrow and some food. Like all of us, I need a shelter. And I am dreaming everyday of God, hoping for a glimpse of what brought me here.

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.

Apparently neurologists and psychologists are now making a link between temporal lobe epilepsy and mystical experience. The two often seem to go hand in hand. When having fits, such epileptics often experience what they might call God or Oneness, or indeed, experience themselves as God, or perhaps, as the man on the videos below does, as having "heaven and hell in my eyes".

Somehow, this doesn't surprise me at all. I have long suspected that all kinds of so-called afflictions, physical and psychological (such as migraine, epilepsy, low blood-pressure, brain tumour, mental health issues, personal trauma, neurosis, mental breakdown), can open gateways into bigger, spiritual, experience.

Last week I found out that somebody very close to me has temporal lobe epilepsy. It has been a diagnosis that's been long due, and though in many ways I wish she didn't have to live with this, in others, I'm glad at least we know now what the cause is of her fits.

Without wanting to go into her personal experience, on another level, I've been intrigued by some things she has told me about her unusual experiences during and after a fit, and by the potential implications of that for her, and indeed for myself.

Though I am not epileptic, I do have a strong disposition towards both fit-type experiences and what one might call unusual or mystical experiences. Just after I was born, I started having convulsions which went on for some time, resulting in periodic stays in hospital. Throughout my childhood and teens I had a strong tendency to faint at the slightest thing, where it would almost be like a fit (instead of falling to the ground, I would often still be animated and moving around as though awake, much to the amusement and bafflement of my family). I also had a strong tendency towards both intense psychic, imaginal or 'cosmic' experience, and also, in my teens, a tendency towards extreme mental dissociation, which caused me severe distress at times, as I feared I was 'going mad'. This has continued into my adult life, but has decreased as I've got older and, I think found bigger contexts for it.

Without medical diagnosis, I can't effectively say the cause of this, but my own guess is that it could have been caused by a combination of intense physical and psychic sensitivity and perhaps low blood pressure, which I suffer from. I still seem to often experience extreme physical responses to emotional (and particularly spiritual) input, such as shaking, convulsing, severe coughing, gagging, involuntary laughter etc. I wonder what it is about my physiology, if anything, that perhaps encourages me to experience things this way?

Though I am not denying the physical nature of temporal lobe epilepsy, I do find the link between it and spiritual experience fascinating. It raises many questions. I also find the reverse connection interesting also (and somewhat unnerving), that is, perhaps mystical experiences are just our way of interpreting certain patterns of neurological impulse/connections which are taking place in the brain. It also makes me want to mull over again the connection that I see over and again between that which is often named as 'messed up', 'dysfunctional' or 'destructive' in life, and the arising of genius, deep spiritual insight or experience.

Here is the link, the site itself is worth checking out...

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?"

Diary of an Exquisite Morning

I went looking for God up the Breakfast Cereal & Tea and Coffee aisle of my local Tesco's.

Of course, I caught a glimpse of what I was seeking, I caught a whisper of it in my hair; a touch of gold, flaked on my forehead. I expected the Shreddies and Nut Clusters to hurl themselves from the shelves, in awe of what I was experiencing, and that in the space they left, from where they had fallen, a light would shine, right back at me.

I moved towards the Egg & Jam aisle, where black and red haired women with toddlers charged towards me, and I felt angry because I didn't want these women or these babies interrupting my search for God. I curled my lips into a harsh, wavy line. I ruminated over Free range or Organic Free Range, knowing really, this week, I just couldn't afford the latter.

And then I felt the touch of it again. I couldn't name it until I had left the store. It was only as I scoured the long aisles of the supermarket from the other side of the glass, edging myself toward the street, still hankering for a final glimpse, I could finally mouth to myself the word angel.

Sitting at home now, I understand that this compulsion towards God can take on many forms. And I'd like to think of it as holy. I would like to think of it as truthful. I would like to squeeze my palms together, making like a prayer and for it to be that simple.

The world is made up of religious fools, scraping the floors of cemeteries for the latest dust of truth. I will be there with them, falling on my backside as the gatekeeper comes, jangling his keys impatiently, already imagining his wife's stockinged legs in the bedroom waiting for him when he gets home.

This, of course, will not stop me looking. Nor should I stop. The presence of angels is a good enough reason in itself for me to blink, huge-eyed, when they appear. Silly as I am, daunting though the consequences may be, I am in it for life - a hunter after divinity, a shark for brilliant light, a presuming idiot who spills her breakfast when her head is turned towards this burning and burnt crater manifesting at the edge of her living room floor.

This may not make any sense to you, so I will not bother trying to explain. I bought what I needed to, then I walked away. My bags were mediumly heavy, I had numerous voices in my head, which I didn't bother listening to, for they were all bores. Instead, I walked home, and up the stairwell to the unpainted door of my flat, entered, breathed and put my shopping away.