Two Left Feet

Tonight I think I need to confess how I'm feeling. Well, I probably don't need to, but I want to; so forgive me for using you as a kind of therapist's couch this evening. For I am confessing to being a mess.

In fact, it was last night when I realised what a mess I was, as I struggled out into town to band rehearsal, full of some strange flu-like illness, and sat wobbling on a high black stool listening to piano keys clunking and red wine being supped. I felt tears pricking my eyes and a familiar welling up inside. Shit. The penny dropped. I am all over the place.

Then something else happened. Something that rarely happens to me. Instead of feeling upset, anxious, fearful, confused and stupid about feeling a mess, I suddenly was overcome by a feeling of alrightness. Absolute alrightness. And I liked it.

I'm one confused human being at the moment. I wonder if this is why, when I am falling asleep last thing at night, my heart keeps doing little pirouettes in my chest and why my dreams are filled with psychopaths. Why I keep having to trim my hair just that tiny bit shorter. Why one day I wear low-cut tops and the next I find myself in high collared shirts. Why I reel from reading the biography of a saint to writing songs about strange animals to compulsively watching a tv show where women are dressed as men and strap-ons are as commonplace as the next soya-decaf-frappucino. All this might not sound too significant, perhaps a bit drama queeny, if you don't know me that well. Or maybe even if you do. But who I am doesn't add up anymore. It doesn't add up.

Tonight I feel less welcoming of this fact. I feel disarmed by myself. I'm also aware of the fact that I'm going to be back in Wales in a couple of weeks, and I know, deep down, I'm really frightened because it brings the mess of me right back into sharp relief. It brings back how confusing life is, and how hard it is living under the shadow of Mum's state; knowing how I've been blocking it out these last months, because if I didn't block it out, I would have become a mess, and I don't want to be a mess, I want to be ok.

So the mess has to cope with only getting little outings, little forays into the world of Clare. And the rest of the time, it is strictly relegated to the world of dreams.

As usual, there is a good side to this. Whether I let it in or not, the devastation of Mum's condition is working on me night and day. And the price I may pay in sorrow for this, is reaped back through all the cracks that grief shows up in my life. It prises the cracks apart so I can look inside and see what truly makes me tick.

I thought I liked it better when I supposed I knew what made me tick, even if it felt constricting and suffocating, like a silk stocking tight around my throat. Now, I don't quite know what to do with all this air. Or what this feeling is in my lungs. I know too well the sting of life. And how things can fester. But this breath inside me, well, it's equally as terrifying. Such a grave responsibility it is: stepping into one own shoes.

Thursday

I've been flailing about lately, as perhap you may have discerned from my recent posts. I could also say I've been a bit in the wilderness, a place without borders or signposts, without a nice cup of tea waiting at home for me, with a few wild animals tracking my footsteps and a distinct lack of fresh water.

I am tempted, as is easy to do, to assume that this is a problem, that something is wrong in me or in my life. To temper this, I find the good old 'New Age' sound bites rising up in my mind. "Follow your heart". "Trust the process". "Everything is a lesson". Oh, to be a New Age writer churning out masterpieces such as "The Little Book Of Wisdom" whilst earning a nice few hundred thousand spondulies.

I digress. I can mock such phrases, but that doesn't stop them from potentially being true. The problem for me, as I suspect it may be for a lot of people who don't feel guided by angels or the will of God, is precisely how to discern exactly what these statements mean. One can follow ones heart, but that doesn't mean it won't lead you straight into a ditch. One can try and trust the process, even if it's difficult, but there's often the niggling doubt that there might not actually be a process going on at all, one may just be in a bit of a mess. On a good day, all is a vast and mysterious lesson from which one grows. On a bad one, well, the word dukkha springs to mind, that is, things are painful and crap, and basically sometimes there can be no reasoning that out. In fact, to try and reason it out is just to try and escape the suffering.

Having said all this, it cheers me up more to think of profound cosmic things afoot in my experience, of processes rising and falling and leading me to a greater understanding of something or other.

So how to find something in this life that endures. That's the question. I know it's all going away, every last drop of this life is disappearing with the clouds, never to return. And living with such fragility and uncertainty, and finding the peace and beauty is certainly what I have been taught to do through Buddhist practice, and what I've tried to do, in whatever ways I can, for years.

But right now it doesn't feel enough. I can't struggle with that existential question on my own. My body isn't large enough to hold the magnitude; this 'self' of mine cannot meet nature, time, old age, sickness and death on its own terms, never mind violence, injustice, poverty, cruelty, betrayal, corruption, abuse of power. I am no one woman army. And the fact that we all stand in exactly the same shoes when it comes to facing life and death means we can be guiding lights to each other, unfortunately our relationships made out of the same fragile and delicate material as this life. We can claim solidarity, but we still face the questions alone.

Perhaps it is obvious, where I'm going in this post. This thing that endures, that can hold all life within it; that isn't separate from life or from the people in it; that's in the buildings and the structures of our existence, the hearts and minds and bodies, as it is in the end of them. But is it an unnameable force which is at once there and not there, an emptiness which is full, a fullness which is ultimately empty; the beauty of transience itself? Or is it a tangible, real presence we can call on, we can count on, that has a name and a face; a body and blood?

I don't know. But these are the questions I don't quite know how to put to rest.

These days, I am finding it increasingly hard to look at photographs of my Mum. I glance over them quickly, unable to allow myself to make the connection between who I see in the picture and the image I hold of her in my head. In so many more recent photos, she is sitting in the front room, tv on, her hair scraped back into a pony tail. She is smiling self-consciously. But the image in my head is of a moment caught forever in silence and stillness. It is a running video, but nothing is moving; it is a song without sound, a touch I can feel, but I don't know where the hand has gone.

The woman in the picture has gone and I don't understand what is left of her. I think of Sleeping Beauty with her rosy cheeks, ivory skin, eyes closed, spellbound to perpetual coma. I see only a haze of white - white sheets, white pillows, the white of her eye, white nightdress with a satin ribbon at the neck. I want to immerse myself in snowdrops. I want to course the ice floes, stretch myself out on a glacier, breathe it in deep. I want only cloud and a sun behind it that never sets. I want to be pale as a baby wrapped in its first blanket.

From the whiteness, red creeps in. Blood circles in my hands and arms, and begs these legs of mine to run. Run to the equator, to where time zones collide, imprint a map of the world upon my skull, forage amongst the insects and the beetles for a taste of life itself, curse the sky and ride a westward thunder, laughing. Blood follows me wherever I go. I cannot evaporate into ether, nor disappear into silence. Blood keeps me feeling, remembering I am flesh and bone, skin and longing. Angels inhabit my tender places, they haunt my dreams with their whiteness and their singing, but it's the bloody hand that keeps me here, that keeps me in the running.

I won't lie frozen for an eternity until I am kissed by a prince with black hair and a sword. But I will watch my mother, in her own world now, in a world of whiteness far beyond my reaches. And there will never come a day when I won't crave her touch again, to see the redness in her cheeks, for her lips to come back to life and speak. Blood still runs through her, though it is silent. She stares out of the window, at what, I can't know. It is then that the snows fall on me again, as I remember the belly I came from, the mess and spill that fell out with me, the cord that kept me attached until it was cut, my first cry into her breast and the red fist I raised at the world as I realised, in utter joy and horror, that I was alive.

Snowdon

I'm just back from a week in North Wales to see my Mum and sister, and to explore my native country.

I began the journey at my Mum's house, staying with my sister. We visited Mum in the special nursing home the next day, the first time I had seen her there since she got transferred there from hospital last week. I thought I'd be ok with it, thought somehow that her being settled somewhere would make it easier to comprehend her situation, but it didn't. I spent the first afternoon with a dazed head that wouldn't quite attach back to my body, as I walked in and out of her bedroom, nauseous and lost.

The second visit the following day was worse somehow, my Mum has a chest infection again, which is never easy to see her in such physical distress. In the end I had to walk outside in the cold Autumn air with my sister, and rail at the whole situation. It all just felt sick, cruel that Mum is being put through all this struggle in the name of living, when it seems to me that her time has come. I have had it said to me that maybe her time hasn't quite come, maybe she is hanging on for something that we cannot comprehend. Maybe. But without two drips feeding and medicating her, she would not be here right now - it is only thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, and a philosophy that says we must have life, no matter the cost, that she hangs on.

It brings a lot up for me, seeing my Mum like this, in terms of issues such as euthanasia and a human being's free will. It seems we cannot even determine our own death anymore, we can't die with dignity or self-determination, instead we must ebb our days out in state funded nursing homes. I know it is a complex subject, but somewhere it just seems wrong, wrong to subject a person to this. I guess it is perhaps only when it happens to someone you love that you realise what an important and painful subject euthanasia is.

I guess death itself is such a complex thing. Determining at what point someone is still deemed alive or capable of life or having any quality of life is a difficult thing to assess. People don't want to be responsible for making that choice of potentially ending lives that could have maybe been lived longer or even saved. But the price is that people are forced to live on, and it seems in this culture, no one realises that that is often worse thing than dying, for the person, for their family.

As I was sitting outside the nursing home with my sister, I became aware just how kind and strong my sister was. She understood all my anger, my fear, my fear, my panic, my loss. But every day that I was unable to come and see Mum because I live so far away in Brighton, she was there, day after day, going to see her, wiping her mouth and brushing her hair, holding her hand and playing her the radio. In the face of all this seemingly impossible and boundless suffering, she told me in her own way, that there were still little acts of love she could give to our Mum, there was still dignity and humanity she could bring to the situation, and that is what she would do, to the end.

After talking with my sister outside on the front bench, I felt renewed courage, and wasn't afraid or angry anymore. No time for that, these moments are too precious. I returned to my mother's room, somewhere more at peace. It is no surprise that we resist the truth, the awful truth of sickness and dying, because it just hurts so much. The pain of having to let go, in a situation over which, ultimately, I have no control, is hard. But when I can stop resisting, stop struggling, somewhere there are moments of peace, things are just as they are, and I am back again, loving, no longer afraid.

Wednesday night, Bob arrives, on a late train, that was late. We all go to meet him at the station. Thursday is the day he and I take the train to Snowdonia to climb the biggest mountain in Wales.

Darkness When The First Light Was Born

Homage to the world. Homage to the raging fires that eat it alive. Homage to tomorrow. Homage to the day when none of us will wake up. Homage to ships and planes. Homage to speeding clouds. Homage to the stripe on the zebra's back. Homage to all fallen prey. Homage to the predatory. Homage to light. Homage to the baby's skull. Homage to machinery. Homage to apparatus. Homage to buildings and to streetlights. Homage to my sisters. Homage to bad friends. Homage to mistakes. Homage to silent birds. Homage to snow.

Homage to stereos. Homage to the yellow stain on my mother's nightdress. Homage to kissing. Homage to fingers. Homage to harrowed eyes. Homage to brilliance. Homage to stupidity. Homage to sex. Homage to abstinence. Homage to a blue sky. Homage to apples, unripened fruit. Homage to leprosy of the soul. Homage to worshippers. Homage to the uncontrollably vain. Homage to TV. Homage to the hermitage on a hill. Homage to the ringtones of teenage children. Homage to their fathers.

Homage to the dying. Homage to every tear wept at their bedside. Homage to my mother. Homage to my father and his ebbing mind. Homage to animals and to beasties. Homage to the night. Homage to the frail, the ugly. Homage to superstars. Homage to the brave. Homage to power stations. Homage to sadists. Homage to euthanasia. Homage to the suicidal. Homage to insects. Homage to bats, eaten alive by beetles. Homage to caverns. Homage to church steeples.

Homage to the beatific. Homage to the horrific. Homage to the damaged and needy. Homage to air. Homage to sunlight. Homage to wrinkles. Homage to breath. Homage to limbs. Homage to eyesight. Homage to decay. Homage to the Atlantic Ocean. Homage to gravestones. Homage to small Northern towns. Homage to nonsense. Homage to the written word. Homage to mystics. Homage to tenderness. Homage to the cry of the wind. Homage to bad smells. Homage to the face in the mirror. Homage to you. Homage to me. Homage to waving goodbye. Homage to the end.

Hope To God I'm No Greeting Card

I've not done any substantial writing for a long time now, it feels. I've spent most of today and yesterday either at, or at least hovering around my piano keyboard in some tense, exploding state of consciousness. Creating makes me feel like the bird that has just broken out of an egg. Exhilarated, breathing, insane.

I pace the flat for something to distract me from the inevitable truth of those black and white keys. And still I haven't written anything of note for a long time now. The novel, or at least the drive towards a novel, on the 'back burner', that is, crept back into the recesses of my mind. A book of short stories, is reduced to two ideas only: birds' nests and windy places.

The post sinks into the ground. I am more preoccupied with things that make no sense than those that do. I walk to the shop. I walk back.

This thing I call creativity makes me happier than any sex, is as great as the greatest love. And sadder than all sorrows put together. I like myself a lot when I write, because I am not hindered by my own 'thereness', I am free to wander into whichever room of experience I please, untroubled by my own preferences and predelictions. And I sometimes hate all that I am too, saddled by my insecurities and cracking bravados, on nights like these.

Tonight, experience is painful and the rain dances.

But creating is giving birth, it is about something being birthed, born. And as I feel like the chick out of the egg, I also feel like the bloody mother, I can feel my body torn in labour. So this is a necessary pain, a necessary tension. Like new teeth pushing through gums. Skin ripping open.

And for what? For what reason do we give birth in this way? For sure, there is no fulfllment for me without it, to let the words or the song come into fruition without the tension of struggle, without working for it. Those slippy slidy works of supposed art, that trip so easily and so correctly off the smoothest tongue, they leave me unmoved by their composure, by their lack of a crime scene. No dying bull to trace in the sand, no ideal to stretch to the limit. Art can never be hidden behind, but exposes it all, all the workings. Ah, we are all so clever at this, still we try and tame the animal, lassoo it all so it belongs to us, not the other way round. Idiots, we are.

Can we make poetry with the head? Some people seem to think so. We can stare out to space with special instruments, we can calculate the mass of the world. We can float in space suits far above this bluest planet and watch the gases and the atmosphere, imbibe the greens and the corals and the turquoise patches, sail the infinite seas above, notating the wonders with a biro pen. And what does that make us? If we don't see it, it is all just another TV show, just an interesting experiment.

Poetry is not an interesting experiment. It is living, life itself. It is the often agonising process of opening up to what this universe is made of, and looking around, taking it in.

It is a space ship that travels to places otherwise unreachable, no other vehicle has the engine power, the correct design. It brings this human back, with the wonders and horrors of the world, of space, to write shakily some 'feeble approximation of starlight'.

It also travels underwater, to where the plants and the jellied fish grow. To where light cuts out under the ice, where sound is an ancient song from far above tides.

Descends, descends, past trees and caves and earth and matter and stone, into the stone it goes, the greyest, smoothest stone. Then the peat, and the ashes, the burnt out coal, the embers, the black chalk in the fire, soil and worms. Feel it in your hand, cool dark and sodden.

To the people, the stares, the unrelenting dreams. We say we are a million miles from the sky and the wood and the ground, from under the water.

No, we are the same life. In the human, there is always the valley and the rock, the repetitive seasons and the swimming fish. Discovered lakes, so much unchartered territory. The horrors of the flesh, the sinking stone, buried under ivy, human sleeps with fur and paw, eats its brother, dazzles with the sunlight and becomes dawn itself.

We are the night and the day, the afternoon, Northern Lights. We are neutron stars, gas and pollution. Moving in a haze of cloud. Whiskers. Dead creatures. Our own faeces. The blazing cottage. The never born girl child, left in a dream. A window, this book you hold, spent, spent, always spent.

This is all poetry to me. And to sit with that, is to sit with life itself. And the bravest poets are the Captains of the Boats at roughest sea. They bring the words home, they inspire, touch the fabric, rub the thread between their old warm fingers.

If I ever doubt poetry has a purpose, I think of this. I think of the bold. The death defyers. On a night like tonight, that I can be so bold, take these controls and launch again, is all I ask.

I have not forgotten...

I have not forgotten the breeze in the branches of the tree outside my bedroom window, and how, during those long mornings, it kept me going. I have not forgotten the way your hair sits on the pillow, braided like a seven-year-old girl's, the sweetest sight I could ever lay my eyes upon.
     Nor have I forgotten the way you leaned in to feel me near you, when I kissed you, when I wasn't even sure if you remembered my name anymore, or who I was to you.
I have not forgotten the trips to the supermarket after the hospital, how I cowered in the drinks aisle, behind the diet cola, nor the feeling of something I could barely articulate between us three sisters, feeling so alone in the world without our mother, fussing round your bed like the oldest of souls together, the best of friends, the tiniest of children . We love you; that's as clear as the first morning of June, we love every hair on your head, and brush it with all the tenderness our shaking hearts have within them.
    I see your toes in their special white socks, poking out of the bottom of the white bed sheet. It cripples me with love just to look at them. I see your mouth, encased in plastic, and this is the part I find hard to talk about.
     I see a loss so big it will never be replaced, by wind or water or earth slide or rain storm. And you are in me with everything I do, you never go away, but also you are somewhere else. And how can that be - that you are always here and yet so far into another place I cannot reach? Here, gone, here, gone, here...awake but asleep, living, breathing, dying, seeing into my eyes, looking away, travelling, sailing, floating, shivering along another shore, a foreign land, in a language I cannot speak.
     I have not forgotten how you brought me up, how you taught me to spell, how you always nudged me to look up at the sky, to see those red and violet sunsets, to watch for the blue of the morning. How you are my only mother, how I was born out of you, how I stretch way beyond you into vastness and my own mystery, but always return, a cub to her mother bear, a fox to its hole, a bee to her hive that always was the source of honey and creation. Home. It is so far away now, and yet I carry it between my breasts, under my vest, in this heart here, and in everything I do, everything I want to do and will become, as the last light of this day ebbs into a filament of dust.
     Here are your daisies, your buttercups; the box of flowers you planted and that are still growing. They are all for you, and their colour will keep the night alive in your absence. For today you are sleeping, as you have never slept before, and when you awake, I will be there.