A forked road

Tags

choosing healing, demarcation point, fork in the road, Grief, Healing, PTSD, Sorrow, Trauma, Wisdom

One of the truest things I know is this:

Wisdom comes at a price

It isn’t cheap or easy, and the whole getting of wisdom process itself? It sucks. Until it stops sucking, and by then the wisdom is deeply ingrained.

So much so that it doesn’t really feel like one has learned anything at all.

This was true for me. Until of course, I found myself observing the experiences of others.

It doesn’t matter how similar/dissimilar their experiences are to mine. It’s all around us, all the time: the world is in deep, deep pain. Sometimes, that pain gets tipped over into terror and agony. This is what I’m talking about.

Lately I’ve seen friends and acquaintances alike going through some heart-rendingly painful experiences. Seems to be a lot of this going around at the moment (blame the supposed end of the world perhaps – which is really just a massive energetic shift of consciousness).

These days, I find that suddenly I know what to say or do. How to help. Well, sort of.

I still have that horrible sense of helplessness, even though I know how it feels from the inside out. There’s only so much someone can do.

I really hate that.

I wish I could rip open my own soul so I can put my battle scars on display. So you really can know that I really, really do get it.

Regardless of my ability to express this, I do understand. Intimately so. And I see and feel the sorrow, trauma or grief of others and I silently weep in sadness because I not only know roughly where they’re at; I also know what’s coming.

Holy Shiva, how well I remember those first steps on the path of incomprehensible loss…

I remember trying to make sense of it all and that NOTHING made sense, no matter what.

I remember how long it took before I realised that actually, nothing WAS making sense!

It took even longer than that to realise there was truly a way out. That feeling good again was even feasible or desirable or something that could happen to me.

As awful as it is while you’re still in the bleeding-and-wounded phase of those experiences, at some stage there’s a fork in the road.

A very clearly marked demarcation point

1. Continue down the path of total and complete utter-fucked-up-ed-ness.

OR

2. Get really sick of the path of total and complete utter-fucked-up-ed-ness and decide that enough is enough.

Of course, the first path eventually leads to the second. However, the time frame on that is different for everyone. For some people, it can take their entire life. Others pass from this world before they get there.

THAT’S how hard this shit is to get through.

The second path? Choosing that one… is just the beginning of the process of healing. Which, it should be said is an absolute bastard of a thing to do.

Because real healing requires in-depth levels of honestly – with yourself, about yourself, about how you relate to everyone else in your life. It requires real change.

Eventually, this second path leads to bone-deep wisdom. Life lessons you’ll find are applicable across all kinds of situations, times and places.

The other thing? This becomes an ongoing path for the rest of your life. Once you step onto that fork in the road, you’re wisdom-bound. Yes, you’ve paid a ridiculously high price. Yes you have.

But in choosing healing, or even in choosing being utterly fed up by feeling like crap… you’re on the path to a deep understanding of yourself, of life, of what makes being alive worthwhile. Despite all the horrors life has thrown your way.

I guess what I’m saying is that when ready, you WILL get there in the end.

But the road is long and so it really isn’t worth looking too far ahead. Way better to focus on where you’re at right now.

And keep an eye out for that fork.

~ Svasti xxx

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Next step unknown

Tags

Foundations, Gravity, Loss, Love, Pease, Poem, Poetry, Recriminations, Reparations, Sorrow, Spider's web

Tension and complexity

Create the spider’s web

No one leaves the whirlpool

As it swirls us to our doom

Gravity holds the satellite

To its planet, never leaving

The binding force is love

Previous beauty brought undone

Reparations, recriminations

Salving this path is not

Easy, there’s no clean

Cut to suture nicely

No balance, no simple

Answers to banish

Those unwanted tears

Do the strength of

Our convictions create more

Problems than they solve?

Love is no struggle, here

It’s our battle stations

Horrifically dragging us to

Something no one wants

I love you, oh I do, yet

I don’t know the way

From here, to that blissful

Commune of love we

Laughed about, before

The foundations trembled

~Svasti

Bottomed out

Tags

Depression, Disaffection, Frida Kahlo, Samskaras, Sorrow, Struggle, Wasteland

Did I have to come this wasteland? Place of no-things, loss and aloneness, just so I could really see?

Even once I’d arrived, was it necessary to strip away any last vestiges of safety and comfort? Key lifelines, no matter how tenuous, taken too?

Nothing grows here. Nothing happens. There’s a silence I can hardly stand.

A dusty dustbowl, static frozen representations of what my life once was. Kind of like those movie special effects, where someone has the power to stop time. I can move around, but nothing else does. You think it’d be cool for a while, and it is. Then, it’s more horrifying than anything else.

There’s no activity. Nothing to say or do.

Just try going about your regular (haha!) activities. Go on. Nothing here is conducive shielding the eyes from clear understanding.

Distractions lose their lustre. No shine or pleasure. Can’t hold my interest, I have no interest. Its nil, zilch, de nada.

There’s many tears, as always. But I don’t know what I’m crying for any longer.

Much as I’ve always respected crying for the great relief it offers, just maybe I’m getting a little sick of that, too.

I’ve heard it said before, but you should never reveal your secret identity, coz it always backfires somehow. And now I’ve learnt that lesson for myself.

Seems at the heart of the matter, are my over-powering desires that still, after all this time, rely on some kind of confirmation. The samskaras that rule my disposition in this birth push so hard, especially now.

It’s enough to drive a person insane.

The harder I try, the more confusing things become. Or is that, the less I try? The difference appears to be lost on me right now.

So I’ve stopped. I am stopping.

Is this all that’s left?

Funny how, people can show such disaffection and/or lack of care, isn’t it? But take part of their life away, and they’re devastated. Even if that part was only tiny and relatively unimportant. It was still something that contributed to their view of life, how they relate to everything and everyone.

Really, if there was an easy way, I’d take it. No hesitation. I’m so familiar with struggle these days, perhaps I wouldn’t recognise it now, even if it did show up?

The worst thing about all this is that no one can help me. No one. I want to be helped so badly – part of my problem, actually. I want to be able to rely on other people, but repeatedly I’ve seen how that just leads to more heartache.

I am an ocean of intensity and neediness. I am relentlessly in need of love and affection that never arrives. Or when a facsimile appears, I’ll take it. But later I always discover it was just a copy… because it never lasts.

Nothing ever does.

There’s no hand, no shoulder, just… other people also in pain and struggling and they can’t help me either. It’s understandable, really.

So I take it all back. I have to. Because I didn’t know that heartache could make your entire body hurt.

Just gonna hang out here in nowhere land a little longer…

~Svasti

Writing nooks & other stuff

Tags

Anger, Antique desk, eBay, Elephant in the room, Post-traumatic stress, Pounding heart, PTSD, Rage, Sorrow, Writing nook

Most excitingly, this is the first full day in my new home where I don’t have to go anywhere or do anything in particular.

Okay, I had to do one thing, but it was a very, very good thing.

I arranged delivery for my recent eBay purchase: an old antique writing desk!

It’s quite large and sturdy, and fits neatly into my new writing nook (in a corner of the kitchen).

My nook has its own nifty window looking out on the back courtyard which is all leafy and green and stuff. Its private, gets plenty of light and all up, it’s a great spot for writing!

The pièce de résistance has to be my desk though. Apparently it came from Melbourne’s Treasury Building.

I love it – I’ve yet to absolutely cram it with gadgets and rubbish, so my set up is very minimal at present. But I betcha anything I can’t keep it that way!

It’s very me – suits my personality and style…

The two drawers are really deep – which means they’re probably gonna end up holding a whole bunch of crap I should really throw out.

And someone’s written “Colin” inside one of the drawers in pen with a little cartoon head above the name and there are plenty of ‘customised’ markings – carved initials and stuff on the desk top.

So I’ve kicked my old flat-pack desk to the curb. Actually its in the carport right now on account of the deluging rain (which we need as a country that’s been in drought for a good twenty years now). But its going – either free to whoever wants it or… donating it to the local charity. It’s not even worth selling on eBay.

In other news

Can anyone say ‘elephant in the room‘?

Yeah, okay. I’m still on the road back from this unexpected and painful trip to PTSD-land.

And today I’m not ready to write more just yet about what’s going on. But I’m getting there. The words are forming. Well, to be completely accurate, my words tend to form as pictures and images first… (my possibly rather odd writing technique) before they translate into text…

Moment to moment life right now? It’s a fine balance between keeping myself busy enough so I don’t just stay in bed (would be so easy right now) and having too much going on… which just pushes everything back down again. If I’m too busy then sure, I start to feel better, relatively speaking.

But then once I stop being so busy, my heart pounds like a… a… something that pounds really fast… (apparently it has returned, but its all beat up like a wounded animal) and there’s a lot of physical pain involved with that.

I copped that experience last night, and spent an hour wondering if I was gonna have a heart attack. But then I crashed out on the couch and did a lot of sleeping.

The more meditation I do the better, although sitting still for too long isn’t ideal either right now. Argh!

So, I need to walk the line. I want this stuff to come out, but at the same time I have no wish to become a pillar of stone or completely drive myself nuts. Or repress this stuff any more.

I want to feel it and work through it. I want to drain every last drop of this deep, deep rage and sorrow from my body and mind.

And that I suspect, is gonna take some time.

~Svasti