Compassion

This is something I wrote for myself some time ago, but I’m offering it up for anyone who is enmeshed in what is currently happening in the Middle East.

In order to cope with the discomfort of listening to someone talk about something that creates stress in you, you need three things.

Courage to keep sitting there and actively listening to the meaning of what they are saying.
Faith in yourself that whatever is happening inside you, you can cope with it. That you will not be traumatised by their trauma.
Compassion on yourself – not them. If they are voluntarily talking then they are having compassion on themselves. Your compassion on yourself will create the environment for them to continue to have compassion on themselves. Fear expands to fill the space available and in order not to be overwhelmed you must create a container for it. So the compassion must expand at a greater rate to contain it and dissolve it.

Compassion is a power of unconditional love. It is not pity. If you feel pity, turn it into respect. That person is dealing with stuff you can’t even imagine.

You do not “give” compassion, you “have” compassion. Meaning you offer to embody it. Compassion is the act of relinquishing yourself to unconditional love and requires courage and dispassion. It is non-personal. It has no subject and no object.

To be in the presence of compassion when you are in distress is to be reminded that for every action (experience) there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is a reminder that in your world of unremitting pain, such an opposite exists. The experience of it is excruciating because the contrast is so great it cannot be accommodated. Its presence forcibly splits your world apart. It requires change in you. You can choose to paper over the cracks, pretend it never happened and cling to your pain. Or you can use it to help you find your way back from the extreme to the balance point.

Compassion is hard.

Before the note…

In order to get lost in music, it has to be there already.

When you create music, you can’t get lost. If you get lost, you simply stop. Because you are in the space before the note. You create it from yourself and then you release it through your body across the instrument and into the world.

It sounds.

But by that time you are no longer with it. You are realising it’s child, and the child of its child.

And that’s why you have to practise, so that you can let go of each note before it’s played, and know that your body will merge with the instrument and create exactly the sound that you intended.

Image by: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay. With thanks.

Why music saved my sanity

vinyl-records

Words are such untrustworthy things. They cling to the edge of the impulse-to-live as it dies. Scavengers. Every moment of consciousness is a reflection of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. So often the translation is I think, therefore I am. But thinking is so far removed from I, much better to translate it as I am aware, therefore I am. To get from the impulse-to-live to thinking requires a fair number of steps; become aware, assign meaning, fumble in the mental dictionary for words that might be appropriate, string them together according to the rules of grammar, and finally listen to the result. By which time, the world, and the impulse-to-live, has moved on. So there we are, right out on the edge, clinging to words, living in the past.

Do you see what happens there? Where the wriggle room is? Between becoming aware and assigning meaning. That’s where past experience, outside pressures, conditioning, all perk up and claim a piece of the action. They scurry away to the dictionary to slap a label on the impulse, often erroneously. Words can take life and skin it, dice it, discard most of it and then triumphantly proclaim the morsel contained in a single word as The Truth, complete, whole and entire. Nothing to see here, move on, move on…

When I say music saved my life, I’m not being entirely fanciful. It definitely saved my sanity. At a time when all the words in my head were cruel, judgemental and manipulative, music was the thing that revealed a piece of me to hold on to. I’m not talking about lyrics here, I’m talking about notes. There’s the impulse-to-live, and that grabs hold of a note—a sound—and follows it to the next note, and the next. Instead of words imposing a meaning, the impulse-to-live inserts it’s own meaning into the note and feeds it back before that dictionary of predisposition can literally get a word in. What music showed me of myself was melancholia which is a much misunderstood term. It is not depression, it is the exquisite beauty of sorrow. The musicians of the 16C understood it perfectly. And if you would like to hear what that means, try listening to John Dowland’s In Darkness Let Me Dwell. The beauty of the song is not in the words, which are of such despair, it is the music that makes it so beautiful and life affirming.

Image by: Free photos on Pixabay

Interstices

Interstices

I find myself in the gaps between words. In the interstices, where awareness flows unfettered by meaning and paints a world that does not fit neatly into the dictionary. I cannot shoehorn all of myself into ways of being that end in a full stop. My sense of self stretches beyond this physical body and rational mind. It encompasses the continuum in which I swam before life taught me words and separation, or hormones taught me reactive emotions. And it embraces the experience that I expect to feel as I die, when words and emotions dissolve into the velvet depths of silence.

The growth of years has little meaning for me as I do not experience myself or my life as temporal stepping stones. Some things I knew before I learned them, others came in cycles linking past, present and future. The ways I define myself now are not, explaining how I worked hard to get the money to achieve the thing, or picking over the traumas of my childhood. They are how compassion saves me, how joy surprises me and how I understand that life has no meaning that can be spoken of in words.

Picture by Geralt on Pixabay

 

“I lost a world the other day…”

i lost a world

I remember… I remember… I remember an inn Miranda and a highwayman who came knocking at its door, under a new moon shining wi’ the twinkle, twinkle little stars that looked down on a land where the Jumblies sold sealing wax and cabbages and kings asked queens, who asked the little serving maid, not to go down to the end of the town for marmalade and a bier, which great lords will carry…

Oh where, oh where has my childhood gone? With its breathless words of verse and worse that tumble and fall in rhythmic joy, like a comb through the tangled curls of memory. Whose lines are as knotted as the memories that weave new poems about a childhood I imagine I lived; and perhaps I did. I will never know, for what is memory except imagination labelled real.

The Scissor-man went Snip! Snap! Snip! and daddy was gone. That most definitely happened, exactly like that. There is proof in artefacts, in death certificates and the gap where he should have been.

Or the glorious technicolour holidays which my sisters and I piece together in a tapestry of conflicting times and places and people and words. And somewhere, beyond the cracks, enough consensus lurks to say—I lived this. The ski-jump and the corsets, the oompah band, the crowded train and puppets on a string. When for me, earth had nothing to show more fair than Michelangelo’s David, or the Milky Way stripped naked by the desert air.

But what of the Sandman, trusted to care, who woke me to strange and terrifying games that played hide and seek in my memory for thirty-five years until, in fragmented snatches, they flashed back in technicolour cinemascope? What really happened to a terrified child, who left her body and thought she was dead and gone to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, who had repeatedly failed to bless the bed that I lay on. Who is to know, now he is dead and gone and there can be no consensus to agree upon?

I so needed to be healed and meditation was the weight of pleasure that held me like a dream in a world of imagination lived real. A time when the inexplicable was inscribed on the soul as indelibly as a stylus scars wet clay.

And later, when somewhere between the heart and the need, God was elided by other lovers and became an apostrophe; did I simply imagine that I loved them and they loved me? Was that live-long minute true to me, all that heaven allowed? And when it altered, as it alteration found, did I forget with one what I remember with another, until the past has become a thing of chance?

And what of all those forgotten moments that have created me? Can leaps of faith and imagination span the gaps of my identity and make of me some fragmentary whole? Can other people’s words, in lines of poetry, fathom the unfathomable where past and future memories resonate in an eternal present? Or is it, that like all time, I am unredeemable?

Image by Geralt on Pixabay

What makes a good read?

Good read pezibear 857021Isn’t that exactly what you want to know as you flick through titles on your phone, or run your finger along the spines of books on the library shelf. If it was just as simple as saying, abc. But it isn’t. And there are plenty of snobs out there who will tell you, that good books must be literary, so you can dismiss all other books. Just as there are passionate advocates of genre fiction that can drone on about chapter and verse and talk it up to the status of genius.

How many god-awful literary novels have I discarded on the “unbearable” pile? Yawn, yawn, another tedious serving of a university professor beset by middle-class angst, liberally dressed with irrelevant and embarrassing similes. Just as I have spurned robotic science fiction with robotic characters who have the emotional range of teaspoon (to quote from a good read).

I know what I think makes a good read, and it’s nothing to do with literary versus genre. A good book can come from anywhere, be about anything and written in any style. It is to do with the understanding and vision of the writer. A mediocre book is one where the reader understands at least 90% of it on the first reading. A second reading, if you ever do it, will definitely bore you and give you what remains of that final 10%.

A good read gives you about 75% on its first reading, but you will find it totally satisfying. If you decide to re-read it, you will be amazed at what you missed on the initial outing. You will realise that the inconspicuous sentences at the start of the book that you failed to digest the first time, ring like bells heralding later developments in the plot. You will see underlying threads that were not clear before. You will appreciate character arcs and see the steps by which they are achieved.

But a really good read gives you just 60% and leaves you thinking wow! The second reading ups you to 80% and you realise that you will get even more from a third reading and wonder if you will ever approach 100% understanding. Each time you read it you peel back the layers. You start to see the subtleties in the dialogue and the things that are left unsaid. You will notice the unresolved nature of the dilemmas; the imperfections of the characters; the wider questions that are raised. You will talk about it with friends and it will stay with you through the years, providing reflection and thought that sparks off in a 100 different ways.

Then there are the books that arrive at pivotal moments and change the course of your life…

Here are some of my really good reads in a variety of genres, because the only way to find them is through happenstance or recommendation. It’s a broad selection, and what worked for me may not work for you. Some of them I read many years ago, others more recently, but for one reason or another, they are all ringing in my memory.

  • Crime and Punishment – Foydor Dostoyevski (classic)
  • The Other Side of You – Sally Vickers (modern literary – English)
  • The Ghormenghast Trilogy – Mervyn Peake (fantasy)
  • Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood (modern literary- Canadian)
  • Any Science fiction by Ursula le Guin (self explanatory…)
  • A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry (recent history – Indian)
  • The Lymond Series – Dorothy Dunnett (historical)

 

Photo courtesy of Pezibear on Pixabay