Carrying on carrying on

Another day of trudging, a rainy and cold Sunday.

 

But I have to say that looking at the thought-provoking and intriguing artworks posted by recovery blogger ScottW in Attitude of Gratitude always gets the morning off to a good start. Art (paintings, music, literature, dance) is so core to living well, whether we are appreciating it or creating it.

And even the most piercing heartache doesn’t stop me enjoying a strong cup of coffee and a hug from my housemate. I am so lucky to be loved, really I am.

And talking of coffee, I am going to have to cut out that morning cup or two in the course of this week or I shall spend the first few days on retreat sitting with a headache from caffeine withdrawal. I don’t drink that much coffee (two or three cups a day) but strong cupfuls and enough to give me a mild pang or two of discomfort when I stop altogether. So I shall have chamomile or green tea and feel virtuously bleh.

I’d love to be elsewhere. But I’m not, and while doing a slightly chilly meditation this morning I could feel myself grounding again. The way I feel when I am sitting in an AA meeting, just there and nowhere else, listening and swelling with empathy and ‘me too’ stuff. Or that ‘Thank you God that her/his particular trainsmash hasn’t hit me yet’ stuff.

Sitting up in bed in the half-dark, paying attention and clearheaded, calm, no inner storms even though the rain and wind was hammering on the glass and rattling the front door. Sober at the dawn of another day. Thinkng: this is my life and this is all there is right now. I can go into the ‘thisness’ more deeply, I can wait for it to pass or change, but right now this is as good as it gets and this is reality. Awareness filling the bedroom like the quiet acceptance in my bpdy, that inner spaciousness I never understood.

Thinking: whatever happens today, I need not drink. I choose to stay conscious and mindful, I choose to live as fully as I am able. I choose to grow in skilful relating.

Telling myself: it’s OK, you didn’t do anything wrong, you just fell in love. It isn’t all your fault.

The breath so sly and subtle as it enters and leaves my nostrils, so cool, then warm, so gentle and soothing.

At this point I often start to ruminate with bitterness on what others have done wrong or how sad it is that I can’t seem to get my life together or to worry about the ache in my left shoulder blade and remember that the yoghurt is nearly finished and I will have to have a mingy breakfast etc, etc.

But this morning I just sat there and enjoyed being in my life and aware of myself sitting there, while the thoughts and feelings flowed in and out and my breathing expanded. Nothing to run from, nothing to avoid. Nothing to hope for, nothing to fear, everything right there in that moment. All the Maryness and Marylessness possible right there and then.

Consciousness is more interesting than I would have believed. Considering I spent most of my life desperately seeking obliviousness.

So I’m getting on with the day. Rain pouring down so I can’t walk anywhere. A leak dripping into a bucket in the kitchen, but slowly. Not enough yoghurt to moisten the muesli. But I have access to a computer, I have a house lined with books like a quilted coat of many colours, a garden spongey and green from rain — and I have a modicum of inner peace.

So I’m carrying on, just trudging and letting the feelings come and go. Our neighbours have given us four litres of freshly squeezed Eureka lemons in great big ugly jugs. And that means adding sugar, boiling it up and making lemonade, or, to be more accurate, organic lemon syrup to drink on spring evenings out in the garden. Life is blessed if I can open myself to that blessing.

The weather a wilderness

Squalls of rain and galeforce winds — driving through the veld we saw Brahmin cattle standing with bowed heads in a field of low grey scrub. Farm dams rocked with choppy waves, black and indigo. The Breede River had burst its banks and the  dark waves were rising and falling through tree branches and shrubs. Roads closed, birds flung like black paper wrappers across the skyline. The mountains coming and going like chimeras on the horizon, eerie sentinels obscured by cloud and rain.

 

I had forgotten this wildness, this feeling of being out alone on the edge of the known world. When we reached the restaurant and dashed indoors for cover, the valley below us was black and only just visible through the rain and fog. Grey trees with leafless branches cracking and tearing away. Ditches swimming with half-drowned white arum lilies. Pink blosson scattered like celebratory confetti from the orchards of almond trees.

 

It was exhilarating, and my sadness took a back seat. Springbok carpaccio and hot baked breads, lamb and bobotie: country food, unimaginative but warming. Tomatoes that taste of tomato. A large fire in the hearth at my back, well-lit tables by the window. Grape juice and bitter coffee.

 

Driving back, we stopped to buy a small bag of waterblommetjies, a Cape delicacy of bredieor stew made from the flower buds of a water plant that grows in icy dams and ponds, only flowering in spring. The vendor had his stained woollen cap pulled down low over his ears and his hands were shaking with cold. He had been standing there  by the roadside without rainjacket or shelter, in wet clothes, since dawn and he will wait hopefully until the sun goes down tonight. Drenched and frozen and choiceless.

 

South Africa drives me a little crazy. I feel helpless in the face of the destitution and desperation, and racked with that helplessness so much of the time.

 

And at last we were through the mountains, hail bouncing off the bonnet of the car. Low slopes of blackened vines in rows, dull yellow reeds thick by the rivers and streams. A few oaks just coming into leaf. A mongoose darting across the road. Both of us laughing and talking together quite easily, the semblance of an old friendship observed. Unpacking vegetables and groceries together in the kitchen, missing the dogs who used to greet  our arrival with such excitement.

 

Something in me that is not resigned to this return. And something in me broken. But I will find  a way to go on, finding a place for myself in this wild impossible country.

Storming Saturday

Well, it is the new moon in Virgo, but I shall not catch a glimpse of that until the black thunderclouds and storms have passed through the mountains.  The village rainwashed and windswept, gales blowing and dead branches littering the side streets.

 

Received confirmation of my meditation retreat booking and looked doubtfully at the requirement to get up at 4am and sit on a small cushion in a draughty hall with only a shawl or cape for warmth, as well as being reminded that the last meal of the day will be at noon (oh, that simple vegan bowl of brown rice, tra-la) and 10 hours a day in silent sitting practice.

 

Is that an exhilarating challenge or a daunting invitation to masochism? Well, it will clear the sticky emotional cobwebs away if nothing else. I can foresee my bad temper reasserting itself in no uncertain terms. More scowling than satori.

 

This morning I am going through to the small town of Worcester at the head of the Breede River valley to get some basic supplies. Then a light lunch up at a wine estate restaurant overlooking the amphitheatre of  vineyeards below the mountains. Soup and a slice of bread and we can’t really afford it, but it will be a chance for Una and myself to reconnect as friends and housemates.

The Greek root of the word ‘nostalgia’ is noster algos, meaning ‘to look homeward with longing’. I am missing Wales as if somebody has stolen that countryside and the chance to experience autumn from me. I feel cheated of seeing another season there, of revelling in that beauty.  This is not a rational feeling, but it goes deep. And with the longing and missing and feeling cheated, there is a bitter grief that things could not have been different between S and myself, that the love did not take root and grow. That too seems unfair and there is nothing to be done about that unreasonable feeling either.

And it is also true that I am grateful to be here and sober and having a chance to be present to this actual reality around me today. To be there for others, to notice new opportunities, to live this one life fully. Taking a deep breath and letting go of the daydreams. Not pointless longings, but a distraction from my life as it really is. Let the rain come down.

Here comes the weekend

Friday morning, the garden soaked and green from all this rain, more clouds looming, the cold as intense as ever. Woke in the dark from a distressing and unresolved dream about homelessness and being attacked. Sat up shivering and took some deep breaths to calm down.

 

Reading through vegan recipes for creative ways of working with very simple grains and beans, a few vegetables. This style of cooking rather exhilarates me once I get over the ‘too poor to buy red meat’ sense of deprivation. I have soaked black beans and will concoct something with garlic, chillies, lime, broccoli and carrots. Slow food is very satisfying to prepare and eat, and when I looked out of the kitchen indow this morning I saw that the rosemary bushes are flowering that lovely deep blue the Irish call ‘Mary blue’. My heart lifted just to see that blueness.

 

A friend asked me yesterday in an email about how I manage to stay centred and  not overwhelmed by loss or anger. There’s something I needed to put into words and say quite clearly. I’m talking here in this blog and in emails about the ending of a relationship and consequent feelings of hurt and loss — but I am not talking about abusiveness or violation or trauma.

 

I have endured that kind of violence before, both in prison (under the struggle against apartheid) and in my childhood with a very disturbed father and battered mother. That is something very, very different and raises issues that for me have required adjustment therapy and post-traumatic counselling.

 

This break-up is painful and full of awkwardness, full of feelings to do with misunderstanding, rejection, broken trust and disappointment,  but it is not traumatic or overwhelming. The only thing that would make this frightening and ‘out of control’ for me would be if either of us were to start drinking and acting out against one another. Fractured and erratic exchanges between active alcoholics are, in my experience, nearly always abusive and traumatic. When they are not pathetic and absurd, that is. Drunks can turn anything into grubby bathos.

 

In quiet times (and there are plenty of those right now) I’m thinking things through. Talking to those I can trust, who have known me a long time. Keeping boundaries straight. Looking at patterns around intimacy and psychological space, looking at friendship, thinking about acceptance.

 

I’m reconnecting with those in my village and with the messy, chaotic, creative and challenging realities of South African politics and civic life. Feeding myself and my housemate, taking care of household stuff. Doing the bodywork that keeps me in touch with thwarted energies. Reading and writing.  Gardening and walking. Letting the deeper fears surface and just listening to what they are saying. Nurturing the ‘conscious contact’ with my Higher Power.

Hoping to see the way forward more clearly as time passes. 

 

Some days are better than others and I have always enjoyed Fridays. There will be friends to see this weekend. Exciting things to do with lentils (Joke). With luck, a little spring sunshine. And one of these days the healing  will start.

Between brokenness and bliss

Woke up to pounding rain and a hard wind, realised I would not be able to go out and walk. My heart sinking. Yesterday I was able to keep busy, kneading and rolling out the silky dough for homemde pasta, walking up to the mountain road above the village and then to the library for research, working on a borrowed computer for an hour or two. Weeding and planting out seedlings in the garden. Chatting to neighbours.

 

Today I will be alone with drafts of fiction in a moleskine and needing to live with, tolerate if not embrace my own thoughts and feelings. No money for phone calls, no computer, no music. Financial struggle is not easy and I am especially vulnerable at the moment. Things were not handled well while I was away and I am in part to blame for that. Now there needs to be a tightening of belts and very careful budgeting.

 

The vulnerability at the moment is very intense. I feel broken and inadequate and a failure in so many ways. I made a bad mistake and it is costing me a great deal.

 

Here in the mountains there are no AA meetings and I have no money for travel, for petrol costs. The nearest meeting would be more than two hours away. Overseas I had that sheer luxury of being able to get to three or four meetings a week. It enrages me when I think how alcoholics in the UK do not appreciate what they have on their doorstep. AA is not a right, it is a privilege.

But although nothing can substitute for face-to-face meetings, I have sober friends emailing me and I have online AA, the precious community of recovering bloggers, forums, cyber-support. That will carry me through the hours when I am unable to get access to a computr.

 

And by the grace of my Higher Power, I have no desire to drink. This is what my life is like now and I accept the brokenness and struggle with gratitude. I made a stupid error of judgement in early sobriety and I am living sober through the painful and degrading consequences.

 

It feels as if much of the hope that has sustained me in the last year and  a half has been crushed. But perhaps I needed to live more realistically, enter into the truth of my own limitations and the failure of relationship on many levels. Human selfishness is a fact and the harm we do to one another cannot be wished away as an inconvenience or assuaged by glib apologies.

 

At night I wake in fear, the old terror that those I trust are lying to me and will abandon me or let me down. Then at last the morning light begins to warm the room and I can get up and make coffee and begin another day, sober and accepting of what cannot be changed. Learning to put my trust elsewhere.

I would give anything to be able to go and sit in my women’s group in Hereford, strong and loving women sharing their stories, reminding one another how we have stayed sober and what it was like before, the miracle we each experience now, one day at a time. The rooms represent my faith in human community. Although I cannot be there, I know they are continuing to meet each week and that comforts me,  I live on those memories.

 

Little by little it will get better, so long as I stay sober and keep working the Steps. I am reading my copy of the BIg Book that I have so often taken for granted, and I am able to keep working the Steps. In many ways I feel the Steps are a process carrying me through this time, that so long as I stay open and receptive to the mystery — the grief and consolations and upheavals — it will all be well in the end.

 

Always before, I fled these opportunities for growth, refused to deepen my understanding of the brokennes within. Resentment and self-pity were much easier crusts to gnaw on, the whining and self-justifying.

 

Now I am staying with the truth about myself and learning to trust the process and the Higher Power guiding that process. The old patterns are dissolving and one of these mornings I shall wake up and the light will be breaking through.

End of winter

Woke in the freezing dark and stillness before dawn and spent 45 mintues in meditation. I have done this sitting practice with monotonous regularity for most of my adult life and it has now become as significant as brushing my teeth. I don’t think of it as ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ because I am leery of those words right now.

 

I pay attention to my breathing and how my body feels, the tension in my shoulders, tiredness, the energy flow. As my breathing, body and mind quieten down, I just watch the thoughts, sensations and emotions flow through my mind and heart, unimpeded. I don’t judge them or examine them or try to influence them, I just pay attention and note the flow, the mutability.

 

The bedrock these years is thankfulness, the persisting gratitude, that I am alive and filled with courage to go on.  The suffering is there but so is presence, the receptive breathing self, consciousness, embodied and just paying attention.

 

Then I have coffee and chat with Una before she goes out to do community work. After that I dress warmly nd go for a walk up the steep hillside. Looking down past aloes and eucalyptus towards the valley, it all looks very brown and dusty and thin to me. None of the lush beauty of the Welsh border. A little neglected and shabby and empty of colour.

 

But the sun is hotter this week, a fierce blaze coming over the granite mountain peaks, and winter is coming to an end. The inner drought will pass in time. I keep walking but not so fast I don’t notice vivid carmine azaleas and camellias in flower and the veltheimia in umbels of dusty pink. Labourers, Xhosa and Sotho,  in dirty blue overalls, surly and with woollen caps low over their ears, coming down from the squatter settlements of Goniwe Park. Clanging of handrung bells from the high school set against the hill, the beginning of classes after assembly.

 

Back at the house I have slices of lemon in hot water and go out with a watering can to dampen pelargoniums and my new rocket seedlings. In the next road I can hear dogs barking at passersby.  I miss having dogs, I keep hoping the cats from next door will visit.

Then to work, the sustaining grind of it. Birds very noisy in the hot sunshine. I listen for the African cuckoo, the piet-my-vrou. It is almost spring and each spring the birds come into the back garden for nectar and dew on the grass. Birds, little white-eyes and house martins, fly onto the front stoep to get at the nectar in the apricot clivias in terracotta pots, their wings a quick blur in the sun. And there are lizards basking in the warmth on low walls.

 

And I am just staying in the day, staying present to what is there.

Hanging in there

Snow falling on the mountains all around and the firewood bought is green and wet. I think with envy of the heated houses overseas. Hot water bottles and blankets.

 

Just taking my time on a very slow computer, waiting for the booting to work. I knew I was coming back to financial struggle and it will take time for me to get on my feet again. But the relief of not feeling under obligation to anyone is worth the struggle. I realised last night listening to reproachful friends that I am a very poor judge of character, my own and others. I take things at face value and trust in foolhardy ways. But I am learning.

 

The comments and emails are a great comfort and thanks to those of you who have reached out to me during this time. The Internet is not really a ‘virtual’ community at all — we are flesh and blood, real men and women sitting at desks in city apartments and country kitchens, reaching out across the world to help keep one another warm.

 

And the blessing of sobriety is that we are able to suffer and feel that suffering without the inflammatory hysterics and maudlin outbursts, the paranoia and wild accusations that arise inevitably with drinking. Sobriety lets us feel something more than self-pity and resentment. Gratitude is there like a steady bedrock each day on waking and a benison on falling asleep.

A cold spring in Africa

Very cold and grey morning, Monday in a country village amidst the mountains. Rock pigeons cooing, black branches wet with rain, frost on the grass.

 

It is not easy being back and I am still disoriented, feeling fragmented. When the rain stops I shall go for a walk. Emails voicing concern from friends in the UK, the kindness of strangers. My life has a strange disconnected feel and the only thing to do is to get involved and work with others. Get back to the discipline of writing.

 

Things will get better, I just have to hold on and keep going through the motions. I will go out and plant some rocket seedlings in my herb barrels. Make a pot of rogan josh with basmati rice and raitas. Write to friends.

 

Keep doing the next right thing, as I did in early sobriety. Just putting one foot in front of another and waiting for the pain and exhaustion to recede. I have lived through so much worse.

 

Walking up a hill road above the village yesterday morning, I saw the scarlet curved flowers of the Erythrina, the African coral tree. That flame red against the deep  blue skies, flowers like vivid beaks or tongues, flowering on the bare dark branches. My heart lifting at the sight. I just have to trust to the healing forces around me and within. And to the passage of time.

Back in the Overberg

The Cape on the verge of spring, dark bare branches of the apple trees flushed with bud, dams full but a dusty black in the air. Cold and with strong winds. The flight from London came bucketing in over the green seas around Robben Island into mists and a fierce headwind.

 

And my trusty laptop is giving up the ghost so I may be offline for a while, struggling to get Internet access and the memory hiccuping and sputtering.

 

Sober and grateful all the same for a safe return and the habit of travelling sober, resuming  my life here, greeting friends and neighbours. This morning I am going to a country mrket in Greyton, about an hour’s travel through the mountains.

 

Have caught up on sleep — a very deep tiredness. Now to acclimatize to the dazzling light and bitter cold of a delayed spring.

Day of Departure

Lay awake last night and spent some time looking at how I go about experiencing the thouight flitting back and forth in my mind, the fleeting emotional storms and body sensations. Hot, cold, anxious, feverish, tense, angry, sad.

I could have sat up in meditation position and do some breathwork but I wanted to get back to sleep. Today is going to be a very long day with the trip to Heathrow and a flight back to South Africa leaving at 9pm.

Because I worked for several years with a Theravada practitioner, there are many ways of paying attention in Buddhist practice that make sense to me. While drinking I could not implement even the simplest technique because the excess drinking inflamed my mind and prevented detachment. Now it is possible (sometimes) for me to recognise the patterns of thinking and the difficulty of staying in the present.

There is as little point regretting the past as speculating about the future. Conditioned responses are just that. Anger, ignorance and greed. The fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz wrote: “The mind is ever a tourist wanting to touch and buy new things, then toss them into an already-filled closet.”

Just paying bare attention changes the feelings. This is my restless mind at 2am. This is the ‘self’ suffering, being distracted, feeling fear and regret and loss. This is the mind circling the same preoccupations and trying to avoid the feelings. This is the mind being impatient. The feelings come up and fall away. What stays is the intention to observe quietly and just be with the thoughts, letting them come and go.

When I can’t pray, can’t sleep, feel at the mercy of my own moods I can at least pay attention. And at last there is inner quiet and the chance of renewed sleep. No great insights, no transfornations. Just the tiredness and drifting back to sleep.

It is a cloudy and cold morning. All I have to do is pack and get ready for the airport. Nothing to do and nothing left undone. The pain is there but it is fine. It is not unbearable.

Tomorrow morning I will be landing in Cape Town. A friend there to meet me. There will be a long drive back through the mountains, a cold spring just beginning in the Cape, and when I get home I shall be able to sleep in my own bed. Then I shall begin piecing my life together again. One day at a time.