End of the day

Sometimes I get this very tired feeling around certain topics to do with recovery and alcoholism. I can’t wait to see how unenthralled I shall be with them after a decade or so (one day at a time). Every time I am asked to say something or write something on the subject of ‘prayer and meditation’, a number of warning bells go off in my head. The subject is full of pitfalls, rather like chatty asides on the US presidential elections, amusing unless you think of possible consequences to do with war and more illegal invasions or the brutal glossing over of torture etc. Then there is nothing to be said and so much needing to be done that nobody knows where to start.

But eloquence from spiritual writers aside, it is sometimes not enough just to quote Thomas Merton or Thich Nhat Hanh or Julian of Norwich and sidle off quietly. I have come to understand that recovery and the gift of sobriety opens us to understand reality more compassionately and perceptively and that the numinous is to be found in the most unlikely and mundane of places. And the only way to encourage others to share their experience of this is to share my own.

Here is something I posted on a forum dear to my heart but prone to all the glib cheerleading that passes for spiritual enthusiasm and faith talk online. I couldn’t say very much and yet I do feel that somehow in these discouraged days I am learning to recognise what I have in common with every other suffering alcoholic and with all of humanity. Which sounds dangerously grandiose, but I have come a long way from thinking of myself as a tormented mystic….

“Each time this topic comes up, I post with great reluctance because it is difficult to speak of something so travestied and liable to misunderstanding. Alcoholism made a mockery of what I once called my ‘faith life’. The movement from desperation to gratitude is one for which I don’t have words. The traditional religious language doesn’t seem to fit. In recovery, many of the compassionate and perceptive insights shared with me have come from AA members who would define themselves as agnostic or atheist.

“Earlier today I was reading a review of the novel Home by Marilynne Robinson, looking at the theme of the Prodigal Son. Her character Ames, a failure by all accounts, comments: “Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true. ‘He will wipe the tears from all faces.’” The reviewer pointed out that each of us is lost and a failure, trying to find our way home and that we are all without exception weeping and in need of comfort. There is nobody who is not bereft and struggling at some level of our being, nobody who is not in need of comfort. It moved me very much to think that we are all included in this image and invited to reach out to one another.”

Planting tomatoes and basil

One of those prosaic days. Yesterday was fun: sitting in the old farmhouse transformed into the Cuban African restaurant Buena Vists Social Club, all blues and ochres and the famous portrait of Che Guevara, old photos of downtown Havana, Spanish chandeliers, fires lit to warm the diners and too many jalapenos stuffed with cream cheese.

Driving home, dense mist on Sir Lowry’s Pass, we stopped at a plant nursery and I saw a bonsai wisteria smothered in deep blue panicles of blossom, the panicles almost larger than the tiny creeper. Bought silver thyme (a girl can never get enough thyme so long as there is Mediterranean cooking to be done!) and a tray of ‘Roma’ tomato seedlings. I want bushes of ripe tomatoes, juicy and ready to eat by Christmas. Companion-planted with basil, the makings of classic Italian pasta dishes right at hand.

So I shall be gardening this morning, enjoying the spring blossom and trying to detach the ripe yellow lemons from the top of my lemon tree.

Taking each day as it comes. This afternoon, a bout of editing work. This evening supper wth friends. Leaving the past and the future to serendipity. Just dealing with what is happening now, what I can do to hold the balance steady now, live as fully as I can on this particular day. Sober and grateful and keeping the focus on the here and now.

Monday malfunctioning

My computer is malfunctioning and may have a virus. A damp cold morning, roads and fields wet with mist. There is a falcon circling the oaks at the far end of the field, leisurely but watchful movements.

My neighbour Tienie brought round a copper samovar he found at an auction sale in some warehouse near Cape Town docks. It is dented and ugly. Tienie loves collecting old unloved objects he calls antiques. He has a pink and yellow rose-patterned chamber pot he insists is genuine Limoges. It may well be Limoges, he paid a fortune for the damn thing, but it is hideous. I looked at the samovar and pointed out that it is non-functional because there is nowhere to put hot coals and no cylinder for heating water, no electrical connection point. It is a copper-plated ornament designed to look like a Russian samovar. Tienie ignored me and said it looks very old to him and he intends to hammer out the dents and burnish the copper. Nice teapot but no tea.

On Wednesday I shall be leaving for my 10-day retreat. Before I go I would like to write something decent for the third chapter of my fiction manuscript, but ‘decent’ needs inspiration. Nevertheless, I labour on.

My housemate wants a supper of tandoori chicken, grilled, with poppadums and chopped coriander and creamy yoghurt and spicy potatoes. That will take care of the afternoon. While I was away she lived on fried eggs, ketchup and toasted sndwiches, gave herself heartburn and didn’t look at a vegetable or make a fresh salad, not once.

This morning I woke from an odd dream about trying to fix up a farm belonging to my former editor, to find a glass of just-squeezed orange juice on my bedside table. Sweet and delicious, such a wake-up alert. Then I sat up and read some John Banville (The Sea) and some passages from the BB, hokey and earnest, but true. Mention of the still suffering alcoholic and I said a silent prayer of thanks that I am not still there, arguing with myself and scheming about finding ways to drink secretly, needing to pour drink down me and in denial of that needing it, lying to myself and others, using up all the time and energy available to me in the day on thoughts about drinking or not drinking or trying to stop drinking or not being able to stop drinking. Addiction is so tiring and monotonous and takes up so much time.

Hard work is tiring, but in a different way. Boredom is just boredom. And if I am lucky, there will be new opportunities and a phrase or two that makes the writing worthwhile. I might even get to see the falcon swoop down through the branches of the oak, that precise, deadly, but beautiful pounce.

The hard durable beauty of the unanaesthetised life.

Dreaming into the dark sea of the unconscious

When I wake in the cold darkness of these mornings, fragments of dream stay with me.

A man I once loved deeply, as a young woman in my 20s, is sitting listening to me. He looks tired and ascetic but his eyes are filled with tears. ‘I am so sorry my darling,’ he says to me. “I am so sorry it had to be this way’. I look into his tear-filled eyes and it seems to me that I have only ever sought him in every other man I have known since then. The knowledge is unbearable. In the dream I can feel myself falling through the seat, through the floorboards, into a well of bitter grief.

Then I am taking care of two cats in small travelling cages. One cat, the more timid, escapes and I am afraid it will come to harm. Yet I admire it for seeking freedom. I look out of the car window, trying to spot the runaway cat in this unknown city. My younger brother, the alcoholic, is driving the car and looks neither to left nor right, he drives on grimly.

And then I am in a cinema with a young woman beide me, naked and covered in lice, small and grey like ticks, thousands of them covering her breasts nd belly and thighs. A living, heaving mass of vermin. I don’t know what to do and I want to help her, brush them away, wash them off her body. At the back of the cinema, in a raised gallery, S is sitting all alone and I wonder if I should join him, but am not sure I would be welcome. A film by Luis Bunuel begins, crackling and with the sound obscured. Scenes in grainy black-and-white of a 1930s city, Toledo or Madrid, during the Spanish Civil War.

Waking, I am filled with sadness, a sense of loss, revulsion, bewilderment. Wave after wave of indecipherable feeling rises and falls in me. I go through to the bathroom and wash my face with freezing water, jolt myself into wakefulness. Then I sit down with coffee and the years slide away — recalling the anguish of J’s death, the friends murdered in Lesotho, the horror of rape. Memories of war and death and torture.

And, too, the experience of being truly loved, that will stay with me for a lifetime. Those who are able to make promises and keep them. Let me be one of those.

We can’t give our lives meaning. The meaning is there waiting to be found and cherished. Against one wall of the garden there is japonica, cherry-red blosoms on bare branches, a lovely sight.

And there are white butterflies floating over the lavender bushes and the flowering rosemary. It poured last night and the village is rainwashed, the light distilled. If I flicked my fingernail against the sky it would ring like glass. A transparent glowing world, newborn.

One step forward at a time. Hugging my housemate, both of us laughing. Planning to see friends over the weekend. Explaining how I am going to make a cream cheese and chives filling for large black mushrooms, grilled, for supper.

The inner ocean of dreamwork and those dark dark depths stay with me. Tragedy is not denied to any of us, it is the key that unlocks a door into vision. But how it hurts.

One step forward, another day sober and moving forward. I know there is a precipice within, the deep places of the spirit, and I can bear only so much knowledge. What was it Auden wrote? ‘Life remains a blessing/ Although we cannot bless.’

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 forest within

Once all these hills would have had great forests covering them, denser along rivers and near springs or lakes, Forests of rowan and ash and beech, grey with mistletoe, holly and ivy. When I went out for a walk yesterday I came back through the path going through woods past the spring and its mossy shelves of slate. I paused there for a short while, just taking it in.

There was a gleaming holly bush there and I thought of the old song we used to sing as schoolchildren far away in Africa where we never saw the bush in question: ‘The holly and the ivy/When they are both full-grown/Of all the trees that are in the wood/The holly bears the crown.’ I could smell the deep earth mould and the damp, the rotting humus which is where the fertile plant life begins. Humus is the Latin word that is the root for humility, that grounding of the self in reality.

As I walked I could still taste the cold definite taste of the pure spring water and hear starlings and blackbirds calling in the forest. All of a sudden it came to me how lost I am, despite the path leading through woodland so clear and well-trodden. Dante’s famous phrase:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi retrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.

“In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost”

The straight way has been lost and I am now walking along an unknown trail that may lead deeper into the woods or out into sunshine. The darkness is there and I am a fool not to see it. This is one of the most challenging times of my life and the most bewildering. The journey of my life has taken an about-turn and I do not know where it is leading. I have to trust the darkness of the forest, the shining leaves of holly, the ash and rowan trees, the nurturing of the spirit in dark places.

I have lost my way and there is nobody to tell me which way to go. I do not know my destination. I am simply expploring the forest and hoping for the best. And I am present to the journey within, of sober spirit and attentive.

The self uncovered

Lively sharing at a meeting last night in Hereford — strange to be there in the evening, the warmth of the day glowing in the skies and quiet city streets. I think of Hereford as a town but it is a cathedral city.

 

Shared a little myself, caught up in the excitement and vitality of the meeting but afterwards, driving home, wondered if I had shared from a deep and sincere enough place within. I struggle to find language for what is going on in me as the months pass, finding myself in steady recovery and living in Britain.

 

I feel I have somehow lost a vital connection to place through leaving Africa — I hunger after scenes of dust and heat and empty spaces, far horizons. The sounds of the Nguni languages, the smiles and laughter. People here don’t laugh or sing enough.  But I am also getting used to living without the hypervigilance and fear I lived with in South Africa, especially in the cities. The absence of danger makes me almost giddy at moments.

 

My life is in hiatus. I need steadier work so as to feel anchored and secure. The deep insecurity stretches back much further than my present situation. For years I lived without family or any sense of belonging, lost and distraught, adrift in a dark strange universe. Now I am finding a place for myself but losing a place and a relationship that meant so much to me. Loss of place means loss of identity for me. And I lack a regular and sustaining spiritual practice. That will take time because I cannot borrow faith any longer, need something authentic in which I can trust.

 

Now I am going to go out for a brisk walk as the sun burns off the valley mist. Time to embrace the day and get those legs moving –