Resolution check-in

By admin on February 6, 2010

Checking in, a month into my New Year’s resolution to be a little kinder. So far so good, if a little conscious of trying. Efforts are concentrated on the other by:

– Not correcting something in order to align it with my reality
– Paying attention during interactions even brief ones
– Showing interest and making eye contact – focus
– Listening and agreeing

I’ve had some encouraging feedback, attitude noticed and acknowledged. At times I’m biting my tongue, holding back contradiction and criticism, effort undetected I hope.

Plenty of work to do to be more real, more genuine, as I start to appreciate just how critical I am by nature, picky, picky, picky sometimes, and plain smug and superior other times.

Boy, my little voice is on to me today – I’ll try to calm it for next month. More to do…

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I’ll take the force of the blow

By admin on January 21, 2010

Sometimes song fragments hum around in my inner, a refrain singing to the outer.

Browsing around Powell’s, a great bookshop in Portland, a remnant of a song I didn’t really know was whispered by my inner, wanting to be known.

“I’ll stand in front of you and take the force of the blow…”

Book browsing abandoned, I tried music shops singing the only line I could recall of the song sung by artists I didn’t know. The listeners, the CD sellers, struggled to recognise the song. It took some days to track it down, not only due to the quality of my singing, the song was 10 years old.

“I’ll stand in front of you and take the force of the blow…”
I hummed the words about actions I’d failed to fulfill. I hadn’t taken the force of the blow.

Haunted by a partly remembered song line and unsure of what my inner needed the outer to know…

There’s another part of the song I take solace from. This might be what my inner was singing for my outer to know:

“Now I can’t change the way you feel
But I can put my arms around you
That’s just part of the deal
That’s the way I feel
I’ll put my arms around you…”

I couldn’t change the way Mottsu felt, I did put my arms around him.
My outer is still learning, that I can’t take the force of the blow on behalf of someone I love. I wish it were possible.

…but I can put my arms around you. I can sit by you. Hold your hand. Be close by, if you have to suffer the force of a blow, or dark forces unknown.

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The burden of one’s own story

By admin on January 17, 2010

If traumatised by events in your life, trying to slip back into the world you used to inhabit is difficult. I found it difficult. Scarred and bruised, but somewhat patched up, I returned to work only to encounter an environment where there was little room for acknowledgement of events I had been through.

I became burdened by my own recent history. Like a little Greek Island donkey laden with baggage and plodding to somewhere with a stubborn donkey brain determined to make it to the destination; my own stubborn head was looking for normal.

In trying to get back to normal, I didn’t necessarily want to talk about what had happened, Mottsu’s suicide, and yet it was important to be able to tell chapters of my own story, have scraps of it witnessed. The traumatic needed to be integrated with the everyday. Normal couldn’t be attained by papering over or ignoring what had happened.

Returning to the office was distressing. Pleasantries exchanged while ignoring my recent history became unpleasant. When I knew that they knew and said nothing, it was a struggle to maintain a polite composure. I wasn’t always composed, it wasn’t possible. The steeliness of others in not acknowledging any of what I had been though was unendurable at times.

The workplace can be tough, tougher than it is supposed to be, or is typically regarded as being…

At the same time I loved my colleagues how didn’t know what to say, those who were taken beyond the “edge” of what is possible to perceive and respond to, and then said “I don’t what to say…”

Those words were a great gift, gratefully received.

I’m not sure I knew what to say. I do remember sitting at my desk and quietly weeping when words were both too much and not enough.

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Departures

By admin on January 11, 2010

Remiss of me to write about movies with themes around death and loss without mentioning last year’s affecting Japanese film, Departures.

Departures is about the transition between life and death, and about the resultant loss and inevitable grief. The film is presented in a quietly captivating way, with great reverence for the dead.

This is a gentle and very moving movie that honours the dead and with respect and ritual.

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At the movies

By admin on January 10, 2010

I can’t imagine why someone who is grieving would want to watch movies about grieving and grief behaviour. I did, there’s no why. I have written about watching Truly Madly Deeply over and over. I watched it, and found it consoling.

I saw a couple of movies last year that depicted life after a death in the family. I appreciated that what might have looked like odd behaviour on the big screen reminded me of what normal can be like.

I recommend (and have reviewed):
• Genova – the character studies are intelligent, multi-layered portraits of grieving.
• Quiet Chaos – is a subdued but sure-footed meditation on grieving as lives and priorities are reassessed.

As with Truly Madly Deeply, it’s deeply gratifying to see a difficult theme faithfully handled without unnecessary tragic overtones or a weepy soundtrack.

I have to mention Ghost as well, mostly becasue of my supermarket episode. . Ghost is more weepy and Hollywood in style than the other films, just so you know.

Four Weddings and Funeral, fast forward through the weddings just to hear the reading of W. H. Auden’s moving poem:

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The clocks stop.

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Moving forwards and backwards

By admin on January 9, 2010

“Biography is not destiny” says Tony Robbins, “…the past is not the future.”

Thanks Tony, only it seems that way sometimes. Makes me think how easy it is to be defined by the past, particularly by traumatic events which shatter our beliefs about our worlds. Regaining a foothold after a trauma takes time, for a while there is only the past, a future is barely apparent as you work to integrate what happened into your biography. That’s how it was for me.

A lecture on working with trauma given by Dr. Shar Edmunds and Alan Richardson in 2008, illuminated my experience. They said:

Trauma begins with an event or series of events that is too much to bear. The experience is beyond the “edge” of what is possible to perceive and respond to. It shatters our most fundamental beliefs about the world. It’s beyond what we can include in our identity – as an individual or as a community.

The presenters explained the biology and the psychology of reactions to trauma, and the scar tissue created. They talked about the trauma ‘receiver’, how and why that person has a monopoly on feelings and sensitivity.

Listening, I glimpsed something of poor misunderstood, woebegone, powerless, me. Poor me, who wants to thank her dear forbearing friends, the ones who stayed around while I was so bruised and wounded. The ones that allowed me to grasp onto all of the feelings and hurt as if no-one else had ever suffered a loss like mine.

Gratitude.

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Try to be a little kinder – a resolution

By admin on January 5, 2010

I have a resolution for the New Year, and beyond, to be kinder. It’s a resolution, a wish, a practice, a dream, and will be even more central to my way of life. I’m planning to change the world, starting with me, in the smallest and most gentle way with kindness, creating little ripples of care, respect and acceptance.

It will be magical…

I resolve to try to be kinder to myself, I resolve to try to be kinder in my role as daughter, sister, aunt, neighbour, friend, confidante, leader, manager, consultant, colleague, consumer, constituent, blogger, facilitator, learner, trainer… in every role.

I expect be fully occupied by the task, and growing.

I am indebted to a wonderful Facebook friend in Copenhagen, who inspired me by posting a status that included the latter part of this quote by Aldous Huxley:

“It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder”.

It is no more difficult than that, and I intend making kindness a sustained practice in keeping with the emergent global imperative for sustainability, and my own high dreams for a world I want to live in.

Happy New Year

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I can smile at the old days*

By admin on January 4, 2010

One day after work, I sat on a tram looking out of the window at the city parks that lined the route between the office and home. My newly acquired aloneness felt all the more accute, amid a crowd of homeward bound passengers, with no-one waiting at home to greet this city worker. Surrounded by strangers and inspired by the familiar scenery my thoughts harked back to happier times when Mottsu and I would share the detail of the one act dramas that unfold between tram stops. All alone with memories*, I recalled when we’d sit together on a tram, in collusion, observing the other passengers and enjoying the diorama of public transport.

A chorus of school children who’d filled the aisles with unwieldy backpacks loudly discussed their emerging interests in the other gender. The ubiquitous talker took up a soap box stance and berated the Prime Minister, our political system, and humanity in general. There was also the extra, the one that no-one else would sit near or make eye contact with. The soundtrack was underscored by one-sided mobile phone conversations that predictably opened with the line “I’m on the tram” and then went on to share more than the talker realised about themselves.

From my seat in the stalls I saw a woman teetering on stilt like heels almost unable to balance as she negotiated a transaction with a machine to secure a ticket, she tripped clumsily before heavily landing in a seat. I smiled inwardly.

Mottsu would have enjoyed these displays of humaness. I looked out of the window missing the intimacy of his company.

Involuntary tears welled and gently spilled, responding to the pull of gravity and leaving a tiny pools of longing on the empty vinyl seat next to me. I was conscious that by crying I became one of the players in the vignette of tram theatre, a part of the drama. I resisted wiping my cheek not wanting to draw attention to the overflow of emotion. The tears liberated themselves from somewhere within and continued to gently flow and I felt a little liberated too, free to cry or maybe just unable not to.

I also felt conspicuous, becoming a member of the cast on the tram carriage stage. The audience were watching from behind a façade of disinterest secretly spellbound, perhaps imagining what might be unfolding in front of them and all the possible reasons for the quiet sorrow of a fellow commuter. I sensed the scrutiny of their questioning looks and focused on my lines “keep it together, keep it together…”

*lines borrowed from Memories – Andrew Lloyd Webber

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Keep it together

By admin on January 3, 2010

Grieving is a lonely place, it’s impossible to share, you must live there alone.

There’s a tension between the internal, and self imposed, solitary confinement and the real or imagined external judges scrutinising every move while you’re trying to function, look after oneself, in public.

Facing up to the challenge I felt a pressure to “keep it together, keep it together…”. It became my mantra, told to me by my friend Lena who borrowed it from Hollywood.

In the 1999 film, Bowfinger, a desperate movie producer tries to make a cheap film without paying for a big name lead actor. The producer decides to shoot the film secretly around a famous actor filming him in public places. The actor has no idea what is happening as other characters play out a sci-fi script around him. The actor can’t discern what is happening and becomes convinced that he is being visited by aliens, or cracking up, he admonishes himself to “keep it together, keep it together…”.

I tried so hard to keep it together at all times. I had some extraordinary lapses (i.e. collapses) in the first few months,mostly while working in overseas cities. It didn’t count if unobserved by a local audience.

While, ostensibly, keeping it together I cried, in the office, in the street, in the supermarket, at the park, in the airport, on planes, into my coffee, soup, salad, sandwich, and pillow. I kept it together while unashamedly crying. Tears were part of my soggy version of keeping it together.

Maybe I would do it differently now, let myself fall apart more. I wonder what that might have looked like. I wonder if my version of keeping it together looked like falling apart. I couldn’t say…however it was, was how it was.

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…and so this is Christmas

By admin on December 25, 2009

013

Let’s hope it’s a good one without any fear…

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