written 5 days ago … on the other side of the world

I’m getting ready to go. Slowly. Trying to take my time. Trying to slow it all down. And of course it passes – there is another moment of waking in bed next to you. Another morning, shared coffee, tea and cigarettes. Another moment to look into your sleepy face, at your mussy hair. Time to watch you dress and feel reassured when you poke your tongue at me.

So much time to be with you. Now there is forever, much longer than anything I can imagine yet to come. I imagine  a crescendo somewhere ahead, maybe that will come once we are parted. Maybe we will surprise ourselves and will continue as we are now. Simply being with each other as we always have.

I look forward to missing you. Deeply as I will when I am flying, and soulfully when I am walking and you are no longer right there in the air that I breathe. I look forward to realising what is missing from my life, from me. I look forward to every moment that I can be without you and know how that feels.

I look forward to seeing you again. Holding you again. Living with you again and being surrounded by your love.

I look forward to where I am going, for I trust that is a place that brings me even closer to you.

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

Well, the badger has farted, or to put it more succinctly the cat is out of the bag (and the box) and the dog is once again on the other side of the world. If that makes any sense at all, then you know me very well indeed.

I am back in the land of the long white cloud, wooden houses and cicadas – just three of the things I have noticed on my first day back (oh and blue skies, warm air and flies, lots of flies). There is obviously so much surrounding my return, and my departure, my coming and my going. Much of it I am still not conscious of, however I do know that over the last 4 weeks I have worked a lot of stuff, shifted things, dug, excavated, opened and shut my mouth, spoken up and kept quiet. And the person who has been there, right beside me, alongside me through all of that is Cari.

So while there are so many thoughts and things that I could write about, right here, right now, there is only one.  I just hope my words can capture all that I feel. Here goes…

Cari. Thank you. Once again you have set me free. As you have done so many times, in so many moments. This time the moment has lasted long enough for us to know it, for us to be in it so fully. In my leaving I have come once again to recognise the magnitude of your simple and gentle love for me. Of that I am grateful. Yet I know it is not just in this moment that your light surrounds me, it is there in all moments. It is there always and in all ways. It has never faded. It burns so bright and so consistently that I have often failed to recognise that it is your light that has warmed my skin, filled my heart and cleared my vision.

So yes, for this moment, thank you. I am so happy in this moment. Thank you.

And for all the multitude of moments that have gone before, those in relation to which I have not stopped to express my gratitude, I do so now. Thank you for loving me as you do. For always and in all ways giving me the gift of freedom.

It is through that freedom that I have come to realise true happiness.

I love you dearly my darling.

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

I came to know this most wonderful man while I was studying to become a ESOL teacher (and no, I’m not referring to myself -  although my study has led me to know myself a quite a bit better). This guy’s name is Scott and he is one of those genuine people who seem to exude only love, compassion and goodwill. What a pleasure, what a gift it is for me to have met Scott. He lifts me up every time I am with him.  Every time we meet I am astounded all over again by his way of being.

We all had to give a couple of  ’micro-teach’ lessons (this is a 15 minute teaching activity that we present to our classmates) during the course. During Scott’s last microteach he chose to facilitate a discussion about ‘chance’, about how our lives are very much determined by chance, or what seems like chance. Things like taking the earlier bus and just happening to come across an old friend who we haven’t seen for years when we disembark. An old friend who just happens to mention in passing that he has been reading a book that we then see in a second-hand bookstore the following day. When we buy the book we discover unexpectedly that it has the very information in it we have been seeking for the essay we are writing, due the next day.  That sort of thing -  chance…

…or not. Scott’s teaching got me thinking about synchronicity – something I have written about before (see sweet caroline… ). 

And it reminded me of a presentation I gave to my classmates a few months ago now – a presentation which started with a piece of graffiti that read ‘your life is chance not choice’ and ended with that graffiti rewritten as ‘your life is choice not chance’. Well it’s both, and that’s where synchronicity comes in.

Synchronicity is a big word for the collision of chance and choice. It is a collision we all create simply by being here. We exist in a world of randomness, a world of chance. And thoughout our lives we make choices about which bits of this randomness we will collide with. Often, particularly as we age, we come to understand many of these collisions as being caused by the conscious decisions we make. And we tend to relegate all others, those that seem to us to be not of our doing, as coincidence, chance, luck.

Yet perhaps this is a false dichotomy. Perhaps we are present in all the collisions of our live, whether we are conscious of it or not. And the sooner we realise this, and the sooner we take responsibilty for this, the sooner we can have our strawberry ice-cream.

So thanks Scott. Thanks for being who you are. Thanks for being in my life right now – I appreciate it, I appreciate you immensely.

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

S. N. Goenka, a most wonderful and gentle teacher would often preface one of his fantabulous parables with the words ’story is story’.  I guess I came to understand from this that trying to ascertain how ‘true’ something was was just a bit of a waste of time. More important that any ‘truth’ was whether I enjoyed the story or not. 

Never underestimate the power of a good story!!

Thanks Gary for sending me this. Great story.

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

‘I’m at a loss to explain my actions. I have always had an aversion to facing the music. What a ridiculous saying anyway, it never made sense to me’.

There was no doubt in my mind that I was dealing with a sociopath. I recognised his behaviour, he was a lot like myself. But I liked to think I had come to fit in. I had learnt to read the signs, speak the language. A good trick was simply repeating the last words or phrase as a question, like this.

“Never made sense?’ I placed the emphasis on ‘never’. I wasn’t sure what I was doing other than I’d rather have him talking than me, and I had some unease with any silences.

‘Never. I remember as a child my mum caning me for this or that, yelling at me that I was incorrigible, a hopeless case. It wasn’t so much that I broke this or that, or this rule, and there were quite a few of those. She was a stickler for rules, all different sorts for all different situations. It was like living in a board game, spending half my time waiting for my move. And anyway ‘I didn’t want to play. What was the point? What is the point?’

He looked at me, obviously expecting an answer. One that would inevitably be unsatisfactory, therefore only proving even more pointedly that there was no point. The pause though was starting to become a silence, I had to say something.

‘How about you don’t bother explaining anything. How about you just tell me what you did? Just for the hell of it. Just so I know. No point. No purpose. Just tell me’

He looked like he was considering it.