Writing comes easily, it always has. I was raised to worship the word as written, as God. Writing was the road to salvation. It was the ultimate form of expression, of transmission. It was the means by which we could find our way through to the heart of darkness. I was taught to form symbols and meaning from the strokes of black on white.  My father showed me how to form the necessary symbols; my mother encouraged me to inform.

I was blessed with a fertile mind, an active mind. A blessing that meant I had plenty of material from which to form my words. My mind never shut off, there was always something there, something forming, reforming, leaping and sweeping, demanding space to move. This blessing soon become a curse, as I too quickly fell behind. My hand could not keep pace with that which moved it.  By the time I was six, the backlog had begun. Words unformed festered in my head, becoming mishappen and mashed together, they soon formed an amorphous seething black mass.

I tried my best to ease the beast inside. I scribbled and scrawled, doodled and drafted, and yet I never rid myself of that backlog. The seething mass just kept getting bigger and darker and more demanding. I tried, and the more I tried the more I seemed to fail. All I managed were moments of temporary relief through an expulsion of built up vocabulary onto the page in front of me.

What I saw there only disheartened me more. My words made no sense.  Their mutant shape while  recognisable to me, were alien to any others who saw them.  They were not pretty, they emerged from me squashed and pummelled. I had no time it seemed to nurture and nourish them after their birth, for there were always so many others, mangled and maimed, yearning to be set free.

For so many years I have lived in this agony. A narrow neck, a choked canal.

 So why do it?

Because it is what I am meant to do. I realise that now. It is not about making sense. It is not about finding an audience. It is not about anything other than this, simply this. Writing words is what I’m meant to be doing.

Some people are talkers, others have a healing touch, others still are affectionate and demonstrative in their love. I am all these things in part, yet none of these things come as naturally or as easily as the recording of my mind.

And I need to keep practising. I need to keep sitting in front of the page and writing what I am. For when I am not, I am distracted by the voices in my head. I am distracted through attachment and investment. When I am not writing I am caring; caring about whether I make sense, caring about whether I am making a good impression, caring about whether I am fully in this moment or not, and what the next one might be.

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

He was able to convey his feelings through the slightest rearrangement of his features, and in this moment he once again was saying that he did not understand, and also that he was not interested in trying to understand. That he had more urgent and pressing things to think about. Con knew what those things were, Carlos was always thinking about the same thing. He was worrying, like the proverbial dog with a bone, about how many years he was going to be spending in prison, in a foreign land. His best bet was three; the worst case somewhere around six, both of which were half of what he would be sentenced to.

Con was used to Carlos being distracted, it was more common that not, and for Con it didn’t really matter. he was not here to push these guys. As long as they were having a good time, as long as they would rather be here that sitting in their cells, then his work was done. They were a mixed bunch. ‘His boys’ he called them when he was talking with Cat. She would sometimes ask when she got home from work ‘ so how were your boys today’, and he would answer – ‘always good’, there had never been a time yet in the year that he had been teaching in the prison when they hadn’t been good, when he hadn’t had an good time with them.

He had long agao given up trying to understand why he felt so at ease with men who were locked up. Now he just knew it was so, he was able to develop an easy and relaxed relationship with those who were known to be drug smugglers, thieves, rapists and even murderers. He had been around such people for a long time now, in two different countries, on different sides of the world. They were good people. He knew this. He also knew they had done bad things, but for most of the time he had spend with them, this was not his concern, not directly anyway.

There had been a time, many years ago, when it had become too much. Not so much through being with the men themselves, but rather through having to know what it was they had done. After the riots at the maximum security prison he had sat in a small interview room, sometimes seeing close to 40 prisoners a day, one after the other. Reading their files, often huge tomes of paperwork squashed into two and sometimes three brown folders. Sometimes spanning decades, reaching back to when these men were children, detailing their lives through their contact with probation officers, social workers, psychologists, prison officials, judges and others. I made for depressing reading; so much life spent in institutions. The accumulated effect of it had been too much – not that he was conscious of it, not as it built up, it was just there one night as he lay in bed.  He remembers the dark gloomy expanse welling up underneath him.

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

what does it take to be

blissfully happy?

I met her amongst the second hand books. My hands were full when she called, ‘ hello stranger’. I raised my eyes and saw her there, looking older that I remembered, strained and drawn with a heavy hand, she tried to smile. It was an unhappy smile. She was, she explained, in pain.  An unexpected and, as yet, undiagnosed ache in the side of her head,  came and went, like heavy breathing, like bliss.  ’Stress’ I told her, and we both agreed.

And that would have been that, except you wanted to tell me something. You wanted me to know. You fed me your uncertainty and doubt. Your worries about the future. You threw your self upon me, wrapped your naked arms around me, and held me close. You promised me, nourished me, admonished and astonished me. Thank you for that, thank you for taking the time to speak. By the time you chose to release me you were no longer resigned to your suffering.

I wanted to say, and perhaps I did, I can not recall, that you don’t need to be unhappy. You do not need to be in pain. Do not turn and walk away. Close your eyes and you’ll see; see through and behind that which makes you ill.  It is a simple thing; to turn around.

Open your eyes

Look up and you will see

the light surrounding me.

I wanted to say, I wanted you to hear…

May you stay forever young

May you grow up to be righteous,

May you grow up to be true,

May you always know that truth,

And see the light surrounding you…

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

The tooth may be gone but the headaches continue. Every morning it is the same, waking to a sore head – a tentative rising. Sitting for a moment on the edge, the day laid bare before me. It is not a pretty sight, I am not a pretty sight. I have started to forgo a morning shower, exchanging the rush of invigorating hot water for sweet black coffee and a hand-rolled cigarette, no filter.

Thirty days, perhaps more. The pain came and went before that, then it came to stay, take root as it were. A half-face full of excruciating pain, and this ache deep, deep inside. Sometimes it was all there was, and all I had was my breath. No voice, no thought, no vision, just a single-minded focus, all my attention on this one thing; and inbreath, an outbreath.

And in this I shut down, a safety mechanism activated in response to the agony that pursued me, and enflamed my fear of being caught, once again. The physical demons were accompained by the psychological; no job, no responses (and I mean absolutely none) from over 20 job applications. No job is not so bad though. No job, no money and monthly credit card payments to meet is a but different.

And I got there, I made it. I borrowed money from my son who lives himself on the poverty line. My need ws such, and I’m glad it was, and glad that I could ask, and bloody glad that he could respond as he did. Staved off the drama for another month.

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

Each day begins with a slight headache and a dawning doubt.  I don’t know where my confidence and optimism have gone?  Every time I wake a bubble bursts and there is a mental grinding of the teeth as I prepare to engage with the day. 

Yet this morning my clenched and strained stance softened within the hour. On turning on my laptop I find a pleasant and promising message from a language school in the UK.

Such a glimmer of hope is all it takes. The slightest of smiles can produce the smallest chink in the armour and a single ray of sunlight slips through – my cloudy day is diluted and once again I am standing in the faintest of lights from above. The shadows slink slowly, resentfully backwards and in their absence I remember my initial half-baked plan. My plan for my three months down under:

• to visit with my sons
• to spent time on retreat
• to complete a TEFL course

And after all that is done and dusted, my plan to return to Caroline, to the UK. 

Now here I am only days away from completing my plan! It seems to have all fallen into place, it seems to have worked out. In 3 days I will have done all that I wanted to do. I have succeeded, I am reassured, in a few days I will be qualified to teach. It has all worked out… hasn’t it?.  Has it all worked out?  …. and if it has what I am doing feeling so bad? What am I worried about? Why do I doubt?

Is this whole drama that I am feeling, this pain and agony once again simply an unnecessary act of  despair? Is this just another completely pointless self indulgent exercise in doubt and worry? Have a fooled myself once again? Fooled myself into thinking that life sucks?

To discover this is the case would be the greatest of lessons.

To find out that this moment of overwhelming doubt was simply once again a trick of my mind would be  a most wonderful lesson. It would be, once again, a most powerful reminder that WORRY IS POINTLESS. That …

…things ALWAYS work out…

ALWAYS

ALWAYS

ALWAYS

work out

… and the best way through all of it is to simply know this truth. The best way through life, through all we experience is to simply hold on to this truth and let everything else go.

everything always works out

there is ABSOLUTELY nothing to worry about

The light from above grows stronger. I become stronger, more aware once again of the perfection of this human existence.

This morning I completed my final assignment and in doing so I realised another significant difference in emphasis between CELTA and TESOL.  In TESOL there is an emphasis on differentiation and following that on preparing extension tasks within lesson plans. This is hardly stressed at all within CELTA where the emphasis is on the fundamentals of eliciting and reacting.  I am lucky to have experienced both courses – to be learnt from both.

I am lucky – ha. Life is good!!

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x