The road to nakedness

My recent attendance at some of the online interviews and discussions at the Collective Trauma Summit taught me a new vocabulary to comprehend trauma on a variety of levels. Above all, it made me realise that I am far from alone in my attitudes towards grief, the environment, and war.

A dominant theme that was articulated repeatedly was that we need to learn to feel each other at an emotional level, in order to create and sustain a lived awareness of interconnectivity with one another, all life on earth, and, indeed, the cosmos. For, life, when it is hurt, is cold, distant, and repetitive in endless hamster-wheeling cycles. And who wants that?

The conversation between summit organiser Thomas Hübl and climate grief expert Britt Wray confirmed that humans, both individually and collectively, frequently cling to a refusal or an inability to "digest life" as Hübl put it. Covid, for example, was a collective trauma which we did not digest fully, either at the time or since, and, as such, it was a "lost opportunity for harvesting learning". The avoidance of distress manifests as an inability to honour, let alone deal with and channel it, and is a mark of emotional immaturity that resists natural change, growth and transformation.

So, an overarching question is: How can we channel distress into care and action? The more aware we are of any distress we feel, and the more tools we summon to help us channel this distress, the freer we become to "release our burdens" and to choose to lead our selves from one present moment to the next.

As Hübl said several times during the summit, "Trauma is the inability to be present". Closely related is his profound statement: "Presence does not have an other". 

Hübl emphasised that each individual who practises self-leadership, and who has the tools to regulate their own nervous system, has a healing impact on the collective, even if that impact may not be obvious to themselves or others. This was corroborated by bestselling author Gabby Bernstein, who shared how she "wrote herself back into life" after her soul (her unconscious) made it impossible for her not to face the trauma, and its cloaking by shame, of sexual violation. She highlighted the fact that healing takes place "one person at a time".

My personal favourite session was the conversation between Hübl and Prentis Hemphill on 'The Transformative Power of Vulnerability', where 'power' was redefined as:

... openness: Can I be soft enough to listen to what is asked in any particular moment? When I receive you in myself, and our combined agency, power is the creation emerging between us. When both are willing to be fluid, ego steps back.

Hemphill issued the wish that she would want to it to become commonplace for humans to "help one another to shine". Again, the topic of discomfort came up, and that our capacity to be in the discomfort of the world, with all the pain it brings, equals our capacity to grow into our own ability to 'shine'.

"When I let the pain do its work, something changes in me," Hemphill, or Hübl, said. My notes do not indicate which one of these two remarkable people actually uttered those words in that moment, nor would either of them need to claim the quote for themselves, as both live it, have learned to engage with the process of working patiently with pain, whether individual, ancestral or collective, and to trust what emerges from it.

"Kindness at the heart of human beings is the medicine that brings us back home." This quotable quote emerged during the conversation between Kosha Joubert, CEO of the Pocket Project, and somatic practitioner Linda Thai, which touched on multiple levels of trauma, ranging from war (which Thai called "an over-exposure to death"), refugee experiences, the transgressive dissociation from nature (for example, when ancestral land is turned into property), to vicarious trauma due to "hyper-attunement" to the other - which can cause collapse of the self, flipping into existential nihilism or hopelessness. 

One talk I attended, with such hunger that I did not take any notes I can quote or refer to now, was the discussion between the two co-directors of Combatants for Peace, Rana Salman and Eszter Koranyi. Their revelations came as a trauma relief mission to me personally, as the two women represent an organisation that speaks my language and my own heart's truths, namely: There is another way.

I have been near to hopelessness in regard to the war in Gaza, having seen friendships break up around me because of it. In the fray of that I remember saying:

I stand for no flag, I stand for the naked human body. Between Israel and Palestine there lies this form in the sand, and I see it clear as clear with my mind's eye: a naked human body. Who will pick up that body and rescue it from the madness of violence?

After attending the Collective Trauma Summit, I see that this body is being held and nurtured, not only by Combatants for Peace, but by all who refuse a language of othering, who refuse a violating, blaming language, and choose, instead, a creative, courageous language: There is another way. That way does not avoid pain, it does not avoid discomfort, it does not avoid trauma, but faces them all, and chooses to grieve together with 'the other', to hear the other, to see the other, and so to heal the Self.

Then, life itself becomes a poem, becomes attuned to what we could call the poetry of being, and begins to sing.

The creative way

 

The orange bicycle of shame: A psycho-logical song of signs

The piano piece was in an orange book and I am sure it was called 'The Bicycle Song', or 'On my Bicycle'. Something like that anyway.

I had an orange bicycle. It had been given me while my family and I were still living in Germany and it had been loaded with the rest of our household onto a passenger liner, the Galileo Galilei, and shipped all the way to South Africa, where my folks were heading for a couple of years. (The couple of years turned into the rest of their lives, but that's another story.)

The first time I cycled to school on my, by South African standards in those days unusually brightly coloured bicycle, and rolled through the open gate, my peers starting jeering and calling, "Nazi! Nazi!" Back home, I asked my mother, "What is a Nazi?" I was all of 9 years old and that ignorant. I soon discovered that it was de rigueur for my English-speaking peers to use exclamations, such as "Jawohl!" and "Schweinehund", whenever I was present. It was tiresome and inescapable, nor has it, in 50 years, ceased in all quarters. One close family member, who worked for some years, up until 2011, for British Waterways in London, also suffered the daily "harmless fun" of this widely accepted racial harassment.

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When South Africa, in 1994, finally moved from being an oppressive racist state to becoming a fledgling democracy, my black-skinned compatriots could triumph in their collective achievement of having resisted abusive denigration and having successfully taken a step forward in honour of their human dignity and rights. To follow the example of anti-racist activism, during the 1970s and on, as a solitary German-mother-tongue child in an Anglophone context, would have meant standing up for myself alone to face my classmates. As was the case with the family member at British Waterways - there was no collective to help or sympathise with us. We learned to endure the mockery, as our innocent tormentors mimicked figures from movies I, for one, had never seen, and we took the insults as we knew we had no choice, because we'd been born in a shamed country, with a divided capital, containing the deliberately forever unrepaired Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church.

Photo by Gregor Samimi on Unsplash

Sometime in the first decade of the new millenium I did, however, finally challenge one dear friend in the Cape Town poetry circles. I asked him whether he was aware of how enervating his mockery was. He was genuinely shocked and said that he had grown up learning that it was obligatory to make fun of Germans, to the extent that it had become completely automatic. He suddenly realised the mindlessness of it, and the one-sidedness, never having thought to imagine being on the receiving end of this ingrained custom, and he was glad to be able to apologise and stop the habit. The shame of the Germans after their hideous transgressions under Hitler has a very long tail indeed.

* * *

It was the same orange bicycle upon which I pedalled every week, in the company of my sister, to our piano teacher in Voortrekkerhoogte, taking the shortcut on the dust track beneath bluegums past the military camp. The teacher decided to host a performance evening, giving her pupils the opportunity to play in front of each other and their parents. I was her star pupil and one of the oldest, so she chose me to start the evening off. I got up and seated myself at the piano, opened the slim, orange book and faced the notes of 'On my Bicycle'. I lifted my hands up to the keyboard, but before my fingers made any sound, I burst into a tragedy of tears, leaped from the stool and straight into my mother's lap. 

My mother was mortified. The evening proceeded, I suppose, with everyone performing, but I cannot remember whether I played my piece or not. What I do remember is that my mother asked me to pass her a record sleeve of some music, which the teacher had put on after the children had played. It was lying on the table in front of us and for some reason I tried to indicate to her that it was not permissible for us to move this record sleeve from its position. My mother thereupon asked my sister to bring it to her, but my sister followed my example and refused. Another mother, seeing our strange reluctance, instructed her daughter to take the record sleeve to my mother and the child obliged without a murmur. My mother was now triply mortified. Back home, it was her turn to burst into tears. She lamented how ashamed she was of us and how painfully we had embarrassed her, me with my collapse from stage fright and both of us with our inexplicable refusal to do her a simple favour, such that another mother's daughter had had to step in.

My poor mother. She had her own loads of shame and insecurity to carry. She had not mastered the English language by a long shot, her Afrikaans was non-existent, and she lived in virtual isolation, cooking and cleaning for us in her European hippie gear, in a suburb that was dominated by the crimplene wives of permanent force members. In her own youth, she'd been her rather famous piano teacher's best pupil. Now, here she was, in a strange country among strangers, trying to enjoy a rare social event, only to be humiliated by a cowardly, obstreperous daughter and her incomprehensible sister.

 * * *

Notwithstanding these ignoble beginnings, I have sort of kept up, more off than on, with the piano playing, for the last 50 years and was approached last year by retired professional soprano and singing teacher, Gwyneth Lloyd of Starways Arts Centre, whether I'd be willing to accompany her newly-formed ensemble. I agreed and found myself learning "popular" and "well-known" songs, which I have somehow been shielded from all my life. In other words, much to the disbelief of the singers, many of these songs are not at all well-known to me and I have painstakingly to learn them, thus slowly repairing my cultural ignorance. We have performed a few times to sympathetic and grateful audiences and I have been humbled, losing perfectionism and uptightness.

For the most recent performance, last weekend, the dress rehearsal went very well, which, as anybody involved in theatre knows, is not a good sign. True as bob, the next day, as we gathered half an hour before the performance, the plug for the keyboard was suddenly dead. We were each of us required discreetly to subdue rising consternation and, indeed, in my case, panic. Fortunately, the organiser of the event found a replacement plug and the keyboard could once more produce sound.

The performance began with a couple of exquisitely rendered A capella numbers with five voices, then it was my turn to introduce 'It Don't Mean a Thing' by Duke Ellington and Irving Mills. For no reason at all, I missed the notes in the last chord of this introduction, my fingers simply landed on keys beside the correct ones. This can happen. It is called nerves. I tried my best to keep going and made my way through the pieces, despite the fact that my heart was jackhammering in my chest, my fingers played imprecisely over and again, and I kept seeing an orange bicycle like a mirage in the distance of the rather hot venue. At one point I actually played a musical introduction over, telling the audience that I was doing so, as I kept on missing the right notes. Mostly, this was thankfully not noticeable either to the singers or to the audience, but in the middle of 'Poor Wand'ring One', when a gust of wind blew the score from the music stand, I was certain that I would collapse from sheer stress. Dear Norma, who was singing tenor, but whose voice was not part of that song, rushed to my side to rescue the situation, and Gwyneth, Estie and Stephanie held their parts bravely, while I miraculously stayed seated upright and, don't ask me how, picked up the thread of the music to resume my accompaniment, as the mirage of the orange bicycle slowly receded.

After the show, warm words of gratitude and gentle praise were poured over the singers from the audience. To me, Gwyneth said matter-of-factly, "We all made mistakes," and Norma joined in, "Nobody focused on the mistakes. They just flowed away." Her husband, who had come for support, declared, "The most important thing is that the audience enjoyed it - and they did!" When I told another friend, who'd not been able to attend, what happened, she said, "You did your best, carrying on while you were going through all that inner stress!" And my companion, Ed, messaged in response to my sobering report-back, "mistakes make it more real (human)." Indeed! But the light-heartedness, and the loving words of comfort all round, brought what continues to feel like lasting medicine to my soul.

When I returned home the next day, I remembered and felt urged to find a particular poem - a poem, which Ed had uttered casually, more by way of a self-ironic joke, two years back - which I'd enjoyed so much that I'd written it down. We'd had pizzas at Café Mario in Knysna at the time and Ed had seen an orange bicycle leaning against the fence outside the window. He thought that it made a very beautiful composition and had run outside to capture it. It had been raining and he slipped and by the time he gathered his balance, the bicycle was gone. Here is his poem as I captured it.

Slipping on mud

while chasing the lady

with the orange bicycle 

- all my camera caught

were the black-eyed Susans

opening their hearts to me,

while she disappeared 

around a corner.

* * * 

The web of these incidents and memories, the strands of colour, the bicycle, the feelings of shame both personal and collective, mistakes both great and trivial, the open hearts of friends and fellows, the living witnesses of flowers - all of these aspects thread together a crazy coherence, a zigzag psycho-logic of signs and signals through the decades.  

One of my late husband's favourite English idioms was: "I've turned a corner". I would like to think that this applies to me at this point. And I am, hopefully, again "on my bicycle" - only this time I'm no longer a target of shaming. Orange can once more be the beautiful colour of creativity and black-eyed Susans can laugh out loud in continuing abundance.

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* * *

    

S.O.S.! Respect for the soul at work

About two and a half weeks ago, my friend, Tony, from the days when we both still lived in Hogsback, called out of the blue.

Out of that day's unclouded sky, Tony brought renewed focus into my mind's unexpecting eye.

He asked me to clarify Table Love. He said he is busy writing about Table Love, because he feels it's important for people, for the world.

In that moment, he did something important for me: he took me back to a ritual, which my late husband, the poet Norman Morrissey, and I began for the first time on the 3rd of July 2010. It was really simple. We sat down together at his big oak table and absorbed ourselves into a companionable solitariness. Each listened to what came to him or her out of the silence. When something arrived that was more or less pleasing, true, satisfying, playful or significant, we wrote it down. In silence.

Whoever finished first, waited quietly, for as long as it took the other to complete 'their thing' - thought-string, piece, or poem. When both pens had been re-capped, we read our 'things' out to one another. Invariably we hummed and gave our sense, our understanding of what the other had done. Sometimes we commented, made suggestions, and sometimes we praised one another's creations. So there was a natural flow from companionable, silent solitude to sharing, responding and communicating.

There is nothing quite like sharing an absorbed, creative silence with another or, indeed, with others.

It occurred to me, after talking to my friend, that the Hiku Hikes are really extensions of Table Love, with the added benefit of being outdoors and susceptible to all the fresh air and stimuli offered there. In the Hiku Hikes, too, we move from silence to sharing, to further silent work, to further subsequent sharing. It's dynamic, peaceful and stimulating, nourishing both individual and communal needs.

The single most crucial aspect of both Table Love and the Hiku Hikes, I would say, is respect for the space of another human soul at work. The soul works in the dimension of what is sometimes known as 'the dreamwork', that is to say, in a dimension that is temporarily independent of pressing or immediate worries and concerns, a dimension whose concern is a lucid state of consciousness, whereby time and space are inhabited simultaneously without undue friction, and without the body necessarily being in action.

When you are truly engaged on a creative level, you cannot think yourself into another space, nor another time, than the one you are inhabiting at that moment. In other words, a kind of unification takes place between body, mind, heart and spirit. I venture that it is that unification, or unity, which we call soul. It is frequently felt as deep concentration - the choice of the word 'concentration' for this state of being-doing is not accidental. All parts of us are brought to a common centre or fulcrum. 

When a person has had no opportunity for and no experience of this, they cannot understand this process. A person who keeps their dreams away from the everyday, indeed, away from themselves, who is unaware of the needs of their soul, will automatically suffer impatience, there is a restlessness that prevents them from giving themselves or the other person silence and proper solitude. With this inbuilt lack of generosity and lack of respect for Time and Space, our industrialised, digitalised modern culture has been, to quite a large extent, dangerous to the dreamwork, if not lethal to the soul.

The peculiar need to throw stones into the still ponderings of others is motivated by mischievous jealousy and greed, not for anything material, but for the substance of their souls. It connects to a need to own the other person's time and space and to command it. It consumes what the other has, because oneself does not have it. Many people are anxious to prevent others from having what they themselves do not have. And many more compulsively inflict injury on others to avenge injuries they themselves have borne and have not tended to, let alone healed.

Human beings everywhere are doing what we can to remedy the situation in numerous ways, we are, many of us, occupied with the vital question of how to save our souls. The open secret, of course, is that it is for each of us to save our own, hence the emergence of healing modalities, such as soul retrieval, somatic trauma release, mindfulness workshops; bringing in fresh concepts and vocabulary to assist understanding, such as 'enneagram' and 'ecopsychology'; along with truly mindboggling advances globally in overall emotional and psychological literacy for everyman and -woman, for everygirl and -boy.

To paraphrase Pearl S. Buck, where the human soul used to be the most underdeveloped terrain on earth, it has become a hotspot of attention for the very good reason that reason alone has proved to be not enough!

It is a question of protecting the creative self, of preserving the creative flame, for it alone is the carrier of human souls forward. That, and the freedom of laughter, playfulness. Such insight comes not in garrulous, excited, or fretful company, but murmurs in the unruffled privacy of ponderings.

by Silke Heiss, published in Greater Matter

by Silke Heiss, published in Greater Matter.
The playful layout is thanks to Flow Wellington of Poetree Publications. 

Self-tuning: The Tonic of Choice Words

I would like to present you today with two poems by Norman Morrissey, which perform very lucidly a dance of change in the spirit of a man. This change concerns a self-healing process, recorded in words, moving from a divided to a more integrated sense of self. 

For me, one of the most remarkable qualities of my late husband Norman – as man AND poet – was his determination to self-examine, to self-edit the tissue of his being and writing alike, in order to enact a continuous transformation of both poetry and psyche into a truer timbre. Self-tuning would be a choice word here.

 

Conscientious nerves

 

You talk

of a life

without regrets

 

– some line walked always true

so you never must

ache for your myriad mis-steps.

 

I’ve never been

that lucky,

there’s no recall of any day

 

my shoulders didn’t stoop:

memories,

conscientious nerves

 

rooting

in

my marrow.

 

– Norman Morrissey, first published in Sound Piping, Ecca Poets, Hogsback, 2015

 

I confess that I’ve long felt accused by this poem – of failing to be ‘conscientious’ in examining my wrongdoings – but this is probably due to the fact that the poem models the act of self-accusation by means of the conscience: describing the man’s very bones (“my marrow”) as being strung through with “conscientious nerves”. The lines, which alert the reader to this, are:

  there’s no recall of any day

 

my shoulders didn’t stoop

 

There’s an open display here, a FREE EXPRESSION of feelings of low self-worth and shame as performed by the body. 

Now I remember my father – a self-proclaimed atheist, fervently reverent of life – reminiscing on conversations with a pastor friend, in which he took issue with the Christian term ‘sin’. I can do wrong, he maintained, I can, as a human, do harm – but that does not make me a sinner. 

Hiding in this rejection of a fallen state is the heathen’s freedom, but also his innocence (though innocence is, of course, not necessarily innocuousness). The word ‘heathen’ originates as a designation of the ‘uncivilised’, but probably largely harmless, folk, who populated the rural areas (heaths) beyond the precincts of state and religious control. The online etymological dictionary observes:

It is most probably that the Germanic word haiϸana (heathen) referred to a person living on the heath, i.e. on common land, i.e. a person of one’s own community. It would then be a neutral word used by heathen people in order to refer to each other rather than a Christian, negative word denoting non-Christians.

I don’t see an untouched Bushman with “stooping shoulders” due to a deep, inner “ache” for his “myriad mis-steps”. But, on being told he is a sinner, surely her or his posture will change.

Nietzsche, in his critiques of the tenets of Christian civilization, examined the ominous build of resentment in the collective human psyche, due – if I recall his writings rightly – to unacknowledged guilt and shame over the fact that our species had murdered God;  resentment, then, being a phenomenon whereby negative feelings (grief, horror, shock, rue) are not felt and expressed, but denied and repressed, thus generating a continuous acid reflux (the metaphor is mine) of powerful energies denied the opportunity for natural transformation or –mutation back into the flow of life. 

The miraculous turning-point in the Christian story is, of course, that our wrongdoings, including, I would guess, the murder of God – surely our ultimate crime – are forgiven and, moreover, REDEEMED, through penitence before that same God, resurrected. The orthodoxy (Bible) prescribes words for us, with which to realise that miracle, which I understand even today serves the more non-verbal among our species, who are not given the listening tongue – but, for the poet, there is a different kind of freedom, that is to say, the freedom of conscientiously elected words. Consider the “shift” in the heart of him here:

The story

 

Something has shifted

in the deep of me:

the constant memories

 

– starting like a grouse at my feet –

fly differently,

don’t lurch

 

sickly

into shame and griefs

and thoughts

 

of clumsiness and wrong-headedness

– of ineptitude and folly.

There’s still

 

the whirr at my feet

and the wings beating

at my face:

 

but each visitation

starts to whisper

new words:

 

starts to hint

a new

language of belonging,

 

the replays

start making a movie

that shows the essential me.

 

I still have a script

of bungles and crimes

– but at least

 

it’s becoming a screenplay,

becoming a history

that makes sense:

 

and that changes

the shape of the story

as something to live with.

 

– Norman Morrissey, first published in This Moment’s Marrow, Ecca Poets, Hogsback, 2017

 

What I notice in this poem is the transition from a prevalence of guttural sounds and clipped consonants in the first four stanzas – sh, ch, f, t, c, s – to a lovely in-breeze of gentle w and wh sounds, and even the s in ‘visitation’ is heard as a soft z, in stanzas 5–7 – as if the breath itself were taking command to expel fearful tension in the body. 

The image of the grouse in stanza 2 – which strikes me as strange, foreign, even – suggests itself, to me at least, as an unconscious memory, “in the deep” of the poet, of the German word Graus (horror) – a word, which is pronounced the same as ‘grouse’. In the fifth stanza, this gives way to a softer, much more English-sounding “whirr”. 

“each visitation/ starts to whisper/ new words” we read, as the last four stanzas take on more measured, calmer rhythms and employ longer, soothing vowel sounds; while a prevalence of alliterative s’s snake confidently through – perhaps delivering a shimmer of Hippocrates’ staff of healing? Indeed, that staff is invoked in ‘Grasp’, a subsequent poem in the collection, whose last line names ‘This Moment’s Marrow’.

The poet’s use of the word ‘story’ to mean something he has shaped “to live with” must be firmly distinguished from recent usage of the word in a negative sense as ‘the story you tell yourself, which repeats old patterns’. Norman’s “story” is one which he has built himself, resulting in a sovereign, “essential me” – HIS history and life, which, despite “bungles and crimes”, he CAN live and, by implication, be at peace with. 

The choice of the word ‘crimes’ is particularly interesting, and, in my view, suggests that – unlike the sin-free heathen, or atheist – the poet faces his “essential me” as inextricably entwined into a species NOT FREE OF a violent and sacrilegious past.

Between ‘The Story’ and ‘Conscientious nerves’ lie two years; the last two years of the poet’s life. They record a process that took place inside the man, and allow readers to witness genuine self-healing, self-tuning, as it were, by the tonic of choice words.

For a more indepth examination of the minute particulars whereby Norman tuned, exercised and trained his voice to become the medication it could be for his soul, see John van Wyngaard’s superb Introduction in Gripscapes. This posthumously published book contains two of the three poems referenced here. Reading MORE of my beloved late husband’s carefully crafted poems CLOSELY may be the best thing you could do today, in order to prepare for tomorrow.

– Silke Heiss, February 2023

Trinity of blogposts 2 Course correction (with yoga, dance and fairies)

So. Life drives you with a momentum that makes it really hard for you to take stock. “It’s all too much” is the daily feeling, you’re in survival mode: keep going, keep going, keep going, keep gggg ... And I kept goinggg, stuffing my days up with humdrum duties, dredging ever deeper down into – actually beyond the remains of – my energy (!) to summon patience, more patience, AND MORE patience and loving kindness for the endless admin and communications required, to organise the daily physical and emotional support my parents asked for, fitting in (against my, secretly somewhat languid, nature) with THEIR WORLD (a world of, to me, too many false securities); and, simultaneously, trying to learn more about my new partner and his – to me, in many ways, completely foreign – outlook on life. Looking back now, at the three moves in three years, which I was obliged to weather, they reveal something about the panic my own heart and its lostness.

I ‘skidded’ off the mountain in Hogsback, which had been my home for 8 years, and skidded up and down the coastline, in a manner of speaking, as each place Jay (not his real name) and I found to rent, albeit all were beautiful, was quickly sold, due to unfortunate circumstances besetting the owners. Were we hexed, Jay and I?

Absolutely. The hex was: my utter idiocy. Possibly that germ of languidness. So, what was the turning point in the tragi-comic tale?

Well, the first course-correction, I believe, was that I chose to leave the beautiful village of Brenton-on-Lake – or, rather, I chose to accompany Jay, who was set on returning to what I privately call “the belly of the beast”, that is to say, the Eastern Cape, where it is impossible to ignore or avoid South Africa’s notorious problems. Jay had never felt at home in the Western Cape, I was sure he was secretly yearning (my take, not his) for his home environs outside East London; and he also wanted to be closer to his shop again. As for me, I listened to my heart in following, not just Jay, but a ‘geographical piety’ – a kind of deep, inner compass that drove, despite everything, joy into me on seeing again the lush green grasslands and roaming cattle so typical of the Eastern Cape (definitely not a mis-take).

We found a place to rent that had been advertised, of all places, on Gumtree, and it turned out to be situated in the very village where I had enjoyed art lessons during my latter four years of living in Hogsback. The rocky sea shore was more familiar to me than it was to Jay – I’d sat there every other Saturday with sarmies and a boiled egg after the art class, writing poems whipped by the wind.

I was now geographically twice as far as I had previously been from my parents and, although my father’s dementia made him unable to remember where I was now, I could hear in his voice over the telephone that he felt in his heart – as I did in mine – that I was distancing myself from his and my mother’s extreme emotional dependence on me. This was no bad thing for any of us. They have the privilege of very loyal and loving carers in the familiarity of their own home. Of course I kept up with my duties to them, and of course I visited them for Christmas, but, even so: there was new room for sanity to re-enter my sphere.

Several people mentioned that I ought not to feel guilty about re-moving myself, geographically as well as emotionally, further away from my parents – to be honest: there was no energy left for any guilt in me. I knew that a cycle had, necessarily, ended. True to their natures, my parents did not complain at all. There was an overall feeling that things could not be otherwise. This, of course, is the precondition for inner peace and, I daresay, they have grown more peaceful.

So the daughter in me was making progress. But what about the wife/ female partner aspect? Unmarried though we were, my womanly heart was given to Jay – and she was distraught, if truth be told. Jay is a lifelong nicotine addict and, although I knew this when I first teamed up on the journey through life with him, I had become increasingly intolerant of what to me was his enslavement. I was helplessly jealous of his ‘first love’, Lady Nicotine, whom he cherished a hundred times more devotedly than he cared for me. As I saw it, Nicotine was his true partner in intimacy. Clearly, I needed to detach from him, too, leave him in peace, and give myself space to lose my possessiveness. But how?

It was the second ‘course correction’ that helped me with this question. The second ‘course-correction’ occurred very recently, as a result of three momentous events happening in quick succession.

Firstly, my yoga teacher, Cher, invited me to offer a writing workshop at her upcoming yoga retreat. This opportunity, again to collaborate with a woman whose mission I respected and chimed with, blew the exact wind into my sails that I needed. At last I could be working again on MY terms! I’ve been eagerly getting back ‘out there’, renewing my commitment to my writerly calling, not merely in private, but as a public phenomenon; and also focusing on my connection to my precious readers again – even this trinity of blogposts are evidence of that.

Secondly, I signed up for a Journey through dance with Cher.

And, thirdly, I went for a fairy card reading with Angie Vanstraaten.

I had consulted the fairies, as mediated through Angie, a total of three times in my life at major crisis points and each time I had been shown a way forward. This time, though, I was in for a shock of major proportions. The fairies warned me in the strongest terms that I was drained to the bone from endlessly giving without replenishing myself; that my masculine aspect was completely upside down; and that I would lose everything and suffer extremely painful experience if I did not step out of MY addiction to SERVING THE PRIORITIES OF OTHERS AT THE EXPENSE OF MY SOUL.

Wow. They freaked me out big-time, those fairies. There was one, whose hideous face with missing teeth has stayed with me in particular – fittingly called the SOUL SHRINKER! – who warned of keeping company with people, including loved ones, whose comments were habitually, unconsciously critical in the most innocent (unconscious) ways, steadily eroding my self-confidence and strength. The habit is probably best summed up in the old proverb ‘familiarity breeds contempt’, expressing with wondrous brevity the harmfulness of not maintaining proper boundaries – something I had NEVER learned!

Shaken, the days that followed I was on hyper-alert and actually began to notice this habit – both in myself as well as in Jay. I consciously applied the medicine of kindness, accepting nothing less than genuine warmth from either myself or from him at ALL times, no matter how insignificant the occasion might seem. If it isn’t kind, rather keep silent and self-examine. Fortunately, Jay was completely with me on that particular track. You could say it actually helped our relationship become ‘more professional’; we orbited in our respective (very different) worlds, with greater distance between one another, which actually gave us both the breathing room we each craved.

The Journey through dance took place three days after the fairy card reading. What a truly healing process! It’s re-ignited my passion powerfully. I’ve documented it, with view to showing a way for others, who may be at similar crossroads in their lives as I am. I urge you to seek your kindred spirits when your soul is as emptied as mine has been.

Best of all, the Journey through dance brought me a fascinating insight, which I definitely had to explore. This insight came through an offering, during our feedback session, from one of the participants, owner of the venue Driftwood Studios, ClaireKockott.

To be continued. 

Angie says: The Singer of healing tells us ...
Healing begins when we let go of what hurts us,
and embrace and nurture what benefits and heals us

The terrifying soul shrinker

The beautiful venue for Journey through dance @Driftwoodstudios

Weed (It's not what you may think it is)

 1.      Preamble

It is star-shaped and yellow and so delicate as to feel like a miniscule spray of mist. I am on my three-year-old haunches, mesmerised by its beauty. She speaks to me. She says she is from the stars and she asks me to look after her. I tell her that I will visit her every day. I keep my promise.

Then I sense the caretaker’s wife standing behind me. She is big and pregnant. I often play with her other children, who are older than I am.

She says, “What are you doing?”

“It’s a flower,” I say.

“It is a weed,” she replies. “We must pull it out.”

She is gentle. I don’t remember pulling out the flower. I remember agreeing with the caretaker, but I don’t remember pulling out the weed.

It has remained forever in me.

 

***

 

2.      Reflective Notes

Journey through dance

Driftwood Studios

5^th February 2023

First, we did a RAIN meditation, listening to Tara Brach.

Recognise Allow Investigate Nurture

I remembered the feeling of following my mother’s back, as she refused to turn her face to me, embarrassed by me, & me feeling cast out, unwanted, unworthy. And I knew I must re-mother myself.

 Then we walked in the lovely garden & I felt the moist grass under my soles, which have become so tough from all my barefoot walking. And I nudged the driftwood dinosaur, who looks away, into the foliage, & I found a little clearing near there, where I could hide – my bright gear did not camouflage me! But everybody was quiet and discreet.

 

Then we danced. It was strange at first with the words Cher was reading over the music, I am so sensitive to words spoken or written. But I realised this was a time to be more conscious. I breathed in the colour spring-green, which felt delightful. Then, when Cher told us to breathe in red – that was at once instinctive, it pulls me to feel so primitive, or primal, & lastly I found or was given a luminous blue sphere, Cher spoke about holding a seed, & my very beautiful sphere became a blue flower, & I remembered a tiny flower I once loved between the cracks of the paving, which spoke to me of the stars. It had a voice, & I danced her.

 

***

 

3.      Sharing

Each participant in the Journey through dance read their reflections. How many different worlds had combined in the studio, each one contained within her body! Some felt that they had freed themselves from reining in the love they feel for others and the world; another felt aware that she was releasing barriers she tended to put up, for fear of losing her independence; yet another travelled through her father into history, wars, complex family heritage rippling out into, or from, her individual self.

When I read my reflective notes, Claire said, “You are the flower.”

“A weed in a crack,” I replied sardonically.

“Yes,” said Claire, “and look how much it has influenced you.”

 

***

 

4.      Renewal

The next day, I walked along the beach near where I live. Suddenly the wind breathed an emission of positive memories of my mother into me, surprising and elating. The Journey through dance had wiped away an ancient, stagnant grief as if it were only a greasy mark on a glass. I no longer needed to think of all the wonderful things, whereby my mother influenced me during my life – I could feel them all again! The splendid books she piled on me; her not minding to walk in the rain; her irrepressible cheekiness and big-mouth-laughter.

I don’t need diligently or desperately to list or remember the bouncy, flowering weeds in the cracks of my mother’s persona anymore – they, too, are in me, abundantly so.

Even better, her back is no longer turned towards me, as I turn to face myself.

“You are allowed to be brave. You know how to swallow your fear and breathe fire with it!”

 

***

 

5.      Blue fire

I take up where I left off. I return to that point where I gave up on the little flowering weed pushing up between the paving stones. She was yellow like the sun. The Journey through dance gave me a blue sphere to hold: was that her sky?

Where will you lead me, little star-flower weed?

I don’t know why, but the words “blue fire” follow me, as well as your colour, yellow.

I’ll wait and see.

 

***

 

6.      Forgiveness

I ask forgiveness of all those readers, whom I disappointed, because this is not a story about dagga.

 

***

 – Silke Heiss, Sunrise-on-Sea, February 2023