Final Journeys

There are good friends, people whose company I delight in now, and then there are very good friends, people whom I might see only every few years, but who have lasted the test of time. As a general rule of thumb prone to all kinds of exceptions, the more decades I have known you, the better I love you. Of course, there are johnny-come-latelies whom I love dearly, and people I've known most of my life that I'm uncomfortable with, but those exceptions are very rare indeed.

 

Between 1977/8 and 1981, I used to volunteer at 2MBS-FM doing all kinds of things, and I still have some very fine friends that date from that time. (I've changed my name legally since then so the station won't have a record of this name, but the people I still keep in touch with will.) I will identify one of my friends by the initial Q, carefully chosen because it will not identify him.

 

Q was great. He wasn't the person there that I spent the most time with, on or off the Chandos St premises, and he wasn't one of the blokes there that I might have [gasp] slept with. But unlike many of them, he ended up being a long-termer.

 

He moved interstate when my daughter, now facing down her 21st birthday, was a pre-schooler. He had spent quite a lot of time with us when she was a baby - he even changed a nappy once. I used to joke that he'd make someone a marvellous mother some day.

 

I moved out of the city when I was pregnant, and time and attrition being what they were, we saw less and less of each other. However, by then he was already a long-termer, and thus a friend for life. We kept in sporadic touch: the odd postcard, phone call, letter, and later on when it had been developed, email. We had a history of really only telling each other the big, important things in life.

 

Late last year, he told me he had cancer of the pancreas. At the time I was dealing with not one but two seriously ill people, so I more or less put him on the backburner, to my shame. Time passed without my even really realising it, and he became sicker and sicker without saying anything else to me. The next news of Q that I had jolted me to the core, was only a couple of weeks ago (I suppose - I've always had a loose grip on time): a nurse rang me to inform me that he was being transferred into a palliative care unit, and that I was the only person he ever asked for. This was later that same day after I woke up after a dream of standing frozen with fear-of-heights on one of those huge inter-city cable-supports that carry electricity long-distance around the grid and look like giant robots - and he was an electrical linesman for most of his working life!

 

I immediately consulted with my finances. I didn't have enough cash to hire (or borrow) a car and buy the fuel it would have taken to drive there, although I love long-haul driving. I also didn't have enough cash to buy plane tickets, which would have been a similar travel-budget but would have allowed me much more time with him and would have necessitated at least some budget for accommodation - you can sleep in a car, borrowed or hired, if you're like me and can sleep anywhere.

 

I just couldn't see how I was going to get there. I knew I couldn't. But I had to. But I couldn't. I moaned to friends. Sadly, they were broke friends and had nothing to offer except sympathetic ears which was all I really wanted or expected when I moaned. I moaned on Facebook as my need-to-get-there-can't-get-there crisis got worse, and very quickly a certain Facebook and real-world friend offered me money to get down there.

 

This threw me into a dilemma: I couldn't honestly offer to repay it as I'm working just enough to survive (I seem to be happiest that way), so I didn't want to take it. I had to argue myself into accepting the offer, spelling it out to them that it would have to be a gift rather than a loan as I didn't know when I'd be able to give it back, and also arguing to myself that during my affluent decade - yes, I definitely had one - I thought nothing of throwing large lumps of money at friends who might have needed it for something (bills, sometimes, and I financed holidays, and even part-financed a fledgling jazz musical that never got off the ground for various friends). If I could give money away without strings when I had it, why wouldn't I accept it when I needed it from someone who thought they could afford it and liked me enough to want to help me out?

 

Put like that, I couldn't worm my way out of accepting help. And I really, really needed to fly interstate. I looked online at the prices of a few of the budget domestic airlines, and decided how much I needed, and consulted with the Generous One. A couple of days later, my bank account was suddenly stuffed with dollars. A few hours and an online booking later, my bank account dropped significantly. I got the best value ticket price there and back from Virgin, but I hadn't reckoned with their online booking fee, which seemed to be calculated only when you committed to pay. Never mind - in the meantime the Predictable Bit of my income had come in, I had paid my rent, and I wasn't going to need groceries if I was away from home. A few more dollars - not many more - to play with. But that was okay - I could sleep on a hospital chair and save on accommodation!

 

Work was a problem when choosing my dates: I work a day here and a day there normally, and while I was trying to line everything up, I was offered an extra day's work that I really couldn't afford to turn down, stymying me and putting back my departure date. But from last Friday morning to this Monday night, I was utterly free, so that's when flew. An early enough morning-flight that in order to check in before the flight I had to set my alarm for 4.00am (which I never do - I object to round numbers, so I set it to 4.02am). Shower, dress, pack the last-minute stuff, jump on a bus, a train, another train, and I was there early enough to check in for my flight. I was planning to fly back late Monday afternoon so that I could sleep in my own bed and be ready for a day's work on Tuesday. 

 

As I did the commute down to the city airport, I had time to really think. It had been a good twenty-five years since my last flight, and if it would be a similar time to my next, I would be lucky to even fly again in my lifetime. I'm an Earth-person, really wedded to the ground under my feet. Ironically, my memories of flying previously were memories of pure joy: I hate sleeping "upstairs" anywhere because I am too far from soil and bedrock to be comfortable and relaxed, I have a fear of heights when I am in any way connected to the ground - cliff-edges, staircases, high buildings and the like are torture to me, and my muscles are reluctant to work on the second rung of any ladder and lock up permanently on the third. Yet in my twenties I absolutely adored hang-gliding at Kernell and the few flights I had taken in my lifetime were also wonderful. I figured that this was because I had a grave lack of trust in things that might - or might not - collapse under me, but when I am supported only by the air, there is nothing to collapse. Commuting down, I decided that as this trip might be my last chance to fly and as I had booked window seats both ways, I was really, really going to let myself enjoy the flight.

 

On the flight out, check-in was crowded but uneventful. After that I drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, drank more coffee, and got ushered into a plane. My seat was just behind the left wing, which was great: I would get a good view both above and below me, and I would be able to see the ailerons working as well, which pleased me. Sadly, the left ailerons were rather dented and battered, which didn't. We had a very long taxi out to the end of one of the runways. Safety demonstrations haven't changed in all the time since I last flew - the only thing that had changed was that now lifejackets are hidden under the seats instead of above them. After that, the pilot spoke to us, telling us that we were going to swing out over the Pacific Ocean, then make a right-turn over land.

 

My fear of heights seems to be specific to this body, associated with no particular memories. My fear of drowning isn't: I have long-ago-and-far-away memories of being drowned at least twice: once when I was thrown off a riverboat and once when someone held me by the shoulders in shallow water. Water is for drinking, cooking and showering in - I dislike baths and if I find myself having to swim (which I regard as a safety-skill not a pleasure), I make quite sure never to immerse my face, snorkel or no. I surruptitiously felt around under the seat, making sure I could find the life jacket.

 

We reached the end of the taxi-way, did a left turn into the runway, then the pilot throttled up and we started racing over the tarmac. I could hear the salamander (magical Fire Elemental) in the engine closest to me, roaring with sheer pleasure at being able to feast on all that air and all those hydrocarbons. I could feel sylphs (Air Elementals) sliding around, under and over the surfaces. It felt much like "borrowing" the body of something big and ferocious in meditation, feeling its muscles powering up for the kill.

 

I was waiting for the sensation I could remember from previous flights: that instant when the rear two wheels pick up off the tarmac. As an Earth-person I am rarely ungrounded: the only times I ever get ungrounded are when I get totally immersed in books, and pretty much as soon as I stop reading I am fully plugged-in to the Earth again. I understand that at the beginning of meditations and magical work other people need to ground - but it boggles my mind having to do so, with its implication that they live bits of their lives ungrounded. I really can't imagine it. And aside from reading, the only times I get ungrounded are in those very rare flights. That instant when physical contact is broken with the earth is a rare and precious moment for me, one to be savoured.

 

And it happened. It was every bit as delicious as I remembered. The nose of the plane went up, and I watched the ground fall away from beneath me. That, too, was delicious, not terrifying. I think I might take up parachuting in my old age! Buildings became smaller, the beaches scallopped the coastline, growing smaller and more detailed like intricate fractal art. And then we were out over the ocean.

 

I had a quiet chat to the salamander in the engine closest to me, telling it to keep on firing up the engine and to talk to its buddy on the other side of the plane. I had a quiet talk to the sylphs all around, asking them to be gracious enough to keep bearing the weight of the plane for a while. Magic works - we didn't crash into the ocean, and I never had to grapple with my lifejacket.

 

Looking down at the sea, I felt my horror of drowning recede. The air was clear, and I could see the different textures of the water's surface: where it was shallow, where it was deep, where it might have been over a shoal of fish, where it might have been roiling with invisible, unbroken waves. Fascinating. Then the aeroplane banked, which I saw as you might in a computer game, without feeling it, and we came in over land again.

 

It looked as it does through google-earth, and it looked entirely different to how it looks through google-earth. Through google-earth, you see the buildings, the vegetation, the rocks, all that stuff. You don't see depth. Through a plane window, you see all of that, but you see heights and depths as well. The courses of the rivers are embedded in the land deeply to some distance on either side - they aren't embedded in high-altitude photos. Little towns are connected to each other by little ribbons of trees following the roads through agricultural land - the overall impression I was left with was how little of our supposedly wildest continent in the world was still wild. The land has been thoroughly harnessed to produce meat for McDonalds patties and grain for McDonalds buns. This thought occurred to me with some sadness. The idea of wild versus domesticated land had previously occurred to me via out of body work and via google-earth, but it really hit home with the physicality of air travel - obviously, even at those altitudes I was still grounded to some extent.

 

I enjoyed every moment of the short flight, so engrossed in the view from the window that I wasn't even aware when the attendant came along to offer me a coffee. She persisted, though, and I refused and went back to my view. We passed a stage where there was some cumulus cloud far below us, dense and white, and with huge vertical columns being forced upwards by thermals from the heated ground below. And between us and the cumulus, some scrapings of thin cirrus clouds, below us but a lot closer. I was aware and thankful, again, for sylphs: supporting us under the wings, and simply playing for the sheer enjoyment of it in the cirrus.  All too soon, over agricultural land the plane started powering back and dropping. I loved the low-gravity feel of each drop in height, then the substantial thump of wheels on tarmac, the roar of reverse-thrust jets slowing us down, and the taxi to the docking-point. I was suddenly grounded again.

 

In an airport I had never visited before in a state I had only ever driven through at high speed avoiding the capital city, I found my luggage without difficulty, then went in search of a smoking-spot and a coffee. Replenished, I had to find a given hospital. This took me time: eventually I resorted to the time-honoured technique of asking a taxi-driver. He gave me what I needed to know. I took pity on him and asked for his rough quote on how much it might take in cab fare: his eyes lit up. My heart sank. I had little enough money for food and unforeseen costs. He was quite civilised, though, and told me where I needed to go and what I needed to ask for to access cheaper public service infrastructure to take me close to (but not right to) the hospital.

 

An hour later I was dumped in a leafy street, and started walking. It took me a long time to work out that I had walked in exactly the wrong direction, turn around, and retrace my steps. Hospital receptions are the same Australia-wide, it seems: a nurse with a computer terminal gave me long and complicated instructions on how to get to the palliative care unit, which I supplemented every time I caught the eye of someone wearing a name-tag. My luggage bumping behind me and my carry-on laptop heavier and heavier on its shoulder-strap, I ended up where I needed to be in the early hours of the afternoon.

 

Q was asleep. He looked like crap-on-legs. The only medical technology he was hooked up to was a pulse-monitor on a finger and a single tube into an arm-vein for his hydration needs: he evidently wasn't on the edge of death yet, as far as technology was concerned. I pulled up a chair and sat quite near him, and held his hand. After what seemed like quite a long time he woke up, smiled thinly at me and tried to speak. Nothing came out. So I talked. I talked quietly and evenly, long-term memories of things we had done together: the Mike Willissee incident at the 729 Club on Sunday in our 2MBS days, drunken Sunday Afternoon Tennis, slow-waltzing up and down a staircase together to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington when I was younger than my daughter is now, a sex-free weekend away sharing a hotel room in the Southern Highlands, him teaching me the only possible way to make meat pies edible and how many inside-out pies I've eaten since. When I ran out of shared memories, I picked up a two-day-old local newspaper and read aloud to him, with my own brand of unique political commentary added in. I regretted not bringing a Pratchett book with me to read from.

 

All this time, he drifted in and out of morphine-induced dreams. I like to believe that when he was conscious he knew who I was the whole time, but I doubt it. He certainly seemed grateful to have a friendly voice making steady, calm noises with occasional bouts of laughter, whether his eyes were clouded and distant or whether they were focussed on me, following me carefully. After that first attempt at speaking to me he never tried again, and no one ever heard him say anything again.

 

I escaped a couple of times for fresh air, a nurse made me coffee (she said I was doing her job, so it was a fair trade), and the sun set - or at least, the room got darker and colder. When he started shaking, I got a blanket off the table, doubled it up, and wrapped his skinny little body up carefully. His bag of saline got replaced, and a shot of morphine went into the thingie hanging below it. The nurse told me he'd probably sleep most of the night, and there was nothing more I could do. I didn't go away: instead, I slept in the bedside armchair, my big purple winter-wrap being used as a blanket. It was a fitful night: I tended to wake several times an hour spontaneously, as well as when staff came in to check on him. In the morning, I was woken by more coffee, this time poor quality instant coffee, but what the hell - it was wet and hot.

 

The second day was more of the same, except that I was smelly and itchy from not having showered and changed my clothes. I really don't think Q noticed. His dreaming spells became longer, and his periods of consciousness became shorter and even cloudier. Did I get recognised? I don't know, and I don't think it matters all that much. By now I was here for my own benefit: he could die with or without me, but earlier in life I was a bit ungracious to dying friends, and treating him properly was a part of my making amends to them.

 

I never saw a doctor (and I wasn't his next-of-kin anyway), but at some stage a very kind nurse I hadn't seen before came by, introduced herself as the one who had rung me up weeks ago, and told me he was now in a coma he was unlikely to ever emerge from. I didn't comment, I just thanked her for her tact, and made to leave. She allowed me to use the nurses's station internet connection to get onto Virgin and change my flight time (for another fee), then I left the hospital.

 

I wasn't all that sad - I was much sadder when I first heard. In fact, I had had the sensation that he was more-dead-than-alive from the moment I walked in: the moments when his eyes were open and actually focussed and aware were moments of effort on his part, dragging him back to his body. My primary concern was for myself, now - I became aware of how desperately I needed to shower and lie down. Thank the gods for pubs-with-rooms-above, I say.

 

After a fabulous shower and a change of clothes I ate the best pizza of the last fifty years, made at that same pub. The crust was so thin that it had the texture of crackers topped with prawns so fresh that they were nearly swimming, the garlic was treated properly - that is, it was treated as a separate ingredient and not a spice - and the tomato base was obviously someone's Italian grandmother's secret home recipe. Perversely for those who colour-code wines and foods, I opted for a glass of Merlot, though after the first sip I'd wished I'd gone for the Cab Sav. Never mind - at least it was red.

 

The flight home was interesting. Remember I brought my internet-booked ticket forward also on the net? I had scribbled the new flight number, time and reference number in the margins of my original paperwork. So I rocked up at the airport in plenty of time to check in. Reached the head of the queue, and told the guy that I was booked on the flight to Sydney at something-o-clock. He told me there wasn't a flight at that time, and had I booked with another airline? I suggested that his own website would be reluctant to book flights with other carriers, and he looked again. Nope, I was booked nowhere. So I told him what flight I had come in on, and he looked it up. Yes I was there and I had paid for the return flight, but there was no trace of a return seat for me. I threw myself on his mercy and asked him to get me on a plane back. He offered me a flight an hour after the flight-time I had booked online, and again, a window seat. I accepted. So he told me what departure gate to take, and told me to be there in time for the original flight-time! I offloaded my bag, and was at the proper gate at the earlier time, getting my carry-on and my body scanned. Waiting, waiting.

 

Then there was an announcement, telling everyone boarding flight number whatever at gate X, to go to Gate Y, right down the other end of the airport! A planeload-ful of people sighed, stood up, and went on the long walk to the other end of the airport. It took us ages to get down there, and only one of their scanners was working. Even though we had just been scanned we had to go through it all again, with only one scanner. It was after takeoff time before we had all boarded. Then the pilot made an announcement that he had decided to refuel, and it would be another twenty minutes. It was a lot longer than that. After the refuelling was completed he said that he had done a walk-around and discovered damage to a tyre, so could we all disembark in an orderly fashion so that the engineers could change the tyres. We did so. By now the smokers amongst us were all collected in a nervious little pile of twitching people, sniffing each other's breath and clothes for any trace of Queen Nicotine that we could get. Then after a wait, the staff got us back in.

 

Again, I appreciated that delightful moment when the tyres left the ground, and the rapid rise away from the earth. This time there was a lot of cumulus cloud around, and the pilot cleverly navigated a route through it so that the windows didn't white-out, but instead I got a grandstand view of the constructions of the cloud, the towering columns of twisting shapes from the inside of the cloud-layer as well as when we rose above it. We came back to Sydney not from the ocean but over the Blue Mountains, and once again, it amazed me how clearly I could sense heights and depths of mountain ridges and valleys. Landing was uneventful; my bag didn't come out on the right carousel but on one that apparently was dedicated to a flight from quite a different part of the continent, and before I knew it, I was on the simple surface commute towards my home.

 

It occurred to me, that just as I was probably taking my final journey on a plane, Q was taking his final journey in this body. Farewell, old man. In my strange, perverted, non-sexual way, I loved you.

The Girl with the Black Camel

I'm fairly set in my routines. For the last couple of years I have spent Wednesday evenings with my Wednesday Friends, and I spend Tuesday evenings with my meditation group. Until recently, I spent most of my other evenings at home.

 

What changed? Well, I went out to a particular club to hear a local band playing. It's as simple as that. Since then, I've spent most of my Monday and Thursday nights there, too. I'm not all that interested in alcohol, and I'm not all that interested in gambling. So why do I do this?

 

The first time I went, I took refuge from the volume on an outdoor balcony. It is spacious, providing several sets of tables and chairs and a bit of walking-room. It also is glassed-off instead of having a concrete or wooden railing. You can see across the club's mini-golf range, then one of their carparks, then a bit of a field that I believe some of the local schools use for team-sports. Past that is a fringe of native trees, planted as a sound aural and visual shield against the nearby arterial road, and beyond that are low hills, partly developed and partly left covered in bushland.

 

The day the band played, I took refuge out there a few times, and communed quietly with a cigarette. What the hell, it gave me a chance to be away from the crowd, the noise and the sweaty, human heat. At twilight, I was out there, looking into the distance and thinking of nothing in particular, when the girl with the black camel came over one of the hills, walking towards me.

 

She wasn't a normal spirit-shape - she looked as solid as the trees, and more solid than the cars, barely visible on the road behind them. She would have been in her early to middle thirties, I suppose, walking on the left side of her camel, leading her by a nose-string. She was wearing a long, dark robe of some sort that hid her hair, was very pale, and had bare feet. In fact, I still love watching her feet - those little white things that become visible briefly at the very beginning of each step before her weight moves forward and her robe catches up.

 

The first day she walked gravely down the hill to the arterial road, paused, looking both ways, then led her camel out across the road during a gap in the traffic. Then she walked across the field diagonally towards me, wound her way between parked cars in the parking lot, and before she emerged from the corner of the building which obscured her at that point, she vanished. Or, perhaps, took a different route than I was expecting.

 

Only when something else demands my attention do I miss out, now. I have been going back every Monday and Thursday evening to catch a glimpse of her walking in her slow, measured pace. She is wrapped in silence. She is wrapped in her own purpose. She comes only on twilight, never before or after. She waits for a gap in the traffic to cross the main road, but traffic never seeems to see her - in a town like this you'd expect cars to slow down to take a look at the unusually-dressed girl leading a camel, yes?

 

Usually she arrives from the northwest, coming over that hill and steadily walking towards me. Just occasionally she travels in the opposite direction, coming from around the building I am in, wending her way through the carpark, over the field and through the trees, where she waits gravely for a gap in the traffic to cross the road and climb the hill on the other side.

 

She must feel as solid as she looks - a ghost or spirit-shape wouldn't wait for traffic to pass, as it poses no danger to the traffic and traffic poses none to it. Yet traffic doesn't see her and people in the club don't see her. I often don't have the balcony to myself, and once when she was in the parking lot I pointed and asked the woman at the next table: "What is that?" The woman looked in the direction of my finger and said: "A Fiat, I think." If she had seen a woman leading a black camel, she wouldn't have been trying to identify car models, I'm pretty sure.

 

I watch for her twice a week, and I see her nearly every time. She never looks up, but after all this time I feel as if there is some kind of budding relationship between us. I feel her insularity, and her profound privacy. If she ever leaves her camel in the carpark and comes in for a drink, I can see myself sitting near her, but not to talk or even to look at her. Just to enjoy a companionable silence, something I love sharing with people on the occasions when I find someone who knows how to be silent.

 

As far as I have been able to find out, there is no history of camel-use in this area. And in areas where camels are or have been used, you wouldn't ever walk barefoot - the ground is either freezing or frying, and good footwear is a basic essential. Is she an analogue memory of someone from another area and/or time, which has somehow been transplanted here? She seems to know about modern traffic. She seems to know about the club. She seems to consider both of them irrelevant to her and her purpose for taking that walk.

 

After a couple of months, it occurred to me that I could learn something about her by looking at the camel. Its tack was very simple: brown leather straps buckled under the belly and tail, and a simple nose-piercing holding a string that she uses to guide the camel, a traditional way of managing their speed and direction. I noticed when I looked carefully, that the belly-buckle is clinched slightly to the left side of the camel. There is no colour, no glitter, no showmanship. It is not saddled-up - it is wearing some kind of dark pack, which I assume contains water, food, bedding, and the bumps in it are consistent that that - and with a lot of other things, too.

 

Does she stop at night in a sports-field or bushland, and pull out a swag or small tent? Does she light a camp-fire, refill her water containers at polluted creeks, campsite taps or service stations? Does she hobble her camel according to tradition, and let it graze at night? Does she eat at McDonalds? Does she not eat at all? Does she walk endlessly, steadily, through all the nights and days, on an endless route that only she knows for a purpose that only she understands, that just happens to bring her close to the club when I am there?

 

If other people could see her I would speculate that her guise would be a great cover for smuggling: is any cop ever going to pull over a barefoot girl with a camel? I'm certain nobody else can see her, though - none who have been around when I have been in her vicinity. They may be others like me, individuals in a population which ignores her, individuals that do see her and wait at other points along her route to catch a regular glimpse of her and wonder.

 

There is something very beneficial about unanswered questions: they allow your mind to play in a way that ordered thinking and finding answers doesn't. I enjoy it immensely, anyway. I am going to continue spending two nights a week sipping water and waiting for her to take her walk with her camel. I'm going to watch her fluid, graceful pace, and the lope of the camel. I'm not in the business of getting to know anybody at the club - these two evenings a week are not about being social, they are just about being me, in my strange, unconnected, silent relationship with her, with the girl with the black camel.

Grounding

A couple of weeks ago one of my clients asked me to teach them how to ground themself. It was -er- an interesting exercise for me.

 

I was born with both my Sun and my Moon in Earth signs - I am pre-programmed to be grounded. I am in my body strongly, and it is connected to the earth. Between 2003 and 2005 I gained a lot of weight - not unwelcome weight - completely unconnected with my diet and activity-levels, further pressing me to the ground. Just today, someone who knows me very well indeed expressed my relationship with words to the effect of: "after all, you are rock. You find it hard not to be grounded." And this is perfectly true.

 

When my daughter was little, we spent a great deal of time travelling on the rail system recreationally. Just south of a particular town, the train goes through a tunnel, then immediately on a bridge over estuarine water, then into another tunnel again. I taught her to recognise the difference in energies, by noticing how she felt as the train passed through the tunnels, and how she felt as it passed over the bridge.

 

We used to walk a steep bush track behind the town we lived in, and we walked it when she was quite small - say, four or five years old. On an early one of those walks, she had difficulties walking because the loose pebbles and fallen leaves that she was walking on slipped around underfoot. I taught her to ground very quickly, by telling her to "put herself in her feet, and make her feet stick to the ground". In less than a minute, she wasn't slipping on the leaves and loose stones any more. She is a young adult now, and and still is firmly glued to whatever surface is below her feet.

 

It is important when beginning a meditation, pathworking, or ritual activity, to ground and centre. Grounding is important: it attaches you to the real. Centring is important: it allows you to access your inner-world reality immediately and powerfully. In my meditation group, a group of friends as opposed to a class, we take turns to lead the guided visualisation,  and I've noticed that many of the members when they lead, pay a lot of attention to grounding, which is healthy, and less attention to centring, which is just as important. When I lead, I tend to incorporate both processes subtlely into the induction routine, so that by the time the whole group is in trance, they are both grounded and centred. When others lead and they do only a grounding induction, I automatically centre myself at the same time, because I never have to waste time grounding.

 

Over the last couple of weeks, since I've been thinking about this blog-post, I've been watching myself, and the only times I've caught myself being ungrounded is when I've been reading particularly enthralling books, into which I have immersed myself and "left this world" to enter the world of the writer. The last occasion, I took a book along when I left the house, and I sat somewhere reading. When I got up after a couple of chapters to go outside and catch some air, I noticed I was walking unusually gracefully for me, and could barely feel the floor beneath my feet. I was ungrounded. I stamped my feet on the ground and suddenly I was fully there again, fully in me, which also extends into the earth.

 

During the conversation earlier today where I was described by my friend as being a living rock, I talked about an incident a few years ago, where I slept overnight in a friend's living room a few floors above ground-level. All my life I have slept on ground-level floors, even when I lived in a two-storey house, and my imaginary dream house is a sprawling bungalow - one floor, its space stretching sideways on the surface of the earth, not upwards into the air. I routinely fall asleep by settling my body, then rolling out of my body into the earth below me. In that room I slept badly: rolling out of bed, I had to roll through a succession of rooms and what felt like a huge distance before I found the earth below me. It was really unfamiliar to be so ungrounded.

 

I also have problems with things like skis, roller-blades, skateboards and even boats, anything that moves around under your feet. After all, I like my feet to be well-anchored at all times, one of the signs of more-or-less permanent groundedness. In many of the public rituals I have attended as a participant, after energy has been raised, the leaders of the ritual tend to get people to be grounded. I always do whatever physical acts they ask for to that end, but feeling fraudulent - I've only ever once needed to ground during ritual in decades, the rest of the time I was already grounded.

 

It is less easy for people who are not pre-programmed to be grounded. I have a number of dear friends who are water-signs - I like to think of my friendships with most of them in the terms of them being the waves that lap around my rocky shores and erode me into sand. I have Fire-friends: I like to think of them as the heat that melts my rock to lava. I have Air-friends, too - they are the wind that rustles my leaves, moves my sand-dunes and rises my dust.

 

Many of them, and even Earth-people, have trouble grounding. They don't seem to be able to sense the minerals in every cell of their bodies. I understand that on an intellectual level, but will never understand it on a visceral level - it is foreign to me, as foreign as trying to think in Japanese.

 

There seems to be a problem, too, with people who know only a little about the Chakras: such people mistake the name of the Base Chakra, which is about labelling its location in the body, with its function, regarding it as somehow "base", dirty, unworthy. Many people who talk freely and often about "opening their heart-chakra" or third eye or crown chakras, seem to want to avoid the lower chakras. In many years' practice, I find that all chakras are important, are healthy, are spiritual. Focussing towards some and away from others leads to physical, mental and spiritual imbalance, which can only be unhealthy. In practice, I find that people who do this, need more help learning to ground than the rest of us, and find it harder to ground when they know how.

 

Get to know the soil - it is real and spiritual. Get to know the substance of your body: it is real and spiritual. Get to know the element of Earth - it is real and spiritual. And ground - feel your feet, your lower torso, and how they connect to the real world. Without this, you are only half the person you could be.

Life Without Forgiveness

I've been thinking about forgiveness recently, and while I am probably fairly untainted by my past - certainly more so in the last couple of years than at any other time - there's a lot that I don't forgive.

 

Society, both Christian and otherwise, commands us to forgive, and is unforgiving of those who can't. And as I was typing that last sentence my mind conflated two Christian slogans, and came up with something that amused and pleased me:

 

It is better to forgive than to forget.

 

Whilst it came up as a slip of the tongue, or perhaps a slip of the mind, it is probably worth a second look, since we are so programmed to claim to "forgive and forget" (whilst storing every memory). So what, exactly, are forgiveness and forgetfulness? We think they are easy to describe, until we give them a second thought - then they become slippery customers indeed.

 

To me, with experiences enhanced by a couple of years of post-brain-incident fogginess, forgetfulness and the act of forgetting seems to be associated with losing the "lane-markers" in the traffic of the mind. It is my considered opinion that I have not become stupid, nor have I become incapable, but I am so adrift in time and forget so much of what I should be doing or other important stuff I should remember, that it is extraordinarily hard to organise myself for any kind of meaningful work. Prior to then, forgetting was something I did as a process of living through extended periods of time - even the heat of direct emotional or physical pain would fade and be forgotten by the simple accrual of time. And perhaps those out of my past who might consider that they have done something that I seem to have "forgiven" are mistaken - perhaps I merely forgot through time and more recently through the process of being unanchored in my own head.

 

And forgiveness? To listen to people of all faiths preaching about forgiveness, it would seem to be a positive act, or an object that you can offer to another person, so it is spoken about. Offered to another person, it might be the "that's okay" we routinely offer to an apology, if we really mean it and if it is not just a form of words that slip out of our mouths habitually.

 

A friend of mine recently told me that they have a troublesome friend who once told her that they have to make a conscious daily habit of forgiving her for something in their past in order to be able to face her and maintain the friendship. It sounded like a struggle, it sounded difficult and time-consuming. But surely, if you have forgiven something, it is forgiven already and doesn't need to be re-forgiven the next day or the next time you see them? Forgiveness is letting go, is turning your back on the problem and wiping the slate. Forgiveness offers a fresh start. If the slate is still dirty enough to need another wiping, forgiveness hasn't happened.

 

"Forgiveness is letting go," my own words. But nobody knows more than I do how hard it is to let go. Injustice burns. Loss burns. Pain burns. And as anyone who has been ignited will tell you, after the flames have been beaten out, it takes a long, long time for the pain to go away. I believe the vast majority of people are in my camp when I say that no matter how good my intentions, I find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to forgive things when they still burn. People have counselled me to "let go", but it is not a conscious act. Like a petrol-burn, an emotion-burn will heal at its own pace - you cannot hurry it, you cannot voluntarily "let go" if it is still burning, and it is only when both kinds of burn stop generating more and more heat in the affected tissues that any kind of healing can happen.

 

So, along with forgetfulness, "forgiveness", or "getting over it" or "letting go" is to a large part, a function of the passage of time and is extremely closely related to forgetfulness. It is not voluntary, not something you can counsel someone to do. And those who think they do it consciously as a matter of choice - is it possible, perhaps, that they have consciously chosen to ignore or repress it instead?

 

In my opinion as an ethicist, some kinds of forgetting should never happen at all. If we forget the wrongs of history and society, the harm to many that sociopaths and megalomaniacs cause to others (in the names of things like "patriotism" for example), we run the risk of allowing ourselves to be ruled by such people again, instead of sensing the warning-signs and removing from power any future Pol Pots or Hitlers before they embark on genocide again.

 

I recall from my reading on the Persian Wars of ancient times that one Greek leader led a foray into a Persian town  on the east coast of the Mediterranean - I've forgotten exactly which town and general, sadly - to find that all the able-bodied men were gone from the community, off to fight in other locations. So they killed the elderly, the infirm and the children, but worse, they let the mature women live, their breasts crudely amputated with swords and knives, to die slowly of shock, blood loss and infection. Not a single person survived. Some of us call Tony Abbott a misogynist, but I'm pretty-damn-sure he doesn't advocate amputating the breasts of every single Labor-voting woman and allowing them to die in agony, untreated!

 

Historians and the odd individual remember the wrongs mankind has wrought upon mankind. But the general populace, in order to feel comfortable with itself, forgets. We like to see ourselves as "good people", and descended from "good people", so we turn a blind eye to anything discomforting in our history so that we can get out of bed, go to work, play with our children and sleep again, comfortable in our image of ourselves as good people. But that blind eye that we turn, it allows other motivated and cruel people to rise to positions of power in our society, unseen until it is too late ...

 

So yes, in that sense, it is in fact better to forgive than forget. Cultures that haven't forgiven wrongs that happened centuries ago are still warring in some parts of the world, but it is almost as bad to have forgotten the lessons of history and leave ourselves vulnerable to really bad leadership. Was it Gandhi who said "You cannot prepare for war and then expect peace"? We need to prepare for peace: reduce international threats including everything from sanctions to armed forces as one half of that preparation (and yes, I do know I have a child in the military with a career-path in front of her leading to command), and make ourselves as peaceful as possible by temperament: accepting of others and their beliefs, colours, behaviours and values, being unwilling to judge those we do not know, being prepared to compromise even at the loss of face (or money). This is not about forgetting competitiveness, but about actively remembering it, and actively choosing another path.

 

Then, and only then, will our Zeitgeist be able to forgive itself and move unencumbered into the future. Society's forgetfulness is a problem, but personal peace, which begins with forgiving those who have wronged us, is a function of personal forgetfulness.

 

You cannot step away from your hurt, any more than I can. This is why I don't forgive, when I have something personal to forgive - because I know I can't, not without doing something unhealthy like repressing or ignoring the pain. Time will work its magic, both on me and on you, and allow the pain to lessen, fade, disappear entirely, as our memory of it fades.

 

My ex-partner was once very judgemental (bordering on visciousness) to a friend of mine, who had lost a newborn baby twenty-something years earlier, and was able to talk about it without tears. We were friends at the time, whilst my ex didn't come onto the scene for decades, and I'm here to say that my friend suffered terribly. The "one year" that her counsellors suggested was normal for intense grieving stretched into quite a few years.

 

My partner, meeting her a lot later, didn't see any of that. All she saw was a middle-aged woman, talking calmly and dry-eyed about the events that led up to the death of a baby. She told me that my friend was inhuman. I knew my friend wasn't inhuman at all - she had just eventually healed, at last. My ex-partner, on the other hand, held onto a lot of pain from her past and niggled at it, like a cat chewing out its surgical sutures or a proud person getting off crutches too early and delaying the healing of a bone, and had deliberately refused to allow time to heal her.

 

So in retrospect, my advice would be this: feel what you feel at *that* moment. If it is intense, really feel it, and don't forgive. If it is not intense, don't feel guilty about that - it is a sign healing is starting to happen, and for the gods' sakes, don't keep prising the wound open like my ex did, to extend your pain further into the future! Allowing yourself to heal at your own natural speed is the only way that pain can go away healthily, and the only way you can really forgive someone who wronged you.

 

So no, I never make any effort to forgive anyone. And I never will. And I am not ashamed. And, you know, there is probably not anyone in the world at the moment that I need to forgive - none of my past problems are still a problem. Try it - you'll like it.

Lightworkers

(dedicated to Belinda Rose Hawker, 11/6/1961 - 6/10/2009)

 



So who are the lightworkers in your life? I had an interesting conversation today (well, I do most days) this time with a stranger at a bus stop who had troubles, and it got me thinking about lightworkers yet again.

 

They were looking for a lightworker, because the darkness had descended on their life again. I may have made them feel temporarily better, but I'm pretty sure I didn't give them what they actually needed.

 

What, exactly, are lightworkers? Well, probably not me. "I am not a lighthouse, not the answer or the truth," sang Rosanne Cash, and I could well sing it too (in fact I do most weeks - The Wheel is one of my favourite housework-CDs).

 

Is the person who seems to have all the answers a lightworker? The person who makes you feel temporarily better, who says that you choose every aspect of your reality despite gravity, despite pollution, despite infection, despite the wholly unchosen and unwanted actions of others? (thus, placing blame on you for unintentionally choosing to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?)

 

Is the person who helps you feel temporarily better by understanding, sympathising, giving you a shoulder to cry on, or a meal and a bed for the night in hard times, a lightworker?

Is the rebel, the courageous person who stands up to oppressors including the oppressive aspects of society as a whole, a lightworker?

Is the healer a lightworker?

Is the firm friend who sticks by you through the decades a lightworker?

I think they all have their role to play - but do you know whom I think are the real lightworkers? (And bear with me here!) That alcoholic stepson who steals everything that isn't nailed down, takes it to the pawnshop at regular intervals and physically stands over you monstering you with brute strength should you ever say anything at all. That person you cross the street to avoid. That former "friend" who makes you feel so awkward that you try to avoid them at all costs. That addict who burgles your neighbour's house for money to buy drugs and finding your neighbour at home, takes to their heads with a crowbar. That disabled family member whom you will have to care for, for the rest of your life no matter how exhausted you become. That stupid person who can't seem to grasp anything you say and drives you to despair. The lover who walks out on you in the worst possible way, taking your heart and leaving an aching hole in its place. Brutal police regimes or soldiers in times of war making your civilian life a misery. All of those who seem to completely trash your life despite your best efforts.

And why? Because there is no growth in happiness. There is no development in peace.

If we lived in a perfectly peaceful world, with no pollution, perfect diets and relationships and no dissent at all, we would have no incentive to grow. We would have no incentive to develop. Our strength, endurance and compassion would never be tested. We would never have occasion to help others, or to test our own humility and ask for help from those we love - or strangers. Life would, in short, have no meaning at all.

"God" needs "the devil" in order to survive. Goodness is meaningless without its polarised opposite to give it purpose, give it direction and give it focus.  If everything was perfect, if the holocaust had never happened and everyone had everything they needed to be "happy", the world would be void of meaning, would be void of improvement, would be void of achievement. We would sit around doing nothing: never studying, never exercising, never working. We would be frozen in time, frozen in our own lack of development.

 

Yes, injustice is horrible. But it gives us focus, it gives us something to battle against. Yes, horrible situations and horrible people are horrible. But they give us something to transcend, something to learn from, something for us to measure our own strengths and development against. Yes, negative emotions are bad to live with. But they make what we might otherwise perceive as negative or at least neutral and call "boredom" seem blissful. They make us appreciate what we have. Some of the happiest people I know live simply without many of the things I value: broadband, hot showers, etc, working hard to coax food out of small acerages or doing hard manual labour for little more than the price of a roof over their heads.

 

Why? Well, if you can have anything, if nothing is an achievement against the odds, then there is no sense of satisfaction, achievement, even triumph. And the people who either have the least resources or have the most trials to overcome, are so grateful for even the small things, that their lives are flooded with light whenever anything goes their way.

 

You can be ground down by the negatives in your life - or you can fight against them. Fighting against them and the wins in the small battles along the way (even if you lose the overall war), bring a disproportionate happiness. My life is far happier now than it ever was years ago when I was young, because in between there were some very black years indeed. Nowdays, purely because of that blackness, I appreciate every possession I have, every moment of peace. The person and circumstances who caused that blackness is dead and superficially I am very grateful. But with some perspective of hindsight, she did me a huge service - she made my future-without-her far happier than I knew I could ever be. She was more truly a lightworker in my life than any of the people who judged or judge me for engaging in that situation in the first place.

 

So who are the lightworkers in your life?

 

 

 *       *       *       *       * 

 

 

 

BAD FRUIT

 

by Nisaba Merrieweather

dedicated to Belinda Rose Hawker, 11/6/1961 - 6/10/2009

 

 

I want to pick the bad fruit.
I want to hold it and squeeze it.
Feel the rancid juice dripping
From my sticky elbows.
I want the waft of bacteria cultures,
Impure alcohol, repellent,
Coating the roof of my mouth.
I want the sting of acid toxicity.

Were I to pick the bad woman,
She would hold me and squeeze me
Until I could not breathe, and black
Lace netting fell before my eyes.
She would feed on my ideas,
Drink copiously and vomit copiously
With stench of abscessed teeth.
She would, herself, be the sting of toxicity.

 

 

 (NB: This poem won a gold trophy in the Allpoetry "I had my Choice of Poisons" competition two years ago.)


Dealing with the Menopause Fairy

While I was living in Western Australia living a well-developed relationship with the Menstruation Fairy, the Menopause Fairy paid me a visit. That was years ago now, and she has since developed a close, loving relationship with me.

 

In the very early nineteen-eighties, which coincided with my very early twenties (as I am a decade-baby*), I finally grew some sense, and went off the Pill, something I haven't resumed taking since. Initially, this was both a good and bad decision, as two things happened: the waves of depression that I just couldn't account for in my life stopped which was wonderful, and my supposedly monthly bleeds swung wildly for a while making planning a little difficult and one or two away-from-home incidents a little embarrassing. With time, though, it settled down into a predictable twenty-nine-and-a-half day rhythm, almost exactly the same rhythm as the lunar month.

 

Later in the eighties, though before the stock market crash in September 1987 (and wasn't that a wonderful birthday present for someone working in the Financial Sector!), I lived a life that was as clockless as possible for someone whose income depended on the stock market, and as electric-lightless as possible for someone who enjoyed reading in the evenings. I had been involved with Magical Paganism since the late seventies, and had bought my faith-ring in 1984, with a promise to myself that if I ever lost my faith and my magicality, I would take it off. It's now 2012, and I'm still wearing it and cannot even see a possibility of taking it off. It lives on my right hand when I am single and on my left hand when I am in a relationship, but it is a statement of faith more than a statement of relationship status. Being gold, it is also my Sun-God ring - my silver pentacle-ring is my Moon Goddess ring, and my copper ring is my Earth-Mother ring. Yes, my spirituality is important to me - I have many other rings, some of them lovely, but those ones are important, and they leave no room on my hands for me to wear other rings comfortably.

 

In my time of clocklessness I meditated often (and still do), and used to enjoy very much walking around outdoors in a state of meditation. Gradually, I became aware of the lengthening and shortening of the days - without a timepiece to check at sunrise and sunset! And I worked out why the 25th December is such a huge celebration rather than the 21st or 22nd: in the Southern Hemisphere where I live, that is the first day after the date of the Solstice where someone without a clock can really sense the shortening of the days. In the Northern Hemisphere where my forebears come from, it fell in winter. On the Solstice the village shamans would have conducted Fire rituals to encourage the sun to rekindle, to bring warmth and growth back to the world, then sat around watching for the first signs of the lengthening days to know whether the magic had worked. And when it had, on or around the 25th, there'd be a huge community feast with much jollity, overeating and overdrinking, to celebrate!

 

Living also without clocks or artificially induced hormonal "flats", I was at the same time becoming very aware of my body as a magical organism. Whilst most books on magic talk about active magic and passive magic as being enhanced by certain lunar phases, I found active magic, magic where I projected outwards, worked far better in the days of my menstruation, whilst passive magic, magic where I worked internally on myself, worked far better around the times of ovulation (something to do with being "sexually receptive", I think). For decades, without the deadening influence of the Pill or any other forms of hormonal contraception (and no, I have never had an unintended baby), I worked with my magic and my hormones as intertwined aspects of each other and of myself. I was internally powerful, even in times of outer powerlessness in my life.

 

Then, as I said, when I was living on the red earth of inland Western Australia, the Menopause Fairy first visited me. I liked her on sight - we already knew each other, and I had been waiting patiently for her to come calling for a few years by then.

 

Now in that region, the local people indigenous to the area, have a creation myth. I don't know all of it, but one of the elders whom I was friendly with told me some of it, probably the bits of it that I was allowed to hear as a white woman. In the beginning, everything was void. There was no land. Then one of the sky-women started menstruating, and where her blood fell, it solidified and became the rich, red earth. Everything else grows out of that life-bringing earth: trees, rocks, creeks, creatures. The salmon-gums, in particular, with their orange-red timber, are seen as a reminder of that act of creation and are especially valued. I lived on land whose spiritual/symbolic origins were in the gifts that menstruation brings. I found that thought really inspiring and I had a terrific life there, returning to the eastern coastal strip of the continent only because of my teenager's educational needs. Nothing else would have been important enough to drag me back.

 

The Menstruation Fairy announced Her first visit on a hot, dry desert-summer's day, by a sudden flush of tingling and additional heat that started with my shoulders and upper arms, and spread quickly through me. It didn't feel just like ordinary heat, though - it felt like the movement of magic in my body. I greeted Her respectfully, and made a mental note that next time I would try to direct or make use of that magic surging through my body. That day She visited me eight times, more than She has on any day since. I think I know why - we were just getting acquainted and needed time to get to know each other.

 

The second time She visited me that day, I noticed that for a few seconds before the heat arrived there was an indefinable sensation of "prior notice" of her visit: a sensation that I cannot describe, but which is quite distinctive. I braced myself, dropped myself quickly into trance (I can do that pretty-well instantly), and waited for the heat. I converted it into a cool, green, tingling energy, and washed myself with it, and was pleased to see some of my mental garbage flowing off me and away with the flow of magic. Yes!

 

From that day to this one, I have practiced and refined this. Every so-called "hot flush" that comes on a warm day, I grab it before it turns into heat, and transform it into some other form of magical healing, which I use either on myself, my surroundings, objects, or living creatures. It takes only a second or so - at times when this happens during conversation, for example, all that the people with me will notice (even magical people), is that I pause for a moment, then go on talking. Occasionally on very cold days, I'll allow my "hot flushes" to remain as heat - I regard it as a sort of personal central heating!

 

The Menstruation Fairy continued to visit me for a good few years after that, and I became aware that I was the rope in the middle of a magical tug-of-war between two powerful magical entities, both of whom gave me energies and strengths that I could use. Some time in the second half of last year, after a very long absence, the Menstruation Fairy paid Her very last visit. I knew before it happened that it would be Her last visit. I did all the necessary physical stuff, then did a quiet personal ritual of farewell with the limestone-fossil Cup, a lovely symbol of the womb, that a dear friend had given me for my fifty-first birthday. She was satisfied and She went away, leaving me in the warm, wrinkled hands of the Menopause Fairy.

 

Since then, completely undistracted by my menstrual cycle as a source of power, I have been using my menopausal "symptoms" (not an illness in any way!) as a source of power. And whilst the so-called hot flushes, or surges of raw magic that She gives me come more and more rarely these days, they are a blessing and a gift. I treasure them all, and I use them all. Mood swings? Nah. My "mood swings" are dependent on life-circumstances, as they should be. I suspect that if I were not utilising this raw energy that the Menopause Fairy chooses to give me, I might feel uncomfortable in my body - and I am supremely comfortable in my body - and if I were uncomfortable in my body, that might cause mood-swings. I can't see that ever happening, can you?

 

Menopause is the greatest thing that can happen to a woman. Absolutely. It completely eclipses things like orgasm, childbirth, all the other stuff that pre-menopausal women rave about. I really, really recommend welcoming the Menopause Fairy into your life, and utilising the energy that She presents to you.

 

 

 

 

 

FOOTNOTES

 

 

* Decade-baby: someone of any age born in a year ending with zero.

 

** Other resources: "In Praise of the Crone" by Dorothy Morrison, published by Llewellyn, 1999. (Note: I have known Dorothy personally from before the writing of this book, and we never discussed it before or after she wrote it).

Moving Into Winter

Moving into winter is a process of completing the biological year. The growth-spurts of Spring and Autumn are over, and the searing, deadly heat of Summer that browns grass and stunts growth, too.

Moving into winter is marked in my Pagan practice by Samhain. Life is thinning, death and potential death is drawing near. This is a time of farewells, of remembering the past and the ancestors, of thinking things through, of sitting by the fire (or the laptop) and analysing the past, both by self-reflection and by the passing on of our tales to the young: tales of their childhood, tales of our own personal history, tales of grandparents, uncles and family friends, and the tales of our society's inner wisdom that we encode into "fairy stories" and dismiss.

After taking part in a few Samhain rites in the eighties, I went solitary for many years, and for many years my Samhain rituals were also solitary, marked more by contemplation than by the props of circles and magical tools.

This year for the first time ever I attended three separate Samhain rituals, all of them run by different people, within the space of around ten days. It was very pleasant and relaxing not to have to run any of them myself, but to follow someone else's cues.

In one of them, I was asked to gather up and farewell people I may have lost. In one of them I was asked to contemplate the end of my own life, and how my life will have been of value, and who I look forward to joining after death and/or what I need to do before death. And in the third I was asked to invite the spirit of someone dead to join us (I noticed there was little emphasis on dismissal).

I invited Gladney Oakley, someone I'd been very friendly indeed with in the 1990s, an elderly bearded man with a quiet and gentle wisdom that I had very much valued. I had always regretted that after he lost his vision and before he died I had not spent enough time with him, allowing the bustle of my life at that stage to get in the way of even thinking very much about him. And he, for his part, was far too reticent and gentlemanly to remind me that he was unwell and might need the company.

I always regretted that. I wanted to apologise to him silently during the rite, but I never felt his spirit.  I few faces from my past that came and went, but nobody really stuck around.

For several days after that rite, living in my disappointment with myself regarding Gladney, a dead person did, in fact, come to me, whom I had had high hopes of early in our association and who became more and more hostile, clinically insane and violent as time went by. I remembered all the different ways that I had fantasised about killing her. I remembered the many different ways she actually tried to kill me. Death hung in the air for days, old death. Violent, passionate death, real and imagined.

And her face hung in the air, too, reproachful. I tolerated it for days, knowing that it was just a part of the whole Samhain thing, and thinking I'd probably overdosed on Samhain energy by attending not one or even two but three whole rituals. Mental note: in future years, limit it to one or two!

Today I attended Pagans in the Park, a regular monthly social get-together I enjoy attending and try to get to as often as possible, and the group's resident rock-hound was there. He knows about my affinity with minerals and always tries to give me some, and today was no exception. Last time it was fossils of sea-creatures and assorted non-fossil minerals, this time it was petrified (ossified or fossilised) wood of different kinds: different species, and fossilised in different ways (agate, silica).

He also gave me a small bag of Apache Tears, tiny translucent obsidian gems, black and precious. Wikipedia is only very sketchy on the subject, but interestingly, it was Gladney in the early 1990s who had talked earnestly in Kibble Park with me whilst our companions chatted elsewhere, about Apache Tears.

He had talked with me at length not only about the history that they grew out of, but also what they were said to do for those who carried them close to their heart. Apache tears, as the hardened and preserved tears of that intense grief, stand in the stead of the tears of those who can no longer cry.

Now, but much more so in the past, our society encourages girls to cry (to some extent), and actively discourages boys to cry. Discouraged long enough and hard enough, their tears eventually die. My tears died differently: between the years 2000 and somewhere in 2003, I cried so much that I appeared (and still appear) to have simply exhausted my lifetime supply of tears. I just cannot cry any more.

It could be said that perhaps I don't cry any more because nothing is as bad as those years, but that avoids the obvious, which is that the period between 2003 and 2005 was actually far worse. I had more reason to cry, not less. No, I had simply biologically run out of tears.

I remember crying, both as a child and (occasionally) as a younger adult. I got snotty. I got hot and blotchy-red. I developed pulsing headaches. And the act of crying was very, very physical, so physical that it exhausted me. People talk about crying as "emotionally cleansing" or as an "emotional release", but in retrospect, being able to view the physiological process of crying with some distance and objectivity, I feel that it is more draining, it is so exhausting that it leaves you (or me) without sufficient energy to maintain the intensity of emotion that brought it on, and because you cannot sustain that intensity, it buys a period of relief in which to sleep, or review the situation, or escape, or turn your attention elsewhere.

Not being able to cry, I am no longer able to drain myself so completely and so immediately, either of the energy to feel things intensely, or of the toxic body-chemicals voided in tears and snot. Feelings hang around in my body for longer, even though my mind mercifully lets go of them fairly easily.

I offered some of my Apache Tears to a friend of mine who also doesn't seem to cry and he politely refused, saying he didn't want to cry. I think he missed the point. I certainly don't expect that carrying these subtly beautiful little objects with me will make me - or him - cry at all. We are your basic non-crying people and probably will remain non-crying people for life, which is not wholly a bad thing and is certainly less embarrassing that finding yourself crying in public.

No, what I suspect these stones may do for me is take their darkness into my own energy, ferret out the stuff I never cried about in the past that I probably needed to cry about (even things that are totally resolved), and without my conscious knowledge, reduce the amount of tension that I might or might not carry in my body. Who knows, perhaps some of that vague mystery-pain that comes and goes in my body might be the after-effects of unwept tears, and who knows, using these stones mindfully might help with that.

And so I conclude by thanking Gladney, who belatedly came to me today whilst I was thinking through all this stuff, rather than when I wanted and expected him to. You were a wonderful man, and although I never told you, I feel certain you knew all along how much I loved you. I'm sorry the months of your final illness passed without my making any effort to see you at all. Go in peace, old man, knowing that from now on I am freed, and will remember you infrequently and with only pleasure.