No metaphors

I thought it had been longer since I'd last posted something. I forgot about the post I wrote on Friday night, although why would I remember it anyway. Socrates apparently opined that the point of writing is so you don't have to carry everything around in your head, although he may have been talking about lists and chronologies rather than emotions and dreams. I'm not judging him either way. Well, a lot has happened. My personal situation took a steep and unexpected nosedive during the week. I had thought it was bad before but I was wrong. I don't need to write about all that and I'm not going to - don't laugh at this ok, but privacy is important - but it does me good to push myself through the gentle discipline of thinking over recent events and inner states and articulating something about them, indirectly if necessary. The knot in the chest loosens, and then I can breathe, and when I can breathe I can walk, speak, listen, smile, pat a cat, look, sing, eat and drink, do what I need to do. As in yoga, if I can breathe I can hold a position of tension and pain, even finding strength and ease in it, knowing that it will release and change, I will breathe in and I will breathe out and I will find a place of peace and rest and sweetness, and this place will not be for me alone.

The worst thing about pain and grief is how utterly selfish it is. I have spent time with friends and felt like a vampire feeding off their equilibrium, which is sometimes almost as fragile as mine, and I have been unable to step up as much as I want to step up for a dear friend whose health is is a very bad way. And I have understood for some time that the degree of need I am currently bringing to my relationship with my little son must urgently be dialed down.

On Saturday I was taken to the beach, the very best place in the world for forgetting about everything else except the aliveness of the water and the sky and the cold, sharp wet rocks and sand and weed underfoot. Yesterday I managed to tear my mind away from my own problems long enough to listen properly to somebody I really value talking in depth about a very difficult situation she is contending with. And today I was able to play with Lenny in the sunshine for hours. I felt better for seeing glimpses of what it might be like to have again a healthy balance in my life of being cared about, caring for myself, and caring for other people, without the hot and suffocating weight of need dragging any one element to dominance over the others. But these glimpses were framed in a vista of distance and difficulty. It should be easier - it should be natural as rain. I don't know how much of that difficultness begins and ends in my own feelings and is imperceptible to others. Most of it, I hope. But not all of it is just in my head, that I know. I understand I'm hard work right now. I also know I won't be like this forever. I also know that this, right now, that I am writing, is a classic example of me being hard work, probably not adding much to the overall happiness of your day. Feel free at any time, ok, to go back to the archives for the early funny ones.

Oh, goodness. Pictorial interlude 

I ordered these then couldn't eat them. Their fault not mine, they weren't cooked properly.

I had to crack open the emergency chocolate for Lenny after I snapped at him last week. He gnawed half of it and cheered up. I'm not sure what I did with it after that. I've lost it. 

Essay Club with Tosca on my lap.

It's a shame Vinnie and I can't be better friends because we have one strong and fairly sick interest in common, namely my feet. Without the evidence that is threaded through thirteen years of blogging I might never have understood this about myself.

       

Breakfast today

A couple of hours ago I arrived home and pushed open the front gate. On the concrete path to the house a dead possum lay. I pulled a wad of junk mail out of the neighbour's letterbox and used it to pick up the body, which was cold and stiff and heavier than I expected; I've seen several possums running along the ground in the dark lately, and they have the lightness of squirrels. I couldn't see any injuries or obvious causes of death and I felt a bit worried that maybe someone in the street had poisoned it. I turned it over. It had no wounds. I was looking at it and its belly moved. For a moment I thought it wasn't dead after all but it definitely was. I tilted its body a little and the belly rolled and rippled again. I thought, it has a baby inside it. I stood there, holding this dead creature, watching something moving inside it. After a minute I wrapped the rest of the paper around it and put it into the bin.