Whole

Over the past few days I've been drawn to write a post. Largely the inspiration has been to explore the ways in which the limitation of my ability to surrender affects my experience. 'Give up and look up' my friend Mugo would say. Acceptance in the widest possible way. Do that which is asking to be done and release the need to try to be in full control so as to have everything just so. Sounds easy. But in the end there are (I have found) limits. In the wider spiritual sense there may be no limits but there is karma; cause and effect. Things are stressful just now for DC and I with a lot of disruptive work having to be done on our home. DC has been great fielding contractors whilst trying to work on the index for his book while I've been out at work. I've not been well enough to be as close up and involved at each tiny stage as I usually would. But of course I still feel the need to intervene to ensure we get what we need and hopefully avoid as many future problems as possible. Much childhood trauma has been triggered and it's been a difficult dance for both DC and I to negotiate. But as ever, our love for each other, our willingness to be open to as much of our reality as possible and our ability to support each other continues to make us stronger together.

It is not all this which in the end has prompted me to write today though. It is the words of Andrew Scott in his interview on BBC Radio 4's This Cultural Life. DC has been trying to listen to this for a few nights at bed time but falls asleep almost as soon as his sweet head touches the pillow. I was still awake and heard Scott discussing his experience growing up gay in Ireland where homosexuality wasn't decriminalised until 1993. Scott used the word 'desexualised' to describe the way society forbade queer people to be who they were. This still happens. A 'normal' adolescence is denied queer people by this. In place of the affirmation straight people get we get the opposite. It's something I've written about before but the word 'desexualised' struck a chord. Why? I think it sums up the gross indignity and more; it's the removal of part of our person, our being. We are prevented from developing in our natural way. We are not perverted as an adjective we are perverted as a verb. There isn't anything wrong with us but we are told there is and then we are erased. And this happens to a part of us which is so fundamental to so much of our life. The fear and shame induced compartmentalisation in which we engage is something I've also written about before but the added element made visible in the use of the word 'desexualised' is that part of us is removed by others. I have blamed myself for this. I have thought and felt that it was me who desexualised myself; I decided not to face up to my sexuality in my teens, I did it... But I didn't, society did. I didn't fail I just wasn't allowed. Any option open to me would set me as perverted. Society was the active abusing element and I could only manage the situation as best I could. The management, a process likened by a number of gay men I know of to putting together a jigsaw without the box lid picture, inevitably causes us to abandon and reclaim ourselves over and over again. Fortunately, most of us do get to the stage where we have our picture fairly well assembled and about as 'complete' as anyone can ever be. We are all a work in progress. Things are much better now than in the 1980's of my adolescent years and young men both straight and gay seem to be much more whole, without undue edge and artifice. The machismo of the past seems to be at last fading away and new men seem wonderfully gentle by comparison. And yet I also observe self censorship, compartmentalisation and much of the same prejudice still at work. As Scott also said in his interview, much homophobia would disappear if people stopped the assumption that everybody is straight. My own experience for many years now is that most people are fine with queer people. It's important for queer people to trust this and not assume others will be homophobic. We have to play our part in creating a more whole world.

Spiritually, what does all this mean? Well, DC and I were discussing the merits of a rich life over a happy if limited one the other night. I'm not sure to what extent we have control over this or what the best life might mean. I'd like to think that we are spiritual beings who live in order to see our true nature. What that might mean is a whole other post and probably the theme of the whole blog.

The Third Man

Last night DC and I watched the film The Third Man. We didn't set out to watch it but instead it was one of those fortunate turns of evening entertainment.

The Wikipedia entry says - The atmospheric use of black-and-white expressionist cinematography by Robert Krasker, with harsh lighting and distorted "Dutch angle" camera technique, is a major feature of The Third Man. Combined with the iconic theme music, seedy locations and acclaimed performances from the cast, the style evokes the atmosphere of an exhausted, cynical post-war Vienna at the start of the Cold War.

Having read part way through the movie (and rightly DC will tell me off for Googling things when we're watching a film) that the film employs the above techniques we did indeed notice them and in fact commented just how obvious they are. Setting aside the cinematography and concentrating on the plot we might note that the character Harry Lime whom the movie revolves around doesn't appear until relatively late and his character is only gradually revealed. Indeed, what becomes apparent is that we never get to know much about him and those who have had lengthy and / or close relationships with him it seems don't really know him either; what they seem to have is a projection, a fantasy. But neither do we get the chance to explore the character and the version of him the other characters hold in their minds. No, the protagonist in this movie is not Lime but rather Vienna. Anna, who we gather was in love with Lime does indeed appear exhausted and cynical at some level. And whilst the role is no doubt a cypher for Vienna at the time, she does I think raise a question about the difference between who people are and who they're seen to be. If she has painted Lime as at least lovable to her and she remains unchanged in her view even when she knows of his dreadful deeds, then Holly Martins who reappraises his view of Lime upon discovering his deeds seems no less to see her as someone he cares about. There is here then Martins looking at Anna looking at Lime. But it is their versions of the people they look at. There is the sense in the movie that all the characters are in their own world, all coping with this post-war world in which they find themselves. Vienna is divided into sectors and there is a sense of compartmentalisation throughout the movie. Yet at the same time there's a sense that beyond all this there is still humanity. It is then I think, interesting that the book and film versions have different endings - in the book Martins and Anna get together, they don't in the film. The film stays focused on separation but in so doing evokes connection.

What this film prompted me to post about is this mixture of separation, projection and connection. The interconnected nature of our existence and the paradox of our apparent separation seems to me to be at the heart of the storey.

 

The Year Turns

I find this an odd time of year; the days are short here in Northeast England, it's between Christmas and New Year, many but not all have stopped working for a week or perhaps two, time is spent with friends and family or perhaps alone... there's both a feeling that this is a time of rest and a feeling that an effort is made to connect and have fun. Whilst there is rest, connection, warmth and love there is also an inbuilt expectation of some kind of fantastic, best there could ever be time of goodness knows what; a mythical Christmas. There's a kind of inbuilt failure in this if one should fall for it. And the commercialism supercharges all this. I take a low key, laid back approach to it and enjoy a time of peace, rest, connection and warmth. Memories of Christmas past come and go. There are walks in nature, time with people I care about, good food, time to reflect and time to feel.

Yesterday evening whilst looking up recipes and cooking times on the internet I had Nina Simone playing on Spotify. A number of songs amongst them 'Ne me quitte pas', brought me to tears. Her voice has the power to embody the deep sadness at the very heart of human life. A voice that seems to walk the tightrope between despair and a joy born of the love of life, the very force of life, it takes me across the precipice of misadventure (perhaps) as adventure, life as journey; an errotic flowering in an ocean of heaven only knows what... Listening to Nina Simone I recall the first time I heard her and liked the song, it was 'My baby just cares for me'. It was in the late 1980's and I was in a pub with a friend. I was still waiting to 'grow out of' my same sex desires and had probably shut down in ways that I still don't fully recall. I didn't know it but I was falling love with this friend and whilst I knew I found him interesting I wouldn't realise that I loved him until he told me (not on the night that song played) that he didn't want to ever spend any more time with me. He wouldn't say why but only that I was 'in a bad way'. That was painful; more or less all at once I realised how much he meant to me, that he didn't think much of me, that I wasn't just turned on by other guys but that I wanted them emotionally too (I'd kind of understood that before since the boys I fancied most at school were the ones who I could imagine connecting with), that yes I probably was in a bad way and that this person who I now realised that I loved (although I don't recall using the word love) didn't actually exist. He didn't exist because the person I thought he was wouldn't be so cruel. Those tears Nina's singing provoked contained her pain, parts of the pains which I've experienced including that unrequited love described above and of course the sadness that comes with life's flowering in an ocean of heaven knows what... that we are at once and at all time interconnected and separate... Just now I'm reading Straight Jacket by Matthew Todd a book about the way LGBT people are adversely affected by being at the margins of society. I'm reading this to see if it's suitable to send to a young gay man I know who will soon go off to university. Because I'm reading this and because Nina Simone is connected in my memory with my struggle to make sense of being gay those tears had that struggle as a bit of a focus but it's the journey across that precipice; life's journey that's the light brought to focus. This is what moves us, the enormity of our, of life's potential and limitations.

The thing I enjoy about this time of year is that I do have time to feel. It's not only at this time of year that I can do this, but the time away from work at midwinter when work lives sort of slow for many facilitates the chance for deeper connection with feeling and being. The feelings are as ever, at times complex  and at others apparently simple and more and more there is the sense of the space that holds them. Spiritual life for me is about awareness. The mirror is without a stand and has nowhere for dust to land yet it still needs to be wiped clean. And it takes a healthy self to forget the self. This brings me to constructions of masculinity. I've seen straight men struggle with that, from machismo to men who seem wet and without direction and I've seen gay men struggle with it. Gay men struggle with it both in relation to straight men and other gay men. What is needed of course is just to respond to life from the heart with the power that is needed, without too much attachment to the outcome but with the care that the situation needs. This requires a lot of awareness and a willingness to act. The two are of course related. Women too have to negotiate constructions of self but as a gay man my energies are naturally directed in terms of masculinities. We often create our selfhood through our work or in our sense of alienation from it. At this time of year if we take a step back from our employment and take time to feel and be then there is the opportunity to consider our life's work as we move into the next year. What are we all about? I feel fortunate in that I've had opportunity in life to explore this question and continue to unfold it. My hope for the young man I'm considering sending the above book to is that he lives a life with balance and flair; that there is depth, understanding, peace, joy and compassion and that he gets these qualities without too much pain yet is creative, engaged and growing. And that's probably what most of us want for ourselves and those we love.

Longing in the world

I had a few ideas for a post a week or so back but as can happen the muse left me too soon. Robin William's suicide has put a bit more shape around those ideas.

As I've said before I think we come out of the unknowable void of unity, that which is called by many names; God, Buddha, Source, in order that the very void may perceive itself both as raw consciousness and as apparently separate forms within that consciousness. But this too is just an idea and one not to get too attached to. Part of experience is undoubtedly a sense of self, a will and desire. Fear might be said to be the feeling generated by the prospect of a seemingly unbearable contradiction between desire and apparent circumstance; usually the desire for safety and well being of the self. And whilst there is no separate self there is the interconnected self, a self were it wise enough to see, that is The Self; the unknowable. The purpose of life is to experience it. I think depression arises when that purpose feels thwarted. And whilst Buddha nature like paper never refusing ink irrespective of what is written, is always accepting, our experience is naturally filled with desire, contradiction, fear, confusion and much more.

Desire it seems to me is the fuel which makes things happen, or at least the feeling which goes along with things happening. I'll not get too distracted here into writing about control and how much or rather how little we actually have. And as I've alluded to above the real desire is to live that we may see our true (Buddha) nature. Creativity is an aspect of sexual energy or vice-versa . Sex, to me a calling to unity, fires us up and draws us to each other; cracks us open that we might love. Happy young straight couples experience this uniting love albeit tangled with romantic attachment and glow in its joy. Young gay men sometimes have this too, but their path is often more complex. When enmeshed in the pursuit of some subject or area of study both our self and the subject are also cracked open. Most gay men will tell you of the pain involved in coming to terms with their sexuality and the complexities of their love lives. Yet this experience is revealing and ultimately rewarding as we see the water which other (straight) fish simply swim through. History is littered with people who have been washed up on the shores of their subject be it technical, political or human. We all see our own version of the world. For many it's fine and they fit; no problem. For others the world they see is filled with contradictions; aspects that don't seem as they could be. Those aspects mingle with desire and creativity and beckon a new awakening; a further exploration of the void. For some this process is joyful but often it is painful. Consciousness cares not either way; all it wants is to explore the void. I've heard it said that our environmental problems are sort of irrelevant to consciousness; if we mess up consciousness will just spring up out of what is left behind. We will have been an interesting experiment and life will move on. Of course it's only an interesting experiment because we do care what happens; we are both infinitely expendable and infinitely priceless. This priclessness resides in love. Sometimes sight is lost of this love in all its guises and great enveloping waves of heavy grey-blackness wash in; depression. Like Sisyphus eternally pushing  the bolder up hill only to have it roll back, we are entombed in wave upon wave of heavy darkness with no end in sight. Sometimes the darkness is shot through with lightning bolts of fear at other times the fear is like sheet lightning or rain. Rain, it rains and rains... then worse, the rain and the dry have merged together; the self seems lost, merged in the enveloping grey. Objectivity is lost, the will seems to have fled, chased out by fear. An empty maw remains. And still the stone has to be pushed and still it rolls back... and on... and on. From where does this bleakness come? Then, almost as quick as it came it can leave. Colour returns, the will creeps back and the world regains some objectivity. And more. The world is more seen, the water is more visible, the swim is more visible.

There is talk in the media just now about the link between creativity and depression. There are warnings not to romanticise depression in this way. Good warnings I think. But it is I think also true that a certain kind of seeing and seeking, a certain kind of creating a world comes at a price. I think this inevitable as when we touch the depth of our human being we inevitably see that there is a rich sadness at the root of life; we long to return home (to the void) yet we are already there and long to enter the world...

The merit of this post is offered for Robin William's family.

Embarrassment

I looked up embarrassment on the (in)famous Wikipedia. Here's what I found:


Embarrassment is an emotional state of intense discomfort with oneself, experienced upon having a socially unacceptable act or condition witnessed by or revealed to others. Usually some amount of loss of honor or dignity is involved, but how much and the type depends on the embarrassing situation. It is similar to shame, except that shame may be experienced for an act known only to oneself. Also, embarrassment usually carries the connotation of being caused by an act that is merely socially unacceptable, rather than morally wrong.

The unquestioned part in this might be said to to be the notion of self and the beliefs leading to notions of 'right and wrong'. To put this another way, embarrassment is the feeling which arises to fill the gap between what I want my sense (or storey) of self to be and what the moment is demonstrating it to be. Or to be more accurate what it might be. Might, because when all is said and done I don't have the full picture in any moment. And that seeing only part of the picture is at the root of embarrassment. There is judging in all this. If I can see the illusory nature of a small separate self and / or illusory nature of the solidity of those beliefs giving rise to notions of 'right and wrong' then where is the embarrassment? But that can require a lot of spaciousness and simply being with what is arising. So embarrassment can be a gift because it's pointing to notions that might have been previously unseen; notions of separateness and unworthiness. And there is more here too. This 'what I want my sense (or storey) of self to be' needs some consideration. I believe it points up. Surrendering into any emotion has this gift and ultimately the koan unfolding. The koan or paradox of separation and unity; my own experience of a sense of separate self doing its best to survive and the bigger picture of interconnection in which this sense of separation is formed. At the level of that picture there is only acceptance and the part that is feeling embarrassed (or anything else) is held in compassion. If I am judging myself or others then where is the compassion? If my embarrassment is rooted in the belief that others will judge me then I am judging them and accusing them of judging me. And if they do, again where is the compassion? If I am not held in compassion why feel any less (than those judging)? Expanding and softening into any situation, drawing back but without creating a further separation the stillness holding the drama is revealed. The small (embarrassed) self has afforded this revelation and there is gratitude. This is personal growth as a small self grows and looks up and the sense of self diminishes.
If embarrassment arises when I feel I am not what I want or should be, from where then do these wants or shoulds come? And who is it that is feeling them? These questions are answered in the spaciousness if I can be with the feelings and let them soften. But this all takes time and as ever insight alone is not enough; I still need to give each emotion time to unfold. And in there will be found someone trying their best, looking up. A one reaching out to see. It's not a separate one seeing but One seeing. And when we smile at our foolishness in good humour we can come together, we cease judging our self and each other, see our humanity and in that seeing experience our divinity. We come out of Oneness to see, seeing takes us back.

The merit of this post is offered to Sue who is sitting with her dying mother.

Eros v Control

I started this post some weeks ago.

On a Friday evening:

Looking out my window I see him

Lovely in a boy next door way

Late teens early twenties

Clean, relaxed and happy

She stands next to him in her socks

Throws her shoes down

He kneels, puts them on her feet

She stands (child like) and lets him

I notice my objection to her (playing the child) and also

my awareness that I could be mistaken

He reaches around her leg to tie the lace as if it were on his own foot

She runs her fingers through his hair

I feel it - soft and thick

Pangs of longing and sadness - she has what was out of my reach...

He stands, they kiss tenderly for some time

I feel the desire in him

I note (my fancy of?) the manipulation in her

Suddenly they part and run off together

I feel a familiar wretchedness

What is wretched for me is the recollection of my own experience in those years. Struggling to accept my homosexuality and with low self esteem I was not playful and relaxed and not enjoying intimate relationship. For years I thought the only loss was the simple erotic connection. But of course the real loss is in the wider emotional aspect. The pain remaining is rooted not just in what was not but in the deeper who I was.

Ah well, the years since then have passed and now the weeks since looking out my window upon this scene have also passed.

Last night I watched program about a number of people with OCD undergoing intensive treatment at a camp in the USA. Seeing this group of people I recalled just how debilitating my own experience of OCD was from about age nine to thirteen. Back then the term was not in common usage and I thought I was the only person in the world with the feelings and rituals. I was scared people would think I was crazy and that I would have to undergo some treatment that might make me worse. I never went to see a 'professional'  for help and that may or may not have been wise. I was ashamed and exhausted. At eleven I so wanted a holiday from myself and realised that that was not possible. By thirteen I decided to go cold turkey and just stop. I must have intuitively hit on what is now known as exposure and ritual prevention and I freed myself from the prison of OCD. Or, maybe it just faded in intensity as I somehow learned to cope with uncertainty. For many years I thought I had just a few residual habits left over from OCD. But of course that's not quite true, in reality OCD is a condition which in my experience has receded to virtually nothing and can resurface under certain conditions. Thankfully though, I've not been imprisoned by it the way I was as a child since deciding to stop. But it is nevertheless, an insidious condition from which I think one is always recovering. OCD is a coping strategy to deal with risk, with the uncertain. I was trying to gain control to strike a bargain with the unknown; I do this ritual and the bad thing I've just thought of or feel won't happen. I must have been feeling a pressure of uncertainty from a very young age to come to OCD. Now I see this in terms of emptiness; I saw the frailty of everything, that things are insubstantial and subject to change as conditions arise and pass and that the change can come sudden and 'out of the blue'. This is seeing emptiness, interdependent origination and the arising of the moment from the reality of a single point of consciousness at an age when I simply did not have the wisdom to cope with it. Scary stuff. At about eleven I was shocked by the realisation that I would be a different person had my surroundings and family been different; where was the essential me?

So it was against this background that I came to the realisation at about fourteen that those feelings of being different from a young age now had another aspect; I was attracted to the boys not the girls. I decided that I would grow out of it. I knew only too well the mental pain of self loathing and I knew I would likely feel terrible about myself if I acted upon those oh so deep cravings to be intimate with another male. So started the compartmentalisation of my sexuality. It would take years to take the compartment walls down. There would be no relaxed youthful intimacy. Sexual freedom as a gay man would be won only as a process involving considerable risk and uncertainty. The very things OCD is about avoiding. Eros, the creative impulse, is stifled by excessive control and yet without control Eros is powerless.

Time to see how we are connected

I usually start the day with a check of email followed by a look at the BBC news website. I found this article about soldiers returning from Helmand very moving, so sad. And other even more devastating stories could be told. And they are so young. Just why do we (as a species) do this?

A bit of an internet trawl to see how people are feeling about the austerity measures we are being made to undertake produced this result with which I find I am in deep agreement. The UK government economic policy is not about sensible solutions it's ideology.

There is a link between fighting wars and neoliberalism. I am not referring to the whole grubby business of making money out of arms trading, no, the link is far more basic; a belief that we are separate beings in competition with each other. And this is my fundamental objection to right wing politics and the awful neoliberal experiment of the past thirty years; it ruins communities. And as the failure of the Western economic system has shown, it also ruins economies. The big problem now as I see it is how to generate stable communities, finances, work, environments and services to enable people to live reasonably peaceful and meaningful lives. Clearly any sustainable solution can't rely on continued growth; we live on a finite planet and can't keep digging stuff out of holes in the ground to make things to throw away into other holes in the ground. Nor can we throw huge numbers of people into unemployment and expect society to thrive. We have to move away from this failed experiment and make the financial sector the servant of nations, not the master. And George Monbiot is right; it's about power not economics. There is yet an other war going on here; the one between the ultra-rich and the majority of people on the planet.

Silence

I like the radio but I am also quite happy with a room in silence and more often than not I'll leave it that way - radio off. But today making bread in the kitchen I decided to put on Radio 4. The news of events in Libya came to a close and a program called Soul Music commenced. The programme is described as 'Exploring the impact that Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's piece for piano and violin Spiegel im Spiegel has had on people's lives'. As the program began I was almost immediately moved, not just by the story being told but by the triggering of my own stories by the music, I began to wonder about a whole different set of feelings which the piece might trigger. But this soon passed as the meditative quality of the piece expanded. Dave C came in and I asked him for a comment on the music. Yes, he liked it. I offered that 'for me it evokeds unfolding stillness, and that is the paradox'. How is it that stillness unfolds? Dave C then explained that Spiegel im Spiegel means mirror in the mirror. I did not know this and was taken to my own experience sitting zazen, which I have described as 'like two mirrors facing each other'. Yet some thing else is present in the piece; a sense of loss or of a gap between where we seem to be and where we might like to be. For me this can capture the losses I've experienced in life but also a sort of yearning to return home. The same yearning evoked for me by Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending. And I do see this as a spiritual yearning to return home, to the source. And yet at the same time there is this wanting to be in form, in the world, and this seems part of a paradox; a kind of gap. My friend and 'spiritual yardstick' RM Mugo has told me 'there are no gaps'. I am sure she is right but at my level of experience it seems that there are, but they get filled by the falling into them. This falling, for everything is to some extent falling or changing, seems to be the world, experience unfolding; life. Listening to the comments and stories of people in the program it seemed that a common spiritual understanding was somehow held by all who spoke.

Last night an acquittance said in passing that he loved silence. I thought 'yes, and however much noise there is, it is always silent'. I seem to recall a post on RM Mugo's blog Jade Mountains, pointing for me, to the way everything is cut through with silence. Searching for the post I find, as might be expected many references to silence. Arvo Pärt's piece for piano and violin Spiegel im Spiegel, seems to take people beyond the stories and into the unfolding silence holding the stories, and in that holding to compassion.

Wild Love

DC and I saw the movie 'Sex and drugs and rock and roll' about Ian Dury, last weekend. Fantastic! Dury's 'I am not here to be f***ing remembered I am here to live!' a shout to us all!
Dury did not have an 'easy' life. Rediscovering the music I bought a few tracks over the net for my MP3 player. Such energy.

Walking over the town moor the other day, I noticed a sucking sound and turned to see a whirl pool vortex sucking in air where the lake formed by snow melt water was being drained through a pipe under the path to the other side of the path. This drainage arrangement was put in a few years ago and makes the path much more usable. Anyway, I rolled a snowball and threw it into the vortex. Good shot. The sucking stopped then as the ball rolled out started again. The ball circled the vortex before being sucked in and down... Like Alice in wonderland I thought and looked to the other end of the pipe... would it come out? Pop, there it was. Were we now in wonderland, samsara transformed?... Buurr, too cold for this... enough poetic day dreaming, time to walk on, a warm home beckoned.

Just finished reading Wild Love by Gill Edwards. I enjoyed it. Some parts I found not quite in tune with my thinking/feeling but much of it is. I particularly like her exploration of the difference as she sees it between co-dependant merging v connection with Oneness and separation v individuation. Much along the lines of my own thoughts all that.

And on the subject of merging into the collective verses individuation and the path to awakening, I note the writers of Star Trek Voyager explore this with the Borg. In a repeat episode we watched recently, Seven of Nine is severed from the Borg collective and her human body starts to regenerate but she still thinks as Borg and can't bear the pain of separation and longs to be reconnected. She can only hear her own mind and longs to hear the others again. The Borg assimilate; no room for individuation, no harmony of difference in unity. This is co-dependant merging, but Seven of Nine is 'liberated' and must face the illusion of her isolation. She must take up the challenge of discovering her identity and connection to not just the Borg but to the universe. Quite a challenge that! Time passes, as it appears to, and she settles down to become to use those school report terms, a useful member of the team... Which is to say, assimilated into the American way...

Dealing with our pains and accepting what is while remaining open to the joy of life is no simple challenge. It is unconditional love for each and every aspect of our experience not a stoic knuckling down. It requires an infinite expansion of consciousness, there is always more 'work' to do to see that we are perfect as we are. No wonder it sometimes feels like Alice in Wonderland! Hit me with your rhythm stick!

Which is NOT to say party on without a care but care to and as we party on.

Samadhi

Yesterday my friend Graeme and I replaced the window and backdoor to the kitchen of his home. His partner made cake and helped a bit too. Later I picked up DC and the four of us had dinner at theirs. I really enjoyed the work and the company; purpose and connection and being in my body, my mind on the work. Removing frames from rubble walls and replacing with new needs care and a bit of strength together with skill. The dance of working with someone on a physical project like that is something I've not done for a while and it made me remember just how much is involved and how good it is to share that way. Graeme and I worked well together and we mixed in some banter and theatre too! The theatre playing in the construction of masculinities area; two middle aged middle class gay men playing with straight working class lad masks; 'ahll reet pet, well wiv got the old one oot so will be off, see ya tha mora, ah no, wa gannin tu tony's will seeya Thursda... And she was all upset coz wid left the winda oot...'

I have recently had three sessions of psychotherapy. I sort of stumbled into this after a bit of a freebie chat with my old CBT therapist and to be honest I am not sure about how much time and money to spend on it. Things have been tough lately (with relationship and work issues) and I am in a bit of an existential crisis but I can see that crisis as coming out of and giving rise to opportunity and really I feel fairly ok about me. So what issue might seem salient? Well, the thing that always comes up for me whenever I look at my psychological baggage is my relation to my past. To be specific, accepting that I was twenty four before I came out. And I have this tendency to let my inner critic beat me up about this and tell me that I must have just been 'asleep' and wasting my life. And when I see creative lively young people my inner critic beats me up saying that they are doing so much yet when I was their age I was just shut down and wasting life. And then there is the thing about feeling a bit of a misfit / being on the outside of things. That said I am often right in the middle!

So, my therapist was putting forward last time that my childhood may have lacked rough and tumble and that this led to my being isolated from the other boys. Well, I really don't think that I wanted it and that wasn't the reason for the isolation. Anyway, yesterday made me remember that throughout a lot of my teens I was involved in some quite sizeable DIY projects; plumbing, tiling, heating, woodwork, windows, electrics etc. And I learned all this fairly much on my own. I was the driving force behind a lot of projects at a young age. Ok, so I have this grief for not spending that time enjoying exploring sex with other boys of my age but I was not wasting the time. And all of those projects were in a way a continuation from the childhood years spent taking things to bits and not paying rough and tumble etc with the other boys. And I joked about this with Graeme yesterday and said something to the effect of '...and just how capable is my therapist when it comes to this sort of practical work... rough and tumble... machismo... sensitive to the needs of this sort of job etc...?' In other words, happiness, constructions of self (including masculinities), purpose and connection, past and present form a complex and varied mix and I am ok. And the pain and the suffering and the developmental path is a result of complex karma and it's important not to see things just in classical psycho therapeutic terms. Even if those terms do push a few buttons and leave me wondering... Which brings me round to other things that came out of the session not the last of which is, as DC pointed out, that I don't like incomplete gestalt! And my next session is not until the end of January!

And practice, where does all this sit with practice? No enlightenment outside of daily life. Variety is the spice of life, and I think we need it; the void desires to be and to know, to experience in a human life a full and rich aliveness. I agree with those that recommend a spiritual path that expands one's life in the dualistic realm as well as the non-dual realm. In other words take a bit of individuation with your meditation. Expand and explore as many aspects of being as seems viable, share in lots of ways. I sort of brought the conversation around to this point last night and the fact that in the West at this time we have so few areas where we come together to share deeply in open acceptance. I talked about creating sacred space and sharing in the way which is so easy in the Findhorn community and Graeme talked of his experience in circle sharings but somehow I felt it was falling on stony ground. Why is this? I think our society lacks meaningful ritual in this regard and we fear creating such space for two reasons; first because we often live defended and anaesthetised lives and the idea of going to a place of authenticity is thus a challenge and secondly because we also recognise the dangers of self indulgence, that sharing might move us not away from ego but further into it. This second fear is I think a misconception based upon a the idea that in sharing one keeps to a fixed notion of self. Yet my experience is that forming sacred space by sharing helps in moving from I to me; it helps in owning shadow and disidentification. And key to all this is what I suspect I don't write much or well of but sometimes hint at in this blog; emotion. I often talk and write 'I think...' but all the time I am feeling. I do feel that I am in touch with my feelings I don't think that I am particularly repressing them but I am also analysing. And in expressing 'where I (or in a more wholesome sense me) is at' it is my habit to analyse probably too much. Whereas, replacing windows and doors like yesterday I was fairly much just being doing; as close as I probably get to positive samadhi. Working with others I felt with not separate. Thanks Graeme.

Flight

When I hear the lark ascend in Vaughan Williams' The lark ascending I feel a just out of reachness, like the lark can't quite get there, like we (or should I say I) can't quite get there. Where ever there is. Does the music point to that feeling of wanting to go home in the spiritual sense? Am I just confusing this with some existential feeling of being out of kilter? And in (an adult's) crying this same out of reachness, like the tears try to fill the gap. Such crying could be over any loss and not closely connected to spiritual home sickness. Yet there is I suppose, at the root of all pain, a gap between where we feel we want or need to be and where the universe appears to have placed us. A gap born of our illusion of separation, our incarnation in the physical body in the material world.

(Setting aside yet sparing a thought for those with terrible physical pain and) thinking of emotional suffering, the pain of impeded heart connection can't be so far from our spiritual home sickness. The desire for unity flavored by attachments, form desiring form. This way of taking an interest, that way of reacting to events etc. mirrored and projected in each individual's awareness as personalities interact. And in the mirroring and projections how much authenticity? How close the less adapted selves? And how close the path of adaption of each self? What is the complexity of our interactions with each other? How big the gap in each exchange? What is it that draws one into various forms of intimacy with others? How many aspects of ourselves can we connect with in an other? Such complex chemistry, each preference moving us from unconditional love to romantic attachment. Our aloneness reaching out.

Intellectualising it doesn't take away the feelings. Fly high dear lark.

Still Hot

I am still in this hot place. It's scary. And it's be about more than just the next couple of weeks here. Wanting to escape is be about the thoughts I have brought with me not what is here. This feeling of isolation is terrible. I know it's not rooted in anything other than my thoughts, but I still feel it.

And part of me watches and knows the deep, deep connection and love, not just deep in the philosophical sense, but the direct practical every day; those who are thinking of me and love me.

I need to get out in the world and do something of use. Something I can believe in and that will help with fruitful connection.

Separation

A loose strings plays no note
I feel the red thread tighten
Ah, where is the sound of my flute

Again when this came to me I pondered with some equanimity the relation between meaning, desire, vitality, compassion, non-attachment, enlightenment, what seems authentic for me, the whole koan in a way, but I've much less equanimity now. And worse, when I was happy to search for the ox and to try to see all before me as just so much not to get attached to, then there was a way to peace of mind. Oh yes, I saw the danger of attaching to emptiness but I though I'd got a balance. But I had expected trouble to come in the form of loss of some thing in my frame of meaning, not a loss of meaning. Oh, this is dangerous water, this is for the experienced practitioner. I can't accept my koan, I can't accept a no answer. I seem to have broken one set of chains only to tie myself with the tools that broke them. It is that thorny point; I am always approaching from some where. Right now it is painful, so painful.

I am no doubt mixing metaphors in a dreadful way, but that fits my confusion. I am giving myself permission to be upset.

Authentic

I try to be authentic in each post and reflect what I seem to be with at the time. I try not to censor though I might be 'telegraphic'.

Just now I am with stuff too personal to post to the world. And this throws up all sorts of questions about attachment and practice. And I am also surprised I think by what I am feeling, I seem to have opened up a well of emotion.

It will pass.

Intimacy

Do we really understand intimacy? We are both separate and part of each other, all of us. Intimacy is the extent to which we open to others but it is not a single dimension. Information, thoughts and emotions can all be exchanged both with and without physical contact. Energy might be exchanged from the head, heart and lower chakras. We communicate with and without words. With and without physical contact. How intimate are we with our self? How well do we understand our motives. Do we know what and how we are trying to communicate? How much of our intention is to take and how much to give? Intimacy between individuals can involve various levels of selfishness. There is giving and taking both passive and active in each case, the two aspects inseparable. Is it that in intimacy both (or all) participants have a similar view and the ego is lessened in a way? If the view is not largely shared then the participants are having separate experiences and little intimacy. Ego and intimacy are an interesting relation I think. To what extent, in which ways and in what context do we open? We need to balance our relationships with people in our community; if in opening to some we fail to consider others then we are being selfish. Eros can be a cause of this. Eros I think, requires separation; the goal to some extent needs to be just out of reach, and yet there is a sort of reaching it. But is that intimacy? It's a question of the extent to which the view can be shared. But I don't want the reader to think this post is mainly about Eros, that is but a part of what needs to be considered. It is the stripping away of defences, the honesty of the communication, the reality of being to which I refer.