The Priory

(The Priory became the only sanctuary from the persecution of my own thoughts. Could not imagine life on the outside. And yet, here I am, well and getting better. Looking in at that place from the outside is nice.)

(Remembering Gary, Hilary, Matt, Danielle, Lana, Toby, Becca, Beth, George, Richard, Caitlin. And Caio, Bhavna, Nicola, Christos and Harry.)

I remember that place
where I walked with those others.
Rough carpets and blank ceilings,
bland pictures that said nothing,
nothing that could reject or invite
or allow belonging.
And us others passing through this place,
mothers and children, addicts and saints,
stories flowing into stoic walls.

Curtains of ivy framing sash windows,
consultants ensconced in warm academic rooms
upstairs, at the tap trickling drugs that blunted our demons
while we raged and wept on the lower floors.

The garden with the border of red tulips,
defiant buggers that demanded we look.
Deflated balls lying around
for us to kick and ruminate over
while we talked and walked,
bared and covered.

The cold corridors with doors along it
like a tedious metaphor.
I stalked and sweated there.
Once I opened a door and looked in
on a child woman's tormented mind -
raped, addicted, judged, ashamed.
I ran back down that calm, cold corridor
and through my own unremarkable door.
Demented hermits we were behind the doors.

In my room I lay still, watching TV
day after day, escaping my thoughts.
They came with food and drink and care
and too loud voices and too bright lights
and made me wake, shower, eat and step out some.

There was love and philosophy and some simple things
pragmatic grit and resolute hope.
A little bit of everything went
into the making of my new peace.

On my last day, I was alone a lot in the garden.
The tree strewing pink blossoms
effortlessly, impartially,
on whose bed I sat and stared
for an hour at air.
A perfect circle of time,
broken perfectly by my child's embrace.

Outside in the disjointed world
I remember that sanctuary.
We others are among everyone.
No one hears our gnashing teeth
through the chatter of rambling days.
I'm learning it all again, how to be
a mother, a wife, God's loved child,
How to just be.

On a dull October afternoon

Today is one of those grey, dreary days. It's foggy and dark outside and inside my head. I'm that 'patient etherised upon a table'. I'm not really here, not anywhere. Feel little of anything,  maybe a little sad at some things, mostly disconnected from everything. I am exhausted easily by little things - showering, eating,  playing with my son. The effort involved in getting through the day is unreasonably high. I was ready to go back to the unchallenging comfort of bed after making my son breakfast.

Today is also one of those days where I can watch the tide flow and not drown in it. I'm learning to stand by the water, still,  and let the tide wash my feet. I'm learning to not rush into every emotion I feel, flailing in the rising waters and not being able to see past it. (A metaphor I was instructed in at the Priory, where I spent some time recovering from my breakdown.) It has been dark and dreary for a few days but it will pass. I have faith.

Am I happy? I keep asking myself this, as an index to decide which direction I should take, what choices I should make. When I asked myself this over the past few years, the answer was always shaky. I was happy momentarily a lot when I did some things but I always felt fearful of those things ending. I used to fear waking up in the morning to go to work, fear returning home from anywhere, fear looking in the mirror. I used to fear meeting people. I felt afraid and anxious, always. Nowadays when I ask myself 'am I happy?' I notice that the answer is more certainly, more regularly 'yes'. I am more at peace with myself. I am still trying to work out all the tags and labels that make me, but it's a great ride, this exploring of me. I like who I am more now. I have surprised myself. I am not at all unfulfilled as a stay at home mother, in fact I have never felt more creative, more enlightened, more content. I have very little money and I find it liberating. It's so much easier to say no to the pressures of a consumerist culture's recognisable traps when you just don't have the enabling agent! I have freed myself from relationships that were meaningless and bound simply in expectations and pretensions. I have detached myself from relationships which I am still duty bound to, but which provide no joy, no nourishment. I have found poetry in my child's voice. I have found stronger reaffirmation of my faith than in any time spent amongst the loudly faithful.

So today when I'm in that familiar displaced, dislocated fog, I have just stopped struggling and let it have its run. This too shall pass. It will be a brighter day soon. I am this displaced self and much more. I am ok with who I am.

So today I smile at the black dog and tell it to stick around and watch as I make Halloween craft with my son and some cakes for a friend's birthday. The bats, spiders and bugs are really taking shape (note you unforgiving school teachers who wrote off my art skills). The cakes look messy, have to wait to taste them. The black dog is still sulking in the background but I'll probably go for a walk in the awful weather if he gets too unpleasant. My grey fog can meet the grey fog outside; I can stay busy with the special madness that muddy puddles excite in a toddler.

Once upon a train journey

I could pretend that through the branchfuls of sky I can glimpse God

That the light fingered clouds are something more than

Magic to a child

Below, blinking houses

packed into the ground

Sucking space

Red bricks bleed

White fronts pale

Man and Superman I see.

God I imagine.

A difficult Saturday's journey

I found myself fleeing last Saturday. Fleeing from my home and from my own inability to be unflinching and steady. My depression had been building all day, with Malcolm's exhaustion not lifting, Seth rejecting and challenging me, and having to attend a most tedious, middle-class-aspirational gathering where I felt isolated and out of place. By the time I served up dinner, I was barely managing to hold in my tears and failing totally to engage my son’s toddler energies. When we somehow approached bathtime and it looked as if my overtired son’s violent, screaming, physical protestations would cause him to hurt himself in the bath, Malcolm forced himself out of bed and came to my aid, to try and calm Seth down. Seth rushed into his arms like an oppressed being and something in that action snapped my tenuous restraint. I screamed in despair and frustration and rushed out of the room. I had a brief glimpse of Seth’s face as I passed him. There was nothing there but a fearless, uninformed child’s shock, but I imagined much else growing there, over the years to come. I’ve read that this is typical of people who suffer from anxiety – an inability to deal with the limited present and an insistence on imagining a threatening future based on the frightened spectre of past events. I glimpsed things in my son’s face that weren’t there and I was repulsed. So I ran and kept running until I was in the car and drove away, running still.

It’s difficult to describe what I felt while I drove for the first hour. Great waves of earth shaking sobs racked my body. My mind flailed around desperately, looking for refuge. Family, friends – no I couldn’t turn to them, couldn’t let them see me this way.  I thought of the church I take Seth to on Sundays, because I could go and sit in that familiar place and be broken there, and relative strangers would comfort me. Strangers who in their Christian duty would never turn me away, who hadn’t already tired of nursing me, whom I hadn’t bled dry of empathy. Then this vision rapidly turned rank –strangers who would pity me, tell me words that I knew would heal nothing, and then ever more after that, on smiling and sunny days when I would be winning inside, these strangers would come to me, place concerned hands on my arm, pity in their eyes and ask me how I was feeling. They would make my darkness laugh at me, at how helpless I had been. No, I could not turn to these kindly strangers.

St Mary’s appealed next. I have always been able to … well, nod to God there, at the very least. I’ve never been very good at listening to God, but I’ve been able to talk to God, a little bit, at St Mary's. People have worshipped at that place since the 11^th century and I have felt their piety flowing through time towards me, I have felt the distant pulsing of their living faith in the air. I have imagined St Mary’s existing in a different dimension in space, somewhere where the world stills and God holds your hand. You have to step out into that space, leave your world behind and enter God’s world. I have always liked walking into St Mary’s through the narrow, overhung path, through the ancient cemetery, approaching the building from an angle on the side. It’s like seeing the building through a portal and needing to chase it, quietly, meditatively, fixedly, as I walk towards it. Old, old Time rests among the graves. When I get to the door, the building straightens out in front of me, and as I open the ancient door into the church I give up the unwitting struggles I put up against God on most days.

So when my soul was floundering, I wanted to take refuge in St Mary’s. And then this vision too, was cast aside by my breaking mind. I saw myself alone on a dark night in an old, abandoned cemetery instead, where there was no God, no grace. It was as if I had stepped through that portal like countless times before, only to find that my space with God had moved coordinates and I was trapped in an imitation of it, dark and lonely.

So I kept fleeing, my foot firmly down on the pedal. The road signs told me I was heading to Canterbury. The word ‘Canterbury’ gave me a sliver of hope. Why? I didn’t know. But relieved at the idea of having a destination, I kept driving, fleeing to somewhere now, and not just from.

By the time I reached Canterbury, I knew why I’d headed there. Canterbury was the place of promise, of new beginnings, of new love for me. I bought myself a new life in Canterbury years ago. I was running to that promise, to remind me of all the way I had come.

I was now a little less frantic but I was still fleeing. I had no desire to stop anywhere or see anyone, so I kept driving and soon found myself headed back towards London. ‘London’ on the road signs brought on a little twinge of the old anxiety. The bright lights and busy streets of London have always excited me. But I felt old that night and excitement seemed like a thing for the young, I felt drained at the thought of it.

I drove on, managing to calm my soul into a kind of stupor, like when an intemperate animal has been shot with a tranquilising dart. A fallen, unwilling, winded heap of a soul. When I feel this much edge to my depression, I try to achieve an utterly numb state, a state where no sensory information is allowed to register, no thought is allowed to take root, where everything around becomes white space, until I can get myself into bed and seek oblivion in exhausted sleep. Afterwards, I try to deal with the guilt, shame and fear in a rationalised, systematic fashion which would make any therapist proud. But first, the numbness must be brought in, to stop the internal laceration.

So I forced myself into that state of numbness while I drove. I didn’t dwell on the stream of headlights and backlights flowing through the rolling landscape ahead, red on my side and yellow on the facing side. These things normally give me pleasure and I like feeling the motion of the lights. But that night I didn’t let the faintest pleasure in, or the insanity might have forced its way back in. I drove in that white space, trying to see, hear, feel, think nothing until I got home to bed.

After a while, something tiny, like a little germ wriggling its intrepid way through, did force its way into my conscious mind. The ticking of the indicators as I changed lanes. It was indiscernible background noise at first, but it grew clearer and very real, like the insistent rhythm of a beating heart under a suppressing hand on the chest. With each tick, into the white space came a drop of peace – not pleasure, just peace. (Kind of like my friend Kalyani’s pictures that I like very much – drops of vivid blue mixing and swirling frame by frame in a bowl of water.) The ticking walked in on my numb consciousness, politely and sympathetically, speaking in soft tones, until my mind turned to hear and listen.

It told me to remember all those long drives I had shared with Malcolm. He would talk with wonder of Roman engineering that gave us some of the roads we still drive on. He would tell me his fantastical stories, how wizards fought for power and precocious children changed the destiny of worlds. And always, I would fall asleep, his voice wrapped around me like silk and dreaming of slow dances and warm sunlight creeping in on resolutely dark corners. It told me to remember the true nature of the love that awaited me, patiently, in my home.

When I got home that night, a few hours later, I saw Malcolm at the window, waiting for me. I walked in and sat on the couch. He brought me a glass of wine, said not a word and drew me into his arms. Later, we watched some pretentious post modernist twaddle on TV and laughed together. I had stopped fleeing, at least for this night.

Memory of a young Namboodiri

An ancient house of stone
And a statue of stone.

Incessant chanting in a dead language,

Flames dancing in the dying day,

The kiss of incense on the quietened soul.

He arrives after his ritual bath,

Honest: in wet thin cladding.

Caresses and adorns the stone

In gold, silk and sandalwood paste.

He bathes, feeds and worships the stone.

The young watch and their spirits move,

In tender, exciting, rising piety.

Hands folded, eyes wandering,

Foreheads ablaze with godliness,

The hair on his chest gripping their hearts,

The mysticism of his chanting

And the purity of his lineage

As potent as an aphrodisiac.

They worship the man as much as the stone.

God, Love, Worship and Shoes

On a dull Sunday morning

We gather outside the church doors:

Mothers and fashionable children,

Fathers with bright prams and new babies

(Eye shadows sparkle and lipsticks smile at

Expensive watches and crisp perfumes).

Smiling men in dark suits

Welcome each one personally,

(Their ties shine in their trendiness)

Pat the children and wink at them

Shake hands heartily, laugh grandly,

Exchange kisses and

Predictable jokes.

Each one is welcomed, each one is loved.

So much studied and practised love.

‘Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God;

And every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.’

The tall walls rise to meet

Hands joined in prayer.

Heaven dangles before hope filled sinners.

My head bowed, I see

The lady next to me has lovely shoes,

Red, that match her suede jacket.

I look at them and admire them;

My shoes aren’t all that bad either.

A tall leather affair that cost a week’s pay.

I must get a dress to match.

God does not speak to me here.

(Bexley 2006)