So so so...

You have to laugh right?  I go to Italy to become all cleansed and pure and I find myself mired in shit. Again.

I should have known.  Everything moves in cycles and I had been feeling buoyant for quite some time. Buoyant despite the disasters surrounding me on a material level.  Buoyant yet…maybe a little negligent of my spiritual thingy.

And when that happens, something always tends to come along and stir things up.  As someone once said: ‘Alchemy makes a mess of the kitchen. It’s embarrassing.’  Damn right.

So I find myself, in this smart spa, in a beautiful part of Italy, just empty, totally blank. And cold. And, above all, lonely. So lonely. And, you know me, I don’t do lonely.  I usually relish being on my own, having my own time to think and meditate and be.  Not here. Not now. I can’t meditate. I can’t ground myself.  So, at first, I just keep busy.  I walk; I do all the classes, the qigong and wotnot; I listen to the lectures and take notes; I dowse myself in water and dry myself with heat.  But then, because avoidance clearly isn’t on the cards, I manage to injure my knee – doing qigong. Doing qigong???  For feck’s sake, nobody injures themselves doing qigong.

life-number-9.deviantart.com

So I can’t walk, can’t exercise.  And so I feel sorry for myself.  ‘Are you okay?’ someone asks and I say, petulantly. ‘Not really.’ But she doesn’t rise to it.  In fact I try the trick on several people. What am I hoping for? That one of them, any of them will say, ‘Oh poor you. You poor love.  Come cry on my shoulder. Come sit and tell me all about it.’?  Yeah, I guess so really.  But nobody did, and thank feck for that.  For, really, nobody can save you.  And where’s the point in pity?  I’m responsible for how I feel; nobody else. And this is just another part of the process.

So I go to my room and cry.  Sob for hours. And then, when I’m all cried out, I basically hide away and rot for a few days. Feeling worthless. Feeling old and wrecked and dried up and hopeless.  And then I cry again.  And I start to recognize where I am. Fermentation. ‘The dark night of the soul’. Again.  Because that’s what we do – we go through the same cycles over and over again, every time (hopefully) getting just a little more sussed.

I guess you think, oh for pity’s sake, you spoiled bitch. You’re staying free in this posh spa and you’re…fed up?  But, really, we all know (truthfully) that it’s not where you are or what you have that matters but how you feel.

And, to prove the point, I came back home and it was…pretty much the same really.  Just colder. J

'There will be no miracles here'

And so I hear you say, well, why on earth not just watch TV or read a trashy book or get blind drunk?  But those old distractions don’t work any more. And what is more unsettling is that the new distractions don’t work either. I used to escape into the inner world, losing myself down astral pathways, journeying into strange states of unbeing. Yet if I try now – the doorways are firmly shut in my face.

It’s classic stuff – I’m nothing special. Just feeling like another human alien.  Or alien human.  Or whatever. 

Anyhow, life just goes on, the way it does. The tide will turn again, the wheel will rise once more.  Presumably. And, in the meantime, I just...breathe. 

I wrote this a while back but haven’t posted it before because it’s not a call for sympathy. I’m fine, really. It’s not depression either. It’s just…something to work through. Writing things down, putting it in black and white, somehow is useful.  And, who knows, maybe in some funny way this might be useful to someone else. So…