What’s sitting at the Head of the Table in You?

This is week seven of recovering from brain surgery.  In the last few weeks I’ve seen the neurologist, the neurosurgeon, the osteopath and the dentist.  I’ve pulled a little dissolving thread from my head that I didn’t even know was there.  I’ve talked to some folks who’ve been down this road. I’ve been coming to terms with some different concepts in the last ten days or so about what denotes “recovered” and what is a work in progress and let go of knowing what's around the corner.

Road of Pearls

I can report that the neurologist and the neurosurgeon are very pleased with my progress. The wound is pretty much healed now and my hair has grown back around it to “tuft” level. I’m taking pain relievers only once or twice a day and just at an over-the-counter dose now. My headaches have lightened up to a weight that is often lighter than they were for years prior to the diagnosis and surgery, spiking only with weather changes and allergy season. I even think I realigned my jaw, with the help of the osteopath, by yawning incessantly for a few days to the point where the throbbing pain, that sent me to the dentist in a panic about potential root canals, has diminished.

What I have been bothered by is much more subtle than the physical symptoms that dominated my concerns for months, and has shifted my ideas about where I might be headed to, to definitely not knowing. These trends emerging within myself are both amazingly cheerful, and dismally fearful, and seem to lead to new revelations of self-definition on a daily basis.

I’ve been focusing on the ends of the spectrum in my thoughts about it: expectancy and curiosity, blind spots and mindfulness; holding on and letting go; order and chaos, and lucidity and imagination. For instance, when my expectations fade away almost thoughtlessly, my curiosity rises and becomes the leader. When simply knowing what to do next is absent from my table, there is my imagination mysteriously sitting near the head with new ideas.

If you read “My Stroke of Insight,” or see the TED video by Harvard Neuroscientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D., this can be intellectually understood. In fact, I thought that at some level there would be a rebalancing of brain use from the left side to the right side while I healed from surgery. I just didn't know what it would be like. Since my tumor was caught early, upon a partial aphasia seizure rather than the complete wipe out that Dr. Taylor suffered with an aneurysm, I thought it would be a minor thing, and maybe it is a minor thing. I still recognize words and numbers, faces and signs after all. I know where I am. I know the people around me, unlike her experience where she could not even recognize her own mother. I haven’t had any trouble walking, and I’ve even been given the go ahead to drive again because it has been 6 months (October 2, 2011) since I was diagnosed as having had a partial seizure.

Still, the rebalance act has surprised me in many ways. I promised to write about nerves and tears and it is more than that. Let's just start there though. When I cry, I expect tears to come out of both eyes, but I find now that only the right eye responds to my feelings of joy or sadness. My left eye is completely tearless and neutral and that causes me to stop and notice it, and when I stop and notice that my left eye is neutral, often my entire emotional experience drains out of me. My curiosity is stronger than my emotions or my expectations suddenly.

The important absence of a single tear  has switched the power of my own responses in a way I never guessed it would. I don’t feel I’ve been robbed of my feelings so much as I feel that they are less necessary than they once were, because now instead of dragging on for hours or days, they come and go quite quickly, like the weather I always swore they were because I’m no longer totally invested in them, whether with resistance or permission. As I’ve become used to having no tears in my left eye, I’ve been more aware the intellectual rejection of my cry has gone now too because I know without doubt it will pass. Now I cry until I cannot sustain that feeling. When there is no logical resistance, or guilty thinking, I go deeper into an awareness of what brought me to tears in the first place in that moment, right away.

Here is an example of how it works. I’m feeling frustrated about writing at the moment. It’s taken days and days of thinking to write about how this rebalance is occurring, and even more challenging is dealing with metaphors that appear as pictures in my brain but don’t travel over to the word side of my brain as easily as they have in the past. I find I want to draw a picture instead of stitching together two ideas with words in hopes that someone understands what I’m getting at. I’m even having trouble reading more than a paragraph at a time. I recognize the words, but they're just a jumble and I have to take it slowly to really understand them. Everything about words has slowed down incredibly in a period of my life when I deeply wanted to be making progress.

I was looking forward to purchasing a book of poetry by a wonderful poet in Denmark, Bo Gorzelak Pedersen, (more to be found at Red Door) and there have been delays and I was sad about it (though he promises that the book will happen and to be patient).  I was sad and I could only tie it to my desire to get back into reading and writing by focusing on something new that I know I will enjoy and I selfishly told him so. Then he posted this poem, and I burst into right-sided tears upon reading it…

GHOST

By Bo Gorzelak Pedersen

Night like an absence of music, 
just a hole for your eyes and the creeping ivy gone black.
Unfamiliar things and things not forgotten, unforgettable things,
it’s the same skin for it all. Echoes of fading and fading echoes.
No reasons why and no why. No multitudes. Nada.
Only what was chewed and spat and left
for the slowest of winds to collect. 
I am trying to read a poem, but it makes no sense.
I can do nothing but shadows.

Immediately, I noticed the lack of left-sided tears and next the right-sided tears disappeared, and I was left with a neutral feeling that I must use it as an example of exactly what’s going on, finally, a way to explain the switch I am experiencing.  Before I would have read it, hailed it as wonderful and felt compelled to go write something. Whether inspired or competitive, his writing has done that to me in the past because I admire its grace and bull's eye. While wishing that I could have written something like it, knowing it is out of range for me right now, I now really wanted to make a picture of this GHOST. I may indeed.

However, I started this blog all over again.  After all, as I said, I am able to see everything that I saw before surgery; it’s just that I can’t express it as I would like to express it. Everything is too formal, too rhyming, too disconnected between imagery and words…but here is this poem by Mr. Pedersen…and it collected the shadows of days when it was connected, when I could enjoy chasing the discombobulated image rising with words that made sense, and I could cry with overwhelmed feelings and no neutrality entering the picture for hours, or days, or months. Like a baby with no tears I recover quickly. This poem captured for me what I cannot seem to capture right now – echoes of fading and fading echoes. It’s all I can absorb when it comes to words, no matter how many times I re-read and re-write. A poem like this engulfs me with a feeling of being recognized, known, and I want to hold it and express it like I'd imagine a ghost wants to hold the material world it drifts through. I find that is more likely with an oil pastel than with my keyboard presently, because I'm lately unclear about what I want to write, even right now.

There’s more to say, or write, but I feel like already I’ve gone on much longer than I would have before.  Suffice it to say that the neurosurgeon said it would take time to reintegrate my right and left brain, to get the nerves in my face out of a state of Novocain, to develop tears in my left eye. How much time? Up to two years. The neurologist told me that in spite of the external signs of healing, the inside of my brain has essentially been hit with a hatchet, and I need to learn some patience. 

Two years is the subtle, or not so subtle, indication that my writing is going to focus on small challenges for a while longer in order to integrate things that used to seem easy to me – words and images, feelings and metaphors, whether to use "at" or "for,"  "when" or "where" and to enjoy the flow of ideas. I’m reading the dictionary and the grammar books. I’m returning to basics to find the difference between “since” and “sense” and “they’re” and “there” as my fingers act like the auto-corrections on my smart phone and drop in “like” when I meant “lost”. The huge projects I’ve worked on in the past simply overwhelm me. A sentence is a good challenge…to write simply without so many words (could I have just written – to write simply?). A poem is even better, though it is more challenging, and so I'll be focusing on other Kosmic Egg and Kosmic Egg Tarot sites, and come here less often because right now it feels like a lot.

Finally, I’ll let Curiosity remain at the head of my table now and let Expectations drop to the side, in between Imagination and Patience. 

Picking Up Where We Left Off

Remembering presence has been the work lately. It has been absolutely right for me not to focus so much on the benign meningioma in my skull. After seven weeks of working with a wonderful allergist/immunologist, Dr. Michael Volz, we have induced my body to tolerate the anti-seizure drug, Dilantin, so that I may have surgery. Today I had my blood work done to find out if the medication is at "therapeutic" levels that are acceptable to the neurologist and neurosurgeon in charge of my case. I have a good feeling about it, enough so that I'm willing to share that my surgery is scheduled for a few weeks from now.

What a quest! I have learned so much already. By diverting my attention away from the little-dirty-gray-ball-of-laundry in my skull, I managed to start a few projects that I can imagine picking up again with eager joy as I am recovering from surgery. Yay! This is the smile I was looking for in "Resting in Ambiguity" - knowing that there was something in me that was left to express and be in this world. I felt I had to have some sort of baby to birth, even knowing that the baby would have to be myself. I knew that simply looking forward to recovering from having "Titanium Snowflakes" adhered to my skull was not the fuel of living I count on. Now, I know without a doubt that I have work to do, people to meet and stories to tell, and I'm looking forward to getting there no matter what travails I have to wander through on the way.

If you've read any of my earlier blogs, from say 2010, you will know that I've struggled to come into my life meaningfully. After years of  having the main goal of fixing others around me, and, of course, of course, failing miserably, I had to sit in some "fallow fields" and accept there was nothing to do in that moment. In a sense, my journey with the benign meningioma was already well underway, though I was unaware of it. I had a great deal of fatigue, a constant headache, hearing loss, and a general feeling of malaise and I thought I had spent all of myself already on the failed pursuit of my first marriage, and career misfires. My field was full of rocks and permafrost, and from what I could tell, fully depleted, and all I could do was plant a cover crop of experimental writing that I knew wasn't really going anywhere, just to put some nutrients back in the soil of my life. I have to admit I had doubts that it was working even up unto this fall. Truly it felt like a last ditch effort to save my dreams.

When I had the clarity that actually there was something physically contributing to my sense of hopelessness, it managed to actually pull in my focus, like a closing aperture, to find what it is that I do love about living. Besides my children, my husband, and my dog, I knew there was something else. I admit it. I love writing. But, what I love about writing the most is not what I thought I loved. I saw a PBS special in December about our Poet Laureate 2010-11, W.S. Merwin, and he nailed it: "Poetry expresses what cannot be told." Now, I do believe this is what has interested me about poetry for so long, but I also have seen it in the best films of our age.

The intangible quality of fine art that communicates underneath opaque structures and reaches into our hearts rather than into our minds is what I have always wanted to pursue, and what I have always denied myself by trying to write acceptably, commercially and with the audience in mind. In fact, as a writer I have gone down all the wrong paths for my particular longing. Grin. It's all right. I don't have to wonder anymore whether I could be a social media maven, a content provider extraordinaire or a Rom-Com dudette in Hollywood. I can't seem to pull it off. Those are not in my bag of seeds.

Here we revisit the notion of trust. Can I trust this knowledge and pursue, finally, what I am truly capable of producing? Ah. You may rely on the fact that the question emerges nearly everyday still, and so it is with effort that I hang onto, "Yes," as the answer. Brain surgery is not cheap, nor is having two kids. I struggle with the notion of letting my husband carry this weight while I seem to be namby-pambying around with "creativity" rather than practical pursuits.

It so happens with all the effort I put into trusting that "yes," something has happened. I wrote 78 and more poems since September last year. You may see some of them on Kosmic Egg Tarot, and on Kosmicegg and even still I wonder if I can accomplish anything this way. Then as I was devoting my heart to poetry I realized that even that is not enough for me.  I've taken up landscape photography, oil pastels, co-writing a novel with my daughter, futurism and more. I used to say "more is more," and frankly it was a rebellion against my father's mantra, "less is more," but in the field of creativity it turns out that the more diversely I let my talents express themselves, the healthier the productivity and consistent the flow of ideas is for me.

I have a talent for extrapolation that thrills and entertains people and finally looks like it could be a business in futurism for me. This is funny to me since I had such trouble figuring out my own future for a long while, but like me, the world is sort of in a "fallow field" state with glimmers of hope coming and going with each nation's debt crisis. Indeed having a vision for a prosperous future seems to be a battle for more than just me alone. So, as I'm recovering from brain surgery I now have abundant plans and things to work towards. I don't know for sure that it's all going to work, but I do know that I must have this bridge to my future because fording the river Styx is not so wise if one is keen on remembering presence.

Chapter Five - Part Two - Land Use

Filling my field with poetry seeds feels a little bit like growing flowers. It's nice. It's pretty, but, but, but, other than making my life beautiful for a season how is it going to help my sustainable future? Can I afford not to worry about it? This should spell out how jittery I feel about my writing. Often I find myself wanting to abandon the field altogether, for a job in the city, but I've always found myself thrown back into the field, and so this time I'm going to try to stay in it until I know what the land is good for, and if I offer anything that can be sustained there.

So, I suppose I could go Dutch. I could imagine myself as the great tulip grower. The tulip has been my personal symbol since I was in middle school after all. Anyone who has seen my signature has seen the crazy scribbled tulip "trademark" at the end and speculated about it. Maybe all along I've been meant to plant pretty flowers. Have you ever seen fields of tulips? They are amazing. When I lived in Oregon I made a yearly trip to see them near Salem. Fields and fields of tulips of every size, shape and color. My favorites are probably the French tulips with their elegant long stems, their pointed turned-out petals and often variegated colors.

Interestingly, tulips don't grow very well in Southern California. That's kind of funny, isn't it?

Here's a poem I wrote last fall about screenwriting:

Double-Edged Metaphor
Copyright © 2009 Amanda Morris Johnson


Follow a flowchart down
Through the thicket of films already made
You’ll find the stones of this chart
Well-marked, well remarked, will tell
You everything you ever wanted to know
About writing a screenplay.

Of course, it will ruin movies for you.
Like stale popcorn, the craft actually
Sticks to your teeth unavoidably
And there you are picking at them at every showing,
Sometimes for days, and longer,
While you consider the rationale.

Yet what is a movie without popcorn?
What is a script without this well-timed craft?
What is a thicket without a lot of trees?
You’re told under the florescent grow lights,
It is a duty to ingest the stuff so that everyone
Is happy at The End when the girl gets kissed.

The thicket, the films that crowd
Un-weeded, robustly around your brain
Are timed to be fully-popped.
Perfect white kernels, variously flavored.
But, being a thicket, include many bags
That are full of un-popped kernels.

I rather like the un-popped kernels.
Who is to say they are unrealized trees?
Small, hard, and brown, their refusal to pop
Wins my admiration every time. Maybe they
were supposed to challenge the mouth
to actually chew on them for a while.

It’s the burnt kernel, the stinkin’ overcooked
popcorn that smells up a place for days like a forest fire
Leaving its layer of ash on the window sills,
Making you rewash that once clean pile of laundry
Ruining the whole damned bag that
Rages through a perfectly good thicket of films

And before you know it, you find yourself
Unable to bear watching the bag
Inflate in your microwave of a brain
Forcing you to leave the flow-chart,
The timer, and the copse for poetry that
Will never make you six figures.

It is tulip season on the Front Range in Colorado. They are hardy, withstanding wind storms, and snow. When I see them in their bright colors, then I know the hope that was planted last fall is paying off.