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. 

Spring Fever

Any farmer must have moments of spring fever rush over them, when it feels impossible to do anything but rush out to the field and check things out. It doesn't matter that there is still every possibility that it will freeze again because we are caught in that moment of potential and we're excited about it. This happens to writers, too. And, if you've lived long enough as a farmer or a writer you know that you have to grasp that momentum and run with it because soon enough the plodding sustaining of the thing will set in.

I went to a futurist talk last night at The daVinci Institute in Louisville, Colorado. The topic was "The Future of Print Media," and of course having been an editor in the past and a writer in the present my interest was piqued. Thomas Frey was the speaker. He speaks all over the world, in different industries, about the future trends of education and business mainly, but he'll talk on any subject if you give him enough time to prepare. He's a tall man, prone to wearing costumes from the renaissance, and he has a serene posture that is barely covering his enthusiasm for the future. His talk was interesting as it covered the systems of publishing (i.e., print media, digital media, audio and video) in terms of what takes us further and what holds us back. The long and short of it is that he believes most print publishers are in the death throws, but that there will be survivors in niche markets. The bottom line is that digital publishing has greater potential to expand, but that our literacy is likely to change. I won't review the entire lecture except to say this: writers are going to have to be extremely flexible in the future.

It's not just the mediums that our work will be presented through or by, but it is ownership of our creations that is going to be changing a lot. Going back to my proverbial orchard, it's like this: I grow the trees and I own them as methods of production. Methods of production. I sell the peaches and once the peaches are sold they are not mine anymore. Another company can slap their label on products made from my peaches and never give me any credit beyond the natural grown quality of the peaches. The peaches could be made into pies, cobblers, juice, smoothies, etc., and no one would ever know they were my peaches. I might not even recognize my own peaches once they are sold. What I do have is the method of production, my orchard, and possibly I can improve on that alone. I could possibly even grow my peaches in such a way that they might be recognizable no matter what product they ended up in, raising demand for them, but then other people could take my peach pits and grow their own orchards and change them yet again or keep them the way I created them.

Can you translate that to writers and their writings? Yes, you can. It used to be when a writer wrote a story that the writer would retain the copyright for that story. The story could not be reproduced (i.e. printed, made into a film, copied into another work) without that writer's permission and without paying them for it, and certainly not without giving them credit and giving notice to them that they would be using that bit of writing. Therefore, it behooved the writer to hold their work as precious, close to their heart, unwilling to put it out until it was perfect and protected. The digital age has changed all that for writers. Now, if a writer keeps their work until it is perfect and protected it is likely never to see the light of day or the back light of an iPad. Now a writer had better jump on the bandwagon of self-promotion, self-publishing and selfless let go if they ever want their work to be read because the publishing world of the last 650 years or so is dying. They had better be prepared that their work, once out on any digital platform, is likely to be "sampled" the way a musician's work is now sampled, often without due credit. Does this mean the end???

No! It is just a whole new world of creative opportunity for writers to create and tell stories that move the world. It means that methods of success are as important as the product because being prolific is the best way to succeed. It means fast and more is going to rule the day for a while because the world is so hungry for digital writing, and it will be so until the heirloom peaches restore balance to the palettes of readers everywhere. Please note that heirloom peaches have been preserved in the age of commercial farming, and so will poetry and short, pithy fiction, and long complicated novels, but they will not be what everyone necessarily wants to purchase for their Kindles. Still, people will buy specialty writing to read mainly because it is as enjoyable to some as an heirloom peach is delicious to eat. There will be some heirloom peaches that still end up in peach pies, but there will be other heirloom peaches that are eaten as fresh and unadulterated as possible just because they are that good. There will be stories like that, too.

So, these thoughts have given me spring fever, and I'm jumping all over my field to see just what I think it can handle producing.