Magnetic Poles Switching Inside

This experience of discovering the benign meningioma, struggling to get ready for it to go, having it removed and then recovering from its absence has been quite a process. For years leading up to the discovery of this tumor, I really was in quite a struggle to understand how my life had gotten so far off course from my dreams, and I had ascertained lots of bits of information about the past, and ideas of how to get back to what I had a will for really pursuing, but I couldn't quite put it together. As I write this, I can see that perhaps my journey is unique, maybe other people can get a grasp onto things much more easily. On the other hand, I also wonder if other people who run into these sort of monumental physical, emotional and mental challenges might be able to use what I've discovered on their own quests, so I'll share a particularly surprising part of this story...

The Sun XIX

A child's mind invents many future potentials, and sifts them as she grows. She sends them out looking for approval, and doesn't realize that approval often comes to the thing she's least interested in. She pursues the least interested future with all her energy because ultimately she desires the approval. The potentials she deeply loves, the ones that involve her so completely that time passes without her knowledge, get branded as distractions from the things she ought to do and so they're put on a shelf display in her head as evidence of bad habits.

At some point in adulthood the shelf falls apart and suddenly those future potentials start a mess in the mind. They play hide in seek with her as it dawns on her that her lack of happiness has something to do with the fact they've gone missing. There are marvelous books by worthy authors that help her find them (CG Jung, Oriah Mountain Dreamer, Julia Cameron, Paul Ferrini, Leo Buscalia, M. Scott Peck MD, off the top of my head). Classes are taken, and yet even when one piece is found and put back on the shelf, others are lost. Therefore, a great swath of time goes to piecework while still giving the most time to those things that get some approval. The battle to actually take some discovery off the shelves of life and to wear them and live in them is already known to gain disapproval, and that is not something she desires.

Because approval has become so important, she is even likely to surround herself with echoing voices of friendships that agree with the approved choices, and that in turn leaves all of those shelved selves exposed to further disapproval. The internal battlefield between the bits of desired denials and the framework of desired approval leaves her frustrated with even having another potential at times, or frustrated with her approving friends and family because they don't see her true desires as worthwhile, except perhaps as a hobby. When the secretly loved potentials make unplanned exposures, her urge to quickly finish them and get them off her mind can lead to self-exhaustion and frizzle-frazzlement.

Am I making any sense?

Last post, I talked a bit about rebellion, and this story I'm outlining is a further exposure of the wrestling I've been doing for almost all my life. For some reason now that I have a flow of water again around the part of my brain that puts things in order, I am able to see that the approval/disapproval war is an old, old habit. I also have the sense that I may actually be experiencing a reversal of that order. Now, I recognize everything that I'm supposed to do for approval from many who have been a lifetime around me, and I am feeling disgusted by it, by my own former behavior, and finding that I simply cannot condone allowing it to remain in the limelight. It comes up daily, moment to moment. As if the magnetic poles of the order within me have switched, my strongest desire is to bring out all of those uncommitted desires and let them be experienced for the rest of my life, whether or not I'm ultimately understood. In turn the modes of operation that attain some sense of comprehension from much of my family  and some of my old friends are being boxed and labeled with things like "taking care of external perfectionism," "the right diet," "beliefs that have nothing to do with me," "rising to expectations," and "buying artificial pleasures."

Meanwhile, as I dust off desires that have been hidden away everyday, more potentials appear. It is as if I've landed on the island of misfit toys and they're all so happy to have me. These desires are not all quite working yet, and I'm not but partially developed on most of them, so I have the sense of practice and experiment. It isn't that I haven't tried all of them once or even often, but simply that now instead of killing myself to get something done and out of the way, I sense I have the opportunity to see what unfolds over time, and that as part of my healing doing it little by little is essential.

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.

Resting in Ambiguity

Because I’ve found the struggle interesting, I suppose I’ve not envisioned the outcome I want. Now, I feel neutral in the struggle finally, that the gains and losses have evened out. Today I told a friend in my community that now it looks like brain surgery won’t happen until February…or so. She laughed and said, “Oh. Forget about it.” This stuck with me and it occurred to me that there was great wisdom in those words.

How much does any one of us really know about the future? The fact that you can make plans in your calendar stretching out infinitum doesn’t mean that any of it will ever happen. Ouch. I know. What happens if the future becomes encased in a fog?  It doesn’t mean that nothing is going to happen. It simply means there are no predictions, no scheduling, and no planning. Even the events you know are out there become vague, memory-rooted markers that have no pull anymore.

Maybe it is the fact that I can’t drive, that I can’t seem to make a plan for the future without it being wiped off the white-board calendar by another surprise in this situation. I am simply tired of the disappointment. I have to laugh that the thing I want to know is when I’ll have brain surgery. Who thinks something like that? Here’s my confession…I can’t imagine my future anymore and I can’t imagine how this situation gets resolved. I give up on specifics.

I’m going to forget about the specifics. I am now fully invested in vague.

Yes, there will be a solution to the benign meningioma. What is the solution? I don’t know anymore. I have vague ideas.  The ideas may or may not work in the way I think they will, and so I am free now to completely let go of struggling with the details to get to my destination out there.

 

For another metaphor, imagine you are going on a vacation and you have to learn how to not only operate a plane, but also all the luggage systems and run the stewarding. Wouldn’t you rather simply focus on arriving at your destination and what fun you’ll have when you get there?

Taking me out of the alarming field of making the medical plan work, or the alternative plan work is a little bit…relaxing. It is what it is. That’s what I say about everything else, and it turns out, “It is what it is,” perfectly applies to this. I do not need to understand the why, when, where or how, and I know the what –vaguely – the solution will happen. I accept that the strong stream of prayers and light coming my way has made an impression that there must be something in me worth saving. The intentions for full recovery are in motion.

What does that leave?

This makes me think of my daughter’s smile. When I was pregnant I read all the books, researched methods, chose the most independent route I could find. In other words, I distracted myself because I had no idea what it would be like to be a mother of a child. I had no idea what this child would be like (I didn’t find out gender via technology).  Yet, being pregnant, I trusted absolutely that I would love my baby. I did what I could to express that, of course, I petted the baby’s head, or maybe it was her bottom, through my belly’s wall, and I tried to keep food down. I played music, took long walks and she gestated in spite of some surprises along the way, some changed minds about methods, some moves (two), and a new job. Somehow it all came out okay when she emerged. No matter what detail I struggled with (nursing, diaper changing, burping, working), there were only a few things I cared about – that I love her the best way I could by learning about her, by being curious, and that I not betray her trust, and that when I smiled at her, she smiled back at me. When that smile finally appeared; oh boy, I spent a lot of hours smiling.

So, that’s what I’m aiming for metaphorically, I’m aiming for an inner smile that trusts that the world is my oyster. I want to be loyal to my life, to my purpose, to my mission. I want to be curious and learn more about my purpose here on earth. In short, I want to learn somehow in the next few months to absorb what has escaped me before…how to love myself, accept myself, shit, burps and all. I want to embrace a sense of wonder as I emerge from recovery and begin to smile in love with life.