October 20, 2011
More and more, it seems, the only thing that changes is my perception of reality. Ironically, the effect of this is that reality itself appears different when I view it from different perception. So from my point of view, it feels like I’m re-writing reality and scripting my world experience rather than being a victim of my world experience, scripted by someone else.
My granny died recently. She was old, and she had dementia so couldn’t remember much of much. Her quality of life had gone some time before, and by the end, she had stopped eating and drinking because she had had enough and wanted to die. I won’t miss the old lady who couldn’t remember much of much. She was sweet in her way but I didn’t really know her. I will miss my granny. I hadn’t seen her for several years. She was replaced by the other old lady almost overnight…. and there was no time for grief. Technically no one had died… my granny had just turned into an old lady with dementia, getting old and forgetting her relatives. How can you grieve for someone who hasn’t died? Who hasn’t even gone away?
I spoke at the funeral. I’d written a poem, the lady garden, almost a year before her death, about my perception of what her final moments might be like. It was meant for the funeral. It was true to my granny’s character, and the words climbed into the heart space of everyone in the room, I think – it was a moment of beauty that I will always be grateful to have been part of. I have rarely felt such strong waves of gratitude before or since.
I miss my granny every day, and am starting to understand that grief is a curious and unpredictable beast. You can guess how you’ll react. You can even try to plan it, but the truth is that it will happen the way it happens, and one must just do one’s best to rise into the fullness of the experience, rather than to sink into its emptiness – and it is on this point that I’m starting to understand how perception shapes reality: rising into the fullness vs. sinking into the emptiness – the experience is still the experience, either way. So meeting life isn’t so much about the experiences one has. It’s much more about the way one approaches them.
My Dad just got diagnosed with something small and hopefully minor, but he has to have a kidney removed under general anaesthetic. He will potentially have to have some time off work, and the experience is going to change his life. I had a conversation with him on the phone this afternoon. I showed him a new piece I’ve made for YouTube, The zero point field, and he thought it was beautiful.
He told me about some of the things that have happened to him this week as he tries to tie up work based loose ends before his operation next week… and one of the stories was so beautiful, it made me almost cry, realising how much I love him. It’s a wonderful thing when a man is able to remember how much he loves his Dad. It’s even more beautiful when he is able to express it without rush or fuss, or because it’s Father’s day or Christmas day or the old man’s birthday… I experience it as a gift to be able to tell my Dad I love him, just because I do. I think he is one of the most wonderful men I know – I remember so well how it was when I hated him. I thought it would always be that way and didn’t realise that as I grew up and started loving myself as a man, that I would stop making him wrong for all the misktakes I believed him to have made when I was a child. We have come on such a long journey, he and I. I wrote a poem about it for his last birthday. I think he really liked it. It was called The wizard’s child.
Things with my boyfriend are going so well. I’ve never got this far in a relationship before. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever been with anyone before who I am finding more attractive as the days go by in the same way that they are finding me more attractive as the days go by. We’re both in a position in our lives where we are ready to be humble in the face of our own demons, and stop trying to fight them. I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I try to fight my demons, this anti-flow behaviour always manifests in my blaming my boyfriend for something I am convinced he has done to me. The truth is always the same. He doesn’t do anything to me, only to himself. And I am the same. And the more we see this, the more we flow in understanding, and the less we jar in misunderstanding.
The other day I wanted to shout at him for something he was doing that made me so angry that my face got all hot. But I didn’t shout. I just breathed the energy down and imagined some of it leaving me through my feet, into the Earth, and I asked him what he was doing. He explained to me what he was doing. He did not do it defensively (which he usually would) because I was not attaching him (which I usually would) and in his explanation, I realised that he was not making me wrong for anything, he wasn’t taking anything away from me, nor was he experiencing me in an unpleasant way. It was an epiphany moment actually - not the biggest I’ve ever had, but size really isn’t the issue with an epiphany! All the anger and all the hot faced rage, was gone, and it didn’t leave slowly – it just… wasn’t there anymore, because in my epiphany I moved in an instant from one perception to another, and left all the emotional programming and bad temper in an alternative perception (reality/old way of thinking)… that no longer serves me.
I’m sure it won’t all be plain sailing, but it feels good to me to know that in the face of such a hectic time, I am feeling almost overwhelmed with a sense of wellbeing and gratitude for (as Kevin Spacey said as his closing statement in the film, American beauty) ‘every single moment of my stupid little life’
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“I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me… but it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life…”
