Rigid
Cerulean frozen carcass
Frigid
Hiemal, icy mass
How cold does it feel?
Absolute zero
Skin starts to peel
At minus below
Frostbitten
Brittle
Cold smitten
Glacial
Azure cracked ice
Crisp. Snap. Precise
Emotional wind chill
Slow setting will
How numb
Have I become?
I’d end this moment
to be with you
through morphic oceans
I’d lay here with you
only to stay
stay here in paradise
Ever had morphine? It’s a powerful drug and is more than entitled to its link with the master of dreams.
My encounter with morphine happened one day at the start of December, two years ago. I happened to nonchalantly slip in the snow and unfortunately landed elbow first (I know – I never do things the simple way). Result being a spiral multiple fracture of the left arm and a disintegrated elbow. That meant morphine – because gas and air wasn’t cutting it kids.
Morphine is interesting stuff. It completely disengages you from the usual time experience. You zone in and out of consciousness in an entirely disengaged mode. You become a third party watcher with a vague sense of self – very much in the same sense of self one gets when within a dream.
In fact, within this state, thought stills and awareness, albeit in a limited form, supercedes. I did eventually come off the hard stuff and got transferred, instead, to remarkably powerful horse tranqs (the chemical equivalent of a rubber mallet blow to the head).
But the remembrance of an aware, disengaged state, stayed with me. I can still achieve this same quiet mind state if I let go a focused mode and instead try to observe the butterfly of thought flitting around my head. But if you can attain this quiet mode even if only for a few moments, strange things happen. You see everything around you happening as a complex, integrated dance with everything happening not as separate, random events but instead, as an interrelated, syncopated and alive correography.
It’s a bloody weird experience: sounds are clearer, shapes and colours more vivid – like someone’s turned up the contrast on the TV screen. I’m not saying that everyone would get that happening, each human will perceive awareness without thought in their own unique way. But in this disengaged meditative state, things appear clearer to me. No pretentious new age crap – just a change of experience.
Zen zoning’s rather fun.
The ring broke. Snapped clean in two. She examined it: old gold, it must have been Victorian, perhaps Edwardian, but it had that faded red coppery look to it that all old gold had. The snap hadn’t broken off the delicate seed pearls that peeped out from small ornate flowery swirls on the front.
She felt strangely numb.
It wasn’t really her ring anyway. In the same way it wasn’t really his ring to give her in the first place. It was borrowed, or rather given by a friend in the heat of the moment when he’d knelt dramatically on one knee for effect in front of the drunken crowd all grinning and puzzled and expectant.
“This wasn’t how it was meant to be” she whispered to herself as he loudly proposed.
It’s a fucking show.
She knew it, sat there like a rabbit in the headlights, everyone clapping and whooping and nearly falling off their seats waiting to hear what she’d say.
“Yes”, she’d said, inaudibly.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be…mind racing. Not fucking now. Not a fucking show.. not with someone else’s ring handed down to them by their grandmum… I don’t want that fucking ring. I want you without all the show and the shit. If you’re going to do this right get me a ring from you. With your heart engraved on it. Not this, second hand, second thoughts .. seconds to think.
No.
She should have said.
But the word yes tripped off her tongue because she wanted him.
Wasn’t that supposed to be what couples in love did? A proposal, he loved her, he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, would she do him the honour? Oh very dramatic, very striking he was. Tall, dark, good looking, green eyes sparkled with a little too much merriment and drink; high on the social event. He moved so gracefully in that swoop down to one knee. With one fucking eye on the crowd.
She knew that now.
Too much noise, too many people, too much show.
She realised that now, as she looked at the broken band.
It was three years after the event and she calmly put the ring away. In an envelope, ran the edge over her moistened lips, sealed it shut.
I’ll get it fixed she murmured, knowing it would stay permanently sealed in the envelope. Just like her emotions were becoming. Sealed, so she could deal with the practicalities of making ends meet. Getting by and putting worry, and anger and fear away in a little envelope, sealed shut, called coping.
It took him a week to notice.
“Where’s your ring?” He mumbled, distractedly.
“It broke,” she said flatly, tired.
“I’ll get it fixed”.
He looked at her for a longer moment and nodded in silence. He had no money to get it fixed for her, it was a mute point. Another stress, another reason not to get it fixed, no money. There never was.
Days merged into weeks, weeks into years, no ring was fixed nor new one bought. He got a job, and she wondered: “Would he get her a real ring? One from him? One from the heart?”
“We’re comfortable as we are, aren’t we?” He said one day as she lingered at the jewellery window.. after all.. weddings cost so much.
Excuses. Now it’s always with the fucking excuses.
She sighed quietly, and wondered when would be a good time to say, “Let’s just jack it all in. It’s done, like the ring, snapped in two.”
But there’s never a good time is there? she silently thought back.
One day came she finally gave in to her suspicions, and on another night out without her, she sat calmly at his computer. Keyboards rattled on against the silence. She scanned his directory – found his notes – hacked his email account.
There’s never a good time she whispered to herself as she read love letters that were not hers to read. I’ll love you always… Her face cracked a twisted smile. The kind that pushes the corners of the mouth down like it’s sealing shut emotions like steam trying to escape. Rattling, pushing. No. Not yet. Shut…
She exhaled a long held breath.
Reading the same glowing words she remembered: uttered to someone else. Tarnishing like old gold. Love you…
“There’s never a good time” she said, emotionless.
Two days later.Time to part.
On a subdued summer’s afternoon in the open air of a street park. The sun was breaking, dappled gold through slow, swaying leaves, whispering like gossips watching. The cold air snapped: like her patience; like the goddamned ring; like the break she now inflicted. Snapped shut.
Time for the open heat of anger later.
There’s an old Japanese saying. It goes: if you wait patiently, long enough, by the side of the river, the dead body of your enemy will float by past you.
God knows where I heard it, but it kinda stuck with me. It means that sometimes long term patience is better than quick actions to resolve an issue or to effect an outcome.
I woke up this morning to find the annoying fuck of a mouse that’s been too canny to catch this last month, was lying, twitching on my living room floor.
It had starved to death – I figured it was going to be an inevitable outcome, seeing as it had managed to avoid all attempts at mouse traps (humane or otherwise). It finally was giving up the last ghost in the doorway.
I don’t know.. I’m not one for portents, but sometimes things that happen that jar your step, make you double take a look, or make you think, okay – that was wierd.
It’s the fact that the damned thing was just lying there in open display at the entry point, twitching in the last throes of life, at the threshold.
Don’t think me hard for letting nature take its course, because life is harsh – nature is harsh, and ways I figure it, I’d already tried to end things quick for the lil guy but he just wouldn’t be lured by the cheese, peanut butter, chocolate… fussy fekker. So it was finally the lil guy’s time to go.
So I spent my first waking minutes disposing of a dying mouse. Joy.
Such a small thing. But in the end, some things are resolved not by rushing around trying to enable, to facilitate a forced outcome. Instead you have to let nature, indeed life, take it’s course.
Did he die without a sound?
Flushed, face up?
Or folded, face down on the ground?
In showing his face to the stars
Did he hang fire?
This man gazed…
Three ayes, blazed full of ire,
Before the dawn
Upside down…
Sideways, on a cross…
Hanging on words,
In silent loss.
The hanged man is a powerful symbol (best known within the Tarot major arcana) – encapsulating the meaning of suffering undertaken voluntarily in order to achieve greater knowledge and understanding.
There are many key ‘hanged man’ archetypes found within mythology and religion.
Many are interwoven into our cultural heritage and consciousness: Odin One Eye the All Father of the Scandinavian pantheon; Shemyaaza the fallen angel (also one eye shut) hung in the skies of Orion; misunderstood Judas who either died hanging or bleeding on the ground – who did not deny his master unlike Peter the so called ‘Rock’ who denied his master three times before the cock crowed in the morning; Jesus on the Cross; Prometheus hung out on the rock awaiting his daily trial of having his heart ripped out by an eagle only to be healed again at night – his crime – giving fire as a gift to humankind…
Notice the reference in some cases to ‘one eye open, one eye shut’ – one sees the outer physical world, the other is closed and accesses the inner spiritual world.
All silently, accepting loss in order to transform and achieve growth or redemption.
“Time is not a reality (hupostasis), but a concept (noêma) or a measure (metron)” ~ Antiphon the Sophist
Time waits for no man, woman nor beast
Cold and remorseless she steps
Measuring the present, metering the past
Her hard gaze, as a mirror reflects:
Non judgemental
Unforgiving
Unsentimental
Relentless passing
Her slow, paced, steadied gait
She will not abate
And so we eventually will meet
Our pre-appointed fate
scatter me free
like leaves on the wind
waves on the sea
merging into the sand
like diamonds thrown
against the sky
like giving… it’s known
there’s no need to ask why
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
— Frank Herbert, Dune – Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
The Little Death has been used to describe many things – sexual orgasm, sleep, fear… depression.
I guess I’m focusing on this primal subject because I, and a good number of my friends are subject to the black cloud of depression and the fears that come with it, on a regular basis.
It’s an ongoing battle of self worth and vitality against a leach of frustrated anger, inexplicable feelings of loss and lack of energy.
It’s like surfing the sea waves, they crash over you, you drown in the little death, grappling with emotions, you fight and scramble your way to the surface again, gasping for air, feeling glad to be alive, feeling the sunshine on your face again.. after nearly drowning in the ‘undertow’.
But it’s a tough road. Many of us have been there at some point in our lives – some more regularly than others.
What I am trying to say is, that for most of us, there is no magic, easy formula to deal with this, it partially makes up who we are – this darker side of ourselves.
Perhaps, in dealing with darker emotions, we acknowledge our humanness – that we can’t always cope, that we’re not always on top of things, that sometimes we fuck up. Gaining acceptance of yourself and who you really are, warts and all, can be extremely difficult and yet cathartic.
At times of the year when it’s dark and cold, thoughts and emotions get heavier much more easily. I can only suggest that focusing on the strengths of friendship, of communication, and self reward by being kind to yourself (yes go on, you CAN have that piece of chocolate) … are ways to get through.
That and focus. Set yourself aims, targets – and bloody well go out and get them. Focus that angry dark energy on what you want to achieve. Don’t deflect it onto others and push your hurt onto them… and fuck, I’ve seen that happen with others. Too many times.
Little deaths… are dealt with by little steps, not big ones. Small victories over the hum drum challenges of life. That’s what it’s about. Hanging on in there… with your friends swimming and riding the waves with you.
Seeing is believing or so they say
But belief may have a high price to pay
A game of tag; of tic tac toe
And who is friend and who is foe?
Hide and seek’s the one we’ve played
Smoke and mirrors – but who has strayed?
Riddle me ree, riddle me this
What is the price of the forbidden kiss?
XOX
XOX
OXO
 | blonderblondest on Kōan |
 | Ross on Siren’s song |
| Ross on amīcus |
 | eyeofh on amīcus |
| Ross on Dare to be different |
Vertically challenged
Tags: article, being short, commentary, discussion, humor, journal, social, vertically challenged, writing
I, am five foot two. Well.. five foot two and a half, cos ya know, that half inch makes all the difference. In Americanese that translates as 158 cms.
Pint pot, short arse, tiddler, munchkin, titch, smurf, matchstick girl. Feck – I knew all the good nick names as a kid.
I take after my mother who is even smaller than me at a full 5 feet high (152 cm) and looks like a pixie.
I figure I stopped growing upwards around the age of thirteen, and looked wistfully on as my classmates shot up and, so did my smaller, younger, brother… not so small now.
I mean, being short is okay. It just has slight annoyances – like you can never reach top shelves. My battle with supermarket top shelves is comical: on a good day you’ll see me hanging half off the second shelf by my left arm – right arm blindly scanning, whilst tip toeing on the first shelf so I can grapple that last packet of potato pancakes that some kindly shop attendant thoughtfully shoved to the back of the top shelf.
Kitchen shelves are also fun. I usually use a combination of steak knife and bread knife in a pincer movement attack to drag offending drinking glasses to the front of the shelf, that my finger tips can just about reach.
What about step ladders?
Yeah – since when was dragging step ladders into the kitchen, setting them up, clambering up and then back down again, an easy option? Besides which, pissing around with bread knives is much more fun.
Then of course we have the classic struggle with the trash. The system we have in quaint old Edinburgh is one where by you fill up your black bin bag, then drag it outside onto the street, then woman wrangle it across the road to the large dumpsters on the other side. The ones that are about 5 ft high.
Most Sundays you will see me doing an impression of an Italian Mafioso trying to dump a body bag. Hurling a full bin bag into a dumpster that is damn near as tall as me, turns into a scene reminiscent of the WWE. It’s not pretty. And remarkably smelly. I get really creative, ruffled hair styles doing this. Trevor Sorbie would be proud.
Oh yeah. In Britain when you go to a Bar, you very rarely get served at your table. You literally have to walk up to the bar and catch the bar man or woman’s attention, waving your ten pound note in the air in the hope of catching their eye and getting served. I have become the mistress of the art of surreptitiously catching attention. This usually involves half draping my body across the bar in a come hither manner or simply just being fucking loud. Singing helps. It embarrasses them.
Of course, being short does have its advantages.
We have a low centre of gravity, so we’re fantastic in a fight. Wrestling matches are fun. Vertical sex is easier. Squeezing into small seat spaces on crowded buses feels less like an attempt at vacuum compression. Making an escape through someone’s legs is a fait acompli.
In short, it’s okay to be short, so long as you know the short cuts to getting by.