Day 18

We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops.

Maya Angelou

Sometimes it hurts too much to be present because you discover you actually can't be. You can't hold on to anything. The now is an illusion; the more you try to feel, hear, taste and live it, the more it eludes your grasp. Thoughts and feelings may shift but they are much easier to grasp. You can identify with thoughts and know yourself real through them. To be present means to acknowledge that you do not exist.

I wrote that once, when I first began to meditate and read Buddhist philosophy. Do I still believe it? I don’t know. Partly I do. I think what scares me most is recognising the illusion that is “I”; the more present I am, the more my edges blur and I become part of something so much greater than myself that I become dizzy. It is not that life ceases to exist when I meditate, merely that my own sense of a separate self disappears. And I’m not sure I’m ready to not exist. It’s funny. I keep thinking about what Anni of Mirth and Reverence said about nobody being able to touch you if you know who you are. What I find through meditation is that I dissolve and disappear. Even my thoughts begin to float and drift and it feels like there are no boundaries at all. A bit like not following the rules, and becoming completely lost. I can still feel my own heart beat, racing in anxiety. I can still sense pain or itching or every other physical distraction that encourages me to let go of awareness and focus back into the every day. But everything else dissolves and I am nothing and nobody at all. It’s as though my form won’t hold together properly, like buttery shortbread biscuits in the oven, losing their pretty shapes and spreading outwards, flattening, merging into each other. Just like flying, when I think about it. In all the dreams when I fly (except when Fanu is holding me!), I find myself drifting right away to where gravity can no longer hold me and one day I will float right out into empty space and disappear altogether.

I first began to meditate after the night of the big hallucination. I’ve never really believed in “resilience” and “stress management”. It all sounds like fancy, professional terms for “Suck it up, Princess!” As though employers can discharge their duty of care simply by saying that stress is natural and the solution is not to reduce it but to manage it. To learn to bounce with it and become resilient, ready to cope with anything and everything that life – and work – might want to throw at you. It’s an excuse to not see when something is desperately broken and cannot simply be plastered over. Resilience says the fault is with those who are broken and not with the system doing the breaking.

But that night scared me. I knew I had allowed myself to become overwhelmed – and overtaken - by work, but I did not realise by just how much until the bed began to shake. I woke one night to discover that my bed was rocking. Quite gently at first, but insistently, ominously. I froze and stopped breathing, focusing all my attention on what I could hear and feel around me. Nothing else was moving, only my bed. Whatever this storm was, I was at its epicentre. Soon I could hear soft, malevolent laughter and some of the shadows became blacker than the rest, slender shapes moving so rapidly in the night that they became a blur. Their voices were distant, echoing, as though only partially present within the room. Mostly what I could see was long, supple arms with long and graceful fingers that seemed to claw at the air.

The bed began to rock more and more violently and I found myself clutching desperately at the edge of the mattress, trying to hold myself in place. I became absolutely convinced that my only hope was to remain attached to my bed, keeping myself firmly in place. If I allowed myself to be torn from its relative safety I would be completely lost, completely exposed. And I would lose touch with the only solid reality that remained to me. The bed legs wobbled dangerously. My bed is not a strong one and I worried that it would collapse under the onslaught. But then the frame subsided a little and instead the mattress itself began to rise and fall, exactly like a horse trying to buck its rider. Whump! Whump! Whump! Great heaves and subsidences, brief pauses and an intake of breath, then more heaves. My quilt began to flap around, and only the fact that it was, by chance, pinned under my arms as I clutched so desperately at the sides kept it from sliding off entirely. My pillows slid around and one disappeared off the side.

The echoing laughter grew louder and now the hands clawed at me with long nails, clutching at my clothing and hair and attempting to drag me. If I could not be thrown, then perhaps I could be dragged. Fortunately, however, there was insufficient strength in them. No, that wasn’t true. There was all the strength that was needed. But that wasn’t the aim of the searching, violating hands. Their aim was not to succeed; their aim was to test me and find out at just what point I would break. At the very moment I realised this, everything stopped. The laughing, the black shapes, the clawing hands. My bed was still and everything was silent, just as usual. I found myself lying in a wild chaos of dragging quilt and half-dislodged pillow. My hands were painful from such strenuous clutching. I lay there, simply breathing and intently listening for some time before I dared to move. A tiny, experimental move at first, to see if it would provoke a response. Nothing. Whatever demons from my imagination had come, they had just as firmly gone again. Slowly I stretched and retrieved my lost pillow from the floor, smoothing my quilt back into a semblance of order. The bed, I noted, had not moved as much as a centimetre as far as I could see and the carpet showed no sign of heavy furniture having shifted in position. Everything, apart from my quilt and pillow, remained just as ever. My clothing was intact. But my hands continued to ache.

I thought of that night yesterday when the shaking came again. This was very different of course. It was daylight and it was a response, not of demons of the imagination, but of my body to the experience of being out at night. This time I was half ready for it, curious that there seems such a time lag between experience and reaction. Like earthquake and after-shock. It was gentler this time, less new and terrifying. Because I was expecting it, I settled on the floor with a bookcase at my back (is there anything more solid and reassuring than a bookcase filled with friendly books?) and rocked. I did not attempt to meditate properly but instead allowed the feeling within my body to take over. Whatever needed expressing, it was coming out through every part of my body. The rocking was soothing and even restful, as real and reassuring as the books behind me. The ache in my limbs did not lessen exactly, but it seemed to help to move into and across the rhythm of the shaking, deliberately intensifying it and changing its tempo. Making it more deliberate and controlled, more calming and part of me. For some reason the rocking reminded me of that old faded-rose pinafore and of the way I would hide in my room, shutting out all the world except the sensation of stroking its softness. And so I rocked and rocked until I became tired and the rocking slowed of its own accord. And then I just breathed. And meditated.

Life feels very much like those black, clawing hands sometimes. There is too much of it, pulling me in every direction, all wanting a piece of me. My mind and body want to dissolve and melt, spreading out and losing form. But I hold them somehow together. As if impatient at my own resistance, the world attempts to hasten the process, dragging at me from every direction, like the old gruesome execution method of drawing and quartering. What will not submit of its own accord must be made to submit. My existence as a separate being is an affront and its end must be hastened. At least, that’s how it feels when I’m out, participating in every day life. The lights burn too brightly and voices come at me from every direction. If I can sit apart and watch then I am fine. I can enjoy the ebb and flow, learn the stories and patterns that make up people’s lives. But if I am pulled into the game, the balance is pushed out and the unseen forces drag at me resentfully.

So it’s not really very surprising that meditation can feel uncomfortable for me. You’d think it would be perfect, wouldn’t you? Turning down the tempo of the world, sitting apart and resting in stillness. But that’s not really what happens. When I sit and observe life, I am still very much part of it. The stories all around me become my stories and the energy expended by people and plants going about their lives becomes energy shared with me. When I sit a little apart the fire does not burn me but instead warms and nurtures me. When I meditate, however, I discover something more and utterly different. Something I’m not yet ready for, like the cold vacuum of space. Gravity becomes my tie to the world. If I am dragged from the safety of that anchor, then I am utterly lost and swept out into the nothingness of non-existence. And so it seems that I am not destined to walk away from the world nor to walk in it. Instead, I seek to walk alongside, in sympathy and trust, a symbiotic life form.

Perhaps that’s why I find it easier to walk than to meditate sitting or lying down. For someone who loves stillness and silence, I don’t seem to be very good at it sometimes. Now, perhaps, I understand why. Walking allows me to still be in the world, even if not of it. There is power and there are boundaries in walking. I can feel my purpose, direction and intention, the edges do not melt or blur. When I walk, I can focus, not only on my breathing, but on the breathing of all that is. I imagine myself as a moving compass point, with all the infinite lines that connect me to the universe. I hear the calling of the trees and feel their soft tug as they invite me to visit them. Their energy and the beating of their life pulse are alive and awake to me. Through my own rhythm as I walk, I seem to hear and feel the rhythm of other lives, like a vibration coming up through the earth, and swirling all around me through the air. When I sit I sometimes lose that. Not always, but often. I imagine a giant pendulum swinging. At one end is the heart of the maelstrom. If I enter in, I am pulled apart. Or am I crushed? Crushed seems the better word. At the other end of the pendulum is the vacuum of space. The vacuum of being and non-being, the vast emptiness that dissolves everything and in which my form becomes lost. Right now I would choose neither but seek to hold that perilous middle ground, that deep swing of the pendulum as, for a brief instant, it comes to its still centre. If it were to allow itself to actually rest, all Time would come to a halt, and so it swings back and forth, forever out of balance. Just for fleeting moments it finds itself in perfect balance, between gravity and vacuum, and in that space, I attempt to maintain the illusion that the perfect balance exists and that I can walk it.

I wonder if that’s why people keep so many possessions, far more than they actually “need”. Is that why they like pretty objects and souvenirs of times past? Do they also need to feel the pull of gravity to know that they exist? Sometimes even I wish I had more things and didn’t just go with minimalism because I’m afraid of how much extra work and cleaning I’d have to do if my apartment were filled with more than blank surfaces. And, to be honest, because I simply don’t know what to fill the apartment with. I would love colour and texture and softness, but my desires change as swiftly as my moods, as swiftly as the clouds chasing after sunshine. Thus, what would I choose? Would I gather yet more and more and more things to myself, in the hope that, if I have an over-abundance of them, there will always be something that meets the need of the moment? The trouble is, it wouldn’t work. It’s like food. I used to imagine that, when I was a grown-up, I would stock my fridge and pantry with everything I could conceivably want. I believed I could plan for all contingencies. But then I worked out that somehow, the one thing I didn’t have was exactly the one thing I would want. I might suddenly want dates or porridge out of season. Or, like just now, I would experience a sudden craving for halva. Halva? Why halva and why now? And so, in practice, I continue to stock the same boring, predictable meals that are easy to plan for and don’t require extra thought or headache in my shopping order. If I were vastly rich, I like to pretend that I wouldn’t stock any food at all. I would eat out or get take-away for every single meal, eating whatever I felt like whenever I felt like it. What would I choose? At what hours would I eat? That is a wonderful fantasy, like so many “if I were rich” fantasies. But the fact remains that what my heart desires is infinitely, capriciously changeable, as variable as drops of rain or the passing current of air.

And so, yes, it does hurt too much to be present sometimes. Because, then I find myself asking questions. What happened to the shaking that coursed through me yesterday? Where did it come from? Why? And where did it go? Why did it not stay when I granted it free passage? I did not want the pain of course, but I find that I do want meaning. Meaning is what I’m afraid to lose. I remember once hearing someone tell a story about a dying man. All he would do, over and over, as he lay in his hospital bed, was tell anyone and everyone about everything he would lose when he died. It was a very long list, from his house and car to every item he owned within it. Right down to his watch, his shoes and socks. And he repeated it in an endless loop. Until finally someone gently asked him, “What do you want to keep?” That is when he became silent. When he began to think, to relax, and to accept.

What do I want to keep? I ask myself that same question now. If I dissolve into the universe, what I am afraid to lose? Or what is it of this illusion of self that feels so important that it must continue to be held? And the answer, for me, is meaning. I want to know why. I want to understand. It’s not that I need some grand purpose to existence or a story about reincarnation and why I’m here or anything like that. For the big things, I trust in the universe and don’t seem to worry too much. But it’s at the level of the little things, down at the level of my deepest, shifting feelings that I truly care. I want to believe that my thoughts and emotions have a meaning and reality. I do not want them to be simply the shifting sands, something to be observed and allowed to freely pass, like grains of sand on a desert wind. I want every person, every thing, every desire and song of the heart to truly, richly and deeply matter.