Day 20

A song she heard

Of cold that gathers

Like winter's tongue

Among the shadows

It rose like blackness

In the sky

That on volcano's

Vomit rise

A Stone of ruin

From burn to chill

Like black moonrise

Her voice fell still...

Robert Fanney

It was the 20^th shadow that did it really. I was fine up until then. Really I was. Or so I thought. So I told myself. Each day I faithfully tuned myself in to the lessons of Kelly-Ann’s 29 shadows, curious to know what I would find there. And each day, nothing happened. At least, nothing that I expected. I loved listening to the questions she raised and hearing her explore the myriad ways a single word could be approached and considered. So many nuances, angles and perspectives. The very depth and question of it all was intoxicating. But from within myself, no glimmer of a response. Only my mind leapt forward, eager to grapple with ideas. My heart remained silent. And that, I learned, was exactly the problem. Each day I carefully wrote in my journal, as though it were a homework exercise. Interesting homework – far more interesting than any I remember from school, but homework nonetheless. An absorbing intellectual exercise.

And then came the day of the 20^th shadow: Family. And the world crumbled. I see now that it was that shadow that somehow started the question in my own mind, the gnawing pestilence that would lead me to what I thought was impossible: abandoning my responsibility to work. Strange really. The two ideas seem so entirely unrelated, but of course, nothing is unrelated. Everything connects, like Maha’s interjoining figures; so many tiny humans linked and bound to each other, not seeing the surpassing beauty created by the whole.

Such a little thing, and yet, from that day, my world changed. There is, I discover, no path back again. I didn’t understand that when I set out on the course of the 29 shadows. You cannot go back. Once seen, a shadow cannot be unseen but must be felt and known and lived. Like the transforming moment of an accident you replay a million times in your head, trying to make it come out differently, so that your injury never happened and you could go back to being who you were. Our shadows are like wounds we cannot see; wounds that were hidden but once found become forever part of how we move in the world.

As ram cedes to bull in the zodiac, I am there again. I have been there in my mind for several days now, feeling the tension of this building moment. For some reason it is the number and not the word to which I cling; as “20” loomed I felt myself falling back into that pivotal, decisive moment that would alter the course of the heavens for me. So it is strange that, upon awaking to the ominous knowledge that today I would have to revisit it in my writing, the clouds had a different story to tell. As I walked on the beach and then stopped still to marvel at a world so differently conceived and born every single day, the clouds gave me a new story. One of gratitude and hope, excitement and possibility. And I will gladly try to find words to tell you what the clouds spoke to me. But first…

First I must tell you about the shadow. The shadow that needs to be named and brought into the light. But I cannot. I fear I cannot. I have made you too real in my mind; you are a part of me. I decided that you would be non-judging, but there is no one who would not judge. Judgement is real and necessary. And we all know that words, once written or spoken, cannot be erased. Like the shadows themselves, to speak them serves only to make them that much more real. Right up until now you could view me with boredom and frustration as a somewhat dull, introspective person, endlessly repetitive in my stubborn gnawing at the facts and beliefs of my life. But there might also have been a certain twinkly-eyed sympathy. But that was when you saw an illusion, not a monster.

Overly dramatic? Possibly. But not in my mind. In my mind, Guilt has the breath of a dragon and the teeth of a shark. And Shame, its ghoulish companion, comes with burning then with freezing, eating at the very core of me, creating paralysis and diminishment. I am their plaything, sold to them through my own dishonour. By my singular inability to love. It is that question which plagues me, over and over and over again. Have I no feeling? Am I truly ice, with no capacity for genuine caring about another human being?

I am glad, glad – so very glad – that I now live separate from my parents. When my father sought a suitable job for me, it was my very great good fortune that I knew he had a friend up north and I persuaded him to try there first. So I could get away from the knowledge of my own betrayal. Away from the scene of so many memories. How much easier is it to read and respond to a weekly missive, playing dutiful daughter, sight unseen, voice unheard?

Is it so very strange that I do not love my parents? Perhaps it isn’t; I would hardly be alone in that regard. But for others there is reason, and for many, it seems, the struggle is not to blame and judge, but to even speak words of separation. “He’s my father” my fictional characters will cry to me from page or screen. “I know what he did is wrong, but he’s still my father.” The bonds, or at least the desire for the illusion of the bonds of love, are not easily dismissed, despite all reason. So why, then, am I so much the opposite? Why, when I am so very fortunate to have lived a comfortable life with comfortable, undemanding parents, does my heart remain ice? Ice so thick and cold that it will not melt, even in the face of others who might reach out in friendship towards me? Why do I freeze at human touch and run from contact?

I remember a day in high school. It must have been Mental Health Week and we were all laughing that little bit harder, being that little bit more festive, at the prospect of a change in routine. They were going to show a DVD on the theme of mental health. Not a particularly amusing topic, but anything that caused change to the regular routine of timetabled classes, and a moment to sit back instead of engage, was reason enough for celebration. But then the movie began. Most of my classmates shifted a bit restlessly, or made soft “Ohhh” noises of sympathy. Instead I sat rigid and transfixed, my whole body so tense it might have shattered if someone had accidentally knocked into me. The documentary (it was some made-for-education thing, not a regular movie) showed what it was like to live as a paranoid schizophrenic. Of course I had seen movies like A brilliant mind before, but they never had the same impact. Because in those movies, the characters were always someone else, with a completely different life. But this – this was me! The girl in the movie was telling my story. Not really, not actually. But somehow it felt like she was. In my mind, I heard the voices she heard and I saw the world become dark and strange and ominous the way she did. And most of all, I felt the power! When she began to realise that she walked a different world, one that others could not see, I knew what she would find. Because I had already been there. I had already found it. I knew that secret pleasure and privilege of knowledge unshared. I knew the searing pain of it. And also the joy of it.

For days, weeks, after I watched that movie, I could not concentrate. I walked in that metaphorical daze, barely aware of where I walked or to whom I spoke. My work suffered. I could not talk to anyone about it. I had to talk to someone about it! It was impossible, and yet it was all I lived for. I was a fraud. I knew that. I wasn’t really like the girl in the documentary at all. I was a perfectly ordinary person, pretending to be special and important. I just wanted attention; was I really prepared to upend the lives of my parents and cause them endless pain on the basis of my own sick fantasy? Of course I wasn’t. Of course I was.

There was a counsellor at school. I had never been near his office before. His office was at the edge of the library for some reason and his door was always forbiddingly shut. I always skirted well around it, afraid that I was intruding by simply walking near. On the day he showed us the documentary, I saw that the counsellor had a small moustache, just like my father. I didn’t know if that made him more or less repulsive and scary to me. But it was compelling. And so, in the end, one day, I knocked. I went right up to that door, checked briefly through the panel of glass that there was not already another student inside, and then knocked. I thought my heart was going to leap right outside my chest and my knock was so faint he didn’t even hear it. I had to knock again.

He was very friendly. A little too friendly, if anything, leaning over me a little too much, crowding me out. But he invited me in and seemed completely comfortable with the silence I thought I could never break. I hoped that if I could once get a word out, others would follow. Apparently not. Instead, tiny, jerking phrases came out, interspersed with long, deadly spaces of silence. “That movie,” I whispered, my face becoming so hot with shame and embarrassment that it would have needed a fire extinguisher to cool.

And then it occurred to me. Tell a story. And so I did. My voice was still shaky and halting, but slowly my breathing recovered and I spoke a little more normally. I will not tell you what I said. I can’t. I didn’t say anything really. No lies exactly. It was all suggestion and innuendo. I let him create his own ideas about what I might really mean. But I let him think – I didn’t intend it but I think that what I said made him think – dreadful things – about my father.

I came to a halt. Realisation came to me like a lightning bolt. What had I done? I had replaced one attention-seeking fantasy with another. And for what purpose? I froze for a long, long moment. I still had the possibility to take it all back. To tell the truth. There was even that moment when I considered telling him about the power and the pain and the secret knowledge, about what I really felt when I saw that movie. For just a fraction of an instant, truth, and all its consequences, hung in the air. Then I looked up and saw, not a rescuing angel but a teacher. My eyes zeroed in to his mouth so that it became all that I could see. I found myself looking at my own father’s moustache. I felt sick. Taking that as the perfect excuse, I panted, “I feel sick!” and literally ran from the room.

I never returned. He never chased me. I avoided the library after that. And I was never more glad than when my father finally decided to shave off his moustache.

* * *

There. I have done it. I have opened the door. I have not entered, nor invited you inside, but I have opened it, just a crack. A hint of daylight seeping through into the darkness that is me. So why am I not diminished? Why do the clouds still sing to me? Why do they continue to allow and to forgive, to endlessly form and reform, telling me that there is nothing that is solid or immutable? The building blocks remain the same but the form changes over and over again – a continual process of transformation.

For the clouds, by some miracle, do not judge. Always they welcome me, and if I look up into them, I can greet each day with the question, “What is possible?” No goal or dream, no fear or shadow, supersedes this: the magic of art is not to answer but to endlessly ask, day after day, “What is possible?” The work produced is simply a by-product. What matters is always to ask, and then, bound for adventure, knowing that no two days can ever be the same, head out into the unknown, seeking truth.

The destination cannot be reached; like the clouds it shifts and moves and recreates itself anew. It is foolery to wish to hold and tame the clouds, to know their shape and claim them within ourselves. Perfection is a dream, an ever-shifting god of unspeakable beauty, created in each moment through the union of that which lies within and that which lies without.

Perhaps I am finally learning that, as with all else, I cannot arrive at a place of security, knowing or certainty. I cannot arrive at a place free of the monsters of Guilt or Shame. I have moments of arrival and of understanding, but all is fluid and Time is not linear. There is no wise crone whom I shall become, devoid of fear and childish needs. I am forever and always all times and all ages at once, forever a question in shifting cloud.

It is time to relax and cease seeking for the mirage of “growing beyond”. It is time to be and to know that the lesson is in the ever-unfolding moment. There lies the answer and the question, the destruction and the hope of rebuilding. Perfection, like crisis, is forever in motion.

It is a strange kind of miracle that this morning, filled with dread, I watched the clouds. And watched as the clouds became thoughts, became words, became ideas. The union between self and universe is magical indeed. Perhaps this is what Anita Moorjani meant. Perhaps this is why we choose to live embodied, finite lives. We live for the spark of magic that ignites when limitation reaches outward into the infinite.

It is our brokenness that opens the door to the creative possibility of healing and leads us in directions that would remain otherwise forever unexplored. I cannot forgive myself for what I have done. That lies beyond my power. But I will approach each day with the urgency of the questions, “Who am I?” “What is possible?” I will be present to the gifts of the moment through the commitment of opening myself in trust to fluid possibility.

The clouds build castles

       more fantastical

than any we could conceive.

With a thought Wind tears them down

as, laughing, Rain raises them yet higher

       and more wondrous.

Ever-shifting are the halls

that greet the age-old sun.

As children knelt in awe before the

Magic of our parents,

       these great gods,

we seek through art to know them,

to claim our Selves in love.

How is it then, as gaze turns inward,

we see only offspring of our hands?

What is that moment, when sight is lost

and we name ourselves

       instead as gods?

We tear at Earth to build our dreams:

Would we own the very Heart of trees?

But still the clouds build castles,

and the gods, in wisdom, laugh.