Day 4

No matter how deplorable a situation may seem to an outsider, the individual involved finds no reason to look for a better way until, for him, it becomes a necessity. When discontent reaches the point of necessity, we demand of ourselves and our world that a better way be shown. Until then we put up with less. Because we fear and hate the problems that seem to trap us, we find no way out. It is often necessary that we find more confidence and love before things can start to improve.

Laurence G. Boldt

I love how the world can change in an instant, especially when you have access to far horizons, as you do at the beach. And often the days of heavy cloud are the most beautiful, changeable and dramatic. This morning was just such a morning. As I set out, the world seemed so lost in shadow that I might almost have been walking through the night. By the time I arrived at the beach, there were patches of dark, brooding cloud layered with clear sky. And above the cloud the beautiful waning moon, lying on her back, overlooking all.

Within minutes this had changed and dark cloud was all around me. In every direction I looked, I could see great walls of misty grey, evidence that in the distance, rain was falling. I love being able to watch rain from the outside; it feels like it ought not to be possible. And then, before I had even time to register the change, it was raining on me and I laughed with exhilaration as large spots spattered my T-shirt and the sand at my feet.

The mood of the morning was perfectly timed, matching the mood to which I woke. Monday. A reminder that somewhere out there, people are wondering where I am. Even though I will not be going in to work today, or tomorrow, or the next day, I could not escape a knot of anxiety. Actually, it was heavier than anxiety. More like a deep dread. It was the deep and death-like drums reverberating through the dark and cavernous halls of Khazad-dûm, before the orcs attacked and Gandalf fell to the balrog. But even that deep, insistent rhythm invading my entire being was not entirely proof against the majesty of morning drama, with clouds whipping into storms above and the scent of rain lightly fragrant on the air.

And when I think about it, work does seem entirely lacking in reality, the figures that inhabit it seeming to fade into mere paper cut-outs, less even than shadows, the moment I walk out the door. It is not just that their importance to me wanes as my attention shifts; it’s that even when I walk among them, they feel insubstantial and somehow implausible. Logic tells me that everything I own, from my bed to the iPad on which I type, come to me only through the efforts of people who have done the “right” thing and gone to work. My ability to walk across the road, past beautiful trees, is afforded to me only because someone has created those roads and planted those trees. I have the ability to seek shelter from the rain, if I choose, because someone built this apartment block. This, my mind patiently tries to explain to me for the zillionth time, is reality. This is the reality that must be lived. And yet it seems far more like a surrealist painting than any dream I have ever had.

If I picture myself at work, I see very bright lights and suffocating mounds and towers of paper. Paper covered in meaningless numbers and scrawls. Folders and folders, full of them, all lined up in grey cubicles designed to keep us each tied to our individual screen. We no longer work together but separately, pinging each other with demands for action. And each of us stalled, waiting for someone else, in another cubicle somewhere, to play their part; only they are stalled, waiting on someone else and someone else. All of us furiously entering data, running to the printer and filling more and more folders. But nothing ever actually changing.

And the reward? I heard a conversation the other day about the wonderful new super K-Mart that will be opening up. How wonderful their furniture is! How good it will be to have access to all that near by! Laughter at the thought that every house in the area will soon sport identical sets of furniture. Deep zombie chills crept up through the core of me. The sum of all existence: Super K-Mart and identical furniture. Identical grey cubicles at work, identically stifling “professional attire”, and then, apparently, at the end of the day, identical lives with identical homes and identical shopping patterns. It feels like hands clutched around my throat – and around my very lungs - squeezing the life from me and seeking with unquenchable thirst to add another zombie to the growing horde.

In truth, by the time work starts, I will be no more than a nuisance to them. Bob probably swore when he got my email on Thursday night or Friday morning, called me a weird cow (or something somewhat less flattering) and felt very inconvenienced. By today they will be solidifying arrangements to manage without me and no doubt yet more people will be cursing me because their own workload has now increased. Their focus will be on the work and how they will cope, not on me at all. But guilt has made them very large in my mind and I see them towering above me, as dark and fiery as the balrog himself. Or perhaps they are the great dark eye, endlessly searching from its seat in Moria, searching for the one ring. Do I have it? Am I of interest? No. It is only guilt that makes me feel suddenly visible and exposed, as though by abandoning work I had slipped on that one ring and made myself, not invisible, but hyper-visible. I imagine a great, thundering knock on the door and demands to know what is wrong with me. Would I have the strength to simply say “I am not well. That is a matter between me and my doctor”? Me, the compulsive explainer, who needs to excuse, justify and apologise for every action, even if it’s not mine? Do I have the courage to not explain? It seems impossible, as if lightening really would strike from above if I attempted it. “Bad person, bad person, bad person” the mantra keeps repeating in my head. Or it does if I stop to think about it, rather than looking out the window at a sky now so blue it seems to be pretending that there never were any clouds and I merely imagined them.

Wolf Peach Wilds says that we tell ourselves into being. Our history, our beliefs, our science – everything is stories we tell ourselves in order to frame a negotiable reality. We literally construct ourselves from words. So now I am trying to write myself into being. And in the process, I am hoping, not merely to understand and reframe my own story, but to write Truth into being, a Truth that will change the nature of reality itself. Because Laurence G. Boldt is right. I have avoided facing this problem, precisely because I do not see a solution. No matter how I tell the story, it always comes out with me being responsible for paying the bills. And a belief that it would be completely irresponsible to do anything that would risk my ability to do so. Much as I would love to be, I am not the person who would live comfortably from the land (even pretending that land were free for the taking), growing my own food and being almost entirely independent of the world. I am simply not that practical a being. And in terms of a job, I have looked at every career option I can think of and set my Seek searches ridiculously wild and broad, just in the hope that some idea I had never even heard of strikes my notice and leads me down a path I hadn’t previously considered.

The real dream, of course, is the heart-centred business. But even that evades me. Two problems immediately leap out at me, laughing at my vain attempts to magic up a solution. The first is that I have absolutely no useful skills. It took me a little while to realise this, but it’s true. There are people my age out there already skilled and confident in everything from yoga to dance to Tarot to art to – just about anything. They produce beautiful things to sell, they offer services or they teach. But my craft projects invariably come out as misshapen monsters and I become so distressed at bringing such deformed, pitiful creatures into existence that guilt overrides my attempts and I quickly desist. As for skills – what skills? I never learned enough music to be able to teach it. Certainly not sport or dance. I can’t even cook or garden, and do not even know the names of the trees or plants (yes, I know, what kind of Pagan doesn’t know anything about trees and plants?!).

And my degree? I surprisingly “defied” my parents by doing an Arts degree, which essentially means that I can write essays and problematise just about anything if I want to. Which I don’t. Despite my continual process of whining here, I really would rather not problematise the world, thank you very much. I never ended up using the degree, there being no obvious careers for people with a mish-mash degree in anything and everything; in other words, nothing. All my defiance led to was having to accept a job my father found for me through a friend. Without so much as even a TAFE qualification in anything to do with accountancy, I doubt I would have gotten even that job if the friend hadn’t owed my father a favour.

I could, of course, learn Tarot, like so many others. And I love to play with the cards. But I have resisted “learning” for some reason. I so much prefer to let the images play with my mind and see where they will take me. I like reading about what the cards “actually” mean, but when it comes to playing with them for myself, I would rather they tell me their own stories, which I almost invariably interpret wrongly, when I compare my stories with those of the guide books. And I usually prefer to look at just one card at a time. A “spread”, for some reason, seems too overwhelming, like too much information all at once.

I know that there are infinite interpretations of Tarot, and enthusiasts often kindly welcome in newcomers with the assertion that there is always room for more, but it seems to me that there is a danger of Tarot becoming the new fall-back position, like teaching. You know the old saying about “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach”? Well, while many people are truly passionate about Tarot, I suspect that for some it’s a path to a heart-centred business and something that feels like it ought to be authentic and exciting. Actually, I’m being harsh. What I really mean is that, if I were to learn Tarot properly, that’s what I’d be doing.

And that leads me to my second problem. Not only do I know nothing of any use, I don’t appear to be interested in anything. Except reading stories. And watching them. And that really, really scares me if I think about it for too long. The more I search in my mind for something that really interests me, the less I find. It’s like that old movie, How to make an American quilt. The protagonist says of her many aborted attempts at writing a Master’s thesis, something along the lines of “The more I know about something, the less I want to know about it.”

Why do I not care about anything? Hypothetically, of course, I do. There are lots of really, really important causes in the world. But the thought of being part of them? It gives me the horrors, frankly. Advocacy? Absolutely not – I abhor trying to push my views on anyone else. Marketing / PR? Same deal. Fundraising? No way! Asking other people for money is almost worse than trying to sell an idea. That leads me back to, administration. And as soon as I become involved in the grind of administration, I feel like I’m dying. The “cause” is entirely lost under the weight of claustrophobic bureaucracy. And as for face-to-face contact with real human beings? Don’t even go there. Way too painful to contemplate.

There seems nothing left, because, if I’m honest, much as I care about people, if I did work with them at some level, the incessant every-day-ness of it all would very quickly horrify me. I would cease to see real people and start seeing chains instead.

And so I find myself wondering if I am a truly unnatural being. There is nothing that I want to do. Nothing that truly interests me. Sometimes I think my obsession with reading stories (not useful non-fiction or even mythology, but simple stories) is simply an attempt to prove to myself that there is still something in this world that generates an emotional response from within. Something about which I can actually be said to care. It certainly couldn’t be said of anything I do or of any relationship I have with any human being. I repeat. I am an unnatural monster.

My real heroine is Áine Órga. I used to think it was Kelly-Ann Maddox and of course she’s awesome. She is incredibly self-aware and consciously evolving into the life of her choice. She has an amazing ability with words, knowledge I could only dream about, and an incredible relationship with her own body and sense of style. But no, when I really come down to it, if I could “be” anyone, it would be Áine. She questions everything and isn’t afraid to do so. She is talented and also intellectual. And now she has found a way to live her dream and is studying religion in Edinburgh. When she opened up Heart Story, part of me was sad. I loved her work but it felt like she was selling herself short. She wasn’t being all of who she could be. I don’t know why I thought that but I did. I actually got a Tarot reading from her and it was incredible. It turned into a three-day conversation. It’s like we took a journey together and she brought all her knowledge to the trip. Everything she said made a lot of sense and really made me think. I liked the fact that she didn’t even do Tarot like everyone else; she brought her own unique style to it.

And now she is studying, writing essays, and talking about important things to do with religion. And maybe, hopefully, planning a PhD. I can’t wait to see who she becomes. In my fantasy, I would do something similar, except that it really is fantasy for me. Because there’s a reason I tend to read fiction rather than non-fiction. Academic work bores me. Academic-speak and the tendency to use “insider terminology” frustrates me, and the writing seems so often colourless and entirely lacking in imagination. It also seems to take itself waaaaayyyy too seriously for my liking. Or maybe it just makes me feel inadequate. I don’t know. And besides, I’ve been at uni. I’ve seen how the teachers live. Long hours, impossible mounds of marking and endless competition for research dollars in order to undertake the research they don’t actually have time for but somehow have to produce if they want to keep their jobs. The ivory towers are actually a business enterprise. Somehow, Áine is living the fantasy ideal and making ideas – and ideals - come alive for herself. I just know that I can’t follow.

What do I really want? Apart from “I don’t know. I have absolutely no idea”, the only response that comes up is a non-response. Silence. Actually, what I want is Kelly-Ann’s three Ss: Stillness, Silence, Solitude. One of my longest-held fantasies is the idea of being a hermit or a solitary wanderer. How I would love to make that possible (if only I didn’t have to garden and cook!). It seems like such a “nothing” thing to be, and yet it is all I really fantasise about when I’m being truly honest with myself. Surely I’d get bored within the first five minutes, but that is what keeps calling to me.

I imagine myself like Sister Wendy Beckett. I can’t remember the words she used, but it was something about being a fairly “useless” person (who just happens to be brilliant at both literary and art criticism, and who somehow managed to end up getting exactly what she most wanted in life!). She called herself silly. But she firmly believes that her life of solitude is perfectly valid. In spending her life in prayer she is receiving God’s love for the world.

I used to imagine being a nun (of course I did!). It’s not like it would be a sacrifice to me to avoid people and much of the material world. Actually, if anything spoke against that vocation for me, it would probably be the very fact that I would want it. The hierarchy would probably say that convents aren’t for people looking to escape the world. Of course, there is the slight problem that I’m not Catholic. Or Buddhist. I used to wish I was, just so I could be a nun. I even thought about converting, but the issues of ethics and honesty got in the way. And the practical thought that I would actually have to submit to someone else’s ideas about when I woke, when I worked, when I prayed, when I spoke and when I was silent. Hmm. No thanks. I want to make those decisions for myself. I wonder what a Pagan Order of Nuns would look like? If it didn’t make me feel guilty for not being a vocal advocate for environmental / animal rights and raw vegan diets, it could be pretty cool! I wonder how they’d operate? I’d love to see the Pagan Scholar take on the challenge of imagining what Pagan monasticism would look like…

I’m going round in circles. I feel like I’m trying to convince myself that what I want is to “not be”. I’ve spent a lot of time whining about why nothing is really an option, but what I’ve really been doing is asking, “Who the hell am I?” Is there anyone truly in there at all?