I’m a little tired of writing about the pain. Last night I attended the Sunday evening session of the Landmark Forum. It’s something that Landmark graduates do when we have a friend taking the Landmark Forum for the first time. It became really clear to me that a good part of this journey will transform when I am willing to fully accept my body as it is, my pain as it is and my personality as it is.
Of course, I imagine that I have already done this – more than once. But I guess this is another layer and a different journey after all.
Jen, the masseuse, was here again this morning. Most of what we talked about and most of what we worked on was to support me to express anger. Anger is not something I have been willing to freely express. In my world the social cost is too high and the physical jeopardy too great. In the Wisdom way of looking at things I am experiencing an opportunity to upgrade my relationship to expressing my anger. I am no longer a child who might get hit, or a teenager facing getting shunned.
Jen told me a few stories about singers who began their careers by renting a sound booth and privately singing until their voice emerged. I never told Jen that I used to sing or that secretly I would love to sing again. Her intuition makes me marvel.
My good friend Savoy is a boxer and she has often invited me to come to her gym. Who knows what we might invent together that would allow me to vent the fire that currently burns my bones?
Sometime yesterday I began to realise that I have a version of Gloria’s Emu oil and Med Marijuana in my bedroom with me. I have a bottle of capsules of marijuana oil produced in Alberta and carefully rendered to be non-hallucinogenic. I have a tube of generic Hydrocortisone cream. I have begun to mix them and have them massaged into my lower back from where the rod ends to my tailbone. The concoction tingles in a nice way and already I feel a difference.
Much as I want to get out of bed and get on with life, today was a good example of what I can do while I’m lying around. Mike Skubic and Kimberly Fu were over and we did planning around Laser Eagles, a potential WPIT tour, a ten session seminar on personal support that I will give in December and January and a presentation that Mike and I will make to students that create video games. We did a full days work within five or six hours.
I love working with enthusiastic people. I love working with young people. I love creating when there is minimum resistance and good solid questioning. If most of my days were like today, I could happily live from my bed.
Sometimes I think too much in terms of either/or. Perhaps I don’t have to choose life in bed or life out of bed. Truly, together with others, I can create life with the best of both.
There is a certain discipline in committing myself to write more than one page a day. There have been days when I have written a great number of emails or other documents for other reasons and where I have been tempted to count them as part of this commitment rather than keep up this form of expression. I have also been tempted to consider averaging my numbers as there have been several occasions when I have written three to five pages in one sitting.
But this is not the point really. My experience has been that there can be something available beyond the point where I run dry. It is relatively easy for me to write and so it is also easy to not dig very deep.
On the few occasions when I have run dry it has been an opportunity to pause and wait. Beyond the waiting is there more? That is the faith and that is the exploration.
My friend, Martha, has taught me that people who do not easily use language will often seem to be completely nonverbal unless someone is willing to sit and wait long enough for them to speak. For example, one might ask such a person a question and then wait nearly half a minute before the person answers. In the absence of other people’s willingness to wait such a person rarely gets to express any unique perspective in the world.
Part of the faith and journey in creating these writings is my assumption that there is part of me that I have not yet expressed. Jen was pointing to this this morning when she questioned my willingness to express anger. She was pointing out that expressed anger could even lead to singing. What songs have I not yet song?
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