A consistent experience of the past 3 weeks is having the sense that my being is fire or that there are bubbles of fire effervescencing through my being. Sometimes it’s waves of nausea, sometimes pain, sometimes insight.
One of the anchors of my identity as Judith is a question of when and how I will die as a physical being and who will I be when I’m dead. In the first cycle of my life this was entirely a background context framed in the disability conversation. Simply, no one expected me to be a survivor. I was blind sided by this expectation when I was 29, unexpectedly caught up in a drama of realising that I would pass the age of 30.
The same question had a different flavour in my second cycle. Similarly, though I did not expect to get passed 60 but didn’t realise how strong was the expectation. I can see now that many events in my life from about the year 2000 were shaped by a passion to hone in on the true “purpose” of my life and to fulfill it by age 60. I searched for the gift to give and searched even harder to know that I had given it.
Like a cork speeding out of a well shaken Champagne bottle I overshot my mark of 60. physically brought low in the 61st year of my life I have realised that the Gift is given and has been received. But the fire remains.
Suddenly there is a tentative sense of new and open space. Who and what is this fire?
The question of if and when and how I will die continues to be compelling. But now it seems more like blinders on a horse designed to prevent me from seeing what’s going on around me. Not being able to let go of the question – it is deeply woven into my bones – I wonder if there is a way to relate to it differently so that it can be part of a bigger dance and less of a compulsion.
If dying just happens and doesn’t have to be avoided or predicted or even prepared for, if it can just be a sliding moment both present and elusive at all times, what place would it have in my artistic design in my life? Some of my paintings have a dark spot or two in them. Supposing the question of my death was simply a dark spot in my art, or like a floater inside my eyeball, occasionally drifting in and out of my view?
To be filled with fire is to feel something like a hot air balloon. Although my body is solidly stuck wherever it is placed, yet my being is somehow quite floaty, sometimes bumping up against other beings, sometimes close and sometimes far from my own physical body. Yes, I am sure that this is partly Morphine and partly recovery, but there’s more to it than that. I am a very passionate and unfixed perspective.
I’m beginning to want to put dates into my future – to be at this certain meeting, to go to that particular test, to achieve a pre arranged result by a specified time. These points are like anchors or handholes in a rock climbing wall. Partly they exist to create a sense of safety. I am reluctant to leave the normal social/political parameters of our culture. I don’t want to be tossed away as simply odd and of no particular use. But this fear does not hold much sway with me anymore. These moments, these anchors are more like navigation points, or like setting up the corners of a loom upon which to weave the creation of my life.
When I think of them in that way I’m struck by how uncourageous I’m being. Surely if there ever was a time when I would be allowed to create something completely different, this is my moment.
Beyond that I am struck by the enormous fire within. How can I possibly channel this fire so it moves through and beyond my body and is a creative force in the universe. This I would rather do than settle for dampening it with Morphine and other distractions.
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