Private pleasures

I realise it’s been a long time since I said something aloud in the written form. I neither wanted to, nor felt the need to, though occasionally there’s been guilt about not doing so, and a pull towards holding off until I had something clever or astute or insightful to reveal.

Throughout this in between time, I’ve been gradually and gladly surrendering (after some initial internal resistance) into the ease of not over-efforting to contrive and create. I made the intention during this time to be free and easy with my journaling practice.

After a few days of real revulsion (akin to recovery) about the idea of picking up my pen, I found the words stumbling then flowing out of me – because I was doing it for no other reason than my own private pursuit. And let me tell you, it’s been a pleasure to feel the love return for something that had, in all honesty, become a burdensome task of emotional and intellectual labour. Of trying to figure things out, make sense of the nonsense. Even the act of putting words to the confusion had become tangled up in the messiness of everything such that it stopped feeling like the liberatory practice it once was and can be (and is again now).

I have during this time felt some responsibility and guilt about you kind readers who pay towards my missives. For your support and patience, I’m grateful. I realise it’s been a while since you received anything in return.

So, I’m here now to be upfront and honest, to share the what and the why of my process of late – on the off chance that it might be of benefit. And to let you know that from now on, my offerings may be random, less formulated, likely patchy and irregular. Because that’s life. And it helps no-one to pretend otherwise (other than the head-fuck of a socio-political-cultural machine that has us tricked into thinking that our worth is measured by arbitrary standards of productivity).

The trouble with words

Something I’ve been realising lately, waking up to, you might say, and therefore pivoting away from, is the fact that so much of my approach to writing has been unconsciously hijacked by the toxic agenda of colonisation and white supremacy – the conditioned impulse to say something meaningful, to make even the imperfection appear eloquent (even when I was trying to let go of that impulse, trying being the operative indicator of remaining stuck), to be out there “representing”, to reframe and reclaim and retell my story as a demonstration of my/our worth, however much I asserted my resistance and rebellion to it all.

The irony being that my approach to writing, my reason for writing, and the things and people I write about, were all focused on decolonisation, on getting free of the baggage of the past. And yet in the process, I was tethering myself to it. And then the guilt and shame of not being perfectly imperfect, of not being authentic enough, of not being good enough, of not being enough.

Well, enough is enough. I have nothing to prove. I don't care for any of it anymore, for how it eats my brain, sucks my time and depletes my energy. Hence I realised all this in the absence, in the process of coming back to my reflective writing practice as something pursued for private pleasure and nothing more.

To speak is not necessarily to know

In part, this hiatus and retreat (and surrender to the exhaustion, which in a sense, was a surrender into the lap of my wiser self) happened because I got sick and tired of listening to the noise, and of being part of the noise – of the barrage of words, opinions, counter opinions, the rage, the exhaustion, the over explanation and the counter explanation. So much conversation, and so much of my own writing I felt, had become about analysing and reframing. Which I don’t discredit or demerit. There's huge value in some of it. And at the same time, a lot of it is lacking.

There’s an emotional labour that comes with being a writer, especially "a writer of colour", with any identity frankly, and that’s what I’m really tired of and freeing myself from; my subconscious attachment to identities that no longer serve me, or perhaps the restricted and restrictive embodiment of those identities.

This all takes me back to one of the cornerstones of my spiritual journey, that of Zen and the Tao – the quiet, humble, sparse and austere approach to life, where excess of anything simply clouds the view. To paraphrase Zen wisdom – words lead the way, but they are not the way itself. Be careful not to get caught up in the web of them, and in the writer’s case, in the webs we weave of them. Undoubtedly, there is poetry and pithy wisdom, but too much of anything drags us down.

One of my recent post-meditation notebook entries went like this: “I have nothing to say and that's okay.” As I wrote that one line and left the rest of the page blank, returning to stare into the nothingness of the distance outside, I felt an enormous sense of lightness and relief. The pressure was lifted, I was, I am, letting go.

Nothing is wasted

In other words, I have been busy composting. Something I talk about a lot when guiding writing practice. The inherently messy process of tilling over our inner stuff, thereby softening our resistance to the dirt and spending some time getting real with the muck of our lives. Shifting perspective, enjoying imperfection and learning to see the goodness in the tangle. Something I do a lot in a very practical and visceral sense, turning household bio debris into mulch that will disintegrate, degenerate and regenerate over time such that scraps and all manner of waste become the nourishment for new life forms and food stuffs.

What I’m feeling into, appreciating, accepting and changing my way as a result of, is the fact that there’s not always something to be done with the waste. It gets done anyway. No need to make a big deal of it. Something doesn’t have to consciously be made from everything. The material of our lives doesn’t have to be revisited and reframed and reclaimed and retold. Some of it just needs to mulch down, rot and regenerate without fuss.

I used to think it was my role to right the wrongs of the past, to dig through the dirt and find the teachings in the muck, to rake over my own life’s material and make something of it. And while for a time and to a degree, that intention and practice served a purpose, I’ve reached the stage where that phase of metamorphosis is done. And what's left undone, well, so be it.

During a couple of recent plant medicine experiences, I very clearly received, heard and saw messages telling me to “stop digging”, that “the way lies beyond the words, stop looking”. What I took from these experiences was that my work, in so far as I had conceived of it, was done, is done, in this formulation at least.

Ancestral work has made me realise that it’s time to reclaim and focus on, to actively create joy, to live the life I have not so much in defiance, but in full hearted joyful glad presence. To let the past go, to allow the residual reverberations of intergenerational trauma subside and rest, to let my ancestors rest, to let old storylines go, to set myself and my ancestors free from the shit we no longer need to carry.

The trouble with focusing on all the suffering, which is what colonisation of our minds after the colonisation of lands can do if our attention lapses, is that it has a way of trapping us in diminished states of being. And that’s only half our story, only a shred of my story, of my lineage. I am made of the parts of the past, and I am more than what came before me. I am what I am and what I have been and I am what I am becoming, as a result of the past and as a leap onwards from it.

This is the joy of growth, or degrowth, of progress that is actually a backward step, by way of returning to the root and seeing things differently, more simply, for what they are rather than what we might have made of them. Even using those words, I hesitate and wonder if I should clarify that growth isn’t always a positive, that regression isn’t always negative, that backwards can be forwards. But it all just muddies the waters, doesn’t it. Because there are so many ways of seeing and experiencing and interpreting.

All of which is to say, I once saw things one way and did things a certain way. Now I’m seeing things differently and writing a little differently. In short, in the words of either the Dalai Lama or Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (probably both) as pithy captures of the Dharma – Everything changes. As I approach my 47^th birthday, I open up to the annual reminder of how good the lived experience of that teaching feels.