Patchy (Title)

That's how it's been of late, uniformly patchy. Reliably without rhythm.  Random, you could even say, but less predictable.

A few days back the whole thing, all of life, was about fading.  My being was consumed with the whole energy of fadingness.  At the time I figured maybe when you get two major systems of one's self - in this case my body and the part of my cognitive self that has discipline, focusses and concentrates on stuff - more or less attuned to the same frequency, like the frequency of fadingness, it becomes overwhelming and you can go deeply in there.

I remember weeping at the understanding in my cells, in the feel of my marrow, that fading is what I now am.  The weeping time passed, and I was OK with it.  Saw myself still me enough, just fading all the time.  Fading became less a thing and more a point on the compass - part of the quadrant my path leads into, as least as far as I can see in this light.

Then it changed, we entered another patch. This was a moment of searing love and kindness, directed everywhere, and I was simply radiant for a little while. Only a little while. Like a recharge break or something, in between these fossil layers of accreted self I traverse backwards now, seeking source.  Life did its bumbly thing, a jumble of smallnesses of emotion, tiny patches of once-normality now permanently shot through with this new light, this fadingness, rendering every little thing potentially nostalgic, and thus new again in my heart. I got tugged around from patch to patch for a while.

Today though, I had visions.  I awoke looking forward to a session with Robyn in the afternoon, our amazing friend and bodyworker.  It's hard to pin down what it is she does when we have our sessions, but she uses Bowen Technique, massage, is skilled in things like Trager, is a master reflexologist ... a hands-on healer in other words.  We seem to mostly do my feet these days as the rest of me has such little flesh, and because I love it.  It worked out to be mainly head and feet today, and whole new things happened.

A while back a Buddhist friend, on hearing the news, reading my last post, was moved to write me "Don't be afraid when the visions start" and I tucked that away in my memory, for it seems in my experiences in living and dying to date that the Tibetan Buddhist way of thinking is extremely close to the money with what is happening in my dyingness.  I have great respect for their knowledge tradition.

So when the visions started, I had this friendly admonition there and it was fine.  At first.  I saw myself as an energy body from the outside - this is not a new thing at all for me, but the clarity and 'place' I was seeing from were radically ramped up and different - and as with the realisation a few days before of fadingness, I got a deep draught of deathness, and a sudden flooding tide of visions I cannot in any way describe to you except using nonsensical mashups like 'white textured depth' because the visions were as much felt and sensed with every part of me as they were seen.  Importantly however, they were seen.  A question arose against this marvellous and entirely unscary background then - what if I get afraid?  I was suddenly afraid of being afraid and doing all sorts of panicky things. Afraid of chickening out, as if I had some sort of choice ultimately anyway. Afraid that when the next watershed line to cross came up for me, the next step in letting go, that I'd prove driven by fear more than love. And I could see and viscerally feel how the fear pollutes my being.

It felt utterly fucking devastating, and I'm not sure I've ever been that scared.  And yeah, I have had some scary shit happen in life too.  This feeling and the energy patterns around it nearly swamped me.  Robyn knows me very well and we have a trust that says to her "do what you feel I need without fear" and she facilitated my going into it all very deeply.  Got me stable and grounded enough to get to the car before going home, topping up quickly on some food (I'd barely fed anything all day) and essentially surrendering. Passing out, in a way.

Love conquers all.  Meeta was just there for me, and I felt that 1% feeling.  It's the same 1% of your being that (for most of us who have survived and even thrived from the experience) kicks in when you take something like LSD that remembers to tell you that you can't really fly.  But in this case, it was that you cannot be drowned in fear when there is love. So it was safe to go into it, and I let go a second time into the maelstrom. I let myself be that weak and terrified and beaten. Judged, found wanting, without courage or spine, a creature of base reflex only, clinging like an amoeba at whatever environment sustains it even one second longer in life.  Devastated at the thought that I might after all be completely devoid of spirit, a shell, an utter mortal with nothing beyond my animal senses and hard-wired physical drives and fears. Not connected. Just a gaping wound in the skein of my own consciousness, raging with sensation at the dying of the light.

And all that.

And it was, you know, OK in the end.

So that patch passed, but not without passing on its baton of learning.  What I have now to adorn the fading sideways light is a little monument to all the fear I have learned in my life and what it at heart rests on; the simple cellular panic of not finding breath.  I have a new respect for that terror, but know something about it now.  That love actually does overcome.  Even if that is a conceit of the desperate ego, a lurching fistful of balm against the horror of Not Being Here, it is true.  It is true for I have experienced it as such once, and thus, might again. So the fear has been more deeply felt, and it is still there, but that's, well, OK.  I know it for what it is now.  OK. And one thing I do not doubt, is that love is here.

So that's how I've been.  And you?