2025-08-25 :: Big
The world and life is too big to put in words, and right now... terrible and immense, overpowering, overshadowing, overhanging, a cliff face reaching up and striking out, dangerous. Dangerous silent earth.
So I keep thinking I should start regularly writing again, and keep putting it off. I never feel like it. I feel like staring at my phone, I feel like going to the gym, I don't feel like putting words down. And besides, life is so big so big so big, what's the use what's the point? All of this is so frightening. I am frightened.
Slow, aching grief. Cruel disease. I don't want to look to close because I will be overcome.
Even so, I'm thinking of another mushroom session, take out an AirBNB somewhere silent and out the way, ask A. to come sit with me, and plunge into - into grief? Into life? Into love? Into the pain.
You cannot escape the pain. And if you try, you will maim your heart.
I am trying to navigate this.
I don't think it occurred to me before - and if it's deepening meditation or deepening grief, I don't know - but I realised the other day that if you truly, genuinely, learn to sit with grief - or fear, or regret, or even terror - then they don't go away. To sit with them in the expectation they will go away is to reject them. If you truly sit with grief, the grief will encompass you, enfold you, obliterate you. It will hurt.
There is no way this doesn't hurt. There is no way this won't become the most painful, heartbreaking mind shattering thing I have ever yet experienced. And it is understandable to want to avoid that, but seeking to avoid that pain and that suffering only leads to so much more suffering, and a maimed heart, and I think that this is what the Buddha truly meant, or one thing he was getting at. The way out of suffering lies in accepting the inevitability of suffering. If you can do that... it will still hurt. There is no way life doesn't hurt.
I can write OK if I dance around it.
I started writing something last week - it started long ago, when Britain was under warm shallow seas. It started even longer ago, when plants had first developed lignin and before fungi had learned to break it down, when almost all the planet's land was covered in trees and the undecaying wood of old growth, being crushed being crushed being crushed.
When the world was more new and more full of life than we could ever imagine.
I can write about it maybe in metaphor and write about it in official communication, but I can't write about it honestly, in that space between metaphor and fact where I guess I am most open and vulnerable.
The way out of suffering lies in accepting the inevitability of suffering.
I finally sat in meditation again this morning, no timer, just sat and... just sat. Half an hour on the dot, I opened my eyes and mum called almost immediately. Stressed and drowsy with grief, dad lucid then suddenly not, gasping in terror, frightened, confused. An hour I spent, talking, calming, supporting. She cried at one point, grief-dizzy and crushed and lost, 'I don't think I can do this'.
I don't know that she can, either. But first we need a diagnosis, then we can see what support these is, and maybe with all the support we can find - home visits, transport, support groups, social groups, friends - she will be able to do it. But maybe she won't.
I told her it was possible dad will be like this for years before he gets worse, and she just said 'oh god', and I don't think there was anything there beyond everything I've already thought. I don't want dad to die soon but I also don't want him to live much longer - fuck fuck fuck what a fucked up thing to say, but it's true, the first thing I said all those years ago when I saw what was happening was 'I hope he dies before this kills him'.
He would hate even this. The meanness, the confusion, the anxiety, the dependence, the tantrums. The half-dream of wandering about at night, lost, frightened, confused. Nothing making sense. He bashes his head sometimes, says it's full of noise, full of nothing, full of a storm, full of an empty and terrible sky. I don't think he would want to live much longer.
But maybe I only say that because I still can't believe in death, in the way the living often can't, in the way I can't, outside the first furious madness of grief. I want more time I want more time, I want to sit with him and go through old photos, I want to chat with him in the garden in the mornings, I remember him standing wringing his hands over mum's sleeping body on the sofa, "she's ill, she's ill, there's something wrong!", knowing something dreadful has happened but not comprehending that the thing that was wrong was him.
I want him to tell me again how mountains form and how the strata on the cliffs is laid down. I want him to again show me the signature of ancient earthquakes in stone, show me where the ice sheets scoured the earth.
I need to stop now. I've got too close. This is too big too big to big.