Fourth Form of Madness

When I was about 12, our family  got chooks.  They were beautiful black hens with scarlet speckles around their necks.  I used to love to watch them pecking around their pen, stirring up the dirty with their forever scratching feet.  My brother and I would sometimes play a game of releasing all the girls (as they were affectionately known) out into their larger pen and then see who could round the most up into their smaller sleeping quarters.  Sometimes they would burst loose from their confines altogether and roam our larger mid-surban backyard eating all the parsley and assorted vegetable garden goodies they could find before being returned to their chookie prison behind mesh wire.

They were all magnificent creatures, but by far the chook that stole all our hearts the most, and was also the consistently best egg layer, was Moses.  Named by father for reasons only known to him, I’m guessing biblical flashback, Moses was by far the most splendid girl amongst them.  With graces that can only  be bestowed by the gods, Moses ruled that chook pen with the cold, steel, beady eye of a most convincing and appropriate Matriarch.   Nothing went on under her watch without her say so.  And that was why I was so surprised when a certain turn of events happened one hot mid summer days in the mist of school holidays.

It was like any other day, as I meandered my way down the back yard, being careful to stick to the shade, the shadow, out of the blazing mid day sun.  I was going to check on the girl’s water levels and collect any eggs that may have been laid already for the day.  There had been a lot of noise from the pen earlier and I felt confident that there would be a bounty of eggs to collect. Instead a rather gruesome discovery lay ahead of me.

There amongst the dust of the scratching feet of the girls, lay a fallen hen who was missing many feathers and was looking feeble and unwell.  Instead of the other girls showing any signs of concern or offering any form of assistance, they instead were taking turns at pecking maliciously at the fallen hen with aims so true and strong that it make me flinch each time a beak struck her.  And there was Moses, off happily pecking up random grain that had been flung the furtherest from the early morning feed.  Off taking care of her business the best she could whilst the others settled a civil unrest in true might is right style.

I was childishly and idealistically appalled.  How could this happen on her watch, how could she let the whole group peck to death a stricken hen,whilst merrily feeding in the corner, her refusal to engage or even acknowledge  the vile scene condoning her support of what was happening.  And it was then that I saw it, her powerlessness in the face of group action.  Moses only had status, power, dependent on the approval of the group of girls she led, without that she was just any other speckled neck hen with a slightly better than average egg laying ability trying to get by along with the rest of the brood.  In the mist of that blistering summer’sday, a chill overtook my being.

Recovering from my initial shock, I quickly rushed the group of blood hungry pecking machines and did my best to shelter the fallen hen from them.  The mauled and mutilated hen survived the ordeal but my trust in groups did not.  Group dynamics, to this day remains one of my biggest fears and I give it all the respect it deserves.  This is an ill defined,  often poorly understood leviathan that does not care for the rules of rhyme nor reason but seemingly has rote learnt all the words in the songbook of dogma. This makes it a most menacing foe indeed.   A foe that you can never entirely be certain that you are not, in some way, forming a silent alliance with, somewhere in some far off corner of your own life.

This week a new rule became installed at our house.  No-one, under no circumstances is allowed to let the cat our after 4pm.  Yes puss now has a curfew.  I’m not one for imposing rules on free spirits but this one definitely needs to be chained a little.  Over the years puss has developed some bad and one could say slightly annoying habits.  The first is she forgets she has been fed.  A little forgetful is fine but not when it is coupled with a demanding on the second meow at your feet. This loop continues from the time she gets up till the time she is locked in the laundry at night with a nano-second of relief provided when she is actually eating. It is like living groundhog day over and over again.  But I got to say she sure has helped me practice shutting out distracting noises.

This second bad habit came on in the last year or so.  Bedtime would come for the household and I would go open the front door to allow her to come in as she is always usually malingering on the front path or hiding in the hedge.  It used to work like clockwork, I open the door, puss runs in, gets a pat and then gets installed in the laundry (aka her bedroom that she shares with the dog).  Now it has turned into an odd ritual of me begging for her to come in and bribing her with whatever goodies are on hand.

The other night it reached it’s crescendo.  It started as usual, me hovering at the door in my shortie pjs trying to entice  the cat inside whilst still retaining some of my dignity with the neighbours.  Each time I edged closer to her she retreated away a few steps.  I got down to her level and tried the old, “here puss, puss, puss, puss” Nope not giving up any ground.  Next I tried the old “I’m just going to the letterbox, and I am so not interesting in you puss”. No joy, the minute I set one foot in her direction she was off to the edge of the road, which she knows sets my heart in my mouth.  After 15 minutes or so this was wearing thin, it was time for the big guns – food, puss is not one to deny her desires.  So there I am, under the moonlight shaking her bag of biscuits whilst by this time hissing between clenched teeth “Here kitty kitty kitty”.  Nope, puss has chosen this moment to exercise some self control over her usually out of control eating habits.

And then my solution appears.  For some time now I have been feeding a stray cat that I think was left behind when some people around the block from me moved out.  Despite my hubby’s disapproval, I have snuck biscuits out to the friendly and full of personality little fellow when he has come looking for food.  The shaking of the cat biscuits was like music to his ears and like the piped piper I led him to my front yard in a kitty trance.  Well the minute puss clapped eyes on her nemesis, she turned tail and trotted off inside quick smart.  Nothing like a lesson in gratefulness to motivate right action.  I left a healthy handful of biscuits for my partner in crime and gave him an affectionate pat on the head that he loves and then legged it inside before the approaching headlights caught me in their view.

Earlier this week I had a blogging crisis.  Some lovely person from the Ukraine had decided to embellish all my blogs with hidden embedded code – in the techy geeky world of my hubby this is known as malware – malicious code.  And I never even noticed a thing 🙂 The first I knew of it was when hubby dropped me an email at work to say that he been working for the last 6 hours on my blog page to clean it up and gave it the all clear.

It did get me thinking though, that sometimes it is easy to resemble the malware blog page model in real life.  How much malicious coding have we taken on board, either voluntary or involuntary, that we then operate from, most times from a totally subconscious level.  What constructs are lurking within us that pull our strings like we were puppets?  It’s hard to say as we are all rather like icebergs when it comes to these issues.  There is the insy winsy part of us existing in the conscious world existing as the tip of the iceberg, and then there is the large hunky chunky murky subconscious floating along in the darkness of the water, the massive majority of the iceberg.

I have often heard life described as an adventure, I believe that adventure is to delve into the subconscious part of your being with the courageous heart of an explorer, open to all experiences, come what may.  There are many ways to start having a conversation with this part of yourself, but none of them use words, this is not the language of the subconscious.  The subconscious loves to speaks in many other ways, and invites you often to listen.  It speaks though mythologies (the central themes), symbols, synchronicity, dreams and feelings (yes those old things), intuition and many more ways.

It’s popular to think that perhaps you shouldn’t get stuck in exploring this part of yourself, that you should transcend it.  But it is impossible to transcend this part of yourself.  Bear with me a bit and I will try to explain.  All of us have pretty much done the “ultimate” transcending to be able to say “this is me” in the conscious realm.  To transcend something means to go beyond the meaning of something in the conscious realm and find a higher knowledge, deeper knowledge.  To know things in the conscious realm, they must exist in time and space.  The body exists in time and space, and therefore  you can know it, in a segment of time you can know that form as you.  But the mind does not exist in time and space (I don’t believe the brain to be the same as mind).  The mind is a formless, bodiless structure.  It can not exist in time and space.  In any one segment of time you would not be able to say , this is my mind, here and forever, this is me.  Therefore to have any concept of who you are (in terms of your mind) in the conscious realm, you must transcend yourself, to arrive at a concept of you.  Concepts are great but they are just concepts, abstract.

The subconscious is an invitation to return to a “truer”, more “unfettered” version of you.  It’s an invitation to sink deep into the murky, dark water and surrender to what you find there.  This descension is a necessary journey which allows you to deconstruct the “ultimate” yet rather false transcending you have already done.  It is here where you will start to learn all those things that you have squirrelled away, sometimes on purpose, sometimes unconsciously, that now pull your strings in the conscious world.  However, unlike the malicious code embedded in my blog page, these things do not need to be removed, it is enough to have awareness of them.  To see them in all their raw beauty (yes beauty).  Awareness gives you choice.  If you know these things have the power to pull your strings, you can then decide if you want them to.  To me, this is true freedom, a kind of freedom that is open and accessible all.  Happy journeys 🙂

I’m working from home at the moment and I must say I quite like the experience. I save two hours in travel time which means I can start earlier and knock off earlier giving me plenty of time to do the truck load of other things I also want to be doing. Also I am finding when it all gets to stressful, usually indicated by me shouting at my computer whilst simultaneously banging random keys, I can take a break, do some yoga and then come back all “marshmallow” and “light” in nature 🙂

On one such break, hubby (who is also working from home at the moment), and I decided to watch a movie on AppleTV (sorry a bit of plug for Apple there but I’m not sponsored by them so it really is my own opinion that it is brilliant). We (I) selected Vegucated because I love a good doco particularly about re-programming of people’s habits. The doco was primarily about taking 3 die hard New Yorker meat eaters and seeing if they could go Vegan for 6 weeks. Now they just didn’t give them a bag of salad and say good-luck, no, they educated them about the meat industry’s way, about what foods are good substitutes for egg, meat, cheese, diary etc and put them in touch with all sorts of activist and support groups. We were talking 3 serious meat eaters and all of them at the end of the 6 weeks was Vegan or vegetarian with intentions to remain so. Incredible. Actually, make that 4 people, after what I saw on Vegucated I don’t want to eat meat either.

I have a long history with being veggie. Me and veggie are like another rendition of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton – a hot, and totally passionate romance that so easily turns sour. Suddenly good turns to bad and you have to abandon your love, yet you walk around feeling incomplete. I have been a veggie 4 times and each time I love it ethically :-), yet each time my body revolts and loses so much weight that I just look so sick and I get depressed, really dark.

So after watching Vegucated and having a huge howl over the segment on how animals are treated in the name of producing food for us, I declared “I’m going veggie.” My ever supportive husband, did state that I best be learning how to take care of myself better this time and then started singing “Your once, twice, five times a veggie…..but you are always a omnivore to me…”. Promising that this time I would actually read a “How to be a Veggie (dummy’s guide)” I kicked everything off with making a delicious spinach pie out of one of my yoga books. Seriously I think that might be the first time I have cooked in nearly three years and I loved it. It felt so creative and cool that you could mix all these things together and come up with something new and edible.

To be fair I am breaking myself in slowly, seeing how it is goes, baby steps (yeah this in itself is new to me, I’ve always been a bit of an extremist). I’ve decided to still eat seafood at the moment. I went to see a neuro-chemical brain specialist a few years back. He was pretty special. He was zen buddhist (it had passed through his Japanese family) and he was like opening the window on an airless room. He was so vivid and intelligent, that one genuinely felt better just being in his presence. He also loved to save dogs, we are literally talking hundreds of them. At his private rooms, it would not be out of place to find yourself surrounded by three dogs, usually one on your lap, one at your feet and one in his lap. It’s kind of a nice way to chat. During one of these chats he suggested to me that I might need to take a certain amino acid that currently is being produced and sold only in New Zealand if I wanted to be a vegetarian. Therefore, I am kind of waiting for that to come through before I cease eating meat altogether.

There is a part of me that wishes one day I would wake up and find that I no longer like the taste or smell of meat and that I don’t really want to eat it at all. I wasn’t born one of those types of veggie. My brother was, he hates red meat and could take it or leave it and as an extra kicker until recently was allergic to seafood! No not me. I feel like a vampire off True Blood that is living off the synthetic version of blood, “true blood”, whilst all the other vampires drink the real thing. I still don’t like to be around meat if I am hungry and as a reflex action will start munching on anything else non-meat around (my version of true blood). Still I don’t trust myself, hungry, alone with bbq chicken. I’m sure with time this will get easier, until then I will just have to put my ethics into practice and stop acting on habit and start acting on how I “ought’ to be acting out of “duty” to fellow beings.

Yay we’re still here! No end of the world drama to deal with which means I best get on and do some christmas shopping that I have been putting off!!!! It may not have been the end of the world but man it sure felt like it to me on the night of the 21st. I was at friends having a few drinks and being cooked for (yay my favourite). I had a headache earlier in the day but it suddenly slide up up to a Deathcon One status as I sat there chatting at the dining room table. I got panicky as my head started to scream and I felt like I was also going to vomit, which only made the situation worse. Luckily due to plenty of shoulder and god knows what else reconstructions my friends have undergone they have plenty of serious pain killers available. I downed what they gave me and literally collapsed on their couch. Two hours later, with people chatting around me, I woke up, dazed and groggy and totally confused. My head still sore but manageable. I only hope I hadn’t snored whilst unconscious.

The fun continued into the next day. I awoke at 6.30am with every intention of doing yoga. Infact I had planned to do the tri-fecta of yoga classes, assisting in another and then assisting in a third. Life continually teaches me not to plan, I only wish I would listen. There was no way I was getting out of bed, the migraine had returned with avengence. I thought I could sleep it off and go to another class closer to home at 9.30am. But 9.30am came and there was still no way I was leaving that dark room. So I surrendered and popped some more pills and sunk into a deep sleep full of vivid dreams.

They were the most dark, mythological, joseph campbell types dream. On waking I wished I was still seeing my Jungian dream analyst therapist. A while back when my life had taken a turn into craziness, I dragged myself off to every specialist and a couple of yoga knowledgeable I could find. On my first visit, the beautiful, very womanly Jungian therapist said to me in her no nonsense way, “relax you’re sane, your not going crazy, but your not here for psychoanalyst, why don’t we just do dream analysis”. At that stage I was dreaming prolifically so I thought why not! It turned out to some of the most interesting and revealing self work I have ever done (and painful). I got more bang for my buck when she revealed she was also a bit of a knowledgeable on chakras. This wonderful therapist who had studied under the right hand of Jung (studied straight under this assistant) also had this wonderful esoteric side. Turns out Jung did to, he was a big fan of Kundalini Yoga and believed that this style of yoga, coupled with self-analysis (contemplation), would get you home.

So in the end, I didn’t end up getting out of bed on Saturday until 4.30 in the afternoon. Never in my life have I slept so much or dreamt so much. I felt like I was in a brave new world as I got myself ready for a dinner out with my friend. I felt a tinsy winsy bit like a walking zombie as my head still wasn’t 100% there. However, the good foods and conversation helped me come to a bit. When you have been debilitated for even a short amount of time it makes you ever so much more grateful for everything in your life. Gratefulness is such a wonderful feeling to manifest and harbour in your life. It can be one of the rocks that keeps you centred when all else is crazy. I find when I don’t focus on being grateful I pretty much turn into a spoiled monster – whinging about this and wingeing about that. Very pleasant I know. So I try to chose grateful first and foremost. Simple choice which makes a big difference to how you live.

I’m off now to ready myself for my mother and her two energetic dogs who will, along with my dog, turn my quiet house into a mad barking kennel and I will smile, grateful for the experience.

Last night as hubby and I enjoyed a dinner out at a local restaurant, I overheard a conversation on another table. I’m no Mrs Mangle but I do enjoy good conversation and love nothing better than to discuss, sometimes a little too passionately and heatedly, a topic of interest, particularly if that issue is about how to live your life. So I start to get drifts of the conversation and fairly soon I realise the man on the next table is retelling advice he has given to his young daughter about how to behaviour at school so that she doesn’t stand out or cause others to pick on her. My heart and ears both hear this one. Apparently, his daughter is an “individual” and seems not to have learnt quite as quickly as the others to blend into the crowd and to not stand out. His advice still rings in my ears ….”You just have to learn to be like all the other kids, to say the things they do, to like the things they do, and to pretend you like them. Then you can come home and be yourself and tell us about it”.

My heart felt heavy. I immediately identified with that little girl and felt the loneliness and separation I had felt as a child many times when I realised I didn’t always fit in with the views of the crowd. I was always the one that asked questions, caused conflict and said what I thought, even went it meant being austericized and picked on. I remembered many times during primary school and high school verbally fighting with fellow students across classrooms due to our different views. I think the only thing that saved me from being expelled on more than one occasion was that I excelled academically and I also was usually fighting about ethics somehow in a round about way, which appealed to many of my teachers.

I never wanted to the cause of conflict, or confrontation but I came from a stigmatised or afflicted background and the gift of coming from this background is that you have to decide from an early age, are the masses always right? I guess I decided no. What do I mean by stigmatised/afflicted? My father was a manic depressive and my brother was gay. These were things, particularly when I was growing up, that were treated as negative social indicators and whether they realise it or not, other people treat you accordingly. Therefore, you are sometimes taught to internalise this negativity towards these situations and feel somehow “not good enough” or “not like everyone else”. The living truth is, these things are just life, plain old life with no wrong or right tag but just how life comes. It’s the social that always has to judge and grade and I guess it is always the social that I have fought with. Often I would engage in heated verbal exchanges with other kids about my older brother. I have always loved and idolised my brother. He is funny, sensitive, so full of charm and so full of social justice. I decided from an early age that no one was going to tell me that loving whoever you wanted was wrong. This rationale that allowed me go against social rules even when at the time the majority of society was telling me otherwise has been a wonderful gift.

I secretly prayed that the girl, who’s father only meant well and wanted to protect her by telling her to act and think like everyone else, wasn’t going to follow his advice. I prayed that she would instead have the strength of character and inner will to go again the crowd and be herself, whatever that may be and whatever consequences that would bring. Some of the greatest crimes in this world have been caused or at least allowed to happen by people just wanting to be one of the crowd, by people not wanting to shake the boat or speak out against something that didn’t seem right. I prayed that she would not be one of these people……. And then I ate my hubby’s pudding because it was there and finished off the last of my coffee and stopped staring at the other table.

So I am leaving work one day this week. it’s earlier than I usually leave so I am feeling some sort of relief and release as I make my way over a busy city overpass. This particular one is my favourite. It has big plain trees growing up around it and when you walk over it, it almost feels like you are walking in the treetops. I get two steps onto the overpass when I spy what looks like a dead parrot, lying on it’s back and feet curled shut. The only problem with this overpass is it has clear, reflective backing on one side and the birds fly into it thinking they are flying into a tree.