The L Word

So, why another long silence…. Maybe you’ll find out in this post but this is going to be one of my ‘real’ streams of consciousness I suspect, so, if you want to come along for the ride get a cup or glass of something you enjoy and sip slowly, breath gently and forget about meaning or sense and maybe we both may feel what I’m saying:0)

There is an old phrase ‘words come cheap’ and I understand it to be about actions promised with half a heart, very little engagement of brain and even less of intent.

I have difficulties with words, both those offered to me by others and those I try to find for myself.

In the first case I often find that I have been expected to hear many words that have not been said, or at least that simple words and phrases become complicated puzzles that I rarely seem to be able to fathom.

If someone says to me in an email ‘I will write more tomorrow’ I wait and I wait and wait…it may only be until the tomorrow I understand as the next day but often it is days weeks or months later that the tomorrow arrives and it makes me wonder. If someone says to me in a letter ‘got lots more to tell but have cramp in my hand will write later but will get this first instalment in the post to you now’ I wait and I wait and wait…it may be days weeks months or even year before that later arrives in form of a letter and it makes me wonder. If someone speaks to me on the phone saying ‘ oh I have to go now we’ll speak later yes’ I wait and I wait and wait…it may be days or never that the phone rings and it is that person’s voice I hear again and it makes me wonder.

In the intervening days weeks months or years to never ending time span I will try to remember, I will probably send a card, short note or leave a message wishing them well, hoping they are ok and saying it’d be good to hear from them again but most of all I will wonder.

Communication is a gift beyond saying you could say but in the saying a door is left ajar and I wonder about the draught of hot air that oft times whistles through.

Because of a life like most people, complicated by the small which become huge and the huge that become small I too can say tomorrow, later, more to come and find myself led away by circumstance, situation and sometimes plain need. But I have said tomorrow, later or more to come and this seems to me like a small promise, nothing written in blood or given forfeit of a life but found needing acknowledgement if only in one line on the back of a till receipt to say hello I will get back to you just need to get back to myself first:0) or some such thing.

The same thing goes for those times when someone tells me about an idea, project, piece of work they are planning, in the middle of, looking for a conclusion etc., which they want me to see or share or just comment on when they are ready or they give me a time scale and what seems reason to check with them from time to time how its going. I suppose just letting them know I heard what they said and think its important enough to at least ask about regularly is part of the communication, as I understand it. Also the space for them to say to me, hellish time here everything on stop, stalled, binned but know the communication is still open and am glad you are listening.

This is me, this is the way I interact with other people, with myself and with the Earth. Things are said, I try hard to listen, to hear and respond with heart, mind and hope. I understand that the response doesn’t have to make a hell of a lot of sense there just needs to be a response that reflects the hearing of a heart and mind trying to understand and accepting if they don’t that hearing is still happening. My approach, my way of interacting, the way I respond, live my life are all influenced and informed by the discovery and continued discovery of ‘The L word’, apologies to those who may have hit a search button and found The L Word and expected to find Bette and the gals, though if you read on you never know you may have been right:0)

The L Word that I am referring to at the moment is in fact many words which start and end with Love but in between are found light, laughter, longing, life, living, leaving, loosing, lunatic, and oh yes, lesbian.

These are the words that impel me towards communication, propel me in to situations I might otherwise shy away from, encourage me to try much I feel incapable of but most of all they are the words that have built a human heart in to a fighting machine that holds laughter as weapon and smile as ammunition, have held a mind, blasted into pieces by external and internal forces, in some form and shape that still finds operative a possible word, not always spelt correctly or powered in any straight line but chugging along joining dots and discovering pictures that make sense to me – realising that to many it still looks like a whole load of unconnected dots:0)

I grapple to find the right words to express to my self what I am hearing-seeing-feeling and fail so often it is no surprise that unless I am asked directly or have someone check on something I have said, I say and then stay silent, for the fear is not of saying the wrong thing – I do that with the aplomb of a seasoned couldn’t give a fuck practitioner but of course the truth is far more complicated than that and its more the look of shock on someone else’s face or realisation that a deathly hush has befallen a previously animated scene that tells me I let the magic dust out the bag again, so silence is from fear of saying the ‘right thing’.

Fear is not even the word as if I am honest fear is a reality but it’s never been enough to stop me walking forward, opening my mouth and pointing my finger at that elephant in the room the other person or persons are carefully avoiding mention of let alone touching. Not because I see that as my mission, reality is, I rarely see that it’s me walking forward opening my mouth and pointing my finger at anything but the obvious and if its so obvious why wouldn’t I?!

The last couple of weeks have been full of those walking forward moments and getting the shocked silences and appalled looks, which were the good responses:0)

Starting and ending with Love seems good enough for any day but it’s those in between words that give shape form and often meaning to that word.

Light has obviously been on the agenda in the shape of unseasonably clear blue skies with warm insistent sunshine that was a wonder and a delight to heart but a real trial for the eyes and brain. Peeking out from shadowy confines is not my idea of fun nor conducive for feeling good about the day and my place in it. But there was laughter at the delight and sheer unadulterated joy expressed by two anarchic dogs revelling in the warmth and expansion of air and sound found on sunny days in a garden on a hill side in Wales.

There was life and living bound up with longing, leaving and loosing as I faced information I wished I did not have to hear and time no longer mine.

The leaving was about place person and way of life.

The loosing was about being in the moment and it being this one not that one.

The longing was about wanting, so much, for the place person and way of life to be possible once more.

All this happened as anniversaries began to find their way into my consciousness and find echo in some of the days so recently passed.

Thirteen years ago the word lunatic was very much in the air. It was ascribed to me, who had come home to find the woman I had shared my home, bed and life with for years asking me to leave as the ‘experiment’ had failed some test or other and a better professor had been found to carry out further research with and the Herr professor had better equipment and power than could ever be offered by ‘just a lesbian’.

Note, this is not my assessment of me as I have never been ‘just’ anything and was more fazed by the fact that the word lesbian could be attached to just by this woman than the fact a man, the loss of my home and death wish it felt were all being proffered so sweetly. Excuse me but wasn’t saying ‘just a lesbian’ a bit like saying I was ‘just a human being’ negating the fact that I like all other human beings is so bloody multifaceted and complicated how could I or they ever be just ‘JUST’.

I walked away, I walked away without looking back, I walked away to a place that had no roof, one cold tap and windows and doors that opened by falling out but I walked away because I knew I needed to walk forward.

Many things were said, as they always are, many things were not said but the word lunatic as in mad, sad, bad was heavy in the air.

Mad because ‘voices’ and ‘visions’ have been my gift for the last forty years and love me/live with me and ‘they’ come too… which means that obsession, paranoia and a veritable panoply of ‘normal’ responses and being are underlined and highlighted by unknowing souls but someone near to my heart and mind could find the talking to trees singing along with the stars taking clothes off to jump into every stream, river and sea endearing, could understand that the going for a short walk and arriving home three days later coupled with the oh just a minute ( which could mean just that but often means hours days or even weeks) I’ve just got to make marks on paper-fix pieces of metal together-record a tune as I’ve heard-seen-felt something did not mean lack of love or thought or care but of an infinitely bigger landscape that could take in the shopping along with writing a symphony in colour or words.

I was sad because I attested to the fact that I was normal and blatantly that was far from true – background, the woman in question was a well regarded mental health specialist, who turned out personally to be completely sold on the medical model of interpretation even if she professed otherwise so she chose to pathologise all my behaviour from innocent flirting to the need for silence and solitary times to think, process and produce meaning for my self with hopes of sharing that with her in some understandable form. Not only was there this behaviour to categorise – at length, but there was that habit of mine of seeing the elephant and naming it, even when it wasn’t in the room but maybe in a heart or mind, to hear a conversation never voiced and answer the question, to be far more attuned to the weather of a soul than was healthy or sane. Then of course there was the fact that my body had begun to disintegrate and her disgust at some of the finer ‘displays’.

Saddest of all in the litany that was read with extreme seriousness and obvious belief was the interpretation of others ‘collusive pandering’ which had done nothing to help ‘matters’. I let the side down somewhat at this announcement for the people referred to were too dear to my life to let it pass so I laughed uproariously and then just roared, not a sight for the faint hearted and to this day I remember the fear in that woman’s eyes and her exclamation that a) I was about to physically hurt her and b) she KNEW that I had cheated on her throughout the whole time we were a we. That was when I walked away and didn’t look back.

I am voluble, gregarious, noisy and lots of other things but I am most of all someone who believes completely in commitment, promises and honesty all tied up with love respect and truth. Yes I have physically hit someone but that was when I was threatened with violence and actually he ran at me with such force that when I put my fist out I broke his nose and I still wonder who was most surprised. Yes there was a period in my life when I had a list not of shopping items but of women’s telephone numbers and days when I was expected but youthful over enthusiasm was replaced with respect for myself and discovery that other women did not understand my ability to be totally there but that the there could be more than one place. That monogamy was a word fully explored and accepted and if it had been stretched breached or just plain ignored would have been told because that was part of the whole.

I saw the fear in someone else’s eyes in the last couple of weeks when I roared my un-acceptance and intent and for a split second I saw a woman’s face who I have not seen for thirteen years and a moment stood still with me falling out of it into nowhere.

This was not another relationship being terminated without warning, this was not a familiar voice berating me with hate wrapped up in professional jargon rather it was expression of truth without meaning and care without love. It began with one medical professional who wanted desperately for his words to be good news but being the honest guy he is knew they were ‘just’ news and it and I needed time to become anything.

Unfortunately there was someone else in another room who decided they needed to express some of their ‘insight’.

That was when the day almost thirteen years to the day came swimming back into view when I heard this fuckwit begin to pathologise me and my reactions to the news that his colleague had given me and how with help I could alter this. I was a ‘bad child’ who needed firm boundaries and guidelines to accept the truth…. he went on for a while and I sat there VERY silently, which of course was taken as acquiescence by this arse, that was up till the moment I stood up very slowly both because I was actually very tired and in a deal of physical discomfort but mainly because I wanted to make sure he stopped dribbling his incontinent shit all over my head long enough for me to slam my fist down on the desk smile at the by now non-smiling arse and roar exactly what I thought his credentials were and where he could stick them before I rammed them somewhere even more painful if he didn’t just shut up. I saw the fear in this mans eyes and found myself laughing uproariously at his stupidity, that I would have created such a noisy introduction to belting the living daylights out of him seemed the daftest thing anyone could do. Surely if I was wishing to hurt the guy best to jump up and do it all a piece than give him a chunk of this mad, sad, bad mind at highest volume that waiting room and any security person worth their badge could hear.

I walked away, I walked away and didn’t look back but the somewhere ‘back there’ walked along with me and I sat for a long time in a car park and wept for a woman who used my ‘difference’ to hurt me and expressed her fear that I could push her off a cliff and laugh whilst I walked away with another when all the time it was me who fell off the cliff and understood she had been walking away with another for a long time.

I wept because I felt I was so close to being pushed off another cliff and that the society I live in is about to sanction that kind of action in my life, simply because responsibility is a mad sad bad word when expressed and reasoned by someone who doesn’t fit in to the ‘norm’.

Being tired and physically in pain is not reason for voices or visions, if it were the case at the very least I would have been walking around since the age of ten with a broken arm and fractured skull to account for my ‘difference’. I haven’t even bashed my head against many walls :0) because another woman came in to my life when I was only a year and half old and she told me from that day till the day she died twenty nine years later that not only was I loved, wanted and delighted in by her but that I could be loved wanted and be delighted in by others. That the differences that became more and more apparent as the years went on were just that not reason to go screaming off to ‘thought police’ but means to explore and discover ways of living and being that would make my heart smile and expand and maybe occasionally make others smile too. She never lost that belief even when her daughter began to go walk about, talk of conversations with trees and stars and knowing things that had never been spoken but could easily be seen with a child’s heart and eyes.

These last two weeks have been hard not because physically I have been in some major discomfort, they have not been hard because travelling to ‘the man’ has needed to be entertained and executed rather more times than was truly physically possible, they have been hard because I found myself understanding more fully what the years here have been about.

They have been about remembrance so deeply rooted in the very fibres of my body that a memory compromised by various things did not need to worry about the blanks.

Then a snippet of information given with kindness by one, interpreted with crassness by another and received by me with shocked smile and the moment juddered to a halt and I tipped backwards whilst trying hard to at least stay put if not walk forward.

I remembered the fear and disgust in one woman’s eyes and I felt fear, not of her or the fuckwit I raged at but of a government that would wish to put lives in ‘safe’ place simply because they don’t tick enough of the right boxes that are placed in such a way that I could never tick them even if I wished to – which I don’t if you were just wondering and have actually read this far:0)

I remembered the delightful dangerously loving woman I called Mum and I wept for the space and place she helped me create, nurture and accept in my heart and mind. I remembered the woman I fell hopelessly and gloriously in love with when I was 17 and half and the adventure we had painting London pink for too short a time before we both agreed that we had ‘things’ to do which meant physical parting but hearts and minds always stayed connected across continents and years until I found myself in a cottage with a new roof still nothing more than a cold water tap and a lot of paper stuffed in to window frames walking towards her once again knowing it was to help her walk forward one last time. We didn’t know in the late eighties about the dangers of blood transfusions in less well developed countries, we didn’t know that flu like symptoms could be messenger of bigger things so when she was involved in a serious road accident in Africa we rejoiced that she survived and for the generosity of blood donors.

We still rejoiced when I agreed to be there, hold her hand and help her have a safe and peaceful journey onwards. There was no suicide pact, there was no need for that, just the promise to ‘come read to me, dance to Ella and remember me beautiful’, it was the longest twelve hours so far of my life and ones that I would repeat tomorrow if she were to ask. I did not need to remember her beautiful for this was the woman who understood and accepted my ‘difference’ revelled in the discoveries and had hot soup and warm bed ready when I returned from adventures even if that was across thousands of miles or within reach of gentle brush to a cheek what more could I see and feel her to be but always beautiful. Ella was a shared passion found when we both attended a black full gospel church not because we later found out either of us was there for the religion but for the fantastic sound that came out those doors every Sunday. We did dance and as we knew too much ‘excitement’ is too much for a gal prepared for a journey.

In these last couple of weeks I have remembered the momentary look of fear in her almost blind eyes as I gently lifted her out of the warm bath I had shared with her and whispered Ella was waiting but when I said I’d be there all the way and watch till the birds sang at sun rise before making any phone calls she said the final words she would ever manage, thank you. I cried then and have since not just because they were fine, wonderful words to hear but that other woman who gave me home and the chance to call her Mum had ten years earlier said the self same words as her last.

All this and more, has left me silent here in this last two weeks. Has found days without sleep and more days with less than enough sleep and days with sense that in the rage expressed was found love given and kept safe deep within that does find me knowing………

There was life and living bound up with longing, leaving and loosing as I faced information I wished I did not have to hear and time no longer mine.

The leaving was about place person and way of life.

The loosing was about being in the moment and it being this one not that one.

The longing was about wanting, so much, for the place person and way of life to be possible once more.

And then this morning I read these words –

“Courage is just fear walking”

They made me laugh out loud with recognition and as I laughed I heard other laughter from times gone and knew that it really does all begin and end with The L word, LOVE.

Comments

[CdV]

Crumbs. You've been going through stuff. I do think "difference" in a rural environment is a very complicated thing to negotiate. I find people in the country, if they have not lived in many other places (any other places) are not as self aware as people who have lived alongside others from a variety of cultures and critiques. Anyway, I 'm sorry you have been having such a hard time in encountering the fear and ignorance of others.

[Cathy]

I just discovered your last two posts and will read them this evening. Be well, dear friend. The journey continues though I understand that change is at hand.

[Cathy]

Dearest D/W -

I've finished reading this eloquent, elegant cri de coeur. Dear friend . . . I send you my love.

[Pica]

(o)