The Joyful and the Worm

Last week, dear Lois of the Cross-Country-Save-The-Pets Odyssey invited me out of the blue to fly to the East Coast next month to celebrate her birthday and mine: if she paid my ticket, would I come? Well, wow!! Would I?!

But something new developed. On the one hand, pure joy at Lois' invitation; on the other, a gnawing, hollow, anxious feeling of "I don't deserve this." As luck would have it, that very same day three of us got together for a practice Voice Dialogue session. I was the last to be facilitated, and my pair of opposites were these two characters: the joyful and the worm. Both of them felt extraordinarily young. Both said they had been with me "forever." There was an interruption during my session, something Martha-Lou had warned us about as being potentially dangerous. I don't know about dangerous, but I did feel somehow split, half the mind tuned deeply inwards, the other listening to doors opening and closing and trying to identify sounds. I felt fragmented and it was a feeling that continued for some days. The presence of the two small children stayed with me: instead of sinking back to wherever they live, they were very much with me at all times, one on either side. I felt I was walking around with my arms around them. A weird feeling.

The next day, I saw HH. I told him about the invitation, my torn feelings and the Voice Dialogue. As a Gestalt therapist, he said, "Let's have them talk to each other here." I was alarmed: in Voice Dialogue the selves don't talk to each other. They don't even know another self exists. He said, rather grimly, "They'll talk with me." I insisted on having the center self present as well: in Voice Dialogue, center is the aware ego; I needed a home base, since both these two were exhausting. They appeared with no trouble at all. Cringing, clinging worm sat to my left, Happy Ali on the right. I sat between them and I could literally feel their presence, these small children, the one pressed up close to me, the other, trying so hard to be cocky and brave, but finally admitting, "I feel as if the sky is falling." I sat between them and mothered them, stroking the fabric of the couch (where I imagined they were sitting) with great tenderness. They cried through me, and I cried for them. As HH said, "All three of you are crying." It was quite a session. What it meant came much later.  I made HH tell me what had happened. He said, "You know what happened." I said, "I know - but she needs to hear it," nodding towards my right. So he addressed that little Ali who has tried so hard all these long years and who now sat there bewildered. What had she done wrong? HH was inspired: he told her, "You're still a part of her. You're not going anywhere. You're the one who can throw a party for forty people with no trouble; you're the one who can cheer people up by making them laugh. She can't do those things. Those things are your gift to her." She smiled then (does it sound mad to talk of 'she' in reference to myself?) and relaxed a little. I said to HH, "Do you remember when I first started coming here, you said I reminded you of the story of Atlas, holding the world on his shoulders? The similarity being that as a child I held my mother on my shoulders, my mother being my world? I feel now as if I have just set the world down. My hands feel so light." It was a cathartic moment. It wasn't that I had set down the burden of cheering up my mother. It was that I had set down the burden of being the Alison who needed to cheer up my mother.

That evening I hosted a meeting at my house. Only a few people from my little sub-committee could come so I had also invited the Advisory Committee. The AC is the committee that does the brunt of the work for Long Beach Meditation. Four people came. Three from my lot: one severely jet-lagged and sleep deprived, one in physical pain, one straight from a long day's work; and one lone member of the AC, up from the desert. Nobody else came from the AC. I was so angry that nobody showed up! Not only that, but nobody had even bothered to RSVP! I thought if THIS group of people can't be bothered to respond or show up, what does that say about the organization? My meeting had nothing to talk about without the others being there. I would have cancelled had I known they wouldn't show up. And so on and so on. Isn't it easy to slip into blame and anger? To get all spitty-faced and self-righteous because after all, look at me, doing the good thing, having my meeting and where were the rest of you... It hit me in the night. Who was it who was getting so bent out of shape? Yet another childish facet, dutiful, responsible, doing everything right according to her sights, in order to be accepted, win a few gold stars, get that pat on the head.

It was all so clear. Who is the one whose hand shoots up to volunteer for any old thing? Nothing is too much trouble, too much work or too time-consuming. And for what? To fill that nagging hole, to silence that wormy voice on the other side, the one that can only cry, "Not good enough!" If I am accepted by the group, better yet, if I make myself indispensable to the group, then I MUST be all right. And all of this chugs along unconsciously, as long as everything goes according to plan. When there's a glitch - when I throw a meeting to which nobody bothers to come, for example, and my reaction is a sort of self-justified muted rage - it becomes glaringly obvious that I have some other agenda going on, some need that isn't being met.

I've been doing this for a very long time. When Victor first invited me to be a member of the AC, my first and honest reaction was to say with a rueful laugh, "But I hate committees!" In the next breath, I hijacked myself with a speedy acceptance, so pleased was I to be a part of the inner sanctum. Thrilled to be chosen, because that must mean I was worth something.

So it has been a hard haul getting to this point two and a half years on. Who wants to admit to themselves that they are not half as good a person as they like to imagine they are? That they have been run for a lifetime by two little kids: one, the pleaser who knows so well how to make herself liked; the other, full of fear, holding all the negativity because the other, so much stronger and  forceful, will allow no part of it in her world.

My first thought was to disband my little committee; my second to detach from the AC. I feel that somehow these two little ones cannot be allowed to run the show anymore - no, 'allowed' is the wrong word. Poor things: they ran it because there was no-one to relieve them of the job. It had worked pretty well, after all - Happy Ali got me a good husband, a beautiful daughter, kind and generous friends, a life with enough leisure time to ponder all of the above. She had no idea that things were not as they appeared on the surface.

The thing is, knowing now what I know, I cannot continue as before. If there is an adult in this house, it is more than time for her to take charge and let those little ones rest. If things carry on as usual, what was the point of all the pain?

Me in my uniform, being cheerful.

Once upon a time, I decided crying served no purpose, sorrow changed nothing, and took a determinedly cheerful route. And at the time, I was absolutely right. I was a child without a voice and there was nothing to be done but make the best of it in the only way I knew how. To make myself be liked, to fit in, and the way to do that was to be happy because "Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone." My motto.  I find it interesting to realize that at boarding school, the place where I had no voice, I who was never sick, was sick at least once a term with tonsillitis. I lost my voice for real and as a result, I got to spend a few days in the Infirmary, being looked after as much as any of us were looked after, by the school nurse/nun. She was not in the least a cuddly nun, being the whitest, palest person I have ever seen, in a white habit yet, but she was a cool, competent grown-up, respected and capable, and I, who yearned to be looked after, at least felt safe if not loved with her.

A card I sent home when I was around 12. Pretty much sums up the way it was for six years of my life. In the picture marked 'change' I am changing my stockings and doing up my suspender, in case you're wondering what that black thing is.

Anyway. If I revert to things as before, then that little girl who had no voice way back then will continue to have no voice at 50 bloody 7. How can I, knowing what I know, go on as before? For all of the four previous Beginners' Courses, I have been there every Sunday from 1 to 5pm, doing the registration, the greeting, taking the form back at the end of the day, updating it on the computer, sending it off to the treasurer, printing it out for the following week. Even when my cousin was here on a once in a lifetime visit from Australia, at the same time as my beloved daughter was down from Berkeley, I made sure I took precious time to do that job. It was my DUTY.

I cannot think of anyone who would do that, everyone else seems to have such clear priorities. How did mine get so skewed? I cringe to remember an incident when Helen was in high school and I was teaching: she scarily fainted twice as we were getting ready to leave the house. I had never seen anyone faint before and it scared me to death. I called the paramedics and even though she had come around, they loaded her in the ambulance to take her to the hospital to find out what was wrong. I went back inside to get ready for school. Minutes passed and the doorbell rang. It was a fireman.

I was surprised they were still there. "Um. We're waiting for you. Are you ready?" he asked. "No, no. You go on ahead," I said, trusting them to do their job. Helen was safe. I had to get to school and arrange my classroom for a sub. THEN I would go to the hospital. When I got to school and told them in the Office what had happened, and the principal asked, "But where is Helen now?" "In the hospital," I said. They practically pushed me out the door to go to her. I remember being confused. Surely doing my DUTY - my teacher job - was more important than being a mommy?
Oh God.

The Oh God comes from this. From right this minute, realizing I have internalized both of my parents' opposing voices, only they are playing from an eerily childish perspective. This is how my priorities got skewed. A common scenario: My mother, shy, bookish, intellectual, hating the superficiality of diplomatic social life, suffering from ferocious migraines, begging my father to be allowed to stay home - or if they had to go to some such cocktail party, that he would promise that they would leave early. Dad, so English, so pragmatic, also sociable and charming, would say in disgust, "Pull yourself together, Maryse!" Showing a rare irritation in his voice, "How can we decide now to come home early? We might be having a lovely time. Why are you always so negative!" And she, with her pain and her migraine, like that was dismissed. She would deflate, literally sag, while he scolded her. She became invisible. And I, the quiet onlooker, Daddy's girl, must have determined in some dim corner of myself, that I would do my duty, I wouldn't let the side down - and there, plucky, cheerful, dutiful, all those things sprang into being to counteract my mother's perceived weakness. So that years and years later, I could abandon my teenage daughter in a screaming ambulance going to who knows where, as she was suffering from who knows what. And abandon her again (along with my cousin) to check in the Beginners' class. I wonder how many times I have abandoned her in this way? As many as my father abandoned my mother, I would imagine.

My volunteering to do it all was part of this 'isn't Alison wonderful' campaign being waged by the little girl. It worked too, didn't it? Except that the approval I was really seeking, my father's, my mother's - ah well, I will never get that, will I? In that last week before my Dad died, he told my sister that she was "the best daughter a man could wish for." I loitered around his bedside, hoping he would tell me I was also a pretty damn good daughter too, but he never said it. Words! He died in my arms, but he never said he loved me. I've been searching for my father's love my whole life. I only found that out today.

It is a terrific joke on the part of the Universe, a masterpiece of timing, that today happens to be the day that my self-appointed father/mother figure, poor long-suffering Victor, is signing the lease on a place in Ojai. Which means he will be dividing his time between Long Beach and Ojai, which is about two hours away. I imagine that he will spend more and more of his time in Ojai, leaving us here to get on with it. To the child - the whole bloody kindergarten in me - this is abandonment all over again, except instead of me being sent away to boarding school, Victor as parent is sending himself away. I thought I was okay with it, had become used to the idea, but for him to be signing the lease on this particular day, in this particular time period, seems especially significant.

In Voice Dialogue, every facilitation is designed to strengthen the aware ego. It is not a place one can live out of, apparently, although one can aspire to. My greatest fear is that here I am, deeply aware of the children who at last see a chance to lay their heads down and rest - and is the adult strong enough to pick up the reins? Am I strong enough? Brave enough? Aware enough? So many years of conditioning to work against. So much easier to say 'stuff it' and go back - only, I can't go back! I see creepy motives behind every little thing I say or do, and where once I thought I was wholly good, now I see how dependent I am on others' good opinion. Most of what I do has the aim of pleasing others. And if it's not forthcoming - look out! Krishnamurti asks if it is possible for us "to live with what we actually are, knowing ourselves to be dull, envious, fearful, believing we have tremendous affection when we have not, getting easily hurt, easily flattered and bored - can we live with all that, neither accepting it nor denying it, but just observing it without becoming morbid, depressed or elated?"

Can we live with all that? Can I? I have no idea. What happens now? I do know that my meditation practice has suddenly received an infusion of energy. Perhaps all that energy I was channeling elsewhere is now available for me to use for my own purposes. I have lost three pounds, after spending weeks and weeks on a gentle gain. I am positive that fat is an excellent defense, a way to feel safe, at least for me. I had a dream at the start of this period, that someone was pushing to get into the house and I was pushing on the door trying to keep them out. Trying to scream to my husband , "Unwelcome intruder!" but I had no voice. And whoever it was, pushing from the other side, was winning. Who was that out there? Was it that poor little disowned self, the little worm? No, it felt big, angry, powerful, but maybe it felt like that because I was so afraid of it. Woke up before I saw what it was, heart pounding, sweaty, nightmare symptoms. Perhaps there is simply something in me pushing to the surface that is saying "Enough! I won't be shut away in the dark any longer!"

Snuffy, Spirit Guide aka Circus Dog

I've been crying a lot. Grieving my Snuffy, my little dog who had to be put down 18 months ago. He was twelve years old, but had been sick for five years with a chronic illness. Back in my twenties, I had a blind psychic friend who told me my spirit guide was a black dog. Somehow I imagined a big dog, like a labrador. A couple of days ago, it occurred to me it could have been a small black fluffy dog; my spirit guide could have been Snuffy. Made me cry. I have not cried for him until now, not once, always managing to say with great common sense, "Well, he was in such a bad way. It would have been one thing if he'd been run over, if he'd been young... but you wouldn't have wanted him to live a minute longer than he did, the way he was." Which are - come to think of it - exactly the same words I have used about my father, wasting away with cancer. I haven't cried for him either, once past the day he died.

Everything is related. Everything repeats, until we get it.

I don't think there is a darn thing I can do about any of it except remain open, inquire into everything and be honest with myself. And start saying no, or at least, "Can I get back to you on that?" That would be a start.

I have faith that it is ultimately good: I created a 'Beyond a Vision Board' just a few short weeks ago in my writing class; it's like a collage filled with images and words that appeal to you right where you are, not aiming at some future time. Mine is filled with images of mothers and children, prayer hands and water, and the words 'Open to Change with Heart' and 'You are You. Whole.'

Whoever that is.

My 'Beyond a Vision Board'

P.S. Writing all this out feels like an enormous weight has dropped away. I thought, if Lois rescinds her invitation, it won't matter, because I have learned so much that I would not have learned otherwise. Instead, today a long phone call followed a flurry of emails and together we booked my flights, made plans, became giddy with excitement. Pure joy and gratitude. No hidden worm.

Letters from Boarding School Revisited

Farnborough Hill

Since writing about boarding school in the Retreat Reflection, sitting daily with the memories, the emotions, now so close to the surface, I found the courage recently to read the original letters I wrote to my parents as a little girl forty-five years ago. 

The week we spent waiting for Dad to die, in October 2005, is when I found my old letters, organized by year and in date order, knotted in bundles with string, tucked away in a desk drawer. I had the presence of mind to take them home with me, unread. They lingered at the bottom of a carry-on bag for five years, until earlier this year, when the little girl I used to be first started to make herself known. I opened that bag and tore into those neat little bundles. Even as I was reading them, I was separating them from their envelopes, getting them out of chronological order - making a mess of them, in other words. I read several out loud to my husband, who had tears in his eyes for that little Ali who was to become his wife. I didn't cry - I read them with wonder. The little girl who had written them felt utterly remote to me.  I zipped up the bag and put them away again, all mixed up, all chaotic. Until today, when I thought I need to take another look, to be honest with myself. Were my memories correct?

I found the very first ones I wrote from Farnborough Hill. (If you don't want to read all three letters, just scroll down to the part in red which describes That Night and below the line of asterisks).

 

The missing postcards I mention in the first letter talk about our nightmare flight from Haiti to Jamaica to New York to London: my first flight without my parents, alone with my sixteen year old sister Claude. I used to get sick on any sort of transportation so my mother gave me dramamine, which knocked me out. Claude was excited to have company on the flight only I was no use at all: I was asleep while the plane was still sitting on the runway. There was a blizzard in New York so we were diverted to Washington and bussed to New York. Once there, as 'unaccompanied minors', we had to wait until all the passengers were sorted before something could be done with us. (Of course we had missed our connecting flight). I remember vividly standing in the airport looking longingly at a hamburger stand and thinking if Dad were here, he'd be waiting in line and he'd send us off with Mum to get a hamburger. I started to cry, which set my sister off, and soon people were clustered around, thinking we were hungry, asking if they could buy us a hamburger. But we just wanted our parents. I thought how stupid these grown-ups were not to realize that. Of course we couldn't say it out loud, we had to be brave... The airline put us up in a hotel for the night and I remember perking up a little to see a television, such a novelty, there was none in Haiti. Eventually we landed in London...

                     ******************************************************************

Friday, September 17, 1965

Dear Mum and Dad,

Have you got our postcards? Golly, it was awful. And to top it off, we arrived at London at 9:30 on the V.C.10 and there was no-one to meet us! We stayed there till midnight and finally the stewardess in charge called the police to get the Timmins [my dad's childhood friend, who was supposed to meet our plane]! Luckily, they were just going to bed, so that was alright. We had a meal and went to bed at 1:00 a.m. We were woken up at 9:00 and had a gorgeous breakfast. Then we walked to Staines and bought my extra pair of socks. So don't worry about that. Oh, I say, what about my books, you know text-books? Are they coming? Have you ordered them? Good. At first when we got to school, I had a feeling like going to the dentist, but now it's all right. First Claude and I toured the school practically to find Alex [the headmistress, Mother Alexander] and Felicity [Claude's best friend]. I saw Claude's room and it's nice. Still, I'll let her explain it. We unpacked my trunk. Then we went to lunch and met Alex. I've met Maria, Gillian, Joanne and others but I don't know their names. I went to afternoon class and we had Geography, Religious Knowledge and French... There was tea but I wasn't very hungry and neither were some other girls so we skipped it. Now there's a study-period and I've almost finished this letter. When I have, I'll go and find Claude.

I wish you were here.

I've got to write again on Sunday, but I'll have more news so it won't matter. I miss you terribly.

PILES OF LOVE, Lots of love and lollipops, Love, Ali

Sunday, Sept. 19

Dear Mum and Dad,

My bed is terribly nice, it doesn't sag at all.

Yesterday I played netball for the first time. It's lots of fun.

I don't like Mrs. Hinton's sweets; they're nutty. Tell her they're very good.

This morning we had a meeting and Alex talked about rules and things.

I was almost late for breakfast as you have to wash (and the basins are MILES away) make your bed, and get dressed, all before breakfast. PHEW!

I've made three real friends, Susan, Maria, and Celia. Susan's my favorite. 

Oh yes, there are two clubs - Photo and Pottery. I'm in Pottery. We had our first lesson on Sat. We made coils of clay and next Sat. we're going to make a pot.

I can find my way around now. I don't know half the nuns names, but if you just say "mother" you're alright.

They've got super books here, Agatha Christie, you know.

Claude's got a terribly nice room. It wasn't before she put her junk around that it looked nice.

Our "dorm" as they say in Enid Blyton books, is meant to be the warmest in the school when the heating's on - unfortunately it isn't on now so it's about the coldest. However I'm quite warm.

The food's quite nice except today when we had bacon. UGH! All flabby.

Yesterday I reduced the whole table to laughter. I carried the tea tray to the kitchen and when I came back, I sipped my tea and said, "I feel like a char." [cleaning lady] I was sitting with St. Theresa's house (Claude and Felicity) and they roared. They thought they'd be stripped of their prefect blazers.

We're having a film tonight. Walt Disney, I think.

Anyway, I can't think of anything else. 

PILES OF LOVE AND KISSES, 

Lots of love,

Ali

Sept. 1965

Dear Mum and Dad,

Thank you for your lovely letter... Do write soon.

Answered Questions - Yes, mum, the pills [dramamine] were wonderful and though Claude felt a bit sick I was fine. I suppose you will have received our other letter by the time you get this one, and as they describe our trip, I won't write about London. I put on all of my woollen clothes and Claude the same, and the wind was blowing, and it was drizzling - BRRRRRRR! Still it was too bad. My first impressions, mum, was that it is quite nice, but now, after ten days without going out, I'm rather sick of it. The first few days I was lost but now, I know most of it. I go and see Claude in the evenings before bed. The first two nights, I wasn't homesick at all - but on the third - it must have been delayed reaction! I practically had the whole dormitory in tears. Then Claude came along and SHE started crying - it was GHASTLY. At last I stopped and Claude creeped up and gave me a packet of SMARTIES! Well, I had been on the verge of going to sleep, but I couldn't after that and so I just slept on and off. WHAT A NIGHT!! I'm alright, now, but I refuse to come to boarding school if Claude's not here.

Gosh, dad, the maths around here is VERY above my head. I have Mrs. Anscombe, who, you'll remember, kicked Claude and her group out and I'm sure I'll soon be following. We had these equations and I've never done them before, so I told her and she said, "What have you been doing then, learning your A,B,C?" Then she asked how old I was, and when I said eleven, she practically FAINTED! So I'm scared stiff I'm going to be moved down, but not if I can help it!

To go back to questions - I get a bath three times a week and otherwise I just wash my face and hands and teeth. I'm in 2C; don't worry, mum, it just is the name of our form-mistress, Mrs. Curren, do you get? Luckily, I sit next to the radiator which unfortunately, is not on. In the refectory I sit next to Yvonne, who you may have heard about from Claude, and a fifth-former called Helena something, they're both nice.

Yesterday, Sunday, Claude and my friends went out and so I stayed at school. Another friend is Bridget. She's very nice. Anyway, in the afternoon at Yateley, where the juniors go to school, there was a short procession to celebrate I don't know what. They wanted a few Farnborough Hill girls to be the choir. About 24 girls went and we sang in this procession. It wasn't very long and lots of parishioners joined and sang. Gosh, I practically had hysterics when this man with a deep voice started, "Sanctus...!" Golly, I nearly died! One old nun started singing in a quavery old voice and suddenly a young nun nudged her - she'd been singing the wrong tune!!! We got a nice tea there - biscuits and orange juice. It was much better than hanging around school!

Honestly, you know that K.T. [an ancient nun, mysteriously known by her initials] has a sweet shop [a closet] open on Sunday? Well, everybody came into the shop and was making a bit of noise, so she said, "I'm not putting up with this" and with that she closed the shop. What a SWIZZ.

Do you know at what time I am writing this letter? At around 7:00 in the morning! Gosh, it's the only time I've got time!

Yesterday, we didn't have too much homework so I wanted to finish it and write a letter to you in the rest of the time. But after tea, there was gym club. Susan and I have signed up for the same clubs; Alex said you had to join two clubs. We joined gym and dramatics, and I've got pottery, as well.

As I said, Susan is my best friend, but I'm friends with other girls, too. Susan's got a boil on her bottom and Mother Renny said she wasn't allowed to do games. She watched, though.

They're about 17 in the club and first the teacher, Miss Crofts, demonstrated different ways to do a head-over-heels. Then we had to do hand-stands (with someone holding us of course!) and end in a roll. After that, we had to vault over these huge boxes but I got stuck on top! Then you ran up this springboard, jumped over this bench, no sorry, vice versa, then end in a roll. It's lots of fun! Oh, mum, when are my shorts for Dicks and Jones [Dickens and Jones, department store in London that sold our school uniform] coming, because I had to do gym in my green knickers.

I sleep with my eiderdown lengthwise tucked in the bed (where I'm writing this right now!) though the pillow is very skinny, so I fold it in half.

Claude went out shopping on Saturday with Felicity and bought me some sweets and socks (long white ones). 

Well, the bell's gone off for getting up so I'll say ___ ____ ____ ____

PILES OF LOVE, ALI

P.S. Just think I'll be back in about 10 weeks and there you are!!!

                      ***************************************************************

It's a strange sensation to come face to face with an early incarnation of yourself. My little girl lives, in these sheaves of paper decorated with blotchy hearts and flowers, in the messy writing, my first experience with a fountain pen, letters careening in all directions. I've put this little self so firmly out of mind, recalling her only in the abstract. After all, it is only in the last four years I have been able to admit to myself that boarding school was not a wholly positive experience. Typing out her words is entirely different to reading her words. The act of writing seems to fire up the traces of those original letters' paths in the brain and I feel again, as I did when I first wrote them, everything she isn't saying. She is so reticent! 

"Golly, it was awful" doesn't begin to cover it.  

By November, I have a motto: "Patience and Perseverance." I discover exclamation marks and pepper my letters with corny jokes and drawings of little girls with pigtails and a big smile, labeled ALI. I tease the nuns, get into trouble and make everyone laugh, including my parents. I learn not to write home about anything that matters. I am trying hard to adapt and fit in and make the best of things. How disorienting to more or less put my hand on the exact pages where the child I was morphed into this cheerful creature I became, veiling my anger, layering my hurt under winning smiles and a desire to please, no matter the cost.

I wondered how much to share of this story. Would it interest anybody? Then I remembered a getting-to-know-you exercise in a parent group years ago: Biography in a Bag. We had to choose five things that told something important about ourselves to put in a paper bag to share with the others. I brought my old school magazine, which had as its cover a photo of Farnborough. When I stood up to face the diverse group, I wondered if they would think me a privileged brat to share this experience. Would they think I was showing off? But when I talked about what it was like to be eleven years old and far from home, the women cried. That's when I realized that everyone has a boarding school story; everyone understands abandonment.

Victor has said we cling to our stories, we don't want to give them up, even, perhaps especially, the painful ones. Who are we without our stories? Like the Buddha meeting the man clutching handfuls of hot coals. The Buddha tells him,"Put down the coals! Your hands are burning!" "I can't!" says the man. "Why not?" "Because they are mine!" We fear we are nothing without them. 

Stephen Batchelor says, in Buddhism without Beliefs, "So what are we but the story we keep repeating, editing, censoring, and embellishing in our heads?" If I could let go of this story, would I? Without this story, don't I lose a big chunk of who I am? 

This is where it gets complicated, where the psychological and the spiritual work intertwine. They meet on the cushion and in my old letters. I close my eyes in meditation and I see my letters. They weigh me down. In my mind's eye, I write the words, uncovering the little girl in her own voice. Which was not a truthful voice. There was so much she didn't dare admit to her mother, to herself. I breathe - and the little girl breathes with me. She IS me. I focus on the body - our body - breathing, and feel what she felt then and what I feel right now. All I know today is a forty-five year old sorrow that finally I am safe enough, strong enough, to allow myself to feel. Today my little girl is free to finally drop her guard and let her heart go ahead and break. It's the only way to heal.

Part 6: Silent Meditation Retreat: Bad Words, Wild Laughter and the End of the Retreat

Too soon it was time for the last sits of the morning, the last dharma talk. Victor added a caveat to the Saturday talk, saying if you have been on the path for a long time, as a mature long time Buddhist practitioner, in the hands of a skillful teacher, then you will understand the teaching, "It's just a thought!" and it will be useful to you.  But if you are a child, the words will not comfort you, they will do you no good ... I thought of my symbolic peacock magically changing my mood and I felt very young, sure these words were directed at me. I felt like a fraud to be at the retreat at all, as though I had wandered into an adults only event scribbling blue crayon on the walls, some place where I had no business to be. 

At the same time, there was a faint lightening of the heart. A relief: I didn't know why, I needed to chew on it, but suddenly we're sitting in the Talking Circle, it's happening so fast, and I'm sad that it is over. The retreat is over. We can speak! So I speak because I can and don't say anything that matters. I don't even remember to thank Victor for his teachings and Tricia for her kindness and her care. (Tricia broke Noble Silence to go off property to the supermarket down the road to buy aspirin for my poor knees on Saturday night. And I forgot to thank her publicly).  Instead, I keep the spotlight on me, I make people laugh. I'm back in the business of Alison as usual. So much for Right Speech. 

But to redress the balance of the earlier terrible grief, I need to make myself laugh. This is instinctive and I don't fully understand it at the time. It happens within an hour of finding our words again.

Tran, Victor and I head to lunch together. I bound up the steps to the cafeteria two at a time. 

Victor asks, "What's with this going up the steps two at a time?" 

I say, "I've been dying to do that! I'm letting my inner child out." 

Victor turns to Tran, "'Letting her inner child out' - she IS her inner child." 

Tran says to me, "I've been thinking a lot about this. I think you are 65 % child, 5 % adult and 30 % wise woman."  

As one part of me is aghast-  65% - so the child within is rejoicing. Now she is rising from the ashes of her dark night. Now she lives again. 

Victor asks Tran, "And what do you think you are?" 

"I'm not sure," she says. "65% too?" 

"Oh, I wouldn't say that much," says Victor. 

At which point I - 100% child and irrepressible, triumphant, alive - shout, "HEY!!! I'm twice her age - she can't be less than me! F**k!!" just as we turn the corner  into the cafeteria - and three tables of women look up from their lunch in startled silence...

Victor says quietly, "Did she say a bad word?" (Tran and I can't speak) and mildly, "Alison, you're not setting a very good example for Long Beach Meditation, representing us just coming out of a silent retreat." 

Of course Tran and I are on the floor laughing.

Things deteriorated further over lunch (mercifully, they put us on the patio, out of earshot of those serious others). Wendy inquires brightly, "What does 'pudding' mean in England? I'm reading a book and they're always talking about pudding." Tricia pipes up helpfully with something about Yorkshire puddings. And I am overcome by the character my daughter Helen calls her 12 year old brother, and announce that there is a sweet pudding called... Spotted Dick! And then the child falls under the table in gales of laughter. Giddy with relief. Not abandoned. Not banished. Not dead. 

Balance was restored. I needed to laugh - I had cried so much. Victor would ask, "Who needed to laugh? Who had cried?"  The child, of course. The laughter - and especially the juvenile nature of that laughter - was a clue that this was a child come roaring back from the dead. From the place to which she has long been condemned, whenever she is shoved back into the past without a voice. It was the mad laughter experienced after a brush with death, on top of which the Mary and Joseph Retreat Center was so much like my old Catholic heap of a boarding school. It could only be words like "f**k" and "spotted dick", (which is the unfortunate name of a real pudding, by the way) from the mouth of the child, that would reassure her that she had not been annihilated.  Reprieve!  Reprieve! That was the feeling, though it didn't make sense until much much later. At the time, I just thought the terrible grief earlier in the day had been redressed by the gleeful schoolgirl: tears and laughter, life and death, and so the journey continues. 

Part 4: Silent Meditation Retreat: Abandonment at Boarding School Revisited.

The little girl summarily dismissed with that perfunctory "Oh poor darling", I did sleep, like the dead. The bell next morning jarred me awake. I had to rush to my cushion for the first sit at 6:00 a.m.. Eyes barely closed, the tears began to fall. They continued through the walking meditation and back on the cushion throughout the next sit. I didn't imagine this had anything to do with the little girl. I still thought these were the tears of that general "sorrow".  My thoughts returned to my tile imagery of the first night and I found it shattering. How often had I heard life is impermanent, life is suffering; nodded and thought complacently, yes, of course. Makes total sense. And now here, crying on my cushion, I understood that until an intellectual concept is actively felt in the body, it is not truly understood. 

I skipped breakfast, went back to my room after the sit and exploded into sobs on my hard little bed, wracked with the sense that every moment, every breath: none of it will pass this way again. Good times too - irrevocably gone, moment by moment by moment. I had only ever experienced anything remotely like this when my mother died suddenly: it seemed that one moment, life stretched out before me, a wide sunny path; the next, it revealed itself to be a razor's edge, our hold on it perilous to say the least, great chasms dropping off to either side. There is a terrible clarity that comes with death: the things that don't matter fall away in sheets. But death is still a vast experience: this was microscopic. Breath by breath by breath. All changes. Nothing lasts. Nothing. 

Funny that I compared this to death early on in the writing of this reflection, unaware until much later, days after the fact, that it was death itself, MY specific death, that lay at the root of those tears. This was far closer to home than the axiom, "Life is suffering." My little girl, felt in the tight heart of the night before, was the one who was shattered. After spending an entire, excruciating year clawing her way into the light, now she is dismissed, and told she is "only a thought?" Oh no! This was a plunge back into darkest pit. This was that terrible night at boarding school all over again. What a place of nightmare for a child! Haunted country house of Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, a Gothic pile of turrets and cupolas and secrets, up on a lonely hill in the south of England. The little girl, eleven years old, lying in her bed with the thin mattress worn to the shape of countless other little bodies before hers, listening to the other nine little girls breathe in the cold room with the high ceilings and blue velvet curtains that were never drawn, and the moonlight playing over the sleeping figures, everyone asleep except me, my voice quaking, "Aren't we going to talk?" and somebody saying sleepily, "We're too tired." And the realization that this was it, this was my life now, Jane Eyre in her orphanage, no waking up from this one, I was awake and still the nightmare continued, no getting up and padding off to find my mother, she was on the other side of the world. My crying disturbed the others so much, one of them went to fetch Mother Glendon, our dormitory mistress, who in turn went to fetch my sister, five years older, who was somewhere on the other side of the building in her own senior quarters. And when she arrived at my bedside with her friend and a packet of Smarties, and I sat up and reached for my dressing gown, so happy to see her, so sure all would be better now, swinging my legs out of bed, searching for my slippers, it was so cold, we had come from the tropics, and this English school was so cold, and my sister saying, "What are you doing?" "Coming with you," I said. "You can't!" Oh! And that was almost worse than anything - to imagine you are saved and no, sorry, you still have to face the monsters under the bed all by yourself, you must live through this night alone. No reprieve. I think I died right there, clutching my Smarties, eating the little chocolates one at a time, the only good thing about that dreadful night, so starting a weight problem that would continue from then on. I survived of course, that worst night of my life until my mother died. Next morning I vowed I would never cry like that again, and I didn't until Mum died thirty years later, and then I couldn't stop.