Once, not too many years ago, in a previous incarnation of this blog, I was trying to figure out how to deal with death. A lot of deaths, actually, that happened in rapid succession and made me question everything about pretty much everything. The parsing out of the loss of so many close people at breakneck pace is still happening (some days I think it will continue to be happening for the rest of my life), but it is, for the most part, manageable. The handful of longtime readers of these musings will recall that I do possess some of the best tools available in woo-woo world to deal with such things… however, during the first bit of the intervening time (has it really been eight years already? Damn!) I managed to damage my health considerably. Truth be told, perhaps that more than anything is the reason I haven’t gotten around to writing on this blog since.
Saying that I don’t have a lot to write about is, of course, an inveterate lie. I am nothing in this life if not a writer, after all. However, something something gulf between design and execution, blah blah blah… suffice it to say that since that other thing that happened to the world (you know, the BIG one, with the masks and the vaccines and the bungled government responses), I had a moment of truth when I realised that I had been neglecting that all-important part of myself and that, in the wake of the ability to perform my function as Witch-Doctor to the unknowing tribe, I had finally and completely run out of excuses. Writer I am. Thus, I must write. So here we are.
It’s funny what happens when one decides to go at it on one’s own for so long. Humans are pack animals. We take our sense of security, validity, and self from our peers, whether we like to admit it or not. If one decides that one’s fellow humans are not valid guideposts for the direction one is supposed to go in life, then one loses the ability to be reassured by others. At best, any well-meaning passerby will fail to provide any except the most cursory and general encouragement. At worst, one will feel utterly and meaninglessly alone. I’ve had both, and I can assure you the former is sometimes worse than the latter. One learns to love one’s own company in circumstances or radical aloneness. But the blank stares, the uncomfortable silences, the risky avoidances of people trying to relate? That sucks.
Anyway.
The other thing the World-Changing-Event took away from me was the inveterate travel schedule that gave justification to the moniker “the Wandering Dragon”. I had already for quite a few years, on account of my declining health, been thinking out loud that I needed to stop traveling (for reference, I did the numbers, and for the entirety of the six-year period during which this blog had its first life, I did standup comedy, and All That Death™ happened, I was never in one place continuously for more than six weeks at a time. How’s that for a jet-setting lifestyle?) However, not until travel was banned in most of the world did it finally and noisily ground to a halt, and I was stuck in one place for over two years. Now, that was a life-changing experience. However, as all good things in life, it passed, and just earlier this year I found myself in the hills outside Florence, Italy, completing a training in craniosacral therapy that had begun eight years ago.
Eight years is a long time to be halfway-done with anything. It was a bit of a faff at the end, really, because the knowledge had become old, in my mind. I was out of practice with the particulars of it, the nitty-gritty as it were. Not that I’d forgotten how to do it, mind you. Those skills are in one’s hands and mind-set, perhaps more than they are part of one’s discursive thought. However, I felt bad that it had become blended in with the rest of The Work, even if the end result was the same and I did, in fact, complete the training and receive my rubber stamp in the butt, er, I mean, certificate of completion with my teacher’s congratulations.
So, I asked myself, what now?
My teacher, Crazy Daoist Guy, and I, had a conversation about it. I told him about the writing bit, and about this, and also that I’d been thinking that I needed to attend to the writing more. Write some stuff, getting it published, the works. And I also said that I’d been thinking that I didn’t really know what to do with The Work, partly because I’d been doing it for so long, fallen off my own bandwagon, gotten sick, and then been completely unable to do it for so long that it all felt completely pointless. Something like that. I may be taking some artistic license here. What he said, tho, was a lot clearer than my musings. Spot-on in his uniquely crazy way, he said, “yeah, you know… that’s the problem with climbing all the mountains and finding all the teachers and learning all on your own: you wake up one day and you realise you’re still waiting for someone to send you your Jedi Robe™ in the mail.”
Boom.
And then, just to drive the point home in its entirety, he added, “how would it be like if you decided that craniosacral training was the last mountain you climbed for a while? Be the valley for a bit… let the rivers flowing down from all the mountains you climbed flow down to you.”
Be the valley. Yes, I’m certain that I have that tattooed on my body somewhere. Still, it was both refreshing and very scary to hear it, as getting advice from my favourite source of crazy wisdom invariably is. I did say I felt I was neglecting the writing, didn’t I? Well, here we go.
I probably will never stop doing The Work. It is a sacred trust, after all, and for all my stabs at involuntary humour, I do take such things seriously. Besides, it is kind of my single set of marketable skills, and I do need to maintain my posh lifestyle. I have decided to do this other thing, tho, and do it for realz. So, in the process of integrating that, I’ve come across this blog and remembered that it started, way off in the prehistory of ten years ago, as an idea to have an outlet for writing.
Let’s see how it goes.