The Reclamation:

What is ours and what is not?

This is possibly going to be my most personal piece yet. I say this as I allow the words to lead me and you a new place from here…something I decided I would do with my Substack, editing only typos and confusing grammar, but essentially allowing the new to come through me.

Today I am musing upon what is mine to carry. Earlier today I had this image of myself on the road of life, being given parcels of various sizes and weights by people I knew and loved; significant others let’s say.

And the criteria of this ‘gifting’ seemed to be ‘Here is this thing that I am barely aware of, and I am carrying, and deep down I know it is not mine, and I have a feeling it is yours, here take it..I see something in you that tells me that this will help you’.

And in some cases I did not even open the parcel to see what was inside. I just added it to the growing pile, where it held expression in a soulful, silent, yet potent way.

As I look back, there was a point where I also realised that it was time to open some of these packages, see what I had been carrying, no matter how ugly. This has been a process of near on two and half years now.

It all started with the day that a slow and gradual disintegration of my Father’s brain began. Memories are anchors that pin us to a definable self - as his dissolved, the myths that were holding our little, fragile family unit together began to unravel.

I could not see this then. It is only now that I see it, and can assemble a sense-making story out of the numerous pieces of strange new experiences that pulled me in.

Families are held together with silences, spaces filled with things that were never spoken about but which exist still in the bodies of those that remain to tell the tale. I have been a carrier of such a silence, it has taken form as a bubble inside me ready to be infused with the language necessary to describe it. On some days it required rage to articulate it, on others quiet reflection, and on others it just sank back into being the bubble, ready to be re-infused.

At one stage it appeared to me that he was being transformed into a kind of Zen sage who only saw wonderment everywhere he went, singing songs and gasping at clouds and trees. Except for him there was no escape from this eternal now. Paradoxically in order to inhabit the now we need to have the not-now, the well of stored experience, the contrast. During this stage, I was usually taken by surprise by something I had not noticed. But in my all-too-many not now moments the bubble was being repopulated with more fragments of story.

Like how important it was to me as a teenager to be seen, and to be loved…even at my most reckless and rebellious. And how he missed this vital piece of information, too much caught up in another story of order and obedience which really only applied to men in uniform or government officials.

I have revisited this re-learning a few times in my life - and it’s a very old story of how the heads of the goddesses were removed from their bodies, and peace-loving beautiful people were subdued, abused and overcome. A story that still exists suspended in the solution of the vicious, interventionist, judging God. A story my Father must have heard (encoded) so many times in Sunday School and maybe also at home. Disorder and disobedience enraged him, he could not allow it, he was afraid of it.

So one of the parcels he gave me was the one that said that I in my unruliness was fundamentally flawed. He who lived in a house of women had never looked inside this parcel himself, and yet it was alive and seeping a corrosive stain, a hole, a silence, in his heart.

‘Here, you have this radical de-sensualisation, it looks like you need it in some way…I have no need of it’.

To be separated from our bodies is never chosen by us. And it’s odd to think of it as a gift unconsciously, and painfully, given.

Unknowingly, as soon as this poisoned parcel (that was not his either, but passed on to him) was delivered he simultaneously gave me an embodied knowing…that has over the past 40 years or so been carefully and gradually excavated by me, with the help of others, to reveal the possibility of a society where peace and harmony reign - and I found with gradual re-embodiment that the foundations were still in place. Beauty was one of the pillars I still knew, that even in that moment of being ripped it was still there, and with it awe and wonder.

The Reclamation is a storied and storying excavation of these silent sites created by repeated unasked-for gifting - the bubbles - which we can, if we know how, fill with regenerative narratives of recovery that might be the saving of us all. Fortunately for me, my Father also graced me not just with the gift of song but also with the magical gift of improvised story. He and I went into that enchanted forest over and over to meet the guides who lived there.

What are you carrying that is not yours? Can you allow it to resurface and transform through the medium of your innate wisdom? Reclaim it as your own, re-newed.