As ever I qualify what I cannot express (easily or at all) in word-language alone with the suggestion that ‘western’ word-language (and science, maths, etc) is not good at explaining and understanding things; anything really.
This is especially so when we consider gifts of trauma.
And notions of letting go, in order to become free, and that this can be frightening, because this can bring us face to face with our own mortality.
I’ve written previously elsewhere that my partner Liane Ashberry’s suicide in 2015 was a gift to me, because I am lucky to be able to reframe or re-imagine it so.
What a waste if her self-sacrifice resulted in no good coming from it; instead only cascading despair.
This is part of the myths of reality.
Liane’s suicide, although horrific and nearly fatally catastrophic for me, was a gift to me of unimaginable beauty and wonder.
I add that the horrific years of additional traumas that I brought upon myself after Liane’s suicide were worse than death, because for those years I wanted to die; to kill myself, but could not, because I was trapped in the questionable belief that my own suicide would impact catastrophically on a few (not many) people who loved me.
Suicide tends to cluster and cascade.
But what if we reframe or re-imagine traumas to be gifts?
Perhaps I deprived a few loving people close to me of the gift of my own suicide?
Well, anyway we shall never know about that particular hypothesis in time and space, because it didn’t happen.
There was nothing coming the other way at the time I chose a suicidal overtaking of two long lorries in a night storm on a country lane in Autumn 2015.
A perfect storm of suicidal depression, motorway closure diversion, sleeplessness, 3am or 4am, driving too late, desperate to get home to safety, overworked, especially trying to complete the Ploughed Heart album, scary irreconcilable family and friends dynamics, in the midst of a highly and increasingly acrimonious divorce since marriage breakdown in 2007, a life-saving yet life-threatening rekindled romance from 1978-80, and other shatterings of my life that cannot be pieced together again ever.
Good.
We are better not fixed if being fixed we do not grow to freedom.
Broken things. Move on to freedom. Why go back to being less grown?
Thankfully for the overtaking madness no vehicle was coming the other way.
I’m guessing had there been, at a combined collision speed of about or over 100mph, then I and the oncoming passenger(s) would have been killed, and my loved ones would have had the opportunity either to reframe my suicide and my homicide, or more generously and falsely, a crazy overtaking manoeuvre at a difficult time in my life, as their own gift from me.
Interventions are fascinating.
Do we leave people to discover for themselves and be responsible for their own traumatic or less wounding growth and living towards dying, or do we intervene in the hope that help, even if misguided and wrong, will somehow contribute to a whole life (and wider humanity and planet and cosmos) that is deemed (by what standards and by whom) to be good rather than not.
What is ‘good’?
Which interventions, even well-meaning ‘loving’ interventions, are good and which are not?
And does it matter?
And this is part of the reality myths; that what we imagine could matter, does or does not ‘matter’ according to context.
It is evil to kill a child, for sure, to my mind.
And yet, many who are bereaved by the murder of their children become golden beautiful people.
Millions die anonymously traumatically and no stories are left to be told.
I make no excuse whatsoever for anyone harming a child, or actually harming another person, nor harming any living things aside from a balancing of surviving healthily ourselves with the respect for all else alive or inanimate.
My best interpretation in ‘western’ word-language as this, is that only the mentally deranged knowingly aim to hurt others.
All other people are trying to do their best to make sense of their living, in the ways they see themselves and so everything else, while understandably not thinking very much about their dying.
The notion of ‘gifts of trauma, balance, purpose and letting go’ bring me neatly to a sort of conclusion that by nearly dying (big trauma, and especially traumas) and then recovering, seems how we learn to let go of ourselves and our attachments to anything and everything, while we still have years of purposeful life and work remaining (let’s assume ‘good’, by whatever objective measures, impossible though this is to determine), rather than grasping for these freedoms of letting go when it’s too late for such freedoms to be helpful for us and anyone else.
Is it too late that so many people cannot let go ever because of being medicated unnaturally, or until the final few minutes or months of life?
When and how is a letting go okay or best or not?
You decide.
I decided when I re-imagined my traumas as gifts of freedom.
I let go.
I follow the energies that defy ‘western’ word-language (science, maths, etc).
I ‘be’. Peaceful. Calm. Increasingly consistently. Whether I’m working, resting, or anything else; except sleeping, during which something else is happening that I understand even less :)
I breathe. I live and love each beautiful moment, including the traumatic ones.
Most of all, methinks this brief sojourn on the planet is a journey of spirit. If one ever comes across that notion -I suspect the manner frequently involves trauma- and possesses the wherewithal to explore it, life, the journey, becomes endlessly interesting. A subject due observation from perspectives otherwise unavailable. Not to imply easy, just... interesting.
Language is definitely a barrier as far as conveying the richness and subtlety of experience. The bulk typically lies between the lines. Always open to interpretation.
Just from your (guesstimate) less than 1,000 words your take on your journey falls within reach of the spiritual. A good thing, which indeed is a subjective value judgement. You might already reside there but I can’t tell for certain. Growth would be the operative concept. A good thing with respect to any life, though that, too, is subjective judgment.
Can’t recall what link dropped me here. Just wanted to lend an evanescent voice from the inter webs saying good for you! hang in there, keep up the growing. It’ll all be over in a jiffy, then we go home.