My Lostness

There is always a sad story to begin with…

As far as I’m concerned everything begins with a story and before that it begins with a feeling. There is always a beginning before the beginning. Like the story of your parents and the day that you were born. There is always a before. That is why we are still unpacking the big bang theory and searching the great mysteries for ever more information. There is always more than one truth and here is where I offer up mine. 

For me the fall out if the 3D reality started on a boat the only place where I could stop from running, residing in a place that was designed to move. That boat “The Yacht Samara” was the first place I ever lived that gave me permission to stay. You see before that I had always been running. I didn’t know how significant that realisation was until right up until this moment. You see healing isn’t linear, nor is life our even time. As many have said before me “The lesson will be presented again until it is learned”. Nothing is unbearable and the real trick in life is to learn to bear it. 

I was swimming in a fog of changemaker addiction; experience consumption. I was running from my feelings the only way I knew how. Sef-medicating through co-dependency hoping that someone might make me feel good about myself  and continually thinking that there was somewhere else that I belonged. I have often said that in life I wasn’t spoiled I was ruined. I grew up in the west coast of Scotland exploring bluebells woods, talking to fairies and playing in ruined castles and as someone once said about my village “That to live in The Firth of Clyde was to live your life drenched in beauty” I grew up surrounded by magic it was imbued in the place where I at that time belonged. Until along came the bulldozers, the concrete, the badly built houses and the poorly planned developments and life and I were transformed forever. I moved from there to Glasgow (where I learned that a life of beauty was far from a given) then to the west coast of Canada, New Zealand, then Cornwall where everything was at best underwhelming. 

Something was dead in me. It was only as I stood on this boat feeling the gentle rhythm of the water beneath my feet and feeling thoroughly panicked for what had seemed like an eternity I realised that it was me that was lost. That if life on a yacht could not ease the aching of my gipsy soul what could? It is here that my journey inwards and the true quest for internal answers began. Lost in all the mess that the modern world could offer. No money, no job, no love, swimming in the carnage of unprocessed emotions about all of the above. That no amount of active fixing could solve, that the hamster wheel of hell would not allow me to quench. I was sick in my soul and I knew it. I had nowhere to run, nowhere to run too and no one to fix it. It was down to me to face this invisible beast that seemed to dwell in me and although it disturbed me that I would have to start here where everything had gone so badly wrong there were no other options left. 

They say that we find our fate is the road we take to avoid it. It was true of me maybe it is of you? That is where my story begins, lost on a boat, tethered precariously to the land on the precipice of becoming.  

If you really want to know why this offering is called The Free Buffet we have to go right back to this moment where for a spell I was so poor I literally used to hope that people would invite me round for dinner so that I could eat. Poverty is humbling. It breaks you in ways that most things can’t. Of course at this time  it took everything I could to contain my rage, which of course used to spill over into public view at the most inopportune moments. About how the poor were mistreated and how only those that were deemed viable were ever offered a seat at the table of opportunity. I lived in a place where potential and the future had been aborted for a chance at survival. That the gift of giving is reserved for those that were able to service somebody else’s needs. Even now the discomfort of that knowledge channels through me with the seductive allure of vengeance. 

Eco-Anxiety didn’t exist then. Trauma was a word reserved for car crashes and the growing dis-ease of humanity was an elusive whisper in the undercurrent you couldn’t find. That still needed to be drowned out with drinking and the delusion that any form of action and all forms of solidarity would help. Then adrenal fatigue set in,  which wasn’t a term either. I was exhausted by the insanity of the system. Broken by ignorance and silenced as a result of my speaking. And so I retreated into the world of social isolation. Where the solace of living in human form was a dreary groan that encompassed everything. It was sad time all in the prime of my life. Time was lost and the gains where small. It used to amaze me when I arrived in future.  

These days I do feel I am at the very least ascending. One slow upward step at a time, as me knees ache and grasp tightens. I can’t tell you that they ground beneath my feet is solid or the path ahead is assured. I still sit down on the steps and grasps for breath as my feet slip. It’s ok for the moment. It’s all ok. I have learned to speak to myself gently, encourage myself deftly one step at a time. It’s just for this moment. Everything changes. My inner scape is friendly, my own presence is kind. Rage and hurt only come as visitors. Teachers to be questioned and played with on the eternal path home.  It’s a soft persistence I work with now, like Japanese water torture. The intention is set the seeds are sown and I’m witnessing the growth of an acorn. You can’t see it yet, that force of nature and it’s still there. Writhing, pushing, expanding like an unborn thing waiting to take form. It’s ok to be lost you don’t know what or who you are yet. It’s ok I don’t know either. 

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