Grief Therapy Group Stream

and there i was just sitting and listening letting it all in mulling it over in my heart hearing him talk and talk and talk because he needed that space that time for speaking for telling the story that major story of all our lives the story of the dying of the light the dying of the light and it was so moving as he spoke through his experiences of letting his father go and at so young an age only forty two or something like that and here he is barely nineteen years of age and he himself a father of a baby girl and yet this little fellow sitting before me has truly lived in this his short life for as he said himself in his own words that he chose to be present as his own daughter was being born and that he chose also to be present as his father drew his last breaths and as the machine beeped and beeped and beeped and slowing then to a continual drone of death that droned away until unplugged and i was moved and i was touched as the other four boys sat and listened and embraced him in that listening and that listening is a powerful metaphorical embrace and it was powerful so powerful that it was empowering of all there present and i continue in this world to wonder at the opportunities where i am graced by these chance occurrences and moved and touched and inspired and shaken to my foundations and yes i do need this shaking of my foundations and i do need my roots pulled somewhat because that is the way with life we are made stronger in being challenged and all the old wisdoms come calling at the door of my memory that adversity makes us stronger that we would not grow as persons were we not tested in the fires of such adversity that like st paul said of old that we are somehow broken but never crushed with christ on our side and to my old and fragmenting mind this christ can be a metaphor for all new life that is created within us by those trials we experience as we make our way through life and these words i want them to be a wisdom for me i want them to be reminders for me of the tenuous hold we have on the fragile plant that life is and with my former friends who are now dead and gone lost to the world of the flesh these words are poor mementos of my conversations with you and here as i type i remember gerard smith and gerry donnelly and eugene murphy all gone but their presence remains in my life by their questions their enthusiasm and their humanity and these words are forming themselves against the background of the cold drops of rain spattering the window panes of my attic study and i sit and let the click of the keys of my laptop be a mantra a sort of prayer for these my late friends and for the boy whom i listened to today i still marvel at your courage because you are a liver of life you are a drinker in of the mystery it is in its birth and in its death but yet you must be good to yourself you must learn to listen to your own paining heart and be gentle on it for you have much life to live...

Undone, Undone and yet again Undone

A Picture of my 94 year old demented mother

...and it's difficult to understand always difficult how those random juxtapositions happen from this death to that and to the other and thoughts and dreams and images always fleeting of faces long since departed come to this mind unbidden and still the world goes on from losing this bank card to the other to losing one's way in a new city or in some other strange place to breaking a rib being mugged failing or passing or honouring an exam and all this juxtaposed randomly always randomly always randomly and then the passion of the little man who will be president that little man with the big voice and the bigger vision that big vision of what we can be as a nation of what we can be as a people if only we have the courage of our convictions the congruence to be true to self like old Polonius recommended to his dear departing son: yea yea yea and this above all to thine own self be true and all that follows yea yea yea all that follows that one in that case can never be false to another to another to any other human being or even any being as i remember my childhood dog my childhood dog still licking my wounded or cut knees ah yes and the randomness of it all and now there are keys on our calculators to generate numbers at random and all and still as a thinking mind and as a hurting soul i long for an order to the chaos of these thoughts and yet in the seeming chaos of this uncensored stream of consciousness i write on and on and on in order to plumb the depths of my being in order to be true to my self whatever or whoever that may be and i am aware so well aware that even in the randomness of these words there is a thrust to order there is a thrust to meaning there is a thrust to authenticity and to the truth that lies buried like gold in the caverns and caves and passage ways of my being and so that little man our new president with his big voice and greater dream and greater vision is leading me leading this little thinking being this little insignificant mind typing these little random words always random but always in a randomness seeking order ever seeking order and meaning and i think and and i meditate now on the slow death of the wife of a work colleague random death for me but a bitter painful soul-searing one for the poor colleague and his two soon-to-be-orphaned children and this randomness and the suddenness of it all like a shower unexpected pelting down seemingly out of nowhere on a fine day such a fine day and yet little lives are ending ending ending in big and greater pain and it is not you or i at least not yet and as i type i meditate like Sogyal Rinpoche on the Tibetan book of the Living and the Dead on this coming death which is a little death for me and on the coming death of another colleague trying valiantly to struggle on and not to give in i praise his courage and yet i cannot let go some of the injuries he has inflicted on me and on other friends of mine but i know that as i go on and on and on those injuries are getting less and less as they are all about ego all about ego-ego-ego-ego which goes on and on unless vanquished and so these words are stuttering and halting and random and seeking order and meaning and they are not behaving as well as i should wish and yet the little unseasonal daisy in my lawn half-way through an unusually warn November is too random too unusual and yet that is life so random and that is what the great professor Stephen Hawking says that all is random that living and dying is all a matter of luck all a game of chance which we are invited to play and yes that is where some personal philosophy or wisdom comes into play we must learn to play as creatively as possible whatever random hand of cards we get in life and press on and on and dress ourselves appropriately or as appropriately as possible for whatever weather we encounter for whatever winds lash against the canvas of our earthly tent we call our body-soul or soul-body or whatever or whoever we as named are in all our humanity and animal-ness in all our weaknesses and strengths in all our littlenesses and greatnesses in all our brittleness or leochaileacht as a Gaelic poet put it and so and so the sheer randomness and juxtaposition of a drunken man slobbering over a half-eaten dinner and the silliness of two dogs copulating or two teenagers screwing on a settee or or or and these words fade into nothing and trail away away away into nothing nothing nothing...

Post-Holiday Angst

it is so long since i wrote a stream of consciousness that after a year it is about time i let my teeming mind overflow or even act as a conduit for what has arisen within where the metaphor of mind plays interesting games with the brain and somehow i know i ache as i write these lines in that old existentialist sense after having spent the morning raiding nietzsche and lou salome and paul rée for ideas and yes i know that in that triangle of love in that ménage a trois mostly and totally intellectual as it was there yes there was a psychic or intrapsychic depth a depth only keen thinkers could know and yet and yet so much of that thinking was linked with suffering so much of that thinking was linked with pain and this does not surprise me because these great kindred spirits were existentialists who fought against all convention they were frontiers' men and women yes they were the ones who railed openly against society they were the prophets and the seers into the depths of the modern soul and how much they knew especially nietzsche of the catastrophe ahead that all that enlightenment and rational stuff could only lead so far so far so far and it did indeed it would eventually lead to two great world wars oh they were right there was and is no linear progression of truth or of science because everything as the great jesuit poet gerard manley hopkins put it wears man's smudge and shares man's smell as he so well put it in a poem uncannily and ironically called god's grandeur and it was nietzsche who proclaimed the death of god that is the death of humankind's true beliefs because they had sold those beliefs very cheaply for a mess of pottage and i will go on having just come back from a two week vacation in the sun where i read much about the depths of the soul the sheer frightening depths of my own soul and this is what i learned on the pulses of my own heart as the romantic poet john keats i think put it that truth is only truth when felt on ones own pulses...

Gated garden, St Ann's Park, Raheny

and how can i deny the truths that rose to meet me and rise to meet me now as i type these poor words this stream of consciousness here in order to plumb my own depths find my own truth as nietzche would put it after all that's what it's all about not about finding the truth in capital letters like an objective truth out there cold cold cold - no no no that truth is warm it courses in our own veins always always coursing and let me be true as nietzsche and ree and salome and yalom and all the philosophers and psychiatrists  i like to read are true to themselves as this is the very heart of existentialism and i want no marshalled thoughts here no comas no periods or fullstops nothing like that possibly what e e cummings was about possibly what james joyce was about possibly possibly possibly and all is possibility if only i become brave enough to take a chance and in the end learn to own my own fate learn to love my own fate as nietzsche was wont to put it and he did express it in a beautiful latin phrase amor fati the love of one's own destiny and even yet i can subscribe to this hard and difficult and painful though it is and i can subscribe to his metaphorical doctrine of eternal recurrence because once one has really found and integrated one's truth one's very own unique truth only then only then can one choose rightly and wisely because once one has realized and integrated that truth there is nothing left to choose anymore because that is existentially you and you alone or i and i alone...

and newman had it right you know when he said it was impossible to separate out the thinker from the thought that these two were inextricably links and that other old phrase i learned from thew great lecturer i had years ago the great barney kelly that phrase from the french enlightenment thinker buffon that le style c'est l'homme meme and nietzsche knew this and all his friends knew it and no wonder he was one of the first existentialist because he knew the man could never be separated from his thoughts and that was salomé's writing in her memoir on nietzsche and that was her recommendation to anyone wishing to read the words of this complex oh so complex philosopher and she said we must direct our attention to the human being and not the theorist in order to find a way in nietzsche's work and yet strangely newman who was anything but an existentialist knew this too and of course all this shows how fallible are all our categories and after all are not all philosophers tired of telling us that they do not want to be forced into this or that school of thought after all each is uniquely themselves and so i write in a confusion  here yet in a healthy confusion that is integrating all the subpersonalities in me all the positive and negatives even the bisexuality in me and the tension between both poles that is alive in me these days the tension the tension the tension from which comes often the inspiration to write the inspiration to set things down on paper

and like nietzche and breuer whom yalom has walking through a cemetery in vienna i walked through the cemetery where my father is buried yesterday and it quietened my soul salved my conscience it was as if life was greeting me in death yes in death in the very inevitability of dying and death and i read the headstones like i would my prayers when i was a boy all those years ago when i was a little lonely boy so long ago yet in a strange way just like yesterday and as i bowed my head before my father's grave i stood in the silence in the profound and deep yet bright silence and watched all those lovely honey bees go from flower to flower on the fuchsia bust resplendent in red in blood red blooms among the dead and they were all there all there people or souls whom i once knew liam o. not far from my father's grave and pat mc. not too far away either and i walked and walked but could not find my cousin mary's grave but it was somewhere there somewhere but i had thought of her yes i had and then the unmarked grave of my past-pupil who drowned one night on his own vomit jesus he was only sixteen only sixteen not even started out on the journey we call life and i waled and walked and walked and sort of cried silently inwardly in my own soul at the impermanence of things at the fleeting nature of time and at the frightful inevitability of dying and death and death and dying and yet of life and living...

and the sound of the wonderful honey bees brought me back to tommy quinlan's grave back to the grave of my dad my dear old dad who once told me that someday that someday i would understand and he was so right so right so right and it is like that great drama by eugene o'neill that we studied in college all those years ago like that great play long day's journey into night where mary tyrone says to her son that life teaches us to accept what we cannot understand what we cannot understand and yet and yet there are those like nietzsche and salomé and even i who wish to understand and yet that is the cross we have to bear our deep desire to understand and in the end there may be no understanding per se and yet and yet we are meaning-making creatures and we need to make meaning and whether that meaning is in the end meaningful in an objective sense is irrelevant once it is meaningful in a subjective existential self and so

i will write and i will write i will write myself beautiful and ethical and true and moral and congruent in these words that come not just from my thoughts or from my mind but from the whole man from my thoughts and from my person as salome says above ah yes these thoughts are from the very centre of my being  from what it feels like to be human from heart and from head from deep within me and it is a cry for meaning like monck's famous painting the scream and even if the universe is indifferent we have friends or at least this writer knows he has friends who will listen to his tales of weal and woe

... then the sound of the combine harvester and the tractor from the next field to the cemetery drew my attention drew my attention as the world of basic work continued but it was a work that binds us humans to the earth from whose bounty we spring and on whose bounty we live great mother earth great mother gaia in all her rich abundance as the harvest was now being cut and the farmers are so happy this year as there will be a bumper harvest for a second year in a row and life and the living and the planting and the growing and the reaping go on apace and will continue to go on and it is all a cycle a cycle yes a cycle and it is those who deny the cycle and believe in the illusion of the linear myth that truly die...