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Deborah J. Brasket

~ Living on the Edge of the Wild

Deborah J. Brasket

Tag Archives: Blogging

Joy Amid the Turmoil: A 2020 Recap

28 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by deborahbrasket in Blogging, Culture, Family, Political

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

2020, Blogging, Covid-19, life, new year, Politics

The year 2020 may have been the most turbulent year any of us have ever known. Blogging in such a year was challenge enough. Trying to recapture that whirlwind may be beyond any of us.

But I will try. And at least it ends on a note of joy.

Looking back at my first blog post of 2020, I wrote about how challenging 2019 had been. My wish list for 2020 was the same as my 2019 list, as one year had not been enough long to bring the happy endings that I had hoped for. My wish list for 2021 would be a repeat of the last two years, except I’ve put wish lists on hold for the time being. Things are too uncertain, and the turbulent times are still with us.

For me, the turmoil of 2020 did not begin with Covid, but blew in on the tailcoat of 2019 as I wrote about in From the Tailwinds of 2019, Hope Lost & Its Glimmer.” My February post “I’m Praying for You to Die” detailed more of the trauma. But Covid only compounded the turmoil, as noted in March’s post Homeschooling Again & Who’s the Boss.

In April I wrote about The Joy and Grief and Everything in Between that came with Covid, the mixed feelings and emotional turmoil so many were feeling as we tried to survive the initial lockdowns and isolation. We did not realize then how long all this would be going on, the horrendous death toll it would bring, or the economic disaster.

In May I wrote about Poetry in the Time of Corona. It must have resonated with a lot of readers as I saw it move into my :Top Ten Posts” list and rise to number 4.

In June during all the racial strife, the police brutality and protests, I began a series of posts about my “Brushes with Blackness,” how Black lives and Black culture colored my whiteness, and helped shape my sense of justice, fair play, and compassion for others.

In August I wrote the unsettling and surreal world in which we all were living in Still Waiting to Land . . . . I wrote: “Clearly we live in interesting times. A curse? Possibly. A cleansing? Hopefully. No wonder we feel as if the rug has been pulled out from under our feet. And we haven’t quite landed yet.” I still feel that way.

I followed that with Wildfires Everywhere, Politically and Literally about watching wildfires gobble up California and cast an eerie and ominous red glow over the land, even while the Democratic National Convention was providing a glimmer of hope midst all the devastation.

In September I wrote Grieving for America, and Getting Past It, and then my favorite, just after the election, Truth and Love Wins, and I Can Breathe Again.

Unfortunately the political turmoil did not end with Biden’s victory as hoped, and perhaps even has gotten worse, which seems unimaginable. Yet, for me personally, 2020 has still ended on one ecstatic note.

At the beginning of this year I wrote: “The one gift 2019 gave me (which is huge and fills my heart!) is hope for my granddaughter when she came to live with me. Hope that she will remain in my care, happy and safe, healthy and strong, responsibly cared for and dearly cherished as she grows into a young woman.”

That gift kept growing in 2020. Everything I had hoped and planned for concerning my granddaughter’s welfare came true, as I wrote about in My Arms Are Empty, but My Heart is Full. She is happy and well and living the life of her dreams with her aunt and uncle: surfing, hiking, biking, movie nights snuggling on the couch, reading the Harry Potter series together before bed, laughing with her new best friends at school, and telling me all about her fun-filled days on our weekly video-chats. She was asked recently what the best thing about 2020 was. She answered, “Moving here. Else I wouldn’t have this life I love.”

So for all the turmoil of 2020, and whatever upheaval 2021 might bring, I can comfort myself with that huge gift of joy.

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“Vast Emptiness, Vastly Full”

02 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by deborahbrasket in books, Poetry, Spirituality

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Blogging, Buddhism, D. E. Harding, Derek Walcott, inspiration, Love After Love, On Having No Head, personal, Philosophy, poetry

Gustav Klimt

There are a few refrains that I turn to again and again when I want to get a clearer sense of who I am beyond what appears in a mirror or an ordinary, limited sense of self.

Some are from Buddhist or Taoist texts that I’ve written about or alluded to on these pages:

“Able to be the mother of the world”

“Not-two” Or “Not-I”

“Oh so delicious!”

Some are from poems I wrote to capture a particular state of mind where I was “there”–Not-I.

“I am clean, uncluttered space . . .”

“Drifting mindless round the bend, bursting out, bursting in.”

“Vast emptiness, vastly full” is another refrain I turn to that helps me to move beyond a constrictive sense of self to something that feels freer and truer.

It comes from the book On Having No Head, Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious by D. E. Harding. Some excerpts follow.

The best day of my life—my rebirthday, so to speak—was when I found I had no head. This is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seriousness: I have no head.

It was eighteen years ago, when I was thirty-three, that I made the discovery. Though it certainly came out of the blue, it did so in response to an urgent enquiry; I had for several months been absorbed in the question: what am I?

. . . . What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking . . . . Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouser legs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

. . . .  I seemed to stop breathing altogether . . . .  alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void . . .  utterly free of “me”, unstained by any observer. Its total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.

. . . . [I]t felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. . . . . In short, it was all perfectly simple and plain and straightforward, beyond argument, thought, and words . . . . the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden.

I’ve had that sensation of being “vast emptiness, vastly full” and it feels more real, more “me”, than my ordinary sense of self. The full-blown experience doesn’t last long, but the sense of it, the memory, the feel of it when I enter those words vast emptiness, vastly full is heady. It takes me somewhat out of myself and into a sense of being that is freer and fuller. And truer. It brings me home to myself.

Which is probably why I love that poem Love After Love by Derek Walcott so much.

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

. . . . Feast on your life.

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Three to Share: Beauty, Art, Place

07 Monday Jan 2019

Posted by deborahbrasket in Art, Blogging, Culture, Photography, Writing

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

art, Blogging, blogs, inspiration, Nature, photography, quotations

fortunyporticibeach

I love discovering new blogs that inspire me and want to share three, among many, that I discovered this past year.

The Beauty We Love

I turn to this one often, for the captivating images as well as the inspiring quotations. Two I enjoyed most recently were by John Muir, the first enticing us to saunter reverently rather than “hike” when we are out among nature. He tells us how the word “saunter” comes from pilgrims who are traveling through France  ‘A la sainte terre’, or  ‘To the Holy Land.’ Another reminds us that we are kin to everything

When we try to pick out anything by itself,

we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell,

 and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals

 as friendly fellow mountaineers.

Recently I featured another post I loved in Seeing the Self in What We Love.

Then there was Wild Elegance, which speaks to why I named this blog Living on the Edge of the Wild. John O’Donohue from The Invisible Embrace, Beauty writes:

When we acknowledge the wild beauty of God, we begin to glimpse the potential holiness of our neglected wildness.  As humans, citizens and believers, we have become domesticated beyond belief.  We have fallen out of rhythm with our natural wildness.  What we now call ‘being wild’ is often misshapen, destructive and violent.  The natural wildness as the fluency of the soul at one with beauty is foreign to us.

The call of the wild is a call to the elemental levels of the soul, the places of intuition, kinship, swiftness, fluency and the consolation of the lonesome that is not lonely.  Our fear of our own wildness derives in part from our fear of the formless; but the wild is not the formless – it holds immense refinement and, indeed, clarity.  The wild has a profound simplicity that carries none of the false burdens of brokenness or self-conflict; it flows naturally as one, elegant and seamless.

And moreover:

Beauty invites us towards profound elegance of soul.  It reminds us that we are heirs to elegance and nobility of spirit and encourages us to awaken the divinity within us.  We are no longer trapped in mental frames of self-reduction or self-denunciation.

Instead, we feel the desire to celebrate, to give ourselves over to the dance of joy and delight.   The overwhelming beauty which is God pervades the texture of our soul, transforming all smallness, limitation and self-division.  The mystics speak of the excitement of such unity.  This is how Marguerite Porete describes it:

 ‘Such a Soul, says Love swims in the sea of joy, that is in the sea of delights, flowing and running out of the Divinity.  And so she feels no joy, for she is joy itself.  She swims and flows in Joy… for she dwells in Joy and Joy dwells in her.’

The Eclectic Light Company – Paintings

For a stroll through art history and a survey of some of the major and minor artists through the ages, I love to visit this site, which always inspires and enlightens.

The painting that headlines this post is from his site by a lesser known artist, or at least new to me, Maria Fortuny’s painting of Portici Beach in Spain.

The best of his 2018 paintings and articles can be found at this link. It’s a two-parter, so don’t miss this one as well.

For a preview of what he’ll be covering this your, make sure you check out this link.

The Depth of Now

This blog satisfies my longing for travel, art, photography, soulful writing, and that fearsome urge to trust oneself in exploring the unknown. Here a young woman tells about uprooting herself to move to a new city, Istanbul, which she explores through photography and storytelling.

In her favorite posts of 2018 you can taste some of the many flavors she has to offer: joyful wisdom, finding home, writing about place, Istanbul street art, and more.

I also loved her interview with photographer John Wreford. She’s a wonderful photographer herself, and I think that’s how I met her, at a cemetery in Prague.

But where I fell in love with her blog was when I read Home is Where the Heart Is,  where she converses with a stranger she meets in a medieval courtyard and writes:

We talked about how everything at its core is fluid and he talked to me about the Tao Te Ching.

And suddenly we had left the party and were slowly meandering down the road of a deep conversation. And by deep, I mean that reality started to lose its edges as we both came to an agreement on certain points other than what is conventionally accepted.

I admitted to him that I had lived in so many places that I no longer could relate to home being somewhere outside myself. That secretly I was building my home within – letting go of the stuff of this world and instead focusing on the things that I can take with me when I die – the wisdom and knowledge of the world that may (or may not) serve me in the next life.

You see, I don’t believe that we die because what is there to die into? Everything is alive and remains alive in one form or another.

And something tells me that I have lived many lives because from time to time I remember something unusual. I will have a dream that will take me to another place so real that I must have been there before.

I hope you will fall in love with these blogs I discovered this past year as I have. And, please, share some of the favorites sites you’ve discovered with me too in the comments below.

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2018 – A Look Back, a Look Forward

31 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by deborahbrasket in Addiction, Art, Blogging, My Writing, Writing

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

art, Blogging, Novel, painting, personal, travel, writing

light road landscape nature

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The end of a year always signals a kind of reckoning for me, the urge to look back and assess and celebrate, and to look forward and gauge where I want or need to go next.

Looking back through my blog posts, I see three major themes: travel, art, and writing.

Travel

It started with A Slice of San Francisco and a look at the Fascinating Faces and Divine Bodies at the Asian Art Museum.

Then I took a sharp turn left turn in Romancing Europe. I wrote about Dancing through Time & Space, and Tasting Life Twice. I took readers on a tour through Segovia and Bruges, and into the Musee d’Orsay, the Casa Battlo and Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and Down the Rabbit Hole with Salvador Dali.

Art

Art was a big theme with all the museums I visited, but also on a personal note with my own painting. I heralded my New Home Studio with a tour, and bragged about my first public recognition for my art. I showed off  Flowing Leaves, Tangled Limbs, Folding Hills, and Trees and More Trees.

My most popular post this year was the Art of Living, A Reminder.

Writing

I started off in January with a post on why I write in Walking each Other Home. In May I celebrated finding an agent for my novel From the Far Ends of the Earth in Pinch Me! In June I wrote about Following the Yellow-Brick Road to publishing, and in December I wrote about Happy and not so happy Endings in novel writing and life. In this last post and an earlier one on A Walk on the Wild Side, another theme that weaves through the underside of much of my writing in one way or another surfaces, the heartbreak of addiction.

A Look Ahead – What I Want Most

A happy ending for my son.

A happy ending for my novel.

More novel-writing, more painting, more blogging.

More artful living.

More Love. Lots and lots of love, for all of us.

A happy new year to you all!

 

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10,000 Thank-You’s! A Blogging Milepost

16 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by deborahbrasket in Blogging, Love, Uncategorized

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Blogging, blogging community, Community, Graditude, Love, milestone, writing

“Vase with Poppies Emil Nolde - 1907”

I have so many things to be grateful for, not least among them the ten-thousand people who, for whatever reason, took a moment to click “follow” on my website. I reached this blogging milestone just a few days ago.

Each follow  I’ve received over my 7 years of blogging has been received as a gift of love, a “micro-moment of positivity resonance,” as Barbara Fredrickson defines love in her book on the subject. Each click translates into  a smile, a hug, a friendly wave, a nod of encouragement, a cheerful thumbs-up, a coin of appreciation tossed to a fellow blogger, a way of saying I see you and like what you are doing.

I know most of those clicks were from friendly people who in their breeze through the blogosphere stopped for but a moment to wish me well and rarely returned. I certainly do not get 10,000 views on my posts each week, not do I expect to. But the fact that they took the time to make that click, for whatever reason, is deeply appreciated.

Many who are following this blog have become part of what I think of as my blogging family, a mutual admiration community I meet with online. It is you who I am “breaking bread” with each week when I send out my posts, read your comments, and visit your sites to see what you are up to.

My first blog post featured in the “Freshly Pressed” column was about “Blogging and the Accident of Touching“, which is how I see blogging, a way to reach out and touch others and be touched in return by your responses and posts.

Thank you for helping me reach this blogging milestone.

Today I am blowing ten-thousand kisses back to you.

Painting by Emil Nolde

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“Something in This Sleeping Earth” – Two by Whyte, One by Fiske

18 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by deborahbrasket in Art, Nature, Poetry, Spirituality

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

art, Blogging, David Whyte, Earth, Gertrude Fiske, inspiration, Nature, poem, poetry, spirituality

Gertrude Fiske (1878-1961) American Impressionist Painter ~ Blog of an Art Admirer

Gertrude Fiske, American Impressionist

All My Body Calls

All my body calls
for something in this sleeping
earth
we call the spirit.

But how
from lifted arms
where stars run through fingers
and the night is like sand
do I breathe a fragrance of its wisdom
do I call its name
or listen to the drops
that trickle down to earth
and hear
life being given
not only through the moving hands of the forest
but through the hand that reaches in
the dark unmoving regions of the chest
and uncovers slowly
the enormous
indistinct
shape of the ocean.

by David Whyte

Fallen in Love

That day I saw beneath dark clouds
the passing light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew then, as I had before
life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air.

It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.

by David Whyte

What struck me in the poems and the painting is that “something in this sleeping earth” that we are only half-awake to, what Whyte calls “spirit.” I see that spirit clearly in the painting by Friske, the two women immersed in the forest, in that yellow-green light, in those parting branches, those “moving hands.”

And in the second poem, that sense that there’s nothing to wait for, it’s all out here in the open, “speaking out loud in the clear air,”  as solid and humble and astonishing as the ground beneath our bare feet.

In another poem, Whyte writes:

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

What are we waiting for? Especially in these trying times.

All times are trying. All lives are trying. We have to grasp, right here, right now, despite all that, what’s waiting half-hidden all around us this very moment.

Many thanks to The Beauty We Love where I found these poems, and to The Uncarved Blog who shared two wondrous poems by Stephen Levine and pointed me toward this site. It’s one of the things I love about blogging, finding these hidden treasures that speak so eloquently to things I feel and cannot say. 

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Blogging, Another Way of “Breaking Bread”

08 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by deborahbrasket in Blogging, Culture, Science

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Blogging, breaking bread, Community, Entertainment, Pleasure, sharing, Social Media

Recently I wrote about blogging as virtual “love-making,” riffing on the new science which defines love as a“micro-moment of positivity resonance.” 

But there’s more to it than that, it now appears.  According to an article in The Atlantic, “The Selfish Meme – Twitter, dopamine, and the evolutionary advantages of talking about oneself” by Frank Rose:

“Researchers have previously shown that certain online activities—such as checking your e-mail or Twitter stream—stimulate the brain’s reward system. Like playing a slot machine, engaging in these activities sends the animal brain into a frenzy as it anticipates a possible reward: often nothing, but sometimes a small prize, and occasionally an enormous jackpot.”

Apparently this behavior of constant searching taps into a primal food-hunting drive and the reward we feel when the sought-after food is actually found—it’s matter of survival.

But even more interesting is the discovery that sharing information about ourselves as commonly done on Facebook and on blogs can be even more pleasurable.  It can, in fact, give the neurochemical equivalent of an orgasm, according to an article on the Web site for the Today show “Oversharing on Facebook as Satisfying as Sex?”.

So beyond the reward of the hunt, it seems, is the deeper pleasure of sharing what we have (our catch, ourselves) with others.

In that case, blogging may be a new form of “breaking bread.”

We’ve all experienced the pleasure sharing a meal we’ve created with people we care about, and we know how this stimulates conversations in which we share our thoughts and stories.

In a sense, when we blog, we’re inviting others to our “table,” and sharing the best of what we have to offer that day—our thoughts, insights, images, poetry, memories.  We’re feeding each other and inviting responses.  And, while things we find on other sites may create those deep resonating connections we call “micro-moments of love,” the deepest pleasure comes from our own offerings: sharing ourselves with others. Giving more than receiving.

It all makes sense. Blogging, after all, is about creating community.  Creating bonds of interest, of mutual satisfaction, mutual admiration.

It’s all about connecting.  Hooking up. Taking risks. Being vulnerable and open.

Blogging may not be “orgasmic,” but if you think about it, it’s pretty darn sexy.

This was originally posted in 2013.

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Virtual Love-Making, Why We Blog

01 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by deborahbrasket in Blogging, Culture, Human Consciousness, Love, Science

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Blogging, Deborah J. Brasket, Entertainment, inspiration, Louis Armstrong, Love, Love-making, Science, writing

public domain bee

Often when I leave comments on a blog posts that moved me, I write “I love this post” or “I love the way you do [this]” or “I love that quotation.” Lately I’ve been wondering if I’m overusing the word “love”.

Am I really feeling this strong emotional attachment, or am I just being lazy, unwilling to take the time to precisely articulate what strikes me about a particular piece?

After reading an article in The Atlantic on the science behind love, I’m inclined to believe that, more often than not, I use the word “love” because that’s what I’m actually feeling– a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.”   That’s how Barbara Fredrickson defines love in her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do.

In The Atlantic article “There’s No Such Thing as Everlasting Love (According to Science), author Emily Esfahani Smith writes:

Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.

Rather, it is what she calls a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.” She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in “It’s a Wonderful World” when he sang, “I see friends shaking hands, sayin ‘how do you do?’ / They’re really sayin’, ‘I love you.”

PenguinsSo when I say I “love” Louis Armstrong’s song, now I know why—because I feel such a strong positive connection to what he’s saying, as well as with how he says it, and the music he says it with, that I experience a triple love-whammy!

What I feel when reading things by fellow bloggers, or see the images they’ve created, is similar—a deeply-felt resonating connection, often on several levels.

In “Tao and Creativity” Chang Chung-yuan describes this connection between poet and reader as a “spiritual rhythm.”  It is the means by which the reader participates in the inner experience of the poet. He writes:

In other words, the reader is carried into the rhythmic flux and is brought to the depth of original indeterminacy from which the poetic pattern emerges.  The reader is directly confronted with the objective reality which the poet originally faced. The subjectivity of the reader and the objective reality of the poem interfuse . . . .

This is very interesting because Fredrickson discovers a similar phenomenon when she compares the brainwaves of a storyteller and listeners. Smith describes this in her article:

 What they found was remarkable. In some cases, the brain patterns of the listener mirrored those of the storyteller after a short time gap. The listener needed time to process the story after all. In other cases, the brain activity was almost perfectly synchronized; there was no time lag at all between the speaker and the listener. But in some rare cases, if the listener was particularly tuned in to the story—if he was hanging on to every word of the story and really got it—his brain activity actually anticipated the story-teller’s in some cortical areas.

“The mutual understanding and shared emotions, especially in that third category of listener, generated a micro-moment of love, which ‘is a single act, performed by two brains,’” as Fredrickson writes in her book.

Big Sur and Mothers Day picnic 111Fredrickson also discovered that the capacity to experience these daily love connections in our lives can be increased through simple loving-kindness meditations, where, as Smith describes, “you sit in silence for a period of time and cultivate feelings of tenderness, warmth, and compassion for another person by repeating a series of phrases to yourself wishing them love, peace, strength, and general well-being.”

“Fredrickson likes to call love a nutrient,” Smith writes.  “If you are getting enough of the nutrient, then the health benefits of love can dramatically alter your biochemistry in ways that perpetuate more micro-moments of love in your life, and which ultimately contribute to your health, well-being, and longevity.”

So remember, fellow readers, as you go meandering from one blog site to another like busy little bees, making those “micro-moment” connections with people whose work you admire, that you are engaged in a kind of virtual love-making.  You are distributing a pollen-like “nutrient” that nurtures others, as well as yourself.

As Louis says, “what a wonderful world” we live in!

This essay was first posted in a slightly altered version in 2013.

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A Walk on the Wild Side – For People Who Love Addicts

19 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by deborahbrasket in Addiction, Blogging, Family, Love, My Writing

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Blogging, Deborah J. Brasket, drug addiction, From the Far Ends of the Earth, Hope, mother love, opioid crisis, writing

A few years ago I started an anonymous blog with the above title to talk about addiction. About trying to help a grown son addicted to heroin. when I did not believe he, nor I, would survive his addiction. Here’s part of my first blog post:

Addiction, as horrible as it is for addicts, can be terrifying to those who love them as well.  Like it or not, if we choose to be in their lives and support them while they fight this cruel affliction, we’re taking a walk on the wild side, going places emotionally and spiritually, and sometimes even physically, that are dark and scary.

And often we’re alone.

Too often when all hell breaks loose, and the dust settles, one lone family member is left standing to walk this scary path alone with their loved one.  Most others get blown away, or turn away, or run away eventually.  But a mom, a dad, a sister, a lover–hopefully for the addict’s sake, one of us remains behind.  One of us stays by their side all the long, and wild, and weary, and heart-breaking way.

I’ve been there, and maybe you have too.

I started the blog not long after I wrote a post on this site about finding him OD’d on the bathroom floor, gray and apparently lifeless.

This post was followed shortly by another when we could not find a rehab that would take him in. It begins:

The last few posts I’ve tried to write, again and again, disintegrated into dark rants and rages.

Rants against a society that fully recognizes how an epidemic of addiction is destroying our children, our families, whole neighborhoods and cities, filling our jails and prisons, and littering our streets and alleys with the living dead. And yet, and yet, how this same society provides painfully few resources toward treatment and recovery. A son or daughter seeking a bed at a detox center is forced to wait months for something affordable or dole out thousands of dollars for a few short days, only to be turned out onto the street again when the stay is ended.

Rages against the fact that the few available programs designed to help recovering addicts will bankrupt most families, since the road to recovery, as all admit, includes multiple relapses. But instead of sticking with those who relapse, helping them when they most need support, these programs kick them out on the streets again. With no place to go, to start over again and again and again, with no end in sight.

Not long after that post he disappeared. He’d finally gotten into another rehab, but they kicked him out when he relapsed. He was lost on the street again, and I was giving up hope. That’s when I started the new anonymous blog, to vent, to rage. It was right after receiving this phone call, which I write about in my second post:

The last time I heard from him he told me he didn’t think he had long to live. He’d had two overdoses the week before. One where he woke up in the hospital. The other where he woke up in a motel room. His companions had left him for dead after stealing the little he had (a bike and a backpack stuffed with dirty clothes) and even the shoes off his feet. He was barefoot when he called, using someone else’s phone. He’d lost his own weeks ago (again).

I begged him to get help, to go an NA meeting, go to a church, go to a detox facility, go to a shelter. But he was too embarrassed. He was covered in staff infections, he said, and he looked like a zombie.

I’d seen him that way before. I knew what he meant.

I begged him to go to an ER and get medication for the staff infection. Then I gave him the address and phone number of a detox, and told him to get there. He said he would. But it didn’t sound like he meant it.

“Say it,” I told him. “Say it like you mean it.”

“Promise me,” I demanded. “If you don’t want to die, promise me.”

“I feel like I’m dead already,” he said. “Like I’m in Limbo, you know? Or purgatory. Everything seems so surreal, like I’m walking around in a nightmare.”

The good news is that the police picked him up shortly after that phone call and that saved his life, I’m sure. His road to recovery was difficult, which I detail on my blog. But he did arrive. And he’s three years clean and doing great. My son was saved, but so many have lost their lives to addiction, or are struggling still.

One of my posts was Freshly Pressed because it spoke to so many people about the manic ride the lovers of addicts take in trying to help their loved ones. It was called “Am I crazy? Or Is He? How Addiction Warps Us.”

In it I write about three stages of living with an addict which I named: Hyper-Happy, Dangerously Depressed, and Mad Maniac.

 It’s the old pattern re-emerging, the way it’s played out too many times before. The crazy times, I think of them. That’s why this Hyper-Happy son makes me want to cry, because it reminds me of those times. Episodes of my life that are so bizarre and unbelievable, remembering them is like re-living a nightmare, or being in some alternate universe where crazed people do crazy things to survive and to save the ones they love.

I’ve never told anyone about those crazy times in my life. The things I’ve seen and done and endured, trying to help him.

During those days it was as if I lived in a secretive, shadowy world where I became someone no one would recognize. On the surface I was the same old person everyone knew–quiet, responsible, reasonable. But when I walked on the wild side of addiction with my son, I was anything but that.

I think that’s why I started this blog. Why I named it what I did. Not, as I had thought, had hoped, so I could sort things out and figure out a way to save my son. I want that too. I want that badly. But I think the real reason I created this blog was so I finally could let it all out. All the craziness I experienced. Bring it to the surface, look at it in the light of day.

To bring that craziness out into the light of day . . . . Some of the craziness I wrote about on that blog, like the one called Pimping My Son. But the worst of the craziness has never seen the light of day.

The novel From the Far Ends of the Earth that I hope to publish soon throws light on a lot that would like to remain in darkness. Especially on that twisted and dark, love-strangle that exists between an addict and the one who is determined to save him despite himself.

The novel is fiction but it draws upon a deep experiential understanding of the complexity of addiction. It exposes what I call in the novel “the ugly underbelly of mother love,” as seen mostly through the eyes of the son, as shown here:

She’d become the object of his self-loathing, the mirror against which he throws all his plates, watching them splinter against her face and slide to the floor, all his messes splattered over her. And still she’d stand there, watching him, sometimes dissolving into tears, or raging in fury, or stony with disgust, but never backing away from the ferociousness of his attacks. Standing her ground and taking it, bearing it, never retreating from his touch—unwavering, resolute.

 The rage was okay.  It was the tears that unmanned him. That killed him time and time again until he had to make it stop. Had to make her face the truth, that her tears were wasted on him, that he was a miserable fuckin’ asshole who didn’t deserve her love. And he’d prove it by ripping out her heart and holding it up for her to see, until her tears finally did dry up in a rage that blew him away with its ferocity. A rage he fed with little bits of her heart and his heart until she fuckin’ wanted to kill him and would too, if he didn’t dance out of her way, laughing at her rage, her inept, futile rage, which didn’t do either of them a bit of good. Except in stopping the tears.  Neither she nor he could survive the tears.

It’s something he ponders but cannot fathom, the depth and folly of her mother-love. The obstinacy that thwarts his every attempt to shake it loose, even while he tests it mercilessly, uses it shamelessly, depends upon it endlessly—and wears it like ball and chain, like an indictment stamped on his forehead: his total unworthiness of her unwavering love.

There is light as well as darkness in the novel, more light than dark, I believe. People struggling with addiction or struggling to help loved ones will find something here that may be helpful, or at least hopeful, or if nothing else, a mirror that reflects back what too many of us have hidden away in our hearts for too long.

But the novel isn’t only about addiction. Art and art-making play starring roles too. And finding love, romantic and otherwise.

And coming home to ourselves. More than anything, it’s about that.

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Wrapping Up 2017, Embracing New & Old Loves

29 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by deborahbrasket in Art, Blogging, music, My Artwork, Writing

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

art, Blogging, creative arts, creativity, Deborah J. Brasket, music, painting, passion, writing

DSCN3868

Discovering New Loves – Painting

2017 was the year I revealed my newly discovered passion for painting, and dared to share my work on these pages. So I thought it fitting to end the year with an unfinished painting of a passionate embrace, inspired, no less, by the works of Emil Nolde, Edvard Munch, and Marc Chagal, as follows:

lovers emil nolde

Edvard Munch

chagall

Nearly half my posts in 2017 were art related, whether of my own work, or the work of favorite artists, or just about the craft and love of painting. One favorite, my own and others, was a rhapsody on Naming a Painting, “Like Two Lovers in Conversation.”

Several posts paired art with music, starting with Friday Pairings – Butterflies & Vivaldi and including Almost Blue, Jazz & Art, which, along with Artists & Writers in Their Studios, were two art-related posts that made the Top-Ten chart in my blog sidebar, a list that traditionally does not move much.

Renewing Old Loves – Playing Music

But 2017 was also a year for reuniting with old loves, a passion of my youth, playing piano. I treated myself to a baby grand, something I never dreamed I would own, and began relearning to play. Old favorites like Beethoven’s For Eloise and Moonlight Sonata were flowing from my fingertips once again.

In pursuit of my music I discovered, amazingly, two master pianists that you would’ve thought I’d already known: Bill Evans (jazz) and Martha Argerich (classical). I wrote about them and shared their music in Playing Piano, a Full-Body Workout for the Brain and Perfect Pairings, Evans’s “Peace Piece” & Sapiro’s Skies.

In a way, 2017 was the year for making time and space in my life and my home for all my loves, old and new, which I also wrote about. But it wasn’t, isn’t, easy.

Returning to My First Love – Writing

As new loves (painting), and renewed ones (playing piano), took center stage in my life, there seemed little time for my first love, writing, apart from blogging. And so I made a concerted effort to increase my blogging output.

When I started blogging, I averaged one post every 7 to 10 days. But in 2015 and 2016, when my life changed in a dramatic way, my blogging fell off, and once or twice a month became the norm.

This year I made a concerted effort to pick up the pace. Inspired by my 5-year blogging anniversary in July, my posts nearly doubled over the next few months, with 8 posts in August, a new high.

After that flurry, I’m back to about once a week now, and this feels like a good, satisfying and sustainable, pace.

But as much as love blogging, and I DO think of it as “real” writing, I miss creative writing. The novels that have been pushed aside, that wait patiently for my return, still call to me, as I wrote about early this year in Which Would You Choose, My Art or My Novel? Clearly, art won that contest in 2017. But I promised myself that I would return to my novels in 2018. It’s a promise I mean to keep.

Part of that return will be wrapped up in my blog posts. I find writing about writing inspiring. It gets my creative juices flowing.  When I’m thinking out loud on paper about my characters, my themes, their dreams, what drives them, I discover that they are also my dreams, my themes, what drives me essentially, as a writer, an artist, a blogger. Even the music I love and love to play comes from the same place that feeds my soul and fires my passion to create.

In a way, it’s all about exploring our passions, the things that set our souls on fire, and sharing those loves with others. Because love is not love if it does not spill out over onto everything we touch, and touches all who come within its reach.

Wishing you all a happy and passionate embrace of the coming New Year.

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