༺ Thesium ༻

You mentioned about that recurring dream. Please expand on that if you’d like to?

Oh that, yeah, around 7 years old, on a family camping holiday again, this time in Cornwall maybe. Wherever, there was this big storm and we’d been out for a dinner, lots of Chicken-in-the-Basket, and when we got back to the campsite the tent had blown down. Everything was all wrecked and everyone went into overdrive. It was still blowing pretty hard and really dark, everyone was given jobs but I was too small and young to really do anything and I felt all stupid and pointless. I saw that they all needed to see what they were doing so at least I could hold up the light. So that’s what I did, holding the big electric torch up right up high so that everyone could see. I just stood there and they all wrestled with the tent and poles and all the stuff that had been blown over and they put it all back together.

A really odd part of that experience was that I was aware of how potentially symbolic it was even as I stood there, with one arm and then the other, right up high with this heavy torch thing. I remember feeling that it might be my place in the family. That maybe I had a point after all. It was also pretty grandiose, me being the youngest and all. But still, I find it poignant that looking back over forty-odd years I still have a sense of the potency of that image and how I wish that I could make that true somehow.

I don’t know why particularly, but it reminds me so much of a kind of spiritual experience I had back then too. There was this phase I went through, a bit embarrasing now, but I got super into all the Christian stuff. Like, I prayed all the time, and read the bible and did the rosary, the whole nine yards you know? Anyway, it didn’t last very long or anything, but what I particularly recall is the sense of security. There was the incredibly solid sense of wellbeing in knowing, I mean really knowing right deep down, that love was universal.

There were a few things that happened around then that really upset me. One was having my hair forcibly combed before going to church. My mam wanted me to have neat hair and we were rushed for time and she just dragged that comb through all the knots in my wild, ginger hair. The tears of pain prickled in my eyes and I was furious. Having to sit through the mass at church while feeling this fury had a big effect on me.

I mean, it wasn’t only that, there were lots of little messages all over the place as soon as I started to notice them, that the people extolling this beautiful thing I thought I’d connected with, were actually not very nice. It seemed to be all about power and domination in reality. There was this intense pain at the split between the two things. The wellbeing and oneness and love and everything, and the control and ‘do as I say’ coercion. It made me so fuckin’ furious I can’t say.

Many years later, on a Buddhist meditation retreat, I woke up one exquisite summer’s morning to a very clear sense of how that rage I felt was actually in defense of Christianity. I had forgotten the beautiful core of it as a simple, human experience of a kind of divine love for everything. I guess holding up that torch was a thing that made me feel that maybe this split could be healed and that I might be able to do something.

My brothers were all pretty cross about it too, in their own ways, it seemed to me. I so much wanted to be on their team and against the power you know? Like, the family was split down this crack and this split went right down through my own heart too, you get me?