Engaging (positively) with Personal Space

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Since I hit my 70’s (five years ago) I sometimes find myself wondering … why bother? Living alone, even with the support of a few good friends, can often seem a heavy-going, lonely battle to rise above health issues and other slings and arrows of daily life.

My mother died in 1976. We were very close, and her spirit remains as much a part of me as it ever was. I am especially grateful for having inherited her positive approach to life,being able to put any negative thoughts on hold, close my eyes and wish myself back to better times, let them comfort, reassure, inspire me to understanding full well that nature intends that we live and die  so it’s up to us to make the most, each in his or her own way, of what lies in-between. 

Instead of brooding on woes, better by far (surely?) to count our blessings in the shape of those family and friends we have known and loved, any places we may have visited that are as flowers on the evergreen Banks of Memory whose perfume we have but to inhale to be transported away from whatever moment of contemporary crisis may have struck ... temporarily perhaps, but long enough to rise above its worse moments, pause the downward spiral into despair, self-pity, whatever … and rise above it all, slowly but surely emerging from the experience better equipped not only to start looking on the bright side of life again, but actively participate in it. 

I am so grateful to my mother for her philosophical approach to general well-being that has helped me through some of the worst periods of my life, never more so than now as we all struggle with multiple consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.

Did I say it was easy …?

ENGAGING (POSITIVELY) WITH PERSONAL SPACE 

There is a place I go

known only to me, where time,

no longer counting

along lines of arithmetic

or measure of its pace,

takes me beyond known parameters

shows me who I am

There is a place I go

whenever thought cannot reason

nor sensibility rely

on some abstract morality

to come to the rescue

if only to attempt justifying whatever,

or pointing a finger

There is a place I go

where bigotry on grounds of gender,

race, sexuality, creed

(and, yes, age too) but voices

falling on cloth ears

flagging up referrals for creative therapy

(hope springs eternal)

There is a place I go

where I am free to think just about me,

well-meaning advice

(from any perspective but mine)

given short shrift

by an alter ego weary of always being lost

in translation by ‘betters’

There is a place I go

where mind, body and spirit take a break

from running rings

around me, engage with each other

and help me connect

with that whole which is the sum of my parts

(amateur self-portrait)

It’s in my personal space

that I consider and reconsider my actions,

hopefully preventing

any future systems failure down

to taking fake news

for gospel and spreading it without due care;

(garbage in, garbage out)

Ah, but personal space

cannot be contained for long in any one

persona, but needs must

journey through time and space;

rites of passage

for artists, historians, anyone with an interest

in fitting jigsaw pieces

Copyright R N. Taber 2020

Amateur, a Self-portrait

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Few if any of us will admit to not being masters of our fate.Up to a point, we are, of course but human life and nature are as complex as the Here-and-Now we have to try and make sense of every day until our past-present-future reaches its conclusion one way or another. 

A wise old bird I once knew warned me never to play amateur psychologist with my own feelings. Sadly, it is advice I failed to take for many years. Consequently, I developed an inferiority complex and lack of self esteem that I tried to confront and deal with, failing miserably. (Yes, my realising I am gay and growing up in a homophobic atmosphere was part of the equation, but only a part.)

Regular readers will know that I suffered a bad nervous breakdown some 40+ years ago. A married reader who confesses to experiencing much the same asks how I 'fully recovered' and 'got my life back to normal'. The sad truth is I never 'fully recovered although , yes, I did manage to knock my life into shape again, even managed to resume my career (thanks to a lot of help and support from various sources and some wonderful people) after several years of being unemployed and seemingly unemployable. It was tough, but if I was a victim, it was of my own making in the sense that I should have sought professional help years earlier. I suspect my breakdown was mind-body-spirit asking for that help, if somewhat late in the day; it had been damaged and badly in need of fixing for far too long. There was never going to be a quick fix.

Although I have been on an anti-depressant for years, it was being given a second chance that made me determined to to address my personal problems head-on and rise above them.  Returning to work in an entirely new environment where only select senior colleagues had been made aware of my history, proved to be a life-saver. I moved into my present flat, and spent years paying off credit cards used to furnish it. By that time, I was conscious of a growing uneasiness within myself. I needed form of creative therapy, and time to pursue it if I was to have any chance of averting another mental breakdown. I gave up a full-time career to work part-time, made time to write (a second life-saver) as well as creating a social life since living alone and often working long hours was contributing to a sense of depression that needs must always be attended to.

I have not been particularly successful with my writing, but enjoy it, and am happy to have achieved a minor reputation as a poet in the 70+ countries that continue to visit my blogs since I started writing them up some ten years or so ago.

Can I live with being a 'failed' novelist? Easily. The few novels I have written can be read in serial form on my fiction blog; only Blasphemy and Catching Up with Murder were ever published; several literary agents expressed an interest in Mamelon 1 & 2, but nothing ever came of it.  

Happy enough in my later years - since recovering from my breakdown sufficiently to get on with my life - I can well relate to the C.S. Lewis quote: “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

AMATEUR, A SELF-PORTRAIT

There is a part of me

that no one ever gets to see,

for my living out

its fantasy, a nightmare fiction imposed

on Mind-body-spirit

The mind, it may fight

as best it can to get the better

of forces unknowingly

(and unwanted) hell bent upon infiltrating

the human body

The spirit, it may resist

most dreams dressed up to kill,

yet fall for home truths

last seen feeding on an amateur psychology 

worn on its sleeves

The better part of me

struggles to compensate for secrets and lies

it’s made to house

in a heart hell bent on betraying appearances

behind closed doors

The years, they passed

in tears for my struggling daily to break free

from a mind-body-spirit

that would ransom me to Reason, but Reason

would have none of it

Finally, Reason paid up,

returned me safe and sound to the kind of self

that makes a kinder person

if (still) vulnerable to life forces beyond control 

of you, me, anyone

Now, I grow old, haunted

by the ghosts of those same dark secrets and lies

that held me captive for years,

but there are other ghosts, too, allies in adversity,

come to dry my tears

Such is life and human nature,

last seen seeking to nurture its natural predilection

for love and peace

in a world rarely living up to its promises (or ours)

but… who knows…?

Copyright R. N. Taber 2020

S-E-L-F, Living with the Enemy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Now and then we find ourselves confronting aspects of our past we would prefer to forget, especially any that may have caused distress - however unintentionally - to others.

Years ago, when I was a psychological mess and desperate for some time to think it through and work out a positive sense of direction for myself, I fled to Australia on the Assisted Passage scheme; in so far as any hopes that things would be different, even better, there, I might well have thought myself to be on yet another losing streak. For me, though, the redeeming feature of a venture doomed to failure from the start - not least because of the person I was then – was my meeting up with an old aborigine to whom – for the first time ever – I found myself able to confide my worst fears; I unleashed a string of regrets I had never quite faced head-on, probably because I was too busy blaming them for my state of mind.

He listened. He said very little, but listened. When I finally shut up, we sat in a very comfortable silence for some time until he said, “Regrets are part of life. If they come to haunt us, it’s but to teach us. Whether or not we learn anything, well, that is down to us, no one else.” It was such an obvious comment, yet made more sense than anything had made sense to me for years. (I was 24 years-old.) I could hear my old English teacher, ‘Jock’ Rankin, telling me much the same thing, and wished I had taken on the implications more, but does anyone in their teens?

Regular readers will know that thanks to my aboriginal friend, I flew home a few weeks later, hopefully a better person, definitely a changed one, and more importantly willing to learn from my ghosts instead of hating - and all but giving up on - the part of me that gave rise to them in the first place; a part that is still there, of course, but still learning, and hurting the less so for that.

S-E-L-F, LIVING WITH THE ENEMY

Regret is never enough

for the graver wrongs we do

as sure to haunt us

by day and night, ghosts

of an alter ego we got to know,

learned to hate, and finally cast aside

long, long, ago

Regret is never enough

to compensate for any mistakes

baying at our heels

like wolves, ready to pounce,

do their worst, gnaw to the bone

a body deserving no less for caving in

to being human

Regret is never enough,

cannot ever (quite) make amend

for any hurt caused,

by promises broken, trust betrayed,

a dark side of Everyman seeing to plans

haphazardly laid

Regret, for any impulses

of the worst kind, mind-body-spirit

long since redefined

by such confessions as no one hears,

meant only for the inner ear, and no one

to dry its tears

Regret, enemy-friend nobody wants know,

teaching us, ourselves, to know

Copyright R. N. Taber 2019

Note: Frequently, and as recently as only yesterday, a reader complains that I rarely insert full stops at the end of stanzas. I offer no apologies. For me, full stops mark an ending, and a poem has none; it does not even have meaning (for the reader) until he or she starts to take in whatever is meaningful about the poem for them. and thinks on…

Landfall, Human Spirit

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We have no choice regarding our being brought into the world; all the more reason, in my opinion, why we should be allowed choices regarding how we live and even leave it. I, for one, would not want to stay if my quality of life (as I see it) was such that I felt unable to give to or take from it as I would like.

We should never underestimate or shrink the capacity of children and young people to think for themselves, the more so as they grow into a subtle if inarticulate awareness of the world into which they have, unasked, been brought. The better, greater part of instinct, if nurtured with loving care, will always be the cornerstone of humanity nor is it entirely lacking in nature.

Now, I have always maintained that quality of life is more important than life itself while how an individual assesses his or her quality of life will vary considerably since we are not (yet) a race of clones. As for so-called ‘success’ and ‘failure’, they are very overrated and far less important than aspiring to goals where the very process of aspiration helps make us (hopefully) better and kinder human beings.

Everyone sees life differently and wants different things from it. We should respect that at every level of society; home, school, workplace etc. Children and young people are not vessels for the aspirations of parents or teachers; they have minds of their own and should be encouraged to develop the moral stamina to make their own way in life.

Why do I refer to the human spirit when I subscribe to no religion? As my mother once told me when I said I did not want to go to Sunday School any more, religion does not have a monopoly on spirituality, and she was a Christian. Moreover, it is a spirit that endures long after death in the form of a posthumous consciousness whereby something of us, by word or deed, lives on to be passed on in turn by someone somewhere who may not even have known us well, if at all. [No religion has a monopoly on immortality, only its own interpretation of it.

LANDFALL, HUMAN SPIRIT

Faces, competing
to offer a helping hand
where I cower
in my corner from wind
and acid rain eroding
a world ever whimpering
in pain

Hands, reaching out
to drag me into the world,
urge me stand tall
among rats running rings
around human beings
looking on and/or placing
bets

Hopes, aspirations
and pipe dreams staking
a claim on me, tossing
fistfuls of straws where left
to surf a perfect storm
on my own, make for a safe
haven

Eyes, closing, as sure
as the world’s blood, sweat,
and tears customizing
its tee-shirts with this or that
social, cultural, political,
or religious divide, no place
to hide

Ocean of voices,
a crashing hypocrisy urging
I strike a balance,
take its swell in my stride,
do tin gods proud,
last spotted strutting cloud
nine

Landfall, blanket
of noises (potential choices)
and new senses
wrapping me in silver foil
to keep me warm
and safe from harm, peace
in our time

Waking refreshed
and inspired to sail on whatever
life throws at me,
stay true to mind-body-spirit.
each new day
reassuring me it's OK
to be gay

Copyright R. N. Taber 2000; 2014 

[Note: An earlier version of this poem under the title Waters of the Womb first appeared in an anthology All Our Tomorrows, Triumph House (Forward Press), 1999 and subsequently in Poetry Monthly (43) the same year before I included it in Love And Human Remains by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2000.]