IT WILL PASS, WHATEVER IT IS

'This too shall pass',

my grandmother said,

over and over to me - 

There was always something

that needed comforting

in me.

Yesterday I glanced up

to find a hospital plaque

talking to me - 

'It will pass, whatever it is',

it said, and time looped back

to watch over me.

 © shaista, 2013

Today is the day the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Today is also the 87th birthday of Vietnamese Zen monk and peace embodiment Thich Nhat Hanh. Martin Luther King Jr. strived to put forward Nhat Hanh's name for the Nobel prize in the 60's but time has moved far along from the Vietnam War, and the monk moves in much quieter waters now. 

Without his teachings in my life, my own peace struggle with pain, fear and anxiety would be a sad and terrible failure. The greatest of the lessons has been the simplest - to stay present and if fearlessness is available in the present moment, revel in it, trust it, be grateful for it. It passes. The gratitude and the pain. The fear and the remedy. It passes, whatever it is. For days I had stitches that had worked themselves into such positions that I could neither sleep nor breathe without the constant scratch scratch against the soft inner linings of my eye. I wrote to the surgeon with hope, and two days ago he kindly saw me, plucked out the offending irritants and trimmed others he saw might irritate me in time. Purple stitches they were, caught just in time - he was leaving for China that night to perform complex surgery on a train. Lucky travelling patients, lucky me. Perhaps they don't need prizes and awards, the heroes of our world. They just need to exist. And practice.

images: The Mag

Palestine Rose

Teasips

WILD THING

The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him WILD THING and Max said, I'LL EAT YOU UP so he was sent to bed without eating anything.

That very night in Max's room a forest grew and grew and grew until the ceiling hung with vines... and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to the place where the wild things are...

I bought this book for my nephew Rafael long before he was ready and when he arrived this autumn, I still wasn't sure, but almost the first words he spoke to any of us were, "I'm goin' EAT You All Up!" And Max was already in Raf and Raf was Max.

But Max is in me too. The place of the Wild Things is the place I entered the night after my eye operation. It took over three hours and when I woke, my body was doing something very strange.

'And now', cried Max, 'let the Wild Rumpus start!'

I have a theory about why I reacted so wildly post waking from anaesthesia. Our brain doesn't completely shut down during anaesthesia, even if the CNS is paralysed, and it felt as though I was simply continuing my rumpus through those hours of desperately trying to get away from the pain. I was almost jack knifing off the bed, spasming every few seconds, then minutes, then longer passages. When my speech was less slurred I requested the lovely Irish nurse minding me to keep me in the recovery room so Mum wouldn't have to worry about this as well. Karen made me laugh by teasing me and calling me Nemo, because I was flapping about so.

Pain is an animal and I became Queen of the Wild Things that night. With nothing to numb the localised site of surgery, I was facing down something with sharp and terrible claws minute after minute for almost a year until it was morning and I saw the surgeon again and he numbed my eye for a brief, beautiful few seconds.

'Now stop!' Max said, and sent the Wild Things off to bed without their supper and Max, the King of all the Wild Things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all. Then from all around from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat. So he gave up being King of Where The Wild Things Are...

I am still sailing in the boat of pain, but feeling grateful for every day spent with the people who love me best of all and keep my supper hot and make me cups of tea and most of all, for the memory of a small figure with curly hair and a wild look in his eye as he commands or cajoles, 'Aunty Shai, tell me 'tory!' and then when I begin with 'Once upon a time', tucking himself neatly into my lap with a sigh and the occasional tap tap of his fingers against my skin keeping time to the rhythm of a tale spun just for him.

GLI ESPERTI DEI FIORI

It was pouring rain yesterday when I left for surgery. The pink roses were bowed in head and spirit. "Buck up!" I urged, "we've a long day ahead." It wasn't a long procedure, although might have been nicer if the Blue Eyed Surgeon had indulged me in a wee song. No such luck. I wearily warbled "It's a long way to Tipperary..." to encourage the Irish in him to join in, but he grimly persisted in needling, draining, anaesthetising...  This was me all day yesterday...

I howled a lot, silently and sometimes, loudly, dramatically, but mostly I felt as an animal would, unable to scratch or lick the wound clean of pain. My kindhearted neighbour Victoria stopped by with a cold eye mask and on Twitter, the Girls were endlessly comforting and funny. As I approached sleep, I dreaded waking to more burning. But it does feel easier today, and this afternoon I answered a knock at the door to behold...

Thank you Kathy from Twitter, thank you for my cup of tea-roses. They are perched just beside my bed and with the sun pouring in, today is so much better than yesterday. Gli esperti dei fiori - you are the flower expert. Indeed you all are, expert at arranging flowers and cards and love to be sent to a place and a person who is deeply appreciative of every heartfelt, healing gesture.

MASK

It's all a mask
It's all a mask
It falls apart
so easily

It's paint on wood
It's just a face
It comes away
too easily

Hang it high, for effect
It's really just for show
Or look behind, if you prefer
It's just a piece of hollow

Would you care
to step inside
And give me eyes
and life and light?

I'll understand
it's just for a while
But your insight
might make me smile.


Too many weeks of fever, and ulcers and pain have woken the fibromyalgia beast again. Somehow my face falls apart and try as I might to stitch the threads together, this place is too fearful even for me. Some hours into waiting at the Accident and Emergency department yesterday, I lost my smile. The emergency medic finally let me go late last night because I couldn't bear to be admitted. Not then. 
I am trying to tell myself that my other face, my smiling face, is still there. When the waters clear, I will see her, and cling to her fiercely. Why does she ever leave me? I will never understand. 

The Find

Things fall apart
at the slightest touch
New words cannot be found
only the old, looping
round and around.

Insanity can be found
here,
and here.

Pain, of course,
everywhere.

Reading Rilke,
I try to breathe
but am drowned
in his sea of beauty.

His sea, mind,
not mine,
And for the first time
I find myself
bitter.


- Shaista Tayabali, 2011

Horrible, horrible word, bitter. Poor Rilke. Poor me! But there it is.
The sculpture is Eve, by Auguste Rodin, 1881. You know how deeply and tempestuously Rilke and Rodin were entwined. It says of this piece ...'Resigned, sorrowful and tentative, Eve contains her emotion. She embodies a pessimistic view of human fate.' I am not pessimistic, just in pain.
The model for Eve left abruptly, so Rodin finished a second Eve. It is more refined. Too shiny and perfectly polished for me, though. I like the rough-hewn version.

Steroids

the flush creeps on
a year later
hot discomfort
inside my veins
the flush confused me once
disguised as fear
I recognise it now
I understand it well today
the sunshine
of my blood.


Life in my little room
curtains drawn on harsh light
and behind it the birds sing.
Every day my hair falls
and piles beside me on the bed
Every other day my toes inflame
and confine me to bed again;
Still the birds sing.


I still wait and watch for your arrival
even though I know you will not come
Cars pass and the light fades
and still you do not call.

sept 1998

Balancing Act

I am sure only of the immediate.
Nothing is solid beneath my feet.
Perhaps it never has been.
Always the observer
but never more so than now;
I am in between everything
watching listening waiting,
always waiting,
and then the moment is upon me
and I am startled unawares.

I nearly tumble off the brink
till something magical winks at me
and I am caught
in a painfree moment.

15 jan 1998

On New Year's Eve

A cold is a cold is a cold
But not when you have Lupus
It is a beautiful day outside
Golden and silver lights on a breeze,
A breeze I cannot feel
A natural beauty beyond me
Trapped as I am in pain;
No painful oblivion am I accorded
No heady drugged state do I lie in
No, I am aware of everything
Although I begin
to feel the collapse of sense -
I am struggling with pounding heart
and shaking hand
and aching back and legs
and outside the faint song of bird
and rumble of train
and tapping of spoon against cereal bowl,
I hear it all
and sometimes see nothing at all
in the darkened room
As the world rushes by
and life is lived on
New Year's Eve.

31 dec 1997

Drugged

Semi darkness; semi conscious
I am writing to know this is real
While it howls and it spits outside
Inside is my own storm
Mental madness; mental sadness

I have no immunity
I have an illness
called Lupus.

Sometimes I think I'm imagining it all
that the pain is a figment
the distress my creation
that I'm a fake and a phony
and if I'm not careful
they'll call my bluff -
or is that only wishful thinking?

I laugh in the face of pain
till it laughs right back
in the middle of the night
throbbing in my head, stabbing in my legs
and screwing with my brain

I am in pain
I have an illness
called Lupus.

27 dec 1997

Empty slate

stares back at me expectantly
Hungry slate
has waited patiently...

There is much to say
in a tangled web
Inside
energy burns
with a slow glow
Invisible
to the living world.

I have my own world
a castle built in pain
I am my only prisoner
trapped within the grains
I watch the sand slide
and the sun set
on each tomorrow
I hear the sounds of living
and the pressure
to keep moving
and I step out of the crowd
to hide my sorrow
while the axe grinds
and the clock chimes

but who am I
with the pounding heart
and the tired eyes?

I am
the darkness in the light
clouded in fear
the coward the victim
I am
the shining star
the smiling power
the lover the vision
I control the destiny
that controls me,

I am the pain
and I am the cure
Now
bother me no more -

dec 1997