Walking

“A man who has learned to die has unlearned how to be a slave”
–Michel De Montaigne

Yesterday I was given the date of my surgery. More to follow…

March 1997 – May 2010

just round it off at 4,800….Rumi come in for this one:

“This is love: to fly toward a secret sky,
to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.
First, to let go of life.
In the end, to take a step without feet”

Wednesday evening this thought hammered through my soul like a billion lightning strikes finding home

childhood and what comes from it
….coming soon

so I am driving down the highway, and I am thinking to myself: when it comes down to it the key to your healing is pleasure. In that very moment, I feel a massive jolt through my body, there is smoke EVERYWHERE and there is a pink bag in my face, the windshield is cracked on the drivers side and the entire passangers side. Apparently I have just crashed and the destinies of three people collide.

The first is me: playing the role of Diarmuid Brannick here in LA to heal after discovering that chasing the money for healing is a spiritual trap, the second character is a man of between 43 and 53 (who can tell?) driving a less than new pick up truck..it seems Brannick has run into the back of it and him….lets continue

He gets out of his truck and passes by me without even acknowledging that I am alive much less asking if i am ok, presumably because the incident is my fault it doesnt matter. He checks the licence plate on the back of car and then goes about calling on his walkie talkie his boss or whoever…it seems he needs to make a delivery and now he can’t.

I give him my licence and ask if he is ok, he tells me “yeah I’m ok”. Next thing a booming voice is saying something, turning around I see a cop car, the white and black, and a young female cop directing me through the window with both jestures and the booming amplified megaphone voice to pull in off the highway. (I was smoking weed in my car in venice beach a couple of weeks ago when I heard a cop doing that directing someone to pull in and I instantly thought ‘I need to get one of those loud speakers for my car’ and I think I will)

Anyway she is the third character, a young gorgeous latino woman playing the role of the cop. She has us pull into a gas / petrol station and then she commences to take the mans details first. Before this and in between this, the man begins his pantomine:

he is talking on the walkie talkie and then talking to the cop but he is saying the same thing:

“this always happens when I try and do something for someone” “I was going to change my insurance and now I can’t” “I need to get to xyz and it looks like now I won’t be able to” blah blah blah

As he is talking to the cop giving the details of the incident from his perspective, I go to get my camera from the trunk / boot…this is real art and I want to record it (obviously ‘on the sly’ as we say in Ireland) I want to capture the mans pantomine.

His pantomine is his insistance on putting the incident into a context that justifies why he cannot do something and reinforces his way of seeing the world. My pantomine for the past 11 years has been: the reason I cant heal is because I dont have the money, i dont have the x, the y and the z

Anyway it seems my battery is out and so i get the other one to put in the camera, after doing this I see that i dont have tape…at this point the cop walks a few feet over to my car to get my information and licence. She has beautiful legs and and that weird tweed cop uniform material with its weird brownish color is tight around her legs, but it is not tight around her crotch where my gaze has set, I move my eyes to see the contours of her hips…beautiful…I look to her face, she has beautiful tanned skin and dark hair combed tigh on her head, American female cop style.

And so it is my turn to reveal myself: she asks me for my licence and I give it. She asks me where I am going and I tell her the Venice exit. She asks me do I live in Venice and I tell her I am just visiting, which is technically true. She asks me do I live at 1201 East Drachman street, I tell her I do and it is a lie.

I felt the fear of telling the truth and the imagined consequences and in response to the fear I lied…what more needs to be said?

To be continued

What is healing for? I think that is the most complete answer that can be given. I Came across an article in a Russian paper where a guy (now quite famous in the martial arts circles) says the purpose of martial arts is to save your soul and I think it applies as much, even more so to healing.

““Realistic people” who pursue “practical aims” are rarely as realistic and practical, in the long run of life, as the dreamers who pursue only their dreams“

Hans Selye was an Austrian physician & endocrinologist, an author of 33 books and hundreds of scientific papers. During a laboratory experiment in 1935 he discovered that his animal subjects had the exact same negative response to being injected with certain organ extracts as they did toxins. He basically went on to prove that stress of a physical (or emotional) origin will have a simmilar effect on the organism regardless of what the cause of the stress is. I.e. that stress (or strain on the body) of any kind causes its own type of disease and can effect or cause other diseases.

His discoveries laid the foundation for 50 years of research into biological stress and its effects. What seems to have been lost somewhere along the away, amidst the huge troves of clinical research, are Selye’s ideas on health, becoming healthy and staying healthy.

Of particular interest are his thoughts on the primal human needs for; self expression, for harmonious connection to others through selfless service, for acomplishment of aspirations. His book The Stress of Life is supposed to be for the lay person but is real complicated and contains some pretty awful animal experiments. Having said that final part called ‘Philosophic Implications’ is easy to read and of great value.

Common sense and an inquisitive mind can effortlessly expand on his ideas to identify the overiding principals of health and disease prevention. In the section ‘The ultimate aim’ he says the following:

“As I see it, man’s ultimate aim is to express himself as fully as possible, according to his own light’s”

“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice its conformity“

– Rolo May

Today is the 26th of may. Its a beautiful sunny afternoon in Dublin and I’m downing a nice cold bottle of beer (brand x). This is my first post and I am racking my brain as to how best present the contents of my mind to the virtual world. So many years have past since I lied on that black leather lined table in the consultants clinic and he said there is no cure for this, it’ll never be the same….and I thought ‘what the f*ck do you know, you don’t even know me, I’m gonna recover, I’m gonna do this’.

My life from that day took off in another trajectory, I felt like a man totally lost in a new and frightening world desperate to get to a destination unmarked and unsignposted. It seemed every angle I tried to get a positive change in my condition came up with a fat zero. Dissapointment, failure, fear and anxiety became constant companions for at least the first two years.

I could fill many volumes about why I refused the operations offered me and the situations and people I encountered as I traveled the world in search of answers.

That is for another day…for the film infact. For now I can tell you this: on the 15th of June I leave for Tucson, Arizona. There I will be doing an intestinal detox program which will coincide with an intensive physical therapy program to include: massage, watsu and Feldenkrais ‘functional intergration’.