On Music - Oliver Sacks / Brain Pickings (Fri 11 Sep 2015)

score - Chippen Lane / Chippendale (Fri 11 Sep 2015)

Oliver Sacks on Music:

music makes one experience pain and grief more intensely, it brings solace and consolation at the same time

via Oliver Sacks on 9/11 and the Paradoxical Power of Music to Bring Solace by Making Room for Our Pain by Briain Pickings.

music pierces the heart
a tear manifest

On Time and The Past - Tim Winton / The Turning

Geoff - "an early start for the first day of the rest of my life - 'where do you start?'" - Alexandria (7am Wed 01 Jul 2009)

Tim Winton on Time and the Past:

When a wave breaks, the water is not moving. The swell has travelled great distances but only the energy is moving, not the water. Perhaps time moves through us and not us through it ... the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.

via The Turning by Tim Winton.

These words are so touching. Not really sure how to say what they make me feel - this photograph of me the day after Jenny died, might say it all? Maybe time did move through me and I am still there - I don't know really, but this photo makes it feel like it - one of those reference points in life. It also reminds me of who I was, who I have become and want to be, which when I think about is the same thing. Not sure what I'm trying to say or how (nothing unusual there). Gladly, it is never over. I have a past, it is who I am. And thankfully, I've stopped trying to be anything else.

On Grief - Rebecca Norris Webb / riccomaresca.com (Jun 2013)

Self Portrait - Newtown (Mar 2010)
Rebecca Norris Webb (*) reflects On Grief (*):

I accept that everyone I love will die. I accept that grief (*) will break me open time and time again.

I also accept that if I can pick up my camera (*) and head out into the landscape, I can create even during the darkest and most devastating times of my life. I find some peace (*) in this.

via The Geography of Loss: A Conversation with Curator Laurel Reuter and Artist Rebecca Norris Webb (*).

Is Suffering a Private Matter? by Cath Duncan (Wed 16 Feb 2011)

Beautiful Day by U2 (Boston 2001)
You've been all over
And it's been all over you

You're on the road
But you've got no destination

Reach me
I know I'm not a hopeless case

What you don't have you don't need it now
What you don't know you can feel it somehow

Beautiful Day by U2


Some times you stumble across a post that takes your breath away. This one did for me:

• Is Suffering a Private Matter? by Cath Duncan (16 Feb 2011)

It captures much of what I have felt, thought or had to consider during the last 21 Months and it does feel a bit like the Beautiful Day lyrics above, particularly:

You've been all over
And it's been all over you

Here are the dot points from the article:

Grief needs to be expressed in some way – either privately or with witnesses, in order to heal. [..]

Some people say that suffering is a private matter because..

• It’s important to avoid embarrassment and rejection by your tribe


• It’s important to protect the parts of yourself that are most vulnerable


• It’s important to protect other people from pain


• It’s important to take your pain to “professionals” who know how to deal with it


• During grieving, it’s important to tune out external influences and tune into your own inner wisdom


• It’s important not to focus on your suffering in a public way because what you focus on grows

[..]

On the other hand, some people say that suffering can be more easily negotiated when it’s out in the open because:

• Keeping your suffering private engenders self-judgment, shame, loneliness and pain


• Sharing your suffering brings people together


• Sharing your suffering facilitates healing


• Sharing your suffering promotes resilience – in yourself and others

[..] the benefits of sharing your suffering with empathic people are incredibly powerful! It’s scary to share about our suffering, but I don’t want to miss out on such powerful benefits and opportunities for healing!

Have come a long way since the first day of the rest of my life back on Wed 01 Jul 2009. Thought I would capture a photo just now so that I can remember this day, which also just happens to be the 21st Anniversary since the first time that Jenny and I went out to dinner together and to see a Movie Look Who's Talking.

Geoff - 21 Months Down the Track - Alexandria (0:16am Wed 30 Mar 2011)
Geoff - "an early start for the first day of the rest of my life - 'where do you start?'" - Alexandria - 7am Wed 01 Jul 2009 (picasa)

Beautiful Day Lyrics

The heart is a bloom
Shoots up through the stony ground
There's no room
No space to rent in this town

You're out of luck
And the reason that you had to care
The traffic is stuck
And you're not moving anywhere

You thought you'd found a friend
To take you out of this place
Someone you could lend a hand
In return for grace

It's a beautiful day
Sky falls, you feel like
It's a beautiful day
Don't let it get away

You're on the road
But you've got no destination
You're in the mud
In the maze of her imagination

You love this town
Even if that doesn't ring true
You've been all over
And it's been all over you

It's a beautiful day
Don't let it get away
It's a beautiful day

Touch me
Take me to that other place
Teach me
I know I'm not a hopeless case

See the world in green and blue
See China right in front of you
See the canyons broken by cloud
See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out
See the Bedouin fires at night
See the oil fields at first light
And see the bird with a leaf in her mouth
After the flood all the colors came out

It was a beautiful day
Don't let it get away
Beautiful day

Touch me
Take me to that other place
Reach me
I know I'm not a hopeless case

What you don't have you don't need it now
What you don't know you can feel it somehow
What you don't have you don't need it now
Don't need it now
Was a beautiful day

A Couple of Random Quotes (Agile Living)

Hard work provides the opportunity to make sure that when that inspiration comes, you’re ready for it. You can build a solid base while you’re waiting, putting you in the position to use your creativity to propel something that’s already good to a level of greatness.

Planning your Creativity by Thursday Bram (18 Jan 2011)


Striving towards meaningful goals can be an important part of finding satisfaction in life. Remember it is the "striving" that is important, not the achievement. If we do not enjoy the daily commitment to bettering ourselves, it is unlikely that achieving the final objective is going to bring any lasting happiness.

The Problem With Goals by John Bardos (13 Nov 2010)


Finally, I am still trying to take the following post in:

• Is Suffering a Private Matter? by Cath Duncan (16 Feb 2011)

Seems rather timely considering I am thinking a lot about why and what I have posted here over the last 21 months.

Note: Found the web site from where the above posts come from via a Google Search for the term make mistakes well, the title of a recent post. Really quite a coincidence and has given me a lot to think about.

Jenny and Geoff - Nelson Bay / Port Stephens (Sun 06 Jul 2003)

Hereafter - Sydney Morning Herald - Spectrum (Sat 19 Feb 2011)

Hereafter - Sydney Morning Herald (w) - Spectrum (Sat 19 Feb 2011)
Really enjoyed this film (more so than Rabbit Hole). Happy to make my own mind up on this one. Don't really care what the critics or the majority of the viewers say. Will touch people in many different ways and will probably be a function of their own life experiences.

Rabbit Hole - Sydney Morning Herald - Spectrum (Sat 19 Feb 2011)

Rabbit Hole - Sydney Morning Herald (w) - Spectrum (Sat 19 Feb 2011)
Gained a couple of insights from watching this movie and then having a look around the web where I found a couple of good reviews written by Grief Counsellors:

• Unbearable Grief in Rabbit Hole (2010) by Joseph Burgo, and


• A Grief Therapist’s Film Perspective: The Rabbit Hole by Beth S. Patterson

Particularly liked what Beth S. Patterson writes in A Grief Therapist’s Film Perspective: The Rabbit Hole:

Change is part of the grief process too.

Grief changes us.

We are never the same after a major loss.

In fact, part of the process of grief is to find one’s “new normal.”

Conversely, as we change, our grief changes.

As Leah’s mother eloquently describes it, grief is like a brick in one’s pocket – we always feel it, but over time it feels less heavy. After some time, we can actually forget that it’s there sometimes, but memories come back, and we feel the brick again.

Had kind of worked this out for myself (i.e. in order to move forward, you need to adapt, otherwise you can get stuck) and was actually going to write about it to mark the 2nd anniversary of this little Blog, which passed quietly while I was in Auckland for the Takapuna Cup. In the end I did not get around to posting (happens a lot - only a fraction of what I would like to post makes it here - have started so many posts that never quite get finished).

Anyway, what I had thought I would write about for that unwritten 2nd Anniversay Post was how my life (and is some ways my identity) had changed since that first post on the Wed 25 Feb 2009 and how I thought the blog might give some indication to what I am passionate about, who I was , the transition to who I have become and where I am heading, at least in the short-term.

I have enjoyed the Blogging. It has given me a creative outlet and has kept my mind stimulated. It is fun to look over what I have written. Like a photograph, I can remember the feelings and the reasons why I might have written the post.

Finally, as Ken Burns said at the 2004 Commencement Yale Class Day Speech (as pdf):

Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality. Remember, too, there is nothing more incredible than being a witness to history.

Keep on Blogging.

Regards .. Geoff

Grief is concentrated in the face [take2] - The Art of Grief by Jonathan Walker

Grief is concentrated in the face. It makes the flesh sodden and unresponsive, dull with blood, like when you are drunk and heat comes off the skin like vapour off water, as if your vitality is evaporating into the air. The muscles go dead around the mouth and eyes. It almost hurts when others smile and your own face remains inert, held down by the drag and weight of the blood. The memory of grief stays in the flesh. The body recalls it, feels its weight, moulds itself automatically to its shape as the loss is remembered, the mask becoming tighter as the memory becomes clearer; not the memory of the dead person, but the memory of grief itself.

Page 24 The Art of Grief by Jonathan Walker

Geoff - "an early start for the first day of the rest of my life - 'where do you start?'" - Alexandria - 7am Wed 01 Jul 2009 (picasa)
Took this photo of myself the first morning after Jenny had died. I slept OK, all things considered and was up early - I had no idea what the day would bring. All I knew there was a Funeral to organise and many people to be contacted. No stranger to all of this, so I headed up to my usual Coffee shop (Cafe Sofia) so that I could have a few quiet moments to myself before the onslaught of the day.

Not sure why I took the photo - maybe so that I could remember that moment of numbness, despair and initial grief. I did a similar thing when my younger brother Tim died (see here).

The words above by Jonathan Walker (he reviewed one of my photos that I took in Newtown - see here) seem to match up with what I now see of myself in the photo.

The following gives some context to his writings on Grief - The Art of Grief - and its relationship to his new Novel - Five Wounds. It is complicated, but Grief is a long drawn out and complicated process. I am still trying to work it all out myself.

Five Wounds: An Allegory by Jonathan Walker

Five Wounds is a parable as well as a fairy tale. Throughout, it refers to an invisible, suppressed source: ‘The Art of Grief’, an abandoned essay on the deaths of my parents. This essay is never acknowledged directly within the novel, but it will be made available in March or April 2010 as a free download on my website for those who wish to investigate.

[..]

‘The Art of Grief’ is a key, which unlocks hidden meanings in Five Wounds. However, the relationship between the two texts is more complex than that of a riddle to its solution or a joke to its punch line, because Five Wounds has an independent life of its own. Its characters act according to their own natures, and make their own choices. They are not mere ciphers, condemned to act out episodes of my biography in a disguised, pathological form. The characters may be fantastic, but they are real within their own world, even when they unknowingly refer to events beyond its borders.

In this case, then, one text does not solve the other. Rather, Five Wounds places stolen fragments of ‘The Art of Grief’ in a new setting, which transforms their meaning, as the Venetians studded the façade of the church of San Marco with pieces of marble looted from Constantinople. Here, however, the arrangement is reversed. It is not the loot that shines brightly, but the container, within which the quotations are safely hidden away, like bones in a reliquary.

UPDATE: To download a PDF version of 'The Art of Grief', go to this part of my site

[Geoff: A repost of a version I was working on that somehow got posted on the 10 Apr 2010 - subsequently deleted and this is the remaining version.]

The perfect moment of grief is when .. - The Art of Grief by Jonathan Walker

[..] The perfect moment of grief is when the need to speak is balanced by the desire to be silent, and when the shame of past sins is balanced by the need for dignity, to honour the dead as well as yourself. Within this moment, the only responsibility is to endure until it passes and it becomes possible to act again. This is why it seems perfect, because all that is required to be absolutely right and correct is to take the strain and wait for the checks and balances to break down somewhere. [..]

From Page 2 The Art of Grief by Jonathan Walker. More here.

Joanne and Geoff - Spreading some of Jenny's Ashes on the River near the Charles Bridge just down from the Kafka Museum - Prague - Mon 01 Sep 2009 (picasa)

Afterglow - INXS - Letterman

Afterglow - INXS - Letterman
Andrew Farriss from INXS writes about Afterglow ..

"Lyrically I was looking for something that deals quite generically with the sense of loss. But not in a depressing sense. It could be about a family member, someone close, [..] it could be about loss of any kind. I really wanted to convey a recognition of coming to terms with that loss in a positive way and remembering someone with immense affection. Initially the loss makes you sad, but then you feel that glow of warmth and I think this is something everyone can relate to."

Afterglow Lyrics

Here I am,
Lost in the light of the moon,
That comes through my window.

Bathed in blue,
The walls of my memory divides,
The thorns from the roses.
It's you and the roses.

[CHORUS]
Touch me and I will follow,
In your afterglow.
Heal me from all this sorrow,
As I let you go.
I will find my way
When I see your eyes,
Now I'm living,
In your afterglow.

Here I am,
Lost in the ashes of time,
But who wants tomorrow,
In between,
Longing to hold you again,
I'm caught in your shadow.
I'm losing control.

My mind drifts away,
We only have today.

[CHORUS]
Touch me and I will follow,


In your afterglow.
Heal me from all this sorrow,
As I let you go.
I will find my way,
I will sacrifice,
'Til the blinding day,
When I see your eyes.

Now I'm living,
In your afterglow [in your afterglow].
When the veils are gone,
As I let you go,
As I let you go.

[CHORUS]
Touch me and I will follow,
In your afterglow.
Heal me from all this sorrow,
As I let you go.
I will find my way
I will sacrifice,
Now I'm living,
In your afterglow.

Bathed in blue,
The walls of my memory divides,
The thorns from the roses.
It's you who is closest.