O England

The children’s eyes call me back. My lover’s eyes call me back.

I am a third of a globe away.

A sense of foreboding came upon my heart as we saw the Gatwick signs above the motorway. I wept in the car, checked in with love and fear and sadness sweeping with a visceral tide through my heart, wept on the plane, pulled myself together, travelled to Vancouver, San Francisco, slept a few hours in Berkeley, drove to Oregon, arrived, and wept some more.

O England.

Those children are approaching school age, one or two have already began.

Aged 4, I was a singing, dancing creature. I sung on the stairs, danced in the living room, sung and danced in the garden, pinched my sisters’ dancing costumes and went and sang and danced in them the nearby woods.

School began; recalling it last month, my body bent over; compression.

I went through that pipe and came out 16 years later, aged 21, with very high shoulders, many addictions, and a depression so heavy I wanted to die.

I was a straight A student; society would shake my hand and say congratulations.

It's taken me a full 16 years more to find my way back to being a happy singing, dancing creature.

Those children are about to enter that pipe. Was it educational, cultural, familial ways that shaped me so, or a mixture of all three?

England, what is going on?

I arrived in Oregon, at the Network for a New Culture summer camp. I enter the tent. Sarito greets me, standing still, looking at me straight with eyes full of heart, full present, fully in his body. I return his gaze. And finally he says, in a soft voice so shaped by heart, “I love you.”

I burst into tears. I come from a culture where no-one will greet me that way. 

England, here is everything I struggle with.

Avoiding intimacy

Eye contact lasts for fleeting sub-seconds. A hug or handshake is brief. We’re always moving, offering the next good word, funny joke or interesting story, to keep us away from just… being here, now, together. 

What happens when we try it? We have to face the sadness and fear and vulnerabilities our eyes can’t hide but we don’t want people to see. Don’t see into-me. Don’t Into-me-see. No intimacy.

Until we get drunk, or have sex. Ahhhh finally thank fuck the restraints are off and we can connect.

Where is the heart?

I had some therapy with my parents recently. I said, hey, we have a culture of rejecting and resisting experience. You say to me, “no Briony… that’s a silly thought, don’t have that feeling, no Briony… we would have wrapped it up sooner if you weren’t there with your feelings.”

Hey, i’m a part of the family, and being a part, I have feelings. We say it to the children: “no Magdalena, don’t be scared.” They say it to themselves: “I mustn’t be pissed off, I’ve got to be a good host and make a nice Christmas. I mustn’t be f******g pissed off, no I’m totally fine, fake smile… what you FUCKING ARHRHRHDKFHDSUIEHRSEBI!” and drama is created that we’re still cleaning up six months later.

I say, what if we could give attention and respect to heart in ourselves and each other?

My parents say, hey, be gentle with us. We weren’t cultured to feel our hearts. We were sent to boarding school young. Feelings are disruptive. We’ve been trained to be as undisturbed by them as possible.

England I want to be able to feel! And I want you to be able to feel too! I want to be in my heart, and not turn it off when I speak, or work, or make love, or look in your eyes, or hug you.

And I want your heart!!! Otherwise… it’s so easy to go from thither to thy, thirsty.

Grey skies and rain

There’s not much we can do about this. But it’s a downer. Cold dampness.

Tea, cake and alcohol

Alcohol. If we’ve created these intimacy-avoiding, “heartless” persona to function safely in the world with, how on earth do we connect when it’s time to socialise? We press the off-button using alcohol, and come out of our shells a bit.

But what if we could connect, and be courageous, and play, and dance and sing and laugh and seduce, without it?

That takes a different way of being

and that’s what we need to find.

Tea and cake… God doesn’t it just make you feel so… boggy? In theory it peps you up but in reality it bogs me down… What is this tea and cake all about?

I can’t move back to England until I’ve really learnt to say over and over again, no thank you, I don’t want cake, no thank you, I don’t want tea, no thank you, I don’t want wine or beer.

It makes me a parya, but here in California with the rosy-cheeked dancing people who don’t seem to age, we don’t have this stuff. We never offer it to each other. It’s never around. Seriously.

England, wft, it makes us old and boggy and bloated and then we just accept these un-vital bodies and this un-vital culture and these un-vital sex lives (I have no idea to be honest) - wtf?

Small buildings

There’s a crampedness, a small pokey-ness to buildings. Look we’re bigger than we were 100 years ago. Honestly one of the really nice things about the American built environment is that it never asks you to shrink, offers you big windows and as much sunlight as possible.  Ahhhhhhhh

The puritan crackdown / Judgement / keep those hips square

Hmm maybe I’m conflating a few things here but there’s a) a shit ton of unconscious judgement, by which I mean, judgementalness that we’re not doing any work around. In my American circles, a judgement points to a wound of your own that you’re projecting onto others. (Humm is that the irony in this whole piece? Investigate)…. So you have to investiagate, then you grow, and then you become more loving of this world right as it is. And that love helps it to heal and grow.

Humm… I should change this…. to… England I love you just as you are…

But there are like… those cold little tea cups they have in church, the omnipresence of shitty little white sugar biscuits… and traditional styles of dancing in which the body stays entirely straight because.. what? we have hips? we are sexual beings?

No! They burned the witches for that…

Seriously. We’re living in a legacy of puritan, witch-killing that said women can’t be sexual and men can’t be vulnerable

and it’s high time for a new ear.

How does this connect… it’s like…. if we are in our bodies, and our hearts, and our eyes, then we have to face how much we are erotic creatures, and gosh, we might be attracted to one another, and that would disrupt something…

Not all cultures are monogamous. In some cultures monogamy literally doesn’t exist. Can you imagine that?

The judea-christian world strongly values monogamy, marriage, and the nuclear family as the social unit. In other cultures, tribe is the primary social unit.

I see people struggling in the nuclear family, much as I adore those children. “The nuclear family is radioactive” says Jon Young, a nature-connection teacher in California.

And it keeps us in high consumption; one washing machine per family; one kitchen with everything per family; then folks divorce because they can’t bear it (the radioactivity), so then it’s one washing machine etc each.

What if we tribalise.

What if we come into heart, body, connection.

How would we do it, in this world built to the principles of an old culture?

And, what would happen?

Living in America, I get all these things in droves; a hearty culture of embodiment, expression, love, spirituality, great weather, a wonderful built and natural environment, and a really healthy food culture all around me. I have abundant access to touch, intimacy and connection. I like it.

And, the longer I stay here, the more I sacrifice something heartbreakingly precious; belonging, family, connection to children, stability, long-term living. 

What am I going to do?