Right. Woke up this morning and feel better. The important thing to do now is to not over do it!
So, no swim at 6am, go easy on the diet, and maybe just try to get back to work gently. It is as always a busy week coming up, but the whole point with this thing is to take it slowly. Rushing back in will just exhaust me. So steady, steady…
So, illness. Doesn’t happen often to me, I have the constitution and the subtle nature of a plank of wood. However, every so often I’m reminded that I am a biological entity like everyone else and I get sick. By ‘so often’, I mean every ten years or so. This is the week in question; my sinuses are all infected and it’s in my lungs, and the reduced lung capacity has made me weak. So I have been off work all this week. The last time I had so much time to myself I was on maternity leave, and that was at such a high pitch of fear there was no chance of rest; merely sitting there squawking my arms like the fat hen I was.
Being ill is strange to me. Most of the time a night’s sleep or a big meal means the energy is back again and off we go. But this time, no immediate efforts made things better. I’ve been asleep for the better part of a week and I am only getting back to myself. Strange, to have to listen to what my metabolism is saying to me. The eyes in the mirror look weird.
Tired? Me??
So that’s been my week. No work done at home or at … work, no writing and no editing. But there was no choice, I’m forced to admit. There was nothing I could do, I had to do nothing. C’est la vie.
See this image?
It is level. Quiet. Undisturbed. The ground is even and smooth. Its very marginal nature is intended. It makes me think back to the marriage referendum, when person after person after person in our society came forward to disclose that they were gay. These people were not deviants, strangers or outside the mainstream; instead they were establishment figures well within the status quo, and who had operated and achieved much within our communities. And yet, they had lived a life somewhere both within and without our world. where they were made to feel different and excluded, because they were. They were people who were not part of how society views itself. Instead, they lived lives that were at least in terms of its dialogue, silent and unfree. The silence was imposed both within and without; Ursula Halligan says she never spoke of her sexuality to her family, in her need to avoid exclusion. Pat Neary was never out either; years and years of not being able to be himself without fear in our country.
We hate. We hate well in this country, with passion, history and layers. Right now, as I type, the Citizens Assembly listens to testimony regarding the need to repeal the 8th Amendment. It invites Churches, but will not hear from TFMR people, an oversight that is outrageous. But lets go back to that field; that quiet, lonely, smooth field. That silence is what is wanted. Shut up. You need to shut up. It is the same silence one finds on battle fields and in cemeteries. It is the silence of rooms empty of the living and loved. Those horrible people who destroy the doctrines of hate are silenced and are no more.
The last entry of Anne Frank’s diary is the 1st of August, and after that there is a white, silent, page. That silence is the desire here. We can be compounded, capitalised and calcified into nothings, ground like pestle and mortar by the greed of them that will have us for their pleasure or their worth, and then we will be made silent and uncomplaining by the deeds of their ways. They will destroy us, make us silent, and let the sweet calm pastures left after us testify that there is no loss or damage to be noted. We were not here. The loss of us is no loss at all. Let that which was here be not here from now on. Let our words be silent, and not heard. Let the wind alone be heard as our voices.
These people have been free to kill us; there are people not here who should be here today. They will continue to act in this way if allowed. For the sake of overly silent rooms, this must not continue.
