Your wounds are hard at work making their sacred medicine in the hidden spaces below the scars. [Pixie Lighthorse]
All lives acquire scars. It’s an inevitable part of being human and sharing the world with others. Some of those scars are self imposed, some are inflicted by others, by circumstance, by accident. Nevertheless it is an absolute given our bodies, minds and souls will bear the marks of our own personal journey of years. How do we carry them? I think it’s fair to surmise that a great many are hidden and remain that way either because we deem them ugly or because they may reveal our vulnerability. They are not shareable. Then there are those marks we cannot hide, when surgeons wield their cutting tools and take away parts that hurt or fail us in some way. Mastectomies and amputations, extractions and episiotomies. When we fall and a break or deep cut heals but leaves a permanent reminder of and at the point of collision. They become part of us, our story.
In the past week, I’ve seen almost on a daily basis, those around me acquiring new scars, myself included. Some are grounded in the joy of birth and new life, some are the result of ‘squatters evicted’ - rogue cells excised and leaving livid evidence of their previous existence behind. Some scars occur through and by the heart. Hurt and hard words have as much power as a scalpel in piercing flesh and drawing blood. These marks can’t be seen. We carry them inside and it takes nothing to find an ancient wound aching or even reopened and seeping it’s hurt into us all over again.
My old school friends and I had our first meet up of the year last week and enjoyed the generous hospitality of one of our number. Her home has been completely refurbed as a result of flood, this took some time during which they were ‘homeless’. Alternative accommodation had to be found. The deep waters of insurance claims had to be navigated and life over many months was uncertain and challenging. This kind of event leaves a print of it’s own and it’s a testimony to her resilience that we met at her home for reunion. Recovered yes, but the memory remains and the memory contains pain.
It was wonderful to be with each other again. Together we bare the scars of so much and it isn’t over yet, the hurdles of test results, medical treatments, our children’s problems and more, wield an indiscriminate cutting tool that leaves none untouched. Yet we laughed and ate, talked it all out, reminisced and generally had a beautiful day together. We are a sort of safety net for each other, a support that neither judges nor criticises. The cut made on one, is a cut we share and a consensual balm is offered to aid healing. We talk and we listen.
‘Make your last audible breath a sung tone’
In the same week we learned of Alexei Navlany’s execution. A scar on his wife, family, his country, on all of us. Although this may feel distant, somewhere over there, just another Putinesque horror notched up in world history. It’s nearer than we think, it’s close up and personal, etched into us. The reverberations mark us all. We’re connected and can’t move through this life untouched by the tragedies taking place around us. Every time an atrocity occurs, it infects the whole not a part. So Alexei’s death and what comes in it’s wake, prints it’s sadness and horror upon us and can’t be ignored. We may hear and see it in the media and believe that for us it remains within the frame of a screen, but the toxic momentum of it seeps into our lives like a disease. We’re hurt by it almost without realising. There is a great deal of the grotesque on a global scale. Ukraine, Gaza, Syria…and of course earth warming. These are scars we’ve made on the world landscape with our consumerism and individualism, our warring. Hacking away at rainforests, digging still deeper for minerals, for fuels to meet the ever increasing appetite for more. Hotter water, power showers, air con, Jane not Jon, Christmas lights, holiday flights, bigger cars, buzzier bars, smart phones, bigger drones - you get the picture. Just more.
When someone dies, aren’t we all ‘cut up’ by it? Whether it be someone famous like John Lennon, Nelson Mandela, George Alagia or our mum, cousin, friend, each time we encounter death I believe a small cut is made upon the heart and mind creating a pattern of lines, reminders of our mortality and our pain. Those wounds heal but never leave us, we get used to them, we carry them on. They are our battle scars.
Disease also has the power to scar. Collectively we passed through and out of the pandemic, licking our wounds and are only now understanding how deep those scars run.
Like chicken pox, diagnosed in our household for one of the babes this week, those blisters may leave a lasting reminder of the event. I still have a chicken pox scar on my stomach and of course the virus remains in the body….reappearing as shingles in later years, also in my family at the moment. So we get back up each time, body ready for more mark making. More healing over.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001wjbz
Then today I listened to Music Manifesto on BBC Radio 4 and found myself completely engaged with the content and that in some way it felt completely connected to this piece on scars and healing. In particular an American woman called Pauline Oliveros. I discovered her work undertaken in the 60s within the production and composition of ‘music’ through sound and a process called Deep Listening
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“What is the difference between hearing and listening? Does sound have consciousness? Can you imagine listening beyond the edge of your own imagination? Pauline Oliveros
Quantum Listening is a manifesto for listening as activism. Through simple yet profound exercises, Oliveros shows how Deep Listening is the foundation for a radically transformed social matrix: one in which compassion and peace form the basis for our actions in the world.
In 1969, Oliveros began studying Kinetic Awareness with the dancer and bodyworker Elaine Summers, in New York. In her method, Summers taught students to become sensitive to signals coming from their bodies, including the ways in which people unconsciously police their own movements. Questioning, for example, why a woman’s hips are permitted to sway only slightly (and a man’s not at all), Summers showed how societal inhibitions can leave lasting physical restrictions in one’s body. She taught awareness through slow, quotidian movements like sitting, standing, lying, and walking—activities that would soon become central to Oliveros’s “Meditations.”
“Healing can occur . . . when one’s inner experience is made manifest and accepted by others.”
“Sonic Meditation”: approaching the world with ears wide open, with as much courage as one could muster, pausing when necessary, and listening deeply.
“Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening.”
Read the world around you like a musical score.
I’ve included here excerpts from various writings about her and around her Quantum Listening, a music manifesto prompted originally by the political state in America, the Vietnam war protests, JFK’s assassination and a young student who poured kerosene on himself and set himself alight, she ‘felt the temper of the times. She felt the tremendous fear.’ Here is a woman who explored, experimented and expressed her humanitarian purpose, specifically for healing and expanded consciousness in sound. I agree with her that most of what we are listening to has little consequence. Our auditory attention is taken up by the wrong things. The programme shone a light and has provoked an appetite to retrain my auditory skills, to undertake some deep listening of my own. Every sound we make causes a vibration. Think of the hundreds of sounds in any given day that point you to one direction or another. Birdsong and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. A kettle boiling. Traffic. Paper shuffling. Phone notifications. Your breath. A baby’s cry. Bombs. Running water. Pneumatic drills. Ventilators. Page turning. Coffee machines. Knife chopping. Tractors. Another voice. Are you really listening or just waiting to speak.
The R4 programme is well worth listening to and I’ve ordered the book Quantum Listening. I’ll let you know. There is a chance we can heal our scars, the visible and invisible, we simply have to listen to the world and be open to it. Offer sounds of peace, tones of love, make sounds that heal. Till the next time
A
https://music.apple.com/gb/album/deep-listening/51221050