Ella Wee’s Experience (Participant) [she/her]

i never know how to start. I don’t know what is more difficult — beginnings or endings. Where do I begin? How do I begin? And — how do I end things? Is this the end? 

when we begin something, we start with the end in mind. Or — we start knowing this has to end. 

i don’t know where to begin telling you about this journey. I don’t know how to end this, too. 

//

in split, we often talk about journey. our past, present, future. the past is not set in stone. neither is the present. imagine roads that branch out, intersect. past present future appear in the now.

perhaps we could start with an excerpt of a poem that we read during the journey:

If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season, 

It would always be the same: you would have to put off 

Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more 

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

t.s eliot always had a way with words. I first encountered Four Quartets in a literature module I took in school. I was clouded by my prior experience within that module. I had to empty out and re-look at the poem. This re-reading was a more intuitive one, less academia-trying-to-not-sound-stupid-in-front-of-Dr-Ang and more this is what i feel / think. I guess what really struck me were these lines:

“Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season, 

It would always be the same: you would have to put off 

Sense and notion.”

and

“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

i think about death and dying a lot. Tell me we’re dead and I’ll love you even more. 

how do we communicate with the dead? A medium? A shaman? Perhaps a shaman. Someone who channels the dead. Who becomes a channel, a bridge between dead and living and everything else in between. the not-dead, not-living, the nots.

darryl told us to imagine ourselves as a channel — care passes through us. We resign. 

//

one of the most impactful exercises (?) would be the one surrounding care. 

how do we receive and give care? how do we ask for care? how do we resign?

it was difficult for me, to acknowledge that i need care, to ask for it. it is also difficult to acknowledge that giving and receiving are not so different after all. how do we ask for care? how do we give care? how can we care for ourselves, and others? these are questions i grapple with.

i remember the first time we did the exercise. i wanted to peel my skin off. receiving care so directly was so deeply uncomfortable for me. i wanted to run. to cry. it felt as though something was breaking inside me. something that was holding me together as a person.

then i realised — do i really know how to care?

//

care comes so naturally to some people. they give so easily, so naturally. i am jealous. i would like that too.

what does it mean to care for someone? I equate it to a kind of love. and love requires a yielding of intentionality. i think. I don’t know what it means to love and to care for someone. I’m still figuring it out. 

my hands feel foreign. I don’t know how to care.

i don’t know how to be cared for either.

//

darryl talks about resigning — resigning to not hold back and not taking. in my head, it feels like a letting go. no longer do we exert energy — instead, we simply let go. 

//

there are many stages to this exercise. each one made me realise difficult things about myself, and how i relate to others.

i hate asking for care. but i am also deeply afraid that my care for others will be seen as a disturbance. too much. 

//

the word care comes from Old English caru (noun), carian (verb), of Germanic origin; related to Old High German chara ‘grief, lament’, charon ‘grieve’, and Old Norse kǫr ‘sickbed’. 

i find it interesting how it is interwoven with grief, pain, loss. And I think of Jeanette Winterson, who wrote “why is the measure of love loss?”

i don’t think care and love is about grief, or is about loss. I think it’s about growth and hope. 

//

there is an emptying out, a resignation. how do we strive for “I-Thou”, not an it?

//

writing this, I realise that there are a lot of terms that you, reader, might not fully understand. they are a jargon of sorts, within the programme. I would love to explain them to you fully, but that takes the joy out of slowly discovering them yourself ;)

//

i-Thou. A greater thou. A relationship that has no bounds. A relationship with no objects, no possession.  I still struggle with this concept, this ideal. 

it is an emptying out, a resignation, almost like… a prayer? to trust. to love without bounds. to re-member

//

re-member — to make whole, to put together, to do it again. when growth happens, sometimes, one has to let go of things, to chisel away parts of the self, to shed. and that is scary, because it is a venture into the unknown, away from what is familiar and comforting. 

how do we grow, how do we care, how do we resign? 

//

thank you, for sticking through this mess of a journal, that jumps and leaps and never really finding its footing. I don’t know how to end this, or if I should end this here, but I am going to trust that this is the end.