Deborah's Visions
As a result of much positive feedback from last month’s newsletter about her dream, Deborah Clarke author of ‘Songs From The Secret Place – The Meeting of the Spirits’ has agreed to give us more of her own personal recollections.
One of the comments we had came from Jayne Hall, the winner of our latest short story competiton ‘Human Nature Versus The Spirit Guide’. Jayne whose story is posted on our web-site www.buttonbridgebooks.co.uk was recently featured in the ‘Shuttle & Times’ and had this to say about Deborah’s Dream:
‘I found Deborah’s dream and story very moving and inspirational. We all appear to have our time in the wilderness (even if it sometimes lasts longer than 40 days and 40 nights!) but hopefully find different keys to help us to emerge into the light and are left stronger for having had the experience. Whilst we are in these phases we are disconnected from others, ourselves and our purpose. Deborah’s Dream appears to me a very powerful metaphor for reconnecting to source and remembering that we are all one, all doing our best in the circumstances and situations we find ourselves in, all a glorious mixture of past life, genetic and environmental factors. In her book “Songs From The Secret Place, Deborah begins to explain this process – personally I can’t wait for Book 2 when I hope she goes further. We cannot underestimate the effect we have on other people through our words, actions and life story. ‘
If you missed ‘The Dream’, it can be found at www.buttonbridgebooks.co.uk, or on this blog
VISIONS
As a result of feedback she has had from the dream, Anne has asked me to write about what happened next. Before I start I want to make it clear that this is purely an account of what I experienced, as I experienced it. I offer no interpretation or analysis because where I am now I know that what you, the reader, make of these events, will depend entirely upon your own belief system, your own internal map of ‘reality’. However what I will say is this: it has taken me the twenty years since these events occurred to fully integrate what happened. Only now, as I approach my fiftieth birthday, am I at last completely unconcerned about anyone else’s interpretation. I offer this purely in the hope that by sharing it I may inspire others like me to come out and speak what they know.
In late September 1984 I moved to the little market town of Tenbury Wells to take up a job working in an old style institution run by what was then called The Spastics Society (now known as SCOPE). I was employed to do arts based activities with people who had multiple disabilities, most of whom were wheelchair bound and also had various degrees of learning difficulties and behavioural problems ranging from mild to as bad as it gets. The institution itself was a grand old mansion called Kyre Park, set in gardens landscaped by Capability Brown. It was located in the countryside, six miles from my flat in the town and I used to cycle to and from work everyday. However, having come from living in a city, I was unaccustomed to how dark the nights were in the countryside, there was no street lighting at all on the little country roads and out there, all alone on my bicycle, it was actually quite scary. Several times I ended up in the ditch because the feeble lights on my bike simply weren’t up to the task! However one such night, when I was cursing and wrestling my bike back onto the road, I suddenly became aware of the heavens above me. It was a pitch black, crystal clear, moonless night and the glorious panorama of the star filled sky suddenly grabbed my attention. As I stood there, gazing up in awe, every fibre of my being started to vibrate like a tuning fork. I got goose bumps all over, my hair stood on end, my heart started pounding and, as I stood there utterly transfixed, I knew with absolute certainty that the sky was trying to tell me something. It was the most extraordinary experience but it was not the first time it had happened. As a child I’d had the same experience but, because this and many other out of the ordinary experiences had been dismissed as ‘imagination’, ‘making up stories’ and even ‘telling lies’, I had grown up to dismiss them myself. There was no dismissing this though and, when it happened several more times over those next two months, the only question I had was ‘Why? Why is this happening again?’ Then on New Year’s Eve 84/85, something even more intriguing happened. I was out with my new friend who, to protect his privacy, I will call Steve, though ‘new’ is a purely relative term, he was one of those people who you just know you’ve known for lifetimes and you’re simply picking up where you left off. Anyway, it was another of those amazing crystal clear, moonless nights so we decided to drive up to the highest point in the area, Clee Hill, so we could gaze at the stars as the New Year rolled in. At this point I should mention that Steve had had a new car battery installed that very morning so as we sat there, looking at the heavens, the last thing we were worried about was whether the car would start again. We sat there in silence, taking it all in, and once again I began to get this overwhelming feeling that the sky was trying to tell me something. I bought every ounce of my attention to bear, desperately trying to grasp the tantalising echoes and whisperings . . . but then something else started to happen. As I gazed at the stars a sphere of blue and white light appeared, sparkling with scintillating geometric patterns. At first I felt myself pulled by it, as if my whole being was rushing towards it, then suddenly my perception flipped inside out and I thought. “Bloody hell! I’m not rushing towards it, it’s heading straight for me!” And even if I’d wanted to get out of the way I could not have moved fast enough for, even as I realised what was happening, it hit me right between the eyes and passed straight through me as if I was completely transparent! What happened next is a bit vague and fuzzy. I recall being consumed with a strange outpouring of grief and joy in the midst of which I became aware that Steve was experiencing exactly the same thing. When we finally recovered we sat there in silence for quite some time, neither of us knowing what to say, but finally Steve said, “What the hell was that?”
I said, “I’ve got no idea.”
We sat there in stunned silence for a bit longer then Steve turned the ignition with every intention of driving us home but, yes you’ve guessed it, the car wouldn’t start! Brand new battery – dead as a dodo! Again we sat there in silence, not knowing what on earth to think, but eventually we got ourselves together and, with the help of a bunch of very worse for wear New Year revellers giving us a push back onto the road, we freewheeled down the hill and got the car going again. We hoped that was that, the car was going, the battery would recharge, end of story. Next morning however, the car was still dead as a dodo. Now highly perplexed, Steve took the battery back to the garage where they too were totally baffled. It simply would not recharge. They made several attempts throughout the day but all to no avail until, determined to figure it out, they took it to bits and discovered that all the metal components were completely buckled and distorted, rendering it quite useless. We wondered about it for a couple of days then decided to just put it down to experience, but things did not go back to normal for long. A few weeks later, shortly before my twenty-eighth birthday, I was listening to some music one night when something phenomenal started to happen. Now as I’ve already said, I’d had a certain level of psychic experience all my life but I had never experienced anything like this! It felt as if the top had been lifted right off my head and I had been plugged into the very heart of the universe. I cannot describe the intensity of the light or even begin to convey the sheer power of the pure, unbounded love that started pouring through me. It was ecstasy! It rendered me helpless with bliss. It bought me to my knees! And with it streams of information downloaded into me, the very workings of the universe revealed before my very eyes, images and concepts coming so fast that I simply couldn’t keep up. Had it only happened this once I might have been tempted to dismiss it but, over the next two years, it happened again and again and I found myself reading voraciously to try and find a language with which to capture these concepts, I sucked up quantum physics, eastern philosophy, the western mystical tradition, Jungian psychology and more. However, as much as I felt I had been waiting my whole life for this to happen, I was also in total conflict with it, for what this experience revealed to me about myself was radical, it challenged everything I had ever been led to believe about myself and for that reason I was quite convinced that I simply could not be getting the messages right. As a result, I quite frequently found myself jumping up and down in the middle of the room shouting, “No, no, no! This cannot be right! I am Deborah Clarke! I am nobody! This cannot be right!” – or words to that effect. In the end the conflict reached stalemate and I realised that whether I liked it or not, I was going to have to get help, not least because it was starting to make me physically ill. So, to cut a long story short, one day I found myself talking to one of the founders of the College of Healing at Runnings Park in Malvern. In fairness I have to point out that I was always very, very, guarded about what I said at that time, indeed it is only now that I feel comfortable about disclosing the whole truth to anybody. However, I said enough for her to come to the conclusion that I was clearly very psychic but needed to get it under control. This seemed like a reasonable analysis to me, so when she suggested that I consider doing the College of Healing training to learn how to do that very thing, it seemed like a good idea. Needless to say, nothing could have prepared me for what happened during that first week of training. It was on the final night of my stay there that it happened, although things had gradually been building towards it throughout the whole week. I’d had a lot of healing by then but far from closing me down it was opening me up even more. I did not sleep for the entire week so great was the energy shift that was building. But I was still fighting, still refusing to give in and then, on that final night, a very lovely man who I will call Benedict offered to give me a massage. I thought, ‘What the hell. I need something’ and so I agreed. All went well for about half an hour, it was exquisite, such utter and blessed relief, but Benedict became very perplexed by the amount of tension in my lumbar/sacral area. Apparently my buttocks were like rock and he began uttering more and more earnest injunctions to ‘let go’ until in the end I thought ‘Ah, what the hell, I surrender’. With that I let go and the most extraordinary thing began to happen. Phenomenal heat exploded in my coccyx and started rising up my spine. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is kundalini, I’ve read about this!’ And, set in motion, there was no stopping it, not that I had any desire whatsoever to stop it. I tell you sisters; it rocked! Talk about orgasm! Imagine the most gut busting orgasm you’ve ever had and multiply it by infinity! But it’s not exploding outwards, it’s exploding up, up through your entire being, blasting every bit of resistance right out of the way and blowing your head right off! And that’s just for starters! Now I had no head there were no limits and I was flying, flying out of the room, soaring way above Malvern, winging my may through the stratosphere, and as I went I grew and grew and grew, now I was the whole world and every person that had ever lived, a million, billion lives rolling all the way back to the beginnings of civilization, then further back I was every plant species and animal there had ever been, then further back and I was the very mineral formations of this world, then the swirling gasses and the stuff of stars, the energetic matrices of galaxies, the blueprint of the very universe itself, until finally, all forms disappeared and there was nothing, nothing but pure, undifferentiated awareness, pure Presence, a velvet black, glittering Vast in which all of creation rose and fell, everything and nothing all at once.
(And people wonder why Brad Pitt leaves me cold!)
However, how I experienced this is one thing, how those around me perceived it is quite another. They were extremely concerned, they hadn’t got a clue what had happened and I was giving them no response whatsoever, principally because, at that point, there simply was no sense of ‘I’ to bring to the party. All of the hushed whisperings, the mad dashing about and the increasingly urgent calls of ‘Deborah! Deborah say something!” were of no concern, simply forms rising and falling on the face of the Deep. Then there was the awareness of being bodily manhandled and carried to the private house of one of the College tutors where another voice began demanding, ‘Who are you?’ At this point a sense of ‘I’ began to reassert itself though only in as far as to register that the question itself was completely absurd. Nevertheless, I was also becoming aware that if I did not come up with some kind of response I could be in trouble. They were scared, they clearly had no idea what had happened otherwise they would have just let me be. There was nothing wrong, absolutely nothing at all, but that was not how they were seeing it, their minds were creating quite a different story and I realised that my safety depended on finding some way to interface with their script. So with this aim in mind I plucked some words out of the sea of possibilities that I hoped might do the trick. “I am the guardian of the light,” I said, “I am the keeper of the secret knowledge.”
There was a weighty silence then the voice demanded. “Where do you come from?”
Again, this struck me as a totally absurd question but in an effort to oblige I plucked another response out of the ether and said, “Atlantis.”
There followed much earnest whispering and then the voice demanded, “Who are you now?”
Well now I was really starting to get a headache. I felt like a genie being forced back into a tiny little bottle. There was obviously a right answer to this question but I had no idea what it was and the effort of trying to figure it out was extremely painful.
Finally the voice said, “Who are you now, Deborah?”
‘O.K.,’ I thought, ‘so now I know the answer they’re looking for, but who is this Deborah?’ At that point I honestly did not know. However, the interrogation continued, I opened my eyes as requested and finally, with a supreme effort of will, I managed to locate this ‘Deborah’. They were happy then, for now I was giving them the answers they wanted to hear, but even as I delivered those answers I knew that ‘Deborah’ was nothing but a façade, an act, a part that I had been given to play, a role I inhabited in order to conform with how everyone else thought things should be. Now I had always had a sense that this was so but had assumed this to mean that there was something ‘wrong’ with me. Now I knew that there was nothing ‘wrong’ about it at all. It was right. Yes, my feeling had been right all along . . .
The full implications of this understanding did not dawn right then. Not until I went back to work the very next day did it finally hit me. To say it was weird going back to work after what I had been through is an understatement but let’s leave it at that because it’s not the important thing. The important thing is this: I walked back into Kyre Park a fundamentally changed person, my whole perception of myself had been turned inside out and I’ll admit it, I was nervous. What would they make of this new me, how would they react, how would they respond? I’ll tell you. They did not notice a blind, sodding bit of difference! My initial conversations went something like this.
“Hello Deb. Have a nice week off?”
“Amazing! Mind blowing! Absolutely the most . . . .”
“Oh that’s nice. Could you take Alan to the toilet for me?”
“???????????????????????????”
“Hello Deb. Have a good week?”
“It was the most amazing experience of my entire life!”
“Oh lovely, Jean’s waiting for you in the activities centre.”
“????????????????????????????”
You get the general idea. Not a glimmer, not a spark, not even a dim glow on the horizon . . . not, that is, until a little chap called Chris Belsten came wheeling himself down the corridor. Now, of all the residents of Kyre Park at that time, Chris was my number one fan, he adored me, he followed me everywhere, declared undying love every day and frequently proposed marriage. If anyone was going to be thrilled to see me it was Chris, however on that day he took one look at me, turned tail and bolted, just as fast as his wheelchair would carry him. Something about me had obviously frightened him to death. Everyone simply wrote it off as one of his funny turns but I was concerned. I went and found him and once again he tried to run away. He was so scared he couldn’t even look at me. It took me most of the afternoon to gradually win him back, but finally I got through to him and we had a little chat. I waited until I was able to establish eye contact and then I said, “Chris, what’s the problem? Why are you so scared?”
And he said, “It’s your eyes Debs, there’s too much light coming out of them.”
Now that’s when it hit me!
Here was this profoundly disabled man, physical impairment, learning difficulties, behavioural problems, the full works, a man whose opinions about anything were at best received with kind indulgence by the ‘able’ world, and he was the only person who could see that something had changed. He was the only one who noticed.
It was a shock, but my journey into the labyrinth was only just beginning. Over the next weeks and months I discovered that there was no way I could talk about what I had experienced without sounding like a raving lunatic. No words I used were adequate and the more I tried, the barmier it all sounded. In the end the Deborah character’s doubts, fears, conflicts and neuroses started to run the show again but what she didn’t know was that she was fighting a losing battle. Try as she might to fit everything back into nice neat boxes it was never going to happen. I smile now at some of the truly desperate measures I resorted to but once the knowing was there, there was no going back. Slowly but surely it began to work it’s magic, unravelling the web of illusion strand by strand, subversively dismantling every structure I had ever erected from this secret place within, unconscious patterns, ancestral patterns, collective patterns, archetypal patterns – a twenty year journey right into the heart of darkness . . . but that’s another story.
© Deborah Clarke
One of the comments we had came from Jayne Hall, the winner of our latest short story competiton ‘Human Nature Versus The Spirit Guide’. Jayne whose story is posted on our web-site www.buttonbridgebooks.co.uk was recently featured in the ‘Shuttle & Times’ and had this to say about Deborah’s Dream:
‘I found Deborah’s dream and story very moving and inspirational. We all appear to have our time in the wilderness (even if it sometimes lasts longer than 40 days and 40 nights!) but hopefully find different keys to help us to emerge into the light and are left stronger for having had the experience. Whilst we are in these phases we are disconnected from others, ourselves and our purpose. Deborah’s Dream appears to me a very powerful metaphor for reconnecting to source and remembering that we are all one, all doing our best in the circumstances and situations we find ourselves in, all a glorious mixture of past life, genetic and environmental factors. In her book “Songs From The Secret Place, Deborah begins to explain this process – personally I can’t wait for Book 2 when I hope she goes further. We cannot underestimate the effect we have on other people through our words, actions and life story. ‘
If you missed ‘The Dream’, it can be found at www.buttonbridgebooks.co.uk, or on this blog
VISIONS
As a result of feedback she has had from the dream, Anne has asked me to write about what happened next. Before I start I want to make it clear that this is purely an account of what I experienced, as I experienced it. I offer no interpretation or analysis because where I am now I know that what you, the reader, make of these events, will depend entirely upon your own belief system, your own internal map of ‘reality’. However what I will say is this: it has taken me the twenty years since these events occurred to fully integrate what happened. Only now, as I approach my fiftieth birthday, am I at last completely unconcerned about anyone else’s interpretation. I offer this purely in the hope that by sharing it I may inspire others like me to come out and speak what they know.
In late September 1984 I moved to the little market town of Tenbury Wells to take up a job working in an old style institution run by what was then called The Spastics Society (now known as SCOPE). I was employed to do arts based activities with people who had multiple disabilities, most of whom were wheelchair bound and also had various degrees of learning difficulties and behavioural problems ranging from mild to as bad as it gets. The institution itself was a grand old mansion called Kyre Park, set in gardens landscaped by Capability Brown. It was located in the countryside, six miles from my flat in the town and I used to cycle to and from work everyday. However, having come from living in a city, I was unaccustomed to how dark the nights were in the countryside, there was no street lighting at all on the little country roads and out there, all alone on my bicycle, it was actually quite scary. Several times I ended up in the ditch because the feeble lights on my bike simply weren’t up to the task! However one such night, when I was cursing and wrestling my bike back onto the road, I suddenly became aware of the heavens above me. It was a pitch black, crystal clear, moonless night and the glorious panorama of the star filled sky suddenly grabbed my attention. As I stood there, gazing up in awe, every fibre of my being started to vibrate like a tuning fork. I got goose bumps all over, my hair stood on end, my heart started pounding and, as I stood there utterly transfixed, I knew with absolute certainty that the sky was trying to tell me something. It was the most extraordinary experience but it was not the first time it had happened. As a child I’d had the same experience but, because this and many other out of the ordinary experiences had been dismissed as ‘imagination’, ‘making up stories’ and even ‘telling lies’, I had grown up to dismiss them myself. There was no dismissing this though and, when it happened several more times over those next two months, the only question I had was ‘Why? Why is this happening again?’ Then on New Year’s Eve 84/85, something even more intriguing happened. I was out with my new friend who, to protect his privacy, I will call Steve, though ‘new’ is a purely relative term, he was one of those people who you just know you’ve known for lifetimes and you’re simply picking up where you left off. Anyway, it was another of those amazing crystal clear, moonless nights so we decided to drive up to the highest point in the area, Clee Hill, so we could gaze at the stars as the New Year rolled in. At this point I should mention that Steve had had a new car battery installed that very morning so as we sat there, looking at the heavens, the last thing we were worried about was whether the car would start again. We sat there in silence, taking it all in, and once again I began to get this overwhelming feeling that the sky was trying to tell me something. I bought every ounce of my attention to bear, desperately trying to grasp the tantalising echoes and whisperings . . . but then something else started to happen. As I gazed at the stars a sphere of blue and white light appeared, sparkling with scintillating geometric patterns. At first I felt myself pulled by it, as if my whole being was rushing towards it, then suddenly my perception flipped inside out and I thought. “Bloody hell! I’m not rushing towards it, it’s heading straight for me!” And even if I’d wanted to get out of the way I could not have moved fast enough for, even as I realised what was happening, it hit me right between the eyes and passed straight through me as if I was completely transparent! What happened next is a bit vague and fuzzy. I recall being consumed with a strange outpouring of grief and joy in the midst of which I became aware that Steve was experiencing exactly the same thing. When we finally recovered we sat there in silence for quite some time, neither of us knowing what to say, but finally Steve said, “What the hell was that?”
I said, “I’ve got no idea.”
We sat there in stunned silence for a bit longer then Steve turned the ignition with every intention of driving us home but, yes you’ve guessed it, the car wouldn’t start! Brand new battery – dead as a dodo! Again we sat there in silence, not knowing what on earth to think, but eventually we got ourselves together and, with the help of a bunch of very worse for wear New Year revellers giving us a push back onto the road, we freewheeled down the hill and got the car going again. We hoped that was that, the car was going, the battery would recharge, end of story. Next morning however, the car was still dead as a dodo. Now highly perplexed, Steve took the battery back to the garage where they too were totally baffled. It simply would not recharge. They made several attempts throughout the day but all to no avail until, determined to figure it out, they took it to bits and discovered that all the metal components were completely buckled and distorted, rendering it quite useless. We wondered about it for a couple of days then decided to just put it down to experience, but things did not go back to normal for long. A few weeks later, shortly before my twenty-eighth birthday, I was listening to some music one night when something phenomenal started to happen. Now as I’ve already said, I’d had a certain level of psychic experience all my life but I had never experienced anything like this! It felt as if the top had been lifted right off my head and I had been plugged into the very heart of the universe. I cannot describe the intensity of the light or even begin to convey the sheer power of the pure, unbounded love that started pouring through me. It was ecstasy! It rendered me helpless with bliss. It bought me to my knees! And with it streams of information downloaded into me, the very workings of the universe revealed before my very eyes, images and concepts coming so fast that I simply couldn’t keep up. Had it only happened this once I might have been tempted to dismiss it but, over the next two years, it happened again and again and I found myself reading voraciously to try and find a language with which to capture these concepts, I sucked up quantum physics, eastern philosophy, the western mystical tradition, Jungian psychology and more. However, as much as I felt I had been waiting my whole life for this to happen, I was also in total conflict with it, for what this experience revealed to me about myself was radical, it challenged everything I had ever been led to believe about myself and for that reason I was quite convinced that I simply could not be getting the messages right. As a result, I quite frequently found myself jumping up and down in the middle of the room shouting, “No, no, no! This cannot be right! I am Deborah Clarke! I am nobody! This cannot be right!” – or words to that effect. In the end the conflict reached stalemate and I realised that whether I liked it or not, I was going to have to get help, not least because it was starting to make me physically ill. So, to cut a long story short, one day I found myself talking to one of the founders of the College of Healing at Runnings Park in Malvern. In fairness I have to point out that I was always very, very, guarded about what I said at that time, indeed it is only now that I feel comfortable about disclosing the whole truth to anybody. However, I said enough for her to come to the conclusion that I was clearly very psychic but needed to get it under control. This seemed like a reasonable analysis to me, so when she suggested that I consider doing the College of Healing training to learn how to do that very thing, it seemed like a good idea. Needless to say, nothing could have prepared me for what happened during that first week of training. It was on the final night of my stay there that it happened, although things had gradually been building towards it throughout the whole week. I’d had a lot of healing by then but far from closing me down it was opening me up even more. I did not sleep for the entire week so great was the energy shift that was building. But I was still fighting, still refusing to give in and then, on that final night, a very lovely man who I will call Benedict offered to give me a massage. I thought, ‘What the hell. I need something’ and so I agreed. All went well for about half an hour, it was exquisite, such utter and blessed relief, but Benedict became very perplexed by the amount of tension in my lumbar/sacral area. Apparently my buttocks were like rock and he began uttering more and more earnest injunctions to ‘let go’ until in the end I thought ‘Ah, what the hell, I surrender’. With that I let go and the most extraordinary thing began to happen. Phenomenal heat exploded in my coccyx and started rising up my spine. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is kundalini, I’ve read about this!’ And, set in motion, there was no stopping it, not that I had any desire whatsoever to stop it. I tell you sisters; it rocked! Talk about orgasm! Imagine the most gut busting orgasm you’ve ever had and multiply it by infinity! But it’s not exploding outwards, it’s exploding up, up through your entire being, blasting every bit of resistance right out of the way and blowing your head right off! And that’s just for starters! Now I had no head there were no limits and I was flying, flying out of the room, soaring way above Malvern, winging my may through the stratosphere, and as I went I grew and grew and grew, now I was the whole world and every person that had ever lived, a million, billion lives rolling all the way back to the beginnings of civilization, then further back I was every plant species and animal there had ever been, then further back and I was the very mineral formations of this world, then the swirling gasses and the stuff of stars, the energetic matrices of galaxies, the blueprint of the very universe itself, until finally, all forms disappeared and there was nothing, nothing but pure, undifferentiated awareness, pure Presence, a velvet black, glittering Vast in which all of creation rose and fell, everything and nothing all at once.
(And people wonder why Brad Pitt leaves me cold!)
However, how I experienced this is one thing, how those around me perceived it is quite another. They were extremely concerned, they hadn’t got a clue what had happened and I was giving them no response whatsoever, principally because, at that point, there simply was no sense of ‘I’ to bring to the party. All of the hushed whisperings, the mad dashing about and the increasingly urgent calls of ‘Deborah! Deborah say something!” were of no concern, simply forms rising and falling on the face of the Deep. Then there was the awareness of being bodily manhandled and carried to the private house of one of the College tutors where another voice began demanding, ‘Who are you?’ At this point a sense of ‘I’ began to reassert itself though only in as far as to register that the question itself was completely absurd. Nevertheless, I was also becoming aware that if I did not come up with some kind of response I could be in trouble. They were scared, they clearly had no idea what had happened otherwise they would have just let me be. There was nothing wrong, absolutely nothing at all, but that was not how they were seeing it, their minds were creating quite a different story and I realised that my safety depended on finding some way to interface with their script. So with this aim in mind I plucked some words out of the sea of possibilities that I hoped might do the trick. “I am the guardian of the light,” I said, “I am the keeper of the secret knowledge.”
There was a weighty silence then the voice demanded. “Where do you come from?”
Again, this struck me as a totally absurd question but in an effort to oblige I plucked another response out of the ether and said, “Atlantis.”
There followed much earnest whispering and then the voice demanded, “Who are you now?”
Well now I was really starting to get a headache. I felt like a genie being forced back into a tiny little bottle. There was obviously a right answer to this question but I had no idea what it was and the effort of trying to figure it out was extremely painful.
Finally the voice said, “Who are you now, Deborah?”
‘O.K.,’ I thought, ‘so now I know the answer they’re looking for, but who is this Deborah?’ At that point I honestly did not know. However, the interrogation continued, I opened my eyes as requested and finally, with a supreme effort of will, I managed to locate this ‘Deborah’. They were happy then, for now I was giving them the answers they wanted to hear, but even as I delivered those answers I knew that ‘Deborah’ was nothing but a façade, an act, a part that I had been given to play, a role I inhabited in order to conform with how everyone else thought things should be. Now I had always had a sense that this was so but had assumed this to mean that there was something ‘wrong’ with me. Now I knew that there was nothing ‘wrong’ about it at all. It was right. Yes, my feeling had been right all along . . .
The full implications of this understanding did not dawn right then. Not until I went back to work the very next day did it finally hit me. To say it was weird going back to work after what I had been through is an understatement but let’s leave it at that because it’s not the important thing. The important thing is this: I walked back into Kyre Park a fundamentally changed person, my whole perception of myself had been turned inside out and I’ll admit it, I was nervous. What would they make of this new me, how would they react, how would they respond? I’ll tell you. They did not notice a blind, sodding bit of difference! My initial conversations went something like this.
“Hello Deb. Have a nice week off?”
“Amazing! Mind blowing! Absolutely the most . . . .”
“Oh that’s nice. Could you take Alan to the toilet for me?”
“???????????????????????????”
“Hello Deb. Have a good week?”
“It was the most amazing experience of my entire life!”
“Oh lovely, Jean’s waiting for you in the activities centre.”
“????????????????????????????”
You get the general idea. Not a glimmer, not a spark, not even a dim glow on the horizon . . . not, that is, until a little chap called Chris Belsten came wheeling himself down the corridor. Now, of all the residents of Kyre Park at that time, Chris was my number one fan, he adored me, he followed me everywhere, declared undying love every day and frequently proposed marriage. If anyone was going to be thrilled to see me it was Chris, however on that day he took one look at me, turned tail and bolted, just as fast as his wheelchair would carry him. Something about me had obviously frightened him to death. Everyone simply wrote it off as one of his funny turns but I was concerned. I went and found him and once again he tried to run away. He was so scared he couldn’t even look at me. It took me most of the afternoon to gradually win him back, but finally I got through to him and we had a little chat. I waited until I was able to establish eye contact and then I said, “Chris, what’s the problem? Why are you so scared?”
And he said, “It’s your eyes Debs, there’s too much light coming out of them.”
Now that’s when it hit me!
Here was this profoundly disabled man, physical impairment, learning difficulties, behavioural problems, the full works, a man whose opinions about anything were at best received with kind indulgence by the ‘able’ world, and he was the only person who could see that something had changed. He was the only one who noticed.
It was a shock, but my journey into the labyrinth was only just beginning. Over the next weeks and months I discovered that there was no way I could talk about what I had experienced without sounding like a raving lunatic. No words I used were adequate and the more I tried, the barmier it all sounded. In the end the Deborah character’s doubts, fears, conflicts and neuroses started to run the show again but what she didn’t know was that she was fighting a losing battle. Try as she might to fit everything back into nice neat boxes it was never going to happen. I smile now at some of the truly desperate measures I resorted to but once the knowing was there, there was no going back. Slowly but surely it began to work it’s magic, unravelling the web of illusion strand by strand, subversively dismantling every structure I had ever erected from this secret place within, unconscious patterns, ancestral patterns, collective patterns, archetypal patterns – a twenty year journey right into the heart of darkness . . . but that’s another story.
© Deborah Clarke
posted by Anne | 8:21 pm
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