Monkey Business

One of the most enjoyable encounters I've had here in Barbados was with some wild monkeys.

They live in the high trees around the Car Park at the new Center for Creative Imagination at Cave Hill University. That is where I am teaching 2 courses over the next few months - Screenwriting, and Introduction to Film.

This monkey seemed keen to connect but a bit shy. I inched closer to strike up a conversation, but seconds later he leapt into the brush, and disappeared with his whole family.

The weather here is kind - better for my health than the brutal cold. It's calm, beautiful and I am getting a lot of writing done! (a play we're doing in the summer, called "Lockdown").
Talk to you soon.
Love,
FA

Tan Tan

I got this from my sister-in-law. My niece calls me Tan Tan! When I was in Tobago at xmas I got her to eat by doing a victory dance zulu style whenever she swallowed a mouthful of food. She loved that!
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Subject: tan-tan

hi there f-a,

just to let you know that your neice is starting to chat away and every time we use your green bottle you gave her she says tan-tan and last night when danny was trying to get her to eat more dinner and gave her a little victory dance she immediately said 'tan-tan' !!!

i keep pointing you out in pics and talking about you so she'll be ready to lime when you get back .....

hope you are well and busy enjoying life....

lotsa love miche

Photo My niece Leah Skye, aged 18mths.

The old washing machine

Since being ill, I have not felt comfortable about writing, my thoughts seem irredeemably black and without hope. Not that I feel hopeless generally - I don't. Just my thoughts, when I engage them - at night before sleep - which mercifully comes fast - or in the interstices of activity, are just dark.

Having survived menopause I know, these are just dark thoughts, they have no import or connection to reality, so I give them as little attention as I can. Sometimes the dark matter flares up engulfing everything. Two or three days go by of intense introspection that feels rough and harrowing like a washing machine. Then subsides.

Dominica, story no 3: my last washing machine experience:

My friend Y paid for my trip and the whole endeavor, which was somehow miraculous and disempowering all at once.

After 25 years, it was painful to me to notice how complete his life was, though I was also able to genuinely appreciate all the great parts of it. The way his life, well lived and nurtured has flowered into something wondrous and whole. And he seemed to have great connections with everyone - lovely smart wife, great family, kids, connections to community etc. But painful to me because it was so complete. There was no space or place in it for a me, except as occasional guest. This hurt, left a great big sore spot on my heart.

Perhaps it is dying, in that process you have to let go of everything, and often all I am aware of is the loss, a kind of resentment that I have lost love and it is gone forever. It seems I am surrounded by this. Loss of Love, loss of opportunity, the loss of childlessness, loss of youth (imminent). All of this preceding the final loss of life, when you let go and all is gone. Right now it's like I'm not accepting that, resenting it. So it is painful, like tearing. Or it may be the opposite: Now - post this illness, approaching fifty - I am trying to reconnect with friends that I had, connections past that I let fall away. And it is painful how time has moved on. Where there was love is now overgrown with a different life, experiences have changed my friends, I no longer recognize the past. I search for my connections and they are not there. The person I loved no longer exists, or has no space for me. Nor I for him, if it comes to that - my life when I notice is full and defined.

And so there is this big hole, an emptiness, that moreover I have known all my life. But by this stage you would have thought I would have filled it up, found ways to be more complete, more whole.

It occurs to me that this old pain defines me, is me, has made me what I am. In that flame my decisions were forged. So like the dark thoughts, like menopause and loss of love, I should try to own it.

There endeth the lesson.
Photo: Y's wife Nancy, in Portsmouth Dominica.

Toronto

I have feelings about being back in Toronto. I feel panicked and scared - my heart beats fast and hard, little panic attacks, and constant gnawing and breathlessness.

I dont know where money is coming from to keep my business going.

Being sick I am not sure that I have the energy or even will to keep up this hustle. It's really hard.

Plus there is a "global economic crisis". Imagine. I am trying not to take it personally...

What chances do you think I have of surviving something so vast? Like a tidal wave, indiscrimate in its reach.

Untypically, I don't have any ideas what to do about it.

There are still amazing/beautiful things in the world... like Barack Obama, cats, turtles, babies, and nature.

Barbados

I attended a screening of "Namibia: The Struggle For Liberation" by the great African American filmmaker Charles Burnett, at the new Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination (what a lovely name) and watched the people arrive and shuffle into the auditorium, some dressed casually in light cotton dresses and flip-flops, some more ornately adorned, each distinctive, all friendly and welcoming.

And I wondered what would possess a person to live AWAY from the Caribbean, since nowhere is as gorgeous and complete as this.

Yesterday I started the day with a beach swim, in the playful turquoise blue waves just across the street from my hotel. The sea was rough, it took energy to keep up. I remembered how good I used to be at surfing: it was a wonderful empowering feeling.

Then took a route taxi up to the Center to check the film before my own screening. It took an hour of weaving around the island, old cab groaning up hills, and along picture pretty back alleys, through depots and markets, me lodged on top of the gear shaft in the front seat. The driver changed the gears between my legs and didn't seem to notice.

The screening last night was the weirdest. The audience SILENT, no laughter, cheering, jeering, or exclamations (like in Jamaica). But afterwards they offered very sensitive critiques. I really appreciated the thoughtfulness.

I am going swimming again this a.m. (and tomorrow before I leave). I love it here, and will be back - for longer. It's the raw insane beauty of nature, and dazzling sunlight that suffuses every living moment, and bathes the landscape with a rough breeze. After a while the brain gives up its querulous monologues and relaxes in to the moment.
(Photo: View from my hotel window).

Trinidad october 2008

I love this picture. Me, my little brother, Danny, and Leah my niece. More later, Love - FA

Dream...

Tonight I had a very powerful dream.

In it I was with Leonie, and another woman (not clear who), a mixed race woman, school mate probably, an old friend.

Leonie has been a stalwart, a very strong beacon for me throughout my illness, because she has been so solid in my support.

I was going to say "solid in my defense" - as if the narrative of this illness required defenders, or soldiers; as if it were a war, with an enemy, which sometimes it seemed to be: I was constantly aware of, not so much an Adversary, but an Advocate for the Other Side, a Prosecutor, a Nay-Sayer, whose voice or voices were loud and strong, saying: "This is a useless cause. This case is without merit. This person, this Frances-Anne, has not earned the right to live any longer. Her time is up. She had her chance. ... "

Lee's voice stood just as loudly against that noise, saying unambiguously "You are like my own, and you matter. You matter. You matter".

She called me often, sometimes 3 or 4 times a week. Sometimes I picked up all the surprising messages at once on voice mail. Her earnestness brought me to tears.

In my dream, a kind of witchy dream, (from thinking too much about Macbeth? - a current project... Yet the witches seemed very different from those.) The witches seemed like me. Myself and another old crone - my longtime friend, and Leonie, naked, wearing only our skins, met to burn the cancer from my body, adding pieces of my body bit by bit to a fire. Here is a slithery snake of pink flesh, here my gall bladder, there a bit of gut, of heart.

I felt my friend represented a younger, more robust or a cancered me, where Leonie was the one who had been through the fire and survived.

In my dream I realised that for as long as the fire burned there was live cancer in me, but somehow it was up to me, to burn it through.

I began to rub the tumor, my tummy, where the scar is, the surgery, knowing that as I rubbed, I was erasing the tumor buried under layers of my skin.I had complete confidence in the power of my hands to do this work.

I woke feeling like I had crossed a boundary to old age, to agelessness, and in the same breath, health.

This disease is of fruitless middle age, with its exhausting battle of hormones and conflicted desires.

All that is passed now, burned, sloughed off, like a healing fire. And I know the power is in my hands to heal the rest.

(Photo: Me and my big ass scar, a full 50 lbs lighter.)