May the circle be unbroken

~ musings on wholeness ~

So now my brother has come and gone, we had an ‘as good as it gets’ reconnecting and mostly happy three days together. He liked my little house and agreed as I had hoped that this was a beautiful place, and yet, and yet … I now feel sad and bereft, left again with this familiar sense of unrealised potential, of something not quite manifesting, seeds drowned and washed away or blown to the winds rather than germinating and growing into something solid and specific. Which reminds me of that image from my first drum journey almost two years ago now: in one of my past lives I had apparently gone out on a vision quest but been unable to quite reach the box of jewels / treasures I was meant to bring back to my people - I had given up and returned empty-handed, then lived out a quiet but somewhat hollow life. But the questing part of me stayed out there wandering the desert, developing and evolving, trusting to be reunited eventually with the rest of me, to reach wholeness.

Very symbolically, the weather was rainy and very foggy during both full days of my brother’s visit, and brightly sunny on his journey here and then on his first day back home. We explored a few beautiful places unperturbed by external conditions, and spent a lot of time hanging out in cafes and pubs and in my living room in between. We had some good reconnecting conversations, but overall I’m left with a sad sense of there not being all that much common ground between us any longer in terms of our ways of being in the world and making sense of life. He is firmly rooted in his family life in a small familiar town very close to where we were both born - aware of and accepting of the fact that he has not made the most adventurous choices in his life, prioritising strong and solid family relationships, work structures and obligations instead. His enjoyment comes from his drumming and music (and here too our style tastes wildly differ), and regular sedate holidays in warm and sunny places with a good view. From my point of view he seemed to have firmly closed the door on his curiosity about anything beyond ‘creature comforts’, and on any questioning of the status quo of mainstream culture beyond ‘it’s all very complex with no easy answers’. Full stop, not worth thinking about any further therefore, to his mind. From his point of view I had stubbornly turned my back on my home and family and convention and ended up in a series of somewhat random wild and beautiful but also uncomfortable and lonely places. He looked puzzled and fairly bored by my mythic stories about the places we visited here, and just wanted to enjoy the view instead. My roaming and searching and questing seemed like fighting windmills to him, ie a bit of a waste of time and energy, when we could after all be sitting on a sofa with a perfect cappuccino instead - preferably in sunnier weather.

Not much common ground was the realisation we both arrived at, after a foggy, mizzly day, which had included getting hopelessly lost on the moor whilst looking for my favourite stone circle (we did find it in the end, but he was too exhausted to fully appreciate it by then!) A bizarre circular argument ensued over dinner later over the merits and flaws of owning a state of the art coffee maker versus brewing a pot of communal tea, with people putting aside their personal preferences in favour of conviviality. We laughed at ourselves in the end and made up over a glass of local beer, but not before becoming quite heated in our respective views of the situation, which seemed to epitomise our different ways of looking at life and the world. His being: why on earth would you not strive for maximum comfort and convenience and a sense of the universe revolving around your needs as long as that was an option, mine that there was a positive value in realising the futility and hollowness of that, and finding the beauty in whatever was happening each moment, without trying to control it so much all the time. He found my wish to make a will at age 60 inexplicable and unnecessarily morbid; I found his refusal to look after his ailing body and stressed-out mind properly frustrating - and so it went on, until on saying goodbye we hugged each other across quite a vast chasm, not sure when and where we would meet again. Our deep connection to each other is related to our shared past much more than to present or future, because our paths over the decades have diverged so much…

My sadness in the wake of all this makes me realise how much I am still looking for a sense of wholeness outside of myself, in an imagined complete repair of family relationships - it didn’t happen with our parents but maybe it could still happen with my brother, and / or my niece, ie in this or the next generation? I need to accept this is highly unlikely, that the integration needs to happen internally, through accepting things just as they are, in all their messy and painful fragmentation. So I’m glad that to my brother’s delighted surprise I offered him and his family the use of my house during times when I’m away, as is often the case in the summer - a little tiny surrender which actually makes me feel considerably lighter on writing it down right now.