Mage (three of five)
Nov. 30th, 2011 12:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aumentouSo, the coninuing and possibly unread saga. I honestly didn't think the first two were that interesting, as I read them back the other day. They were just kind of necessary to describe the character. This one is... weird, to read back. It's about faith, which is a subject I have a tricky relationship with at the best of times. It also contains her awakening. I've read the final passage a few times, and it still makes me shudder a bit.
Stage 1 Anna, Diana.
Stage 2 Anna, Diana.
Stage 3 Diana
They don't tell you what being a nurse is like. They can't, really. I mean, you know it's going to be messy in a biological sense, and you know that it's going to be hard work. How could you not? Everyone tells you! It's not quite obvious just how hard it will be, but that you can cope with. What gets to you is the ways in which it's hard. The mess, the hours, the chaos – you can get used to those quite quickly - or you can quit, your choice. The death, and the horrible things that happen to people... well, depending on where you are, they're infrequent enough that you don't get used to them. I didn't, anyway, in my first job at a hospital. I nearly burned myself out in the first few months just on the work and physical side of things. Once I got over that I thought I had it sussed, but psychology is tricky. It snuck up on me, the knowledge that every day I could see something utterly horrific, and after eighteen months I realised I needed a change of pace.
So I switched to psychiatric nursing. You might be thinking this doesn't lead to fewer horrible sights, and you'd be right. The thing is, it does lead to more consistant trouble. You can get used to anything, and if every week involves something at a certain level of unpleasantness you just stop noticing. Eating disorders, for example, was an eye-opener. Not on the puking side of things, but on the level people will go to to avoid eating tiny amounts of food, and on just how long a person with no body fat and precious little muscle takes to come off an adrenaline surge.
The thing is... medicine doesn't work, sometimes. There are limits, and "the state of the art" is a lot less advanced than most people think - in some fields at least. I mean, I've got to admit there's some surgery that is almost miraculous. But then there's the other stuff. The chronic fatigue, that we don't understand, let alone know how to cure. Or the million things that just leave someone aching, all the time, and all we can do is suggest more exercise, less exercise, oil, or painkillers. Or psychiatry, where you can only help people who want to be helped, and most of the patients don't acknowledge there's anything wrong with them, which is kind of the point of the condition.
I suppose that's why I started getting into holistic medicine. I know, I know, I've heard all the jokes. My favourite is "What do you call alternative medicine that can be proven to work? Medicine.". Thing is, it's sort of true. Homeopathy, for example, is complete bollocks – demonstrably no more effective than a placebo, and with nothing resembling a sensible rationale for working.
On the other hand, some things haven't been tested yet, and some things don't work on some people, or don't cure someone. If I know a series of exercises that have cured no-one, but have helped 10 of 23 rheumatoid arthritis patients get more flexibility and strength, even though they didn't work for the others (some of whom didn't actually folllow enough of the regime for a fair test), then do I have a crappy technique that's no better than a placebo, or do I have a useful partial technique that isn't the answer, but is a partial answer for some people?
My answer is "both".
There are other problems with conventional medicine. It's doctor driven in the research, which means they mostly look at stuff with definitive fixed targets. New surgical technique is admired. New palliative technique for a condition that cannot be cured is not. It's also target driven on the ground, which doesn't help. GPs tend to look at uncurable problems as a waste of time, because every referral costs them money. It's been made better for the system to put you off completely, rather than spending NHS time and effort looking for ways to help you, if your problems are livable and a bit complicated – and the system always thinks your problems are livable.
It's too late to say "long story short" but either way I started looking at things. This was back in 2005. I'd been working three years, half of that in psychiatric care. I researched things, tried them out on friends mostly, and by the end of 2006 I knew enough supplemental stuff that I could often help people with things conventional medicine either couldn't or wouldn't.
One of the other things about mental health work is that they're very keen for you to have therapy. My therapist told me I had a lot of suppressed rage about my parents deaths (surprise!). He also said that I was under a lot of stress at work (for a nurse. I know I'm not supposed to say this, but duh!). He didn't say anything useful about my personal life, and while he had a lot of wacky theories about my flying dreams none of them really fit. His favourite was that they were about escaping the stress and bonds of everyday life – which isn't a bad theory as they go, except for the correlation problem: At times when I was more stressed, and therefore more in need of escape, I had fewer dreams. It was at the times of relatively low stress that the dreams got stronger.
I'll get back to that. I should probably talk about my personal life. I didn't really have one, so this'll be short. I had a boyfriend for, ooh, nearly three years over the end of uni and start of working. Pete, his name was. He liked thrash metal, drinking, and rough doggy style sex after drinking. Too much information? Fuck off, then. Anyway, remember how I said there was a rough patch eighteen months in? I stopped going out drinking, and I was too tense for sex. Our "relationship" did not survive a two month abstinence from both.
No great loss. I've had better. I'm inclined to think there are few better ways to unwind after a week of nursing than to spend half of saturday beating people up in kendo, and the evening dancing to metal before taking someone home for energetic sex. It's relaxing, though granted it means spending most sundays doing various medications and meditations to recover.
Either way, Pete was the only "serious" partner I had. After him it ranged from two month flings to one night stands, nothing even close to what you might call a "proper relationship". Medical professionals usually end up with other medical professionals. No-one else understands.
I said I'd been on eating disorders. That was just six months, then I got a better position in a clinic specialising in serious cases of schizophrenia. Most of the patients were interesting, lucid, eloquent people... who just had an unfortunate tendency to talk to someone that I'm not, because they live in a different world from the one we live in. It's sad. One or two of them were more noisy. The most troublesome was The Marquess. We called her that because she was convinced she was a Marquess and that the staff were her servants. She made a lot of fuss when we didn't do as commanded. She always looked through you, never really saw you.
The Marquess was involved in the events that eventually took me out of nursing. It was April 2007. Things had been quiet at work, and quiet at home. I'd been having a lot of flying dreams and Icarus dreams, but apart from that things were going well, it seemed. Then one day at work things went very strange. The morning started with two patients fighting, and that made everyone tense. There were three more incidents of shouting or outright hostility before lunch (and that was a lot). After lunch it seemed to calm down for a bit, but then there was another fight. I was one of the nurses splitting it up, bodily. I'd grabbed the patient who started it and restrained them with an arm lock, with one colleague holding back the crowd behind the troublemaker and two more holding back the other party and the crowd on her side. All was looking okay then, when suddenly another patient hit me in the face with a table. I still don't know how, or even who - I was sure at the time that I should have been able to see them, but I didn't. I'm also sure those tables were way too heavy for a move that fast. Nonetheless, blam, out of nowhere, and I hit the floor. Suddenly the problem was a lot more serious - you really don't want it to become open season on staff! I remember lying there for a few seconds, stunned. The Marquess leaned over me and for the first time in my life she looked me in the eye and actually saw me. Then she said it:
"Fly to the heavens."
At the time I thought "that's odd" and moved on. I stood up and got involved in the ruckus, and we calmed it down pretty quickly. We locked everyone in their own rooms, and took stock. Strange thing is, we were never able to work out who hit me. Everyone who might have been strong enough was busy. We also never worked out why. Why that day, why so much trouble all at once, or why it evaporated so quickly.
Afterwards though. Afterwards it came back to me. "Fly to the heavens." In that moment she looked like she knew what she was doing. Looked like she knew me. Looked like she knew me better than anyone else did. And in a sense... in a sense she did! Hadn't I been dreaming of that for years?
That night I slept. I dreamed. I dreamed of flying, and I knew before I slept that I would. I dreamed of flying, and in the dream I was conscious. In the dream I knew that every other time the dream had been ended by me. I had stopped them.
This night was different. This night I didn't stop. At first I flew through air, with no world below and no hint of anything besides myself and the air. I had huge feathered wings, and flew with no destination or purpose. Then the world came into focus, a long way down and drifting by beneath me. It was wonderful in ways I have trouble expressing. Ever listen to the Nightwish version of "Walking in the air"? Imagine that, as a dream. No? Okay then. Imagine that you can move fast and almost effortlessly. That you soar and glide on perfectly formed wings, and that travel in any direction is basically both remarkably easy and more fun than sex. Does that help?
Either way, I dropped a little height. The world below me was unfamiliar. I was high enough to see the edges of the island country I was above, but it didn't look like Britain. I looked around at the ground, then I looked around at my own level. Then I looked up.
Above me... above me was a cloud formation, dark and menacing, with lightning zipping inside it seemingly randomly. I thought it a gigantic storm, and then I thought that the storm clouds hid something else inside. I couldn't be sure. I wondered, skimming along beneath it, how to find out. After all, the storm was fierce, and the lightning remarkably frequent.
"Fly to the heavens."
Who's the more mad? The mad woman who's in a madhouse, or the mad woman who works in a madhouse and takes her advice?
I flew straight into the storm.
-----
Oh, wait, you want to know what was in there? Fly up yourself and have a look. It's nice!
-----
Actually, "nice" really isn't the word for it. "Awesome" (in its literal sense) would just about do. "Huge", "majestic", "magical", "wonderful", "joyous", "divine", "terrible" (again, in the literal sense). "Fell", even. "Nice" doesn't get a look in.
As I flew through the clouds the wind whipped at my skin and feathers. For the first time I was cold, with wind and water, and I felt the tingle of electricity. Gusts tossed me around, and lightning cracked past me, but I kept heading towards the centre. Towards the thing I had glimpsed from outside. Towards the golden glow.
I don't know how long it took. I was singed and tired when I finally cleared the storm and broke through to the centre. There I saw it. A huge, awesome, majestic, divine, magical, wonderful, terrible, joyous tower. A floating edifice of marble and steel and lightning, guarded by angels with flaming swords. The castle perilous. The dolorous tower. The holy grail. Heaven. Not a silver city - a silver tower the size of a city, with a gigantic glowing golden key at its top.
I flew in closer. I felt drawn to it. The scale was staggering. The largest building in our world could have been attached to the outside of this and just vanish against it. Think of something big. Think of canary wharf. There were projecting turrets that dwarfed it, and were still just small projections from the main body.
I flew in ever closer. I felt an irresistable urge to get in close. Close enough to see what it was made of. Close enough to look in the windows. Close enough to touch it. I flew past angels - is that the right name? I don't know how else to describe them! What else do you call a winged human figure with a flaming sword and a halo? I flew past angels. One, then a handful, then as I got closer I saw whole hosts of them. The tower became a world of itself, defining itself as land, with horizons in all directions. Great features had smaller features. Walls that had seemed plain turned out to be finely detailed. Dots at a distance resolved themselves into great stained-glass windows.
Closer still. I finally came to it. I stopped, wings holding me steady, next to the great structure, close enough to touch it. The surface looked like marble, if marble was reimagined by God to be more impressive. Around the tower there was a strange sense, not of peace in the conventional sense, not of rest, but of power. Holy power. I knew then, this tower was a manifestation of the Divine will.
From here, I could see the surface was divided. The material had squares etched into it. Many of them had names written in them. I had, by chance it seemed, come to rest adjacent to an empty square. I reached out to touch it, unbidden by thought. As my fingers met the stone, fire blazed across it. I drew my hand back, amazed to be unburned, and saw my name etched into the stone just like the other names were.
In that moment I knew. In that moment I felt the touch of the divine. In that moment I pledged myself to the great cause, and I knew I would never be alone, never be helpless. The light would always be with me.
Stage 1 Anna, Diana.
Stage 2 Anna, Diana.
Stage 3 Diana
They don't tell you what being a nurse is like. They can't, really. I mean, you know it's going to be messy in a biological sense, and you know that it's going to be hard work. How could you not? Everyone tells you! It's not quite obvious just how hard it will be, but that you can cope with. What gets to you is the ways in which it's hard. The mess, the hours, the chaos – you can get used to those quite quickly - or you can quit, your choice. The death, and the horrible things that happen to people... well, depending on where you are, they're infrequent enough that you don't get used to them. I didn't, anyway, in my first job at a hospital. I nearly burned myself out in the first few months just on the work and physical side of things. Once I got over that I thought I had it sussed, but psychology is tricky. It snuck up on me, the knowledge that every day I could see something utterly horrific, and after eighteen months I realised I needed a change of pace.
So I switched to psychiatric nursing. You might be thinking this doesn't lead to fewer horrible sights, and you'd be right. The thing is, it does lead to more consistant trouble. You can get used to anything, and if every week involves something at a certain level of unpleasantness you just stop noticing. Eating disorders, for example, was an eye-opener. Not on the puking side of things, but on the level people will go to to avoid eating tiny amounts of food, and on just how long a person with no body fat and precious little muscle takes to come off an adrenaline surge.
The thing is... medicine doesn't work, sometimes. There are limits, and "the state of the art" is a lot less advanced than most people think - in some fields at least. I mean, I've got to admit there's some surgery that is almost miraculous. But then there's the other stuff. The chronic fatigue, that we don't understand, let alone know how to cure. Or the million things that just leave someone aching, all the time, and all we can do is suggest more exercise, less exercise, oil, or painkillers. Or psychiatry, where you can only help people who want to be helped, and most of the patients don't acknowledge there's anything wrong with them, which is kind of the point of the condition.
I suppose that's why I started getting into holistic medicine. I know, I know, I've heard all the jokes. My favourite is "What do you call alternative medicine that can be proven to work? Medicine.". Thing is, it's sort of true. Homeopathy, for example, is complete bollocks – demonstrably no more effective than a placebo, and with nothing resembling a sensible rationale for working.
On the other hand, some things haven't been tested yet, and some things don't work on some people, or don't cure someone. If I know a series of exercises that have cured no-one, but have helped 10 of 23 rheumatoid arthritis patients get more flexibility and strength, even though they didn't work for the others (some of whom didn't actually folllow enough of the regime for a fair test), then do I have a crappy technique that's no better than a placebo, or do I have a useful partial technique that isn't the answer, but is a partial answer for some people?
My answer is "both".
There are other problems with conventional medicine. It's doctor driven in the research, which means they mostly look at stuff with definitive fixed targets. New surgical technique is admired. New palliative technique for a condition that cannot be cured is not. It's also target driven on the ground, which doesn't help. GPs tend to look at uncurable problems as a waste of time, because every referral costs them money. It's been made better for the system to put you off completely, rather than spending NHS time and effort looking for ways to help you, if your problems are livable and a bit complicated – and the system always thinks your problems are livable.
It's too late to say "long story short" but either way I started looking at things. This was back in 2005. I'd been working three years, half of that in psychiatric care. I researched things, tried them out on friends mostly, and by the end of 2006 I knew enough supplemental stuff that I could often help people with things conventional medicine either couldn't or wouldn't.
One of the other things about mental health work is that they're very keen for you to have therapy. My therapist told me I had a lot of suppressed rage about my parents deaths (surprise!). He also said that I was under a lot of stress at work (for a nurse. I know I'm not supposed to say this, but duh!). He didn't say anything useful about my personal life, and while he had a lot of wacky theories about my flying dreams none of them really fit. His favourite was that they were about escaping the stress and bonds of everyday life – which isn't a bad theory as they go, except for the correlation problem: At times when I was more stressed, and therefore more in need of escape, I had fewer dreams. It was at the times of relatively low stress that the dreams got stronger.
I'll get back to that. I should probably talk about my personal life. I didn't really have one, so this'll be short. I had a boyfriend for, ooh, nearly three years over the end of uni and start of working. Pete, his name was. He liked thrash metal, drinking, and rough doggy style sex after drinking. Too much information? Fuck off, then. Anyway, remember how I said there was a rough patch eighteen months in? I stopped going out drinking, and I was too tense for sex. Our "relationship" did not survive a two month abstinence from both.
No great loss. I've had better. I'm inclined to think there are few better ways to unwind after a week of nursing than to spend half of saturday beating people up in kendo, and the evening dancing to metal before taking someone home for energetic sex. It's relaxing, though granted it means spending most sundays doing various medications and meditations to recover.
Either way, Pete was the only "serious" partner I had. After him it ranged from two month flings to one night stands, nothing even close to what you might call a "proper relationship". Medical professionals usually end up with other medical professionals. No-one else understands.
I said I'd been on eating disorders. That was just six months, then I got a better position in a clinic specialising in serious cases of schizophrenia. Most of the patients were interesting, lucid, eloquent people... who just had an unfortunate tendency to talk to someone that I'm not, because they live in a different world from the one we live in. It's sad. One or two of them were more noisy. The most troublesome was The Marquess. We called her that because she was convinced she was a Marquess and that the staff were her servants. She made a lot of fuss when we didn't do as commanded. She always looked through you, never really saw you.
The Marquess was involved in the events that eventually took me out of nursing. It was April 2007. Things had been quiet at work, and quiet at home. I'd been having a lot of flying dreams and Icarus dreams, but apart from that things were going well, it seemed. Then one day at work things went very strange. The morning started with two patients fighting, and that made everyone tense. There were three more incidents of shouting or outright hostility before lunch (and that was a lot). After lunch it seemed to calm down for a bit, but then there was another fight. I was one of the nurses splitting it up, bodily. I'd grabbed the patient who started it and restrained them with an arm lock, with one colleague holding back the crowd behind the troublemaker and two more holding back the other party and the crowd on her side. All was looking okay then, when suddenly another patient hit me in the face with a table. I still don't know how, or even who - I was sure at the time that I should have been able to see them, but I didn't. I'm also sure those tables were way too heavy for a move that fast. Nonetheless, blam, out of nowhere, and I hit the floor. Suddenly the problem was a lot more serious - you really don't want it to become open season on staff! I remember lying there for a few seconds, stunned. The Marquess leaned over me and for the first time in my life she looked me in the eye and actually saw me. Then she said it:
"Fly to the heavens."
At the time I thought "that's odd" and moved on. I stood up and got involved in the ruckus, and we calmed it down pretty quickly. We locked everyone in their own rooms, and took stock. Strange thing is, we were never able to work out who hit me. Everyone who might have been strong enough was busy. We also never worked out why. Why that day, why so much trouble all at once, or why it evaporated so quickly.
Afterwards though. Afterwards it came back to me. "Fly to the heavens." In that moment she looked like she knew what she was doing. Looked like she knew me. Looked like she knew me better than anyone else did. And in a sense... in a sense she did! Hadn't I been dreaming of that for years?
That night I slept. I dreamed. I dreamed of flying, and I knew before I slept that I would. I dreamed of flying, and in the dream I was conscious. In the dream I knew that every other time the dream had been ended by me. I had stopped them.
This night was different. This night I didn't stop. At first I flew through air, with no world below and no hint of anything besides myself and the air. I had huge feathered wings, and flew with no destination or purpose. Then the world came into focus, a long way down and drifting by beneath me. It was wonderful in ways I have trouble expressing. Ever listen to the Nightwish version of "Walking in the air"? Imagine that, as a dream. No? Okay then. Imagine that you can move fast and almost effortlessly. That you soar and glide on perfectly formed wings, and that travel in any direction is basically both remarkably easy and more fun than sex. Does that help?
Either way, I dropped a little height. The world below me was unfamiliar. I was high enough to see the edges of the island country I was above, but it didn't look like Britain. I looked around at the ground, then I looked around at my own level. Then I looked up.
Above me... above me was a cloud formation, dark and menacing, with lightning zipping inside it seemingly randomly. I thought it a gigantic storm, and then I thought that the storm clouds hid something else inside. I couldn't be sure. I wondered, skimming along beneath it, how to find out. After all, the storm was fierce, and the lightning remarkably frequent.
"Fly to the heavens."
Who's the more mad? The mad woman who's in a madhouse, or the mad woman who works in a madhouse and takes her advice?
I flew straight into the storm.
-----
Oh, wait, you want to know what was in there? Fly up yourself and have a look. It's nice!
-----
Actually, "nice" really isn't the word for it. "Awesome" (in its literal sense) would just about do. "Huge", "majestic", "magical", "wonderful", "joyous", "divine", "terrible" (again, in the literal sense). "Fell", even. "Nice" doesn't get a look in.
As I flew through the clouds the wind whipped at my skin and feathers. For the first time I was cold, with wind and water, and I felt the tingle of electricity. Gusts tossed me around, and lightning cracked past me, but I kept heading towards the centre. Towards the thing I had glimpsed from outside. Towards the golden glow.
I don't know how long it took. I was singed and tired when I finally cleared the storm and broke through to the centre. There I saw it. A huge, awesome, majestic, divine, magical, wonderful, terrible, joyous tower. A floating edifice of marble and steel and lightning, guarded by angels with flaming swords. The castle perilous. The dolorous tower. The holy grail. Heaven. Not a silver city - a silver tower the size of a city, with a gigantic glowing golden key at its top.
I flew in closer. I felt drawn to it. The scale was staggering. The largest building in our world could have been attached to the outside of this and just vanish against it. Think of something big. Think of canary wharf. There were projecting turrets that dwarfed it, and were still just small projections from the main body.
I flew in ever closer. I felt an irresistable urge to get in close. Close enough to see what it was made of. Close enough to look in the windows. Close enough to touch it. I flew past angels - is that the right name? I don't know how else to describe them! What else do you call a winged human figure with a flaming sword and a halo? I flew past angels. One, then a handful, then as I got closer I saw whole hosts of them. The tower became a world of itself, defining itself as land, with horizons in all directions. Great features had smaller features. Walls that had seemed plain turned out to be finely detailed. Dots at a distance resolved themselves into great stained-glass windows.
Closer still. I finally came to it. I stopped, wings holding me steady, next to the great structure, close enough to touch it. The surface looked like marble, if marble was reimagined by God to be more impressive. Around the tower there was a strange sense, not of peace in the conventional sense, not of rest, but of power. Holy power. I knew then, this tower was a manifestation of the Divine will.
From here, I could see the surface was divided. The material had squares etched into it. Many of them had names written in them. I had, by chance it seemed, come to rest adjacent to an empty square. I reached out to touch it, unbidden by thought. As my fingers met the stone, fire blazed across it. I drew my hand back, amazed to be unburned, and saw my name etched into the stone just like the other names were.
In that moment I knew. In that moment I felt the touch of the divine. In that moment I pledged myself to the great cause, and I knew I would never be alone, never be helpless. The light would always be with me.
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Date: 2011-12-01 09:06 am (UTC)