I’m no poet, but I love words and what people can do with them. Sometimes I read the poems on other people’s blogs and something in the combination of sounds and sentences makes me ooh and aah.
Way back at the beginning of the year, I was on the Ink Stains & Daydreams blog and I read a poem called “Scar Howl“.
As well as being a great poem, the title has stayed with me many months later.
Why?
Because it seems to call to something deep inside me, resonating with my current state of healing.
For many long months I had a migraine every day, almost all day, and was essentially bedbound. Then, slowly, slowly, I started to get less and less serious migraine attacks after doing mindfulness exercises (prompted by my neurologist who told me “more medicine doesn’t equal less pain” and by extrapolation; “you need to change your life not your prescription”).
Even as I got progressively better, however, my right eye still felt low-level pain 24/7… I recently passed 1000 days of pain, and then 3 years of being (un)well… and whilst I do have some days where the pain in my eye is close to zero, it is rarely ever zero-zero, and never for long.
As a result, I’m starting to think of the pain as a scar howl… some sort of whispered wail that my body is softly sending me…
Perhaps it is my body’s way of saying, “you’ve addressed most of the stress in your life… but… not ALL of it.”
Or else, perhaps, it’s not a signal that anything else is ‘wrong’ or needs to be ‘fixed’, rather, it’s some sort of echo… the last sign of a past pain, in the same way I still have a crinkled fold under my chin from where I received three stitches after face-planting the ice-rink whilst learning to skate.
Or else, perhaps, it is less memory, more legacy; an embedded message that my brain has hard-wired into its neurology; neuroplasticity gone as wrong as a back-to-front-bike-ride…
…a primal instinct to bay at the moon…
…a moon-bay.
The idea leaves me conflicted – I feel both despair and great comfort in the thought that my body is lingering over something that should be a long-lost memory… an olden-days-time I was supposed to have mindfully evolved beyond… but it also seems a remnant, a reverie, of the old me that I have transformationally left behind… and yet… never really can.
Now, when I feel that twinge in my eye, I stop and assess it… give it time.
Are you the beginning of a bad migraine (my once-was signal that a migraine attack was coming) or are you more of a moon-bay (a lingering attachment to the old days)…?
Sometimes I can tell whether it’s alarm bell or echo.
Other times, it remains confusing, and I can only wait and see.
In the same way that I can’t quite articulate what “scar howl” means to me, I can’t quite put my finger on where on the healing illness-wellness spectrum I am today – right now – because it seems to shift almost imperceptibly when I turn my attention to the conundrum. It’s like the mysterious haze of a figure you see in your peripheral vision that vanishes when you turn your gaze on it.
For some reason, after all this time living with migraine pain, and more recently, writing about ways to reduce the pain and increase the joy in our chronic-pain-lives… still… still I find that the material won’t quite reveal itself to my laser-like focus.
Maybe it’s akin to the way we need someone else to point out our flaws – it’s some sort of self-defense mechanism that prevents us from truth-seeking truthfully.
Maybe it’s the fact that healing is a complex, multi-faceted arrangement that takes place across so many aspects of our mental, physical, social, spiritual and creative self, that it is too hard to see a fixed version of reality in such a shifting set of forms.
Maybe our health is like the moon – waxing and waning – growing and shrinking – constantly in motion, albeit super slowly, as we shift from cut-crescent to full-balled… and back again.
Maybe our scars are as vocal as they are visible, and they will bay at our healing-moon forever…
Maybe.
Take care taking care out there, Linda xx
The Mindful Migraine 
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