Something is looping it seems to me. Here I am, after all, in this blog again, suddenly drawn to it, unexpectedly. What is there for me in my earlier self, I wonder. What is there for me in this representation of a me that you, by being there, sometimes liking, create? It’s mysterious.

I have a week in a space that completely transformed my life, over five months in the summer of 2020. Yes, that summer. Perhaps I will write more about it another time but I knew then and knew even more later, that a fundamental shift had taken place in my perception. Perception of the world, perception of self. I had joked that 2020 would be the year of seeing clearly. The joke had me.

So then here too is a loop.

And I find myself rereading the stories of my childhood.

I’m so much older that when I began this blog. I feel it. I can feel the resonances of greater substance, ontological weight, density, weariness, power. I have ‘made my bones’ but they are heavier to carry around, whereas surely there should be a more expansive freedom?

The true lightness of freedom, the true depth of well-formed substance. Another mystery.

So then there is this younger self. I recognise her and I feel triumphant. The self she was wondering was there is me. Her innocence touches me and I wonder if I can rediscover that. Surely that is a treasure? It is not-knowing and it is, I realise as I write this sentence, fear. I am at risk of an idealisation. It was terrible to be that vulnerable, continually not knowing if there was something there, risking everything with the possibility of nothing.

Something was there.

Perhaps though this is the rediscovery and the loop. That vulnerability recurs. The sight of an old tree in spring always touches me. All those frail sensitive quivering leaves on those full grown sturdy branches. It strikes me how rare it is to see those qualities in a person. Fragility is for the young, it seems, the full grown branches necessitate a kind of firmly-enforced self-protection.

I’m getting nearer some kind of reconnection and when I do I will know what it is. It will be a freedom and a lightness. It will be a reunion and an intensification, an expansion of substance.

And in the meantime, I will write this all to you, who carry the me I might become.