Je suis toujours là.

(Why do I want to express this time in French? It’s so particular; a form of linguistic escape, I feel, from the everyday. And sometimes you cannot live in the same linguistic air as certain politicians; a factor perhaps in my emigrating).

Je suis toujours là in this liminal space of mid-air suspension, a mid-air that is also a depth. And stripped by illness and everyone else’s holiday plans and still being a relatively recent inhabitant and not entirely speaking the language and the violent convulsions of the pandemic of everything pressing and usual and demanding. There is a certain quality of silence. And, it turns out that this silence is allowing some deep places of myself to make themselves known.

The day is almost excessively mundane – well, perhaps ordinary is a kinder word, as playing the piano and writing are hardly mundane for me. I’m hemmed in by my depleted energy levels. So there are only quiet activities going on. Yesterday: writing, lunch, listening to a friend, pondering aloud, reading, dinner, quiet conversation with a friend (quiet as I’ve almost lost my voice, alongside the other diminishments.)

But in that quiet space something is stirring. I am encountering my own deep substance, a being of myself that I have had so little chance to be in these last frenetic months. I have reached, it appears, a truth, a tenderness of self, a deep substance of my own being, a home of sorts, perhaps. It is a work of some experimentation to capture the texture of this encounter, the purity of it and its luminosity-with-substance quality. It is perhaps – suddenly it comes to me – the substance of the ‘eternity in the hearts of men’ that we cannot fathom, written about in Ecclesiastes.

So then my silence is making a space for this luminous goodness – the luminous uncanny I now remember I once called it – to intensify. I also know that in my personal history, these moments of imposed stillness are often of great import, places of gathering ahead of some unknown moment of vast renewal.

Je suis toujours là suspendue en l’air.

And in only a few short days I have moved from wrestling to treasuring, feeling this moment as something precious to protect and defend from whatever might disturb it before it is ready.

So then here I am, writing, playing music, attending to the ordinary, trying to be humble to my humanity while eternity does its work within me.