being

la vie suspendue – time

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In la vie suspendue, time is running through me, or to be more precise times. I can feel them, some of them streaming through with no thought of clinging on, some ferociously disputing ownership, claiming my desires, my thoughts, my imaginations, my frailties.

Perhaps it takes this enforced slowness to truly notice the other forms of speed swirling. I am poised in some kind of eternal time, and despite the continuous risks I feel of slipping off its axis, this eternal time, now that I have returned to it, is steady, more steady than I realise, and I don’t seem to slip off as much as I fear.

And so then the other times are making themselves felt, the slow slipping time of summer tempo days punctuated occasionally by the panic of the end time, when I will have to return to the demands of work. So then business time and the seasons of my clients – holidaying for July or holidaying for August or holidaying for a two week scrap of childcare before swapping with the other partner to return to work, according to culture.

His time, how long will it take him, what is he thinking, does he have a time with me in it, should I reach out time, no probably not, patience, time.

Biological time, googling statistics, pondering depleting likelihoods.

Ageing, in a way the same, but felt differently, eyes, hair, skin just a little bit different from last year’s summer photos.

Divenire time, Andante, one dotted crochet = 60 beats per minute.

Ontological time, such a very very long time it takes to manoeuvre the human psyche into new orders to wholeness, always a shock.

Capitalist time, now, immediately, preferably yesterday although then you didn’t actually knew the offer existed, or the deadline.

Poor pitiful modern time, no depth, no heart, no soul, no allowance for grieving, passion, healing, compassion, renewing, also known as ‘according to my personal convenience time’, and ‘validate me! validate me! Entertain me! Feed me! before I pre-emptively reject you’ time.

Nature time, everything in its season, can’t be cheated, nature of reality time.

Sometimes when my younger friends are fretting about how Long everything is taking, I remind them; remember, you were raised in a culture of timescales for the insubstantial. It is a hard lesson, and I have to learn it again.

The eternal time is helping soothe the pains of this emancipation.

suspendue en l’air – gathering

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In the airy depth of suspendue en l’air living, a development has occured. Perhaps it was the intention towards depth that I harnessed in the turbulence of obstacles. Encountering this deep substance of self has given me a confidence and a question: Where next? And since I am often asking this question, I have tried, by sitting with it, to let it answer itself.

And yesterday it did. First it occured to me that having somehow been reunited with this luminosity of being, I should now collaborate in its strengthening, intensifying it but also clearing a space for it, gently. As I allowed these thoughts to order themselves, I pottered about, paying reverent attention to the ordinary: piano (listening), writing, lunch, and, as I am still a little ill, resting.

And then there it was: Reading an old-favourite work I heard the creak of an inner shift and I knew it was pulling me into the next movement of this strange summer: The boxes. Four years after emigrating I finally moved into an own home last autumn and the boxes housing my former life caught up with me. The work of sorting boxes is a particular kind of work, appearing practical but concealing endless emotional and spiritual work. It took a phenomenal organisation even to get them opened and arranged in the attic, and to deal with the wildness of the encounters with multiple former selves. At the point I had undone, unravelled everything, and placed things into their new positions, I landed into a work project that took all my time and energy for months. The unfinished work of tidying and sorting the boxes has been looming over me for months, totally inaccessible in terms of time, yet dauntingly apparent.

And so yesterday I started the work of arranging things into their new homes. Starting with the journals that I have kept since I first heard a boy liked me in senior school – ‘I am at an interesting time in my life…’ – and so yesterday this accumulation of substance took the form of setting my journal/selves in order, sometimes glimpsing a me here, a me there, in Paris, applying for a graduate job, commuting, wondering about some new love interest, off to a consulting project in Russia, praying.

And pondering how little those selves knew where I would be now, and wondering what it would have meant to know it, and now I sit again in the beautiful garden ‘a garden on a mountain is the human ideal’ so I learnt on a podcast yesterday about ancient scripture.

What does my life mean?

la vie suspendue – interrompue

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Toujours là, kind of.

Yesterday in a pinnacle of irony I found myself panic-stricken that the very cough I’d previous resisted, denied, been in a bad mood with etc etc before I finally accepted that I was ill might be actually be nearly better.

Suddenly it was clear that I wasn’t ready. Whatever was being accomplished by the enforced quiet of being ill-ish (very different from actually ill) had not actually been accomplished yet. In a kind surely-this-only-happens-to-strange-me moment I found myself relieved when the cough reappeared. Relief. I was still protected by the circumstances from emerging back into whatever demands I associate with being well.

But there is a turbulence, nonetheless in this unfinished mid-air living. Last night a friend visited with a variety of provocative thoughts and imaginings about my situation, which despite being sweet and light, shook the depths of myself in places where, so it turned out, I had already settled into what might become a staleness. This morning the inhabitants of the piano apartment announced an imminent visit moments before I expected to play. And there is torrential rain so my beloved garden is out of bounds.

I lean in, listening to my own music, my own heart… what do I do with this, with this ruffling of the still depths, obstacles?

And I hear the answer, ‘deeper’, the kerfuffles of the small disturbances can be allowed to herd me into deeper places, deeper depths, the music of my own being. I elude the obstacles with a deeper intention.

The turbulence of suspendue en l’air, echoes the turbulence of the water. I let myself be carried; I swim deeper. These paradoxical realities do their work with me, within me, wildly. I am sky, I am sea.

la vie suspendue en l’air – pretending unconsciousness

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Toujours là.

Yesterday’s recognition of an importance to là vie suspendue en l’air was at once an encouragement and a danger.

When the work of deep substance is going on, too many overly conscious or rational thoughts can disturb the process.

As someone who is often a galloping herd of conscious and rational thoughts, in particular, stories, the moment the recognition that a work of deep substance is afoot is the moment all sorts of theories and ‘good ideas’ can line up presenting themselves as the way to ‘manage’ the process.

One of my wildest works, now that I have actually surrendered to the silence, is to stay out of the way of myself while whatever takes place takes place. To give it space and not to intrude, bustling, with ‘are you ready yet?’ and ‘would you like a cup of tea?’.

The only way I have found to do this is to pretend as if an unconsciousness that anything might be going on at all, to pay an almost excessive reverent attention to everyday rhythms and chores, albeit it quietly, and, then, to avoid those who might see my quiet as a chance to visit their stories and theories onto my existence. I skirt the contours of myself, respectfully, and hope that by carefully holding my attention elsewhere, I can allow the mystery of the luminous uncanny the time it needs to accomplish its fullness.

la vie suspendue en l’air

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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.