reading

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?

loop

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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.

someone I don’t know well

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Betty

Scoured by grey metal catering pots
and pans.  Grown by the
runner beans incessantly.

Worn in by ninety-two
pairs of size four slippers
(latterly, velvet).

Lit by infinite log fires
sussex beech and oak
no longer chopped by him.

Read by books, new, secondhand,
or borrowed, suspended by
an embossed
red leather bookmark.

Captured by photos of an
African safari, Andrew’s family
from Australia and ‘our dear friend’
Nils from Norway.

Fed by a marathon of meals,
fish finger breakfast butties,
roast lamb (fat included),
homemade fruitcake on
forget-me-not plates.

Pinned neatly into position
by a slowly diminishing
grey-white bun.

Loved.

Note: This poem is from the ‘poetry retreat series’.  We read ‘On hesitating to depict my grandmother’ by Gillian Allnutt (amongst others) and were asked to write a poem about someone we didn’t know well enough in six minutes.

washed up

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She set sail
for distant shores
from home.
She stayed indoors.

And all the world
unfurled in that
small hand and
took shape as
large as life could be.

Her poetry, afire
set out to sea.
Glass bottled
tears adrift on
waves of time.

And laughter too,
And beauty, loss
and tiny sparks
of tender feeling
rolled up and tied

with lines of pen
and ink
bobbed as currents
pushed it to and fro

and so to me, in
my small hand,
a visitor on distant
shores where she
would never tread.

Where Emily would
never go, her
poems went
instead.

 

 

 

my favourite café is dying – my library is alive

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Yesterday I did something unheard of.

Instead of making my the café where I have gone to write for the last x number of years, a café so well-loved and frequented that I believe I may have worn a groove in the paths from my home to its threshold, I went to the library.

It had been little while coming.  First they painted the beautiful big communal room dark blue.  It altered the quality of the light, made it always a little bit sombre.  Then slowly slowly things changed.  The low-energy light bulbs cast less light.  The manager moved on and the new one…. Well, these things happen.  He introduced fresh flowers but when I visited they were always dead.  Then one by one the staff abandoned ship.  I saw the way that things were leaning, I made calls, encouraged from the sidelines, Canute-like failing to hold back the approaching tide.  The replacement members of the team were sweet, but somehow insubstantial.  No history holds them together.  And then on Monday, with the wifi more wi-foe, and the toilets neglected and the broken lightbulbs not replaced, and the cookie turned to dust…

That was it.  We had broken up.  A hastily proffered replacement cookie disintegrated into crumbs on my walk home.   There was no more left to say.

My city is not well-provided for cafés with large airy spaces and happy staff and a perfect cup of tea.  Too many are haunted by the spirit of the formula.  Faith has been put in track-records and not enough in the personal.  But insinuating itself into my consciousness had been the reopening of our library.

I hadn’t gone to the opening; couldn’t bear the potential disappointment of seeing old, worn, wabi-sabi beauty trashed by a new-kid-on-the-block.  So my visit yesterday was my first.  I tiptoed over the threshold, breath held, hands metaphorically in front of my eyes, peeking, and – sigh of relief – it was beautiful.  Not quite old-leather-armchairs-beautiful, but really, quite extraordinarily home and familiarity and sit-down-with-your-book-ish.

So armed with tea (yes, allowed in a travel cup), I took my place by a vast window, looking out to a park rustled by autumn winds, and I wonder about the change of seasons.