uncertainty

season shift III

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When I subtitled this blog ‘discovering more beauty through writing’, I had no idea of the truth of how much I really would find a kind of goodness through the act of expressing deep things… I am home from a business trip and as usual, I lost myself a little in the intensity of it. I had a wonderful weekend with old friends, and yet, as with all reconnections after the wildness of the last years, there was an immense confrontation even in the gentle rhythms of Parisian life in the suburbs. We are older, we are scarred by the experiences of isolation, some dreams have not materialised. Yet. So there was delight and there was darkness and I did not have time to comprehend the dance of those experiences.

Then I arrived home into the season shift I had left, and of course the season had crept along without me. Trees are shedding leaves, the sunshine, though beautiful is weaker, the weather forecast predicts days of thick cloud.

And yet, writing. It is a miracle, a way through, the lit path. I sit down and see what I have written, and in it, rediscover who I am. The thread of the writing illuminates hope, is a kind of hope.

It is endlessly mysterious to me and it is wondrous.

I can feel old things disintegrating around me, and in the words I perceive the already-present buds of the new.

revenue à terre

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As suspected I’ve come back down to earth, an event somewhat hilariously marked by the very material and grounding purchase of a new sofa. Although, excitingly, one with more space for a new season.

The change of seasons is always a kind of strange moment. An old prophesy calls the listener to ‘enlarge the place of your tent’, exhorting ‘lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes’. The image that always come to mind in this moment of a season shift is of the tent pegs disinterred, and the flaps of the tent flailing wildly in the air. Flailing, the perfect word for this kind of moment.

So now I’m not sure what the rhythm is. I’m aware that I have made progress in tending the studio inside, but I have not really inhabited it yet. I know this because I have not been painting, nor recently written a poem. Things are a bit flimsy.

There is no way to force this into a discovery, a moment, it’s a kind of waiting and that’s all there is to it. But in the meantime I take time to replenish all my stocks, feed my plants, shop for basics. I know that when the adventure arrives, I will be glad to be replenished.

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.

last pelargonium

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It was really quite white
when I found it,
the last pelargonium,
but I was on a budget
and it was reduced
so I bought it
although really I wanted a pink one.

It’s a ‘mårbacke’, said the florist.
It’s a traditional kind.
But it was white
so I doubted.
Do you know the place?
I didn’t.
It is the home of a famous writer,
Selma Lagerlöf.
A current barely stirred.

And anyway,
I was on a budget
so I bought it
although it wasn’t pink,
but white.

I stood my white pelargonium
in a mixing bowl.
I didn’t own a plant pot
and was on a budget.
A mixing bowl was all I had.

It stood, a little self-conscious
on my step.  Two flowers giving me
joy, but white, and no others
arrived to join them.

I looked up Lagerlöf:
A woman writer
native to this land,
winning prizes,
when women didn’t.

I wished my plant was pink.

I went away for work,
asked an almost-neighbour
to water my pelargonium.
She took it in its mixing bowl,
didn’t comment.

A while later I returned,
settled in and eventually went
to retrieve the last pelargonium.
It has probably died, I told myself
to preempt disappointment.
The neighbour may not have been there
all the time.  It’s been hot.

I wandered up the path,
curved around the corner.
I spied the last pelargonium
covered in flowers.

They were pink.