Chatting to my housemates today, I described myself as a lizard in need of the sun. Ellie said sunflower might be a kinder description, but I quite relished the gremlin -giddy notion of being cold-blooded. I am likely moving upstairs in my house this summer and the girls found my questioning on the amount of light the room gets quite comical. But, rationally, I've realised that growing up somewhere with so few buildings and big old windows meant so much exposure to light and darkness - how wonderful - and now, thanks to the concrete jungle and dingy light portals, I'm in a half-life of sorts. Given how much I write about getting outdoors as a reliable antidote to the complexities of being a human being in an overly-complex society, it perhaps comes as no surprise that each spring I remember how much the sun celebrates this season of new life, shifting out of hibernation. And my friends, spring has indeed sprung, the clocks have changed, the world is waking again.
Aptly, I've been digging into the poet Mary Oliver, whose work is a marvellous gift of reconnection to nature and the self, less on the hatred that is ever increasing in our society caused by profit-driven, compounding, technologies and the unspoken agreements of our exploitation-driven cultures crashing down for the 'middle classes' of the West. I think we are at the beginning of the end here, or much further along than the beginning. I think its most recent iteration started in the 1980s, and can be traced right back to the possessive values of colonisation, empire and even further back to enclosure and the pacification of the peasants on this island, to the church, to kings.
I find myself drawn to writing that gets to the heart of loving this world in the present moment, the only chance we have of healing out of the deep suffering we have inherited and caused in a constant cycle, trauma and denial compounding more trauma and denial: Ursula Le Guin, Mary Oliver, Donna Haraway, Tara Brach, Tao Te Ching. There is a big old gap in my reading there, stepping away from white American women, and in time, selfish time, that gap will be filled, but I want that filled less from a fear of reprisal and more from genuine love.
In the meantime, thank you for indulging me, and on this first sunny spring day, I have written this very Mary Oliver inspired poem/essay. There is a great tribute to her work here - although it was a bit dislocating to have such powerful people reading at the memorial, as if they were not deeply complicit in the harm and greed of which we speak - the soundtrack to my wander today.
Eden x
The part of a whole
I feel most myself, most beautiful, when I return to nature. My face a big moon of light that cradles the orchards of my cheeks and hushes a softness across the stretched archer perched above my chin. The grooves across my forehead lighten, gravity lifting just a little. Dense soil forked and turned, fresh air pockets rustling through my brows. An inch more space. Respite.
Whenever a bad day looms and threatens and my thoughts run ahead of me, wearily far out of sight and reality, the honest song of a sparrow, or bluetit, or pigeon (my favourite) murmurs to bring me back again. To the here and now. Less overwhelming than my actual body, by itself, or the wailing of the noises we humans have learned how to build. What stillness there is in a bird sharing its gifts, here in this moment, as I must share mine, to give to the bigger current of energy yearned for and delivered.
Darling rejoice in your smallness, that you are a needed part of a whole, which aches for your love, in the balance of the day, beckoning your attention to join the fold, trusting you belong as you bed down to heavy night. At five o'clock, that golden hour, I saw a dog, gliding through a park, carrying the sphere of a ball, grinning, as its companion glided in time with them. And I felt joy that I am the dog and the dog is me. They gave their running flight, coated in a smile, and I gave my wonder that their coat cast as many colours as it did.
When I paint my face before the world, I look beautiful in self-preparation. I coax and illustrate a mask, the parts of myself I wish to declare or conceal. The adult, the tasteful, the well-rested. You could say the same about hair removal, which offers a cultural care and safety, and hides the realities of the furry human animal bodies underneath. It is ironic than men want women to be 'natural' and demand they cut away parts of themselves that naturally happen to be there. Always a dichotomy in femininity. And yes, the paint can be beauty too, a wonder of human self-expression and the intricate webs and stories of meaning we have created through millennia of deep connection, and it can also be fear-fuelled from a need to be different, to belong. Who has not felt forced to alter, to change themselves, to be found worthy of the love the world has been ready to give them since birth? The love held in the trees and the light and the open-hearted.
I feel most alive as an animal, when I am together with other bodies, just being, outside. Outside of my own whirring mind-computer, overheating from the continual feedback loop of four walls. I feel most alive watching life happen, smiling at the ducks wiggling for snacks in the canal, or the squirrel with a square of toast between its chops making frozen eye contact, or the tyrannical eight year old on a bike, hurtling towards me and thank god I'm wearing walking boots and can hop onto the muddy verge, or the waving magnolia blooming above my head if I dare to look up. They all unknit me, show me why I'm here: to witness, to participate. Life, gorgeous life.
I feel most beautiful when I can let it all in, that aliveness, and beam it all out. My face goes first and then the resistance breaks and it is suddenly a pleasure to pick up the loaf of bread that's fallen off the shelf five metres ahead of me, and to give the dislocated busybodies the space to hurry past because I know they are far from the legs that carry them, and on other evenings I join their ranks. I have the time and desire to complement the owner of a mint-green vintage car on its shine because they have just finished polishing it with a proud sigh and I know how much care my dad puts into his. I chuckle heartily with the owner of a border collie patiently waiting underneath my park bench to pounce on a ball impractically on the other side of the beams, offering the same diligence as if it were a herd of sheep. I reach out and touch the leaves as I pass them, because I naturally want to stroke the waxy leaves, test the texture. I know something has lifted from my chest when I tighten my core as I walk, grow out a little taller, settle less in a slump or a continual reaching ahead because I am in no rush today, and it feels grounding to be strong.
I am right where I need to be, in among it all. And isn't it such a tragedy that we lock ourselves, and we are locked, in offices and factories and vans and impractically basic or insultingly fancy buildings, far from the beings that share in our whole, deeper, life. All to make some lonely, greedy, insecure, person rich, a person who like me and you, worries about feeling loved enough. Or maybe we find ourselves locked to shelter away from the realities of our own existence, or to put food on the table and a roof over our heads and to give an identity to our being here. What would we do with a freer life, I wonder? With labour that can be both meaningful and well-resourced, slower, more patient? For the resourced among us, do we choose to keep ourselves in those towers - imagined and real - because we are scared of the alternative? Of accepting what our culture, we, have done? What we must let go of, to be free? When will we cease to be so fearful of our own minds and beings that we jump to catch the surviving parts of this once-whole place from falling through the gaps created with our prizing, stretching, desperate fingers? How sick we have become.
But when, darling, the light changes, singing for us to wake because it is spring and beauty comes more overtly, so overtly that even us in our collective slumber cannot deny it, there is the inside of a whisper. It grows, it shouts, 'I am here'. And while I have a hunger, my culture's hunger, to clutch at the new leaves, to have spring always with me, I know- if only in my brain at this moment - that such a grasp comes with the sharp promise of killing the deeper roots of winter and darkness and healing that is known as the order of things. And then more will die, as it has already begun to do. So today, taking what was freely given, I am here to grieve and to wail and to say I love you and to be a small ant, one of many that find their way to me when I am open enough to say thank you. And one day on this journey I know that wonder, that awe, that need for the world's nourishment, will deepen into something more, something I would call care, a giving back. And I am sorry I am not there yet, while spring shares and the world around me dies. I can promise no silver linings, just the cool or searing reality which is not yet fully fixed, when it happens, when I wake up.
Sunflower / Lizard
Loved this! It has awoken me to Spring & the joys of the outdoors at this time of year Xxx