Weather and words

 

 

 

The sky finally broke open yesterday, weeks of heat and pressure shattering like a dropped pot, an explosion of sound and water. I opened the window a little to watch the sheeting rain, and the smell of the garden rushed in, lush, and wet, and green; the pines were glittering all over like brides in sequins and silvery lace. And then lightning scorched the sky, its singular smell like pennies sweating in a sea-green palm. And thunder rolled in, low and deep as the boom of a bass. I watched for ages, the odd jewel of rain tossed on the sill like a coin dropped in the throat of a well. And despite the violence of the storm, I felt strangely calm. Safe and peaceful. Human. Small.

 

I write a lot about the weather here. It's not intentional. I think it's a way of locating myself as I write; anchoring myself in a physical reality before I spiral off into poetry and metaphor and glorious dreamy language. Like someone about to fly a kite in a high wind might plant their feet in the sand before letting their paper diamond go up into the high, far blue.

 

I feel a little as if I am flying today, barely-tethered, grazing the clouds and the white day-moon. It occurred to me earlier, as it sometimes does, that I am writing something; more than that, I am writing a book. I've had bits and scraps for so long, chapters scattered like wedding confetti, notes here and notes there, that it's easy to forget sometimes that it is taking shape and becoming something solid and cohesive. I thought of it for so long as jottings-that-I-might-be-able-to-make-something-of-one-day that even now as it gathers weight and depth, even as it spills from one desk drawer into another, I still think of it as something formless and fragmented, so on the rare occasions that it strikes me that it is now very definitely a book-in-progress, I get this wonderful soaring feeling, a sort of wild exhilaration that is perhaps three parts pure joy, one part fear.

 

It has been slow in the making, partly because I move like a butterfly between projects, lifting here, landing lightly there: poetry one day, fiction the next, non-fiction the day after that. I love the actual process of writing, but I find exacting any kind of discipline impossible. If I’m in a poetry-writing frame of mind, I am quite literally incapable of writing anything else. Each style of writing comes from a different place, I think; is driven by a different sort of compulsion. And the idea of trying to corral that compulsion and break it like a wild horse is utterly absurd to me. I like to write from spark and fire, from the first kindling, to a flickering, through to a furious burning, a bright white heat. I’ve heard other writers talk about the ratios between inspiration and perspiration, about the necessity to sit down and write even when the motivation isn’t there, and maybe that works for other people, but it doesn’t work for me. I write from exhilaration, not from duty; sometimes I wish I could be more clinical about it, more dogged, but there it is. And it’s taken me a while to realise that my way of writing is fine, too.

 

Different people have different ways of doing things. That is part of what makes us interesting. I am fascinated by other people's kinks and quirks, their particular habits and processes; if we all worked according to the same template, I would have one less thing to be fascinated by.

 

And I do so like to be fascinated.

 

 

Moments of Gratitude #6

Beach weekends, and horseriding in the dunes, and peeling lighthouses, and oyster shells with a rosy gleam in their folds, and blue skies, and crab skeletons, and old temples with holy pools, and champagne on the sand at sunset, and friendships, and laughter, and boys with Irish accents and soft, soft lips.

Full Fathom Five

 

 

 

Summer has finally arrived like an overdue visitor, her arms brimming with conciliatory gifts. Lush bouquets of plum-coloured roses. Soft gold bees browsing dizzily in the grass. I bring sandwiches to work - cheese thickly slathered with lurid yellow pickle - and sit outside to eat them in the sunshine, reading, dreaming, feeling utterly content.

Yesterday I watched a jewel-blue dragonfly skimming the surface of the lake. Today I threw in my leftover bread, and the soft little patters drew madly-quacking ducks like filings to a magnet, a hundred gleaming emerald heads bobbing for scraps.

I have always loved the water. It’s in my horoscope: the sign of the fish, two little slips of gold in a single loop, gilt-scaled, thin-finned. I have always found solace in it, a sense of quiet and calm.  It feels like home. Like I lived there once, in the cathedral quiet of the ocean depths, and some memory of it still lives at a cellular level, as coiled and self-contained as a nautilus shell on the sea-bed. When I was little, I wished every night that I’d wake up a mermaid – slim tail the colour of tears, hair spilling over my shoulders like water. (Secretly, I still believe it could happen. That one sunrise there will be a faint salt scent in the covers. A scattering of light in the sheets).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've been choosing beauty wherever I can. And finding that the more you look for it, the easier it is to see. Filling my head with fairytales and poetry, selkies, spells and elves. Taking the longer route home along the river, stopping to take photos of the fish in the shallows, the cool blue herons as regal as queens. I’ve been eating dinner in the dappled garden, cats about my ankles in happy figure-eights. Drinking peach tea and writing out quotes in my cramped notebooks.

It’s as though beauty wants to be noticed. If I open to even its smallest expression - a smile, a sweet smell, the halo of light around a candle flame - it crests and swells, rises like a wave, or the notes in an orchestra. 

And who wouldn’t want to live on that singular frequency. Who wouldn’t want their body to pulse with that song.

Einstein said, Either everything is a miracle, or nothing is. 

 

My whole heart tell me it's the former.

 

 

Down the rabbit hole...

After months and months of grey gloom like a pencil mark smudging endlessly across a page, the weather this weekend was beautiful. I sat in the garden watching the cats chase butterflies, bits of leaf, and dandelion down. I drank fresh pressed juice and read for hours, while the washing flapped smartly on the line sending out tides of scent: fresh air, jasmine, tiger-lily, rose.

My mother and sister are in Greece this week, so I have the house to myself. And although I’ve missed them, I have settled into the peace and space left by their absence with a quiet contentment. Sometimes it’s pleasant to simply be in your own company. I find myself humming while doing the laundry because I’m not mindful of someone’s presence in the next room. I sit in the kitchen with a cup of tea just gazing out of the window, silent, dreaming, undisturbed.

The plan when I initially moved back home was to stay for just six months. I would get well, save some money, and move out again. As it happens, I’ve been at home now for a good while longer than that, and while there was safety in it at first, a necessary sort of net, my taste of total independence this week has been intoxicating. 

There are spaces that contain and protect, and that is a vital thing, sometimes, crucial for health and growth – the chick in the cool room of its shell, for example, or the tadpole quivering like a comma in its gel. But always, always there will come a time when we grow beyond the confines of that space. The grown chick beaks its way through the shell, the tadpole matures and transforms. And so must we eventually step out of our cramped quiet to stretch our legs, breathe different air, move in a wider world.

When I was a little girl, I was given a gloriously illustrated version of Alice in Wonderland one Christmas. I read it over and over again, until it literally fell apart in my hands, its spine broken and the pages fluttering out like dropped petals. When that happened, I took the drawings and pinned them to my walls, a themed frieze of fantastical images: a fat caterpillar smoking a pipe; the Cheshire cat’s smile like a slice of moon in the trees; the playing-card soldiers furiously painting the white roses red; the anxious-looking rabbit wearing a silk vest and a gold pocket-watch.

My favourite was actually one of the plainer images. I couldn’t have said why I identified with it at the time, but in hindsight it seems to reflect how I felt right the way through my childhood, and long into adulthood. It was the drawing of Alice in the White Rabbit’s house. She has eaten a piece of mushroom which makes her grow to gigantic proportions, so that suddenly she no longer fits in the room. I remember that she had one arm out of the window and another up the chimney, while her knees bumped at the ceiling and her head bent to her shoulder like a swan’s.

 

 

It both terrified and fascinated me, that image. A girl who was too big for the space she found herself in. A girl whose place of refuge had changed around her, become a place too small for her to inhabit.

This is a little how I find myself feeling this week. Not trapped, or panicked, but cramped, certainly. Yearning for freedom and change. I’ve let myself get complacent about moving out, about pushing my boundaries, because I’ve felt happy, and centred, and safe. And it’s not a bad thing to have just enjoyed that for a while, but for continued growth, it really is time now to start thinking about moving into a place of my own.

I’m actually giving serious thought to relocating completely. I’ve gotten closer recently to a couple of good friends who live in London, and have spent quite a bit of time down there in the last few weeks, which has rekindled my love of the place. The red buses that steam down bustling streets, the open-air fruit markets, the church bells, the architecture of the cathedrals, as fine as spun sugar. I love the sparkle of saris and gold-threaded robes, the yellow lights shivering at night in the Thames. I love the green beep of the turnstiles on the Tube, and the names of the stops on the underground maps - Elephant & Castle, Goldhawk Road, Marble Arch, Blackfriars, Bayswater, Mudchute – that sound somehow British and exotic all at once, both Dickensian and completely foreign.

The village where I live now is sleepy and sweet, ringed by woods that tremble with bluebells, or else creaks under the weight of rain and snow. There is a tiny train station with only two tracks running side by side like zippers, a preserved Roman road and a centuries’ old church that still has the original village stocks outside, soft with age and rot. These are the things I will miss if I leave. Simple things, and small. But as Anais Nin says in the quote I so love, ‘The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom'.

Time to take the risk.  Time to blossom.

 

 

Straw into Gold

The non-Spring continues. The days are endlessly damp and grey. This is weather to be sad in. Skies to buckle under. Instead, I brim with joy, with light.

In the mornings, I brew tea and gaze out of the window, stunned by my luck. I watch the squirrels skitter up and down the pines, the delicate bluebells shivering in the wind. I look at the tree trunks, soft and wet, barks peeling to reveal the gleam of newer, whiter wood beneath. And I feel such simple happiness. Such gratitude. Such calm.

My life is far from perfect. In the last few months, my social circle has shrunk from a wide open hoop to a small, tight band. I hold it close to my heart, shielded, close, like a widow who hangs her wedding ring at her breast. My responsibilities at work have increased, which brings both pride and uncertainty: until I am totally competent at a task, I tend to feel incapable and small, and because there is a lot of technical learning involved at the moment, a lot of questioning and learning from mistakes, I feel clumsy, incompetent, cotton-headed.

In the past, I’ve seen these kinds of quiverings as a failing. In my head, they were giant, rocky obstacles to surmount: sheer-faced, not a foot-hold or hand-hold in sight. Now, I can see that they’re exactly the opposite. That they are, in fact, stepping stones to knowledge. Ladders to growth, and grace.

I don’t know what, precisely, has changed. I wish I did. I’d paint the formula in neon pink on every blank stretch of brick, scribble it on scraps of paper and scatter them to the wind.

I’ve been reading a lot about radical acceptance recently. I’ve allowed myself to be vulnerable. I’ve stopped trying to heave myself over obstructions, puffing and panting, and tried meeting them head on instead, with recognition and a cool head. I have watered new friendships, even as old ones have wasted and browned in the known confines of their pots. I have cooked good food. I have written every day. And each of these things has contributed to this new sense of well-being, this quiet, consistent pleasure. Like the individual components in a charm or a spell: plain and simple in their separate parts, but combined, they’re pure wonder, pure magic.

There's a certain slant of light...

I am happy today. I feel like the world is open, and my heart. Slowly, slowly, I am coming into my own. All that potential that was suffocated under fathoms of anxiety, buried without breath under my obsession with food, and weight, all that possibility, all that hope – at last, there is a real, irreparable crack in the armour, and the light is spilling from it, reaching out with long golden fingers. 

I realised yesterday with a sweet surprise that I can’t remember the last time I wanted to purge. This normality around eating, and my body…it has become so commonplace and so familiar that it seems it must always have been this way, even though it’s only been since Christmas. How could I have lived as I did before? And for so long? Like asking a butterfly how it lived as a grub, I suppose, small and silent in its nub of silk. Or a rose in the closed head of its bud. 

I went on holiday to Egypt at the end of April. A week of desert heat, and cocktails in the pool, and tasselled camels, and hibiscus tea. But the biggest thing that happened was that I met someone. And I came back feeling…changed. In the best of ways. 

I’m not being a moony-eyed schoolgirl about it: the relationship was bracketed between landings and take-offs, and we live miles away from each other, so in all likelihood, nothing further will happen. And I’m okay with that, if that’s the case. Because it was the experience that was momentous. The letting go.  The taking a chance.

All those years I spent hating my body, covering my scars. All that stress about not being normal or having the right kinds of feelings. All of it has evaporated like saltwater in the sun, leaving only a beautiful glittering dust behind.

This is the first holiday ever where I’ve worn a bikini and felt, if not exactly confident, then at least acceptable. At least enough. Previously, I’ve been like a dog with a rag, worrying about my broadening hips, the perceived excess of flesh at my belly, the ladder of scars on my thighs that rise and whiten in the heat like the cross-hatchings on a loaf of bread. In Egypt, I felt none of that. I was present in my body, but I was not defined by it. I wore a bikini, and I talked to a boy, and...I was ok. I really was. I didn't liquefy in a puddle of shame and awkwardness. I didn't shut down into cold politeness. I just....was.

There have been men before, good men, sweet men, who have wanted to take things further than friendship. And I wouldn’t entertain it. Not only because of the emotional intimacy – I could not let my guard down, I could not risk being hurt – but also because of the shame of my physical self.  In Egypt, it was different. It was like all of that had been stripped away, removed from the equation: I was in swimwear from the outset, which was pretty much the same as being in underwear, my body, scars and all, was on display...and this boy, this clever, funny, attractive boy still wanted to speak to me, still wanted to spend time with me.

I keep telling myself that I am not my body, that I am not how I look or how much effort I make appearance-wise...but I've never really believed it at a core level until now. It's never been intrinsic. And even if nothing further happens with the boy, I can take away this: I am capable of giving. I am capable of being open, and vulnerable.

I can't over-estimate how huge of a realisation this is.

Long overdue....

I haven’t posted on here in a while. Sometimes, if my creative writing is going particularly well, it’s almost like it swallows my whole quotient of words; there are none left over to spill onto a blog post. It’s exhausting, but it’s a pleasant kind of exhaustion. I feel like every cell in my body is humming. Like my brain is shooting off flowers of colour and fire.

 

I’ve been writing wildly these last few weeks. Poems about seals and selkies. Poems about renewal. Poems about birds, and love, and seasons. I’m finding poetry in everything. All day in the office, I burn for my laptop and a quiet room. 

 

Nothing makes me happier than building a poem. Selecting the right words and clicking them together like interlocking puzzle pieces. It’s strange, but it almost feels like discovering something rather than creating something. Like the words are already there just waiting for me to brush the dust off and reacquaint them with the light. I imagine this is how an archaeologist must feel when they turn over sand and find old gold, or uncover a tomb full of jewels. Reverent.  Exhilarated.  Wide-eyed.

 

It’s still like Winter here even though April is almost over. The skies are gunmetal-grey, the trees are skeletal and the pond at work is thick with slurry fans of slush in the mornings. This time last year, we’d little peeping ducklings everywhere, and lanky, awkward-looking baby geese. This year, the nests are still full and quiet; the eggs are keeping their sweet secrets a little while longer. I love Winter and all of its austere beauty, but this season has been endless; I am more than ready for Spring with its clear skies, its buds fumbling into blossom and its daffodils trumpeting from the grass verges like triumphant yellow angels.

 

I fly to Egypt on Sunday, so I’m managing the current lack of heat by resting in the knowledge that soon I will be gilding my skin on another continent. A week of sunshine and drifting lazily in the sea, cocktails by the pool and the delicious coconut-smell of sunscreen.  The last time I went to Egypt, almost four years ago, I was still actively eating-disordered. I remember feeling totally self-conscious and glaringly enormous, even though I was so thin that sweat collected in the shallow bowls of my collarbone and the dips between each rib. We stayed on a cruise ship, and every restaurant on board had these amazing displays of food that I marvelled at but wouldn’t allow myself to try: hams and cheeses carved into Sphinxes, pats of butter shaped like pyramids, doorstop-wedges of cake brimming with chocolate curlings and bright slices of dragonfruit. My sister lay on the loungers, all lovely golden curves; I arranged and rearranged my pale bones in a vain attempt to find a comfortable position on the plastic slats.

 

There is a quiet joy in knowing that this time round, I will laze in the light, eating whatever I like whenever I like. Being grateful for my body, not at war with it.

 

A little reminder that even the smallest change matters. That any little effort towards the greater good is an effort worth making. A snowflake by itself melts away into nothingness, but a million together make a snowman, an igloo, a Winter palace. Every snowflake contributes to the end result. Every action counts.