Roman Holiday

 

 

The clocks were turned back last weekend, so the days have been suddenly and thinly compressed. The light starts to fail at around three o’clock, the yellow trees dimming as the grey deepens. By five o’clock, we are sunk in darkness: the wet ground duplicates the office windows, the streetlights shoulder their sodium haloes and the shy moon begins her slow climb through the earth’s turn.

Invariably, people complain about the changes – the altered clocks, the rain that slants in sheets, the nights that stretch like black elastic – but I love the suddenness of it all. Summer has dwindled gradually into Autumn, Autumn has heretofore dawdled along…and then comes the end of October, and with it, a switch is flipped. The line between before and after is clean and cold, punctuated with darkness and stars, and from now on, we are on the descent into Winter, down, and down, like Persephone into her long half-calendar of blue subterranean rooms.

Two weeks today, I will be flying to Rome. It is strange, at least to me, that it is still sunny there, the cobblestones still baking with heat, the blonde ruins still simmering in hours and hours of light. I’ve never travelled out of my season before. Always, at this time of year, I have gone to places that are as cold, if not colder, than home. Paris last year was bitter. New York before that was frozen over, glittering with frost like a disco ball. I know, of course, that seasons on other continents are different to those I’m used to at home, but still it feels otherworldly to be able to fly from one season to another on a whim - like a magic spell, or a wish granted in a flash of sparks.

This will also be my first ever romantic break, which amplifies the magic factor exponentially. The thought of four whole days in Rome together fills me with lovely drifts of butterflies. I can’t wait to explore the city - the opulence of the Vatican, the elaborate ceilings of the Sistine Chapel, the crumbling grandeur of the Colosseum - but one of the things I'm most excited about is to do so as one half of a couple, and take part in all those little coupley things that I've seen and sighed over for so many years but never experienced for myself. Holding hands in the street. Stopping to kiss by one of the many fountains. Taking arms-length photographs with our beaming faces cheek to cheek.

Don't get me wrong. I will never be one of those girls who needs a man to be happy (thirty two years of being single has put paid to that)  or who defines the crux of her existence by whether she has a head on the pillow next to her at night. But right now, I am all a-flutter with first love, and treasuring the honeymoon period, which I know won't last indefinitely.  I am old enough and wise enough to know that - if I am lucky - the whirling dizziness of these early days will settle into a calmer and more companionable sort of love, and if it does, I want to remember every phase, every layer, every moment of how we got to where we are, like counting the rings on a tree to determine its age: this is our first date, this is when we said I love you, this is when we realised it was for real and for good….

 

And if it isn't meant to be, then I will deal with that, too. It's just a pleasure to be participating, for once. To feel like part of the game, and not a faceless presence on the sidelines. It's still a  bit terrifying, if I'm completely honest, the whole falling in love thing - it's not all roses and goodness and pleasure. Openness can be completely unnerving. Letting someone have access to all those parts of yourself that you normally brush under the rug is nail-bitingly worrying. I suspect I will never be comfortable with being vulnerable, but then who is?

 

There is a quote I love by Kurt Vonnegut: "We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down". That is just about perfect for where I am now - somewhere between the sky and the sea, my skin thin but rippling with feathers.

 

 

 

Matters of the Heart

 

 

"The bees are flying...they taste the Spring."

'Wintering', Sylvia Plath

 

 

A blogless August, a blogless September. Where do the days go, and the months? The last of the sunshine slips through my fingers like water; the last leaves litter the lawn, crackling underfoot like tiny fires. I wake in the dark and go to sleep in the dark; my days are bracketed by blackness and stars.

 

October. I love the sound of the word in my mouth. I love its briskness, the implications of apples and frost, of breath hanging in the air like clouds. I love this whole segment of the year, the last cold quarter of the calendar, as crisp and clean as a slice of moon. The deepening. The gathering in. The hushed sense of everything having gone to ground, to sleep, to dream, to preserve and replenish. 

 

Year after year, I find my life mirroring the season. As the ground hardens and the hedges moult down to their brown bones, I invariably find myself sorting and settling, tying up loose ends, finishing the tasks that have remained unfinished – nesting, in effect. Readying myself for the year’s closing.

 

Which is perhaps why it feels so very strange this year to find myself suddenly in a process of growth and renewal, of newness and blooming, beginnings and opportunities. It seems somehow out of sync with the season. Like strawberries in January, or snow in the middle of June.  

 

I am thirty two and I have never been in love. Or rather, I have never been in love until now. While my school-friends were doodling names in notebooks and batting newly-mascara-ed lashes across the classroom, I was keeping meticulous lists of calories and loping determinedly around the running track in my lunch hour. While they were enjoying first kisses, first crushes, I was enjoying the new sharpness of my hips, my belly's empty bowl, the stutter of my palms over emerging ribs.

 

I missed out on all those years of relationships - the years where people learn what a relationship is, the years where people learn how to be in one. So that there was a part of the adult me that still felt like that tentative teenaged girl who hasn’t been kissed yet, who doesn’t know how to give herself to someone, who doesn’t know what really loving or being loved feels like.  

 

That used to terrify me. I saw it as a failing or a flaw, as something that made me somehow defective. I would tell myself that I couldn’t ever be in a relationship, that I’d left it too long without having laid the groundwork or had the practice runs. I told myself that it didn’t matter, that I couldn’t miss what I’d never had, that some people were just meant to live independently and alone. All of which is, of course, ridiculous.

 

My relationship history is perhaps atypical, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Yes, this is all new to me, and yes, I am probably very green in lots of ways, but I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care. This relationship, this process, is so important and so precious, that there is simply no room for those old limits. There is no space for those voices saying Don’t, or can’t, or won’t.

 

I wake up in the mornings and the first thing that I remember is I love someone, and he loves me; my whole body hums with that knowledge as though bees had taken up residence. It's exhilarating and wonderful and a little bit terrifying all at once. I don't know whether it feels more like flying or falling. But I do know that I am treasuring every moment. And that the wait, however long, was worth it. 

 

This is what the poems are for, then. This is what the heart feels like when it's full.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.