courage in the face of noise

 

A few weeks ago I was calling a dear friend, who sounded exhausted by life. I remembered dancing with her in a frenzy of freedom at a May Ball, diving into cool water with her and clinging onto her back as she cycled with me pillion, both of us laughing through the cobbled streets to make it to choir practice.

I didn't blame her for her exhaustion. I mirror her now. Life, as it turns out, can be very exhausting. This last month I've often looked at the sky (a habit I retain, thinking God is somewhere among the sometimes fluffy sometimes foreboding clouds, when I know in actuality he is all around us and inside us. But it would look a little odd if I literally navel-gazed, and the sky is much better looking.) and thought "Can you just lay off for a couple of months, God?"

This month has seen us battle with mental illness, appendicitis, heavy work loads, loneliness and homesickness and lack of motivation. I wish I could say we peacefully submitted to this series of unfortunate events but in truth we've blundered through it railing and staggering, not understanding and not being okay with that. Appendicitis was potentially the cherry on top of the cake - I mean, God, why did you create a useless part of the human body, which just causes pain? 

At the same time I must confess that in the midst of this I've found strength I didn't know I possessed. It hasn't been the stalwart strength of a saint, often it's quite a desperate "I-must-finish-the-mopping" sort of strength, but it has carried us through all the same. Thank you God.

I read this prayer by Nikaela Peters and felt it in my bones: 

'Give me courage in the face of noise. Bring me to my knees so I can better look bravely, each day, into the [faces of those I love]. Reveal order running parallel with the chaos. For it does, doesn’t it? Discipline is not the opposite of desire, but the refinement of it; order is not the opposite of chaos but the measure of it. I crave solitude and silence because I imagine them refining and freeing me, but doesn’t this Greek tragedy life do just that? My soul might end up feeling just as trapped by silence as does is by the uproar. I may end up being just as distracted by cleanliness as I am by grit.

So my fantasies change: Do not give me silence. Do not give me cleanliness. Thank you for this thunder and this burden; [...] So it is not through the fulfillment of my fantasies that I am fulfilled, but through the realization that the obstacles between them and me are their fuel. Thank you for my fantasies and their impossibility; for the wild freedom within this form. Thank you, because my response to quotidian pleasure is sharpened and I am emptied, finally, of myself. “So we struggle and we stagger down the snakes and up the ladder, to the tower, where the blessed hours chime”. Amen.' 

- Nikaela Peters, A Mother's Prayer

P.S. Art above is from Luke Edward Hall, whose art is currently my inspiration together with Maaret Söderblom's drawings - I think they are so full of life, colour and fun, and I'm in a drawing mood with the pencils Hannah gave me for Christmas and the paper and paint from my birthday (thank you Hannah for fuelling my desire to be in some small way, and artiste)

No one eats a scone in a rush

 

When Jacob had a week off for the March holidays I took some time off too, and we made scones (recipe here). I put the cream on first just so it would look more beautiful in a photograph, even though I think that jam first is a more practical move. 

No one eats a scone in a rush. 

The really beautiful thing about afternoon tea is that it's a promise of time. Time is something me and Jacob both find difficult to move through slowly. I'm a chronic multi-tasker and I like things fast. A few months ago, David and Rosie told our small group about a podcast called 'Fight hustle, end hurry'. In the episode 'Slowing down', John Mark Comer and Jefferson Bethke talk about how Jesus, who had an ultimate goal and was fixed upon it during his time here, also gave himself time for interruption. He let a woman touch his robe and turned aside and spoke to her. He spotted a man up a tree and said, 'Let's have dinner.' He was hanging on a cross and took the time to speak to the men sharing his suffering on either side of him. This is my God. We don't need to relentlessly use up every inch of our time, we can have time to spare. 

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It's now the June holidays, and we've been married for three weeks (that's a whole story for another time). Already, slowing down has become a necessity and a pleasure. It means that I notice the birds that lace the trees around our home, and notice one which comes back consistently to say hello in the morning. Pancakes taste better taken slow, as does porridge, and toast with faux-butter and raspberry and fig jam. Slowing down is part of how I love and enjoy Jacob, it honours him when I take the time to say what I'm about to do, or when I do something slower but well so he doesn't have to pick up the pieces of the fall out of my rush.

One day last week, we went separate ways - Jacob to pick up a bicycle, and me to get some bits and pieces for the house. When I wasn't around him, like a boat that lost its mooring I felt untethered and went back to speed. I tried to do too many things, using the countdown timer on the washing machine as a 'deadline'. I ended up falling down the stairs, and bruising my elbow. I also ended up exhausted and teary later on when Jacob came home. I was just trying to do a lot so he'd be proud of his wife and his nice clean home. But I realised that what Jacob wants is not what I do, he wants me. He wants to hold me and love me, laugh with me and be with me, not have my mind race on all the things I can do for him whilst actually not being with him.

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This morning as we savoured our toast, we talked about making scones and inviting people over for tea. We imagined the games we'd play. I listed about five, and Jacob laughed and said we wouldn't be able to do all of that over tea and scones. I relented; how ever many games we had time for, that will be enough. There's no need to rush.

Forgetting faces

I read an essay I wrote with the title “Remembering, Forgetting, Re-membering”, all about museum’s and colonial memory. I used such words as “museal” and "Panopticon" and "decoloniality". Sometimes when I look back on my past self I think "She was so much smarter than I am".  

My Mum works with a boy who cannot remember faces. Each time he sees her, each time he sees me, it is a new beginning. I wonder what he thinks when he sees me again for the first time? Do I look kind, or hunched-over, or hopeful?  When I see Jacob’s face the anxiety in my body melts away and is replaced by love.

And if my past self looked at me now, forgetting who I am and seeing me for the first time what would she think? 

Libraries, ice-caves, imagination

I'm reading 'Hall of Small Mammals', a book that Jacob found me in the library on the day we borrowed so many books I could barely carry them (in fact, Jacob had to carry one home for me and pass it to me the next day). I read it today while walking home from a long day at the museum, and things felt so normal- the commute, the particular tone of evening light at around 7pm - I almost couldn't believe we're still in the middle of a pandemic. 

I imagined two and half months (74 days actually) from now: walking from a bus stop not a train, two flights of stairs not three, Jacob there. Time seems to have folded like an accordion. 

Something Jacob and I like to do is imagine the future. Yesterday I asked him to imagine us on a train journey to the Cairngorms. We imagined the dining car on the Caledonian Express, our packed dinner of a sweet potato salad, getting into a double bed (do they have double beds on the Caledonian Express?) and reading Psalm 121 together because it's suitably mountain themed. We'd bring books from the library for our journey, perhaps a Robert Macfarlane book or some poetry. I said I'd bring croissants as a surprise breakfast, but because we'd have a long walking day ahead Jacob said it would be safer to have croissants and porridge. 

I wonder which library we'd borrow the books from? I think, sometimes, about the Highgate libary, with its soft blue armchairs and snail-paced computer, and floors that would wobble sometimes because of loose bits. Robert Macfarlane books were in the last row of shelves. In the library here they're under 'travel writing', which reminds me again that they're about there not here.

I'm reading 'Underland' by Robert Macfarlane now, and I initially found the going hard. Parts that I'd heard before in conversation with Leonard, like the part about the wood wide web, were absorbing. But the new terrain (literally) of karst and catacomb sometimes felt too foreign. Perhaps, like Izzy said, this is a time for re-reading old books, re-watching old films? When so much is new it's easier to go back to what made you you. I'm now on a part where Macfarlane is in Greenland and everything is icy. It reminds me of the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series I read as a child, when Torak and Renn go into the ice mountains, find the soul eaters, almost get stuck in a cave-hole. 

The books are due on the 4th of April, which is Easter day, which is the memory day for Jesus rising from the dead. I wonder what it was like the actual day he rose from the dead - was it summer, or winter, or spring, or autumn? Did he rise when other things were dead around him or back into the full glory of a lively earth, and were the women who came to grieve for him cold that morning when they found the empty tomb?