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)