I’ve lost count of how many times over the last few weeks people have asked me if I’m keeping busy. I’ve always given a non-committal answer. The truth is that I have, belatedly, decided not to. Why should I? What is the imperative and where did it come from that we must ‘keep busy’?
I reject it. The usefulness of ‘keeping busy’ is limited and for some of us is detrimental. I don’t need to keep busy. I need to do the opposite. Relax. Chill. Be still. I need to allow the words to emerge, they won’t be forced. I’ve finally figured out that the thought-processor doesn’t work well under pressure. I can’t get excited when I’m overladen, overwhelmed, when I go into overdrive and over-think everything.
I needed encouragement from outside before I was willing to give myself permission to really stop – to step outside of where and what I had been, to accept that some of the links (professional connections, subscriptions, habits) would be held onto long after they were needed, but that was ok, they were lifelines, not tethers. In writing this down I remember something someone said to me decades ago, about what I could be if you’d let yourself go.
So now, I’m letting myself go, and I suspect much else will follow, but we will see. I woke up this morning, early, after a late night, and took my coffee outside. Fed the birds. Picked up a pen. I thought about last night, when I had played the old music, pushed back the furniture and danced. So long since I have done that with such abandon, getting lost in the music, in the happy memories. I have affirmed my strength many times, but today I felt it, and was surprised by the feeling of it. I had expected something other than this quiet certainty that I can do this, that I can get back to living my own way, that I can write my many stories in parallel, because after all that is the way we live our lives, inhabiting all the different milieux we choose, swimming effortlessly from one to the other. I don’t need focus. I need flow.
It turns out all I needed to do to find it, was let go.
In letting go, allowing myself into the flow, I find that I am not so much changing, as changing back. Many necessary things, and wonderful things also to be fair, had pulled me away from my true course. Given the opportunity – time, money, freedom, isolation, non-freedom, still money, more time – to discover ‘what now?’ I first resisted the idea that I had changed, but then… slowly… uncovered the notion that not only had I changed, but that that was the plan, that I wanted to change. As I embraced the idea, truly and not just intellectually, that I had let go of the past and of myself, I realised that the things I was moving towards were reflections, echoes, of who I had once been, or could have been.
Another phrase echoes out of my former life I want my life back. At my most depressed, my most stressed, along with the stock I don’t want to be here, my plea was that I wanted my life back. If you’d asked me then I couldn’t have told you what I meant. I’d have talked about control, freedom…but I probably wouldn’t have talked about poetry, solitude, slow-living, romance, photography, books…I probably wouldn’t have talked about the urge to pick armfuls of cow-parsley – a poor man’s gypsophila – to add to my roses, I wouldn’t even have talked about the roses…I certainly wouldn’t have talked about listening to the river whispers.
Because I didn’t know.
Rather, I had forgotten. I had forgotten the daisy field, and the velvet notebook. I had forgotten sitting on the gate and laughing. I had forgotten the long-haired lad who simply walked in and out of my life in a matter of days, but left as his imprint Lark Rise to Candleford, and Cider With Rosie. I had forgotten what it was to have dreams that were never intended to come true, merely to hint at what really mattered.
And now…I am remembering.
Remembering the dreams, and what they were trying to tell me. Namely that there are times to get lost in the music, to walk onto the floor and just be inside the sound. Maybe that is why Clive liked to stand on the side and watch, because that was the one place that I would always just let go, step out of my constraints, kick over the traces, and be utterly me.
Just for the record, I cannot dance. But I do.
And now…I am finding…
There is a quiet joy in noticing the first poppy and figuring out that the white flowers are campion (probably).
There is a release in standing straight, in listening to pigeons coo.
There is deep pleasure in early morning sunlight as the ink flows like water canalled between the lines as meaningless and as important as the river. There is contentment in the trafficless quiet where insects hum, and I can almost hear my own heart beating, and a robin sings, where there are shadows on the slate, blurred stars under the acer, murmurs of an unfelt breeze.
I think about the colours changing…the blue spring is shifting. Bluebells are fading, the grape hyacinths have been sipped and drained, even the forget-me-nots are wilting…now there is bright white in cow parsley, and campion, and daisies, and the reds of salvias, fuchsias, poppies and rose. A single golden cup-of-butter. That’s all a change is: moving from one season to another, a shifting of shade, taking the stage and stepping into the wings, and none of it is forever.
I sit drinking coffee on the step and I look around me. Things are growing in my garden. And I am one of them.
