What do you do when you’re not living as consciously as you might – when you’re not living up to your ideal notion of yourself?
If you’re me, you might take a day off. You might realise that you’re starting to beat up on yourself because you’ve over-idealised your vision of who you could be. You’ve lost sight of the fact that you can’t be her. You can only be you. You can only do what will fit into the time and energy resources available.
And if you’re having a wise day, you will remember that it is not even incumbent upon you to do that much. You will remember to stand and stare, to sit and think. To lie back and not do either of those things, because rest is also necessary, and the poetry can also wait.
You will take a day to potter around at home.
You might change the bed-linen, get it washed and on the line.
You might pick up an overdue copy of Resurgence and catch up on some of the good stuff happening in the wider, wilder, world.
You might find yourself infuriated into tackling an email that could have waited, but then you will go back out into the garden – to feel the sun on your skin – to listen to the birds – blackbird, robin, great tit, magpie, pigeon – ordinary everyday birds, with their ordinary everyday songs, but none the less remarkable for that.
You will remember the three magpies in your front garden the day before, chasing each other, and you trying to keep track of which was who like the old fairground game of follow-the-lady. Were they fighting, or mating, or were they possibly juveniles just playing? It did look more like a game of tag, than a real fight over territory or the chance for claiming a mate, not least because every so often they stopped and settled down to feed on whatever insects or seeds they were finding in the lawn or on the drive.
Perhaps you will wonder why the poem you posted at midnight did not send, but decide that the sending was not the thing, the writing was the thing. The standing in the garden at midnight calling down (or up to) the moon, was the thing. The words were just the paper wrapping.
You’ll realise that you have not been home much this week, to cook, to eat, and so you’ll go to the fridge to empty it of gone-off things, which will bring you back to the idea that you’re not living as consciously as you would want. There should not be food going to waste. No matter that your friend tries to reassure you that it is not wasted, unless you bin it to landfill in plastic; you know that it is. Food that is not eaten, however it might be composted or turned into energy, is still not serving its harvested purpose, its transported purpose, as food. That is wasteful.
You look at the garden. You think of all the things you could, theoretically, do – and of all the reasons (or rationales) as to why you won’t. You wonder whether you’ll let the back end grow wild again this year, or keep it down, keep its wildness to the edges. You know you won’t grow vegetables but do want to replant the herb bed.
The truth is that you have no idea what to pick and pluck and prune, and what to let be. You know how little it matters, and how much.
You will sit soaking up Vitamin D, while the bee-flies busy themselves in the grape hyacinth and the few bumble bees about this early hop from dandelion to golden dandelion.
You will listen to the wind chimes with their various notes of glass and ceramic. Traffic on the ring-road. Children, somewhere. But you’re not hearing noises, you’re listening to something deeper, something soundless threading through the life-signs out there, to the heartbeat, soul-song, inside.
Perhaps you’re not living as consciously as you might, but you recognise that you are working on it.
You have pulled a few more of the unworn / unwearable things out of the wardrobe and bagged them up to pass on…jeans that are now too baggy, a ball-gown that you never did wear. You keep the other one, because you never know. Give away a pretty skirt because you do. Every curating of the space is a mixture of culling and keeping. Things that ‘just maybe’ you’ll get around to wanting, and things that really can just go. Kitchen things, a calendar, a book or two…
They’re small gestures, but perhaps the small things we do can make the most difference.
Because you’re trying to think things through, you won’t go shopping or rummage through recipes for cooking. You’ll chop up a wayward salad from what’s in the bottom drawer: lettuce, broccoli stems, a pepper, courgette. Add an onion and hope the bottle of dressing isn’t too far gone. For dinner, you’ll heat up the soup made last weekend – butternut squash and curried apple – make toast. You will go into use-up mode.
And then at some point, you will think about the guitar that you never sold.
Even now, you don’t want to sell it for less than it is worth – have someone make a quick buck on the back of it – so instead you wonder about someone who might just want to play it, which is what it is for – the playing, the music, not the making of money – and you dare to ask whether they might want it. As a gift. And you so much hope they will…want it…play it…
…and breathe deeply into the fact that maybe they won’t. You don't yet know how it will feel when they don't even hesitate to say 'yes, please'.
By now you have come indoors because the weather is shifting. The unseasonable sun has retreated, and it rains. The clouds you’re looking at now are heavier and darker, but they are still shape-shifters, and you find that you are still smiling, because you know that you are too: still shape-shifting, doing the best you can, even if it doesn’t feel like it will ever be enough. Maybe it won’t be…
but who knows? Maybe it will.
