Reflections on an Equinox

Photographer: Aneta Ivanova

This season has been one of seismic shifts and also agonizing stagnancy. My muscles have torn from the bone, my family has been thrown to opposite ends of the world, we have swam in the darkest depths of the mind, and held weights so crushing you'd never think you could bear them until you just do. My brain has flitted from the stratosphere to the very core of my being (where the door is still mostly closed -- but unlocked!), my cells have literally attacked each other because they don't know who the enemy is and who is safe, my heart has cracked open wide, and yet still -- here I am.

And what a beautiful gift, to be served up so much persistent hardship that it sticks around long enough to morph into the vessel of its own demise - the wall becomes the wrecking ball, the ice becomes the pick, the thick mud becomes the plough, the absolutely unpredictable, unfair, unimaginable shit becomes the life altering circumstance that shifts your view of the world, and of yourself.

I don't know much, but what I do know for certain is that humanness that our world is so worried has been lost is still very much here. I know this because if I dig around in my pain, if I press where it hurts, my eyes open wider. My heart bleeds with empathy and my lungs expand with an understanding and an undying hope that in these ashes we are born.

How is it that in the midst of so much hurt I can still experience sweetness? That I have been given arms that are capable of holding an eternal heaviness but also of suspending space and time, twirling above my head as light as a feather, floating on the wind and the whims of my ageless soul?

I'm baffled every time I see a sunset because the end is so beautiful.

I never thought that it would be when the school gates close and after the diplomas are handed out that I begin to learn all of the lessons. But I have taken more notes, digested more information that is seemingly impossible to process, highlighted and underlined and crossed out and erased and rewritten and earmarked more moments of my life in the past two years than I ever did as a student sat at my desk.

We are made for dualities.

The both, and.

The moment when the Sun crosses the celestial equator and everything is perfectly in line, for a fleeting moment, suspended between summer and fall. The limbo in between the seasons where it's too cold for a T-shirt but too warm for a coat. The light is lingering, we still meet for drinks outside cafes in the evenings but then the sun dips earlier than expected and the goosebumps on our arms hurry the conversation along.

And I sit here, alone, watching the sky turn pink and fade to black. And then the Moon, she is full, she is bright, she is strong, she is resolute. And I realize, I am not afraid of endings. In this emptiness I am waxing, not waning. 

In my darkest hours I've been ripped so far apart that finally there is space for the light to come through.

And this, I hope I never forget. I hope I never let fear dominate the narrative that love so deeply wants to fill.

xx mm

On The Moments That The Words Don't Reach

(I went to see Hamilton this weekend, and YES, the show was incredible, and what has really shaken me to my core is the song about the Hamiltons moving uptown.)

Learning to live with the unimaginable.

What do you do when there is nothing to do?

When the shadow has taken root deep in your heart, made it it’s home.

You welcome it, you make its bed - but you leave the door open. You let it come and go as it pleases, acknowledging when it’s there but letting it live somewhere else from time to time.

Oh, you again.

Learning to live with the unimaginable.

And that’s just it, the unintelligible difficulty in it all -- you cannot imagine, you can’t conjure up an image to go along with the description --

Psychologists reveal that language is a fundamental element of emotion -- words make meaning, dialogue can conceptualize. Images cut straight to the chase - no need to process a word, just an image flash brain registers and body feels.

There’s an article in the Atlantic* --- “Do you feel something less strongly if you don’t have a word for it?”

I don’t think so. Maybe you feel it even more strongly, because it lingers, you can put a finger to it but not a name -- oh, you again.

Just as chemical compounds (e.g., NaCl) emerge from more basic elements and possess attributes that their constitutive elements do not—NaCl (sodium chloride, or commonly, table salt) has properties that are not reducible to either sodium, which is a member of the alkali metal family, or chlorine, which is a type of halogenic gas—psychological compounds such as emotions are more than the sum of representations of the body.**

You can’t empathize, you can’t summarize, you can’t describe in enough detail to invoke in the other person that kind of heartbreak that rips through your veins and creates a canyon in the middle of your spine. A canyon that sometimes quakes with so much might that you are forced down to your knees, forced to simply grit your teeth and endure, as the shivers tear your very foundation further apart.

Gentle, how to be gentle.

This is the lesson I am learning. This is the task I am giving myself in order to prop the door ajar, to let the shadow come and go, dancing across the walls.

Soften, don’t let it lock you up inside.

Oh, it’s you.

But alas, here, too, is me.

 xx mm

*https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/the-book-of-human-emotions-language-feelings/420978/

**https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4396134/

On Cities

“Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.” 

― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone 

Here we are, a tangle of bodies, a mess of dreams, a web of plans and to do lists and uncertainties, all navigating this maze of streets and sidewalks, the never-ending stream of transportation, together.

When I breathe in, the man in his reading chair next door waiting for the kettle to boil exhales. When I wake up to the sun, the wandering souls out on the street behind are just returning from a dance with the night. While I am paying my electricity bills there are people down the street struggling to make ends meet, there are sleeping bag-wrapped bodies in every train station. While I can’t pry myself out of bed on the down days, there is laughter echoing against the lampposts from those who have seized the adventures of the day.

Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about the strange human experiment that is a city – all of us piled on top of each other, just trying to carve out as much space for ourselves as possible. Sometimes I feel like I’m suffocating; every venture out my door feels like drowning in a sea of strangers, gazes, looks, other people running errands.

My heart craves stillness. My brain doesn’t lose momentum because the background noise never stops, there is no Off button to the City.

But on the other hand, there is something so intriguing, so utterly intoxicating, about the shared pulse of this place – when the sun comes out, I feel connected to millions of other souls whose hearts are beating a little bit faster, our cheeks flushed with warmth and the fleeting optimism of sunshine in April.

When I can’t pull myself out of my head as I’m walking down the street, just wanting to be back home under my duvet, I see three little children riding their bikes down the sidewalk, giggling and flashing their smiles like today is the very best day, and tomorrow probably will be, too. And I feel my lips curling up and my heart burning for the sanguineness that fills childhood to the brim. And suddenly my walk home becomes lighter, I am pulled out of the negative self-spiral and placed back into the universe where we are all connected.

There are days when I simply can’t bear facing another stranger’s face. I think maybe I feel collective energy so deeply that the city can sometimes be an overwhelming complexity of intensity and forces that are coming from every direction, that are hitting my ribcage from every angle and making their way into the chambers of my own heart.

Do I put my armour on every day before I leave? Or will this also block the serendipity, the chance encounters that become stories, life-forces, pivots in our path?

You don’t know loneliness until you’ve been surrounded by 8.78 million people and still felt excruciatingly alone.

When that tree down the road has begun to blossom and you want to show someone its beauty but there is no one, but simultaneously everyone, and you feel the urge to just shout about the lovely blooms to the next person who approaches you on the sidewalk.

But then the other night, as I was walking home, I paused in my tracks and smiled at the fickleness of it all, of my on-again/off-again relationship with cities. The sun had set and I was looking up at the moon, no headphones in, just listening to the sirens and the chit chat and the slow beat of the speakers down on the high street where a man was rapping to a hip-hop/reggaeton track outside of the station. I was passing by this cute white row house that I’ve always admired (because of the perennial orange berries that climbed along the black wrought-iron fence surrounding their front garden) when I heard the heart-wrenching tune of a violin melody spilling out from an open top-floor window. I stopped walking and closed my eyes, listening to the melancholy hum of the strings, my own private concert.

And I took that moment and tucked it away in my back pocket, for all the times when I will inevitably feel lonely again. For that moment, I was connected to that solo musician in the top left window of the white house I admire every day on my commute home. I don’t know him/her, although maybe I have passed them before on the street, or in the Yogurt/Cheese aisle in the Tesco down the road, or in line for the cash machine that’s next to the flower stand (the flower man only takes cash).

So I sit here, reveling in the duality of it all. I can hold both; the suffocation of the people & the buildings & the never-ending noise and stimulation together with the beautiful serendipity, the eternal opportunities, the communal highs and lows, the joining of sighs and umbrellas opening and windows flying upwards to let in any faint hint of spring.

I don’t know where I’ll end up, but I know where I began (in empty fields, on sprawling lakes, climbing the bluest mountains). And I (kind of) know where I am now – living amongst millions of other people’s beginnings, middles, and endings, aligning my timelines with theirs, sharing this space to grow and fall and mess up and hit life milestones and phone home and build a new home and try to find a decent patch of nature every once in a while..

I don’t know if its harmony that we are living in or chaos, or some sort of blended chaotic harmony that both pulls me apart and stitches me back together again. But for now, this is where I am. And may I continue to be rooted firmly, in the midst of it all.

“Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?” -Thoreau