Catching the updraft

When I close my eyes right now, I hear the sound of waves. They overlay the sounds of my neighbours shouting spite at each other, the sound of traffic from the main road, the slams and coughs and laughs and calls of the narrow terrace. I am 100 miles from the sea and yet, when I close my eyes, I see the glitter of mica in beach pebbles after a storm. I hear the sound of curlews echoing off mountains. At the same time, here, someone leans on their car horn. My phone rotates a steady stream of bad news. The laundry basket is full, the airer on the damp landing still dripping, and there is rain on the way. In my memory, a brown otter twists and undulates under a grey wave and I smile in my head, remembering the flash of his whiskers. The world twists again back to right now, and a perfect skein of geese flies over the terrace, calling calling. I stand at the window, everywhere at once.

I feel quite mad.

It is such a relief, I tell you.

It has been a month of new information and I am not the same person I was that began it. Before August came, I’d hit a low point — I wrote about that. Half a dozen things had gone wrong, or felt wrong, or been wrong for a long time, and I felt utterly lost with them. I felt myself spiralling. I practised small things to try and draw me up again and I wrote about those here too. They helped, a lot. (Thank you for reading them.)

The month ended with a long-anticipated holiday back to my favourite place in the world. I entered it shakily, hoping for healing. As I packed my bags, as I began to move and our trip unfolded, the world handed me three new pieces of information to take with me, one by one. “Here, you’re going to need this,” the world said, or seemed to. I spent our holiday unpacking them slowly.

The first was that, after years of daily painful struggle and confusion, feeling like I had utterly failed as a mother, my brave and brilliant son was diagnosed with autism, not long after his 17th birthday.

The second came soon after: the rare space and privacy that came with our trip meant I had the privilege of hearing a story I hadn’t heard before, told by the man I love with all my heart. It was a sad story, and it changed my understanding of him utterly, deepening my love and respect for him in ways that took the floor out from under me.

The third piece of information arrived more slowly, less a sudden shock and more a slow, saturating kind of knowing that arrived only once I’d stopped, and it was that I have profoundly lost my way with my creative work. I realised I had been pushing at doors and ways of being that only bruise me and made feel empty, excluded, impoverished and miserable. I need to make a change.

While I was away, I offered all these things up to the Scottish mountains that surrounded me in their green, panoramic embrace. My body hurt. Hour after hour, night after night, I sat and sewed, obsessively stitching neat crosses onto canvas, not wanting or much able to do anything else, the deck door open, listening to the shush shush shush of the waves on the beach. I listened, and listened, and waited.

I’m not sure what I do in these moments. I wouldn’t call it prayer. I’ve steadily shaken off the idea that something cosmic is supposed to come along and air-lift us into a different, easier life, uncomfortable with the expectation or demand that we should be singled out while so many of our brothers and sisters of the world are not. Wanting things does not make me entitled to them. No, I didn’t pray, but I did sit with a different kind of expectation: that the world would tell me what I needed to do next, if I listened and looked and waited. It would help, not cure, not fix. And it did, of course. It always does.

I wrote a lot of stuff down. I noticed the images and nudges and thoughts that rose up and took them seriously. I took note of the things around me and decided they were important: the dozens of goldfinch waiting on the telephone wire as I opened the morning’s curtains, the white butterfly that flew circles around my head, the gaze I held with a soft, dirty lamb as we passed it on a walk, a moment that stretched on and on like a bright road. I avoided convincing myself, too cleanly, what any of these things meant, wary of my own egotism and blind-spots — I have made too many mistakes lately and been too humbled to keep making declarations of wisdom. But, still, something happened. I left the Highlands newly confident in a way that’s hard to describe.

I don’t know how to ease my son’s suffering and struggle right now, but I know how to love him, to love everything day by day, in a way that lets the good and bad both be seen, both exist, nothing rejected.

I cannot go back in time and undo hurt that happened in the past, but I can see and cherish people now. I can treat them with the reverence and understanding, patience and care that acknowledges that we’re all of us carrying stories untold, unspoken; that we’re all great mansions of human beings, and that we can never, ever claim to ‘know best’ or judge someone’s truth based on our own small sight.

And my work? Ah, my work — there’s another post in that. Let’s just say that the me that emerged from the mountains is the one we need, I think. Not the good girl desperately trying to get the elite world to like her, include her, to pay her, to even see her, but the mad poet who creates her own worlds, no permission sought, ready to invite in everyone else who feels excluded.

I hold the stone I brought back from the beach — a perfect, oval gift cleaved cleanly in two. I sketch the geese overhead. I scribble down the thoughts that arrive like ocean breeze. I leave my phone in another room.

I’m going to let myself be a little mad for a while. I’m going to keep listening, watching for clues, feeling my way.

Nothing is fixed, nothing resolved, all in flux, always, but my wings are stretched wide again. I’ve remembered the updraft, and that feels good.

This blog exists thanks to the generosity and support of my paid subscribers and to the people who so kindly throw some money in the pot via KoFi. I have no other income right now and by upgrading or tipping, you help give me the freedom and permission to make the big, brave work I want to make. Thank you, all of you, for being here.

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If you too are in need of a wild refuge or a place for healing, particularly if you live in Scotland, please do check out the work of Turadh who, ever giving, facilitated our stay. Our hearts remain always in Glenelg now. Soul place. Deep friend. Thank you Sophie and Sarah.