What might come to you in the silence?
This time every year, I share a story. The story of how on winter solstice many years ago (13 years!), my person and I celebrated the shortest day and longest night of the year by saying ‘I do’.
We lit that long, dark night with love and hope and friendship, joy and dancing and cake and holding on to one another and all the people we loved.
I think really, without realising, we were building a blueprint for how to deal with all the long nights we’ll ever encounter.
The nights are indeed long right now. In actuality and metaphorically, the world feels deeply embedded in a winter that is shadowed by a big, fat question mark. My sensitivity to everything is heightened…it’s a lot.
My friend C told me recently how she’s started asking her daughters ‘how does that feel? Does it make you feel good?’ when they’re engaging with tv shows/the internet/the world etc, so that hopefully they’ll learn to check in with themselves like this independently. Isn’t that brilliant? This idea that we can learn to slow down for mere moments and check in and consider whether this feels good - then steer our direction of travel accordingly. I don’t think we do it enough as adults - the glorification of busyness, of capitalism could never allow it!
I’ve been paying attention to what in my day doesn’t feel good. IG, for instance, has stopped feeling good. Not all of it, not all of the time, but enough that for now I don’t need to be there. Doomscrolling twitter late at night? SPOILER ALERT - Does. not. feel. good. Too much checking of the news, too much staring at a screen in my hand even with all the good that can be found there... These are not the places I need to be right now.
Conversely, the things that do feel good are long and meandering phone conversations, cutting and sticking, videos of my nephew learning to make sounds, watching terrible Christmas movies with my kids, kissing whilst listening to new music, choosing what quality street to eat next, drinking tea and playing shithead, reading books, dancing around the kitchen, lighting candles, playing that forgotten song from when we first moved in together that feels like the first flush of love and passion and anger, friends laughing around the kitchen table, all of us squished on the sofa as we watch Saturday night TV.
How fucking lucky we are.
…
I picked up Consolations by David Whyte earlier, a book of words that I come back to again and again. Sometimes I’m looking for something specific, sometimes I’ll see what grabs me. It’s like an oracle, a bible, a map of not worlds, but words.
Today? I found withdrawal.
To remove ourselves entirely and absolutely, abruptly and at times un-compromisingly is often the real and radically courageous break for freedom. Unsticking ourselves from the mythical Tar Baby, seemingly set up, just for us, right in the middle of our path, we start the process of losing our false enemies, and even our false friends, and most especially the false sense of self we have manufactured to live with them: we make ourselves available for the simple purification of seeing our selves and our world more elementally and therefore more clearly again. We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a different way, a clear, rested, embodied voice, our life as a sudden, emphatic statement, one we can recognize as our own and one from which now, we have absolutely no wish to withdraw.
I’d also been reminded of the Michaela Coel speech from last years Emmy’s via something I read and for the life of me cannot find, WAH :
“I dare you, in a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others, to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, do not be afraid to disappear from it, from us, for a while,” she said. “And see what comes to you in the silence.”
And so it’s time for me to enter into these 12 nights between Christmas and New Year with retreat. Some reflection. Quiet togetherness and pockets of solitude (we live in hope) and to see what comes in the silence.
Shares for the week:
Read:
Do you know I love trash tv? I love trash tv! In fact I feel bad calling it trash because whatever, but critical thinking applied to trash tv is actually my happy place and this article was 100 emoji.
These struggles, as one-dimensional as they may seem, are a microcosm for the hustle-culture feminist zeitgeist that turns the patriarchy into a power-tool and the self into an investment opportunity: When your power comes from the commodification of life at the top of the food chain, it necessitates the continued existence of people below you (and their desire to take what you’re selling). This “feminist” position is available only to an immensely privileged select few — the skinny, the light-skinned, the traditionally beautiful — but depends on the aspiration of the unprivileged to give it power. It’s an ideological pyramid scheme. These women aren’t just selling luxury real estate — they’re selling the shimmering edifice of feminist capitalism itself.
I don’t know why it took me so long to read The Dutch House, but don’t make the same mistake as me! read asap! Watching the painful inevitability of history consuming and directing these characters lives was never boring, and I’m always here for place as a main character.
Total wild card book that I read after a random book tok rec (very into TikTok for all the light hearted art and comedy and joy that feels missing from IG) - a comedy crime farce with a line up of crazy eccentric artists. Whilst some of the ideas are a bit wtf, I also laughed out loud. My son read it after me and even though it’s not YA he was very into it. (Sharing books with your kids is one of the unsung pleasures of parenting, FYI).
I told my Mum this week that we’re in the time of taking the days hour by hour, working out how to fill them in ways that feel ok is enough now. A few days later, I read this:
Listen:
There was a theme to my listening this month and that theme was Katherine May. This podcast and the abridged version of her book Wintering on Radio 4 were the comfort soundtracks that should always accompany December imo.
My husband declared this the song of our 13th year married and I’m not mad about it ❤️ (The whole album is soft, interesting and gently experimental)
Look:
‘til 2022 bbs,
Lx