Thank you for your patience as there has been a pause in my writing for these past few months. Welcome back, I’m so glad you are here, beginning again with me…
It’s been a while since I wrote anything. Since I fell silent. Since I fell.
Things happened. I got sick. People got sick around me. The focus shifted by necessity towards others, and simultaneously deeper into myself - into the dark and the quiet. A place where words are less accessible or perhaps, simply, less important.
Once I stopped writing it became easier to not write. To look back at myself in the past as though the person that wrote was simply a figment of my imagination. A lovely dream I had about myself set in a place where all things are possible.
Still even in the place where writing had become somehow separate from me – there was still a quieter call for connection and creation. A yearning to be alive and touch other things that are also alive even with just the easy breath of appreciation.
Ever since I was a young girl, I have loved the small. I would crouch down at the edge of tidal pools for hours staring into the glimmering magnification of another world, counting snails, touching the swaying sea anemones to feel them stick hold before retreating into themselves, and holding my own breath as tiny flashing fish darted away.
I would stare at the tiny forests of lush moss that grew on ancient rocks deep in the coastal mountains.
And I would dance the pathways of the European Skippers – small orange butterflies that flitted through our back garden to taste the colourful fox gloves and wayward clover.
We lived near a creek that hummed with life, sending dragonflies and their diminutive sisters, damselflies, into the yard each summer to land on my freckled forearm and sun themselves in shared company.
I wonder sometimes: what it is that draws me to the small, and the intricate? To the startling beauty that is all around me if I only pause to look?
Perhaps it was the fairy tales my German mother told me as a child – of small gnomes and insects dressed up in finery for tea parties deep beneath the soil in their homes below the roots.
Or perhaps it is that I have always been near sighted, and long before I ever got glasses, was forced to get intimately close to see the intricate patterns and the vibrant colours of life in full display.
And I wonder if I appreciated the blurred background of the busy world as it was peacefully muted so that I might join in the magical universe below.
Or, perhaps it’s simply that as a small child, my physical and emotional heart were just so much closer to everything, to the ground, to the plants, to the more than human, and to the quiet magnificence of life.
It seems perfect somehow that in these last months when I fell quiet, when I fell in my own way into some kind of collapse, that I fell down back to the earth and to the things that were also slowly and beautifully moving through decomposition and starting to begin again.
I live in a city. Not too large, but a city nonetheless. It’s easy to imagine there is nothing to connect with. No rolling fields of wildflowers or breath-taking vistas. There are sidewalks and roadways outside my front door, but there are also homes and yards, and tiny pathways that brim with all living things.
I walk every day. Even when I am tired. I have a dog, and I always feel better for it. We both do. But recovery is exhausting and giving myself permission to pause and look rather than stride ahead became something so much more nourishing than exercise.
Remarkably, I found company.
At first it was the dangling blossoms of snowdrops winking with sparkling diamonds of morning dew, but then I discovered the stump of an old tree bedecked in a fungus somehow resembling the swishing flamenco skirts of Spanish ladies.
It became the beckoning of the bright purple pearl hyacinths with their sweet white-as-a-daisy mouths pouting in long green grasses.
And the wild flash of pink clover blossoms calling to me from across the street to join their rainy-day celebrations.
Every one of them cheerily waved me over and called me down to my knees to join them.
Episodic. Invisible. Chronic. These are terms that describe an aspect of my vitality. But they are not everything. They are not even the most important parts. But they do mean that I sometimes, more often than I may like, have to stop. I have to pause and rest. If I am overly enthusiastic I am likely to collapse and require time to recover. Sometimes it may feel like punishment, or deeply unfair - as though I am forever on the outside watching life flow past.
Sometimes, I grieve.
And yet, I wonder, would I have ever had these moments without my physiology? My beautiful and gorgeous and flawed biology that forced me to slow down and lean in closely in order to truly see?
And when I wonder, I know that the world is as imperfect as I am, and that privilege lives in perspective. High functioning can mean high demand, and a pause for some can seem as whimsical as a fairy tale. So, I find myself in good company, here in the in-between, down on my knees, both broken and whole, grieving and grateful, in this never ending cycle of starting to begin again.