A thick mist has folded itself around everything. Two geese flap rapidly overhead and disappear through a doorway of cloud into another world. A swan drifts dreamlike amongst the waters of the reed beds. Vibrant green moss clings to damp bark in the enchanted forest. And out there, out across the bay where I should be able to look and point and say ‘horizon’, I see nothing but a pale grey, both peaceful and eerie.
And then there, high up on a little twiggy branch, my ever present and most loyal companion, robin, lets out a few lines of innocent joy. Even as our human world is slowing right down and closing up, so much life is burgeoning forth.
You, dear reader, how will this crisis affect you? I don’t know. We will all be impacted in similar and different ways. Myself I have been comforted and lifted by other voices I’ve read online these last days. Every voice their own flavour of peace and beauty and holding. I hope for you I can offer the same.
Life has never been certain or sure. Security has never been more than a fragile wish. That security and certainty crumbles for individuals and families every day in all sorts of ways. Diagnoses, deaths, financial ruin.
And when these things happen, when something crumbles and breaks, it always opens a space for the light to come in. But this light, it is painful, because in letting it in we are forced to touch our vulnerability and confront our own mortality. We are forced to acknowledge that the walls of distraction we thought would keep us safe were flimsy dreams that need to die.
And now, now this virus is pulling the dream of security and certainty from under all our feet. And this is our opportunity to meet life as it is. We will never discover peace in a distraction. We can only find it in meeting what is here, no matter how painful or tender or joyful that may be.
So hand in hand let us meet each moment before us. Let our wells of grief and sadness rise up and let us hold space for those things to move through us. Let us reflect more deeply on what is truly important. Let us spend time daily touching our being, the only reliable anchor we can know. Let us bask in the morning light and realise the precious beauty of one more day of birdsong.
Let us find the place within us that feels overwhelming gratitude for anything and everything we may have, whilst acknowledging the fear and pain and uncertainty within our hearts. Let us remember, in the end, the very fact that we exist at all is an unfathomable miracle and the greatest gift.
To you, dear reader, you are in my heart. Your loved ones are in my heart. Sit and be still and breathe with me for a while. There is time for that.
Finally, let me leave you with these few words from two years ago, which feel so right for this moment:
Into the Soup
There is a beauty and heartbreak to this life that can never be formed into words, only felt in the caverns of our being. Precious and penetrating. I feel it both as if it’s housed somewhere in the space of this body – this flesh, these bones – and yet also somewhere that is beyond containment. A place we’ve all travelled but can never describe.
Spring is upon the cemetery now. The quickly fading snowdrops, yellow primroses and a crocus carpet of purple and white. There is that light, that smell, that feeling that I try and fail to touch with words again and again and again.
Sometimes I wish the pain would go and leave only behind the beauty. And yet they are such a tangled knot – one giving rise to the other – that we could spend a lifetime trying and never arrive at separating the two.
And so there is nothing for it but to dive headlong into the soup. To be in the beauty, to be in the pain and to marvel at the very fact that any of it is experienced at all.
Perhaps, if we are lucky, we might learn to dance with grace.
Love and courage,
Leah
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