A Light When All Other Lights Go Out

A Light When All Other Lights Go Out

How are you? I mean, really HOW ARE YOU? Be honest, if you have the strength to be, because it really does take strength these days to express your real feelings.

I’m OK. Not always. Not every day, and not through the entire day either but at this precise moment, I’m OK. I’m having nights where I cannot sleep. I get up, go down and sit on the sofa and read. I’ve sat outside with the dawn chorus blazing around me, as the sky is streaked with the rays of the rising sun, and I’ve slept until mid morning having crawled back to bed around 5am. I’ve had a few nights where I’ve slept a decent amount, though never unbroken. My weighted blanket helps, though as the weather gets hotter it becomes harder to use it as it traps heat; I can’t regulate my body temperature well at the best of times so the summer can be a real endurance test.

The last three months have been such a strange time; we’re encouraged to see things in a different light, and yes, for sure there have been some benefits of lock-down. I dearly hope that some of these benefits will be nurtured and encouraged. I thoroughly enjoyed this year’s BBC Springwatch series: three weeks of nature and focus on the beauty and the wonder of the natural world. It was a balm to my soul. So has my garden, and the life within it.

The chances are that despite restrictions being lifted I shan’t be travelling anywhere very far off this summer. My own understanding of the pandemic is that lifting restrictions is premature and that by and large, people will not be sensible. Even if most people are, with a virulent virus around, it doesn’t take much to raise the R level.

I am restless, though. I want to go and see friends and family; I want to go to some of the beautiful places that nurture my soul. Just because we’re allowed to do a bit more does not mean flocking in droves to locations of desire (cough Barnard Castle cough). One of the places I’d hope to revisit this summer was the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, and the White Spring a few yards away; there is peace there I can never fully describe. They’re recently restored the lid to the well itself, replacing the wood that had begun to disintegrate and they have restored the stunning metalwork design, revealing many details long long under layers of paint and varnish. I’d really love to see that this year. But I can’t. In the end, I ordered myself a gift from the shop at Chalice Well: a little pendant, of reinforced glass, filled with water from the well, topped by a vesica piscis, and decorated with a garnet gemstone. 

After I ordered it, I realised what it reminded me of: Galadriel’s gift to Frodo, a vial of water from her well, imbued with the light of a star. She described it as a light where all other lights go out. Frodo tucked it in a pocket and more or less forgot about it as his journey through terrors and trials took him to the edge of Mordor and the not-quite-secret entrance. It was only in the pitch black of Shelob’s Lair that the vial was remembered and brought out. The light drove back the ravenous monster, enough to try and make an escape.

I haven’t checked whether my pendant glows or emits light. The chances are it doesn’t and if it did, I’d worry. The idea of a sacred well becoming radioactive enough that the water glows is a horrible one. But it does emit hope, and in wearing it I feel a connection to a place where the barrier between the ordinary world and the world of deeper connections is thinner than in many places. It’s only a little thing and only a symbol of something greater; it’s a potent reminder of the light that can never be extinguished. And that gives me the comfort I need for the darker days that are ever present.

What are your comforts, your symbols that support you in this time?

The Extraordinary Animal That Is Grief

The Extraordinary Animal That Is Grief

I thought I knew about grief. I’ve written enough about it, after all’s said and done. I thought I understood it.

But I realise that like a child who paddles on the shores of a vast ocean, sometimes venturing in deeper to swim, I only knew what had so far presented itself to me. Oh I’ve maybe snorkelled a bit; sailed out into the open on a calm day; watched the storms from the shore; read books on the subject.

This spring has been a spring like no other. In the first week of the UK lock-down, my mother passed away, less than seven months after my father. Amid that shock came the immense changes to daily life and the sudden ramping up of the baseline anxiety I experience most of the time. Friends lost beloved relatives and friends to the virus; the whole of my social media has been dominated by the pandemic. The usual rituals and solaces for coping with stress have been denied to most of us. Church buildings have been locked; church services have gone to a totally different level and have been done virtually. Places I would have gone to spend time grappling with my feelings are not accessible.

I’ve had even more problems sleeping. It’s not been unusual to fail to get to sleep in the normal manner; I go downstairs, make a hot drink, curl up on the sofa with a book, a heated blanket and sometimes the cat, and try to get past the racing thoughts, the emotions I cannot quantify or express but which make my body and mind spasm with pain. Other nights I wake in the small hours, overwhelmed; a dream may have brought me squarely in the face of the losses and I wake sobbing. The sofa, a book and the cat again become my companions. The thing with grief is you experience it alone; it’s a unique experience that only you can go through. Had I an identical twin, their journey through this loss would be different from mine. We might be companions on the road, but our journeys would be radically different and radically similar all at the same moment. I compare notes, sometimes, with friends, and there’s comfort in recognising that reactions, behaviours and emotions are normal.

I’ve done a lot of staring into space, unable to focus on a book. Only familiar much loved books are my reading fodder right now. I’ll try and read something new but in most cases, I’ll find my eyes slide off the page and I’ll lapse into silence and empty thoughts that are soon replaced by the same litany of confusion, unplaced and unembraced emotions, and a vicious shouting chorus of Furies.

The collective grief of a nation where probably a good 60k(and rising) people have died as a direct result of the virus (official death count of confirmed deaths due to the virus is getting close to 40k) and the restrictions associated, is a silent scream on the ether, a white noise that enters my waking mind as much as my sleeping one. The anger at mismanagement, at the flouting of rules by some, the knowledge that other nations have managed it so much better, make me grind my teeth at times. I am powerless, voiceless. I have written to my M.P, emailing my letter and sending it to his local office and his Westminster office. I have not received any sort of reply. I probably won’t. He’s sitting pretty in a safe seat; he doesn’t need to bother. No one who should care seems to care. I avoid watching any of the briefings now, catching up with various précis later.

I have mentioned staring into space; I’ve been unable to write, draw or do anything very much. The creative urge is drowned by intense sadness. The kind of exercises that are suggested for kickstarting creativity are torment. Brain fog is like being stuck in a sort of mental pea-souper. I know it’s probably temporary but it’s horrible. I’d barely begun the grieving journey for my father, scarcely got a handle on it. Now my mother also is gone. This grief is a different animal, one I cannot yet fathom. It’s a new species to me. But that’s the thing. Every loss is a new experience of grief. If it were truly an animal, I’d observe it. I’d study it. I’d maybe draw it, or write about it. I might seek images or representations of it. Season by season, I’d learn a bit more. And it would still manage to surprise me, shock me, by what I still didn’t know about it.

That’s how grief is: a new species each time. Maybe it is closely related to existing species; maybe this one is new to science and therefore harder to understand. But it cannot be classified, stuck in a box or a book and forgotten; it’s a living thing that changes, evolves, interacts, surprises and sometimes shocks.