Dear July, fourteen, fifteen & sixteen: entangled with mysteries.

Dear July,

I'll say goodnight to you with a song, a picture, and some words. The song: Promise by Ben Howard. I've been playing it a lot since the Spring, and it still makes me pause. It sounds like a number of things to me: the dipping sun, and the hush of morning before the day's routine has taken over yet. Like the softness and ache and uncertainty that comes with loving people, like the stillness of the mountains, like that space between happiness and wanting to cry, like rain starting to fall. Evan, my good-taste-in-all-things brother, found it first. He told me to listen to it, with my earphones in, first thing before getting out of bed, to wake myself up. I'd recommend you do the same (or just before falling asleep). 

The picture: taken at home last night during the golden hour. I was heading down the stairs when this patch of gold yawned onto the wall. I had to run to get my phone so I could catch a sun portrait. 

The words: a paragraph that struck me from Starbook by Ben Okri. I've only just started it, but so far is quite lyrically lovely. (Bit of context: 'he' is a prince that is running away from overly watchful eyes...)

'If they hadn't worried over him so much, and made him seek escape, what happened would never have happened; and, mysteriously, the world would have been smaller for it. Destiny conceals strange illuminations in the suffering life visits on us. The tale of fate is entangled with mysteries. Dare one say such and such shouldn't have happened? History is replete with monstrosities that shouldn't have happened. But they did. And we are what we are because they did. And history's bizarre seeding has not yet yielded all of its harvest. Who knows what events will mean in the fullness of time?'

♥

Yesterday's poem: Ode to my Socks by Pablo Neruda (probably one of my favourite ones so far). Today passed without a poem... so I'll need to read two tomorrow.

Dear July, seven & eight: yes or no, or maybe

Dear July,

Another poem for you. Tuesday’s poem was William Stafford’s ‘A Ritual to Read to Each Another’ (see below). All the poems I’ve been reading so far have been by women, so I thought I’d try and balance things out a little by reading a male poet.

There are so many lines in this poem that echo... even if I feel like I need to sit with it for a while longer to fully ‘get it’ – if that’s even something worth trying to do. I’m reminded of John Keats words on understanding poetry:

‘A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.’

(I think this exact quote actually comes from the film Bright Star – really beautiful, albeit devastating film, if you can get over the silly hats. But it sounds like something – or the whisper of something – Keats would have said somewhere in his letters.)

So: luxuriate in this poem (sidenote: sometimes when other people post poems, I skip them out because they take too much effort to read. But really: don't do that. Read this ones a few times. Carry it about in your pocket. It's worth it). What stands out to you?

A Ritual to Read to Each Another

William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am

and I don't know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,

but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider--

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give --yes or no, or maybe--

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

♥

Pictures from yesterday: the light in our kitchen, sun on a walk around the village, light in the lounge (reflecting twinkle lights around the windows and illuminating a slither of the bookcase in my brother's room). It wasn’t #hottestdayoftheyear kind of heat – like last Wednesday – but it was warm enough to hang my bed-sheets outside and have the window open most of the day (promptly shut, of course, when a bee tried to get in. I'm imagining bugs will be mentioned a number of times this month. It’s an issue, July. You’re a nice month, but if you could do something about all the bugs that come with you that’d be great.)

(p.s. By the by... I’ve made a writer’s page on Facebook. If you’d like to like it I’d like that. You can find it: here.)

Dear July, one: a moth's wing.

I opened my eyes this morning to sunlight, feeling quite quietly happy. Happiness is a difficult kind of emotion (or ‘state’) because it is not – I’m noticing – the absence of fear. It’s clear-water-flowing kind of lovely. But it’s also fear-inspiring. It is fragile and translucent and if you hold it up to the light, you can often see through it. (I have the image here of one of the contestants on The Great British Bake Off holding up a square of dough she’s just been kneading, telling the camera-man, ‘If you can see through it, like little stained glass windows, then that’s how you know it’s ready’ – light shining through, but little holes already starting to form on the surface).

The question this morning then is: how to live with that? How to allow oneself to be happy – to feel the warmth of it, light of it, soft feathery touch of it – while living with this ‘fear’ (or knowledge) of its fleetingness. The temptation is to cling on tightly, to grasp.

Over the past six or seven months, I’ve been living with the phrase: ‘Hold all things with an open hand’. It came quite clearly into my head one day in the dark of winter and in the months that have followed I keep returning to it, trying to figure out what it means and whether it’s something that’s worth paying attention to. 

Last night, I was thinking about something my my Gran said a few evenings ago when she was over. She was talking about a moth my little cousins befriended in the garden last Friday when she was watching them after school. ‘Ollie the moth,’ she said, laughing. ‘That’s what they called him.’ They’d both been kneeling on the grass next to it, whispering encouraging things, trying to get the moth to climb onto their finger by pushing it with a leaf. When she realised what they were doing, she called out, ‘Oh, just be careful, girls. If you touch a moth’s wings you might damage them and it won’t be able to fly anymore. Maybe just let him alone.’

(Side-note: I remember her telling me this piece of moth-wisdom when I was little. Although, I can’t quite imagine in what context. My cousins seem much braver than me when I was their age as you’d have been far more likely to find me running away from the moth than christening it and coaxing it closer. From the ages of about seven to eleven, I used to go to bed every night praying: ‘Dear God – please don’t let any insects come into my room tonight.’ 

When, screaming, I discovered a spider lurking on the ceiling one night, and then a bluebottle a few nights later, I realised that my prayers were clearly too vague and God needed much clearer instructions if He was going to help me out. Thus began the ever-expanding List of Undesirables that I’d recite nightly to make sure He was crystal clear about what I meant. ‘No wasps, God. No flies, no spiders, no earwigs, no woodlice, no beetles, no worms, no ants, no caterpillars...’ I’m pretty sure moths were somewhere on that list).

Anyway – I was thinking about what she said again last night. ‘If you touch a moth’s wings, you’ll damage them...’ I think that might be what happiness is like: Happiness is a moth’s wing. It’s beautiful and strong. It allows for flight. But it’s also extremely delicate. So: notice it. Enjoy it. Sit with it. But be gentle with it. (A difficult thing to do). Let it come to you, but hold it with an open hand. 

Be gentle.

♥ 

Partly inspired by Emily Diana Ruth’s video series ‘Letters to July’, I’ve set myself a challenge to write something on here every day this month in an effort to be more attentive. (I'm also in the middle of a PhD, so most of the posts will be much shorter than today's...) 

As well as writing every day, I’m also going to read a poem each morning this month. Today’s one was: Full Moon by Alice Oswald.

noticing light

Light and shadows. They make me catch my breath.

Our kitchen table in spring .. the dipping light of June as seen through a pine cone .. Paisley Gilmore Street Station .. the Royal College Building at Strathclyde .. a line of light at Wemyss Bay station .. Sonny and Vito's in Glasgow (lemon polenta cake, decaf latte, pink lemonade) .. my brother's room .. my room pre-tidy .. waiting for the bus. All snapped on my iPhone, first posted on my instagram feed (@teaandascone).

there's a certain slant of light.

After dinner tonight, the evening air was so still and the dipping light so inviting that we (me, my brother, my dad) decided to go for a small walk around Skelmorlie. It's a quiet little village, full of hills and cherry blossom trees and old crumbly houses made of red stone. 

When we came to the top of the hill we stopped walking and just stood, taking it all in: the birds singing, the sound of someone practising piano in a nearby house, the pink and orange light glowing behind the mountains, a tabby cat sauntering across the road, the midges gathering in little swarms (not so nice, alas), the deep green of the grass. Beautiful.

The light this evening made me think of the Emily Dickinson poem that begins: 'There's a certain slant of light-' ('When it comes, the landscape listens,' she writes. 'Shadows hold their breath...'). Only, the light she is writing about is one of 'winter afternoons'.  

That sort of golden light that's almost intensely beautiful, but tinged with sadness ('[it] oppresses, like the weight/Of cathedral tunes') because it is always followed by darkness. The Spring light tonight did quite the opposite: it sent me home glowing, the weight of worry that I'd been dragging about all day dissolving, disappearing, until it felt like I was floating up the path, tiny wings beating softly inside my chest. Hope.