Dear July, two: a poem.

A Glass of Water

May Sarton

Here is a glass of water from my well.
It tastes of rock and root and earth and rain;
It is the best I have, my only spell,
And it is cold, and better than champagne.
Perhaps someone will pass this house one day
To drink, and be restored, and go his way,
Someone in dark confusion as I was
When I drank down cold water in a glass,
Drank a transparent health to keep me sane,
After the bitter mood had gone again.

♥

After reading this poem this afternoon, I took out a glass from the kitchen cupboard, got some ice from the freezer, sliced a green fresh circle from a lime and - the ice clinking - poured myself a glass of water. And it was good. Water is simple. But it sustains. It allows you to 'be restored and go on [your] way' (unlike the fizzy-headedness of champagne). Water gives life.

Picture by Tahel Maor.

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.

goodbye June (and some French pictures)

This little blog has been rather quiet. My head’s been a bit up in the clouds recently. A lot of headspace taken up with wondering and worrying and PhD things. My plan is to root July back in the ordinary details of the here and now, though. Notice this moment. Be in this moment. Here and now. 

I think I'm going to try out something similar to Emily Diana Ruth’s video series ‘Letters to July’ on here next month. Every day in July, for the past two years, she’s made a small (quite lovely) video on something she’s been noticing or thinking about, and I think setting myself a similar project might be a good way to shake myself awake. I won’t make films, but I thought I’d (try to) post something on here most days in July: small things on the ‘something I’ve noticed' theme. Some days a picture or a thought. Other days a sentence from a book I'm reading or a poem (another July goal is to read a poem every morning). It’s going to be a busy month novel-writing-wise. But! I’ll see how I get on.

In the meantime – here are a few pictures from my trip to Chartres (and Paris) earlier in the year. I was there visiting my friend who was in the middle of her year abroad at the time and acted as a lovely host for a few days, allowing me to live out my long-held dream of living in a French attic (...even though, the attic in 'the dream' is actually in Paris where I'd spend my days writing beautiful things by typewriter while being madly in love with... wait? Hang on. I think I might've plagiarised this dream from Moulin Rouge. Anyway...)

I’d planned to write screeds while I was there – about the dusty light and the shuttered windows and the smell of baguettes still hanging in the air late at night, the way the cathedral in Chartres peeks out from little cracks in the buildings and how everyone in France seems to wear black making me, in my red spotty coat, stand out like a sore thumb – but something about airplanes seems to knock the words right out of my head. (The same happened when I went to America last October. I brought notebooks to write in and novels to read, but couldn’t seem to concentrate long enough to focus on the shape of the letters.) So, aside from postcards - which I happily scribbled while sitting in various cafés trying to pass for a French person - I hardly wrote a word while I was there and consequently lost a lot of the detail. In the absence of words, I did take quite a lot of pictures though, so here they are. I'll capture it in words another time...

♥ 

Fiona caught this last picture of me reading a Paris map before my train left homewards. Probably one of my favourite pictures. It was a lovely trip, and has made me kind of determined to learn more of the language. Conversation is rather limited when all you know how to say is 'Where's the toilet?', 'I would like one croissant, please' and 'the elephant eats the orange'.

('L'éléphant mange une orange' - in case you were wondering. Cheers, Duolingo.)

and the speck of my heart.

We live by the sea. (Well, technically the River Clyde. But the sea sounds nicer.) The ever-changing view from our window, the seagulls, the sound of the waves hitting the rocks if you listen closely. The thought of moving into the city (something that seems inevitable in the next year or so) is mildly heart-breaking. Even though I have to leave at some point, I can’t imagine not living here. The city just seems so soulless in comparison.

That being said – living near the sea means being very far away from everything and everyone else. Or so it can seem at times. It means trains that only run once in a blue moon, and stop running much too early in the evening. It means an hour-long commute, both ways, to get into Glasgow and the office where I study. And it’s the same for my Mum, who works just outside of the city.

Three days of the week, I ride in the car with her most of the way there, and recently we’ve started a small morning reading practice: to welcome in the day, to wake ourselves up. It’s a long journey, but it passes quickly when we’re reading. Once we’ve been driving for a while and the stickiness of toothpaste-breath has worn off, I’ll pull out her well-worn book of Celtic Daily Prayers (‘open our eyes ... open our hearts’) and read a little aloud from there.

And then we’ll read a poem.

At the moment, we’re working our way through Mary Oliver’s collection ‘West Wind’ (a poetry collection that you should buy. As the Library Journal wrote on the back cover: ‘From the chaos of the world, [Oliver’s] poems distill what it means to be human and what is worthwhile about life’. If anyone ever writes something like that about my writing, I will kiss them. #youvebeenwarned)

Poetry is really something that needs to be read aloud. And shared. When I read it into myself, I tend to go too quickly and miss things. So it’s been lovely to read them with her. We go through the whole poem a few times to catch onto the rhythm, letting the words soak in before pausing over lines we like and talking about what the poem might mean, or what it reminds us of. I thought I’d share one with you – a prose poem – that I liked. Read it a few times. Whisper it aloud to hear the sound of it. Even if you don’t fully know what it means, just let the words be. Here it is: 

♥ 

Read it again. Slower. And then pause, lingering over a line or a phrase or a word that stands out.

(What it makes me think of is the Sublime, that idea that was big among the Romantic poets. Shelly and Wordsworth and Keats and so on. That feeling that there's something more than the visible tangible touchable world. Something unknowable, both beautiful and terrifying. Something powerful and huge and dangerously close. Something inexplicable. Something that might be, maybe, God.)