I despair. The world frightens me. By day my body tenses against danger, and my dreams disturb and scare me by night.
And yet. Look – people carry on, people survive, people love.
How do I learn to live, with so many layers upon layers?
I hear cellos, Barber’s adagio, rending me. Love and grief sit side by side; to know one is to be intimate with the other.
The people who scare me, I think maybe they have been severed from deep love and deep grief, numbed by life.
The music lifts me, wraps me. I breathe with it.
How do I live in these times?
“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”*
We devour the Earth and accelerate towards destruction
And yet. There are people everywhere loving and learning to live.
Look – there is beauty, and there is horror.
I watch white men rise to violence
their flags surround a government with casual references to the unspeakable.
Closer to home, the cynical repercussions of believing that we are different, they are Other.
The string that snakes back to my ancestors, part of a perpetrator nation.
I used to walk with my grandfather to the corner shop where he’d buy me chocolate; smiling sideways at each other as we made sure to fall in step.
How do I live with the unanswerable questions?
My friend tells me “noticing every bit of beauty I can, however small, is my activism”.
The people who scare me, I think maybe they have forgotten how to see beauty.
Then – after the crescendo, the pause in the music where it all disappears for a heart-stopping moment – and I gasp as the cello returns for the final resolution.
How do I live in these times?
I am scared by the other I find in me.
There is no final resolution here. Only to hold the grief and love, to name the distortions of hate, and also the small beauties which proclaim that we will endure.
I’ve had this phrase ‘resilient vulnerability’ rattling around in my head for a while now – what does it mean, to develop resilience when we live with limitations, weaknesses, and are ‘vulnerable’?
To be resilient has a sense of some sort of strength about it, bouncing back or perseverance maybe. To be resilient is to keep going, surviving, finding a way. Learning – there definitely feels like there’s an aspect to it of progression, and developing. (I want to say ‘getting better’, but that feels too much of a linear value judgement.) It is not necessarily robustness, which is a quality of sturdiness and solidity. Resilience feels more fluid and adaptable and also more open, more encompassing of emotion and experience.
So what does this mean when combined with vulnerability? Well, vulnerability means openness, not closing off, letting things in for good or bad. To be vulnerable, is to be fully human and to risk all sorts of things to take all sorts of risks. Resilient vulnerability, I think, means an openness to fully accepting our whole spectrum of emotions, patterns and weak points. It means to know our human frailty at a deep level, and to know also that that is where much beauty lies. And to then work within ourselves as well as outwardly to build our own framework of comfort and protection, or physical and emotional regulation, if you like. Resilient vulnerability means to go through the world acutely aware of our pain while also knowing clearly what we need to help us. It means learning to ask for help. It means learning to trust ourselves and our bodies and psyches. It means committing to sustainability, both out in the world and in terms of how we live. Seeking balance.
Resilient vulnerability means that we have a map to remind us of where we’ve been, show us where we are and indicate the way forward. It means having a network of some sort to hold us. It means radical honesty, with ourselves, as well as with that network. It means being prepared to face our traumatic patterns and find ways to change them, acknowledging that we can’t do that alone and that trauma is also collective and sits in a systemic context – and also accepting that there are no complete cures, no magic solutions. It means treading a path of living strongly with our deepest selves. Resilient vulnerability is finding our power, even when we feel weak. It’s about recognising that we may wield a different type of power to the mainstream world.
Resilient vulnerability means recognising that vulnerability is what enables connection, growth and change – and that vulnerability needs holding and safety around it to anchor us and stop us from being overwhelmed.
A story for you to start the new year…the weight of memories we carry can feel heavy sometimes, especially memories of difficult things, but perhaps there is some help available…
I walk slowly into the forest. Feeling the sounds and smells, the crunch of the snow, rustle of the branches, drip of meltwater and pungent leaf scent. What my eyes are fixed on is the house, indescribable as ever. Somehow both new and unfamiliar – and just as it is in the stories. More sombre perhaps, and yet with an air of joy somewhere.
I sit in the house with her. At some point, I forget when, she takes from an old carved dark wood box needles and embroidery threads. She chooses fabric from a pile in an ancient creaking cupboard.
“Tell me,” she says. “Tell me it all.”
And I tell her. All the memories that come flooding in; the stuff of years, washing through, deep griefs, joys, happenings, experiences. If I can’t describe something, I just name it briefly, and she knows what I mean. She takes these memories and hears them, listens deeply, her eyes burning with fierce love and attention. And as she hears and listens, she’s stitching. She stitches the memories in beautiful rich colours and scraps of fabric, making a quilt – my quilt. The colours of the threads change as I look and as she sews; from gold to silver to red to green to blue.
So I sit and tell her the things, and she nods and stitches another panel into the quilt, and I sit with the fire warmth and crackle and the darkness, and float with my body until another memory bubbles to the surface.
“Oh, and also I remember when…”
And she looks at me again with those eyes, burning with fierce compassion and utter presence. She listens and she hears and her deep loving hearing melts something. I feel myself open up and fall into that total attention. And then she picks up the needle in the fabric and starts to stitch again. When finally no more memories are coming for the moment I sit, curled in the great rocking chair, wrapped in a blanket gazing at the fire, and I feel empty and peaceful. She finishes the last finishing stitch, bites off the thread, puts the needle away and sits back with a sigh. “There. It’s done.”
And there is my quilt. I can’t ever say how big it is. I expect when she holds it up that it would be a normal single bed size enough to wrap around you or snuggle under, but somehow I can’t quite get perspective when I look at it as she holds it up and shakes it out. It could be the size of a handkerchief or it could be the size of a planet.
It shifts, and moves. There it is, in Baba Yaga’s hands. I can feel the lightness in me and see the colours in the quilt that come from all the weight being held by her. There is silence still, and then she stands slowly and moves across the room to drape the quilt over an old wooden bench that stretches along one wall, to join an assortment of other quilts, blankets, cushions and shawls covering the bench…the bench, which seems suddenly to stretch and expand, lengthening mistily. She notices me looking at the other blankets and quilts. And with a half-smile, but fierce eyes, she stops the question rising to my lips.
“Come,” she says, and takes my hand to lead me to the door and for a long moment we stand together. I feel my body’s reluctance to leave – my desire to turn towards the warmth and depth and curl into it forever.
“It is not your time,” she says softly. “These things are safe here. You are known here. Remember that.”
And so I walk out and back down the forest path, without looking back because somehow I know that the house will no longer be there. I am halfway home when I reach into my pocket belatedly wanting gloves, and find the threads. Five lengths of embroidery silk, gold, silver, red, green, and blue. I raise the little bundle to my face and I can smell the woodsmoke scent.
Of Owls and Ancestors 