On She Lets Go

There’s a small cardboard box that comes with me. The size of one of those cubed tissue boxes that you get in the supermarket. It’s bright pink with a white sleeve that slides over the top, patterned with printed butterflies, each of their colourful wings splayed. They lie flat and motionless despite the air all around them constantly whispering ready when you are. When I tug the sleeve upwards and off, hints of stale jasmine and sandalwood and ylang-ylang still puff towards me. Inside there are five small packages, with five small notes. Just a glimpse of his handwriting quickens my blood.  It’s so neat and precise. When he left I erased his number, threw my duvet in the bin, avoided streets and places. It’s been over a decade now and still, each time I pack my life up, the butterfly box comes with me. A stasis reminder that my heart can still flutter.

There’s an old gnarled tree in the carpark next to my house. In the mornings, when I sip tea, I can see it through the glass, over the heads of the lavender, between the slats, to the right hand side, just beyond where I usually park the car. I’ve watched it through the seasons, dying then coming back. At times I wonder how it can breathe, with all the tarmac and concrete that’s been packed in around its roots and trodden on over the years. In the winter, it feels like a stranger standing out there, alone in the silence and the coldness of the shadows.  Yet each spring, a luminous green pushes through and buds swell and skins thicken and the branches become abundant and just for a while, the tree nods and sways and bows, as though it’s telling me that everything is alright. Everything is, as it should be. And it leaves its sap, warm and baked on my windscreen and I really don’t mind. I quite enjoy the reminder that the warmth and the light can soften the stern bones of the tree enough for it to feel again.  But when the nights shrink back and the sun sits lower in the sky,  the tree will follow the age-old tradition of abscission. Its leaves will drop, one by one, until every crooked, knotted, twisted bump of its body is exposed for all to see.  It will let go of the very things that once gave it energy, in order to preserve itself for the next season of life. A vulnerable exposure. A visible exhale. An essential detachment.

Last year, a dear friend and I went to a loch side spa for a birthday celebration. There was a hot tub, a steam room, a glass fronted sauna - each of them positioned to face the mouth of the loch and its surrounding mountains and straight trees. There’s a slide that plunges the adventurous into the sub-zero temperatures of the Scottish water.  I went down first and when I bobbed back up to the surface, my friend was suspended half way down the slide, her hands still gripped to the rail above.  Noise pushed towards her from the queue behind, their voices rushing past and slapping against the loch.  I couldn’t quite see her face but the thumping of her chest pulsed towards me. I tried to lasso words of encouragement around her: Come on! It’s great! You’ll Love it! But what I really should have called out was: in your own time my love, pay no attention to any of us. 

When she came to the surface there was applause and squeals and she laughed into the summer-blue sky. And on our way home, we giggled and skipped, holding our bent bodies tightly and crossing our legs each time the memory came into the other’s eyes. 

Last weekend I was on a yoga retreat on a small island to the west of the Isle of Mull. There were thirteen of us there, some of us friends, some of us strangers. When we arrived, we were asked to plant a seed of intention for the days ahead. We ate meals of organic vegetables, offered one another silence, circled together for yoga. When we breathed our hands upwards from our toes into the sky I imagined my body to be the trunk of an old oak tree. And when I couldn’t hold myself any longer, my body hinged and my hands swooped forwards and I sighed my dead leaves to the ground.

On Winter Solstice

You’ll step in from the darkness, through the lancet double doors, in your black patent shoes and red velvet dress underneath your winter coat, the tips of your fingers tingling. You’ll walk behind Grandma, her sturdy figure and steady eyes leading the way,  the smell of powder and her fur coat trailing behind her. A thousand little bishops’ hats a glow warming your insides. The walls alive with shadows. You’ll stop and offer a smile that courtseys to the lady at the top of the aisle as she hands you your own little pencil candle with its own little cardboard drip catcher. Then huddled in close on the pew, you on one side of Grandma, your sister on the other.  Two individual worlds orbiting around their centre. Mum at the front of the altar, her hands hovering and casting spells on the keys, the frequency of the drone filling your body with another sense of being.  Your heart responds.  You’ll sing at the top of your voice to every hymn throughout mass, secretly knowing your mum will hear your voice through the thickness of the congregation and be proud of you for joining in. You’ll swing your legs and look around, waiting for the lady who lights the candles to approach your pew and you’ll follow Grandma’s commands when they get to the end of yours. It only takes one flame. Then, your eyes will fix on the translucence before you. The blue and the cream and the yellow. The way it lifts and dances as people move and cough and fidget around you.  The way it breathes.  The way it’s there, but not really there at all. You’ll wonder how the candle feels as tears roll down the sides of its body and puddle on the cardboard. You’ll glance at Grandma’s eyes and stick your fingers in the wax that’s pooled around the flame when she’s not looking. And by the end of the ceremony you’ll have at least one whole hand’s worth of waxy gloved fingertips that you’ll pop off and put into your pocket. Later you’ll study these ghostly impressions and as an adult, you’ll wonder how much of yourself you press into the present.

****

Several Christmases ago, myself and two treasured friends spent the afternoon making orange pomanders in my friend’s parents’ Victorian home. We emptied our earthly treasures along the dining table, displaying an array of acorns and twigs and ferns and berries while Frankie sniffed at our feet. We pushed clove spindles into flesh, oozing scents of citrus into the room. Our hands, sticky and sweet, blurring into the busyness of the festivities. Afterwards, when each of our baubles were strung up in competitive charm, we lit the candles and poured the wine and feasted together.

****

I struck the match against the bottle and brought the fireplace to life. It was mid-winter and the house was unbearably cold. I sat back on the deep seated couch and looked around at the artwork on the walls. All those faces and eyes peering out from behind the glass. It was only 3pm but the sky had fallen and a heavy darkness hung above the village. The streets were quiet. I don’t own a TV. When I was gifted my first guitar, I gave away my TV. It was a way of disciplining myself. A bargaining between me and my inner voice to change my behavior, to change my path. At Summer Solstice, the old gothic house is at its best - light bursting in through the lead-diamond windows, a garden abundant,  lavender lingering in the air. But in the winter, the house feels like a traitor, whispers behind you, creaking from below. The clock dragging its hands around the slow passing of the day. My own hands pressing, strumming, pressing, strumming, trying to fill the silence.

****

People say that light therapy is the best antidote for Seasonal Affective Disorder.  Additional light encourages your brain to reduce the production of melatonin (the hormone that makes you sleepy) and increase the production of serotonin (the hormone that affects your mood). In the winter, in Scotland, on the shortest day, the Winter Solstice, there are 6 hours and 57 minutes of daylight. Given that most people work during the day, it becomes a bit tricky to make the most of natural light. It all becomes a bit tricky at that bleak time of year.

****

The last time I saw Rachel Sermanni perform was at Edinburgh’s Summer Hall in September. A dear friend organised the tickets. We left the gig in an afterglow of Rachel’s performance and we chatted all the way home about important things, under the light of the Harvest Moon. When we stepped out of the car we decided to take ourselves on a midnight walk through the forest. As we scuffled along hardened muddy paths, into the quiet of the woodland, Mama Moon shone down brightly leading the way, winking up at us from puddles, reminding us that we were safe. Winter would soon be upon us, the darkness of the season looming, the nights closing in. Two friends and their shadows walking through the wilderness. Our prayers moving outwards and upwards to the sky.

****

Her mindfulness teacher, the one for whom she is eternally grateful, is always offering the reminder:  your gold is within you, just keep mining.

On The Hanged Man

I’m spinning round and around in a playpark five minutes from my house. I’m on an old roundabout, you know the ones made from wood with big slatted skirts and a ledge around the bottom to push off from. I lie with my back flat against the panels, my head skimming and knocking the hard center bulb, hands clenched around the cold bars, holding on for dear life. A boy from along the road is pushing (his tongue is probably out to the side) the scuffing of his trainer against the concrete becoming harder, my heart becoming faster.  Eyes to the sky. The clouds orbit the trees blur the shrieks and squeals from across at the swings they twist and turn and turn and turn until they spin off and silence. And then there’s just me. Me and the big blue sky. I don’t care if they don’t know where I am. Yet something else is here that feels familiar. Way up in the blueness. A tug inside. A voice that isn’t mine. My invisible umbilical cord. 

****

They have different meanings when they’re reversed - she shuffled and spread them neatly into a crescent before me. 

What, like opposite meanings? I asked

Not necessarily. More like inverted meanings.

I turn the first card. A serene looking man with a halo round his head and beads of aquamarine around his neck, suspended from a tree.

That’s a card no one ever wants to get, she said her sky-blue eyes pulsing into me. Not you though.  For you, this card is perfect.

****

Years later I’ll sit in a circle with strangers, sage settling into the air. All of us  with the same bits and bobs: yoga mats and refillable water bottles, journals and eye masks. Some will wear multicoloured trousers, most will be tattooed. Wandering eyes finding anchors in the smiles of strangers. Others sink down into fingers that fidget with toggles on drawstrings. The fair headed lady with the generous smile at the front of the room will say “they have a beautiful way of showing us exactly where we need to go”. And three hours later I’ll be lying on my yoga mat staring into styrofoam ceiling panels, the sides of my cheeks damp with tears and a heart that swells in the wisdom that’s been awakened in me, that whispers in me, ghostly and red.

***

The squeals from the swings tornado back from the distance and they fall down upon me and my ears fill up and my body slips and bumps against the wooden panels and the boy runs off to kick a ball and my slippery fingers slide on the metal and the roundabout slows and my head spins and I wait for a few moments to come back to myself. Back to the park, and the lane at the top that I’ll soon walk through to get to the street that my house sits on, where her arms will be waiting, as they always are.

On Rise Up

When a caterpillar is born, it has everything it needs to become a butterfly. Information stored within its cells, waiting to become unlocked. There will come a time when she is ready for change. Wrapping herself in silk, she will protect her old body as it dies, shielding it from the outside world. When her remains turn to liquid, her enzymes will suck the information required for rebirth. Sip by sip they will take what they need from the information in the cells.  A new form will then begin to grow inside her silk cocoon. Organs, antennas and legs. She will then push herself, slowly, carefully. And when her blood moves into her wings, she will take her maiden flight. 

They say that the ‘memory’ associated with trauma is encoded cellularly and unless decoded, can serve as a nucleus for physiological and psychosomatic illnesses. If only memories could be loosened and extracted from the body like bad blackened teeth.  Identified, then analyzed then rocked and ripped and released from the fibres. An excruciating yet temporary sacrifice for something so imperative for growth. 

When I opened the envelope, it wasn’t the news I had been expecting.  There, in black and white on thin cream recycled paper, everything began to make sense. The smog in my head, the dragging of the day, the dull toothache pain spreading over the bottom half of my body.  All of the pushed down rage.

After I had unpacked my belongings, I flipped the buckles on the hard shelled case. A familiar brassy smell wafting up from the dog-eared maroon velvet. The smoothe neck cradled in my hand. The brassy strings pressing into my fingers. A familiar chord sequence swirling round and around and around until a melody was thrown down from the sky. 

At the beginning of the year I took a course. It involved identifying various lies I have told myself, time and time again along the way. Then a prompt to rewrite my life story, with myself as the main protagonist.  Now, as I sit in morning ritual, with pillows cradling my lotus knees and a pashmina wrapped around my shoulders, I imagine my straight back splitting open and the iridescent, veined, unfolding of two beautifully formed wings.