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.