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Tide
I am swept away on a tide that I can’t quite name, but that is full of work and screens and worry and floundering. I look back to the shore where things glint tantalisingly, things like books and days off and trees and the warm solstice breeze and fat raindrops and calm heartbeats. But this swell pulls me and I can’t escape it, until it spits me out, bedraggled, who knows when.
But the tide has energy. It has future. It has determination and as the waves swell, I swell with them, something building and bursting and I ride that hope and put my all into it. Frothing, tired, exhilarated, full of possibility. Full of the anticipation of the drop. The wave break. The gut wrenching fall. Maybe it will come, maybe my wave will make it to shore. I don’t know.
But as I ride the wave, in the background, behind the relentless grey cloud, solstice approaches. The hint of light at 11pm calling come outside, come and dance in the eternal dusk. The 3am grey lightening, that heady earth smell, the stretch of the trees to the midsummer. The thrum of the building energy, calling to me from the shoreline. I watch, from my wave. I wait on tenterhooks.
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Heatwave and brains
We are basking in glorious heat finally. 30c today and I am warmed through like a happy lizard. The one time of year where a 160-year-old thick stone walled northern cottage comes into its own, ice cold inside still, no heat penetrating these walls. I cool off in the gloom of the kitchen, feet cold on bare tiles, then out of the door back to the thick heat that wraps itself around me like a blanket of sunny joy.
Great tits and blue tits flit through the garden, branch to branch, endless caterpillar search for nest boxes of hungry hatchlings. Newly fledged babies hide in the fir tree, learning about ‘balance’ and ‘shuffling along branch’ in between caterpillar meals brought by busy parents. Under the birch and willow, shade is dappled and life is good.
This week has been one of those weeks of pushing myself through scary things and attempting to detach myself from my catastrophising, rejection-sensitive brain thoughts . ‘Scary things’ being things that probably aren’t scary for many other people, like making a survey live (I have definitely messed it up, it will ruin all the data, people will hate me, they’ll all fill the survey in with how awful it is), and getting second revisions on a paper (the reviewers think I am awful, I am not good enough to be an academic, why did I ever feel I could do this, everyone else is better than me, I’ll fail my phd and just live under a rock).
It’s interesting looking at the random awfulness my brain comes up with once I’ve disentangled the RSD thoughts from actual thoughts, but it’s not so fun in the before stages where all of it is real and painful. But I get through it, mostly, and this week is one of those.
In between the general academic anxiety, I’ve been marvelling at the sky and really feeling like wow, we’re on a planet! A whole planet, in space! And this is what the sky looks like on that planet! I fully recommend, if you want to feel intrepid and very small and lucky and overwhelmed by awe. Way better than watching the news.
In ‘news’ news, actually, I’ve been getting all of my news updates from BBC Newsround. Instead of war and death and awfulness, there is a baby aardvark, some footballers winning a thing and being happy, and lots and lots about space. Fantastic.
I also read 1984 for the first time ever, and then immediately read Julia afterwards (the retelling from Julia’s point of view). I’m not sure which was the more miserable, I definitely didn’t enjoy either, but in that good kind of way where you hate everything and everyone in the book but still know it’s really great.
This week’s project is trying to make myself like espresso tonics. The important things in life.
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Almost
It’s almost, almost high spring. The warmth of May taking a dip to freezing for the last week, giving one last battle to stretch our hope of summer just that little longer. We will get there. Next Friday is 24C…. It’s coming…
The land is glorious, psychedelic green, my human eyes just melting in joy with the endless shades. The trees are alive with that spring bustle, birds and breeze and the hum of big fat bumbles. It’s ‘not quite dark’ at 10pm, the run up to solstice, constant expansion, riding the wave crest in a rush to summer. This is the beginning of my favourite time of year. My season. It’s a long time coming here in the UK, and fleeting when it stays, but that building energy, the drum underfoot of life, the sweep of vibrancy across the land – delicious. I want to relish every second of it.
The smells on the wind are of summer, of dark earth saturated by heavy spring rains, of the sweetness of full leaves and hotter days to come. Night falls softly, heavily, air thick and dark, stars bright and the scent of flowers waiting in the dusk. The wave is building, the tumble and rush of spring is at that tipping point. Let’s fall into it joyously. Bare feet, sun-warmed skin, days that never quite set. Time for exploration, adventures, movement, expansion. Soul season. Sumer is icumen in!
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Maybe it will all be ok
I feel as though my whole life was building up to this. Nothing special, nothing momentous. No news, no occasion. Just a hint of knowing, of acceptance, a beginning in this middle life.
I turned 42 this summer. A true mid-life age, but I feel everything else was a beginning, a prelude. Wild rides, highs and lows, not knowing who I am, swimming through decades. But it is here I am starting to come ashore. Two-score and two. That many years to begin to say, I am her, I like that, I am good at this. To expand into a body and soul more solid than it has ever felt before. To voice that which I didn’t dare before. To feel tentative joy in experience. To watch the glitter of that August-dry grass in the breeze and feel that same sway in the wind, the joy of movement, the embrace of my place in the web of it all.
My hair is falling out in clumps, probably hormones, probably the final year of the PhD, but with the shedding comes a thought of letting go, of leaving those memories locked in keratin and colour behind. Hanging from branches, pulled from hairbrushes, carried away in water flow. I keep a lock, pandemic hair, curled in a small basket, waiting for some magick to show itself, the time to be right to throw it to the wind or sea, or maybe stay with dark earth in silence. Tiny, silver-white hairs begin to regrow in place of long, red strands. I stare at them in amazement, wonder that I got this far, the emergence of a new chapter. Older me squeezes the hand of my younger self somewhere in another dimension of my mind, a few layers deep. She is healing, slowly, slowly. She is beginning to see the path. Neither of us know where we tread in coming years, but we get there, together.
That peach August sun picks out diamonds in the parched grasses surrounding the garden. The flags glow warm underfoot, skin sinking deliciously into the heat. The breeze tickles branches, glorious days. Rosehips glow red, blackberries shine that deep purple-black in the hedge. Harvest is early, this year, pushed by the heat of this dry, bright summer. These are my days, tiptoe-long and layered. Now I allow myself to stretch deep into the multi-layered love of the season, embracing the true depth of feeling for maybe the first time. Not just love for the long days, but each feeling is faceted, past and future, place and expansion, light and dark, what is and will be. Layers and layers, as always.
Two-score and two. The August exhale, the ripening of a harvest sown unknowingly all those years ago, fighting tooth and nail against storms, against identity, against myself. Now, as age spots and wrinkles begin to adorn my skin, I am beginning to understand. With each white hair, I feel love. With each darker spot on my hands, I smile. With new lines on my face, I gaze in wonder. It took a while to get here, but I wouldn’t change it. 42, but I feel I may begin to know myself for the first time ever. I am still discovering, settling, testing. But it feels different. In place of dread, a hint of a smile plays on my lips. Maybe it will all be ok.
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Rise and fall
It is late July, but this morning there is the faintest tang of autumn on the breeze. Warm and humid, but the blackberries are plump and ripe, and grey clouds blanket the valley today. The bees are busily working their way through the teasel heads, scattering those slim purple petals like confetti into the pools of clear water collected in the leaves below.
The leaves are dusky, lush, faded green now, settling into the season, easy on the eyes. Summer feels slower, chilled out, breathing gently, luxuriating and comfortable. The heady rush of solstice is a distant memory, that tightly wound feeling and energy rush expended. I echo that slowing in recent days. A few long-term projects received their final intense push, completed, and now the out-breath. A time of heavy workload is somehow completed, words written, chapters closed off. New things raise their heads, vying to fill that new empty space, but somehow the urgency is gone and I feel I can take time in decisions, which is a new feeling for me. A new chapter of thinking, considering, and synthesis calls in my PhD work, mirroring the season. Lengthening time. Slow consideration. Time to digest. An active type of resting.
I find this helps with tough problems. Sometimes I get to the point where I feel I can’t push my brain any more. I’ve learnt over the last few years that stopping trying to actively think about a problem actually gives my brain the space to process it. Doing something different, taking away the focus, and letting my brain get on with it itself, with no conscious interference. Mostly, the answer will pop up by itself in a few days or weeks. I’ve been trying to leverage this, reading around, filling my brain with data, potential solutions, then taking the focus away and hoping the soup will simmer down to something clear. So far, it’s worked well – that trust and understanding in how my brain works is an ongoing curiosity. I know the answer will come, soon enough. I’ll ride the wave when it does.
For now, though, I settle into the languid season. My work slows but ticks over, attention to different aspects, brain filtering things in the background. I’m actually really enjoying my PhD right now, the whole writing up process, and I don’t want to set it down completely. I need to ride the momentum whilst it exists. As in all things, there are waves. Times of intensity, times of release, times of processing, times of building. The common advice of consistent, sustained effort doesn’t work for me, although it does for some. Routine, especially enforced routine, isn’t how my mind responds best. Or at all! But this flow, this seasonal rhythm, it carries me along with it with less resistance. A few pebbles in the stream, maybe, things that have to be done. But generally, listening to the rise and fall, it reminds me I’m held in the seasons. All part of the same, rush and rest, inhale and exhale, summer and winter. Everything is a cycle, even work, even thoughts. And we all breathe together.