I’ve been 40 for 1 week, today. It’s so strange, this counting lives lived by the number of spins we’ve spun around the sun. What if we counted, instead, maturity levels and wisdom and capacity to hold and heal the hard things and find love and joy in all the little things. Some people with 50 spins might get a rating of 15 and some with 17 spins might get a rating of 89.
The electricity in my seaside flat went out yesterday morning. Being a Sunday no one could come to fix it until midday today and so I spent 30 hours with my books and thoughts and watercolour paints and an evening writing by candlelight. I wish the electricity would go out more often. The quiet humdrum solitude gave me space for words: a new article, 3 poems, and some deeply insightful journaling came tumbling out of me bringing me a peace I had wished for because words from under pens and tip-tapping fingertips are the only balms that reach me under my skin.
My guiding anima visited me at 4 am this morning. She only comes every so often when I have things I need to know and hear, often after I have beseeched her for guidance in my waking life. Knowing that at 4 am I will listen without retort pinned down by the heaviness of slumber in my bed. She told me to get the battery in my laptop replaced to give it a second life. She’s much more pragmatic than I am, the voice of a loving grandmother, filled with practical magic. She told me to stop replying to the man who keeps messaging me proclaiming words of love that dissolve into thin air unsubstantiated by gestures. She told me that all the familial healing I’ve been doing for the past decade is done. And that I can finally turn to larger issues. She told me to write a poem about it.
I still have tendrils of that poem floating about in my mind but am yet to put them to paper. The boy I unfriended and unfollowed and archived all his messages determined not to respond the next time he calls. My laptop has an appointment with the Apple Genius Bar this Thursday.
My friend Petra said something to me today that really laid my heart to rest. I was bewildered by my inability to “settle” that I speak to in ‘finding home‘. She said that ‘nesting’ isn’t the comforting necessity that people make it out to be but an illusion to soothe the sense that life hangs in a delicate balance. I resonate with the sentiment as I have noticed that since ‘settling’ in the UK I have found myself being increasingly measured and inflexible compared to how I normally am to allude myself with a sense of control. I miss my fearless ability to rest in the uncertainty of living in the world.
But now I have a fluffy Mexican fur friend whom I feel I owe some kind of home. Sometimes I wonder if I am projecting all my maternal instincts on him. More than is healthy or natural for an untamed feline. But his soft, gentle love has made me this way.
I yearn for a return to more natural living and am counting the weeks (five) until I find us a home in a gentle Mediterranean bay where I can dig my fingers into the soil and have my bare feet balance over rocks, seashells and sand, diving my sweating brown body into warm salty seas and writing moments at a time in the cool shade of early mornings or evenings. Where my work and art are the fruits of a life lived and not the contents of it.