I can make no sense of my life. Does every person with an ailing, atypical body feel this way? Swimming in the folds of a diagnosis, wondering where this path leads. Treading water for indefinite time.
What does it mean, to live my life in this strange new world I didn't want for myself?
When it feels as if we have run out of road, perhaps the solution is to stop walking. Grow quiet, waiting.
I sit in my garden stroking blades of grass, drinking an endless chain of tea.
Time follows.
Everything is drenched in light. Always changing, a spectacle of shadows and shade, filtering through the strong arms of old trees. My life is a light show.
I miss the vibrant spark of a healthy body. Striding along the cobbled streets of my cathedral city, the dark scent of coffee rising from my hand. Laughing with friends, eating what I liked. Sensing the endless energy of my life rolling away in front of me. What couldn't I do, what wouldn't I become?
I miss every adventure I've never had.
Yet day after day as I sit silenced in my garden, the light rolls over me. I am an intimate friend of every bird and of the bees and hoverflies falling into the flowers, soaking in nectar. Clouds cover me in rain. The breeze shifting leaves picks up strands of my hair, dancing life through the air. Everything trembles, even me.
Sometimes the tears are stuck in my spine and sometimes they flow. Sometimes I am mired in confusion, howling with rage, senseless and fearful in the luck of it all. Sometimes my life is a kaleidoscope of wonder, as wood pigeons coo their love songs through the sky and the scent of roses fill my lungs and always, always the dancing of light.
I am joy; I am defeat. I am hope; I am tragedy. I am the reckless dance of infinite life.
And this is how I know my life is like any other. It doesn't make sense to me. Perhaps it doesn't need to.
Earth born I have fallen away from the world and I don't know how to find it again. These four walls are prison and sanctuary – a holding place – Everyone falls out of my life, all at once. I am not seen. loneliness abounds Light saves me. Sunbeams fall through green trees, leaning over my walls reaching in Past the flush of the pregnant maple and the slats of the dying ash down into the body of that precious queen, my garden. Light and earth; earth and light endlessly remaking the world, remaking me as well Soft light dazzling light hopelessly crowning the sweet jasmine, which bears the name of its own origin: STAR This is the place I learn I too am born of stars; this precious queen. Exhale Sometimes people enter my sanctuary. I begin to see the glimmer inside them too, that birth-light they can't seem to see, which says: STAR Loneliness still abounds but the light shines on revealing itself in surprising – places I have fallen away from the world and I don't need to find it again. Earth born; star light! Exhale M.R. Gill, June 2024
Please like and share onwards! I’m hopelessly dreadful at self-promotion and need your help to get my work seen in the world :)
Dear Miranda,
You write beautifully about your challenges of adapting to chronic illness and pain. Hard though it must be, your writing reveals how much you are valuing and appreciating the beauty and stillness available to you.
I do not have any chronic illness but for unknown reasons, I have gone through (and continue to) episodes of deep depression most of my adult life. I’m now 63 and over the years I’ve gradually come to the realisation that rather than struggling against & trying to “fix” my depression, acceptance is really the only path. I’m not for a moment suggesting that whatever you are going through isn’t far more difficult and painful and so I fully understand that it will be really difficult to keep working at acceptance. But to me, your writing indicates that you are already doing it. I send you many hugs.
A couple of years ago, during a particularly dark depressive phase I wrote this poem, which I want to share:
DARKNESS
is only a compression of light
so dense that it seems
to pull everything into it
so that there is no room
for any movement, any quiver
of breath or meaning
an emptiness that is packed
full of absence; simultaneously
an arrival and a departure.
but darkness is also presence
a container for buried longing
a place of deep resonance
a time of timeless width
where pilgrims stop to rest
and seekers relent
to the relentless cycling
of the wave upon the sand
and the stars in the night sky.
darkness can seem harsh
and yet so infinitely soft
it is an endless unravelling
an abandonment of self
that which feels abandoned
yet is always, always found
in the waiting stillness
where shadows swirl
settling in myriad patterns.
the veil of darkness covers
just as much as it uncovers
gently embracing loss
even as it deftly hides pain
in the unmaking of being
where desire seems swallowed
but is actually unspooling
like the ongoing whirling of
every dervish who danced.
the darkness is my unknowing
and something of my knowing
in a world that confounds me
as certainly as it awes me
and knowing gets in the way
of remembering the awe
as it takes me to places
where darkness obliterates me
as we obliterate the earth.
~ js ~
we are with you, Miranda Ruth.