Weak and Surrendered

Willingly meeting the startling fragility of life

Sometimes I feel like a still point in a world full of chaos.  Living a life changed by chronic illness, slowed down to an ellipsis … but not a full stop. 

I live outside of time.

Seeing friends I feel taken aback by the hustle of their lives, so full of noise.  They juggle the joyful and frazzling craziness of parenting and working lives, balancing themselves in short breaths in between. 

I want to offer my silence.

I sit in my garden and watch the seasons turn.  Hellebores emerge from the cold earth; daffodils and tulips raise bright globs of colour amongst awakening borders.  Roses rise triumphant and the summer garden runs rampant with life.  Then the switch flicks and we fall towards year’s end, all burnished bronze sedums and silhouetted seedheads and whispering grasses. 

We wait, hushed, in the heartbeats of winter.

I am filled up with silence; the still point around which the wheel turns. 

I do very little but my life feels drenched in meaning.

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As my energy rises, we go out at weekends.  I am plunged into the sudden normality of regular, waking life.  We sit and enjoy a drink in a country pub garden, happy and grateful to be out in the world, to be together. 

Early spring sunlight sparkles on the surface of the river; the water dances, alive.  We bask in the long-awaited warmth.  Buzzards and red kites swoop overhead; swans bob amongst the reeds; we are surrounded by the warmth of dogs and people smiling in the sunshine.

Life is vibrant, singing, all around us.  And it seeps in at last, in the aching simplicity of this radiant moment; as the shock of what we have been through takes my breath away.

The long years lost.  This journey to the underworld we’ve taken, my husband and I; a journey I’ve yet to put words around. 

Maybe you know my story; maybe you don’t.  But the uniqueness of my story isn’t important right now, because such moments transcend individual experience.  Because you know, don’t you?  Those moments when you are suddenly struck dumb by the immensity of a loss, finally allowing everything in...  Baffled by the apparent normality which is whirring all around you. 

Moments when time stops while still flowing past, unconquered…

There beside the riverbank I sit stilled in the web of the moment and I feel in minute detail the absurd weakness of my muscles.  They are soft and fragile, like liquid barely contained, seeking against little resistance to return to the earth.   

Frail like the pale light; weak as a newborn.

I am.

It is a moment, an everlasting moment of absolute weakness; and absolute surrender.

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I hear every heart beat. 

I watch each breath swell and fall. 

The river ripples before me. 

My husband looks at me with love and smiles. 

He understands.

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A moment I’ll always remember.  Not simply for that deep shock of helplessness, but the completeness of my surrender. 

A moment when, naked and willing and aching with vulnerability, I was fully alive.

That moment, and me.

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So don’t deify strengthen and reject your weakness.  Don’t fortify against your feelings.  Surrender to it all.  

Helpless; dependent; undefended.  

These are the moments when we are closest to life itself, closest to the mystery of it all. 

This fragile, fleeting life.  This time-filled, timeless space. 

This portal to eternity.

With love,

Miranda x

P.S. If this resonates, share onwards as feels good to you. It’s a message we all need. Weakness is okay. It’s all okay. Embrace every moment, in all of its joy and its pain. Your wonderful, heart-breaking, fragile, miraculous life.

TOP IMAGE CREDIT: Photo by Dominik Scythe on Unsplash

All the others are mine :)