All In

Open, or closed? A practice

The day dawned bright and blue and I thought, happily, “I’ll go and sit outside today.” I’ve had many days stuck in bed lately. Lying there day after day, my view the dingy white ceiling, I told myself I’d been peeled away from life again, that something had pried its fingers in between me and everything else and pulled. I was feeling a little better today. It was time to move, return, re-adhere myself to things, but now it’s 3pm as I write this in the small, cluttered garden. It has taken me all day to get here.

All day, every time I looked out the window, the sun had gone in, the cloud rolled over, and I had turned away. I had been waiting for what? Some easy, obvious, pleasurable invitation, maybe — a big bright yes— but whenever I had looked outside, I had made an unconscious choice — oh no, not that, no thanks — until I realised what I was doing, fetched an extra cardigan and coaxed my stiff bones to the garden. Now I sit under the cloud, the breeze finding its way under my clothes and my hard-held defences, the terraced houses in front and behind stretching up with their dirty terracotta and their cracked chimneys, the sky an angular, shifting patch, crisscrossed by the washing line and telephone wires. Now I finally begin to breathe. I begin to do the three things I think of as my superpower — my easily-dismissable, dorky practice — and with them the whole world comes back to me.

The trouble is, as soon as you close your heart to one thing — to anything — you close your heart. It doesn’t work in increments. As soon as I begin to say no and pull away, there is a contraction, and that contraction closes me off. So I have to ask the question: do I want be open, or closed? Then I have to follow through. I have to acknowledge that to say ‘no’ to the cloud means also saying no to the tight fists of the peonies next to me too.

One bush has bloomed here for the very first time. Every year, for long years, it has thrown up its splayed, open leaves but never flowered, hiding under its more reliable, flouncier neighbours. A little way along, self-seeded in the gravel in the most inconvenient place it could have chosen, the best foxglove I have ever seen unfurls taller and taller, taller than me, taller than the washing line, tapping against the pegs in the wind, a towering triumph, its trumpets vibrating with bees. I think about how easily I could have given up on the peony that never flowered, dug it up, missed its dark pink, careful petals held open like a tea cup, how I might have pulled up the foxglove’s first shoots in the gravel and never seen it grow.

Doesn’t this sound like a nice, pretty little lesson to share? I tell you, remembering it made me swallow hard. It is not the easy lesson you think it is. Real love is all in. ‘All in’ is what it means to choose to really love my garden, ‘nature’, the world. It’s what it means to choose to love my body and myself. It’s what it means to choose to love life itself and that is not easy, not easy at all.

Inside my body, pain pulses and pulls like the wind. The terrible, wonderful thing that I’ve learned is that it is made from the same stuff as the foxglove, and the sprawling bleeding heart that grows beside it, and the aphid-covered honeysuckle. It is made from the same stuff as the delighted call of a child a few gardens down the row and the throaty laugh of someone walking past the end of the alley. I am all of this, and all of this is me, and I know to close my heart to some of it — to pick and choose — is to close my heart. There was just as much life in the room with me as I stared at the ceiling, I just rejected most of it. That is a hard, hard knowing. A deep challenge. 

You want life, Josie? Well here it is. Are you going to say no to the pain in your pelvis but grudgingly accept the one in your shoulder? No to the clouds and the ceiling, but yes to the weeds and the sun? Yes to hands, no to feet? Are you going to say no to the fatigue and the spasms but give a pass to the dizziness? Or are you going to do the bravest, stupidest, most amazing, most daring thing in the world and say yes yes yes to all of it, the whole damn lot. You want to know my goals in life? This is it. It is to open and open and open. 

I shall tell you my dorky, honest superpower: it is two words and an action. The words are simple, obvious, trite, and hold a whole world of change. The words I am learning to say to everything — everything — are ‘welcome’ and ‘thank you’ and the thing I am choosing to do more and more of is to smile. I smile like a bloody fool. I do it knowing how foolish it might make me seem, how cynical folk would sneer at my insistence. I do it knowing how everyone rolls their eyes in irritation at instructions to ‘smile more’ or ‘cheer up’, but, god, to release the frowning, serious, controlling, contracted prison of my face is to feel like a warrior, I tell you.

Screw fear: I say welcome. Screw complaint: I say thank you. I chant the words like a mantra, to the bees, to my pain. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you. I say it with all the strength I can find. I will not live closed up in a tight ball of my own self-importance as if I always knew better, as if there was no magic or possibility or warmth or connection in anything. Instead, I will smile and smile and smile. I will do it every time I realise I’m not doing it, to everything and everyone. I will do it to express grief as well as cheer. To smile at something makes it instantly feel a little more miraculous, precious, seen. To smile makes me honestly feel like I have broken free of every single thing that binds me. To smile is to open, and opening is what I want to do, every minute I can.

What am I opening and closing to? Life itself. My existence entirely. Inconvenient, uncomfortable, surprising, often disappointing, wise, perfect. Terrifying. Terrifying. And the greatest gift there is.

Here I am. The roses need dead-heading. The magpies are rattling from the rooftops. My legs are shaking. All in. All in.

What do I want most? To die saying ‘welcome, welcome, thank you’. To die smiling if I can. To be so well practised, it comes easy. Then I’ll know I’ve lived.

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