Excavation

When a time comes when you must survive, when that time leaves little room for anything else but survival, I think some part of us gathers up what feels spare or unessential and buries it hastily under the ground. We’re not even aware we’ve done it. Our animal bodies sense rubble, death, deprivation and our hands reach for the soil before we’ve had time to think about it, pushing things down where they might stay safe, hidden, ready for when the dust settles and we might be able to retrieve them again. I don’t think we do it consciously; it can take a long while before we’ve realised what's missing. We might stop still for a moment, feeling a sudden sense of hardening, darkness, loss, but we are too busy surviving to think on it and so we shake our heads and carry on. 

Yesterday, I sat in the garden, feeling unwell, resting against the day, and because I couldn’t do anything else, I began to write out the time as it was passing in slow black marks on a blank page. I wrote about the bee that shook the flower, and the grey of the sparrow’s breast, and about whether it was possible to talk to something like God when you were typing words on a computer or whether it could only happen like this, with a pen in your hand, when you were sat in the middle of everything, your computer left behind. I wrote slowly but steadily, my life passing. I wrote about the brown-striped cat that sat by the gate and that I talked to in a soft, sing-song voice until it crept closer, enchanted, and touched its nose against my hand. My son came home from school and I stopped writing to sit side-by-side with him in the hammock, squashed close, my head on his shoulder. I turned to watch the light catch the soft curl of new hairs on his chin and listened to his deep voice, and as soon as he stood, smiled, left, I reached for my notebook and wrote about all those things too, until I found myself writing, “why am I weeping?” and something broke, like old earth.

It’s funny because nothing has gotten especially easier. I have been very frightened, often. The last couple of years have brought new risk, heavy separation and loss. And pressure - oh, so much pressure - my income dwindling, projects stalling or failing altogether, and I have raced to survive it and to survive everyone else elbowing ahead of me. And I have, I have survived it all; I am surviving. Good for me. I have set goals and made lists and followed tasks and fought through them all as if I were bailing out water. 

What changed yesterday? I don’t know - nothing tangible. Perhaps it is because I have been thinking about death a lot, about being ill and getting older, and what all this is for - all the usual 'turning 40' stuff. Still some animal part of me felt safe enough or wise enough to go back to its burial ground and fetch something back, and it was only as I moved slowly about the rest of the day - oh so slowly - that I realised what it was, what it is that I buried in haste and have been missing and living without this last couple of years. It is in itself a kind of slowness. It is the ability and willingness to just be here in time. Why did I bury that? And what have I missed out on in its absence?

Now, as I wiped the dust from my bedroom cabinet, changing sheets and putting away plates, I could feel, cleanly and sharply: this is my life. I found myself giving it all a soft sort of commentary as I moved from moment to moment, as if I were still writing: I am chopping a tomato. I am feeling pain in my stomach. I am hanging up the blue t-shirt that my boy will wear tomorrow. These things are living. These moments are my life. And if time slows down with me, slowing as I slow, perhaps filling my life with slow things done and seen carefully might just be the one thing I can do to help my life stretch long and full. And isn’t that what I’ve been afraid of, deep down? Dying? Ending?

How horribly, beautifully truthful: this moving, this writing, working, cleaning, caring, suffering, feeling, this is my body living on this earth. To rush through these things thoughtlessly, panicked, bitter, hungry for more, is to rush through my actual existing, to rush through time as if it were nothing, as if I had an endless supply of it. Fearing death or change or going-without, we speed up, living in our heads as we try to conquer and strive, and in doing so we eat up our own life and our time more quickly than any disease or disaster ever could. I think that’s what was given back to me yesterday: just enough insight to see that in trying to move on and on, ahead of the wave, I am missing the very thing I'm trying to protect. That in focusing only on survival, I could bury so much that I might as well be under the ground already.

What a surprise it is: I have slowed down and I did not drown. My life is imperfect, hard, uncertain, but it is here, it is happening in my body and my body is alive, and to notice it again feels like baptism. Outside, the world races ahead and leaves me behind, but for the first time in a long time, I don't think I mind. I think I see now what everyone is inadvertently rushing toward as they go faster and faster and faster, and, no, oh no: I want to put off that ending for as long as possible, thank you very much.

---

You’re reading a bimblings freebie post — my heartfelt gift to the universe. If you subscribe, you’ll receive one or two posts like this a month. For more behind-the-scenes news about my personal life, book-writing, art practice, loves and losses, plus more on how I navigate life with a body that doesn’t work so well, please do consider upgrading for a small monthly fee. Alternatively, perhaps you’d like to buy me a coffee? It all helps me and my family enormously. Thank you so much for being here.