Expansion
From this fixed place, I can stretch and stretch and stretch
You know my biggest truth: that I have always lived inside a great mystery. I have a body that stops itself. There are weeks of my life when I become like wet sand. I can’t hold onto a shape, I can’t sit up. I just have to puddle and accept my new form for a while.
It is one of those weeks.
Down I go. The me that was held-together, that could fix its sights on something and claim it, feels like a dream I had. My vision blurs until it’s like looking up through water; my limbs get so heavy I can’t lift a cup to my mouth. I lie still on the bottom of things, accepting my nature as sediment.
It passes. It is long and boring, but in the end, I am slowly returned to form. I’m getting there now. Soon, I will get to swim back up and resume my steady life, but it can take a while. I have learned to be patient.
Window open, I lie in my bed. I drag my thoughts back from the looping obsession of my self-concern and I make myself ask the question: what is here? I ask the question and I take an inventory. I write it down to tell you about it.
The cheeping of the sparrows is constant — that’s the first thing I want you to know. Singular, repetitive, beautifully boring and comforting in its reliability.
Cheep. Cheep. Cheep. Cheep.
The sound becomes a new pulse to align to; like there is another great body next to mine that steadfastly beats and continues, like me.
When blackbird sings, sporadically, it is different. Its sound is careful nourishment — a spoonful of something fed to me. Blackbird chooses his line of song and releases it. I have learnt to recognise his favourite refrain: a high C, then AGF? I find a piano app on my phone and try to play it, like it’s a magic spell I could learn, but I can’t quite get the pitch right.
There are roads all around the house. Unseen cars come and go and the crescendo and diminuendo of the sound is like breath in and out; like my breath in and out.
There are goldfinches in my neighbourhood, too. They love to sit on the chimneys of the terrace in great charms, calling with a kind of mechanical twitter, like a circus organ turned with a handle. They offer entertainment, and mischief. Their call is a little nudge, a little challenge, a little reminder that I am more than just a body but a bright, busy mind too, one that should never be made to be too good.
A fly enters through the window, circles, races, glorious in its energy then stops, dead still, races again, leaves, returns, like a thought, like a feeling. Irritating, persistent, beautiful, companionable. We play hide and seek. When it stills, I try to spy its black spot in the white box I lie in. Then the cat chases it down the hall, and it’s gone.
There are human voices outside somewhere, too. All I can hear is cadence, melody, rhythm, words too faint to be distinct. I know that if I was to start to sing the blackbird’s song right here, the window open, they might hear a faded echo of that too, and then we’d all be birds.
My skin is a skin, and the duvet is a skin, and the room around me is another skin, but outside of these things exists everything else and I can spread out into it.
If I can know that the blackbird is sitting on the highest tip of the conifer, how can I think I must be confined to this body? Because I do know that, even though I can’t see him — I’ve seen him there enough times to be sure. My knowing stretches that far to sit right there next to him, swaying in the tree. I can close my eyes and know the goldfinch, too: their painted clown faces, the little flash of gold on their wings. My knowing means I can be with the sparrows; feel their feet gripping the telephone wire.
I know the rain that’s falling now. I am there in the spreading patterns it makes on the puddles, in the sound it makes as it drips from the gutters. This morning Fraser told me that there was a repository of papery spider exoskeletons on the windowsill, caught in old webs. I am there with them, moving in the breeze. Now Fraser sits in our office down the street. I know exactly the way he will be sitting at his desk, bent over his notebook. I know the way his pen will scratch and the way he’ll clear his throat, and in my knowing I am there with him too.
If I’m not just here, I must be everywhere. Everywhere my knowing touches, there I am.
Will I forget all this when I’m solid again?
Sometimes I think my body does this on purpose — dissolve me for a while — just to try and make me integrate this lesson: that I am so much bigger and wilder than I think I am.
Introducing new paid subscriber content: below the paywall!
Thank you so much to all of you who were so helpful in helping me to decide what to offer my paid subscribers. I know I’ve vacillated over what to do here. Although it’s important to me to keep my writing free and accessible to all, your paid subscriptions make such a HUGE difference to me and I keep wanting to honour that in some way. From now on, to mark the slight change to the blog’s title and content, there will now be a small extra section below the paywall. What I offer will be a little different each time:
a creative activity
an illustrated poem or picture for you to save or print
an audio recording
a video
something else!
Today, I offer, a beautiful exercise for you to try, alongside an original painting to illustrate it. You are welcome to save or print off the image to act as a prompt.
I will also be opening a paid subscriber-only chat for you to share your thoughts and reflections on what you discover as you do this exercise! Keep an eye on your inboxes for access.
If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, I’ve set it to be very affordable — just £3.50 a month. If you don’t like to give via Substack, you could also set up a subscription via Ko-Fi, if you’d prefer. Just email me or send me a message and we’ll set it up.
