Not New

And that's ok

“Hello dear Starling”

I must have said this thousands of times. These are the words I sing every time I step outside the back door and they have been for years and years and years.

For as many generations as I can remember, starlings have nested under the eaves above my yard here. At least one is always sitting on the telephone wire that hangs over my patch, speckled back like static, bright beak open in greeting, warning, defiance, joy: the sound of home.

I talk about them often. You may have even seen this photograph of mine before because I have shared it many, many times — I love it so. The starlings are woven into me. Over and over, above my head, babies are hatched, fed, until their gangly bodies are so big that their wide froggy mouths poke hungrily out of the nesting hole, and then they fledge and join their kin, eventually becoming whichever starling is sitting on the telephone wire today, hearing my singsong greeting, having babies of its own. It is a story that repeats and repeats and only deepens. It only adds new layers to me, only gives.

Sometimes there is drama — magpie with its sharp beak, hanging from the nesting place, jabs inside. The air becomes a scream, brave parents fetching noisy, shrieking friends to fend him off as I watch, sick and conflicted below because I love magpie too and I want everyone to have a full belly. Most of the time though, the circle turns peacefully, so peacefully it goes unobserved and unremarked upon by almost everyone. And you realise that is how it should be, this cheerful, peaceful monotony with its occasional heartbreak. You realise that most of nature is like this. It makes you happy and confused in turn because it feels so contrary to everything the human world pushes at us.

One of the things I struggle with most about being unwell is that it’s hard to offer up anything new. I feel like everyone is waiting for it. I anxiously battle the immense pressure to have new thoughts, new stories to share, new images to express or describe, new projects or achievements to present and crow about, but long illness isn’t about the new, it’s about the things that ensure and persist, and so I fail, often, to provide much that’s new, and I worry it will be my ruin and my big disappointment to the world.

I am in a time of things persisting just now. Not drama, but monotony. Fatigue persists, relentlessly. Rest persists, or must do. My body’s inability to control the basics, my blood pressure, my heart rate, my circulation, my temperature, all that persists too, as I wait for meds to try. My patterns persist. The story of each day is mostly the same. I lie down. I do small things, little forays of motion and activity. I lie down again. I watch the starlings return to their nest again, again with their tiny mouthfuls, as consistent and repetitive as the tides.

I can do very little right now so I cannot tell you tales of doing.

I am in the same place with the same views I’ve had my whole adult life so I can’t describe to you anything new that you will not have seen or heard about before.

I see the same people. I say mostly the same words.

And it’s ridiculous how much this feels like failure. How the starlings would laugh at me!

We live in a culture — and our creative culture is as much to blame for this as any other — that pushes for constant novelty. It doesn’t want old. It doesn’t want repetition, or to wait, or have to make do with what it already has. It doesn’t want to sink deeper, it wants to move on. Stay still? Boring, boring. Give me the new! Our great master dopamine demands new, and it wants it soon, sooner than that. Oh, it is hard to meet that need when much of your life stays the same.

To create anything new requires a tremendous force of will and energy and often, I realise, this is energy I just don’t have. I have written even these sentences one at a time. I must scrape each one off me, leaving a little less behind. New doesn’t let you rest.

Some days it makes me weep with frustrated despair because how can I continue to hold my place here if I can’t offer something new? Starling wants to be overlooked, for its life to be so boring that it goes completely unremarked upon, but do I?

Some days it makes me defiant.

No, I want to say. No, no more new. Instead I will make you see what persists. I don’t care if you find it boring. Look, LOOK WHAT’S ALREADY HERE, I want to shriek, like a starling above your heads. Look at what I’ve shown you before. Listen to what I’ve told you. Because did you really see? Did you really listen?

There are no new stories here, but the old stories are good ones.

Here: I will tell you about the way the conifer outside my bedroom window dances in the wind like a child, how it always has. I will probably use that exact phrase again and again in my writing and my life — “the conifer outside my window dances like a child” — because it’s what I can see from here and that’s just what it does. Can you see it?

I will tell you I know every time that Linda at number six leaves her house or enters it because her door pushes against a set of windchimes. I have heard this sound for 25 years and never tired of it. They sound like glass and ice and air. Can you hear them?

I will tell you, maybe, hesitantly, that when I can’t move, I learn again how to go IN, deeper and deeper, and there I find places there not new but as old as time that feel just as real as the world outside. I have been doing this ever since I was a child. But that might just make you think I was mad.

I look at my body and wonder what I can do for it, not to change it, just to care for it.

I look at this old house too.

Last year, I rejected this house because I’d got it into my head that our fortunes would change soon and we’d move somewhere bigger, and yes, yes, I wanted that, hungered for it, even if it took me away from the starlings and the conifer and the sounds of number 6. This year, as I have deteriorated and had to accept more stillness and more restriction again, I have turned back to these familiar rooms with regret and apology in my voice, (I’m sorry, I’m sorry) and thought again about how I can make HERE feel good, determined not to succumb again to dreams that take me away from what’s right in front of me, begging for care.

Can you feel it? There is something powerful about staying with what is old and familiar. And not to demand something new from it either, not to try and squeeze it for some new lesson or gift, but just to love it. I have learned these last few years that true love is mostly just the willingness to be with something or someone without secretly demanding or wishing them to be different. I have learnt, too, how rare that kind of love is.

I learn to love life better, and all the things that make life up, when I humbly acquiesce to it not changing, me included, and when I resist the urge to join in the jostle for new new new. Rather than keep scraping away at myself to make something new, what might happen if, instead, I let the layers of time, familiarity, repetition and persistence strengthen me, covering me with their sediment, burying me deep?

Ah, but there are harder questions too. Did I write all this in a squawk of defiance, or is this all just that old fear disguised? Am I pushing this out into the world, straining myself so I won’t be forgotten? Even I’m not sure.

How to rest, but still triumph?

How to rebel, but conserve?

How to love, and love, and love beyond all?

Thank you for being here, still. It means more to me than I can say.

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