This post is in two parts. I start it with a request: please do read this all the way to the bottom and consider the invitation I will extend to you there. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
P.S. My posts are always better listened to!
1.
There is an aching in my throat today. The kind that comes up from your chest and catches on the back of your tongue. It is often a sign that I am trying to hold some emotion in check, without it over-spilling.
Beside my kitchen door grows a passionflower. It is a wild, unstoppable thing, in entirely the wrong place, the wrong garden. If I leave it to do as it wants to do, it grows full and hungry, reaching tendrils towards everything it can get its grip on, pushing itself, heaving itself, up and up and out and out until flowers and fruit burst forth from every inch of it. Its flowers open white, purple, yellow and blue. Each one is like an organic astrolabe, like some bizarre, bright and alien way to read the skies and the stars. Its fruits are orange and round and to cut them is to spill dark red guts in a surprising, shocking tumble of flesh. There is no denying it: this thing is alive. It is sensing, seeing, feeling, moving.
To let it have its way means battling my way out the back door every time I try to leave it, the kitchen growing darker and darker as it spreads itself against the glass. It probes its long, curious fingers through the open window only to have them amputated with a wince on my part when I try to close it. To allow it its freedom is to have to duck and weave and contort myself along the path in a spiral dance that echoes the passionflower’s perfect, crisp, tight ringlets that hang irresistibly next to my head, inviting fingers to tug, to watch the spring and release of them. It is to be soaked through as I brush past more hurriedly, to watch my clothes splattered and darken on one of my many back and forths to the washing machine that lives in the shed. The passionflower carries and holds the rain in a million tiny shining pearls long past the end of any passing storm, as if not willing to let it go, until it releases them in a sudden shower with a bright and silver tumble. To write of it this way makes my confession seem monstrous: I have been trimming it, endlessly, trying to make it grow into a neat, blunt shape, trying to make it behave.
It started its life in a pot. A pot is supposed to keep things small, you see. When it began to grow too large, too wide, I thought perhaps I should move it, only to find it had forced its thick, wide root right down through the bottom of that cheap, plastic pot, right down through the paving stones and deep into the ground beneath them. I laughed at that, of course I did. It would not be moved. It grew and it grew. One year, in desperation, when it had grown particularly unruly, we gave it a Hard Prune and it died where it stood, brown and seemingly defeated, and we talked about it all winter, mournful and repentant, but when spring came again, we noticed strong new shoots had pushed their way up between the paving stones, right next to the empty, useless, insulting pot, and soon it was bigger than ever. I laughed until my eyes were wet then. Life, life, stubborn, ferocious life. It would not be destroyed.
Why do I tell this story? Because there is an aching in my throat today. The kind that comes up from your chest and catches on the back of your tongue, and there is something green about it, something reaching and probing and alive. I tell this story because sometimes I wonder what it would mean if I stopped snipping, trimming, taming, pushing it all back down, what bright flowers and fruit might spill out of my mouth, celestial and full, how I might get bigger and bigger and bigger, and how inconvenient that might make me, how gorgeous and terrifying and unstoppable.
How funny that we all give ourselves the label ‘human’ and think that is the whole truth of it, the beginning and the end of us.
Outside, the passion flower is already regrowing out of the shape I most recently cut it into, new tendrils reaching skywards, like arms raised, like trumpets, glorious and wise.
“See, learn: you are not in control of things, not now, not ever, and maybe you shouldn’t be.”
It is the right thing to hear today; the right thing to write. It is a vulnerable day.
2.
After much thought and regular prompting by my big-hearted readers, I have decided to turn on the option of paid subscriptions to bimblings.
I have avoided paid subscriptions up until now. I have felt very afraid of the idea. I carry old, warped trauma around money, around asking for it, around gatekeeping and gatekeepers, around my worth being measured, my worth being measured as less. I have long had very little money. The less money I’ve had and the longer that’s gone on, the harder I’ve found it to ask or fight for any more. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but perhaps to those of you who have been there, it does make sense. The cages that other people put you in don’t go away when you realise the door is standing wide open. It can be hard to leave. I have a habit of trying to make myself smaller so that I will be safer. I am trying to change that.
I find myself in a strange place right now. I lost most of my income last year and have been slowly, painfully trying to work out a way forward with this body of mine. We have a plan — a good one — but for life to change for the better, I have the daunting prospect of some huge expenses ahead. Some regular extra money will be a life-raft when me and my family most need it.
I have held off until now too because I also wanted to make sure I could find a way to sustain a blog writing schedule first. I wanted to be well enough. I wanted not to let anyone down. Managing my energy levels and my working week, and I’m now dedicating a day a week to writing bimblings, to writing to you. I am enormously happy about that.
I always want to make sure that my writing is as visible and accessible to as many people as possible so I will not be restricting my usual posts behind a paywall – a subscription, in that case, will be entirely optional. I can’t bear leaving people out. I’ve been shut out of too many things in my life to be able to do it.
For those of you kind enough to subscribe, however, there will be something new. Once or twice a month, you will receive access to a private post. Here I will share some more informal, personal news, stories and updates: my life where it is now, behind the scenes of things. I want to write about mine and F’s life together and how it’s changing, about my health journey, about the things that are sustaining me. I have book projects I’d like to tell you about, secrets to whisper and work-in-progress to share. I hope that this will be a wonderful place to do that.
I have set the subscription option to the lowest Substack will allow, so hopefully it will feel like a nice, easy way to be generous and join in, rather than a sting or a bite.
A subscription says to me: I see you and I’m glad you’re here. I want you to keep writing. I want your work and your body in the world. It allows me to be big. It gives me permission to stop pruning myself so small.
If you’re able to offer that, it would mean everything to me.
And if you are already kind enough to give regularly via Ko-Fi, please just drop me an email and I’ll add you to the paid list for free. You really have kept me afloat over there. I can’t tell you what a difference you make.
Thank you SO MUCH. So much. Now and always.
Josie
"I see you and I’m glad you’re here. I want you to keep writing. I want your work and your body in the world."
Yes indeed I do 💞
Thank you for being brave enough to ask for what you need.
Your words always resonate so deeply with me,
tears usually come.
I hear you.
xxx