Life is a sack with holes... June reflections

‘Life is a sack – with holes - and you carry it, you carry it.’

― Marina Tsvetaeva

I did not make this world.

I have not consented to the violence that men in power visit on humans, animals and the environment. No-one with the power to unleash hell, hatred or nuclear destruction has ever asked my opinion on right action.

I have never owned a weapon more brutal than my tongue, that’s if you don’t count that pepper spray when I lived in South Africa. Zed kept a cricket bat next to the bed in case of intruders but even that was symbolic and let me tell you did nothing to scare away the odd Huntsman spider.

Two days ago, I was asked to leave a book launch held in a church, ‘if you are a Zionist.’ By which I understood the speaker to mean, ‘if you a genocidal baby killer.’ I did not take him aside for a conversation about Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish homeland because he was in his made-up mind and I will never give away another breath to argue with someone who uses language to mean just what they want it to mean, irrespective of what it actually does mean.

But it is bewildering to find myself inside an identity that incites a level of irrational hatred that is as ancient as the mountains. I understand I can just as easily change someone’s mind as I can stop the bombs from falling.

We are in a riptide of history. And if you know anything about rips, you cannot swim against them.

This is the time we are living through. ‘Making peace’ is a job we each must undertake, with our own traumas, histories, falsehoods and internalized violence.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

- WB Yeats

I understand now why the Dutch writer, Ettie Hillesum accepted the historical moment in which she was caught, even submitting to her fate, that she would die in the Nazi concentration camps. Her only freedom was to do so without hatred.

I am holding as much as I can as tenderly as I’m able until I have sufficient space to see the fullness of it all. We are surely sophisticated enough not to buy into simplistic, single-minded narratives but to apprehend that there are complexities before us.

Do I contradict myself, very well then, I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes, Walt Whitman said.

My dear friend Maggie who is a spiritual soul, reminds me not to get caught up in the sideshows. To focus on what is real and trustworthy.

So each day, I swim out into the wide blue where nothing is being sold to me – not a single view, ideology, product or identity. I find it a peaceful place to pray, far from shore and noise.

Yesterday I found a patch of warm current and swam across it back and forth, the lone swimmer in the winter bay. The water was clear and the sand beneath looked like rumpled cloth, creased from the motion of the ocean and I thought as I always do, how I’d love to paint what I see when I swim, even though I do not have any painting skills. But that’s the human mind for you. Delusional. Irredeemably hopeful.

I looked up, and ahead, maybe ten metres away, was a pod of dolphins, dipping in and out the water, their fins a constellation of dorsal paddles, and for a brief moment my reptilian brain froze – were these sharks? They were so close and getting closer and it was just me and them, and I called, hello, like we were old friends or maybe we might become; and I swam hard so as not to lose them in the swell but then I heard the growl of a boat approaching, because humans stalk and gawk and simply cannot leave wildlife alone, godforbid a thing in the wild should be left to its devices like a woman in her beauty walking down a street or the one sitting opposite me on the tram that took me into the city to the book launch from which I was asked to leave, so immaculate in her youth, sleek dark hair and delicate makeup blooming for all to behold. I wanted to cover her with a cloak of invisibility so that no opportunist would ever grab or claim it for themselves but simply sigh in awe. Sometimes I don’t know what to do with what I see, but some things leave me with anticipatory dread, especially innocence because the world is indifferent to it.

Back to the dolphins and suddenly I was aware of a man from behind who had swum from shore to try reach the pod and steal this private moment between me and them; and the boat was approaching from the left, but by then, they had moved far from us, the aquatic paparazzi. We bobbed in the water; he told me he had been cycling past and saw them from the road and stopped, stripped off and dived into the ocean.

Should we swim out further and try catch them? he asked. I hesitated but only for a moment.

‘A little further,’ I said, because I was flirting with life, filled with adrenaline and wonder, and so we swam out, knowing we would never catch them and I liked that he was a strong swimmer and we were both in love with this moment together, but the dolphins were far and farther, and had shrugged us off, and we were useless in this wide deep and part of me thought, ‘Good on you, go.’

Friends, I do not have a blueprint for how we live through this time, or how we hold onto what goodness offers itself to us in this broken mess but I know we must.

If you find yourself unravelled like me, I wish you a wide openness where something wild can approach, so you can expand into everything that life is right now, full of darkness and distress, but with cracks of light too that give us enough enchantment to want to keep going.

Innocence and beauty still exist.

Dogs still walk around with their names on their leashes.

There are Sabbath candles still to light.

There are sunflowers waiting to be gifted to a friend.

On Monday I leave for Bali to run a writing retreat for ten women who are making this sacred journey to find the words to tell their stories. Many are carrying grief and loss and together there will be hundreds of years of life and courage and survival in a small room. Together we will find ways to fix fractures and ease pain.

I do not want to be small, but vast, as Whitman claims, and to be among others who long for the same.

Meanwhile, I will carry the leaky sack of my life. I will carry it.

May you find the strength to carry yours, til these dark times settle and we see each other vastly.