Last year, I was invited to speak at a podcast summit run by some very dear friends of mine, Warwick and Robyn Schiller. In crafting our presentations, they asked us to consider the following beautiful question…
What is the message you want to share with the world?
At the time, I remember squirming in my chair when I heard this and thinking, aye kaboosh! I’m still getting schooled by this thing called life, I’m not sure I’m ready for my message to the world quite yet. I’m not grown up enough!
I only settled on the topic and content of that talk the week before. I went with what was probably most predictable given my line of work, but also something I’m deeply passionate about; our relationship to movement and its connection to vitality, robustness and how it is we show up in the world.
What I didn’t know at the time is that I would be given the opportunity for a round two. That a second summit would be held in Melbourne, and I would have a chance to again share a message on the stage.
What I’m sharing with you now is the talk I wrote, and one that I believed move me closer to truly expressing my answer to that question.
Writing it was also a big part of deciding to do The Another Beautiful Question project, so it seems only right that it’s the first question to kick us off. Here it is for you now…
*******
Paper Cuts
The way she broke a heart
was in the form of a paper cut.
A simple post-it note,
the sticky side sitting with
obvious reluctance to the
shiny surface of the table
unpeeling itself over
and over
and over
in a threat to make hidden
the words
she could
barely get out.
She felt a strange
dullness as she wrote
and wondered where
exactly she was
in that moment,
the scratchy sound of the pen
hitting the table
under the thin piece of paper
a clue to her still current
aliveness.
She wanted to say,
here it is,
this inch of paper a
letter to the world
of a life that has
strayed
far
from the
original,
imagined
intention.
She wanted to say,
here it is
this inch of paper
a letter to the world
of a life
so far
unexpressed
unwild
un-gotten.
She looked down at
the inch square of paper
the last place she
expected
to launch a bid
for freedom
the last place
she expected
to cast a vote
for herself
the last place
she expected to
find
relief
Her thumb pressing,
the skin around the nail
turning white,
sealing,
the note to the table
so the draught
would not
dislodge it
from the closing of the door
behind her
as she walked out
the short square
of words
covering over
what had been
a life.
I wrote this poem that I called Paper Cuts after listening to a conversation with David Whyte, an English poet, on heartbreak. He described a scene where someone had left their partner by leaving a note on the table and walking out the door. When he recounted the story to his wife a bit later, she said to him, sometimes the note on the table is the only means we have to save our own life in that moment.
I was so moved by that story, and ultimately by that response, that I imagined that person, in my mind a woman, and what she might have been thinking as she left the note and said goodbye- or more to the point, didn’t. And beyond that I’ve held onto the notion of saving our own lives, and the everyday ways we go about it.
When I thought about speaking with you today, I knew that I could speak about the nervous system. About the many beautiful ways that our bodies act in service of our survival, to help keep us around on this planet for just a little bit longer. I could talk to you about the effect of your nervous system on your posture, and how if we understand more about movement, we can recognize it as a self-healing portal to move forward from trauma.
But I’m not going to. At the base of it, all our reactions and responses are no more than a combination of everyday ways we seek to save our own lives. As we get older- as we become hopefully wiser and more skilled, we can meet the transitions of our lives more gracefully and artfully. Where we have more choices than the notes on the table but can be present for hard conversations, hard truths, and recognize them within the fullness of our vitality.
I’ve often wondered what drew me to the places that I have always lived in. At my core, I am a worshipper of the sun, my battery solar powered, my bones craving the warmth that only a steady form of heat can provide.
Up until recently, I wondered why me, a creature of the sun, was born into a place with such an untamable weather system as the Blue Mountains. And further perplexing still, why the home that I return to lies close to the Antarctic, prone to southerly blasts that pass through you as if you were nothing more than a sheer curtain.
What’s more, I have always gravitated towards large bodies of water- lakes of unfathomable depths, wild oceans, tidal estuaries, and yet if asked to describe myself, I am a creature of the forests and the mountains. In the water, I recognize myself as alien. I am comfortable only holding respect and admiration from the sidelines.
When asked why I live where I do, or more precisely, why I stay, my answer always threads back to the particular parcel of land on which I live. This question comes up not infrequently with those who I most love and confide in, an extension of the fact that the community in which I live I’ve never fitted into. Here, I am an anomaly and I crave the connection that I feel with those dear to me scattered in other parts of the globe.
Why then, I have asked myself, as a sun loving, community craving creature do I feel so attached, when the place in which I dwell provides neither of those things? The answer has only come to me recently.
I stay because my home, the piece of land that has held me the most amount of time on this earth is a thin place for me. Thin places are places on the globe where the veil between heaven and earth are especially porous, where you feel so close to the other side that the separation in paper thin.
More often than not, we experience these thin places in areas of meteorological fierceness; where the weather and the elements remind you constantly of your smallness, where you cannot rely on the sky nor the temperature staying the same colour from the morning to the night.
They are also often found near bodies of water, where the land rises up or where the landscape holds itself in a presence that cannot be overlooked or denied. I realise I have sought out these thin places because they speak to my soul. But not necessarily to my comfort.
Where I am called to be a part of nature and revere it, lest I get taken down by it. My body may be drawn to the warm, but my soul is drawn to the places that are thin, and where the air around me calls me to remember something that is bigger than myself.
In life, I have come to realise we are always operating in one of two streams, and perhaps they are ultimately the same. Our actions, be they conscious or unconscious, are the everyday ways we seek save our own lives. Or, they are about following the glimmerings.
Glimmerings are reminders of who we are, what we came with and what we are looking for. They might be the light catching the water in a way that makes you stop a moment, that calls your attention back from what you are doing.
They could be the geese taking off in formation, or the number 49 that was the favourite number of the person you loved who passed away, and now you see it everywhere.
Glimmerings are found in the things that move you, that the things you love, in the things that call you. And it is my belief that no matter how strong or weak they seem, our glimmerings are clues that, if we follow them, show us the essence of our aliveness, often by taking us to places where we realise how easily life can be taken away.
When I’m asked what do I think the purpose of life is, I always reply it’s to follow the things that you love. But equally I get asked, how do I make time for that? And the answer is, you have to steal it. For me, I am a wife and a mother, I run my own business and I am the breadwinner of my family. But these are only facets of who I am. They do not define me. And I know that the way that I love, my capacity to love, is only made true by following the things that I love.
I have come to understand that this belief, especially for a women, is a subversive one.
I’m going to share a quote by A S Byatt, an English critic, novelist, poet, and short story writer. She says:
I think of my writing simply in terms of pleasure. It’s the most important thing in my life. Making things. Much as I love my husband and my children, I love them only because I am the person who makes things. I am, who I am, is the person who has the project of making a thing. And because that person does that, all the time, that person is able to love all these other people.
For me, I have always been a fierce defender of my riding time, sometimes to my detriment. I remember standing in my arena with a young horse, my first son only two months old, and weeping. I was exhausted and needed to be in bed. But I had a strong flame within me that said, don’t let go, don’t let go, don’t let go, of the thing that were and are important to me as I took on the additional role as mother.
Looking back now, I want to reach out and hold that woman in the arena. She was desperate, exhausted, frustrated, and so, so hard on herself. But she did know- her actions in that moment might not have been what she needed but she was holding on to a higher truth. You have to tend to yourself. What you love and moving towards it is not a luxury. It is not a selfish endeavor.
It is a radical act. And act of resistance to a system that has you bleed the land, and you, dry in service of profit. But beyond that, it’s an act of service. Service to yourself so that you may be in service of others. For those of us in the position of privilege that we are- to be having these conversations, to have the headspace to ask ourselves the question, what is it that I love?
We have a responsibility to follow it.
Up until this year, I denied myself the space and time to write beyond that which I believed related to my work. I convinced myself that writing, and specifically poetry, was a decision that I was allowed to deny, reject, and pack away. But glimmerings don’t work like that. Glimmerings hunt you down. They sit in the back of your mind and tap their pencil on the desk. The show up as yearnings, as hunches and soon they rattle the windows and bang at the gate until you have no choice but to pay them attention.
Poetry, to me, is not just writing. It’s an incantation, a spell, a portal to another world. when I read good poetry, I am not just moved, I am teleported. A part of me wakes up. On the page, I find another thin place, a place that allows me to make sense of myself and that cares not for whom or what they are written. They only thing that matters is that they are.
It is for this reason, that the rest of my talk will mainly be in poems. I don’t know if they are good or terrible, but I do know it doesn’t matter. I’m doing this to show you, that please, if you too are the writer of terrible poems, or the rider who is yet to return to the saddle, or the gardener whose hands have stayed clean for too many years, now is the time to get dirty.
A poem for you now…
The Glimmerings
The glimmering, this one young, keen, a force, an energy that does not have a body and requires that of a human form to make its presence known, looks over and says, tell me again what it means to be human?
Imagine, they are told, a pair of hands capable of holding a found stone, its tender heaviness a reminder of the infinite space from which you came and the gentle threads of gravity that hold you to the earth.
Imagine living so fully that the map of your travels tells its stories through the lines on your face. The cartography of the land you’ve travelled showing up in tears that have pooled as lakes at your feet over the course of your years, tracks you’ve have walked, secrets you’ve whispered, laughter you’ve shared to the point where the breath escaped your body leaving nothing but a gasp, a silent love letter lingering in the air, before the next peal of happiness can escape .
Imagine, if you will, bellybutton fluff, of brushing your eyelashes on the cheek of another and naming it after kisses of a butterfly.
Imagine, walking, bending down, picking up a leaf that caressed the ground as it fell, holding it between your forefinger and thumb, and rubbing it gently until it releases the magic of its perfume like you’ve rubbed the genie right out of the bottle.
Imagine noticing freckles for the first time, delighting in the difference of someone with skin colour a different shade to your own, falling over together both at once to graze your knees on a rock and realising the blood you shed was the same.
Imagine when you stub your toe being legally obliged to blame the closest person next to you as the reason for your pain, even if they are in the next room over. Imagine having a bone called your funny bone, with the experience of knocking it being about the most unfunny thing you can think of. Imagine how confusing that must be.
Imagine your insides split open to make space for something that defies the logical shape and dimensions to follow the allotted exit route, who takes your organs and sets fire to them, pulls and tears at your muscles until they’re left like overstretched elastic, the noises made unrecognisable as your own, only for a baby to be born and have all signs of pain instantly forgiven.
Imagine a heartache so strong you wonder where you fit, if you are made for this world, if this place where you rest your head wants you, so consumed with doubt and sorrow and grief that you didn’t hear the grass, the trees, the muddy, sodden earth that shouted back, when you screamed to the hills, asking if anyone loved you, we said yes, we said yes, we said yes.
Imagine, in the presence of fear, lungs that wrap around the heart in a protective hug, a rib cage that braces and demands to the world, come no closer, the toll bridge closing its gates at the pelvis to trap blood in the legs, sending messages of love all the way to the toes, you must run, words of power to the hands, you must fight, a full body survival memo scribbled on every cell and passed around by the messenger of your blood, please, you must live.
The glimmering paused, thoughtful and said, tell me again what I must do.
And they were told,
You are the very specific yellow of midwinter light that make the eyes feel like their being whispered intimate secrets of the world.
You’re the taking off of shoes, skin on bare wet ground, the tingle of realisation sprinting its way to the heart, shouting finally, we understand, there is no need for pilgrimage, the ground on which we rest is already holy.
You are fingers reaching out, unpicking the bumble bee from the web, carrying them gently outside to rest in a shaft of sun, smiling with the need of the gentle creature that you were able to fulfil, but realising all at once it will never be as much as you needed them in return.
You are just the right amount of darkness to find your shadow in the moon, the feeling of someone lost standing next to you and giving you a hug, the sheer curtain between the world in which you stand and the next one over, thin as a moth wing, the keening breeze and the taste of salt from the spray of the surf a magic carpet ride that carries you right through.
You are the finding of people, of things, of places who make their dance on your insides, the holding of your heart in a way that reminds you it is worth being held, the mementoes, the clues, the reminders from people before, leaving tokens on the land to say, stop here, pay attention, this is a place that will hold you if you let it.
You are the sights, the feelings, the sounds, that crack your heart open like a sun baked seed, the liminal spaces where there is no need to put your ear to the ground, you’re desire the only requirement needed to hear the land talking right back.
These, they are told, are the glimmerings.
The glimmering paused once more and said, tell me again about the funny bone.
***
Most likely, in order to follow the things that we love, truly and whole heartedly, we will have to undergo a reckoning. One night, over the last few months, when I was going through a particularly hard time, I was nervous to go to sleep. I had been having nightmares and waking up in the early hours. And so wrote this poem:
Overnight, a simple miracle.
It wasn’t my intention
to talk to the night
and wonder how it was
we could be friends.
The night, she told me,
in the last few moments
while you slept
the Morepork eggs
have hatched
and the mother’s body
with the brilliance of a living thing
now waits
until the tiny naked beings
are all feathered
before she’ll leave the nest.
And I understand that
when the time comes,
the night
she’ll turn towards
the light,
and whisper to the dawn,
it was in the early hours
a simple miracle took place,
before stepping back,
and gently
handing her gifts
to the sun
for safekeeping.
That poem, the birth of the morepork babies, a native owl to New Zealand shows that there is beauty in the dark, it’s just a matter of facing the right direction to notice it, and of allowing our eyes to get used to seeing in the shadows.
I’ll share a final poem with you now, a prayer that I consider my daily practice.
To Begin With, The Birds.
To begin with, the birds.
I step outside
and straight into a love affair,
the birds
arriving to the morning
with hearts
and throats
unzipped,
sweet talking the day,
owing nothing
but the song of
I am here.
To begin with, the birds.
I walk up the path,
their lifting songs
flung outward on the breeze
by the fanning,
multicoloured skirts
of the inlet, the mountains
and the trees,
clapping with delight,
an invitation
to slip between the names
inherited
And those I’ve given myself.
To begin, with the birds.
My eyes are closed,
their song a lengthening
of my spine,
a levitation of my feet,
a smile that appears without thought
or effort,
a quietening of all the things
that tell you
you are something
other than this,
a reminder that
your song is welcome here,
the only point being
for you to sing it.
This is my practice.
This is my practice.
This is my practice.
To begin with, the birds.
