Weathering

Inner and Outer Weather

Hello, how are you weathering?

Three and a half months on and I’m back! I have written this post so many times. There are almost as many versions as there has been weather. I’ve been noticing my own bewildered overwhelm at all sorts of inner and outer, literal and metaphorical weather.

Firstly, I’ve added a last minute audio. Today I got utterly soaked and decided to stay in the soak to record a short watery practice to fit with the weathering theme. The sound quality turns a few times as the rain soaked my phone. I hope if you do listen, it adds a pause to your day and you can forgive the roughness of it. I’m posting a little later on this website. Possibly easier to access the audio on substack here: https://karen844.substack.com/p/weathering?r=2juety

Out in the presence of our turning world, my experience has widely oscillated. I’ve gone from joy and amazement at a dazzling sherbet sunset, to utter delight at the amazing dance of the Northern Lights, and then in the same week, blundered about in soft murk, driech and fog, skidded on sheet ice and cancelled seeing a friend because I was too terrified to travel in the snow. There has been glitteringly clear light, sometimes matched by a mental clarity I rarely possess, and then to murk and back again many times. Snow on the ground, sparkling cold, dramatic blue skies above, followed by intense water melt and pelting rain causing the ground to be lashed and furrowed. Torrents of water cascading down the hillsides, river banks bursting, water threatening to engulf all, and a big grey frown of a sky which let little light through.

So, I took time out to be with a dear close friend who was unexpectedly at end of life. I was gladly there until that end and beyond. It did take a lot, and whilst the grief has receded a little, there is a huge absence where a bright shining presence should be. Mary Oliver’s poem ‘In Blackwater Woods’ featured large in my last post. I read out that poem and others, in the hospice where I was with my friend. Another poem I read was Rebecca Elson’s ‘Antidotes to fear of death’.

Elson was a poet and an astronomer who died aged 39 from non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a terminal diagnosis which she was given a decade previously. We live and then we don’t. My friend had weeks to prepare, not a decade. Yet both these fabulous human beings made something beautiful and graceful of their horrifying knowledge and pain. Both left some glorious and extraordinary works. Elson wrote one book of poetry, A Responsibility to Awe (2001) and over 50 scientific papers. My friend left a legacy of a lifetime of making art, committed to practice. She articulated her version of the world in stunning baskets, textiles and latterly prize winning prints. On earth, she was briefly gorgeous. Below is Elson’s poem ‘Antidotes to fear of death’, from A Responsibility to Awe.

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings

My friend certainly did fly off on bright wings. Elson’s poem captures for me, expansiveness and connection, and finds a space of kindness and compassion. Since my friend died, I have enjoyed some apt experiences that might be merely paying attention to the world of other beings. Yet, I am going to allow the possibility of a connection still to what is physically gone. A richness of swallows, sonic as they swooped and speeded past, a bright vibrant green speckled cricket facing me at eye level on the windscreen and waiting waiting waiting, until flying off directly outside a precise and special location. Experiences heightened by the rawness of my own feeling.

Weather fascinates me, as it does many of us. I watch clouds, I love being outside in energetic weather, and also love it when I get chance to sit in warm sunshine, or sit inside and hear the lash of rain on glass, when I can rest in the ease of being cosy and warm. I also love the weather apps on my phone. I wibble around for way too long, appreciating the lovely graphics of Norwegian weather app YR, then head to the Met Office, and sometimes onto Weather&Radar. I imagine what will happen tomorrow in the skies and on the ground. I adjust my imaginary world to fit what I see on the screen, and get fazed when the outside weather doesn’t seem to match the forecast or what’s in my head. There is metaphorical weather, inner and outer, the stuff of imagination. There’s the matching of weather to our perceived emotions, to what’s going on in the world. Then there is the real stuff, the actual weather, the whole awesome range of it, from stillness and softness, to energising uplift, through to wildly dangerous, life threatening, deathly, to blazing heat to freezing cold, whirling tempest; hail to pattering rain.

We are past the seasonal turn from autumn into our northern winter. The oranging, rusting, shifting. This year, the mellow time before fire and frost felt rudely chased out by snow. It keeps on. Already there is a colder clarity of sound and light, distant activities travel further across the valley. I’m more aware of the flight paths of planes. We have entered, since end October, what we might call ‘thin’ time, the number of daylight hours overtaken by more darkness hours, we are heading to the winter solstice. This has always been a time to commune with what may have already passed, moved on. It is a magical time, rich with calls to connect inward more than perhaps outward. Time to grab a cuppa, blanket, put on some soft lighting, reflect and rest.

I’m noticing how we exist in experience before we exist in narrative, or in maps. We exist in all this weather. We can’t help noticing the weather when it’s wild and soaking us through, or messing with our travel plans, or making us feel warm and lovely and drowsy. Lulling us to sleep or shaking us awake. Do we notice how our own internal weather changes? Mine gets impacted by outside things (yes, sometimes the actual weather, and sometimes the actions or non-actions of someone else, or something that has happened). I also impact myself with my internal narratives. Sometimes I manage to pay attention to what I’m feeling, I notice what the body is doing, and notice how the mind has been so very busy creating stories, dreams, words and worlds. I sometimes manage to remember that thoughts are not necessarily facts! Whilst I cannot change the first hit of hail when I’ve forgotten my coat, or the landing of words I did or didn’t want to speak or hear, actions I did or didn’t want to feel or witness. I can change what happens after that. How I respond. Noticing what narrative or map I do put on my experience.

Noticing when I’m clinging to the feeling of the sunshine on my face or the delight of the northern lights, and when I’m trying to evade a big wave of grief, or deal with the pain that comes with hearing of an action that feels wrong and hurtful on so many levels.

I’ve been considering a lot, this central part of mindfulness, how to respond rather than react, and how to practice acceptance of feelings. How we recognise our experience, especially unpleasant or uncomfortable feelings is part of paying attention. It’s completely understandable that we might want to avoid feeling raw or rubbish or unpleasant, yet we need to accept those feelings, and how do we do that? How do we take enough time, with kindness and compassion to give that discomfort some space to be? To surround discomfort with kindness and compassion, and create a space to live from more fully. You may already have some tools to do this. Here are a few more thoughts. The more tools the better!

• We are not failing when we are in pain or discomfort. Pain is an ordinary part of life.
• Unpleasant feelings are like any other sensation. They are simply feelings or sensations like any others.
• Notice the body breathing, breath as best you can with the discomfort. The body breathes you.
• Allowing yourself to say to yourself ‘It is okay to feel this.’
• Noticing these feelings as a part of us that needs our support, listening with kindness and compassion, just like we would listen to someone we love who is telling us they are hurting.

I will run an online open practice as a support to the festive season. To hopefully give a little pause or a chance to rest, to notice, to surround and notice any discomfort and see if we can create a little space from which to live with more kindness and compassion to ourselves and to others.

This will be on Thursday 19 December. I will run it twice. A morning half hour practice at 10am, and a half hour practice at 6.30pm. Let me know if you’d like to attend one or both.

If you’ve got this far, thank you for reading so much. Thank you also for listening if you did.

I’m wishing you well.

Karen