It was going to be a beautiful week, the way I had it planned. This was the year, my sixth one alone, that I’d finally worked out how to do the turning of the year. This was the year when what really mattered was the lead into the Winter Solstice and the Solstice itself, and then I would
simply move into rest. This was the year when I started my Winter celebration at Samhain, building through my birthday, towards the longest night. That last week was going to be a beautiful week, the way I had it planned.
It turned out to be differently beautiful. It turned out to be laced with sadness. It turned out to be a turbulent lesson in patience and flexibility. Ah, but it had its perfect moments all the same.
I didn’t get to stay in the Garden Room and catch up with Sam. I didn’t get to go to Edgefield for the woodland and pond walk, and all the poetry that would have gone with it. I didn’t get to walk on the beach. I didn’t get to spend an evening quietly writing.
Life, or more specifically death and trains and weather and tides, got in the way. I am grateful to the people who got the sharp edge of my frustration and tiredness, for the gracious way they accepted my apologies.
Rather than walking in the woods I was negotiating delayed trains and cancellations and uncertainty. But then there was Claire with a smile on her face and her warm welcome to her home. There was the way we each held to our own modalities of seeking grounding. For her there was yoga. For me there was the Resurgence Earth Gathering and resting meditations. I’d forgotten to ask her for matches and didn’t want to rootle through her cupboards and drawers in her absence, so I had no candle…but the room was lit by fairy lights which were soft enough.
Then there was warm soup, and wine, and cheese, and more wine, and stories. Wine and stories that led late into the night of sharing memories and emotions. Remembering the man we’d lost. Remembering others we’d lost. There were giggles and laughter as well as tears. There were hugs. There was hand-holding. There was trying to hold it together, and knowing to let it go.
Then there was a walk around the lake. Quicker this time, than when I’d walked it with Craig. We went twice round…talking…about everything and nothing…really just filling the limbo time. There was a flock of soft white doves on the shore, and a single black shag holding its wings out into the drizzling wind out on the island.
Then there was a funeral. A humanist celebrant, who looked like he’d shrugged off his Jesus sandals and cassock two thousand years ago to shrug himself into a suit just now, gently walked us through the life of my cousin. We’d reconstructed our memories and the gaps in our knowledge into the semblance of a life story. It was lacking in detail, but it was full of love and Jonathan (who Claire insists on calling Julian) made us weep and smile in the telling of it.
That night there was a little more wine – but not so much. There were a few more tears – but not so many. There is a point when the soul recognises the mind and the body have had as much emotion as they can handle for one day.
My journey south and east was a simple re-run of the one north and west. Trains delayed and then failing to complete their route. Hanging around on wind-swept stations watching departure boards for changes of times and platforms and trying to remind myself it didn’t matter. Remembering that this was the same train company that had delayed me the day I travelled north to my mother’s funeral, and that it has learned nothing in the intervening decade about being honest: showing departures as being ‘on time’ when they already know they will be late or will not happen at all.
Grief and tiredness are a vicious combination. Add in the simple frustration that things are not going to plan, even now. Even though I understood the triggers, it did not help.
Note to self: if you are planning a calming walk on the beach, check the tide times. Check that there will actually be beach to walk on.
There wasn’t. High tide always reaches the sea wall. On storm days like this one, it overreaches. It crashes. It splashes. It throws itself onto land with the kind of vehemence that makes you wonder if it is trying to escape its thrall or simply subdue the arrogance of the cliffs and buildings. It feels elemental. It feels turbulent. It feels angry and frustrated. The sea looked exactly the way I felt.
Dark and spuming. Over-full. Breaking.
The sea made me think about how I felt. Not resentful, or spiteful, after all. Merely whipped up, slightly frenzied, full of a negative energy that needed to find its release.
I pushed and pulled at the beach hut doors until they would open. I swept the sand and stones and seaweed from the further corners of the hut. I watched the fountains of sandy-foam break over the railings and scatter themselves across the promenade.
I didn’t notice the sunset. My eyes were firmly fixed on the water. The sky changed colour without my seeing it do so.
I’d forgotten how far out of town the Country Club is. I’d forgotten that the Holt-Cromer ridge gives the lie to the idea that Norfolk is ‘flat’. I pulled luggage I’d not intended to have with me when I booked the place up the hill, reminding myself that at least the wind was at my back, and noticing how beautiful the moon looked through the black branches of the trees.
Dinner came out of a tin, but I did drink the champagne I’d bought to toast my cousin as well as the passing of the year. I did not sit down to write. I had nothing left. I slept.
Then there was a morning. I was awake before dawn. It was not raining. The wind was still howling. I walked down towards the sea, towards the ebb tide. I walked along the eastern promenade and out onto the pier, just as the sky was beginning to respond to the pre-rise rays of the sun. When it came the sunrise would be behind a bank of cloud, but its prelude was worth the walk and the wait.
Stray words from old rock songs wandered through my head:
“waiting for the angels of Avalon / waiting for the eastern glow”
“smoke on the water / a fire in the sky”
“time for meditation in cathedrals of our own”
People walked their dogs. Gulls flew, rolling their bodies to tack against the wind, like sledgers dragging their way back uphill, only to turn and give into the joy of riding the wave, the downhill, the wind, riding the world. I wondered idly if gulls smile to themselves; if they whoop with joy.
I pondered the nature of the ebb tide: the moon dragging the water away from the land, the wind driving it towards. Breakers still, but tired ones now. More accepting of things the way they are. Once again, the sea sitting as a mirror to my own emotions.
I felt better for the sleep. Better yet for the beautiful morning I’d been given to start the new year. Better for feeling safe enough to walk out onto the pier and see the dawn skies with the water swirling beneath my feet, with wood and iron in between. Next year maybe I will remember to carry a little earth with me, to complete the elemental round.
There was more disruption to face making my way home…but I got here. And then there was warmth, the lights on the tree, candles to be lit. A settling.
Then there was Jay, with apologies for what he had not brought with him, not seeming to value what he had: a spiced leek and potato soup, and himself.
And so the world turns, and I begin another year, another trip around the sun, as Eileen puts it. And I know how lucky I am, how abundant my life is. And how much I still have to learn: about patience and flexibility, and knowing that there will be beauty even when it doesn’t conform to my imagination and my plans of how it might be.
It was, after all, a beautiful week...
...and I do now have a quiet one in which to come back to myself, rest, revitalise and gentle myself towards this new year.
