These are days of thunder and clouds, of quivering rain-soaked leaves, of things starting out one way and ending another. Expectations are for fools.
The damp air is sweet with the fragrance of bloom and fruit and soil. The air is so humid it feels like we are drinking water as we breathe our skin slick and salty, feet skimming the gravel.
Sustaining has been the one thing that has held this year. In fact, every day - I have made it a point to find something new - big or small to be grateful about. Even when things have been endless: rain, worry, self doubt, there has been blood thrumming through the capillaries in our lungs, our rib bones rising and falling hard like the hulls of little boats pitching on a storm tossed sea.
Sometimes when I sit still on my window-seat, in the middle of contemplation or a sentence off the book in my hand, my entire body moves slowly with each beat of my faithful heart. Syncopated. To their own sustained beautiful rhythm.
And then day in, day out… to “just get on and do your job” … just go, and gradually make a difference. I am trying to learn this: to expect nothing and persist. Never before Karmanya Vadhikaraste has felt more apt than now.
To wipe sticky cheeks, to listen to theories and to be the bedrock, kiss good morning and nights, experiment with age old recipes, gather words, gather fallen frangipani and tuck them in my long raven hair, even, gather hope, put words on the page, hit the delete key, hit the wall, remember, recycle, rinse the plates, go for walks on the harbour; city lights rippling on water, stay up late reading, write… click pictures, taking nostalgia trips with collaging old photos.
And, some days it takes everything just to show up for the day. To get out of bed after a night that turned into gradients of noir cinema. Some mornings I open my eyes through the fugue of, wanting to climb those walls and escape. Mornings where my thoughts are black and jagged and tea seems like a weak substitute for all the hours un-slept and torn into fragments by the urgent primal demands of something beyond body and beyond sleep.
And it's on those days that perseverance of sustaining matters most. Some days it is the only thing saves me: if I can just breathe and I can write or even read for an hour. I can live. If I can live, I can mother and be a worker. If I can live, I can be a human and raise a decent human.
It is the hardest thing, this: to turn towards a new day empty handed and ready to fill it with whatever comes and still to persist stubbornly and gratefully.
Copyright © Nee