40 years, 40 things
Fragments of thought, knowing, and goodness to mark my 40th birthday
This post is an interlude in my series on The Village (here are posts one and two in that series). In July I turned 40. To mark it, here is a non-static list of hunches, thoughts, knowings, and good things. Living feels like an ongoing revelation of love, home, relationship, darkness, light, unknowability, beauty, and more. I’m trying to collect fragments of these things.
Old things — ruins, stones, stars — remind me that this and now has not always been, and will not always be.
We need other people in order for love to move from nice idea to rooted and rolled-up-sleeves reality. Love, I think, can only exist at the convergence of people.
Formational book #1: The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
If in doubt, write, say, or do the next true thing. When I feel stuck, that is sometimes the thing that gets me moving again.
If still in doubt, get corn wraps and fill them with beef or veg chilli, or fish, or make them into quesadillas — and accompany with cheese, coriander, sour cream, avocados, and chilli sauces (these guys, based in Devon, make the best). This will cure all manner of ailments.
The other day I noticed the young cherry tree in our little garden, which we have created in part by reclaiming what was excessive parking space. The tree stopped me mid-washing up, as if I’d never seen a tree before. It seemed to say, planting a garden is good work. I will try to hold on to this when I feel I should be doing more.
Write cards, write letters — I have never regretted time spent doing this, and a handwritten card in the post always, always brings me joy.
As well as the well-documented reasons why spending time outdoors feels good and essential (endorphins, light, and so on) this essay by Wendell Berry helps me to see other layers to it: “…I feel the possibility, the reasonableness, the practicability of living in the world in a way that would enlarge rather than diminish the hope of life…”
Kindness, listening, and facilitating good conversations are not ‘soft skills’. They are hard, and they matter, and I think there are people and places that struggle for lack of their presence.
Listening deeply is hard. Being properly listened to — feeling someone give me their full, undistracted attention — is a gift that helps me understand myself a little better, and maybe helps the listener hear the world a little better too. Or, as Simone Weil said, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
Formational book #2: Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson. “Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?”
Taking joy in food feels important — choosing it, preparing it, gathering with others to share it. A table feels like a sacred space, one that pulls me into rhythm with others, and connects me to the soil and people who produce food.
Speaking of soil — in the Christian creation story, God creates the earth first, then pulled humans from it and breathed spirit into them so that they might tend the soil. I sometimes wonder if soil is God’s first love. I think we are being pulled from the earth again - to tend it, nurture it, work with it. I think God might be found not in the heavens but in the soil, amongst the roots and earthworms and seeds, hoping to meet us there.
Drinking Darjeeling tea feels like an experience, where drinking regular breakfast tea feels like a routine.
Being an elected district councillor opened my eyes to many things. I could create a ‘40 things’ post on these learnings alone, but in summary: how we gather, how we relate, how we listen to each other has the power to change everything.
I stumbled across a framed print of this painting in a charity shop recently. It stopped me — first, because the colour seemed too much, too frenzied. Then, I decided I quite liked it. Now, having bought it home, I like it very much. Colour feels to me like a call to life. In recent years I’ve encountered Van Gogh anew because of his use of colour. His eyes, his perception, show me layers of life that I wouldn’t otherwise see.
Speaking of which, three exhibitions linger with me. The Sacred Made Real, back in 2009/10 at The National Gallery stays with me for its feeling (dark, reverential, like an old church) and for the edges I noticed between imagination, realism and truth. ‘The World of Stonehenge’ at The British Museum in 2022 stays with me for its curation and feeling (ancient, mysterious, holding some piece of our collective selves), and for its braiding of culture, place, people and time. I often think back to it. Lastly, ‘Van Gogh and the Olive Groves’ at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam stays with me for its colour and warmth, and for some sense of sacred and earthiness combined. There is something that connects these three exhibitions, some current of the unseen and of beauty, and I enjoy thinking about it. Art and poetry that lingers asks me to pay attention to something.
Formational book #3: The Solace of Open Spaces. “There is nothing in nature that can’t be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration… Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.”
The bronze age Nebra Sky Disc is the oldest known representation of astronomical phenomena. It depicts the heavens (sun, moon, stars, Pleiades) as well as a boat to transport the sun under the ocean through the night. I saw it on display at the aforementioned Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum. It is beautiful, and it stays with me — its marriage of story and science, sacredness and practicality. The boundaries between things seemed not so clear as we tend to draw them today.
Age, suits, and status do not equal wisdom or even necessarily experience. Wisdom can be found in the smallest of moments, in people and places the world has no time for, in the still small voice; the quiet whisper that remains once attention-demanding storms have passed.
Red lipstick is something I have noticed myself wanting to wear, but I think it looks horrible on me within minutes. It felt flippant to write this, so I deleted it. But that didn’t feel honest, so I rewrote it. I do not know whether I want to wear red lipstick because I live within capitalism and patriarchy and other forces pressing me into shape, or because I like colour, or because I think it will be a confidence boost when I need it, or because I have seen others I admire wear bright lipstick and think, they look nice. I do not know whether this matters, or whether it matters whether it matters. But it gives me release, as does browsing bookshops and charity shops.
When I was a child, I won a poetry competition. The prize was a book voucher, and with it, I bought an astronomy book and a book of quotes. Not much has changed — the love of space, wonder, words. I wish I had paid more attention to that girl, to where she wanted me to go. I think I am re-finding her now.
I can name and point to my values, but I have to consciously live them out, and this takes effort - society tries to pull me into the current of its own values.
I became a mother, and am in awe of what my body can do with very little intervention from my conscious self. In fact, my body seemed to birth best when my mind got out of the way. I am trying to apply this to birthing other things - a book, a new way of being in the world. I’m also trying to braid this with the need for consciousness in how I live my values (see point above). To get out of my own way, but also to live intentionally. Perhaps, when we exist most truthfully, our values show up more effortlessly.
When I lived in Zambia and ran a charity education programme, I wrote poetry around the margins of project documents and funding spreadsheets. I learned more than I contributed. I first took the language of my soul seriously. I realised that there were other (better?) ways to help people than ‘doing to’ them via (often unasked for) projects and programmes.
I think much of the environmental, cultural, political, and social fragmentation of our time exists, when traced upstream, because of an absence of love.
Formational book #4: The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard. “Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?”
No matter how or why I have resisted or ignored or feared it, I come back again and again to something beyond *all this* — to God, to the sacred, to a reality that is not in our capacity to ever know. Faith is something that, like the experience of birth that I touched on above, becomes clearer when I can walk the edge between conscious living and getting out of my own way. There are rituals and practices that help this way of being, and I find myself increasingly needing them — prayer, deep relationship, gathering, old wisdom. When individualism, cynicism and distrust often seem to be the spirits of the age, acknowledging things that point to unknowing, community, humility and awe can feel countercultural.
I am drawn to people who crackle with awakeness, aliveness, fully themselvesness. Shining, rather than hiding their light under a bowl. My tendency has often been to stay under the bowl, in part because of conditioning that says don’t take up too much space. That is changing. When we all shine, we create constellations that light the dark.
I am cautious about anything that fits people into types. But, the Enneagram has at times been helpful for me. It has shown me the light and shadow I carry, and the qualities that might help and hinder my becoming (and what to do with them).
Writing, for me, feels like thinking with my eyes and ears and fingers.
I think and write about community, about belonging, about interconnectedness, and yet sometimes want to hide away, finding the actual work of connection intimidating and exhausting. Other times, it makes me come alive.
The smell of the earth giving up its warmth on a summer evening, infused with grasses and dampness and harvest, is a smell that makes me feel at home and part of everything. Looking at the Milky Way gives me this feeling too.
I am not good at expressing anger. I try to frame this as a virtue, but honestly, it is more often fear of rejection, or of conflict, than wisdom stepping in. Still, I do know that pausing before reacting creates a vast space for choice and wisdom and relationship to enter in.
I am, amongst other things, a walking guide. Literal pathfinding is such a good container for more figurative pathfinding — I have always found questions and answers on walks, in a way that I can struggle to do within four walls.
Scented candles! — a cliché for a reason. They have at times been an anchor for me: in online Council meetings during the pandemic, or when I was preparing to give birth. Sea Salt, Frankincense, Pine… I relax just thinking of them. I learned more recently that the smell of scented candles stimulates the limbic system, the part of the brain that is home to memory and emotions. The body knows.
Having a bath should never be a functional thing. It is a retreat, and cannot be done without books, tea, wine, and time (and a scented candle).
Annie Dillard said “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” This line sometimes frees me, sometimes haunts me.
Wendell Berry’s poem A Standing Ground (copied out below) is one I have been turning over in my mind. It’s in part to do with the line ‘uprooted, I have been furious’ — because in my own uprootedness I have been furious, but also happy, like migrating swifts that seem to screech with joy. Now, when I so want to build my village (literal and figurative), how to balance that desire to root but also to move? (More on this in my Village series).
Formational book #5: A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin. “Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.” Also: “The truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing but does only and wholly what he must do…”
A Standing Ground, by Wendell Berry:
However just and anxious I have been
I will stop and step back
from the crowd of those who may agree
with what I say, and be apart.
There is no earthly promise of life or peace
but where the roots branch and weave
their patient silent passages in the dark;
uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.
I am not bound for any public place,
but for ground of my own
where I have planted vines and orchard trees,
and in the heat of the day climbed up
into the healing shadow of the woods.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn
and pick dew-wet berries in a cup.
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Happy birthday Elizabeth!! 🌟🌿
Loved this, Elizabeth. Particularly your thoughts on red lipstick and 'getting out of the way'. Happy Birthday. X