Fragments #7
Turbulence | Lent | Trout | Mystery | Medieval nuns | Small Prophets | Small Kindnesses
The other day, my husband, daughter and I flew high above the Earth. Having lived blanketed for weeks under grey clouds and rain, it was a treat for the eyes and mind and soul to see endless blue sky.
Early in the flight — clouds below us and seatbelts off and sunlight bouncing around the cabin — the plane shuddered and seemed to skid in the air, then a slight drop, and then forward as if through waves on the ocean; bumping and shaking.
It was, as turbulence goes, not too bad, and it didn’t last too long. But over the years my tolerance for turbulence has diminished in line with the way my hunger for and astonishment at life has grown. Tears welled up, something gripped me: a sense that this is everything, this life, this unlikely opportunity to live when the universe’s history has overwhelmingly been stacked against us.
The turbulence ended. People carried on reading books, looking at screens, drinking drinks. The air stewards had been doing their work throughout, barely seeming to register the precarity of being in a metal tube a mile above the ground; all of us barely seeming aware of the combination of time and particles and care and love that meant we were here, now.
What does it mean to live in recognition of the improbability of life? What do we do with this?
We are in Lent — for Christians, the season of stripping away comfort and remembering that we’re dust. The turbulence briefly did something similar for me — jolted me awake, reminded me of the impossible luck of being alive, made me see my fellow passengers as miracles. Lent is commonly understood as being about giving things up as an echo of Jesus’s sacrifice — but the turbulence of the plane and of the world make me wonder if it might also be about giving up the numbness that can let us forget we’re here at all.
And then we might ask, as Mary Oliver asks, what we might do with this one wild and precious life?
In this turbulent world, and especially in this period of Lent, may we be ever astonished, ever awake, ever peering above the blinkering clouds and finding home in the nowness of things.
What has conjured astonishment for you lately? What makes you feel awake?
Underlinings:
“What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?”
― Henry David Thoreau
“Earth's crammed with heaven...” — Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” ― Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Links / reading
📚 Nun-fiction: I recently went to hear Danielle Giles, author of Mere, in conversation. Mere is historical fiction, set in a convent in Norfolk, AD 990, and tells a story about the meeting of pagan gods and Christianity, of faith and feeling, of humans and nature. In a time of what often feels like increasing disenchantment, I am drawn to stories that sit at the edge of the seen and unseen; the mundane and the mysterious. Speaking of which…
🔮 Small Prophets: …we watched a short, gently funny new BBC series called Small Prophets recently. It felt like it was made not by following trends or what sells or algorithms, but by following care and love. It is full of heart and hidden everyday wonders.
🍋 Lastly, I came across this poem which I thought I’d share (the highlight in bold is my emphasis… I love these lines):
Small Kindnesses, by Danusha Lameris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
What have you noticed lately? What have you loved?
Thanks for reading,
Elizabeth x
Always arresting your pieces Elizabeth. Thank you.
Here’s something (you probably know of anyway) - Emily Berry’s - “It was as if I were asleep” from her ‘Unexhausted Time’ collection;
A 2024 Liberty Faber Poetry diary was open for a third year running, still on late January with this poem above, on point.
You ask about astonishment: well… there’s all the warring, but to be positive the result of the Gorton & Denton by election showed what can be done by people together - talking, listening and caring.
Awake: feeling that joining up the (always more) dots has to be done to see just how systemically corrupted our lives have become.
Noticed: that Fatface has much on sale that is green this Spring!
Loved: the two exhibitors’ works at The Hayward Gallery in Southwark.