I’m alive! I’m alive! Plus book news
Feeling the weave of life via DHL, cliffs, black holes, missiles. Plus some reading, and my book.
A few weeks ago I received a parcel from the US. It was shipped via DHL. When I looked at the online tracking, it told me that on Thursday evening the parcel entered the DHL network in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In the early hours of Friday the parcel was in New York. By Friday lunchtime the parcel was in the East Midlands, UK, and on Saturday the parcel had reached Exeter, our nearest city. On Sunday, it rested. The parcel was due to be delivered to our house on Tuesday, the day of the US election. It had traveled from a key US swing state to our distant green westcountry. It is something so everyday, and yet when I finally held the parcel, and thought of everyone voting thousands of miles away, I thought about how the far away is so close to the nearby in all kinds of seen and unseen ways.
Around the same time, a cliff crumbled onto the beach of my hometown. The red Jurassic sandstone, made unstable over time by hot sun and heavy rain, gave way. The sea beneath turned rusty orange. 185million-year-old sand and fossils can once again see the light. There is an old cottage on the cliff edge, built long ago when the edge of things seemed further away. Now, it teeters, history giving way to future.
I recently watched a clip in which the physicist Brian Cox was explaining something that is being revealed about black holes: from the perspective of someone outside a black hole, anything going into it would be lost to the singularity — a point of infinite density and infinitely small volume, and the final destination for anything that falls into it. But, if I understood correctly, then from the perspective of the thing inside the black hole, all its matter and light will be broken up but retained, and will appear in a different time. I’m sure it’s more complex than that, but what I took from it was that the foundations we assume reality is built on — space and time — might not actually be the foundations at all.
I wonder about the final destination for what we do on Earth. Will things be lost, or broken down and resurrected to another place, another time? Whatever it looks like, this life is a gift. Often, I feel as paralysed as I do energised by the knowledge of that gift, by the knowledge of the precariousness of life, the improbability of existence. I wrote down some of the milestones of that unlikeliness. They make me feel as if I am peering over the edge of things:
Big Bang: from nothing to…something: energy and density into matter, space, time.
Stars: Stars had to be born, live, evolve, explode, before the elements we’d need for life were created.
Planets: Our ball of rock is the Goldilocks of rocks: not too hot, not too cold. Here, there’s liquid water. Here, life exists.
Life: A switch being turned on. The first self-replicating molecules appeared.
Evolution: From the simplest life forms to our complex ancestors, who had to survive, cooperate, and reproduce.
Relationships: If she had turned left, not right, she’d never have met him and they would not have had a child and you would not exist. This, times a gazillion throughout history.
Genes: The sequence of DNA in your cells had to be just right to produce a human being. There are multiples times during conception and pregnancy that life can fizzle out. I have felt this happen; a path to the future shutting down, a growing thread of love supposedly severed, though I can still feel it.
Love: To go from existing to being fully alive takes more than cells and processes; it takes love, and kindness, and other forces that we will never touch but can still recognise, still feel.
And despite these and so many other unlikely occurrences, we are still capable of creating hypersonic missiles and giving them names like Oreshnik, which is Russian and translates to ‘hazel tree’ or ‘hazelnut’. In the 14th century the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich had visions of a hazelnut; for her, it represented everything she needed to know about God’s love for creation: “In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God keeps it.”
If such a small thing as a hazelnut can be seed, food, a symbol of love for creation, and the name of a tool for the grotesque destruction of that same creation, if it has potential to be all these things, then what might our own lives be? What are the possibilities — creative, destructive — that lie dormant in us?
These things linger in my mind — the long ago nowness of the Jurassic cliffs, the faraway closeness of Pennsylvania and Devon, the knowable and unknowable of black holes, the fact and possibility of a hazelnut. Right now, I am in a cafe and the soundtrack is bad. The song currently playing though has a line that says, “I’m Alive! I’m Alive!”. Perhaps I might just replace this whole post with those four words.
There are countless threads connecting us to others, to history, to everything that has ever and will ever exist, no matter how disconnected we can feel. These threads are forever forming, undoing, reforming, weaving together, knotting. We are part of that great weave, never able to see the whole thing from where we are but still able to tune into its movement. Perhaps that is what I’ve been feeling — these things making me tingle with existence; with something like a sense of beauty, grace, chance, invitation, strangeness. For me, that feeling often ends up pointing to the question that Mary Oliver famously asks in her poem The Summer Day — what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Because life is wild, and hard, and so unlikely, and so precious, and sometimes we glimpse that — or feel it — and we respond, and the weave alters, and the great fabric trembles.
Some writing news
I’ve been a little quiet here on Substack because I’ve been finishing and submitting a book proposal. After bracing myself for rejection, or silence, to my great surprise I had interest from multiple agents. I am so pleased to say I’m represented by Emma Bal at the Madeleine Milburn Agency, and together, we’re polishing my proposal ready to submit it to publishers soon.
I’ll share a bit more about this journey in future newsletters. Let me know if you have any questions about it. For any writers out there, I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned so far, but putting some of these posts behind a paywall. (Most of my posts will remain free to read, but I am trying to support my work and our life too).
Things I’ve been reading:
Gift Thinking, a conversation between Robin Wall Kimmerer and Jenny Odell in Orion Magazine. Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, has written a new book. In The Serviceberry, she explores “a different kind of economy than what we’re used to–one where, instead of hoarding, it makes more sense to store your surplus 'in the belly of your brother.””
The Place of Tides by James Rebanks. His new book has a fable-like quality, and captures the earthy magic of the Norwegian islands he visits and the people he encounters there.
The Shetland Way by Marianne Brown. A memoir and investigation exploring loss, community and the climate crisis in the Shetland Islands. To be published in January 2025.
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HUGEST congratulations Elizabeth!!! Over the moon for you and can't wait to hear more about your book xxx