Self-portrait, with a side order of spiritual awakening
It’s that old twist upon the thread, again
Who am I anyway? Am I my resume? That is a picture of a person I don't know What does he want from me? What should I try to be? So many faces all around, and here we go I need this job Oh God, I need this show Marvin Hamlisch & Edward Kleban - A Chorus Line
It’s been weeks since I pressed that New Post box. The words - so many words - have been stuck inside me. I didn’t know where to begin. Nothing dramatic has happened. I’ve just plodded along, at least on the surface. There have been a few days - well, more than a few, if I’m totally honest, when I couldn’t much see the point of anything. Just two afternoons ago, as it went dark and the Manchester rain came down yet again, I was sitting in a teashop with one of my dearest friends and wishing I could understand the complete, dank, dreary lack of interest I was feeling in almost every area of my outwardly happy and comfortable life. I wasn’t sure whether I was expecting too much or not enough. I just knew I wanted more.
Substack has been responsible for a lot of this. It’s given me an inner life again. And the choice of many, many possible inner lives and outer directions. I took a course in Depth Psychology and dived deep into Jung and Active Imagination. I followed a trail to Irish Mythology and found myself strangely moved, if a little self-consciously, into embodied movement and the Spirit of the Cailleach. I made a quick comment to thank someone for brightening my day, forgot about it, and discovered to my astonishment that it had gathered over 300 likes. I felt the old pull of long-abandoned Christianity and began to read the Daily Office, but couldn’t stomach the patriarchal Old Testament passages I was exposed to, nor the shameful conduct of the Church of England in response to revelations of child abuse. I read a wonderful book about The Goddess, and Eve’s transgression being a cause of celebration. I read about the Heroine’s Journey, about autism and ADHD, maternal burnout, rage, Miranda July’s All Fours, and joined far too many writer’s groups. I met inspiring and wonderful people, and begun to interact with them. But I still couldn’t write anything.
I think it’s because I’m very much a work in progress right now. I am changing incredibly fast, and in a way that I find very difficult to put into words. And yet I just read TS Eliot’s Little Gidding, which I’ve loved for over 40 years since I discovered it as an undergraduate, and felt I understood every word of it for the first time ever. Between its pages, now loosening from the spine with age, I found a scrap of paper bearing words in the beautiful handwriting of my long-dead mother, and realised that she, too, spent a lifetime trying to find words to describe the sublime, the imaginal, the eternal, the so-much-more-than-what-we-see.
But mostly I related to Dante, not because I am a cultural heavyweight who reads The Divine Comedy for light relief, but because he absolutely nailed my current state of mind:
Am I having a midlife crisis? Well, the last seven years of my life have been one long crisis - losing a job I loved, breakdown, therapy, hip replacement, Brexit, lockdown, cancer, becoming a grandmother, Trump. I’ve been broken apart and remade. I’m not the person I was before, and I’m not sure whether I’m autistic or allistic, a Christian or a Goddess-worshipping pagan, a literary genius or a pathetic fool, a silly old woman or a much-loved granny, rapidly ageing or coming into my Best Life Yet.
It’s a strange business, this elderhood. I am aware that, unlike many people, I have the privilege of a comfortable life and time to contemplate the state of the world and, if possible, do something useful to alleviate it. But there are many days when my inner life is so draining I haven’t the energy to get to a yoga class. I make endless resolutions - read or write a poem a day, eat better, spend less time online, do my Pilates stretches, meditate, do my Morning Pages, ideally in the morning, go for a daily walk. Meanwhile, my husband clocks up marathons and wishes I would get out more. And sometimes it seems all I do is sit, and sit and sit some more, with very little to show for it.
And then, today, something shifted. It was the last thing I’d been expecting. We’d just finished packing for our Christmas trip to family abroad, trying to fit in all the gifts and stay in the baggage allowance and not forget anything, and we both realised we were exhausted, and went for a mid-day nap. I was just lying there, appreciating relief from the backache that’s been bothering me, when I had what I can only describe as a transcendent experience. I wasn’t even listening to a podcast at the time.
Suddenly I saw how little of it mattered, this doing stuff and starting stuff, and trying to figure out the answer to everything. I just saw that the world is incredibly beautiful and filled with love, and I remembered the times of my life when I have been on the very edge of touching and experiencing that reality, and it is nothing more or less than a gift of grace from whatever Divine Power is ordering it all. I’m sorry, I can’t put it any clearer than that. But I think I might have become a Christian again. One who has very little patience with binaries and labels, and just for a minute grasped how reductive we are being when we try to divide everything into clearly definable categories with impermeable edges. I wish I could put it better. Perhaps I will learn to describe it in time.
Every spiritual quest known to humanity is pouring the inconceivable into a cracked and inadequate container. To reject a particular path on account of the behaviour of some of the people who claim to follow it is laughably beside the point. It sounds incredibly woo-woo, but it really does boil down to love - how much is available to us all, how little we trust in it, how much we fear it, how wonderful those fleeting glimpses of it really are. And the adventure of getting closer to the truth together.
So that is my plan for the year ahead. To try to express it better, not only through words but through attitudes, values and beliefs. I might end up dancing on a Cornish beach in the moonlight embodying some deity or other, or helping kids learn to read, or starting to take Holy Communion again. I might stay as Miranda or go back to being Ruth. I might start a completely new Substack and call it Nel Mezzo (the first words of the Divine Comedy, not my local pizza joint) or Middle Class Woman of a Certain Age. I am sure I will download many more meditations, and get just as cross as I do now when my husband leaves his muddy running shoes on my meditation seat. I may write poetry. I may paint. I may pluck up the courage to walk out of my front door and see where I end up. It might even turn out to be the ends of the earth.
I’m looking forward to it. Well, I think I am. A couple of weeks ago I drove all the way to IKEA on my own. It’s a start.
What we call the beginning is also the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning
The end is where we start from
TS Eliot, Little Gidding