Precious - but not easy...
Life, collapse and re-birthing
Precious - but not easy...
Many people I know (including myself) are taking the daily news in small doses. Rationing out our exposure to the dismaying headlines, the depressing statistics and the bombardment of cheap punditry that coats it all like thick sticky dust. We want to remain informed and involved, we don’t want to abdicate civic responsibility – but we feel the need to protect ourselves from the rotten excesses of both social and mainstream media.
I’m paying attention, as best I can, to world affairs. And yes, yes I’m outraged by it all. The political chaos, the constant hubris, the downright injustice that streaks like rain down a filthy pane of glass. I’m outraged, sure – but I’m also exhausted. Obviously. That’s the point, the strategy playing out like a game. Drive us all to baffled exhaustion until we retreat into our private realms of tv and takeaway dinners. Drive us into a corner where we throw up our hands and say, I don’t care anymore! I can’t care anymore! It hurts too much.
It hurts way too much. And yet…
The worst pain I’ve ever felt was during labour and childbirth. My insides literally shifted within me: my bones, my hips moved apart, wide open; my muscles contracted and squeezed in relentless piercing spasms; the tender flesh of my labia ripped and bled.
Women endure this pain for the purpose and the promise it delivers: a new life. It’s worth it. It’s entirely worth it. So I try to hold onto this when I’m feeling the exhaustion and the pain of the world around me.
There’s increasing consensus that we’re witnessing collapse. We’re living through the collapse and breakdown of the world we have built up over the past centuries, through rationalism, expansionism, colonialism – through racism and sexism and ableism and sanism. We’ve reached the limits of a worldview that no longer fits us. It is coming apart, and all this hateful unleashing of fear and contempt and greed and chaos, it’s all just part of the process.
Collapse is a very industrial word. It suggests a machine, clunking to a halt and dropping loud metal pieces onto a cement factory floor where they bounce and clank and skitter away. I prefer to think of it more like a snake outgrowing its tough old skin, shedding it off in ragged strips in order to wriggle free.
Let’s go back to the metaphor of childbirth and new life. There’s another dimension to it, seldom acknowledged. Despite all the warm romance surrounding newborns – the muted pastel colours, the soft murmur of mother’s voice in lullaby, the warm cradling embrace rocking baby to sleep – what do we actually know of it? I recall just as vividly the squalling cries and small flailing limbs, the wet nastiness of nappy changes, the milk sicked up and coating my clothes in scabby drying patches, the constant juggle of tasks and the desperate exhaustion. All precious in its own way – but certainly not easy.
I guess I am just trying to reassure myself here: creating anything worthwhile takes time, it takes constant effort, it takes discomfort and pain and stumbling, weary steps one after the other. I am just trying to keep myself going, when I’d rather numb myself with distractions and hide within my personal comfort zone.
It’s so, so easy to feel helpless and powerless. To feel tiny and inconsequential, in the face of the big news headlines.
Much harder is it to recognise that immense and profound power which exists in the smallest of our words or actions. This morning for example I received a message from a friend, with some snippets of personal updates and a brief throwaway expression of gratitude for my part in her life. It touched me deeply, to be told so casually that I’m valued. My friend did something powerful by making that incidental remark. It didn’t take much, but it woke something inside me that had been resting, and gave birth to renewed purpose, hope and stamina.
Bring it all on: I’m ready…
Yes, so powerfully expressed Julia. New life does not slip quietly and elegantly into the world. The metaphor of the birthing room is apt (and personally resonant). Maybe it reminds us of the need to 'call the midwife' -a midwife being simply someone who stays with (mid) the labouring feminine (wife). Together we 'with-stand' the ripping up and the ripping open.