Today I only have the past for you, again. As its now October (so suddenly too), I remember Halloween is coming. Samhain (pronounced sow-en). I think what to do for this year. Yesterday Stanley brought me a biscuit icing kit with orange and purple chocolate smarties in, toffee icing in a tube, and little black hundreds and thousands. So I will bake, it seems. What a good present. I can smell cinnamon already.
**
So. Then. 2009. Back when I was pregnant, hugely, with Fluffhead. Outside and inside, the best kind of afternoon.
Outside the leaves picked up, dancing, a tune I couldn’t hear; I could see only the steps. The rustle, the scratch. I watched the branches of the tree from the bedroom window. They moved, pushing their boughs against one another, catching, tangling. They were pushed and pulled and kept tethered. They did not seem to fight it. Around them rain sparkled, one hint of brightness in the grey afternoon.
Inside, I sat up on the bed, my belly round. Pushed myself forward, still looking beyond the room, smiling at the trees. Muscles creaked with every stretch forward. The baby was in a funny position. It felt like it was pressing on all my organs simultaneously. I felt comfortable in hardly any position.
But I felt content.
Yesterday had been Halloween, Samhain. The New Year of modern witch-type pagans and Wiccans, a time to let go of that which no longer serves. I had sat in my circle (badly cast as usual, but in the best of intention), and offered my confusions of feeling to the Cailleach, as part of a meditation. The floor had been hard, but that was fine – it was the standing and sitting for different parts of the ritual, that had been difficult, being so vastly pregnant. And alone. Stanley was upstairs with the door to his room closed, alone in his world of computer gaming, and documentary watching, unwinding in his own way. Over time, I learned more and more that this was not a rejection of me (though I sorely missed the feeling of being under his arm on the sofa – the safe feeling so swamping us we usually both fell asleep quite quickly; the smell of his hair, being absent, bothered me a bit; the casual touching I loved to do as he passed, the love of which I had passed on to him). And it meant I had a lot of time free for my thoughts, my need for balance.
I had closed my eyes, and told the Cailleach of my fears for the coming year, my failures of the last, confusions, worries, what overwhelmed me. I imagined a veiled (mostly) old woman in the corner, stirring a cauldron impossibly heavy, stream rising from it. A smell that could not be identified, not unpleasant, but very pungent though barely on the air. Occasionally, I held out my hands in a gesture of offering from my prone cross legged position on the floor, the old woman simply paying attention to her pot and stirring slowly. Sometimes she would turn to me and nod, as I spoke my thoughts. Eventually, I felt what I had said was done, and I imagined the old woman coming over to me and taking what was left of my offering. Scraping it away from my hands, and taking it to the cauldron – where it’s indeterminate gloopiness, a dust of worries, a sludge of unresolved issues, plopped seamlessly inside, causing only a small ‘pfft’ before the bubbling resumed. I imagined the old woman; whose features were one moment quite clear and then another not. Veiled away and hidden, only her form, also in grey robes, threadbare, old, sturdy, heavy, was visible. Was Hekate as one of her selves in there too, as the old woman? Is there a shade of the Morrigan? Who was I really talking to? Woman in form venerable, form old, form wise and knowing…me, myself, her and mythos…
I imagined the old woman listening intently, and not judging: simply understanding, as she understood all women and their reasons for things, their twisty logics, yet all sensical. She took what was offered, and it helped her brew. She accepted it and it helped. These thoughts of the old year could be transmuted, by another part of myself (the echoes, and sometimes more strong than that, of all the gods and goddesses that are within, the pregnant me felt).
So that Samhain had meant something that last year, something soft and wonderful – the spring cleaning of the mind. It had meant a new beginning was really here, a new path could solidly be taken. I was off work, the messiness and claustrophobia of that state of mind was falling away; I would be skint, but semi taken care of, thanks to Stanley; and I had some time, before the baby was born, to collect my scattered self, and hunker down for the winter, like a man under a car, and try and fix the whole thing. The thing of me, which had made so little sense for so long, and now begged for attention, which I felt I must give. As the child would be here soon.
From my position of safety, from here in the bed, warm and Sunday afternoon-ed, with the memory of Halloween, and the memory of good deeds done (feeding birds the day before in the small garden a few minutes away, the softness yet spryness of the forms of the birds – their incredible deep greyness and cobalt blue, the miraculousness of their life force suddenly so apparent as I fed them the bread, rosemary bread, that I had made, as a good thing to do, a good good thing)….with these feelings and memories, distant and long past, and recent, I felt armed to try and make a good thing of every day. To try. Trying was surely the most important thing.
My back ached badly, but I didn’t mind. It was only a problem as it may affect the baby – this feeling that some of my organs may burst, that I could hear the pulse of my blood thudding in my right ear all the time, was this normal? This was the only worry. Women’s bodies sprang back from childbirth, and rarely died, nowadays. I needed to remain calm and cool on that score.
But what a ripe and marvellous time to grow something else within myself too – something my baby could also appreciate, as I became ever calmer and less able to be upset by transient things. To grow a sense of self respect and esteem, a sturdy self that cried not so very much, that screamed in loneliness and confusion and worthlessness far less; this was a goal worthy of the time I had remaining to me, the less of it.
I got up. It involved heaving, and some pain, and pulling myself up on the radiator, but the day felt friendly, and I felt myself passing unproblematically into it, and went out of the room.
***
Of course, I fail at this marvellous resolve every day. I failed yesterday, and I fail today. I cried both days, as I have a sadness at the moment. But it will pass, as they always do, sooner or later.
And I really did enjoy that Halloween – one of the quietest I ever had or did. Making something mean something to yourself is so very important.
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