on relentless being-ness
{13} interwoven: life as breathtaking, breathmaking.
Welcome to interwoven. Today, we are speaking of the force of life that creates the seeable and touchable, however you define that for yourself.
If you are new to these parts, welcome! I’m so happy you are here. What you are reading now is part of interwoven, a gentle journey of deep noticing, imagination, and appreciation that I’m letting out from behind the paywall for this week.
Aside from my interwoven adventures, I have been absent (and will continue to be absent) from Substack for a while as I tinker away on a piece of work that’s deserving of all my creative energy but as always I am grateful for your presence.
This week I planned to talk to you of wind and weather, and perhaps there will be pieces in between. But a something else snuck in there. A something else that’s actually the everything.
That amorphic presence that gives rise to all that is feelable and touchable.
Do we call that our life force? Do we speak to this as essence? Is it simply just aliveness?
I heard David Whyte speak a line from a poem just yesterday:
It happens to those who live alone, that they feel sure of visitors when they are not there.
To feel sure of visitors when they are not there is something we all can understand, if not something we can’t quite explain.
Perhaps it’s possible to extend this frontier further:
Is this what we feel when we’re alone and quiet enough to hear it? Not the sound of silence, but the sound of life herself, before she finds a being who sings her sound into their own song?
If I was to describe what has taken my fancy this week it that energy of which right now I am speaking. Its relentless being-ness. The ability to persist.
It’s breathtaking. Breathmaking.
I have witnessed this in my own thoughtscapes. I have seen the weather patterns rise and appear with a sense of permanency- this storm will last forever!- only to watch them dissolve into transparencies.
Full life cycles of insects and flowers lived within 24 hours, with no resentment or waste or worry as to their allotted time. They were here while they were here, and then they weren’t. We expect another in their place. We trust in life to continue.
I’ve found comfort in this continuity. This underlying energy which wields herself in many different forms. I’ve found comfort in the thought of life as Mother. That she exists both for me, through me and despite me.
That she exists for and through and despite of all of us.
And once this human animal skin, the one that I can touch, is no longer being, she will wave, and I will rest, and she will continue. Relentlessly persisting.
The visitor we are always sure of.
Today, I am sitting and I’m writing. It is the most dreich day of the week. The way the inside of a body feels when it’s full of damp and silt. At 2:00pm, the sky is grey gauze stratus, a sheer curtain layered in front of a green behind. There are no clouds free to gallop, no wind strong enough to unleash this cake layered fog up from the ground. She is steady, insistent, her presence dividing the distance from where I sit to the far-off mountain peaks behind into a perfect band of three.
The most distant third is fog shroud. Mountains drained of their light as if sucked out with a straw. The grey provides an outline that allows for the contours between light and shadow to be more noticeable. The more you look, the more you notice the striations. Ink and bottle green darkened shapes give rise to the higher, brighter hills behind, the pale sheets of mist more generous in their illuminations.
The Toitoi that stand tall in front of my window reach like feathered fingers, their vividness a relief in a landscape today without sun. I can taste the outside air, even if at this moment I am inside and sitting at a table. It tastes of time travel, of the beaked and the pink-tongued whose drinking pool is captured by the air.
I look up and see a hoon of Kākā taking to the sky, three, then four, then five. Far enough away that I can only see their outline. They rise, then swoop and disappear, the bowl of forest pulling them closer to the top skin of the trees.
For a moment, my body exists only through my eyes. I am with them, flying. I have forgotten talk of fog. For a moment, I am weightless.
I open the book that’s resting on the table. I am searching for the nesting season of Kākā. I suspect that it is soon.
To find the page that I’m needing, I have to search. Through photos full of birds I have not seen and some I do not know.
Beside them are written labels: critical, endangered, abundant. There are so many that are critical, so few that are abundant. I feel my cheeks grow hot. Warm water pools behind my eyes. I look up, stare quite hard now at the ceiling.
I look now for my beloved Kākā. Beside them is written: Critical.
This I know. These words do not surprise
But then:
Each night now I am woken, their sounds splitting through the air like tears through paper. I do not mind awaking to their sound.
Outside the window of my office, Kākā daily visit my nectar and seed dealership. They bounce along the deck, a ground bound stance that makes them comical compared to the stealth and beauty of their flight.
I have seen where they exist now on a map. You could lose the area by placing over the top a tip of a little finger. It is not a stretch to say I am maybe one of a handful of people in the world watching a Kākā feed right now. I am maybe one of not much of a handful more who will come to see them ever.
And yet, in the face of human tenderness, they exist, persist. Not many humans, just a handful. With tools and some supplies, the necessary means now to protect them.
Not many humans, just a handful.
I look up and, on a poster, I see Kākā. ‘Coming back’ is written by their side.
My friend speaks to me of the moment of conception, of an egg only moments after being fertilized.
They were saying, she says of a workshop she’d just attended, how the energy of that embryonic fluid carries so much information.
They were saying, how there are actually two births. One when the egg first leaves the tube after fertilization and the other when we enter into the world.
I love that, I replied, my mind playing with words already.
I’ll probably write a poem about that, I said.
the first birth
It’s water, of course; fluid. This tidal ocean body that we are born from and into. A single cell swimming, asking questions of a sea that might yet become a leg, a hand, a strand of hair.
Today I learn of not one, but two births born to a single being. That, at the moment of conception, there’s a waiting, a paused celebration. The egg herself sits, knowing but not yet known, milk drenched and golden before travelling further to the place she will officially take root and grow. This, the first birth.
Even our beginnings remind us we are the touchable outcomes of second chances.
I wonder, as the bird who sits upon her nest, how her body tunes to a body growing outside of herself? Whether she has the hard knowing of an egg that will or will not hatch, and yet despite either option, refuse to leave?
What is this energy of life that we feel, know, seek to grow?
What is this energy of life that both insists and persists?
invitation
Your invitation this week is to increase your noticing to observe that which tenderly and fiercely pursues life. How the ebb of life in one area allows for flow in another. How the cycles of life play out around you, within you and through you.
To illustrate what I mean:
I wrote also this week of a daffodil who lives in a particularly wild part of the garden, where the grasses hold each other in various forms of embrace, and I imagine that to find a place in which to emerge and reach skywards requires a particular form of effort.
She’s on my left as I make my way up to the horses, my right as I make my way back down, and each time she catches me. Each time, I pause and admire her, which seems like the only right thing to do when presented with beauty. Witnessing is part of our human duty.
We have had glorious days of late. Warm and still. But equally, there have been moments when the wind whips through and we’ve found branches from what we would deem much stronger, more deeply rooted trees flailing on the ground.
And when I check, there she is. Still upward facing. Still positioned with a dignity that does not demand or overshadow. Her stem can be broken with a thumbnail and yet she is not. She is simply here, being a daffodil. And I love her for it.
writing prompts
Even our beginnings remind us we are the touchable outcomes of second chances.
Or
It happens to those who live alone, that they feel sure of visitors when they are not there.
On a new page of your notebook or journal, choose one of these sentences and write them at the top of the page. Use those words as a way in. We often need a platform, a diving board to reach the deeper parts of ourselves that are waiting to be heard.
What comes up when you share in their aliveness?
With love,
xx Jane
I like your connection of this invisible visitor, this invisible thread, that guides us all to it being a (the) Mother of us all. We are Earth. And Earth can be fragile and in a "critical" state but still we exist and persist. <3 thank you.
This week I had to stop the car to take a closer look at the black and white cranes resting and feeding in the nearby fields on their way from Russia or Scandinavia to the Mediterranean or Africa. Their biannual epic feat amazes me and I have to stop and give thanks and wish them well as they continue on their journey.