July Please
The month that was: leaving one home, reconnecting with another; not wanting what I don't have
Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor
- Louise Bourgeois
This month’s end offered a surprise guide of purple buddleia — petal cones drooping gaily from railway banks and private gardens and public parks to make an incantation: you are here, you are here, you are here.
Ryan and I flew to the UK after a brief and frenzied week of preparation, not only for this relatively last-minute trip, but also to leave the little house on Waiheke Island where we had been living since our release from New Zealand’s Managed Isolation and Quarantine in late 2021.
Limbo is my address once more. Plates and pots got boxed up and dropped off for safekeeping. House stays and sits will be the norm for a while, while the next thing takes its time to emerge. April’s fear has come to pass (it is painful to be squeezed out of a place that is a home place). I’m sad but I’m also not. I’m tired and scared, but thrilled to find living within me the animation of a question mark.
Today, on this last day of July, I’m back in the town where I first grew up, visiting my grandmother Joanie. I sobbed to see her waiting on the platform when the train pulled in. The town’s tidal basin was full and still, and waiting at the house were the same two dogs with their same good greetings.
Barley on one side, cows on the other; a hedgerow of firs where the wood pigeons nest. A house filled with photographs of my siblings and me and our cousins and second cousins. Oh, to be so loved! A miracle! This house is a treasure of a through-line in this root-troubled life. It turns out that being in London for a few days did some true good for my root troubles, too. Untrammelled notes written on the walking high of tens of thousands of steps:
July 24th: Astonished and grateful for the relief rolling in on my first time back here since the border. That locked-down-in-London self did the legwork, she suffered but she did establish a relationship with this place, she broke it in and didn’t even know it and now, two years later, it all feels familiar and warm and weighty.
I have ballast in the world! I have ballast and I wasn’t safe and couldn’t fight, so I tossed it overboard to take flight. But today I have the ballast back on my person and the weight is so pleasing, the weight makes me feel real, gravity can act upon me, I exist, my own future feels real — not a known future, but the knowing that there is one, or many. In these pandemic years my future has felt foreclosed and foreshortened. Could life be back? Could life be me? I have nothing and I have everything, how can this be!
July 25th: Huge urge to verbally process everything. Huge urge to forgo processing and blurt out, again and again, I AM SO HAPPY TO BE IN LONDON
July 26th: Still surreal with jetlag but my heart is okay, I am going to live live live.
July 27th: This trip is a recalibration. From lockdowns to the island, I forgot what it ever even was to be held by a city — people being people and some people being horribly rich, yes, but not everyone being rich, everyone making do and going to and fro. Everyone is here! Every second a life, every corner a story!
July 28th: A man on a bike peddling with his legs and dancing with his arms up Hackney Road; a man wearing an empty baby carrier while smoking a cigarette in Clerkenwell; a man sitting on a bench in London Fields exclaiming down the line, let’s do this!
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Today I’ve walked fewer steps, but I’m still feeling the flow. I feel an insistent tug of aliveness. But all this life-affirmation at the same time as the daily heralds of collapse? I told you the familiar parts but I didn’t tell you the queasy new updates in my old home town: that the forest near Joanie’s house has been flattened by freak storms, or that we can no longer walk the dogs on the beach on account of the number of washed-up seabirds - dearest kittiwakes, guillemots, razorbills and gulls - and the risks of avian flu.
I know in my bones, even more now that I have recently connected to something good in my past and future, that these times call on us to be students of what it means to live. We have to want to live, and want for our descendants and the memory of our antecedents to live. We have to want it so badly that we live inside longer time spans than feels comfortable. We have to rage and rest, rage and rest. We have to want less and more all at once.
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So many of us were devastated by the death of Shuhada'/Sinéad this month. May her memory be a blessing, a bravery, a benediction:
I'm walking through the desert
And I am not frightened although it's hot
I have all that I requested
And I do not want what I haven't got
I have learned this from my mother
See how happy she has made me
I will take this road much further
Though I know not where it takes me
I have water for my journey
I have bread and I have wine
No longer will I be hungry
For the bread of life is mine
I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, Sinéad O'Connor
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Until next month may you have water for your journey,
H x
I’ve just returned to Melbourne after 6 weeks in England. I had the same sense of joy, of being held by something I knew, even when there was a scarier side, the weeks without rain!
I love your point about thinking, living, with longer timescales, embracing ancestors and descendants as we puzzle over living now. It catches exactly how I feel too
Welcome back Hannah! Your monthly recollections are something I dearly look forward to. Time is really such an illusion - how can the lockdown and the start of the pandemic be three years ago! How have I been reading these newsletters for years now? Sending you love - thank you for sharing your thoughts - this morning they were the water for my journey into a new month. Best, Momina