A long letter from home

 I went to pick up MsX from nursery this week. (Sorry, MsX! Sorry! Not nursery, but pre-school, because she’s three and she’s a big girl now…This is what she would say to me.) 

And as we set off home down the road the first thing she said was “I love spring.”

“So do I,” I said.

And I do, but as I was hanging out the washing this morning, the opening lines of T S Eliot’s The Waste Land came to mind…

April is the cruellest month, breeding  

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing 

memory and desire, stirring 

dead roots with spring rain.

…because I feel in a weird frame of mind right now. Boxed in, restless and useless, with a background anxiety. 

I’m sure the state of the world, and the possible future of the world is mostly to blame for my unease, but it’s also the spring, and it’s also my age, with all that implies - waning energy, awareness of the shortness of life, trying to make the most of every day while also trying to plan for an increasingly uncertain future.

Every day my email inbox fills with messages from pressure groups - Campaign Against the Arms Trade, CND, Safe Passage, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Refuser Solidarity Network, Jewish Voice for Peace, the Good Shepherd Collective, Upbeat Communities, the BDS movement, the Good Law Project… and most of them want me to do something - write a letter, give money, sign a petition, go on a march, and I sometimes do what they ask, and sometimes I don’t read the emails - it’s all too much. But I can’t delete them either, because that would mean that what they’re writing about isn’t important, or that the plight of the people they’re writing about doesn’t matter. So the emails sit there, accusing me, worrying me.

I have been working on a painting for three weeks now and it’s been making me miserable because I can’t get it right, so I’ve finally put it to one side. I might go back to it in the future. Dave says that all artists have paintings they put to one side and keep returning to, sometimes over years, because they can’t get them right. I am sure that’s true. The trouble is I have no idea what I want to paint instead.

This  - above - was the blog post I was writing yesterday, and it didn’t come to a conclusion, except I thought I might use this Mary Oliver poem, which is always a comfort.

But this morning when I woke up and the sun was shining and the tender new leaves of the copper beech looked even more beautiful than yesterday

Yesterday afternoon at 4pm

This morning at 6.24

and I thought it would be better to write a post listing things that happened this week that made me happy, so…

The new leaves - particularly on the copper beeches and silver birches in our garden

Sitting in Meeting last Sunday morning with all the other Friends, with the sun pouring in through the high windows

Sitting in Chrissie’s garden with her on Tuesday, eating lunch

FaceTiming with Lux in Colorado on Tuesday

The time I spent with MsX on Thursday

Having lunch with Dave on Friday at our favourite cafe, The Old Smithy at Beeley

Talking to Liz on the phone yesterday morning early

Hanging out the washing in the sunshine yesterday

After tea yesterday when Dave brought home a wonderful doll’s house we bought from the small ads for MsX to play with and it was ten times nicer than the ad had led me to believe it was, so much so that I wanted to ring up and invite the family to come over today just so we could play with it.

I realise that bike rides aren’t in the list and that’s because when it wasn’t raining I had other commitments.

So. There you are. That’s me.

How are YOU all coping with this increasingly disturbing and uncertain world?