Retreat Tier Note: I’m postponing our June Retreat until July. The new date will be: Saturday 12th July, 4pm - 7pm UK time. Log-on details are here.
I don’t honestly know what to say about June. Summer is here! Woohoo! Except I always complain about the heat at the best of times, and this year: well. H’s cancer surgery takes place in a few days’ time. He will lose a sizeable part of one lung, and we will not know how much until he’s wheeled out of the operating theatre. After that, an undefined pathway of recovery. June is looking a lot like an unknown quantity.
Illness is a season like any other. It will feel eternal while we are living it, but it will pass. All things do. But that’s not the same as being able to plan. I have a deeply modern desire for this illness to run on some kind of a schedule; to have a predictable set of milestones that I can note in my calendar. This is not going to happen. Life teaches you patience the hard way. I keep reminding myself that although this is a rare event in our lives, it is ordinary in the scope of humanity. It is, in its own way, normal.
But anyway: June. I am grateful for it, really. It will make a difference for H to come home in June rather than January. He’ll be able to sit out in the garden for a while each day, drinking one of the five trillion coffees he gets through (that’s a conservative estimate), and listening to the birds. This afternoon, I watered the sambucus nigra and thought how the umbels of white flowers will be out by the time he gets home. It’s a comforting notion, the garden blooming around us in the slow, difficult time.
Not long now until the solstice. It seems barely possible that this year’s light is nearly at its peak and we’re about to rebound towards winter. I spent the first half of the year trying every stupid trick in the book to halt the process unfolding before me: will-power, ill-temper, bargaining with the Gods, looking for signs. Not a bit of it worked. And now, as the light recedes again, what shall I be? I don’t know. Hopefully someone who softens a little more into this season of life.
My recent posts:
Pond life, chairs and the lucky kind of cancer
Discussing Out of Sheer Rage with Dan Richards
Weekend journaling prompt: our personal seasons
Forthcoming dates:
1st July: Subscribers’ silent sit
16th July: West Cork Literary Festival
What I’m loving in June:
Kentish strawberries (apparently my local strawberries are famous in Japan, which is why they’re suddenly so expensive)
Smelling every rose that I pass (unscientific opinion: yellow roses smell the best). Knoops Cacao Tea
The new season of Taskmaster
Sitting out late in the garden with a coat on
My new bathroom tiles (not for the fainthearted)
The world’s oldest fingerprint may be a clue that Neanderthals created art
Recommended reading:
Ripeness by Sarah Moss
William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love by Philip Hoare
Will There Ever Be Another You? By Patricia Lockwood
Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov
If you think a friend or loved one would enjoy The Clearing by Katherine May, gift subscriptions are available here | Website | Buy: Enchantment UK /US | Buy: Wintering UK / US | Buy: The Electricity of Every Living Thing UK / US
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It’s 5:20 am in London as I read your words, and the light is so bright I’ve been up since four. I found myself wondering: is this how drastic the difference between our pre-solstice days really is? At home, it’s gray at this hour; here, it might as well be late-morning. Years ago, when I briefly lived here, I never noticed it. Your words remind me of the metaphors: let go of the side of the pool, take your foot off the brake, take your hands off the steering wheel, drop the reins. And yet: love is the driver, so how the hell are we supposed to let go of control when it comes to our beloveds. If I ever find the answer, the world as I know it will change.
I’m glad to know that H will heal in the garden, in the sun, and that it’s not January.
I spent the winter solstice in hospital staring at the dark outside the hospital window and marvelling at a wren singing in the darkness.I couldn’t see the light but the bird sensed it’s coming. Now I am preparing for a milestone birthday and marvelling at plants killed by slugs last year returning! Life is very un work out able . Will continue to think of you all and that birds will sing for you .