The Roaring
I am rattling my cage
See below for: Live appearance dates in London & Brighton / Utah retreat details
Hello,
I’m feeling it today: the roaring. I think it arrives with summer, after the fires of Beltane. The mornings get lighter, the birds sing, the world burgeons into greenness and I start to hear it, a kind of bellowing inside, like the white noise barrage of the sea. I feel it in my whole body, my entire being taut and straining to enact.
I am rattling my cage, I write in my notebook.
I am rattling my cage, grasping at the bars of my own constraints - my own slow motion - and trying to break my way out. There is so, so much to do in this life, so many ideas, so many ways I could help. I feel like I do so little. I am so slow. I get slower with age. My capacity does not match my desire.
The roaring is painful on days like this. It rushes through me, a brute-force wind. It is searching, unforgiving. It asks why I dare be so still in the face of all this everything, all this need, all this possibility. Sometimes, it materialises as envy, as a parade of people who always seem to manage to do far more, who are consistent, and brave and energetic in ways that I am not.
The best of my work has emerged from the roar. The worst of my madnesses, too. It searches out the rawest parts of me, the exposed nerves. It flays away another layer of skin. It unravels loose threads and wheedles its way into all the concave parts of me, all the voids.
I am empty; fill me!
The void, insubstantial as it is, cannot oblige.
It can, in fact, only scour out more emptiness. It can only conjure a dozen phantom realities that cannot exist. It can only veil the world that does exist, the work that can be done.
The roar is a bad friend, a faithless lover, a monstrous animal that I allow to rage around my house. I once mistook it for a pet, but I know better now. It is a wild thing, fierce and beautiful. I know better than to trust it, but then I also know better than to be its jailer.
Either way, it has taken residence. We watch each other warily from opposing corners. I try to keep it in its place, to keep in mind its cunning. Now and then, I throw it some meat, just to watch the shimmer of its coat, just to feel its elemental power.
Notices
✵ Details of my retreat in Utah this October are now live - booking opens on Wednesday 15th May.
✵ UK live appearances:
Tuesday 14th May: Brighton Festival with Cariad Lloyd
Monday 20th May: Backstory Books, Balham
Saturday 25th May: Cooking, Eating and Feeling Through the Seasons with Angela Clutton, part of the British Library’s Food Season
Events for Paid Subscribers
True Stories Book Club
Our next Book Club guest is Samantha Irby, talking about her latest book of essays, Quietly Hostile - on Wednesday 22nd May at 6pm UK/1pm ET/10am PT.
Creative Questions
Elissa and I will be answering your Creative Questions on Crowdcast on Tuesday 4th June at 6pm UK/1pm ET/10am PT with a playback available straight afterwards.
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
WOW WOW WOW Katherine! "My capacity does not match my desire." YES. I felt this so deeply. As you said, our limitations/slowness continue to increase as we age, and some of us deal with limitations much more than others, much earlier than others. The balance of pushing against our limitations and knowing when to stop--that balance is often too fine a line to manage, so we do our best...sometimes the discouragement of not fulfilling our capacity and sometimes burning out too quickly for trying to reach our desires. I struggle so frequently trying to find that balance. This post was comforting---many of us in this community connect so much with this struggle for balance--limitations we wish would go away. Thank you for writing this--xoxo
The roar--this is fantastically apt, I feel it too and have never given a name to it, somehow acknowledging it as it is feels revelatory. It also reminds me of the Jacobean era play the Roaring Girl, about Moll Cutpurse, a woman who refused to act as society wanted, gender-bending and stealing and all other mayhem.