'Questions that have patiently waited for you'
Reading corner
Sometimes
by David Whyte
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.
Healing notes
Beyond the binary of choosing and un-choosing lives the many ways we claim disability and chronic illness. We make peace. We accept. We celebrate. We let go. We find pride. We live with ambiguity. We face mortality. We reject pity and overcoming. We build community and grow accustomed to isolation. We seek interdependence. We turn away from expectations of hyper productivity. We insist on what we know about our body-minds. We learn to balance loss and pride. We deal with frustration and pain.
I loathe to define claiming. Sometimes it lives near an active choosing of disability; other times it shares much in common with un-choosing; often it is laced with contradiction.
Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfections
It seems right that in the post marking my year of writing weekly about healing that I talk a bit about this trajectory of owning and accepting my limitations, dealing and hating the frustration of the pain.
It has been an ongoing journey. One I understand and don't understand all at once. It is a mixture of finding community online (on chronic illness twitter) to making friends who are also in pain or living with chronic illnesses and being isolated - no one else ever sees the lows as much, the days of I cannot do this. People empathise and are there for you. Yet in some part, being ill has isolated me. I stay home more. I hesitate to travel as much. I also struggle more with depression and anxiety - so I feel compelled to be home with my cats who change everything.
It is not really a sad or pitiful tale. But one full of contradictions and of course change.
I am grateful for the times we live in. The times where I can read books by women with chronic pain, watch movies about chronic exhaustion, text a friend feeling anxiety, all from my bed, and feel a bit less alone in it all.
If I have learnt anything, it is that community care is a beautiful thing and I wish for more of it.
Dear you,
I haven't been cooking much as I have had a bad bout of illness but getting better slowly.
If you have any suggestions for recipes that comfort you, that care for you in a way that food does, then send them over to me?
I would love to test and eat all the comfort food we might have in this community.
Thank you for this past year of presence. I am grateful.
(Also yay. It's been a year since this started! <3)
Love, kindness and warmth,
Nidsitis
'I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: Am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?' - Rainer Maria Rilke