Whole New Worlds

Hello from Namibia! At last I have made it to long dreamed Africa, visiting my sister who is living here for a while. I am experiencing a very different life from home: my sister has children whereas I do not, and we are enjoying the school holidays together. First, a few days in the interior seeing giraffe, elephant, rhino, zebra and antelope in a brown savannah, where trees were caught in perpetual autumn under a too-hot sun.  The rains hadn’t come last winter and the sky remained empty of clouds. 

Then, we drove to the cool coast where the Atlantic breaks against the Namib desert and salt is harvested in white industrial pyramids amid cormorant and flamingo that gather on the brackish waters.

 

My opportunities to travel the world are limited, and even when I do, how deep can my immersion be? But stories, they open up the worlds and times to me I cannot travel and stay.  They challenge my assumptions, broaden my mind, develop my compassion.

I recently listened to Jaspreet Kaur's "Brown Girls Like Us" on BBC Podcasts.  As she told her story she challenged me to reflect on the times I have othered others.  She freed me from the squirming embarrassment of those recollections because I am one of those she appreciates have learned - are learning - how not to make unintended micro-aggressions.  She generously opens up her world, her experience, culture, beliefs, family, friends, childhood, her present life.  She demonstrates how much we have in common in our human experience, the silenced childhood emotions, the fears we took too long to face, the parents we took too long to understand, the joy of reaching the now and the curiosity for the years that lie ahead.

Jaspreet’s was not the first story I have immersed myself in from another culture, and it won’t be the last.  She has been added in my heart to countless others who have opened up new worlds to me, including those that have let me live in the past and in extraordinary possible futures.  They offer me a kaleidoscope of lenses through which to look and feel.  I am the left richer for it, and am ever grateful. These books, whether fiction or true-story or somewhere in between, provide doorways I can return to again and again and to all those writers I say thank you for taking the courage and time to welcome me in. 

Story Eaters

This is the book my father’s mother gave him, and nearly half a century later he gave me. A tatty old book that opened up to me bright rivers of words that sing in my mind still.

 

As a solitary teenager, I read anything I could get my hands on. My mother went back and forth to the library while I was at school to keep me fed. I scoured my parents' bookshelves and read whatever caught my eye, age appropriate or not.  Why? Because I loved stories, because I wanted to escape, because I wanted to taste existences I did not have courage or lifetime enough to inhabit.

In these habits I was just being human: we are story eaters and can never have enough.  These endless permutations of words are sand whispering along a breath that began in the beginning and never stopped.  They are waterdrops streaming through fingers that will hold their memory as long as flesh lives on the bone.  They rise from their river beds to become clouds on the dusty wind, that will fall and reassemble on the grateful earth below. They gather in pools that shiver with facsimiles of the stories they once were, and we take from them and give each other to drink. And the thirsty ground takes what is left and pushes forth green shoots that become the crops on which we feed.

I have a reputation among my friends for storing memories.  How?  Because they became stories.  Schoolfriend Helen, aged 13, wrote in her Battle of Marathon essay, "There was much death on both sides.  And in the middle."  I told this snatched delight to my family over dinner.  I'm still telling it to this day.  I make sense of life’s challenges by finding the narrative. I trace my feelings back to their origins and mix them with remembered things and those ever shifting stories are me, whether I enjoy them or not. 

I am a story eater and I can never have enough.

Life's a beach, curated.

Under Devon blue skies and the too-hot sun we have had a happy and busy week marking our first anniversary here and the launch of my new business venture.  A year ago we were in the Midlands and a long way from the sea.  Now that has all changed.  One late afternoon we went to the beach for a walk just because we could, and I walked in the breaking surf where it meets the exposed sand.

There have been conversations about how we present curated lives to the world on Facebook, Insta, Twitter and the rest.  Mostly perfect moments with a few carefully selected honesties thrown in, that may show vulnerability but rarely show us at our truly black and awful worst.  But we've always done it.  Handprints and hunting scenes drawn with ochre and spit in sacred caves.  Fearsome deeds and heady frolics in ritual dance on pots and urns.  Philosophies on parchment and diary entries on pages that fade.  Photographs taken with care so as not to waste the film.  Home movie memories with voice-overs recorded in telephone tones.  I am talking, of course, about when we take the time to capture our images, not the unguarded moments when we leak the bleakest sides of ourselves.  That is a whole other conversation.

I've collected stories since I was a child.  Even as I leafed through my paternal grandmother's black and white photographs of dogs and big houses and sunny Cornish days, I pieced together from other sources dark tales of a beloved brother lost at war, a baby sister spoilt to passivity, an arranged marriage, glorious eccentricities and petty spites, a life that ended alone in alcoholism and tears.  

So please, enjoy this perfect moment with me.  I hope it makes you smile.  But do not envy it me.  My life is exactly like yours.  There are moments like these that melt my insides to sugared liquid sunshine.  And there are moments when I just get it all wrong.  There are vicious spiked moments of self-loathing that raise my fists against me and spit nasty at those trying to care.  And there are moments when I can lift another person simply with my smile, and notice their new hair, new coat, new shoes and remember to thank them for a passing kindness.  In the midst of such inconsistency and the power of all that is dark and bad, these moments of nobility and joy and truth and compassion keep us moving on, and it is good that we pin them down.  Because from out of the bottom of the casket of evil things rises Hope triumphant, and she unfurls her vast and shining wings and is bigger and higher than all dark swarms below.  The dark cannot put out a light.  But the light will always lift the dark, however small.

Welcome to my life!

Hi, I'm Anna and on the whole, I like being me.  Like many of you, 2020-21 has been a year of huge reflection and change.  The above picture is of my late Uncle's mandolin: we don't know where he got it - perhaps in France during the second world war - but we know it was with him when he went up to Cambridge after the war to study.  I thought it suitably summed up the journey and learning that this year has brought. I would love it if you would join me on my ongoing adventures.

Let me fill you in on how I got to where I am now.  As 2021 dawned, I was living in historic Warwick in the Midlands and was celebrating my 11th anniversary in my job.  I was happy, but suffering burnout despite calling on a whole host of resources to keep me going - prayer, participation in a coaching club, mindfulness techniques, CBT techniques, enjoying nature and last but not least my husband's endless support.  Sometimes, there's no option but to take time and rest and recover. 

When R and I got together, we had a vision that one day we would have a home where we could offer paying guests a place of peace where they could take a break from every day life, a sort of B&B-plus, if you will.  But - life.  The years slipped by and we thought less and less about this plan.  

Burnout brings brokenness, but also opportunity: it is the husk splitting to release the first stirrings of new life from the heart of the seed.  We realised now was the time, if we wanted to take it.  We sold our house, and began the search for a new home - anything, anywhere within 3 hours of the Midlands and 30 minutes of the sea.  We were too worn out to consider our vision and had almost given up when we found it: a house in mid-Devon with room for guests.  And so August 2021 saw us setting off down the M5 in convoy, with the removal van not far behind.

Of course, plans took longer than we thought.  Recovery from burnout is slower than you expect - I needed so much sleep.  The house had more to do than we anticipated.  R, who worked remotely anyway, continued seamlessly in his job and I found a temporary part-time position to ease me back into working life.  As we celebrate our first year here, we find ourselves in a great community among our neighbours and at church, the urgent jobs on the house are done, and I have just launched my new Virtual Assistant Business - Priory Secretarial Services.   

What the next year brings, we cannot be sure, but watch this space as our dreams unfold!