Shallow little thoughts

Merton, Garner and the care of two kids

I do not have the energy for deep thoughts right now. Just some shallow little ideas that have been poking about my mind for the past couple of weeks.

Since we’ve been back in the UK we’ve been getting used to our new routine. This is how it goes: for most of the week I stay in Somerset with our two children whilst my husband commutes back and forth to London. I ferry our eldest to nursery and then work around the edges as best I can. An average week entails several meltdowns (from both child and parent); numerous gin and tonics; and several misfiring attempts at “writing”.

Now I’m home alone more frequently, I find myself growing frustrated with my brain, or rather, I find that my brain gets frustrated by its lack of use. So it’s important to try and keep things turning over. Feeding it little gobbits of writing or thought. Anyhow, here are some things that are in my brainspace right now:

1. This prayer by the trappist monk Thomas Merton

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

This prayer was read at a drop-in session on Ignatian spirituality I went to at our friend’s church in Texas. Hearing it read out loud that afternoon I was struck by the unvarnished honesty and vulnerability that Merton is able to capture in his words. It’s very much a ‘I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing’ kind of prayer.

I am not consciously praying at the moment, aside from writing. So I find Merton’s line ‘I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it’ comforting. It speaks of a God who works at an intricate but hidden manner in our lives. A God who doesn’t need us to be saying the right things all the time in order to understand the true nature of our souls.

2. Ballet practice

Last Friday I went to my first ballet class in about fifteen years. It was unusually wild and impulsive of me, but I loved every second of it. Isn’t it strange how we do things for decade(s) of our life and then suddenly stop cold turkey? That’s what happened for me with ballet, which I practised multiple times a week from the age of three or four, until I stopped to focus on my Alevels.

I felt quite nervous about the prospect of ‘adult ballet’ – worried that I’d find myself and my pelvic floor in some strange hinterland, but I needn’t have worried. All bar one of the women in the class had danced growing up, including the 70 year old posh lady from Bruton who told me I was wearing ‘the right kind of togs’.

3. The joy of other people’s diaries

I’m reading the Australian writer Helen Garner’s collected diaries at the moment, and it really does feel like you are observing her brain at work. She writes of the cultural discourse around the film Apocalypse Now and laments that her own work felt ‘piddling, narrow, domestic’ by comparison. I love her, she makes me feel seen.

4. This quote from Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar

In sobriety, he still sometimes erroneously expected this of the universe— a stark shock of embodied rapture, the angel dropping from the sky to smack him with clarity’s two- by- four. Cyrus was beginning to realize that the world didn’t actually work this way, that sometimes epiphany was as subtle as a friend showing you something they saw on Twitter.

P.S. Speaking of diaries—last Sunday I wrote the first entry in ‘The Allotment Diaries’, which will chronicle the adventures of our new plot here in Frome.

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