Thresholds of Longing

“The secret that our poets and philosophers have been trying to tell us for centuries, is that our longing is the great gateway to belonging.” -Susan Cain, Bittersweet

I’ll be honest, the minute I set an intention to write a newsletter about such lofty things as art and beauty and community, I instantly began feeling the silent cultural pressure to give this whole thing the sheen of one of those very pretty magazines about living ‘the simple life’ and it would be easy to do that. After all, I live in an intergenerational community in some former stables and we do indeed keep handsome animals and have a nice garden with fruit which we preserve in mason jars for the winter. We have meaningful chats round tables of homemade food and make fresh Christmas wreaths. There are wellies and wicker baskets, stories and warm hearths and large cups of tea. We forage. Oh, and I illustrate children’s books for a living and sell whimsical artwork, a ridiculously privileged career path, a one-in-a-million opportunity. My wee poetic and aesthetic heart is quite pleased by it all and the people-pleaser in me wants to write things that feel uplifting and look pretty for your inbox.

For example, I could just share photos like this one of my little one playing ukulele to the hens and be all “Look at us, aren’t we great?”, but the unwritten subtext that underlines a lot of aesthetically pleasing online content is ‘So, why isn’t YOUR life like this, eh?’. I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling a bit tired of measuring my life against that sort of thing, so I’ll do my best to push past all that right away and tell a more rounded and truthful story.

Our community is in the middle of one of the poorest parts of the country in Northeast England. Life just beyond the threshold of our front gate is full of the challenges you’re hearing about on the news presently; poverty, high unemployment, lower than national average literacy, lower life expectancy, terrible mental health outcomes for children, higher risk all round of the desperation that leads folk to tragic ends. It’s a pretty similar story to the one I grew up in, albeit in a different part of the county, so I empathise with the paralysis that sets in when it just feels like nothing is going to change (and sometimes I honestly feel afraid of being hemmed back into that kind of situation because I know how easily the things we build our certainty on can disappear).

A friend of mine who was a GP in a deprived part of a Scottish city puzzled aloud recently in my company that the area he worked in was close to an area of exquisite natural beauty and yet people rarely went, despite it being feasible to simply pack a sandwich and walk there without spending money. His question made me catch my breath. Somehow, when we suffer, a threshold forms which curtails our longing until it falls silent, to make us hang our heads and feel that beautiful things might not be meant for us. Before we know, we are strangers to the forest and the shore and to each other too. This, of course, can be true in more affluent places in different ways. We all suffer the pain of disconnection in our ways.

So when I arrive back at our current home, the gate becomes the ‘thin place’ where longing is most palpable. I have yearned my whole life for the sort of community we live in now. Though we’re not perfect and we fall out over childish things like any other family, these people have seen me through five years of the unimaginable; pandemic, illness, divorce and other disasters and heartbreaks (and I hope I’ve contributed something to them too) By some miracle, I have learned here how to let others love me and to try to let go of the self-sufficiency that served me well in early life but later became a prison that prevented me from being known by others more deeply. I have lived in their shelter. When we have our warmest moments, I catch a glimpse of that potential world that ordinarily feels just out of reach, where I am simply accepted and where there is much to laugh about, and our greatest concern of the day is a game of scrabble. This is what ‘belonging’ most likely feels like to my imagination and I almost can’t believe it exists here and now in this way. I yearn for it to continue forever and yet I know it cannot because nothing does.

When I cross the gate threshold the other direction, there is a longing of a different sort. I yearn to be able to share this good stuff of life with more people. I wonder aloud often why I’ve been able to experience such a lovely life and not everyone has, and I feel both sad and guilty. I certainly did nothing to deserve this goodness. I long to see that better world become more of a reality for us all. It just doesn’t ever feel fair. There is so much sweetness and yet so much disappointment about the gap between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’. I suppose that’s the risk of cultivating a big imagination- you can see things that don’t yet exist, and it is both beautiful and sad.

I look in the mirror too and there is a longing to see a person looking back that reflects my potential. The Gillian of my imagination is not the one currently looking at me. Ouch, it hurts. Time is running out to become her.

I think about stories of lost potential I’ve heard. I think of the clear and beautiful singing voice of my grandad who spent more than 50 years not being able to use that voice in a noisy factory. I think about people from my primary school- the funny, witty, creative children they were and some of the cruel life circumstances that happened subsequently to snatch it all away. In my mind right now for some reason, I’m thinking of several friends who’ve had their potential crushed by abusive relationships, people of all backgrounds. I think about all the other people, you who are reading this, and about the potential that is so well hidden and yet, still waiting to be realised if we’re brave.

Listening to Longing

When I make art, I am often trying to clumsily reach out and touch or describe that better world, to see if I can hold the beautiful things in mind more than the suffering, to see if I can visualise and feel and become the better thing. More recently, I’ve learned that the thing demanding my attention right now is sorrow. I read the book ‘Bittersweet’ by Susan Cain. In it, she describes listening to our longings because they are pointing us on the path towards belonging. She describes deliberately using creativity to engage our sorrow, to sit with it and use creativity to transform it. I think that’s my very important work of this moment and I’m finally ok with sharing sorrowful work, because I recognise that sorrow connects us all, that it is a fact of our humanity and that it is better carried together than alone.

On the other side of sorrow, I truly believe all that potential we long for is still there. No matter our age, our experiences, it is not too late. We still have hands or feet or vocal chords and we all have imaginations, deep and vast internal landscapes where we can create something different. Over the threshold of accepting our sorrow is the possibility of belonging with others, trusting them with sharing what is inside us and maybe working together to make some of that a reality in this ‘here and now’ world. I am willing to try and shake myself out of the place of pain right now and go after that, I’m willing to do my best to share it here and I hope to meet like-minded souls along the way on this journey.

Funnily enough, nature has a way of showing us that beauty and potential was right there all along. This murmuration occurred right above our front gate, swooshing back and forth over that threshold and paying no heed to it from the air. It put me in mind of an illustration I’d already made, the second such ‘tingly’ moment this week of inner and outer landscapes aligning. It feels like there’s something in that and my 7 year old now totally believes me that I can draw the future. Perhaps, in a way though, we all actually can draw, sing and create the future we all need together.

Some things I’ve connected with recently that you might enjoy:

• I love this book ‘When I See Red’ by Britta Teckentrup. I don’t think I’ve seen such a visceral interpretation of real rage and pain in a children’s book before and it resolves beautifully by the end. It’s a ground-breaking book in my view and I wept over it.

• This Leonard Cohen Song, Come Healing. “None of us deserving of the cruelty or the grace”

• The book ‘Bittersweet’, by Susan Cain

• The sheer poetry of the drystone walling and photography work of Kristie De Garis, thresholds of a different kind :)

Housekeeping: This newsletter will usually go out on a Friday each week. I have no plans to paywall this content and will keep it free, but you’re welcome support this endeavour if you wish, even if that is just by sharing it with someone.