look at today, but which was in a box I was moving. Some time ago I’d
marked this sentence about holidays.
“a time of physical and emotional well-being
when the self’s normal defences of tension, focus, image and desire are
in abeyance, a time when everything that has been planted can safely
creep up through the soil and begin to live in our consciousness."
Another wise writer spoke of the frustration and waste of what she called "unassimilated experience", by which she meant, too much living with no time for reflection, learning and adjusting our inner world to the happenings of the oputer world as they impinge on us.
Holidays have always been a mixture for me. I don't quickly adjust to being off. Some call it workaholism, but that isn't how it feels. More a way of life that is engaged, involved, structured and focused, and if a holiday is about change it means making time to disengage, reduce involvement, step outside of structure and widen focus – and that can take some time. A bit like taking off your specs and letting your eyes adjust; or coming to the end of a long run and slowing down, then walking, before stopping.
Kylie Minogue, not renowned for metaphysical gymnastics, once quipped, "I have had a holiday and I'd like to take it up professionally." I don't doubt she could afford it, but could she live with it. I could neither afford nor live with it. But I do recognise the need to create time and space to assimilate the experience of a busy life; and I too have planted thoughts that need a chance to "safely creep up through the soil".
So this year a longer than usual holiday, much of it spent in and around our new home here in Aberdeen. A sense of place, of roots, of connectedness, breaking in the new home like new shoes and the same aim – to feel comfortable walking the journey. Whe Jesus said "Come ye apart", it wasn't a statement about life falling to pieces or personal disinitegration. It was an invitation to step aside for a while; to stop long enough to ask what it is we are doing and why; to recover a sense of proportion and perspective and understand again that the world, even our own small worlds, get along quite well without us. Indispensability is the temptation of the proud, and I reckon most of us have a rich seam of that running through our egos.
Mary Oliver knows what I'm talking about:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
If our searching and longing, our waiting and hoping, our desring and expecting were distilled into one phrase, for me that would be it – finding and "announcing our place in the family of things." O for the wings of a dove? Nah. I prefer the beating purposefulness of the Canada goose, honking its way home and using its wing-beats to make it easier for the others around it.
This weekend the holiday starts.
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