Love is the Ache of a Bone Mending

And, you don't have to do your work alone

Grape ivy, the last of the year’s great forage plants for pollinators is just coming into bloom where I live. The scent of honey is on the air along with the hum of hoverflies and bees.

This week I am sat here at my desk with a hard stone in my belly. I could write what I would have written and not mention the chill in my guts, but apart from plainly being false, it would also not serve anyone. Perhaps I will always be a teacher at heart, like both my siblings and most of my cousins, aunts and uncles. To fight the explicatory urge to find lessons in almost everything would be as futile as pulling out my own thumbnail. I’d be useless for a while and it’d only grow back. And then I’d find it was a perfect metaphor for…

If you’d like to go straight to this week’s planned short piece, scroll down to the picture of the dog.

Knit-Bone

Readers who have been here a while may know that I have not consumed video news at all since the week before 9/11, and that I rarely engage with moving images of any kind at all, beyond deliberately watching the occasional episode of a classic vintage television show with my partner. I never see moving adverts on TV but I occasionally see them, sound-off, on Instagram, before swiping them away. I keep abreast of news via judicious reading of reliable text-based sources, at least once a week, but never daily. So, when I was looking at some images by an Irish artist Dee Mulrooney this morning, only through reading the caption did I find out about a current court case in Avignon, France. This news, in addition to the recent frankly horrific reports of life under the Taliban for Afghan women and the rapes and attacks on women by armies and militias in numerous ‘forever wars’ across four continents¹, I came back to the dark place today that many women I know have privately shared with me over the years.

On days like this we do not leave the house. We stay indoors and try to put the violence out of our minds. We reach out to our partners and quietly ask for support and reassurance. We secretly go through in our minds all the attacks, assaults, domestic abuse, rapes and threats we and our sisters, mothers, best friends and neighbours have received from men, known and unknown, in our lives. We spend our vital energy moving them up and down the scale of ‘well that wasn’t so bad’ to ‘I am so furious I was so powerless’. We have all had such attacks. I do not know a single woman over the age of twelve who is free of this burden, not in the UK, the US, Canada, or mainland Europe, where most of my friends and colleagues live. We think of emailing our numerous wonderful, trustworthy, beloved male friends and family whom we trust with our hearts and our lives, and want to say to them ‘thankyou!’ and ‘yes, not all men!’ And then realise what madness it is that we would be reaching out to them rather than them seeking to reassure us. But still we do it.

So I am going to say something unequivocal right now and then probably not talk about it for another two years. This should not need to be said, but given the fact that a significant percentage of all the men in a perfectly ordinary small town in France took up the invitation from another man to have sex with his drugged wife, and not one of the men who turned down the offer even thought to notify the police, well, it’s worth my typing time.

There is no situation where rape, sexual assault or any form of non-consensual sex is ok. This is equally true for women, children and men. Sexual violence is always wrong. If a person is not in a state where they can give clear consent (ie, drugged unconscious, drunk, or being a minor, for example), then no consent can be deemed given and sexual activity of any kind, including intimate touching, should not take place. Rape should never be a weapon of war. There is no valid philosophical, anthropological or religious excuse for rape. It is ethically wrong, like slavery and torture. Just because it has happened in human history, and still happens, does not mean we should accept it.

It so happens that I would call myself a feminist, in the sense that I believe women and men are of equal value as humans and they should be paid similarly for similar work, that their testimony should be given equal weight in law. Unlike some feminists, I believe men and women are different to each other in both broad and specific ways, not just anatomically, and I believe this is not a sad but a wonderful thing. I think we are made to be excellent partners, friends, family members and community with each other. Whether you believe we evolved this sexually dimorphic form as humans, or whether we were created thus in a moment by God, neither of these options constitutes a mistake. We are beautifully adapted, like so many other creatures, to life on this unspeakably beautiful planet. We all need each other for this. I do not believe it helps men or women to be at war with each other.

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I have met a lot of powerful people in my time, people whose decisions and whims could mean real pain, homelessness, degradation or poverty for another. I have been on the receiving end of homelessness, both physical and mental injury, threats of violence and poverty due to the actions of men, from (now-dead) family members, landlords, neighbours and strangers. This is absolutely unremarkable amongst all the women I know well. Here’s the thing: every person I have met who wields that power over others and controls or meddles in people’s lives for their own amusement or personal gain, is an unhappy, tormented soul. These people are chased from one compulsive action to another and are completely mystified by other people’s solidarity, generosity or joy. They see other people’s simple pleasures as a personal affront and do not understand when folk are motivated by altruism or community spirit rather than selfish reasons. They feel that they are not in on some joke.

Only that last line is correct. There is indeed a cosmic joke and it behoves us to be in on it and not become the butt of it, as those who hoard wealth, property, power and physical control over others are. We are born and live and we will die and there is no escaping this. We can only ‘keep’ what we have freely given away. Everything we hoard we will lose. Everyone we love will die.

Yet in loving and grieving them they never really leave us, and are as present in our hearts as the last time we clinked glasses with them and raised a toast. We are meant to be here with each other, the humans, the non-humans, the men and the women, the vastly different personalities, nations, lifeways: together, even though that’s challenging at the best of times. It’s the whole point. If there were only one way of solving this conundrum we’d all be doomed to a totalitarian nightmare, and we’ve seen plenty of those rise and fall even in recent history.

Luckily there are as many wonderful ways of restoring the writhing, full-blooded, not-at-all-purist ways of true intercommunal friendship as there are people of good heart.

To the many great, wonderful, beloved men in my life and to all the readers here: in what new, or renewed, ways can you stand beside and honour the women in your life this week? What might be your example to show other men that we are all meant to be a team? Maybe your religious faith can give you some shining examples, you can draw on them. Maybe your lifetime of reading, or your experiences with dear ones can be the kernel of a warm conversation that makes a woman you care about feel less alone, angry or scared under the current deluge of dispiriting events.

Because I assure you, a lot of us are feeling pretty alone, angry and scared this week. Even those of us who never talk about these things in public or online and whose lives are full of autonomy, joy and an abundance of excellent men. Like me.

I am suggesting that we all stand down from this pointless war that no-one asked us to fight, and that only makes even the ‘winners’ miserable. It is a waste of our precious human vitality. I recommend radical friendship as the method and measure of our much-needed renewal. The happiest people of either sex I know are secure in their partnerships with people of both sexes, (whether they are gay, straight, celibate or otherwise…) They do not try to control people or life. They delight in the natural process and see the Great Pattern in all things, especially in their spouse or partner, their family and friends. They are not trying to win anything, but they are always still wholeheartedly playing.

I have written this so that I do not have to sit here any longer and be disheartened. Despair is a thief and I flat-out refuse to hand over my only treasure, which is my hard-won, settled and open heart.

Buddy, never once still, hence the blur

You don’t have to do your work alone

For eight years now I have helped tend a spring. For decades before me, a local woman tended the spring until her health made all the bending down difficult. Perhaps for a month or two after taking on this sacred duty I felt that ‘special feeling’, which was most probably a form of pride. Pride, which is an inflammation of ego, like any swollen thing is rarely a healthy sign. Soon, I noticed stones had been cleared without my intervention, weeds removed or brambles trimmed and I realised, ‘I am not the only one doing this!’ Duly humbled, now aware that I was not the source of all spring-related loveliness, I started to look out for the others who spent their time tending this little place. I have watched all these years and yet I never caught anyone at it. It has remained a very lovely mystery. I felt like I was part of a secret society of shy, outdoor janitors, but with no coded handshake or secret nod and wink, I was at a loss as to who were my compadres.

This year, the well has been full of good fresh water rather than it running out in summer, as is the norm. We’ve had plenty of rain and no long dry spells. In May, I went to clear the large stones that had seemingly fallen into the watercourse where it runs out underneath a lintel stone, before heading underground. As I heaved a ‘mis-placed’ stone out of the channel, I noticed the water level suddenly drop. Quickly, and with prickling cheeks, I let the big stone fall back into the water; the water level quickly rose and settled again. Aesop’s fable of the crow and the pitcher leapt to mind and I chuckled to myself, as someone whose working life pretty much revolves around handling (colourful) stones and water, how could I have forgotten simple principles of physics, such as displacement? I now leave the stones as they are, placed by gravity, bored teenagers, or perhaps a giant crow the gaping bill of which I can barely imagine. The water stays at a level in which kids and dogs can happily paddle and pilgrims splash their faces. I stick to clearing the fallen leaves and twigs that build up by the rocks. It turns out that other people’s ideas for tending the well are at least as good as mine. I resolved to meddle less and to watch keenly for the effects of anything I did.

This summer, there has been a new mystery. Most days there have been a few fresh stones beside the well that were definitely previously in the well, with new stones in the well in their place. Also, there have been evenly spaced stones all the way up the path leading away for about 50 metres. Last week the puzzle was solved. It appears there is another fellow as keen on clearing the spring of bigger-than-fist-sized stones as I am. Meet Buddy, caught in only relative stillness in the above photo. His owner brings him past the well a few times each week but this was the first time I met him. A big German shepherd dog, he jumped straight in, tail wagging, and started gathering rocks in his jaws and lifting them out of the water, placing them on the grass to the side. He continued tirelessly for 20 minutes until no suitable stones remained. Then he started digging with his paws and working on gathering mouthfuls of mud and small pebbles, and clearing that too.

His owner looked on as my friends and I applauded and cheered him on in his classically canine delight-of-usefulness. His owner explained his habit of taking stones back up the path and said she’d been throwing a few stones back in in case ‘they were meant to be there’. Now she’ll leave them where her dog places them. We said, he’s the best of all of us at cleaning the well, especially in his equanimity towards anyone throwing stones back in.

I like knowing at least one other of my well-tending comrades and appreciate his boundless energy and simple sense of purpose. The rest of the human contingent, however, remain as yet unknown.

A friend leaves seeds for the wrens and robins.

This week’s good thing: The Writing Life by Annie Dillard. Dillard herself now describes the book as ‘an embarrassing nonfiction narrative…’ and although it is not perfect, it was exactly the bracing read I needed as I plunge back into daily writing. I think it was

Charlotte Du Cann

who once recommended this book to me. I really enjoyed it, especially the last chapter, describing the stunt pilot Dave Rahm and the rugged people of the western islands she once lived on. In a biography, her husband reported that this is the only part of the book she does not now repudiate. Well, I still think it’s worth reading, especially if like me you can sometimes sprawl and wriggle on the page. This will have us back at the desk with a red pen. Though to be honest, I think the best writing advice actually comes from Charlotte in her current Substack series on writing called The Uneasy Chair, followed by Undertow and recently the extremely useful piece Voice. All are worth your time.

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Heartwork online session on Saturday - reminder

Below the paywall on this recent post is the link to the upcoming online Heartwork movement session this Saturday 14th September at 4pm UK time (morning in USA). If you’d like to come along, become a paid subscriber, even just for the month. All you’ll need is to have already watched and moved along with the video of the previous class which at the bottom of this earlier post. See you there!

I’ll be teaching more of this Heartwork in person in Vermont USA on 18th October. You can read more about it and book here.

1. In the original version of this post I mentioned rapes taking place one particular continuing war but have now removed this, as my point is that any rapes in any wars are heinous.