December & January : Polaroids
“Son, do you know how love should be begun?”
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour...
- William Blake, Songs of Innocence 
Where do I start when the page is bare? I start as if I was photographing— with a small, single frame. Or, in the words of Carson Mcullers,
“Son, do you know how love should be begun?” The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old man leaned closer and whispered: “A tree. A rock. A cloud.”
Here’s to a full year of writing Polaroids. Thank you for reading these little things!
A Longing.
Sometimes I wake from a recurring dream about missing my English Literature exams at school. My chest beats with loss: not because I dreamt that I missed my exams, but because I miss the time in my life where I lived inside the same book for months. I miss the discussions, analyzing and writing so much about the work of other authors and dwelling with words, rhythm, character development, plot twists, sound and imagery. I wake because there is more I have yet to discover — something feels unfinished.
Our classroom was on the second floor of our Victorian school built by a Gothic revival architect. The ceilings were high, the windows sashed and paned, the walls, bricked and lined with bookshelves. If you were close enough to the window, you could see the northern edge of Salisbury Plain. Sitting, we were level with the trees.
We had a small class — there were less than ten of us. I owe much to my two teachers who journeyed with us through Blake and Eliot, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Shakespeare and Stoker, Baldwin and Hurston. My world grew. We travelled in time. We crossed borders and cultures. We learned about the human heart in fear, in love, in weariness, in envy, in bliss. I grew.
My twin sister's presence in those classes was like the perfect binding on a book spine. I lacked the confidence to share my opinions, but with her by my side, I had the courage to risk being misunderstood. Without her, I felt as if I would be loose pages, blank and tumbling. With her, I was coherent, bold and at my best.
“Son, do you know how love should be begun?”
During exam revision season, we would take our books up onto the hills and using the natural curve of the chalk downs like an Amphitheatre, we would recite excerpts to each other, memorising the passages. By the time it came to the exams, I was overflowing. I had the sound of playfulness in my ears. I knew my opinions mattered.
The blank page waited like a companion, an untaken photograph, the curve of a hill, a hidden horizon. The treetops were within reach and I wasn’t afraid.
An Eagle.
A few weeks before Christmas, my Dad, who was previously healthy and fit, was left temporarily paralyzed by a stroke. At the time, we didn’t know how temporary the paralysis was or whether his loss of senses would return. The powerlessness I felt hearing the news about Dad from 13,000 kilometeres away, would have been nothing compared to the vacuum of strength and powerlessness that he experienced in his body.
“I found myself having lost all control of my life,” Dad wrote to us recently, “Determination can only get you as far as God lets you; I have seen an 80-year-old man trying for two hours to lift a teacup but failing to.”
From his hospital bed, he sent us a poem: The Eagle, by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
He clasps the crag with crooked hands. Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring'd with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.
The Poet invites us to see as the eagle sees; we are perched beside him on the mountain walls. We are somewhere we could never be, if not for language. In just three lines we are isolated along with the eagle, cut off from the ocean beneath by the harsh assonance of the ‘c’ sound five times within eight words. This bird has ‘crooked hands’ – not claws — connecting me with a character rather than a detached predator.
In power, he was majestic and haloed, yet isolated. In falling, we, the reader, cannot follow. We can guess at what happens next, but we don’t know for sure.
A stroke patient’s crooked hands in lonely lands circled my thoughts.
I asked Dad why he loved the poem. The understatement, he said, and the precise descriptive language. Learning to walk and talk again from inside the hospital ward he said, “It explodes in one’s imagination. Less is more.”
It says so much, we agreed, with so little.
The Island Chapel.
Over a thousand years ago, a small group of Augustinian monks travelled to what they believed was the edge of the Western world. They built an ancient stone monastery, nestled into a sloping cliff-face, constructing a 600-step steep climb to its centre.
Some say this was the place where they prayed for the souls of Europe. Others say that their pursuit of God landed them here, on this isolated, jagged island – Skellig Michael – where bleakness and splendour hold hands.
The island is circled by harsh wild Atlantic winds all year round. The monks lived in a pervasive sea mist which crept into their stone beehive houses as they slept on rock floors. Every part of life was a physical struggle against the elements. Not a single tree grows on the island.
Somehow, one morning, a few years ago, without booking tickets and against all summer-holiday-odds, my twin sister and I had, squeezed onto the boat as two of the 180 visitors allowed to the island per day. As we climbed the dramatic stone staircase on the island, sitting every few steps to breathe deeply and recover from the sheer vertigo of the climb, we wondered, Did the sheer, heavenly, splendour of the place sustain them? Did the landscape beckon them Homewards?
In his writing the Irish poet, John O’Donahue explores the connections between landscape, beauty, our imaginations, our ‘homecoming’ and God,“If you can keep some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways at, now and again, you can endure great bleakness,” he reflects, using topographical language.
One image from that day remains; a small enclave in the ruins of the island chapel. A window in the wall perfectly frames an abandoned island close by; Skellig Mor, also known as Little Skellig. It’s the only remaining window of the small island chapel. It faces east towards the rising dawn light. If you stand in exactly the right place, the scene through the window is breath-taking; a sophisticated masterpiece is framed by rock : a splinter of shadowy, sharp land, speckled – softened even – against the sky, by white ridges.
This frame often comes to mind when life buffets me around and I can feel my resilience wearing thin. No compressed reflection can capture the sense of scale, the steep elevation above sea level, the thump of our heartbeats as we experienced vertigo, the salty taste of sea-air on our teeth, the shrieking seabirds, the whooshing wind.
Only as we caught the boat back to the mainland, we noticed what the white speckles were. Skellig Mor – was the resting place of thousands and thousands of white gannets. We later learn that it is one of the largest colonies of gannet birds in Europe, housing over 35,000 colonies.
“Son, do you know how love should be begun?”
The monks’ chapel window framed the homing, diving, freefalling birds. Were the birds here hundreds of years ago too? Did the monks glimpse the birds as they prayed?
Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? spoke Jesus once.
Fettered and free, careless in the care of God, a modern rendering of the same scripture describes. If you know God –then be like the birds, Jesus says. Face each day without worrying about tomorrow. Trust me.
This small window in a chapel, danced around by the wild Atlantic Ocean, frames a constant reminder of freedom and provision – unfettered and unearned.
In the words of Donahue, it is a glimpse sideways, a way of enduring bleakness. At the start of a New Year, I need these contours.
Lord, give me faith like the Skellig Monks, I prayed.
May the windows of my soul frame the resting birds.
Thank you, Ella Grace, for this gorgeous and timely reflection.