#3 Pole to Pole
On the spaces between, holding time, and tensions in the just-out-of-reach.
It’s been two weeks since my first substack, and I’m delighted to be joined by 32 of you! I want to extend my gratitude for the lovely comments and connections I have made along the way. I hope you’ll stick around, and consider sharing these words with another if you feel so inclined. This edition will lead with my words, follow with a note from Navigating the Wilderness’ preceding weeks, and close with what we are reading, watching and listening to.
Content Note: Each edition will touch on themes of grief, loss, and trauma. Specifically, this edition will include brief mentions of c-PTSD, Baby Loss, Racialised Violence, Transphobia, Fascism, Incarceration and Conflict. Footnotes include links to relevant campaigns, please take care as you click through, and note these content warnings extend to those links.
As I sense into the intention for these fortnightly words, I’m conscious of new subscribers, ‘to do’s’ piling up alongside ‘should’s’ and ‘when I have a second’s’. As I settle in to write, I’m hoping to capture something of the preceding weeks, though they have been marked with cycles of illness, unsent emails, and a general feeling of ‘behind’. I settle in to several uninterrupted hours ahead. And then the phone rings.
There’s a slight delay on the android system, an incoming number flashes up before the name of the caller. 0121: I locate myself in Birmingham and I wait to see which version of myself I’ll be answering with. School, a poorly little, another brief moment between moments. I call through to my partner, he’s shooing a pigeon out of a heritage building. Our days are markedly different, his steeped in historic buildings and varying degrees of bizarre tasks, mine flanked with grief and life, grief and life, grief and life. He carries this one, the pigeon takes unwanted flight, and I return to my position at the helm of Navigating the Wilderness.
“If you stop and face Time, take a deep breath, you’ll find your own reflection in that eye.”
– Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death
I’ve been turning words over and over as the preceding weeks swam by. They feel slightly out of reach, like magnets pole to pole. There’s time, and there’s grief. Always grief. I’m drawn back to Mrs Death’s reflections, by the pen of Salena Godden, as Death fucks Time, a dance almost, between ancient entities. These two linear weeks are, as they often are, beyond comprehension. I turn to my cues, developed from a life with complex PTSD, where my memory flattens it’s own field of view. I can see the tangibles, the appointments in the calendar, the photographs of a season on the turn. I sense familiar threads weaving their narrative, chronically behind, running out of time, moving ever so slowly. Broader though, something is illusive
Pole to pole, there’s a thicket in the nothing. Sense repelled from reality. Shame lingers in the out-of-reach, twisting, lingering. Though familiar, this is not my own, unique, self indulgent shame. It doesn’t carry “I can’t do enough”, or “I should have moved faster”, it’s not entangled with me, or mine, with should’s or should not’s. This is global, collective, core of the earth shame. This is time, times. Unprecedented, unworldly. Pole to pole. Resistance, repellence. A fraction of life chronically behind pales in comparison.
“Time was a long strip, wrapped around itself and stuck on top of itself, hardened in particular spots, becoming solid only when it re-met itself and bonded with itself…”
– Polly Atkin, Some of Us Just Fall
This time, with its grief shattered and splintered, fractals of life in disarray, pulls attention beyond comprehension. Caught between contradiction after contradiction, we are called to speak, or stay silent. Trivialise, or ignore. Dismiss, or demand. Wading through the Canva-isation of catastrophic death, I wonder when, and how, we are called to grieve. Global mental health days invite us to share, clipped, cropped, and filtered. Party conference speeches incite violence, we caption fascism on repeat. Baby loss awareness week shines it’s blue and pink beacon, babies die 1, babies die2, babies die3. Without an ounce of reflection, the drip, drip, drip of shame floods our cognitive abilities, and renders us stuck.
Grief keeps me to time. In this bizarre fortnight, my grief surfaced at the school gate. It drew breathe from mine, escaping as tears in front of my child’s headteacher, as I let myself ask the question that had been sticking in my throat, “How do we keep living, when so much wants us dead?”. Drawing me to the realities of the growing threat to trans lives, grief guided me to our present, and found a moment of validation, held in community, resourced to make the next best step.
This dance between grief and time holds something. It’s in the alchemy of our elements, in noticing little loves dance with their whole body, in painting a forest in every colour of the rainbow. Aligned pole to pole, I feel the weight of the nothing. The urgency to do, to keep up, to make this time tangible. To seize those moments of time looping, folding and hardening in particular spots, solid and immovable, as though they were ever ours to seize.
“And when you grow old well, it is constantly nearly Christmas…constantly ticking.”
– Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death
Bringing us back to Navigating the Wilderness, I want to note the trail we marked in the weeks behind us.
We supported two dearly held community clients with regular one to one grief spaces.
Cass was awarded a Visiting Fellow status with the Open University, lending their scholarship to Open Thanatology, and broadening their community research endeavours.
We have received some beautiful, raw, and humbling responses to our open call “Grief x Chronic Illness”. This call remains open until 27th October, and we welcome responses in any medium.
Reading, Watching, Listening
At Navigating the Wilderness, we align our work with the wheel of the year, and although it’s tempting to fold the later end of 2023 into itself, we are reminded to note the seasonal shifts, and ground into the present where we can. This month, we are hoping for fantastical fungi, collecting conkers, and readying for darker months.
We are reading // A Flat Place by Noreen Masud, “I felt how little the landscape needed me.” Noreen’s memoir weaves geographical flat lands, colonial trauma, and her own experiences of complex PTSD.
We are watching // Honestly, mostly Encanto as we cycle through covid round two, stomach bugs, and into tonsillitis and ear infections, in the span of just these two weeks!
We are listening to // SickBabe by Suriya Aisha, a re-listen for us, as we pull together threads of our Grief x Chronic Illness enquiry.
Five X More // Grassroots Campaign committed to changing Black maternal outcomes in the UK
Palestine Solidarity Campaign // Community Campaign for Palestinian Human Rights
We Level Up // Campaign to end Pregnancy In Prisons