Simone de Beauvoir on life

A life is set within a given space of time; it has a beginning and and an end; it evolves in given places, always retaining the same roots and spinning itself an unchangeable past whose opening towards the future is limited. It is impossible to grasp and define a life as one can grasp and define a thing, since a life is 'an unsummed whole', as Satre puts it, a demoralized totality, and therefore it has no being. But one can ask certain questions about it. How is a life formed? How much of it is made up by circumstances, how much by necessity, how much by chance, and how much by the subject's own options and his personal initiatives?

somehow,
your soul
knew
my soul
before we
ever had the
chance
to meet

-it was like coming home after a long, long day

Amanda Lovelace.

Almost Love

It happen sometimes; a pair of eyes a profile
someone we don't know and see only once
or every afternoon.
Someone we met, it was just like that:
a hand on yours
some hasty words.
But someone who became a part of you
and now there's no seeing that face without paling
without trembling hands
and it's almost love.

To have without holding

Learning to love differently is hard,

love with the hands wide open, love

with the doors banging on their hinges,

the cupboard unlocked, the wind

roaring and whimpering in the rooms

rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds

that thwack like rubber bands

in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open

stretching the muscles that feel

as if they are made of wet plaster,

then of blunt knives, then

of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes

of grab, of clutch ; to love and let

go again and again. It pesters to remember

the lover who is not in the bed,

to hold back what is owed to the work

that gutters like a candle in a cave

without air, to love consciously,

conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can’t do it, you say it’s killing

me, but you thrive, you glow

on the street like a neon raspberry,

You float and sail, a helium balloon

bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing

on the cold and hot winds of our breath,

as we make and unmake in passionate

diastole and systole the rhythm

of our unbound bonding, to have

and not to hold, to love

with minimized malice, hunger

and anger moment by moment balanced.

Marge Piercy

Everything Changes

Everything changes. We plant
trees for those born later
but what’s happened has happened,
and poisons poured into the seas
cannot be drained out again.

What’s happened has happened.
poisons poured into the seas
cannot be drained out again, but
everything changes. We plant
trees for those born later.

Cicely Herbert

If I were to write

They tell me to write, as if trying to extract this tangled washing line of emotion will somehow explain what cannot be explained, untangle what cannot be untangled.

They advise confiding in friends, but these emotions packed away in the bottom draw of my belly cannot be conjured up on demand like my daytime smiles. So as life nudges me forward towards the banality of middle age finding my voice has become trickier.

But if I were to write I would write about our love. I would use the metaphor of an ocean’s waves. How our love is no longer a tsunami of emotion, the kind that consumes you before spitting you out, leaving you washed up, winded and bruised on the shore. In my 20s I could handle such intensity but now in my 30s I need to find deep waters in which to anchor.

Now in our 30s the waters have calmed. Today if I were to write about love I would describe our love as groundswell, water that swells into the harbour seeping into every corner before lifting boats out of the sand, ready to sail.  These waters bring ripples of comfort as they wipe away the wreckage from last night’s winds. Now anchored, we remain buoyant ready to embrace future storms.

Without powerful winds to blow us forward such calm waters make our journey painfully slow. Yet there is something beautiful about this inert fragility. We drift from certainty to doubt and back again; never sure we will reach our chosen destination. Indeed, this uncertainly has been the anchor of our relationship, a constant companion through our ephemeral journeys.

So while others set out in search of tsunamis, as we are conditioned to do, let us celebrate the realness of our own gentle love. Its rises and falls; the false starts, new beginnings and possible endings. For our love is a love that has endured countless storms and it is a love that could weather many more.

This is what I would write if I were to write about love.

Be still and know.

Sussex Graduation.