pacing ourselves in a challenging world
I have an ancestor, perhaps a myth, who I carry within. Dig into the earth and we excavate time. The stories say she was ‘fay’, ‘clairvoyant’, ‘away with the faeries’. There are veiled hints of ‘women’s troubles’, of not stomaching food. A fragile creature. Menstruation and menopause were easier for me than most of the women of my family. Still, I was told it was as though I was her ‘come back’. As a child, I looked like I might easily break, ate like a bird, was too sensitive, thin-skinned as a toad.
Were the seeds of lupus there? There are more than 150 genetic loci that nudge the risk of lupus up, most in the immune pathways. Over-eager genes, a little obsessive, trying too hard to clear everything up, easily alarmed.
Were the genetic susceptibilities passed down from my fay ancestor? A paternal inheritance? The long tail of conditions I’d watched my father wrestle with… fragile bones, a stomach that didn’t digest, but burned with acid…
Or nudged by matrilineal genes? My mother had painful skin eruptions, years of being prescribed tetracylcine only to become more photosensitive, her poor digestion wiped out further.
I set off into the forest, walking slowly. I’ve had months of cycling between inflammation and rest, a long learning curve. Pacing. I’m learning pacing. I’m a slow learner. Work is full-on after midwinter hibernation and I’ve been resisting the pressure of ‘urgency’ — one task at time, savouring (rather than rushing) the work, but still the inflammation rises, including a bout of costochondritis — an inflammation of the cartilage connecting the ribs to the breastbone, that has twice been mistaken for a broken rib. Fragile bones?
The trees are wintering still. Stripped back to their skeletons. Green is sparse and low to the ground, grass and mosses, persistent ivy. Brambles arch and tumble, spiky and fierce. The air is damp and cool, the river hissing — we’ve had a long spell of torrential rains, the garden flooding almost daily. Beyond the single larch, the path narrows, darkens. Breathe. Go easy. No rush.
The winter light is dull and kind. I’ve become photosensitive over the last year, but under this pewter sky, light is milky and mild as we edge out of winter. Nothing is urgent. Pace yourself, this place whispers, taking its measured steps into Imbolc, the first of three Celtic spring festivals. There are no snowdrops in this part of the forest, heads bowed as though they too need to look away from the sun. But in shady spots, the emerging buttons of celandine leaves. And along the less-shaded edges, the first of their heart-shaped, glossy leaves, the occasional yellow flower. Clumps of primrose leaves, pliant and velvet-plump, first blossoms waking slowly.
Genes are only one strand of any story. Growing up on Teesside, the respirable exposure to silica dust, metals, solvents, fine particles… was chemically and metallurgically intense. Throw in a heavy viral infection in my early twenties and the stress of a long and volatile first marriage. Top them up with four C-sections and three work-place assaults. Why wouldn’t a body respond with an auto-immune condition?
Place. Even in that industry-scape where belching cooling towers spewed poisons, the earth greened. In that place, alongside the orange skies and sulphur-scent, there’s the story of a child who found another world in a stream where sticklebacks swam.
A hamlet — fragment of an older place trapped between estates and industry. A scrap of woods, a cool-running brook, a field of horses. In this remnant of green, the birds sang louder than in our little back garden and sticklebacks flitted through the clear stream. I am crouched alone beside the beck, a scrawny eight-year-old, two chestnut plaits reaching below my waist, a thin cotton Summer dress, cloudless hot-blue sky dappling through trees lining the little bank, fingers trailing in clear water, gently stroking the wriggling sticklebacks that teem in the gurgling liquid.
Time is other here. Time is not yet chronic.
I have not yet had to think about pacing.
Time is elastic.
Numinous.
Time has long felt cyclical. In ministry, years began with Advent. The season of last things: death, judgement, heaven and hell, was also the start of something. Preparation for a birth that heralded death and rebirth, an eschaton. As T S Eliot’s magi say in ‘The Journey of the Magi’:
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt.
I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different;
This Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us,
like Death, our death.
Each cyclical, liturgical year journeyed towards a triumph that brought death, a death that became resurection, birth, new life…
Now, I keep a Celtic year that begins at Samhain with the bone fires, the world dying away. A new year that begins in wintering, but moves towards the light, heralded in the depths of midwinter at Solstice. The return of the sun that moves towards this Imobolc day — letting go of grief in the flowing waters of the first signs of spring. Moving towards summer — not linear, not teleology, but always circling back.
Somewhere between genetics and environment. Something flickering on the threshold between patterns of chronic illness and kairic enchantment.
Three strands remain: genes, place, liminality. And the greatest of these is liminality. I carry the ancestor who lives in myth, consciously. My dad was a dreamer with visions of another life never realised, but I have had opportunities to become another story. He longed for a place of beauty and nature. And here I am in the forest, walking with herbs. His story was thwarted and silenced. I have a voice.
Something has circled back. The cycles of winter and summer, of births that seem like death, deaths that seem like birth.
I set off along the pilgrimage path of the labyrinth. On Fridays, the chairs covering the carefully winding meander of differently coloured stone on the floor of Chartres Cathedral are cleared. Pacing. I’m learning pacing. I’m a slow learner. Like learning to colour in the lines. I’m unilaterally deaf since childhood, have poor balance. I need to go slowly.
The Latin etymology of pace is pace, the ablative of pax or peace. The same root as pact. I am making a pact with my genes. Making peace with my ancestry and with the place that raised me. Pacing is measured, careful. Breathe. Go easy. No rush.
Pacing is not standing still, but as I wind through the path that doubles back, moves, turns again, movement is not always forward. But still, it is movement. Cycles of work and rest. Cycles of seasons. Cycles that return, revisit, relearn. Nothing is urgent. Pace yourself. Another moment. Another step.
Whatever genetics we manage, whatever the legacy of growing up in a less than ideal environment, no condition is merely chronic. Chronicity marks one part of my relationship to time. Chronic conditions, like lupus and so many others, persist and affect mutiple systems of the body. Their duration, frequency, longevity, constancy, mark time. Each tick of chronos is prey to the chronic.
Chronicity does not stand still, but it can wind, double back. Movement is not always forward. But still, there are new cycles. Still, there is the liminal.
Liminality is kairic rather than chronic. Kairos — those moments when time is ripe and expansive, when we fall out of time into vision, when we go down into the earth where the ancestors dwell, where we touch the numinous…
You do not have to have a chronic condition to drop through consciousness into such moments. Yet so often this shift from chronos to kairos comes, if not with the imposed challenges of sickness then perhaps with emotional suffering, grief, empathy for a hurting world… comes when we are vulnerable, permeable to our creatureliness and to that of others.
We each have ancestors, perhaps myths, we carry within. We carry particular genetics, the marks of the places that raised us. And we are also more than the surface of things, more than the ticking away of chronos. We are creatures of clay and of the liminal. Creatures of chronos and of kairos.
And as the world moves out of winter towards the slight of spring, we each need a sense of pace. To keep peace with the bodies we are. Make pacts of how we move through a world so challenging that some days we hardly have the words to begin, yet know we must, know that the darkness cannot last.
Imbolc
Light comes slowly to Candlemass—
mares-milk pale, ewes bleating rhythms
of winter birth; life-scraps
of hope in ghosted sun,
scalpel leaves—snowdrop-thin—
pierce through earth, fisted
buds thawing ground
so recently wintered closed.We shelter within—
kitchen a belly of scents,
birchwood flames,
comfort of poppyseed cake,
violet candles flickering chants—winter will pass
rains will be gone,
flowers will bloom,
seasons of singing
will come.
(From: at world’s end, begin)