Excalicauldron: The (Imperfect) Art of Living/Loving - Issue #10
Post-script edit: I thought it'd be short. But alas, you probably know me well enough (and better than I do myself) not to have believed me :)
This week's edition is a short one. We're on a weekend getaway in the foothills of the mountains, attending a documentary film festival.
(Some of the noteworthy ones I've seen so far include:
Haulout, a short film by producer Maxim Arbugaev that follows Maxim Chakilev, a scientist studying - and illuminating - the effects of climate change on the walrus population in the remote coastal village Enurmino in the Russian Arctic.
How Do You Measure a Year? by father and producer Jay Rosenblatt (more on this further down - clearly I was somewhat influenced by seeing this bittersweet depiction of parenting, aging, and change :))
This is National Wake, the amazing - but very unfortunate - story of South Africa’s first multiracial punk bands in the 1970s-80s.
Ennio, Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore’s look at the life and times of prolific composer Ennio Morricone, who’s turned film soundtracks into absolute works of moving audio-visual art.
Surf/Sink: The Parenting Tides
Alexander and I have had a really fun few days, hanging out together in the little hamlet we’re visiting. He's on summer break from his language learning course but no break matches a real breakaway, so we're making the most of our time together here in a strange town before we head back to the strange city we find ourselves in briefly till he sits his first-ever exam in a few months AND starts university without ever having graduated primary school!
We've weathered a few (actually, really very many) tough years together. If you'd asked me 16 years ago what I thought being a single mother would be like...well, people did, and I know how ignorant I was back then, as a newly minted 20yo with not a clue herself on how to be in the world, let alone raise a child by herself. I had no idea the difficulties that awaited me and us. Rightly so, cos I can't imagine that I would've done anything else than run screaming into the hills 😆 But, famous last words, "This time it was more difficult/worse than ever" 😅 Although, as a parent to a teenager, maybe I deserve to use that card for once 😝
Parenting - much like life - is a crazy ride. You want desperately to do the right thing, but everything keeps happening all at once and before you know it, your kids are big or you're locking eyes with death across the water and it's all over, a hurried race to some imagined finish line where you'll finally "Have it all together". The saying "Life is in the living" doesn't include an addendum stating that being present in your life is only advisable when things are going well.
The Greatest Thing You’ll Ever Learn
Being alive and daring to love and be loved by others are very important jobs, and it's a position we're all employed in to some extent.
Wanting to escape being alive (cos it really can suck sometimes) turns us into creative beings indeed, because in the absence of being physically dead, many people turn to things that make them deadeningly numb on the inside. Being the mammals that we are, the desire for connection is often even harder to turn off than the will to live, so even amidst our decades-long slow suicides between birth and death, we're shaped all our lives by the presence and absence of other loving nervous systems, be they human or animal.
The Unbearable Hero/ine’s Quest
In my case, there have been times when I felt like Life is like a game of whack-a-mole where as soon as I conquer one thing, another issue pops up somewhere else. And nothing drove this home more than the last few years of mothering a tween-turned-teen. Our relationship went from rock-solid to something I couldn't always recognise. Neither of us did.
The documentary How Do You Measure a Year? that I mentioned above - which Alexander and I actually saw together and he said was one of his favourites - is about a father who filmed his daughter on her birthday every year between the ages of 2 and 18, asking the same exact questions and tracking how her answers changed. We chuckled together, for as soon as the teenage years hit, there was a noticeable sullen change in her demeanor and outlook.
(Funny how many parents, as hardened adults, expect their teens to "wo/man up and just deal" with the existential depression they experience when they piece together how broken the world is that they've come into and lived under false impressions about for many years, but that's a topic for another day.)
The thing is, a Whack-a-Mole life is a perception more than it is reality. Even if it looks that way. It might seem like it's one thing after another, as if one fire makes way for the next one, especially when you're constantly kitted out in crisis-mode gear. But the truth is that there's often quite a hefty list of cobwebs to clear out, stuff to organise, inventories to take, rooms to move through, before earthcrafts such as we, sailing through space on our birth-to-death quests, can take to a wider expanse and open up our throttles.
Things, very likely so long as you keep trying, are (big picture-wise) getting better. It's just that it follows a horizontal flight path, so the easiest way to retain a semblance of sanity and infuse it with a whole lot of realism-rooted happiness, is to accept and trust that the nav system is dynamic and calculates the optimal direction and speed at any given moment. And this comes with a certain measure of surrender to the process of Life unfolding in ways you can neither predict nor control, while accepting the sacred-but-OMG-challenging responsibility of simultaneously being able to design your life and nurture yourself in certain ways.
The Beautiful Paradox of Vulnerability
I woke this morning to a Women's Day message from my dad, who just so happens to be an amazing bilingual poet. He composes verses in both English and Afrikaans and he happens to be the only people on earth I regularly speak to in the latter language.
Enjoying a quiet morning on the balcony, overlooking a stone bridge from the 15th century BE that crosses a river which is now slowed down to a littlest stream, I reflected on his beautiful words, which I'll include in the original Afrikaans, as well as my translation:
Gelukkige Vrouedag
Ek bring vir jou blomme en sonstrale
ek hoop jou dag is kleurvol,
propvol liefde en vreugde
ek wens vir jou vrede en geduld,
jou menswees is fyn geweef soos 'n pêrel
kosbaar soos 'n diamant,
jy is beide sterk en sag
mag jou dag
so spesiaal wees soos jy is
en mag blydskap jou altyd oral spoor
ek is lief vir jou 💝🌿
(Bad) English version:
Happy Women's Day
I bring you flowers and sunrays
I hope your day is painted with colour
filled with love and joy
I wish for you peace and patience
your humanness is finely woven like a pearl
precious like a diamond
you are both strong and soft
may your day
be as special as you are
and may happiness always find you
I love you
It struck me how often I've felt, as a person and especially as a mother, that no matter how many times I rose to the challenge, reached the next peak, survived the storm, something would happen to topple my progress and send me tumbling down again to the bottom of the hill. Sometimes even a mountain, snow-capped and angry with avalanches.
And while it seemed at times to tear my heart to shreds, I look back now and - after the words of my wise father - recognise that daring to accept the painful vulnerabilities of new stretch areas (a.k.a. aspects of my life that have been put on the rack lol), time and (seemingly endless) again, prevented me from simply locking myself in, which is so easy to do when you're armouring from the outside in.
Inner-art
For me, the art of living is in developing inner strength that protects my soft, tender core by keeping it intact. My life is my art. My work has always been a little messy to the naked eye, but there's an endlessly active creative process in my subconscious to convert the primordial chaos of my inner Big Bang into the makings of vast universes, new galaxies, and groups of planets spinning around fiery suns.
To all my humans, fellow parents, and the women I love and those who don't who are commemorating Women's Day in South Africa today (commemorating the 20,000 brave women who, in 1956, marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria in protest against Apartheid laws), may your week ahead be soft and strong in all your places and spaces ❤️
xNadjax