Slow Nourishment

“Slow living isn’t about determining how little we can live with – it’s about working out what we simply can’t live without.”

Nathan Williams, The Kinfolk Home

My period snuck up on me this month. It arrived, unannounced, without her usual forecasting of sour sally days or cramps or attacks at my confidence or general enthusiasm for life. My period simply showed up, right on time, no questions asked. Normally, there are three days where my serotonin takes a dip so low that I convince myself that there isn’t a single person on earth who actually likes me AND all of my efforts are going to fail (I recently got a medical diagnosis for this, but more on that later), so for my period to simply arrive was quite a surprise!

Naturally, the only remedy then is to plan a monthly trip across the sea! In all fairness, I do have to wonder what our world would look like if we honored the monthly rhythms of the female body. If we incorporated 3 days of non-negotiable rest into our social systems? How many arguments, and mistakes by human error would be avoided if we weren’t forced to show up in our serotonin deficiency? I heard once that PMS is an accumulation of grievances for the month prior. It is like a physical and emotional playback of ‘what I wish I said,’ and ‘What they said actually really hurt’ and all of it is tucked neatly into our uterus and lower back.

I have many thoughts on this and share them with Nikki as we trek along the Cape tracks. The tracks are soft and spongy, padded earth atop rock shelves, that weave through tall gum trees. The under story of a gum tree forest is spacious. The ferns and currants and reed looking trees on the ground are dense, with small Wallaby and Paddy melon tracks tangled into efficient little holes that dip into the tangle. But between the tops of the brush, and the beginning of the gum tree canopy there is wide open space. Tall skinny Eucalyptus stalks staggered around.

The trees creak and groan with the wind, but we are protected in the understory. I feel very human when I hike. My legs, strong, but stiff from the plane ride yesterday. My uterus, a presence, but not unkindly. My lungs still shaking whatever cold I had a couple weeks ago. My feet, padding along the earth. I feel at ease with people who I trust to try to understand my emotion. I’ve spent much of my life trying to tame it, tuck it in, make it palatable, disguise it in poetry and art, but the truth is that I am a conduit for emotion. Beauty and sadness move me directly (especially at this time of the month might I add), and although it proves hard to find my ‘lover’ I do find an incredible amount of romance in the romantic friendships I have.

To be honest, whoever my lover is, does have a high bar to match. I travel the world with my friends, get lost on dirt roads, and wander extremely long distances on foot just to eat some wine and cheese on a cliff. We take bubble baths together and share our hopes and dreams and talk about the things that make us sad. We grieve for Palestine, and Sudan, and Yemen and Ukraine, and the confusion the people of Israel must feel right now. We talk about what haunts us, and hold each other without trying to change or fix it. Isn’t this what love is? Witnessing each other as we experience the world together?

For the first time in my life I have love like this in the place where I live. It has taken three years for me to form friendships that I can rely on. People who speak the language of effort, who I call for good news and bad news, and we make dinners together and go for walks and share the intimacy of seeing and being seen. Although I yearn for a partner to create a family with, I find that my love life is very full. I am comfortable with the bar that I have set for whomever decides to traverse this life with me. I want the depth, and attention and care that I know is possible through these friendships, and I don’t think I should have to settle for anything less. Step up or get out, I say.

The hike is so well tucked into the brush, that it is hard to imagine what is at the end of the hike. By this time, Nikki and I are slightly jogging due to our realization that it is in fact winter and the sun does set at 4:45p. Every now and then we get a breathtaking peek of the sea below what we later find out are the tallest cliffs in Australia!! The sun is teasing her departure and we are laughing at the thought of hiking with our phone torches back up through the brush.

Suddenly the underbrush ends, and we are on an open boardwalk between low shrubs. The wind rips through the sky, and the end of the cliff is in sight. We jog out to the end, and there are no words that can capture the grandeur of the columnar stacks that drop into the cerulean sea. Nikki and I approach in silence, and sit on the edge to let it all wash into us. I live for these moments. The ones where there is no where else on earth I would rather be. Places, so full of wonder, that I cannot remember what it was that consumed my mental space back home. Places, so wild and formidable that we cannot build on them. We can only visit and acknowledge their power. I bow to these places and pray they stay wild. I believe that we need to see land that has been left to be itself so that we can get in touch with our own internal wild places.

There are wild places within all of us. We see them in children. Untouched by the ‘shoulds’ and ‘coulds’ of this world. Raw emotion and elation and sadness. They’re in us, too. But to find them, we first must believe that they are there. And sometimes, we can’t believe they are there, until a friend drags us down a long trek just before sunset and we see the cliffs soaked with orange lichen, shrubs clinging to their faces, toes dipped all the way down to where the whales are surely singing, and see that these places exist. And if anyone ever tells me that I am being dramatic again, I’ll pull up a picture of these cliffs and ask them if they think these cliffs are being too dramatic.

Now, I can’t speak for all of society, but I do know that there is a yearning for the artist. For the emotions that course through us without avenues of expression. We celebrate the ones brave enough to capture them on paper and words and forget that the wild in us is recognizing their kin. And I forget that I can’t disguise a seaside cliff as something that can be tucked into my pockets for half of each month.

There is always much more to say, but for now we celebrate that there are places left wild, that no one can touch. Out here, and inside all of us. The cliff in me, recognizes the cliff in you.

Until next time,

Han xx