It was one of those marvellous half-hours of a lifetime….

This year has arrived amidst incessant rain and some truly horrible news about the many, many ways in which people can truly devastate other human beings. And in that knowledge, I find I can sometimes feel so overwhelmed – trying to acknowledge and understand everything that is going on – but also being aware that sometimes the knowledge of everything that awful can block any capacity for quiet joy that we should all be allowed to experience.

How do I reconcile both?

Last year was a year of endings for me alongside of a growing awareness within me of a desire for change. I spent much of last year quietly folding away the life of my dear friend who had passed away. It was a very new experience for me – as I learnt how to navigate the necessary formality of someone’s death – filling out forms, making telephone calls, scanning documents and sending identification, alongside the delicate process of going through someone’s intimate belongings and deciding what to do with them.

It felt like a year of ghosts and memories; mine and other people’s. And with much of emphasis on the year being about someone passing that it made me take notice of just about everything in my day-to-day life. And what the experience may have shown me about my life in this new year to come.

I thought about friendship, family, home and belonging. I thought about what really matters, and then how to tell that it does when it’s happening to you in that very moment. I thought about courage – and the way you need to be brave to open out your heart and your mind, so that not only do you see what is right for you – but that you are able to embrace it fully, and not let it pass you by.

When I began to write this post earlier, feeling that familiar difficulty in getting started, I felt I needed to find something to pin my feelings to; something that would act as a touchstone for what it was I really wanted to write. I was looking for something that would anchor my feelings into something more resolved. I was looking for guidance.

I had just sat down in my armchair by the fire, and was looking at an old book I have by the Shropshire writer, Mary Webb. She was a writer from this very place I live now, her writing thematically and poetically rooted firmly in the South Shropshire landscape. A place of hills and wildness and an other worldly atmosphere she captures so beautifully.

The book was her posthumously published writings, an incomplete novel and some short stories and I began to read one I hadn’t read before. And suddenly, there it was, the words I had been to describe what I had been looking for.

“It was one of those marvellous half-hours of a lifetime, which blossoms on…”

I wanted to experience half-hours of gentle beauty that softly shone like light bouncing off copper pans, or to feel as warm as the late noon sun on a long, fine day. I want to moments of feeling like I am coming home and that home is a safe and beautiful and sacred thing. I want to find someone who makes me feel like coming home. Safe and warm and right.

And there it is the answer to my question. I don’t strive for a perfect life or want to push away, or be in denial to the harsher and crueller aspects of what it means to be human and to be alive.

Instead I am just shining my light towards those ‘marvellous half-hours of a lifetime’ bringing them towards me and my little family with an open heart and arms.