Be ground, be crumbled

Maybe we’re meant to fall apart

Be Ground
Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are.
You've been stony for too many years.
Try something different.
Surrender.

- Jalaluddin Rumi

Up until now, I haven’t been able to look for long at photos of myself during the births of either of my children. Witnessing myself in a process of such discomfort feels difficult. It’s not so much remembering the physical pain, but what the pain and the process overall symbolised: the requirement for utter surrender.

Each contraction, a train jolting through my body. The uncertainty of how it would unfold and what would happen along the way. The inability to make the happy denouement come faster. The small chance of catastrophe. The illusion that I was in control revealing itself as a mirage after all.

In my first birth, the experience terrified me, was a kind of ego death. The second felt like a grim remembrance of what I had to give and let go of, how once again I had to be humbled by the sheer power and force of the process.

I gave birth to my daughter in a birth pool in the front room of our Victorian flat. A few months later, the ceiling next door in the communal hallway fell in just a few minutes after my daughter and I had walked under it. The noise was unholy, the mess almighty, and the metaphor of something caving in on itself was irresistible to my new mother bodymind.

Four years later, cracks appeared in the brickwork around our front window because the building was slipping very slightly into the ground. It started to feel like moving into that beautifully proportioned, badly ventilated flat had been a bad decision, that space with giant, ancient windows and magnificent ceilings, with the light pouring in and the icy drafts in winter and the trees all around and the unsteady ground beneath our feet.

We were unable to upsize to a new home while we were waiting for the subsidence issue to be fixed, and found ourselves in a kind of inertia where it felt pointless to pour money into improvements but also depressing to live with the parts of the flat that were deteriorating. But finally, next month our flat will go on the market. We’ve been waiting a long time to find somewhere with a bit more space, but now that perhaps the ending is imminent, of course I have started to see all the beauty in this place, all the things we were lucky to have.

We’ve started to tidy and sort in preparation, including things we should have been doing all along - cleaning the skirting boards, dusting objects, removing cobwebs. It looks so much nicer; with each effort, I can’t understand why we didn’t do this before, why we let the weeds grow up so high. Arguably a building is inanimate, but I was also thinking about reciprocity, how a home shelters you over so many hours or years, keeps you warm and safe, is a silent witness to all the ways you change and all the ways you stay the same. And that the more we care for the environment around us, the more we engage in the boring maintenance work that is the stuff of presence and care, the more likely a place is to remain in good condition, able to support us.

Even so, even with the best care and intention, sometimes things fall apart. I birthed a baby here, I fell apart here, a few times. There were plenty of times when I seriously doubted my ability to do my work, to facilitate anything or hold space for others due to my own mental health. Eventually I came to feel that perhaps my vulnerability, the ways in which I’d recognised my brokenness, was a strength of its kind, was the very thing that made me a person who could support other people.

Just as birth creates us as mothers - a forged-in-the-fire transition - then life’s struggles change us, not always in the expected sense of a crumbling capacity but - after the breaking open - a resilience to cope, to live, perhaps to help. It’s not linear either, in that sense of “I was there but look at me now, fixed, healed!” Instead it’s a recognition of the ebbing and flowing of the good and the bad, that we all have that in common.

Being in dark places gives me a vantage point from which to witness other people’s own darkness. Giving space to my whole self helps teach me to how hold space for others’ whole selves. Learning that I am a thing to grow not fix helps me support others to embrace this.

At my most vulnerable, when I was birthing a baby - literally and figuratively on my knees - it did not feel possible that a person could be both full of doubt and power, of fear and possibility, that the feeling of something going wrong was something going right, that sensing I was in touching distance of death was showing me in my most radiant aliveness. I can see both, in each instance, in those photos now.

In the next months as we give this home of ours some love, I’ll be reflecting on all the ways it held us up and let us down and watched us grow. Grounded, groundless, humbled, crumbled. We are remade many times in our lives, perhaps it’s a daily occurrence. I like the idea of more richness, more gold in the cracks, as the years go by.