#26: twenty-four for twenty-four

Repair, Elders and grey hairs

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The witch’s artist’s cottage I stayed in in Cornwall over New Years

Thinking

In honour of my new year starting on Thursday (Imbolc), I offer 24 stream-of-consciousness thoughts for 2024. Followed by reading recommenations etc as usual.

1. “There are some years that ask questions and some years that answer” (Zora Neale Hurston). 2023 answered; I have a feeling 2024 will ask.

2. My word for 2023 was “trust”, building on my 2021 word, which was “surrender”. Last year, it was in the trusting and the letting go and following instinct that answers emerged to some sizeable questions: “should I stay in this relationship?” (no), “where should I live?” (Devon), “how should I be of service to chronically ill people?” (

   GriefSick
   ).

3. My word for 2024 is “repair”. Repair of health, of psyche, with ancestors, with the living. Repair feels live-wire dangerous. Good thing that I run towards danger, of the emotional variety, at least. I practiced a little in 2023, repairing a rupture in a professional relationship. I learned that for repair to happen, both parties have to explore their shared and distinct values, and truly invite plurality, accepting there is no “one single truth” about an event.

4. I’m travelling to South Africa in February to stay with a friend. What a place to immerse in repair, learning the history and present effects of apartheid and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in the context of South Africa’s courageous case against Israel in the International Court of Justice.

5. For New Year’s, I stayed in a house in Cornwall (see photo above) that was decorated in entirely natural fibres, with beautiful dried plants and woven baskets, and zero digital technology. It was the most soothing place I have ever spent time.

6. Launching

   GriefSick
   in September 2023, I felt deeply connected to my inner teenager and experienced a blooming of creativity (the last time I felt this creatively free was adolescence). I am writing, singing, and playing piano and guitar (badly) again.

7. Through these creative endeavours, I am healing my relationship with being mediocre. Typically, I don’t do anything unless I believe I’m going to be amazing at it (embarrassing, delusional). I will never be a good musician, and that’s starting to feel ok.

8. My first grey hair appeared in the same week I turned 37, back in December. I felt some initial grief at losing my youth, but that was quite quickly replaced with a gratitude to still be here, to have the privilege of ageing. We’ll see if I retain this equanimity when there’s more grey than blonde.

9. I’m slowly realising that what I want, more so than anything else, is to become a an Elder. Who do I want to be aged 65? Given our deeply disregulated world, our lack of Elders in the West and the coming difficulties of this century, it strikes me that this is a useful question to ask of ourselves.

Elders? Where are they? I have no answer to this matter. I have opinions. Where did they go? What happened to them? I love old people, I honor them, I care for them. But I do not find many to be elders. What is the root of this matter? What have we done? What is the history of their disappearance? Who did this to us? Left us floating on this planet without the grandmother’s crucial songs? — 50 things of matter,

MaryBeth Bonfiglio

"Elders are a composite of contradictions: fierce and forgiving, joyful and melancholy, intense and spacious, solitary and communal... Ultimately, each elder is a storehouse of living memory, a carrier of wisdom. Theirs are the voices that rise on behalf of the commons, at times fiery, at times beseeching. They live outside culture yet are its greatest protectors, becoming wily dispensers of love and blessings. They offer a resounding “Yes” to the generations that follow. That is their legacy and gift." — Francis Weller, “An apprenticeship with sorrow.

10. I have made some lovely, new, energising connections over the past year. Mentoring a Huddler exploring chronic illness and creativity (I learn far more from her than she from me). My new pen pal,

    Martha
    , and I, write long, honest, silly emails to each other every few weeks and it’s been such a joy, not least to have a Gen Z friend! I do love an epistolary relationship (as Martha wrote to me: “we are so Little Women coded”). In Exeter a few weeks back, I met some gorgeous people. We filled out our Year Compass together and I held them in a New Moon ritual. I used to think I didn’t make new friends easily, but, really, I was just sick and isolated and hadn’t been able to try. A good reminder to keep challenging our self-narratives.

11. Completing my Year Compass, I’m struck by how all of my growth come from being in relationship with other people — friends, colleagues, family. Development is social, growth is social, transformation is social.

12. I bought a poster, A Well Spent Life, by

    Anna Fusco
    as an invocation for my move to Exeter later in the year. Yes, interrupt me. Inconvenience me. Place demands upon me. Tether me in place, in people, in belonging.

13. I used to have a compartmentalised work “self”, which started to rankle and feel inauthentic around 2019, but I couldn’t figure out how to bring all of the richness and wisdom gleaned from being chronically ill into my work life. Over 2023, these boundaries have started to enjoyably collapse, and my work (organisational design) and vocation (chronic illness grief, see

    GriefSick
    ) are starting to integrate. Last year, I went to a gathering in Bristol about Life-Affirming Organisational Structures (hosted by Transformational Governance, Healing Justice London and Beyond The Rules), I gave a talk on what we can learn from chronic illness organising, started coaching two staff members of an organisation that’s closing down and joined the emerging practice for The Decelerator. A few weeks ago, I supported the visionary team at MAIA with designing their culture of care, as a majority disabled and chronically ill organisation. My colleague and founder of Moral Imaginations, Phoebe Tickell, has been encouraging me to see the wisdom I’ve gained from chronic illness as core to my own moral imagination, and a big part of why I’m confident to do things differently.

14. Get in touch if you want to chat about workplace endings and grief, chronic illness and disability in the workplace or disabled imagination/ futures.

15. A surprise from last year was my growing relationship with facilitation. I’ve been a facilitator for 15 years, but I’ve always identified as a designer, someone who produces stuff, with facilitation as just one of the skills I use in the process of design. It now occurs to me that I do more facilitation (and coaching) than I do design. I feel like I’m stepping into the next phase of my work as a facilitator, feeling more confident to bring more of my toolkit, like small somatic practices and ritual or seasonal elements.

16. I’ve become aware of some of my facilitation shadows through training in grief tending. During one of my trainings, a traumatic event happened. I wasn’t facilitating at the time, but it shook me nonetheless. I was taken over by a childlike, “rescuer” part, and it took effort to come back to my adult self.

17. I felt shame at being flooded like this. I thought I had excised this rescuer part of myself through training and working as a coach (where we believe our clients are whole and sovereign — rescuing is antithetical to coaching philosophy). Afterwards, I had a brief supervision with the grief training trainers, both women in their 50s, explaining my shame at having to learn the same lesson again. They laughed and said: “oh, we’ve let go of the belief that we’ll ever be healed”. How liberating is that?

18. The grief tending training I did was very soon after Hamas’ 7th October attacks and Israel’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza. Like many of us, grief for Palestine, and all off the suffering around the world as a result of colonialism and apartheid systems, has been so present for me the past few months. Cultivating practices for our grief is necessary as we head further into the rough initiation of climate and societal crises.

19. I’ll tell you what, if you want to learn about yourself quickly, put something soul-led out in the world (

    GriefSick
    ) and you’ll witness your murky depths rise up to the surface to greet you, in not-always-welcome ways. Some reflections here.

20. A new diagnosis in 2023 shook me to my core, disrupted my relationship with my body at its very foundations. I’m still reeling, I’m still fighting. I know from experience that the only way through is surrender, yet I cannot relinquish my grasp on what was. I cannot allow my grief in. This is why I started

    GriefSick
    ; it’s the medicine that I need.

21. If you’re cooking and it’s lacking something, the answer really is one or more of the following: salt, lemon, butter. Or another combination of salt, acid, fat and heat.

22. One of my preoccupations is happiness vs joy. My mental health is excellent. I experience a lot of joy and I’m rarely happy.

    Ruth Allen
    puts it so well:

    “Joy is a process, you can conjure it. It’s related to gratitude more than it is happiness. It is an inflection of the heart’s orientation. It beats alongside suffering and sadness too”.

23. I hold multiple futures close. A jumbled seaside house in a close, thriving neighbourhood, with four salt-crusted wetsuits drying on the outside wall; two adult-sized, two child-sized. Or maybe a cottage with copper pans and herbs hanging, quiet evenings, the rumble of a cat’s purr, a grief circle held in the woods outside. There’s beauty in all of it.

24. Here’s what I’m calling in for 2024: building community in Devon, body acceptance, sauna-time, sea-swims, spending more time with ancestors, exploring the indigenous practices of the South West (like wassailing), a singing group, apprenticing to grief tending, curiosity about my facilitation practice, deepening as a coach, a book deal and/ or funding for

    GriefSick
    , learning and play in South Africa, a strength routine, more rest, learning to drive, more talks, staying oh-so open to emergence.

Reading

The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully. A beautiful meditation from a Zen Buddhist hospice co-founder on how holding death close brings us greater aliveness.

When I Met the Pope. Patricia Lockwood is the funniest writer alive. “He says if Shakespeare had been born on a beach we would never have had the plays. Well, we would have, but they would all be called things like Pleasure Hammock.”

My Unraveling: “This is what disability advocates have said all along, not that it usually sinks in: The able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people but the same people at different times”. I’m so sorry that anyone is going through Long Covid, but I’m not sorry that we now have so many fantastic authors writing about post-viral illness (including Patricia Lockwood).

The birth of my daughter, the death of my marriage. “As I nursed my daughter, my mother brought me endless glasses of water. Our three bodies composed a single hydraulic system… Months later, in couples therapy, my husband said, “The three of you were a closed world in that back room. I had no place in it.””

Most read from the last edition:

• Cathy Newman’s house tour

• Callings and Roles for Collective Liberation

• A beautifully illustrated piece on Long Covid.

Watching

Men Up, the true and affecting story of the first UK trial of Viagra in Wales.

All of Us Strangers. This film about grief and queerness is so beautiful and sexy and sad. Has any onscreen couple ever had more chemistry than Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott? This interview with the writer-director is wonderful.

American Fiction. A smart, hilarious, discomforting satire. I do like a film that allows the protagonist to be occasionally unlikeable (in this instance, a snobbish and emotionally immature professor). Have a read of

Otegha Uwagba

‘s review.

The End We Start From. I would like more arthouse films about the climate crisis, belonging and grief please.

Listening

To a lot of Laura Marling.

And for balance, this stupid song.

Viewing

Women In Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990 at Tate Britain. This exhibition is truly wonderful, and an incredible piece of archival scholarship. I took away lots of inspiration for

GriefSick

from disabled organising of the 1970s and 1980s.

Judy Clark wrote of a piece she made in 1973 called Cycle: “if there are rhythms in the body that you can understand, then maybe you can understand social rhythms, cosmic rhythms, historical rhythms”. This resonated with me a lot. Everything I know about systems (which is how I interpret “rhythms” here), I learned through my own disabled and chronically ill body.

I loved this campy poster.

Writing

I realised last November that I’m now the editor of a publication that deals with challenging topics (illness, grief) and that I have a responsibiltiy to myself, to GriefSick and to others to design a collaboration process that’s trauma-informed. Here are some guidelines for collaborating with

GriefSick

.

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If you’re interested in chronic illness and/or grief, you might like my other newsletter, GriefSick (why have one newsletter when you can have two?).