Waiting on the light

Even in Provence, someone has to do the ironing. The crinkles in the linen, while charming, will not undo themselves irregardless of the Summer humidity. And so I pull the bathrobe off of the folded ironing board, lug it into the living room and get to work.

While I am most certainly a visual person, I have begun to listen to podcasts, occasionally, to focus my ruminating mind while I am in the midst of repetitive tasks. Elise Loehnen’s “Pulling the Thread” has been a recent go-to of choice, perfect for the many, many existential questions that rumble around my brain. I can’t help but wonder at her confidence while she interviews the Jungian analyst, professor and 85 year-old James Hollis. Author of 20 books. But of course it is actually my lacking of self-assuredness that has drawn me to listen to precisely this episode, precisely today.

I put down the iron occasionally to lean over to my notebook; jotting plot-lines for how to live a life. How to go above and beyond the status quo to exercise one’s calling. A purpose. There are many words underlined upon the page and spaces left so as to be filled in at some later, wiser date. I ask myself the same questions all the time. I have been asking them for all of my adult life. Their repetition is like a rollercoaster or as reassuring as a heartbeat, depending.

While listening, digging into the exchange of ideas, I lift my face towards a sky that looks like how the iron’s steam feels. I have been “waiting on the light.” That is an expression that I use every year at this time, when there is the most subtle of shifts in the afternoon from scalding blue-white to gold. Although it usually glides like clockwork, this year it is yet to come. The tourists still crowd the Pont d’Avignon. It has been an especially noisy summer, running like a machine, nonstop, even through the dark.

The constant chatter of our current news cycle brays even louder. It has more than rattled me. It has silenced me. I am overwhelmed with feeling for the pain shot through our world. Watching genocide. Like an infant, I don’t really know what to do with it, other than cry, scream. Or retreat into silent watching, waiting for a sign.

James Hollis seems to find me as I fold my t-shirts, press, then fold again. He is saying that to be grown up has little to do with the outward signs that we have traditionally assigned, especially in gender roles, but rather that it is to be found in holding yourself accountable. To the true expression of yourself, your soul, and the journey that your story tells. Not to be prisoner of it. And this even goes so far as to not only doing the work on your “shadow self” (this is Jung, after all), but to be accountable for your part in relieving the shadows of the collective. The paradigm, as Hollis offers, is “to find what supports us when nothing supports us.”

At this, I unplug the iron, perch on the couch, my thumbnail resting between my teeth.

I know what they mean by this. For it is important to how I have (largely) lived, whether purposely or not, as my career permitted or did not. If the presenter of the podcast, tenacious in her questioning, holds an inner confidence, I can remember mine: that I care deeply about my fellow living creatures and the wild beauty of this maddening world and sometimes I have the ability to communicate something (underlined, with spaces left to fill in) about what we are living through together. Be it through a word or a detail of an old building captured on my phone. There is some purpose within that.

I need to stop waiting on the light. I can be child-like, that’s fine in its way, but I can remember…what we all know, if we inquire with enough patience…that I can be the adult in my room. And I can try, despite the ruling circus of fear, to bring forth tiny bursts of change. And that…is light.

* It has been quite some time since I have posted here but I never forget. I hope that everyone who sees this is doing as well as possible.

As always, with love from Provence,

Heather *