The Imagination of Trees: greenbelt

Tuesday, 31 August 2010

greenbelt

I went to Greenbelt on Saturday. I didn't enjoy it at all. I felt terrible because I went with some friends who I love dearly and who all love Greenbelt with a passion. It would be the equivalent of taking them to Venice and them saying 'I'm sorry, but I just need to go home'.

But I did. I needed to go home. I went home. I spent a long time trying to decide why I had so needed to go home. It was lots of things. I didn't want to spend Bank Holiday without Graham. I didn't want to spend it there, without him. I also didn't want to be there full stop.

It interests me that we think we know ourselves, we think we know our friends. But sometimes I think we don't know ourselves or each other that well. My friends thought they knew me and Graham well enough to suggest that we came along to Greenbelt. Graham realised that he knew better sooner than I did. Graham pulled out and explained that he had changed his mind and wouldn't be going after all. I challenged myself to try, to challenge my own assumptions, to test out my instincts, to give it a chance.

What I value, and to some extent envy, about Graham and many other friends and family is that they don't try so hard to 'give things a chance'. They know themselves well, they know themselves so well in fact that they can tell in advance how they will feel about any particular experience. I always like to find out for real. For many years I had assumed that I would not enjoy Greenbelt. I was apprehensive about trying it. But felt I had no evidence to prove that I would not like it. Now I do.

Why do some things appeal and others do not? Why can we be so close to people that we know and yet be so wrong about what they will need? On paper Greenbelt offers everything I have claimed to need with regards to Church and Christianity. I think perhaps I did need these things once, but that I have changed, that I am a different person now with different needs.

What I couldn't work out when I came home was why I had even gone there in the first place. Neither could anyone else. Some people said I had given in to Peer Pressure, others said I was trying to please my friends, which amount to the same thing. I don't think that it the whole story. I think differently. I thought I needed and wanted something and somehow thought that Greenbelt with friends might address it.

But I have never forgotten my friend Anna saying that 'God only gives us what he knows we need and not what we think we want'. Greenbelt wasn't what I needed it was what I thought I wanted. We went the next day from home to a very ordinary service, with a small handful of very ordinary and yet at the same time extraordinary people. We sat for an ordinary hour taking an ordinary communion and then having ordinary coffee and ordinary cake in an ordinary church hall. The ambitious and visionary concept of the Greenbelt festival, with its creative energy and programme brimming to overflowing with ideas and speakers and events seemed worlds away. The 'extraordinary festival' was what I thought I wanted. The 'ordinary hour' is what I actually needed.

When did this change take place in me? Is it temporary or is it permanent? Did my friends know the old me, indeed did I know the old me? Have I changed only so recently that I hadn't even realised myself? Or have I become more truly myself, with less to prove, more comfortable in my own skin, realising more quickly than I used to what is right for me and what is not. I suspect the latter.

I wonder how we manage in life to make our way through it with all the changes that take place around us and within us. I wonder how any relationships last at all. There were friends, and certainly Graham was of this opinion, who knew that I would not feel at home at Greenbelt. They were mostly saying that they would have hated it, which is the same process of thinking someone will love something just because you do. I decided to find out for myself. I won't be going back.

There were a number of different aspects of the experience which I found difficult. It wasn't until I left that I realised which of these were the most affecting. Sometimes that distance is helpful. It helped me work out what was simply my own issues and what was problematic about the place itself. If I did have to go again, for whatever reason, I would work out first of all why I was going. Then I would work out what I wanted to get from it. Then I would make sure that I was there for the entire weekend. Then I would ask Graham to come with me. Then I would buy the programme brochure during the first few minutes and spend a few hours properly researching those things which were suited to my objectives. I think this is the only way to fully appreciate Greenbelt.

In the meantime I have no particular need or desire to go there again and I have no obligations either.

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My original introduction

This photo was taken by my husband Graham on Iona. It is important here because it represents the way in which my Mum's death and funeral offered me healing. It marks a point at which I have decided, as she did, to be fully myself and live every moment given to me as fruitfully as I can. As part of this I wanted to start a 'new thing' and start allowing people to see more of my writing and therefore live my life more openly.
This blog is a response to the insights so many shared at Mum's funeral. I discovered there that my Mum was so much more than simply my Mum. She was never a saint, had many flaws, she could be frustrating and difficult like me. But I realise that these things were tiny when balanced next to her capacity for living and for giving. What emerged from her funeral was an image of a woman whose appetite for life and for quality of life was remarkable. She was entirely herself with everyone, whatever the cost. She gave all that she had to the people she loved, she fed us, nurtured us and showed us that every detail of every day was a blessing.
I am giving you my writing as part of the fruits of my life and person in honour of her memory and continued presence in my life. It is a risk I am now willing to take. She has given me the courage to live my life boldly.
When my Mum was dying I went to the Cathedral and imagined her saying goodbye at the side of an expanse of water. In my imagination there was a boat waiting for her to depart. In my mind I urged her to get in her boat, turn her back on us all, never look back and hope for the light on the other side of the water.
The boat story of Jesus telling terrified disciples not to be afraid in the storm and calming the waves has always been comfort to me in the storms of my life. There are so many ways of looking at the symbolic meaning of a boat.
For me this photo speaks to me about a song called 'Lord you have come to the lakeside' and in it there is a line. 'Now my boat's left on the shoreline behind me; by your side, I will seek other seas.' It is a line which kept coming to me as a friend of mine sat at her Aunt's bedside in her final hours. I sang it for her and her partner as they said their goodbyes as a prayer for them, because I knew how much they liked it. I think it began to speak to me too. When I urged my Mum to the other shore it seemed that her boat was only her own and no one could be in it with her. In her death I do feel called to 'seek other seas' as a new beginning with which to honour her departing.

Books I'm reading & books I've just read

The New Black; Mourning and Melancholia by Daniel Leader
The Time Travellers Wife
Retribution by Maureen Duffy
The Summer Book by Tove Janson
Voice Over by Celine Curiol
Perfume by Patrick Siskund
Loads of Alan Bennett's writings
Writing Home by Alan Bennett
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
Salmon Fishing in The Yemen
Engelby, Sebastian Faulks
The Lolipop Shoes; Joanne Harris
The Prospect of Heaven: Musings of an Enquiring Believer, Frederick Levison
The Courage to Connect; Becoming all we Can Be, Rosemary Lain-Priestley

About my Writing

My writing tends towards the poetic, it has also been described as filmic. It is intensely personal and seeped in Christian imagery and thinking. I think it is spiritual writing in that it is rooted in the belief that there is a God and that God is very real to us in this time and place on earth. I write because it is something I am unable to live without. I write because it is healing and therapeutic. I write out of instinct and because I am by nature 'a writer'. I write for myself and for others that I know and love. I write for specific occasions and for purposes as well as for its own sake. Writing is a pleasure for me.
I write sporadicallly and as the mood takes me, it is not a disciplined exercise but something which emerges from my soul when it needs to be created. I have been astonished to find that people around me need my writing. They ask for what I have written and they ask for more. This blog is an attempt to meet that demand, not because I feel pressured to do so, but because God has given me a gift and it is begging to be used. People are asking me to us this gift fruitfully.
I think my writing is healing in its nature, it is soulful and intimate, it reaches places within us which we do not understand and it sometimes moves people to tears. It doesn't seem that writing like this is a productive or lucrative affair. It is not a 'niche market', it is not designed for profit or thought through in any sense. This approach would disable it.

The Imagination of Trees