Love is always ready
Tears. Bright, salty tears of joy. Sadness. Embodied love flowing through every cell. Past and present.
This is the first thing I’ve written here in nearly a year, and it feels right that it arrives like this.
I can’t get it out of my imagination: the moment in Small Prophets where Elliot embraces Michael Sleep and they hold each other. Shared love of art. Embodied connection through music.
I consider MacKenzie Crook and how emotionally intelligent a writer/artist needs to be to write a scene like this. They’re both wearing the same T-shirt. I’m crying as I write this, thinking about it, with Modest Mouse playing over that scene. I think about his mum, and I know he must have been loved deeply, is loved deeply, by the women in his life to have access to this depth of art as a man. The softness and kindness, and how it’s the central female protagonist who draws the male protagonist’s gaze to the teenager who needs to be witnessed. By another man. I think about Jerusalem and seeing him perform in the best piece of theatre I have ever seen.
I think of the manosphere and the grief and loss it holds. Ableism as trauma shield. The complexities of being a man and feeling the fractured spaces within our bodies and knowing. Really knowing that only the power of the feminine can heal those fractures, and that means learning to worship the sacred nature of the mother within all men. The performative act of trying to subjugate the archetype of the mother through brute strength.
Knowing how men cry for their mothers when they’re in pain or when leaving this world.
My oldest cats. Huxley and Mysky. Lying next to one another. Her paw against his front leg. Years of living together. Growing. Ageing. They were never a couple. Spot raised Mysky. Our first cat. Watching a long-term feral raise a tiny female cat was beautiful. Seeing them both soften into one another in these late seasons is emotional and painful.
Thinking about how Chloe Zhao trained as a death doula to confront her fear of death. It makes sense that many women fear death; they are life incarnate. Life contained in their movement. In each breath they take.
My God, to be a man in a world haunted by the absence of the feminine is hard.
Small Prophets — BBC Two / BBC iPlayer
Created, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook
Ten minutes ago, I stood in the light and let every memory in. All of it. The moments of growth. The times with FP. The pain. The beauty. The grief art has opened my heart to. We’ll Float On. Then those memories moved to the RCA. The PhD, now entering the final weeks of my first term, of my first year. My first doctoral training week. The overwhelm.
Then I think of the magnificent women my life has been impacted and defined by. I give thanks that I was raised alone by a woman. I miss my dad and I wonder who I would have been if he hadn’t died when I was four.
He left so I could be shaped by the feminine strength. A raw power that you learn can be terrifying in how it has enough care to break you apart with its gaze.
My mother, resting in Stevenage. In the ground. Her bones dry and exposed, and yet still alive in my mind and body. Her knowledge and love vibrating hard in my chest. In my cells.
I think of Elinor Rowland. An artist I only met in January, whose work, life, and attitude have already had an immense impact on my imagination. Watching her deliver her talk at Diverge. Witnessing the bodies of those in attendance shift as the truth she cast into the room landed. In my heart. In my brain.
I can’t wait to work with Elinor.
Then I think of Moon, my wife. And the strength and pain and art and wonder we’ve shared. The cells that belong to us both, that now vibrate in our children’s bodies as they cycle with her out in the village we call home, on this Mother’s Day.
I think of Vickie, filled with enough love and compassion and kindness to heal the world. Of the potential of her Neurotype Writers group. The power of her words and her skill as a writer. Of the full moon. Of returning to Hitchin Lavender for the commencement of year nine in a landscape that has sheltered my heart and my practice.
I think of the women whose presence has altered me, taught me, steadied me, made me listen harder.
Why does Mother’s Day hurt?
