A Broken Winter
Last month I was finally granted permission to return to the Hebridean Island where I was supposed to have spent the whole winter. A complete winter of solitude, writing, expanding into edges outside of my comfort zone. What would it be like to go back to the picture postcard little cottage and be reunited with my ‘stuff’? Would all my feelings about how my intended experience had been stolen from me, all be there? Hiding between the old kitchen dresser and the log burner? Lurking in the murky cobwebs that would no doubt have collected? Be strung into the symphonic dawn chorus as I lay in bed listening?
I sensed they might be because I couldn’t be this accepting, right? I couldn’t just let it go and go with the flow this much, especially when I am so against the so-called restrictions thing, could I? Feelings of ‘this isn’t how it was meant to go’ - my winter of solitude, being surrounded by sheep, living closer to nature and further away from my phone. It wasn’t supposed to have been broken, severed with spending another 4 months in my childhood bedroom living with my mum, surrounded by different kinds of sheep. It was supposed to have been whole, complete, seamless, unbroken. I was supposed to get in touch with a different part of me, perhaps a long forgotten part of me that remembers how to live a simpler, healthier, freer life. The kind of freedom that only comes when you are unbound by the shackles of the system – the restrictions have always been there, they’ve just been amplified now, thank fully loud enough so that more of us can hear them. We’ve always been encouraged not to thrive, to embody scarcity, to be co-dependant and therefore not at all free.
Anyway, I’m digressing…that’s a piece – or rather a book – for another time…back to my broken winter. A winter of my planned experience being broken up by an unexpected one. But actually it did turn out to be an experience of growth, expansion and freedom. Freedom from a pharmaceutical dependency through my freedom from life-long asthma. Freedom from continued internalising, triggered by the on-going parent-child relationship through the freedom from no longer experiencing myself as not enough. Well, I doubt I would have gained all that freedom if I’d been hidden away on a remote Scottish island with only myself and a notebook to talk to.
Sometimes things are meant to break. And if we get fixated on the ‘one who broke it’…well, then we’re likely missing out on huge learning, change, growth. So, I can blame, be resentful, angry, frustrated as I make my way back up the entire length of the country in my little red car, or I can feel into it all, noticing the edges, being curious as to what feelings might be awaiting me, whilst of course knowing that my feelings are always within wherever I am. And…I can enjoy it. Appreciate it, indulge myself in my final two weeks…the ending of my winter, picking up the broken pieces, acknowledging all they have given me in their fragmentations. And honouring my blessed broken winter.