"Always we begin again"

I came here today to write about something else but I found this unfinished post in my drafts and it encouraged me, so I decided to publish it instead, as it is, although it comes to a rather abrupt end! I evidently wrote it not long before my breast cancer diagnosis and inevitably some hopes and expectations have changed in the intervening year or so, but if anything these are words I need to take to heart even more now.

If you’ve been here before you may notice I’ve changed the name from ‘Scattered Gathered Practice’ to ‘The Gathering Apron’. It came to me recently as I was musing on the potential of bags, bundles, containers, aprons and pockets to hold what makes me feel at home. I love it as a metaphor for this writing space where my findings and wonderings are collected and held together.

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These words of St Benedict are among the most encouraging I know. I often set off with enthusiasm and falter after a while: distracted by yet another inviting path, waylaid by an obstacle I don’t have the energy to find my way round, sometimes even forgetting quite where I was going in the first place.

But it’s OK to begin again wherever you find yourself. However long it’s been. Right in the middle of mess and muddle. Whether you’ve lost your way a bit, or a lot.

I intended this to be mostly a research log, but that intention has been oddly paralysing. I’m (almost) always curious and experimental, but I’m not doing ‘Research’ in any consistent way right now – just keeping going, really. And I’ve let that stop me posting for a long while. So if simply writing little bits and pieces of what I’m doing and thinking, disjointed as they are, is all that I can manage, so be it. As Cecilia Child writes on her Instagram, @by_cecil: “There’s a link, and that link is me”.

A settled place inside

I’ve been away from home - a lot - over the last few years. Long, harrowing periods in my parents’ home, caring for them through illness of body and mind, losing them, navigating their deaths and the aftermath. There were some routine absences - for my work or my husband’s. And a few journeys that were new and joyous (and a huge privilege) - a short visit to Shetland, a month in Italy - or familiar and nurturing - our annual visit to Tiree, which still feels to me the most like home of anywhere.

It’s not surprising I feel unsettled, and although I hope we’ll be moving back to Tiree soon, the wandering is so much a part of our way of being as a couple that I need to work hard on finding, as a friend said to me yesterday, “a settled place” inside myself.

I’m sure it’s why I find myself so drawn to ideas about home and domesticity, food traditions, ordinary time, daily rhythms and rituals, sanctuaries and shrines.

Cimiteri

Maybe it’s because I was journeying towards and through the deaths of my parents for so long, but I noticed that in Italy I constantly found myself visiting places of burial and prayer - from the medieval Camposanto in Pisa, via the Oratorio Mortis et Orationis in Monterosso, to the Catacombs of Priscilla and Sant’Agnese, the Mausoleum of Santa Costanza and the cemetery of Quadriportico Verano, in Roma. I was talking about this on a Zoom and someone recommended a TV programme - Marw gyda Kris (in Cymraeg with English subtitles). Very moving and fascinating if you are at all interested in the rituals and practices of death. Thanks to @gaiaredgrave on Instagram for sharing it.

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I’m very interested in perceptions of value and in different ways of expressing what we value in alternative and flexible kinds of exchange. I love experimenting with ‘gift economy’ ideas like ‘pay it forward’ and ‘pay what you wish’. I intend to keep all my posts freely available for everyone - please share them wherever you like. Paying for a subscription (thank you!) helps to makes this possible.

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