Flying Low, With Heaven in a Mug
For someone who often lights a candle each morning and during ceremony, I really should know better than to burn one at both ends. Yet here we are.
It's caught up with me. My head feels heavy, my shoulders have crept up somewhere near my ears, and I'm shivery and low. Getting dressed this morning felt like a major life decision. I don't often feel like this. When I do, self-care stops being a nice idea and becomes the only medicine that does the job.
So the comfy clothes are on. The makeup bag has stayed zipped. And the September rain is doing what Scottish rain does while I sit at my table and watch it.
My mum still knows
Mum phoned this morning to check how I was doing. I'm 55, and that woman still knows when I need a bit of compassion and nudge in the right direction. I don't know how she does it. I'm not sure she does either.
She asked if I was having to work. I told her I had a few things to do, but nothing taxing. Which is true, and also a very me answer. I'm someone who always has to be doing something: several projects on the go at once, plans being hatched, words being written, and a life I'm enjoying far too much to sit it out.
But one of the things I enjoy most, even on a day like today, is writing. Which is how you've ended up reading a blog about comfort, written by a woman in her comfies.
Heaven in a mug
Everyone has a comfort food. Mine hasn't changed since I was a wee girl, and it was mum who first made it for me: egg in a cup.
If you've never had the pleasure, allow me to introduce you. Six minute boiled eggs go into a mug with a knob of butter and a good pinch of salt. Then it's cut up with a knife until the yolk and the butter have properly got to know each other, and it's eaten straight from the mug. It's not fancy, but comfort food doesn't need to be clever, because it isn't really about the food. It's about being looked after, even on the days when the person doing the looking after is you.
Anyone who read Trust The Process, my blog about finishing Rites & Rituals Scotland training, might remember that I learned what a ritual is the hard way (bubbles were involved). A ritual, I wrote, is a person doing a physical thing on purpose, with feeling attached to it. By that measure, egg in a cup is a ritual through and through. Eggs, butter, salt, a fork, a mug, and the same feeling it gave me when Mum made it. It marks a change as well: from pushing on to stopping, from doing for everyone else to doing for myself.
A poet came to sit with me
Somewhere between the butter and the last of the yolk, Mary Oliver came to mind. She's my favourite poet, and if you've been at one of my ceremonies, there's a fair chance you've heard her words already.
The poem that came to mind is called Today, from her 2012 collection A Thousand Mornings. It opens with the poet telling us she's flying low, and those first four words said everything I'd been telling mum on the phone.
I'm not going to share the poem here. It's short, it's poignant, and I'd much rather you went and found it for yourself and made it your discovery.
What I will share is what it gave me this morning. Oliver writes about letting her ambitions sleep for a day. She takes that day off, and the world carries on with its business without needing her to lift a finger. Then she leaves us with the idea that stillness isn't empty at all. It's a way in. A doorway to somewhere sacred.
I'm rubbish at stillness. To me it has always looked suspiciously like doing nothing, and doing nothing has always looked suspiciously like falling behind. But the rain didn't need my help to keep falling. The world wasn't waiting on my to-do list to be ticked. And sitting there with a mug in my hands, I wondered whether flying low might be a way of letting something in, rather than a sign I'd fallen off the pace.
Praise from a low place
In a 2011 interview with Maria Shriver for O, The Oprah Magazine, Mary Oliver said she liked to think of herself as “a praise poet”. In the same conversation she talked about words giving her somewhere to live when life was hard, and she had kind things to say about the power of ceremony, which, as you can imagine, made this ceremonialist very happy indeed.
Like Mary, I believe words are a way of offering praise to the world. As a celebrant, they're most of what I bring. The words I choose for a couple making their promises, or a family saying goodbye, are my way of saying “this person mattered, this love matters, look at this, isn't it something.”
What Today reminded me is that praise doesn't need a big occasion or a full tank. You can offer it from a low place. Butter melting into warm yolk. A mum and a friend who phones at the right moment. Rain on the windowpane. They're small things but noticing them is its own kind of thank you. Even on a day like today (especially on a day like today), I can still offer the world some praise. I'm just doing it a bit more slowly... and in my comfies.
Find your own egg in a cup
They say you can't pour from an empty cup. Mine currently has egg in it, so I'm not pouring anything, but you get the point. The people I work with trust me to hold space for them on some of the biggest days of their lives, and I can't do that well if I've run myself into the ground. Looking after myself is part of that work, not time off from it.
So if you're running low right now, here's my wee non-medical prescription… Notice the signs before your body has to shout. Give yourself permission to fly low for a day without calling it lazy. Find your own egg in a cup, whatever that is for you: a particular soup, the blanket that's seen better days, a film you could recite in your sleep. Then go and find Today by Mary Oliver, read it slowly, and see what it gives you.
And if you can manage it, offer the world a wee bit of praise while you're at it. It doesn't have to be out loud. It just has to be noticed.
Tomorrow I'll light the candle again.
Just the one end, this time.
Sources
Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings (Penguin Press, 2012).
Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver, O, The Oprah Magazine, March 2011