Life is the tenderest thing
Every so often, a collection of words will drop into my mind and reverberate around my consciousness for days or weeks. They will feel so true, and yet I don’t fully touch the depth of their meaning until something happens to land them.
In the last month or so, as we settle into our new lives in Ibiza, the words that have followed me everywhere have been these five - life is the tenderest thing.
This morning I took Ocean to his new Spanish nursery for the first time, and I felt wholly and completely the essence of every word, life is the tenderest thing.
As we walked hand in hand down the road, I felt my heart so full of… I don’t know what else to call it, but motherly love... I felt that, in that moment, it might explode out of my chest.
Someone recently asked me what motherhood was like, and I explained that for me, it is like the most exquisite heartbreak I could ever have imagined. In fact, it goes further than heartbreak. For when Ocean came into this world, a piece of my heart left my body and implanted itself forever in his. I will forevermore walk around the world with a piece of my heart living outside of my body. And this little piece of my heart is exposed, raw, unprotected by the soft flesh of my body or the hard shells I have built to protect myself. This little part is eternally tender.
One of the ways I promised to honour the life of my darling sister Sushi is to carry forward her love of words. In the dual meaning of the word tender, I find a mischievous gift offered to us by the trickster gods of the English language. On the one hand, meaning soft, delicate, and easily injured. And on the other, meaning to offer.
This tenderness I speak of is not just reserved for mothers. Anyone living in connection with anyone or anything beyond themselves lives this dual meaning. Both delicate and prone to injury and in a constant posture of offering. To live in connection is to offer a part of your heart to life itself. Out of your body and into the world.
I have spent so much of my life pondering its big questions, questions that traverse time and space - why are we here, what’s it all for, what does it mean to live a good life. The past two years have, for me, as I know it has for so many of you, brought these questions into sharper focus. The tragedy - the pandemic, the painful global awakening to the history and reality of racism, new and old wars. And the ecstasy - new life, new love, the community and hope that arises in the face of adversity. Not to mention the many personal joys and losses that have coloured the tapestry of our collective history. We have all felt so much. Recently I have had moments where I feel like I am awakening from a dream. Did all that really just happen, I ask myself? Sometimes I wish I could go back to sleep, as it has been as much nightmare as it has been dream.. It has been, in many moments, simply too much to feel.
But what I know is that there is nowhere we can run or hide to escape the truth that, for whatever reason, there is so much to feel in this life.
The game, if we might call it that, then becomes this - to expand our capacity to feel it all. To stretch our personal range of tolerance for pain, joy, fear, mystery and everything in between. So that we don’t miss a beat of this life.
My deepest desire is, I think, to taste the marrow of life. To suck every last drop of what it is offering up. And to do that requires the capacity not just to withstand it, and not even necessarily to welcome it. But to be able to feel it without turning away.
As I think back to how I wrapped my arms around Ocean as he walked with me through the gates, I think then about what was asked of him as he left my body and came into this new and curious land, so exposed and raw and vulnerable. And the parallel becomes so beautiful to me. Even in their most tender state, each one who is born is asked to open their arms to life and to offer up a part of their heart. And as we grow, we are asked to open wider and offer even more. And so, in moments when I wish it could all simply feel... less, I remember that to open to life like this, it can be nothing but tender. This is what it’s supposed to feel like. And to taste the marrow of life, we must offer ourselves up as willing participants on the ride of life.
Love,
Holiday xxx