Mind The Gap...
We have just walked through the door from a day of visa applying and running shoe buying...
'Guess what you left out..' Anadi said, pointing to the table...
This is now going to sound like one of those lateral thinking puzzles...
A husband and wife walk back into their home, on the coffee table is a towel... On the towel is a small blue plastic bag full of water...
What has been going on....? You guessed it?
My ice for icing my Achilles still where I left it this morning...
'What is it ?' I asked...
What do you think it is, Anadi laughed...
The natural laws... A bag of ice has turned into a bag of water...
But also magical really, transformation in action...
Water into wine; Ice into water
Anything is possible if we open our eyes to the magic and transformation all around us, in every moment. The leaves on the trees, the clouds in the sky. The movement of the earth around the sun, and the sun itself racing through the galaxy .
We have this opportunity of life, here, now, the wonder of it unfolding in every moment...
We have the opportunity to live it fully within all its multifaceted dimensions and our experiences.
I am reminded of the metaphysical poem by Andrew Marvell, where - if truth be told - he is persuading his coy mistress the reasons she should go to bed with him... now!
He is urging her that life is not forever and that they must enjoy their pleasures while they can... He finishes thus:
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
And so it is... though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make him run...!
I left at just after 8am this morning, to run for half an hour on the grass in the park.
Anadi went on his road loop, so we jogged up the road and parted at the park entrance; I turned right down the hill, past the duck pond and onto the grass.
My ankle was much improved from yesterday and although I could feel it stretching itself as I ran, it felt a getting better pain rather than a damaging one...
As I ran a memory flashed in front of my eyes of the last time my Achilles tendon was troubled
It was nine years ago and it held me back from running for nine months (I became pretty proficient at cycling and swimming!)
At one point I was lying on Professor Nick Webborn's treatment table and he looked up from my ankle and straight at me 'you know this will get better Julia...' He said...
That afternoon I was walking around Eastbourne with a friend and I felt a visceral shift in my ankle and it turned the corner for health that very day....
The memory had flashed into my consciousness as I ran, round the park on the grass, loving the damp autumny morning, running on wet grass, vibrant from the rain, covered in leaves under the trees, the memories of kicking through fallen leaves November days, under my feet
I turned right, up a slight slope and a voice, a thought, my higher self, suddenly said 'I know I will get better...' It was like the thought came from somewhere else.
'Who is the 'I' that knows I will get better'? I asked.
And on I ran, another lap and back home to The Stables...
I checked my emails and looked at Facebook. At 8am my friend Cecilia Morrison had written this comment on my blog...
'I know your Achilles WILL get better...'
Later on...
Seeing the 'mind the gap' sign on the platform while we waited for the train to go to the Thai Embassy with our visa application, I reflected on the huge transition that Anadi and I have been in, still are in, as we let go of all we have known before and set off on a new adventure, a new life.
My Achilles tendon injury feels a part of the shifts and changes as we 'let go of one bar'.. and reach for the next one...
This piece says it all for me
Mind the gap...
Every kind of gap is a space between certainty and bewilderment... We are on the edge of a strange new land, and we don't know its ways or its language...
This tension is captured perfectly in the image of the trapeze artist, who has let go of one bar and risk the flight through the air before coming within reach of the other bar. But the point of the exercise is really about how the trapezius handles the gap. What takes the crowd's breath away is the grace and confidence with which he flies through the air and that open question every time; once he has let go of one bar, will he really reach the second bar safely? (The Other Side of Chaos... Margaret Silf 2011).
We arrived in a London, and bumped into a couple looking bemusedly at a map, as we were studying maps on Anadi's phone in similar vein!
They were lost and so were we. They were looking for the natural history museum which we had just passed...
We directed them there... Do you know where Pelham street is I asked?
They had just walked down it!
'I am glad we could reciprocate', the gentleman said...
'We are all one anothers angels' I said...
'Strangers in paradise...' his wife laughed...
