Bones
by Polly Waterfield
God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He who sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone.
W.B.Yeats, from ‘A Prayer for Old Age’
What the bones know
I am trying to figure out what I know in my bones. I want to tell my story in order to understand how things are, to stand on my two feet in my own story. The gaps frighten me. There is before and after Extinction Rebellion, but what does this mean?
I know in my bones that at the heart of everything is interdependence. I know this through loss: I never had much tribe or the pleasure of enjoying and being enjoyed. I am learning about belonging but it’s a cobbled-together jigsaw, not in my bones. Oh, to relax into being a small part of something bigger, something together. The sometimes suspect seductiveness of tribe.
Tribe
I am not a joiner but I long to belong. People hold hands around a cabbage patch and I give up a successful career to go and live with them. There are things that have eluded me: physical vitality, marriage, children. Some losses are more painful than others. People with families have tribe but I float between groups—this has its own freedom and purposefulness but there is no one to snuggle up to on a dark night. Where will I belong if things fall apart?
On the other hand, a group of us create gold and sea-green slow-sewn banners for our choir concerts. Oh! Creativity doesn’t have to be solitary. A friend asks to hear my XR story and my voice pours out of me onto this page—shared thinking is a river I can swim in.
The well-worn pebble in my pocket reminds me of a timeless day at the beach and that every fragment of carefree companionship is radical, two people surviving each other and thriving.
Breakdown
I am newly arrived in the world—where are the others to help me make sense of this too-loud too-big place? I am a child as thin as bones of time and I love oak apples, climbing the Fireworks Tree, peeping out at golfers from my hiding place. I am the landscape while I am in it. I am a gawky teenager in ochre corduroy shorts and I busy myself being clever and passing exams, but remember not a note of the Mozart violin concerto I’ve just played with the school orchestra, because of the terror.
I am a young adult. I am performing on stages around the world but all I can think about is will I drop my instrument. I must be happy because I am “successful.” I crash and burn and escape to another country. I am successful again, and again fall apart and leave. Colourful motley musicians surround me but there is no one to hold me in mind as I crash and burn, crash and burn.
Closer to now, there are seventy people sitting around on straw bales covered with worn velvet curtains, grappling together with how to be in these bleak times. Waves of despair and desire and dreaming move through the group like a natural force but some people need to close the door tight against the grimness. I walk to the centre, take the talking stick and speak, to honour those who are letting themselves break down.
I wish I could fall apart more deeply, lose my bones.
Mind the gap!
We know we have to mind the gap but this gap is everywhere and so huge no one notices it anymore. Climate breakdown is a reality but “Do you believe in climate change?” a young man casually asks his grandparents in a café, as though we can choose. I do my daily walk through the cool woods to Byron’s Pool with the trees growing and all the birds jabbering and the river flowing as though there’s nothing wrong. Between my experience and the horrifying headlines yawns an unspeakable space. I know the polar ice caps are melting and the Arctic peat is burning but I don’t feel it in my bones. How can I mind this gap?
XR for introverts
I am “introvert.” I am also now “activist.” I used to be afraid of activists, glancing at them furtively out the corners of my eyes. I felt guilty by default, needing to justify the interiority of my life. What moved in them that didn’t in me? Did it mean I didn’t care if I wasn’t taking action in that way?
I believe in inner work and increasingly in the power of collective thought. I don’t want to think that all my years spent not on the streets were a waste and so I have to believe there are many ways of taking action, including some that look like inaction. I gave up a successful career and that signals offbeat priorities. “Why not re-train as a lawyer and use your gifts?” ask the well-meaning American relatives, not seeing I am broken. Instead I join with others in meditation and daily life to anchor something in the sand-dunes. I have the utmost respect for the Benedictine monks in a fold of the Scottish hills who “only” pray.
Now I am being simultaneously teased outwards and inwards. Will the centre hold?
Mother
My mother holds herself as though she has no bones to support her. She doesn’t have a story. I know hardly anything of her family, of what has made her, her likes and dislikes. I know she is clever at the cryptic crossword puzzles and thinks anyone who hasn’t read all of Jane Austen isn’t up to much. She has made a sacrifice of her life—for my sake? She doesn’t hear who I am, what my story might be. Maybe if I try harder to do better, to be better, to arrange myself around her, then she will hear me…
We call the earth our mother but I wonder if she is hearing us now as we scrabble to make sense of what is happening. Let’s try harder, harder, harder… But perhaps she is deaf and cold, turning away her broad shoulder and deciding we don’t have a story worth listening to anymore. Going on without us.
Enough
“But it isn’t enough!” rings out the desperate response to some hopeful micro-initiative to do with goat husbandry. The speaker knows and values her despair and I understand it is her fuel for action and think I need to feel my despair more deeply. But it isn’t enough for what? To save the planet, to save humankind—these are too big to weigh our actions against and in any case some people think it is too late. I respect the people who, with open eyes, are purposefully enjoying what can be enjoyed, moment by moment.
I am not enough to please my parents; I need to try harder, harder, harder… I am not enough to stand on stage and tell my story. I am not enough to keep up with the XR social media circus and because I am not volunteering for the million things that are crying out to be done. I am a hungry ghost and nothing is enough; I am condemned to feel famished the more I eat and I will consume everything around me until all that’s left is bones.
I don’t know what is enough in these times.
Moments of inexplicable happiness
My voice was never heard. By now in my sixties I have put together a patchwork of skills to help myself through but what comes out is unreliable, frustrating and often still not heard. At a Non-Violent Direct Action training day I am astonished to find myself speaking spontaneously and hearing an echo—others stand up in solidarity. My heart stands up too in the knowledge that there are people out there.
My first XR small group meeting: I announce myself with “I’m really not sure I want to be here,” and it is accepted without question. Again: “I’m afraid I’m a rubbish rebel,” and a young man welcomes me as part of the biodiversity we need not only in the world but in our group. My heart is touched.
In April, with friends, I step into the road at Marble Arch to block the traffic. Later I am at Oxford Circus with the pink boat. I am finding my way. I know how to notice who in the crowd is alone or out of the loop and speak to them. Rare inexplicable happiness rises up in me.
I am at Piccadilly Circus with the traffic all snarled up and a movingly small group of teenagers with truth in their eyes are holding the fort. I am terrified of conflict but I look at a stalled taxi and suddenly think “I can do this!” I cross the road, knock on the window and say “This must be really frustrating for you.” The world doesn’t end and energy streams through my bones and my whole body.
Passion
My passion is the potential of people: the sparkle in the young boy’s eye after telling his XR story to more people than he’s ever spoken to in his life, the long-honed skills of body or mind or both. This has been the ground bass to my life, the ocean floor beneath the waves, the one constant. A strange and lonely marriage to what might be possible.
In April I find myself on the streets of London along with many other impassioned people. That same evening another kind of Passion at King’s College Cambridge: that of St Matthew. We are so close we breathe with the musicians in the story’s wailing sorrow, and I feel connected to every one of my brilliant and heartbreakingly young men in the choir. “There will always be music,” says my friend who knows how everything is tottering and is at peace with a terminal diagnosis for humankind. But not music like this; this is the pinnacle and pinnacles fall first. I am filled with a terrible sadness at the skill and the beauty and the passion of centuries and at how everything passes. I think I do not want to live in a world without Bach.
Can you hear me?
Childhood. Everything is lovely—we have all we need, our parents are glamorous, we live abroad and have our own typewriters. The children are clever and talented. How could there be anything wrong? I want a grown-up to tell me how bad things are. Surely it must be bad because of the monsters lurking in the gaps between people. But since no adult is paying any attention it can’t really be wrong. Or someone would notice my mother’s unhappiness. Or someone would ask me how I feel. Or someone would take my hand and introduce me to the world and help me find my story.
And now how bad are things? Can anyone hear me? Is the microphone working?
This is an emergency
It has always been an emergency. My mother has always been quietly dying; my parents have always been silently at war with each other; the baby has always been caught in the crossfire; there has never been enough attention to go around; it has always been clear that only one person can survive a relationship; other people have always been a threat. I know emergency; it is in my bones and blood and nervous system and now shows up in my blood pressure despite all the measures I’ve taken and all the help I’ve had.
So much for my personal emergency. Is it so different from what is destroying life on earth? I wonder if it’s possible for humankind to thrive along with the earth but I fear my imagination is limited to only one survivor and that’s obviously not us.
We are all dying all the time and there is more dying at stake now, but civilisations do rise and fall. We are falling, most likely.
Heartbroken
Some wisdom for troubled times came my way: find the thing that breaks your heart and then plough your energy into that. What breaks my heart is my mother’s life, the wasteland of her marriage, the way she dwindled and died not so old, unspeakably alone. What breaks my heart is the pain passed down through generations because another way couldn’t be found, the unspeakable couldn’t be spoken. What breaks my heart is how the pain lodges in bones and tissues and is passed on again and again.
If you need a signpost here is another: you do not have to comprehend or control everything, but to learn which story you are in and which of the many things calling out in the world is calling to you. My story is something to do with the body, with myself as a creature of the earth. My story is to grapple with this every day.
I help someone align her bones, her mind and her movement and she sheds a suit of armour, gracefully and gratefully. The tears fall. This is my work, to arrive in my body on the earth and to know it as home.
What breaks your heart?
Two things
My sister-in-law is upstairs in the spacious German farmhouse where they have taken refuge, in agony from the brain tumour which will end her life at 33. I can’t find my way through all this pain. But there are also the huge jugs of chamomile tea in the comforting kitchen and the quiet presence of people who work the land and know the pressure of bringing in the harvest when the earth is so generously abundant. They are adults—not the kind who aren’t listening—and they know something that I don’t. Frau Kugel sits with my sister-in-law in pain and something passes between their bodies.
There is the agony and the unbearableness and there is also something else. I want to know the something else.
We don’t know
Does the world need an engineer more than a singer in these times? In all obvious ways, yes—but surely it isn’t as simple as that.
My classical singer friend who just died, inexplicably and no older than me, imagined himself as a storyteller on the road with his harp in the dark days to come. A travelling healing minstrel for ragged times with his big and beautiful voice. Then, in our 20s, I was scared by his vision but now I honour him by remembering what he never became.
This can’t be fixed. This is bigger than any of us. I don’t think anyone can know what the world needs.
Too big, too small
I am close to the ground and clutching my mother’s thumb, small and sheltered underneath the umbrella of her skirts. I feel secure. Older, I am outside with the family in the warm dark night of the Indian subcontinent, supposedly relaxing after a meal brought by the bearer whom my father has treated with his usual condescending bonhomie. I look up at the stars and suddenly disappear into the too-bigness—I can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t speak. I am too small; the world is too big. My blood and bones are turned to stone and there’s no one to bring me back to life.
Later I escape from my successful life and find refuge elsewhere. “World service” and “transformation of consciousness” are terms too big for me, but all the same it’s the first place I feel at home. I unfurl a little, find my bones a bit. It takes all my strength to keep unfurling as life rolls on and I move on, and maybe this is selfish. I create my life.
“Affairs are now soul-sized,” and mostly I am too small and the things I am trying to think about too big. With a friend I remember that it’s still okay to have everyday concerns, and I can breathe again. But where are the big conversations? Maybe everyone feels too small.
Tell the truth!
I live with a dead mother though my mother died long years ago. Every day I work to revive her and this is hard work but necessary.
I am fifteen: a letter from my brother shatters the illusion of “everything is fine” and tells the truth about our mother’s unhappiness, exploding my world with terror and with hope. So I know in my bones that life bursts forth when the elephant is named.
I smile at the elephant at Marble Arch saying “Ecocide” and celebrate with the pink boat at Oxford Circus saying “Tell the truth!”
Yours in love and rage
Love, yes, but what about rage? It’s still a bit of a shock seeing this at the end of many XR missives. I respect people’s outrage especially young people’s but I’m hoping it won’t be directed at me. Anger frightens me. I wish I could “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” but my rage is buried too deep to be summoned at will. All the same, something has got me willing to go on the streets and maybe it isn’t just the love and hugs.
Dreaming
My father says pityingly “Pol… you and your dreams…” No place for dreams or dreamers in the world of “his” war. I only ever wanted to breathe freely, to move easily, to belong. Now I am older and stiffer and the air is full of invisible particles but I am still dreaming.
I am half-buried in the ground. I can’t move; the sun bears down on me. My sisters are being taken to the knackers—they are still beautiful but they are old and are not considered of value. Around me are other horses also buried. We can’t move our legs though it’s our joy and delight to move and to run over the earth. This goes on for a few centuries.
Now my legs are above ground; I am ably supported upside down at the sacrum, the sacred bone, and I am an ice skater. I have found my life partner! Torvill and Dean! Delightedly performing wild, erotic gymastic moves in the air with my upside down legs. This is in public and I know this changes everything.
I don’t have a daughter but she is dead by the roadside, her vulnerable knees showing through raggedy black jeans. I cycle on through the summer hedgerows, not wanting to know. In any case I haven’t had a daughter. I don’t know if it was a violent death but something tells me it was. Can something die that hasn’t even existed? How can I mourn for something I didn’t know I had?
In my bones, I know that I have to tell my tribe. I tell them. It is received. I am overwhelmed with grief.
Habitat
There is no Planet B, as the placards and the book tell us. Planet A is our home and so is the habitat of our bodies, the only chance we get. In my Alexander teaching work I wonder if there is a connection between the difficulty of listening to our fragile bodies and our blindness to the fragility of the earth. Maybe that connection means realising we will die and return to earth, return to being part of something. My desire is to know myself as habitat and part of the cycle of all things. I do what I can to help people restore their mind-body ecosystem, allow some territory for their own rewilding, reckon with the force of gravity in their bones, let themselves be supported by the earth and be part of what surrounds them. But not all want to listen.
I don’t usually do this sort of thing
I really don’t. I am not a natural-born rebel and find it hard to stand up to authority. But now there are a lot of people out there who also don’t and aren’t and this is wonderful. The issues aren’t new; I am not new to the issues though perhaps I had gotten a bit sloppy in my choices. So why do I now want to shout jubilantly about Extinction Rebellion? Could it be there is enough of me in my muscles and tissues now to want to put my body there, on the streets? Or perhaps it’s that I feel buoyed up by the tidal wave of the youth of the world at my back. For now, this seems to be my caravan. It seems these are my people, young and old. I can feel something different in my bones and I want to play my part. Together.
‘Deep in our bones resides an ancient, singing couple who just won’t give up making their beautiful, wild noise. The world won’t end if we can find them.’
Martín Prechtel, from ‘ Secrets of the Talking Jaguar’
Polly Waterfield has been the child of a diplomatic family, a professional violinist, a member of the Findhorn community, a Suzuki violin teacher, a printmaker, and an Alexander Technique teacher. In her 60s she has surprised herself by becoming involved with Extinction Rebellion. This essay arose from an interview conducted by Alice Willitts, in which Polly began to tell her XR story.