frosted over :: on loving the world

Wednesday 14th December 2022 | Glasgow, M8 (at the traffic lights)

For a week: thick sheets of notched ice, both inside and outside the car. Needing to drag myself out of bed early each morning to scrape it, scratch it off the windows. Breath and exhaust fumes staggering out in clouds, fingers red and stinging, a deep shard of reluctance to follow this task by getting in the car, indicating, pulling out into the road, and driving to the office where, once inside, outside the sky will dull and darken before it’s time to leave and begin the process again.

But also: every morning, such a pink sky and the day-moon hanging up there like something precious behind glass. And the trees covered so thickly in frost they are bushy with it. Driving past trees that a week ago had seemed dead now spring-like with ice blossoms. Curving over the bridge towards the motorway and: an expanse of those glittering, frosted trees: a forest of them, the rising sun turning the tips of them golden. The sight so beautiful that it’s caused an ache in me. Every morning. This lovely, lovely sight almost making the scraping and scratching worth it.

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Later, Tuesday 3rd January 2023

Yesterday morning, I led a journal workshop for Writers’ HQ - the first of the year - and started it by reading out Maggie Smith’s poem ‘Rain, New Year’s Eve’. In it, the poet recalls a moment where her young daughter describes the rain as a broken piano, ‘playing the same note over and over’.

‘Already she knows loving the world/means loving the wobbles/you can't shim,’ Smith writes, ‘the creaks you can't/oil silent—the jerry-rigged parts,/MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum.’

What are the things that make it easy for you to love the world? I asked the group, leaving space for them to respond in their notebooks. (‘Light,’ someone said later when I asked what they’d been writing about. ‘Colour,’ someone else said. ‘My Grandson, Henry.’ ‘The sound of the sea.’) And what are the things - the creaky, wobbly parts - that don’t make it so easy? I asked them next. What of these could you bring yourself to love? What would it mean, to you, to love the world?

This is a question I want to ask myself more often this year. What would it mean to love the world? I spent a lot of 2022 just existing, moving through the weeks as they moved into months feeling dazed - or stricken, really, is the word for it. Appalled at the absolute gone-ness that came with the death of my grandmother. I kept - I keep - half-waiting for her to show up around the corner.

She would want me to love the world, though. We both already did. Her, with her artist’s gaze: always seeing shapes in clouds and accosting strangers with her camera because she wanted to paint them. Me, with my inclination for turning what I see into something languaged that I can give back to people. This world, both the joy and hurt of it.

“Let me be tender when it lets me down,” Smith writes. “Let me listen to the rain's one note/and hear a beginner's song.”

This year - though, my goodness, it’s not easy, and so often the inclination is just to drift and scroll and blur the sharpness of it out. But even so - let me try, let me remember, how to love the world.