Holding Space for the Marvellous

How many diaries and journals have you bought yourself this year? Are you too resting in a ‘Colonel Hathi’ level of orderly smugness? There’s only one thing more pleasing to me than an unattainable New Year Resolution - and that’s a dissected plan of attack for it. 
 
Here’s a little story that may highlight the need for us to leave a little space for something this year that may not be in our planners:
 
Many, many years ago, Labi Siffre’s sister ‘allegedly’ moved into my best friend’s house. Labi, who may have been pulled to that part of the world due to free lodgings, decided to play at our local theatre and my friend, who now believed she was family - bought both of us tickets. 
 
Being young, this was not my idea of a good night out as neither of us had a crush on him and it wasn’t vomiting into a bush. Yet there we were and there he sat, on his stool holding his guitar in the little Welsh theatre and for over two hours- no one moved. No crisp packet crinkled, no granny whispered and no one butt-shuffled their way down a row to the toilet. We watched in total silence as he wove tales of his personal life, from taxi driver to delivery man, from songwriter to singer to poet. He interspersed religious and political beliefs amidst simple, soulful songs; and held us in the palm of his hand like glassy eyed pupae, cocooned in the stories of a man who was obviously very much in love with love.
 
At 16 years old, this was not cool and we sloped out of the theatre without making eye contact but very much aware that this side-track from the usual gross teenage weekend antics had allowed us a glimpse of some unexpected magnificence. Anais Nin explains beautifully the importance of keeping ourselves open to new and varied experiences; whilst writing erotic fiction for a client’s private consumption she was asked to ‘leave out the poetry and concentrate on the sex’ and she retorted that by doing so they would close themselves off from ‘a harem of discrete and never repeated wonders.’  She said, ‘sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of those spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.’ ‘Sex does not thrive on monotony’, she wrote and I firmly believe, neither do we.