This text was written as I learn to live with Long Covid and attempt to regain my creativity. All the posts and some more info can be found here.
Today's post come to you direct from my journal. The text has been lightly edited to make sense to readers who are not me.
I packed my tent and lingered long in the kitchen of the campsite to stay warm out of the wind and wait for departure time. Travel days are always a little odd, full of waiting and transition. A. drove me to Swansea which was very nice but I missed the more gentle transition of the train ride from the local village to Swansea. The drive was all big roads and built up environment whilst the train takes me through the green valleys and sleepy villages. Maybe this is why I have a restlessness in me this evening. I went from the magic of Y Mynydd Du to the too-human world in the blink of an eye. My experience of the landscape was so dominated by cars and their awful speed over the week-end. I still feel calmed, soothed. My soul is still and quiet. None of the usual turmoil that plagues me, but I did not have access to the deep connection of before. This requires one on one with the landscape and the kins within, a solitary human experience shared with kins of the more than human world. The mountain and the community around still worked their magic but the deep elation of unbridled joyful tears just was not there. I miss the intensity of these moments, the effort of my body, the sticky sweat, and the gradients in my legs. I miss my random stops on the way and the deep spirituality I can only reach away from human folks. There is nothing to be done about this except the work of healing.
I think this is the first time I have opened myself to that possibility, that I can heal, recover from long covid. It is a shock. The thought made me pause and as I write something in me trembles, shakes at the fear I will pull that thought away. Maybe I can heal? Maybe I will not and that is equally okay. I know I have a life either way, a good life. I can enjoy the now without constant pull to a future I do not know, without the constant pull to a past and all the differences that it holds.
This is such a quiet moment here in the study but it feels momentous. Maybe I can heal. Will I launch myself into tons of research and strict routines? No. I still want to enjoy life but I can think of my routines, of pacing, of all the self-care that I do as both acts of nurturing and acts of healing.
I seek the voice that tells me I won't heal, that it is silly to hope, but for the first time, it is not there. Equally I seek the voice that only sees a future akin to the past but it is not there. Multiple futures lay open right in front of me. One in which I heal. One in which I don't. And many in which neither is true but the vast openness between the two options. I stand at the edge of these many branching paths and I am okay with any of the options, eager to go actually and find out what lays along the way, along the ways.