A Little Story

about the very biggest thing: change

She was sitting in her favourite chair on the porch watching the clouds stretch, morph and reform as they journeyed through a wide open sky, her mottled hands and dark eyes wrinkled and soft with life, when the little one streaked by and fell into her lap, a crumpled heap of lengthening limbs.

She was the youngest daughter of her youngest daughter, the last of her grandchildren and the one closest to her heart, having given up the idea that anything was more important than holding this budding life by the time she arrived. 

‘I hate my life!’, the girl raged, ‘I hate myself! I hate the world!’

She rested a hand on the back of her granddaughter's heart and gave her time, while through her hands, through her lap, through her breath, the space filled with love and tears began to flow. 

‘I miss who I used to be’, the girl said between sobs, ‘I miss that girl who knew who she was. I don’t know who I am and I don’t want to go back but I don’t want to be here either!’

The grandmother’s heart swelled in knowing, remembering herself at thirteen as well. Remembering herself again at 28 when her first child was born and she walked the streets as if without skin, as brand new to the world as the baby against her breast. Remembering herself at 53, when everything she thought she had come to know about who she was, all the reference points she had carefully collated, no longer fit and fell away. And now, at 82, facing the greatest frontier of all, naked in the face of its vastness.

‘Look at those clouds’, she said to her granddaughter, ‘I wonder how it feels to be them, right now?’

The little one turned her head to the side on her grandmother’s lap, and they watched in silence as a rabbit stretched into a hippo, pausing only moments before morphing into a dragon. Change, so much change, skidding across that vast open sky. And a constancy too, with her grandmother’s hand warm on her back, the rise and fall of her belly, the sky.

‘When the cosmos looks down at us, I think we look like those clouds too. Stretching and changing and dissolving back into sky. We try and hold on, because how else can we know if we’re doing ok? See that cloud - it just learnt how to be a good hippo, and then, without asking, it became a dragon!’

The girl laughed, a soft hiccuping laugh. ‘So how do I know if I’m ok, grandma?’

‘Ah well, yes. But what does it mean to be ok, my love? Maybe all your heart really longs to know is, am I safe and am I loved? Don’t you think?’

She nodded, biting her lip and reaching further onto her grandmother’s lap.

‘And there’s a whisper behind that longing too, my sweet. Because somewhere in your heart you remember that you are love, you know. Like the clouds remembering somewhere deep within that they are the sky: that they can let go being good rabbits or hippos or dragons!’

They watched the clouds disperse and reform. Cloud becoming sky. Sky becoming cloud.

She continued, gently rubbing her granddaughter’s heart. ‘You remember this, like a distant spark which won’t leave you. But then you doubt and run from it, searching everywhere else instead. And, oh my love, I know how that doubting and running hurts. It just hurts so, so much to leave ourselves like that.’

Something in the young girl released and crumbled, and ancient tears emerged from an unknown place inside. ‘I’m so scared, grandma. I just feel so scared and so sad.’

But the hand on her back remained as steady as the breathing which rose and fell from her grandmother’s belly against the back of her head. The breeze skudding the clouds rustled the leaves and the porch smelled of wood oil and damp. And at some point, in a moment beyond time, the girl realised fear and sadness had shifted and moved in their own ways, too.

And the two of them, young and old yet both ancient in some mysterious way, sat in the silence of togetherness, not knowing more than this, for now. But for now, this knowing, being enough.