Phosphorescence

by Julia Baird

But still you must avoid people who would control, criticise or diminish you, in any way, or are jealous of you or make you feel small, or are drawn to your strength but then suck it dry. Stay with those who bring you comfort, understand you, and allow you to flower. Know this, too: you deserve love. Real, enduring love. Buckets of it.

Be You. Be the best version of yourself you can be. Work to understand, and show, what it means to have integrity. Dare. Don’t worry about what people think. Grasp every opportunity you are given and run at full pelt.

Know that bad times will pass. They always do. Rubbish will get tipped into your life, occasionally vats of it, and sometimes this will be your fault and you must try to learn from it. But at other times it will be deeply unfair and all you can do is control the way you respond to it. Speak your piece but don’t complain; draw yourself to your full height. Keep moving, place one foot in front of the other, and know it will pass. If it won’t, do what you can to change it. But walk tall.

You will find that humans are capable of extraordinary tenderness and extreme brutality, all in the one day. That one person can contain breathtaking contradictions, sinners can have moments of greatness, and saints can have streaks of darkness. Understanding this is crucial, as you will come to recognise what it is you can accept in yourself and others. You will also see that character is partly innate and partly built: make habits out of kindness, compassion, discipline, humility and honesty. Work hard on them. This will give you an unseen and magical strength.

Cultivate a sense of humour. Show mercy to yourself as well as others. Look at the world, and try to shift obstacles blocking other people’s paths to equality and contentment, as well as your own.

Always buy the underpants that match the bras — without guilt. Accumulate, slowly, beautiful or sturdy furniture, and surround yourself with things that you love. Delight in generosity, learn its joy. Pray, or meditate, often. Find the kind of art that thrills you, and drink it in. Dance as often, and for as long, as you like. Inhale music.

your elders and ancestors give you an authority; the authority of being female in this world. Of being strong and certain and bold. Of being able to create and nurture life. There are a million ways to be a woman: find your own and revel in it.

Find your voice, and raise it. Stake your authority, and state it. Don’t recoil. Don’t back down. Sometimes authority should be worn lightly. But at other times — especially once you have worked out what it is you want to say about justice, or joy, or in response to the nonsense that can sometimes pass as public debate — it should be brandished like a torch. It might take you decades to speak up about things that matter to you, but, being able to speak your truth is a vital part of being human, of walking with certainty and openness on the earth, and refusing to be afraid. Once you have found your voice, you must resist every person who will tell you to bury or bottle it.

Seriously, run. Then, carefully, draw the brilliant, the decent and the good-hearted near, and love them fiercely. Shed the toxic and the small; show loyalty and honour to those you love. It’s not an accident, it’s purposeful. Stand by your friends and spend time with those who’d rather swill acid than hurt you. There are millions of excellent humans on the globe. Find them. Befriend them. Support them. And soon a plant with a thick trunk and roots will grow.

As she then said: Telling stories is a fundamental part of being human. ‘It’s how we understand the world around us and how we convince others to work with us to change it. It is also — and anyone who sat with a child will tell you this — a profoundly and often wildly creative act. Telling stories is the way we take the complicated emotions and weird spirallings of imagination inside us and give them shape and form. It is how we show who we are to the world.

BUDDHISTS CALL IT MUDITA — a delight in another’s good fortune, or an unselfish joy. The Yiddish word nachas has a similar meaning of pride in someone else’s accomplishments, usually referring to one’s children. Another slightly different but rarely used word with a similar meaning is confelicity — pleasure in another’s happiness. In recent years, psychologists studying this concept have coined the term Freudenfreude to describe the opposite of Schadenfreude, and it means genuine rejoicing in another’s success.

We revelled in the freedom of the small hours when the clock stopped and our soles wore thin.

SOMETIMES IT IS HARD to know if home is where you return to or where you start from. It is intangible things: people, not postcodes, and conversations, not couches. When you start from a place, with a friend, you will find you are bound not to the suburbs you grew up in but to the person or people you left with. And these skeins of friendship, knitted by billions of words over decades, bind, then act like kites, allowing us to soar while knowing we can return to talk to someone who will remind us we were not just fools with shaggy hair who danced marathons to escape monotony and restraint, but also women who were escaping strangulation; who will tell us that it’s okay to run, stumble, fall in love, cry, make mistakes, dye your hair red, want to write or want to be a full, equal, complicated human being, that’s it’s okay to dream of more. To want to ‘Get. The fuck. Out of here.’ And they will understand that what you might have been looking for was not another suburb, or even just an exit sign, but open skies. And that the impulse to run is the same as the impulse to run a clipping razor across your scalp: it’s an impulse for freedom. We shed hair in a bid to shed skin.

Candy taught me that even the briefest of encounters matter and that we should cherish them; that the voices from the margins are crucial; and that poetry matters, intensely.

‘We utilise things like art and activism to create a place of belonging within the margins and can revel in what it means to be an outsider who belongs.’

William S. Burroughs called his cats ‘psychic companions’, and the last words he entered in his journal were: ‘Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience — any fucking thing. Only thing can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for [his cats] Fletch and Ruski, Spooner, and Calico. Pure love.’

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger — something better, pushing right back. — Albert Camus, The Stranger

Regarde became Colette’s credo: Look, wonder, feel, live.

We need to learn how to regard and pay attention, to mine our inner strength, and accept the possibility that we can emerge from pain and grow by moonlight — in times of darkness — that we can push ‘right back’ on winter and find inside a summer. We also need to seek and settle upon a purpose in life — something many people seem to discover once they fully open their eyes. It’s in this way, I believe, that we can become phosphorescent.

THERE ARE SO MANY things I want to teach my son. To stand like a tree; to be true; to respect women as equal and also as magnificent, flawed, real human beings; to be kind; to understand the depths and shallows of the seas; to forgive fools; to carefully collect the good-hearted like shells on a beach; to find the part of the natural world that most brings him joy and explore every corner of it. To file his taxes on time and learn to breathe properly over and under water, to be humble, to fold things the right way because I still get it wrong, to scrub barnacles from friendship when they form, to love his family fiercely and never take them for granted. To find a purpose and honour it, to look for commonality with every person, to laugh at himself often, to hunt awe, to value silence and the discipline of logging off, to find ways to love his enemies, to learn to cook some things that make people happy, to eschew perfection, to seek the divine. To dance whenever possible, to keep walking in rain and sleet and snow, to learn self-reliance, to not waste a second on the leers of cynics or the jibes of hateful people, to endure, to run and meander and swim and travel and allow himself to make mistakes and be honest with everyone and himself. And to recognise that even in the madness, the toxicity, the decay and rot of the world, music is made, and played, and danced to.

What I really want my son to know is that life, with all its striving and seriousness, its cerebral quests and spiritual yearning, is contained in crisp red apples and white-marble moons, furry caterpillars and leopard-spotted slugs, the slobbering of excitable dogs, laughter, the crashing of waves, the sighting of a seal beneath a cliff or of a cuttlefish on a reef, the scent of jasmine after a morning swim, a steaming bowl of fresh pasta, the smell of a just-baked cake — that all these jostling, bobbing moments sustain us, that they are the string that threads our days. But if I am completely honest, this is what he is already teaching me.

has crystallised the research on how to savour around three recommendations: look forward to something; enjoy it when it occurs; and reminisce about it afterwards.

We all have these moments, where we are sated by simple pleasures. Luxuriate in them.

IF WE GET IT RIGHT, ert can bookend our days with purpose. So we should search for our own ert. It might not be a tangible object. For many people, it is simply motion.

Indeed, the point of ert is momentum. One foot in front of the other. One arm circling after the other. One word tumbling out after the other. Whatever propels you forward.

Ert is that tiny spark within us that reaches out of the mess of daily life towards what is good, and towards what it is we most crave to be, do and love. Sometimes, it is simply a drive to survive.

First, stillness and faith can give you extraordinary strength. Commotion drains.

What is to give light must endure burning. — Anton Wildgans, Helldark Hour

We’re all on this mad Earth together, bumbling about, trying to figure it out.

Why don’t you let your life be your witness?”’

Doubt acknowledges our own limitations and confirms — or challenges — fundamental beliefs; it is not a detractor from belief but a crucial part of it.

We should also regularly doubt ourselves, and question what has shaped our own thinking, what unconscious biases we might harbour, and whether we might be wrong. All of us have limited understanding of most things, most especially of the lived experiences of other people.

Myths and ideologies have permeated every inch of our written histories, and there is a need for constant rethinking, revisiting and revision to shed stereotypes of the past and allow a full, bustling, diverse experience of history to be heard. We need to constantly doubt what we are taught and what we read.

Many who don’t attend church or adhere to any particular religion congregate on beaches, in forests and on mountaintops — to experience awe and wonder, to sense a ‘peace that goes beyond understanding’, the ‘sighs that have no words’, and seek ways to bring living light into their lives. Such sites are nature’s cathedrals of awe, places where we can sit alongside strangers in silence and understand what we share; where we exclaim at the firefly or the sea sparkles or the cephalopods because they are signs of the miraculous and they usher in a kind of quiet respect for the fantastic, the improbable and the marvellous, the things we can’t quite believe are real, alongside us, here on Earth, where land meets the sea.

With every day we walk on this earth, we must try to understand better, and act to ensure that every person can feel fully human, equal and free. And we must remember what it is we share: that we are born naked and remain naked before fate, which can be a cruel and tasteless bitch. But we can also grow by the light of the moon.

All we can do really is keep placing one foot on the earth, then the other, to seek out ancient paths and forests, certain in the knowledge that others have endured before us. We must love. And we must look outwards and upwards at all times, caring for others, seeking wonder and stalking awe, every day, to find the magic that will sustain us and fuel the light within — our own phosphorescence. And always, always pay attention to the world as we live our one wild and precious life, even when we’re floating in the Bardo, about to return to the surface, bursting for air.