A soft day, thank God,

A wind from the south

With a honeyed mouth;

A scent of drenching leaves,

Briar and beech and lime,

White elder-flower and thyme

And soaking grass smells sweet,

Crushed by my two bare feet, While the rain drips,

Drips, drips, drips from the leaves

W.M.Letts

A soft day, I have a body free from pain, the cockatoos were right, the rains came, and the day is soft, grey, cool and feels like a blessing.

The sort of day that allows for physical ease, enjoyment of reading, drinking Singapore Breakfast Tea, for just being present and sharing small conversations. This is what disease and illness and pain attempts to take me  away from, this hope I hold for lots of ordinary days, a seductive possibility.

This idea of holding hope is also a tricky one for me. There are times when hope is too heavy, too demanding an idea to carry, so it helps if I can have a holiday from staying connected to hope and get someone else to carry it for me for a while. In structural, polemic thinking the idea of taking a break from hope would have us thinking the only option to fill this gap, this newly created space must be hopelessness or despair. Whereas for me having a rest from hope is an act of care and kindness to myself, an intentional act of agency.

There are many expectations of people speaking or writing illness narratives to make evident a strong, unwavering, unchanging relationship with hope. A requirement to take up the burden  to be inspiring, adding to the illness experience the burden of ‘noble suffering’.  The willingness to listen to illness stories that do not conform to these requirements, stories that speak of chaos and rage are difficult to listen to. However if we stay present and can bring forward what is absent but implicit in this rage, what it is giving testament to, the stories hold the possibility of making stronger the storyteller’s connection to a preferred life and identity.

I would sound a word of warning here that while the building and telling of stories seems a personal even private act, there are always cultural, social, political and economic pressures at work on the voice of the storyteller that attempt to mediate what is told. There are discourses acting on and competing for supremacy in this space and these discursive practices will have effects in the storyteller’s life and on what is not spoken/written.

This had me thinking about how most stories including illness narratives, while stitched together from fragments, recollections, shared rememberings, and the incidents of today, have as their focus preferred futures, the life yet to be lived.

However for me today is just fine, tomorrow can wait its turn. The dog pongs because he is wet, I came back dripping and cold from our morning walk, my iPhone camera isn’t working, and internet connection is intermittent at best, but for today it’s all good. A soft day indeed.