Words of Compassion and Wisdom
© Pauline Turmel
I don’t take it lightly when I am given the privileged position of being invited to drop gently and directly into your inbox and one of my greatest pleasures is sending these long form Letters of Love (a much more accurate way of describing this particular type of missive from me to you because it definitely doesn't qualify as an actual ‘news’ letter!).
But I'm not very good at faking them. The words come when they come and not before. Even though my experience of it has been one of privilege compared to many, the pandemic has seemingly stolen many of my words. So there's been a long, long gap since my last 'proper' Letter of Love, which means that if you are new around here you may not have read them at all. I have had the absolute pleasure of receiving so many warm emails in response to my words and I hope you might get something from them too.
I'm not quite sure how to talk to you about today's Letter of Love without sounding cheesy.
The truth is that I am sitting here with Frazey Ford playing (again!) and I am crying as I write this to you. That's how moving I find the words from Véronique that I have the utter privilege of sharing with you today - despite this being the third or fourth time that I've read them.
It seems especially stunning to me that she is able to write so evocatively in a language that is not her mother tongue.
Véronique Belot wrote these words as part of a private exchange between she and I - there was never an intention of anyone else seeing them but me. But such was their impact on my heart that I asked her how she would feel about me sharing them with yours. Because my sense was - and is - that you will likely feel them landing in a tender, soft place inside of you with as much joy and gratitude as I did. And I'm 99% certain that by the time you finish reading this email you will feel more compassion for yourself than you had when you got up this morning. Véronique was touched by my request and gave me her immediate blessing.
It has been my intention from the moment the first seeds of Middle Years Monday started taking root, that I wanted to bring you magic from a variety of women. If you have been around for the last three Decembers you will have enjoyed the MYM Advent Illuminations and the breadth and depth of outlooks and experiences that were shared there by a glorious collective of women. In 2022 - and beyond - I hope to bring some of that into your inbox throughout the year, not just in December. That starts today...
Some of the middle years women I introduce you to here will be MYM Members and some will not. All will be shared with integrity and without cynicism. There will be no 'kick-backs' and no obvious material benefit for me or for these women. All will be shared with the simple desire to enrich your day.
A Bit About Véronique
I adore Véronique and always come away from time spent in her warm and astute company feeling enriched and energised. In this photo I love the way she is looking us straight in the eye with her intelligent, soulful, playful self.
As an artist, Véronique's main focus is on contemporary jewellery and beach plastic. She has also been making forays into the world of collage and mixed media, and is currently carrying out a graphic and poetic work of palimpsest on French literature classics.
She is also a teacher and a webwriter and a mother and has been a cook, a PA and a childminder. She has worked in a talent agency, a record shop, a bookshop. She has trained surgeons to use the tools of laparoscopy when it was still a brand new technology. And she is a trained mediator.
Véronique was one of the Founding Members of the Second MYM Circle - and it’s been the biggest joy to get to know her over the past 10 months. She is French and lives and works on an island in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, where she makes her dangerously attractive jewellery. I have a pair of her delicious earrings and can attest to their mood-altering properties.
It is with the greatest pleasure that I share Véronique's beautiful words with you today.
Véronique's Words of Wisdom and Compassion...
"What a lovely, helpful, very supportive message, Pip: thank you.
I have been putting what little energy I have into making space, quite literally, going through one room after the other to reclaim space over clutter. It's beginning to feel really good.
I have moved furniture around, but not without addressing every little corner of disempowering pile of stuff to see what was hiding there and feel my feelings about that.
Dust, photos, unpaid bills, 20 year old journals, missed opportunities, lost friendships, forgotten boyfriends, broken hopes.
As well as great memories, finding my (physical) self in both my sons' faces, light-hearted echoes of gallivanting, adventurous, fearless younger me, vibrant drawings I had hidden away thinking I was not an artist, heart-felt love letters, etc.
I have been taking my time, my gut instinct being that I don't just need to step into the new year inside a clean, comfortable home that supports and nurtures or even delights me, but that on a deeper level, now is a good time to take stock. Of who I am, where I have come from, what I have come through, and to decide what physical memories I want to keep from the 56 years that I have lived already.
My birthday is at the end of February and I have often entered the new year reluctantly, as though I wasn't quite ready yet, not buying a new diary, not being very social, feeling a bit of a failure, finding myself on the wrong side of those brutal reviews we are asked to conduct, in order to set goals and all that cruel nonsense. As someone who is not proficient at setting goals or carrying plans out, I tend to hide and lick my wounds at that time of the year and somehow, around my birthday the fog lifts a bit and I feel I can properly pick up my life wherever I left it and start living it again, plan or no plan.
This time around, I had the intuition that something else was called for, namely just rest. I did not travel to spend Christmas with my family, I had a very quiet holiday, I felt that my exhaustion did not allow me to sail through the usual travel-cook-party-be-merry-travel-back rigmarole and land back just in time to start teaching and working again.
I knew that if I did that to be nice to my mother, to my niece, to whoever relied on me to provide the fresh oysters, the delicious salmon gravlax and the home-baked bread - along with the humour, the joy and the listening skills that I normally bring to the party table - I would just be abandoning myself.
So I did not!
Pip, this is a very lengthy answer to your sweet message and I hope you don't mind. I feel like sharing this with you because MYM gave me some of the wherewithal I needed to make that difficult self-care decision. The support and life-affirming sisterhood shared through cuppas and the wealth of very precious information I have been finding in the resource library have definitely helped me build my boundaries as well as my self-love muscles.
And then through the quiet times, through the rest and the listening to myself came that urge to winter-clean, in the way that I described at the beginning of this message; slowly, lovingly, deeply. Kindly.
Not judging myself for the unpaid bills, the many layers of dust and sometimes dirt, the missed opportunities and the blatant failures, but lovingly aknowledging my pain, my disappointment, my hurt when they surfaced. Reparenting the five year old me who thought she would be a writer, the fifteen year old me who planned to be a doctor, the twenty-year old me who imagined she would learn 5 languages and travel the world.
Welcoming them. Smiling at them. Crying with them sometimes. Taking it all in, at whatever pace was possible and felt OK.
Somehow the overwhelm started to lift off a little, the imposter syndrome became less relevant, and my house is feeling much more comfortable.
I am not done yet. But I am on my way."
So dear reader, my hope is that this email, Véronique's words and the message they contain may have found you on a day when you most needed to hear it.
I send you much love.
Pip x