We drive to Holy Island in the rain at low tide. Signs all along the causeway show cars underwater. This could be you. It’s the first week of January and nobody’s here. Holy Island is described by Christians as a thin place, a place in which the veil between heaven and earth is porous and worn away. As I read about thin places I cannot help but think of the ozone, and of Harper’s final monologue in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, in which she transforms her grief around climate change and the AIDS crisis into a wishful metaphor of reparation and human redemption:
Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.
The sky does look ragged and torn today, black clouds over the North Sea competing with a low, warm light from the afternoon sun, reflected perfectly in the tidal pools along the coastline of the island and the huge puddles of boggy fields inland. We walk and walk. Along the beach I find a perfect fish skeleton nested in a pile of seaweed. I cannot imagine what it feels like to be thin. I feel so sturdy all the time, even when I’m not. Physically, I mean. There’s so much between my bones and the world.
We climb up and down the dunes until dusk, and rush back to the car park through a flooded path that cuts through the middle of the island, mud in our shoes, clambering under thorny bushes and over felled trees. A murmuration of starlings makes its way across the island, appearing and disappearing like dark smoke, turning their thin bodies this way and that in formation so they seem to disappear into nothingness for a few seconds at a time. The four of us stand in silence like stones. I hold my breath until the starlings reappear, en masse, just like that. Nothing’s lost forever.
When we get back to the car we are the only ones left. Rain pours. It’s pitch black and my friend drives over a tree trunk that gets stuck behind the front wheels of the car. We all try to lift the car backwards but we fail, slipping in the mud. We push the back of the car over the trunk instead. My friend watches two of us do it. Lesbian power. We cheer. I don’t feel powerful but I do feel protected. There’s so much between my bones and the world.
On the drive back to the mainland the rain is so thick we can’t tell if the tide is coming onto the road. The car fogs up so we roll the windows down and the sea pours into us, into the air, into the car. It smells so good. It’s just the rain, my friend says. Back on the mainland I light an upside down fire the way the landlord of the cottage tells us to: thick logs first, then kindling, then firelighters. It blazes and we all have to take our layers off and open the windows until it dies down.
My friend gives me a new year’s tarot reading in the sauna of the cottage living room. The first card is temperance reversed. Imbalance, discord, impatience. Pouring between two cups but upside down so it all tips into the sky. I turn over the next card. The magician reversed. All my talents spilling out into the sky, misdirected energy, wasted resources. I turn over the third card. The fool reversed. Flying into the sky upside down. Carelessness, distraction, foolishness. I think of the sky of Holy Island, a thin place, the smoky flashes of the starlings, perfect fish skull open mouthed on the shore, upside down fire. Perhaps I am just a skydiver in reverse, heaven between my bones and the world.
Beautiful 🖤