pink poppies

on care made beautiful

I can’t seem, over and over these days, to let go of the idea of threads.

Pink ones.

Pink—pale pink, the pink of the sky above Connemara that day we found out I was carrying a seed inside me the size of a poppy seed— the seed that changed my whole life; my whole world; my whole everything.

Pink, pale pink, the pink of so many of the things that I have loved since I started to carry that seed inside of me.

The pink of beauty, of stillness, of love, of peace.

These poppies are some of the most beautiful beings I’ve ever set eyes on, and being with them makes me feel nostalgic for the moment in time when my matrescence began.

Those early, quiet days where only me and my lover knew we’d taken our first steps on this path that changed our lives.

When I think about those days, lockdown days where we saw no one except each other, it has become a little easier.

I can more fully understand that, alone and disconnected as I felt I was so fully, I had already begun to tie myself to people, places and other than human beings.

With soft pink thread.

The pink of those poppies, those skies, our faces after a whole day in the sea, those soft woolen garments passed on from one set of tired hands to the other; delicate, well loved threads that tie us to each other.

When my lover and I first met we were tied, with various thick thread, to other people; other places; other responsibilities. It felt like drowning, actually, the ways it seemed we were held apart from each other.

To undo ourselves from these threads, these ropes, felt unthinkable, impossible. Such is the way we can misunderstand the world: her tenderness, her offer of ongoing one-anotherness.

In reality, all it took for us to be able to tie the threads of each of us to the thread of the other, was for us to accept that we are all tied to one another, and the real choice we have is how we will tend to these ties.

How we will decide to live alongside these threads; the threads that make us much more connected to one another than we might ever understand.

All it takes is for us to sit, much more honestly, with ideas of care.

It started with a pink rose, not a poppy—my coming to terms with the threads that hold this earth together; my gradual falling towards ideas of ecologies of care— thoughts around what this might look like for humans and more than humans alike.

We had finally, over a year of being in love with one another, got ourselves to the stage where we could live as a couple. We had already been