Remembering Will Save Us

I hope.

Sometimes I know what I want to say when I start writing but sometimes I find out as I go. This is an example of the latter. Like so many of you, I have been struggling to believe that the news I’m reading this week is actually Real World news. I have felt sad and angry and powerless. Meanwhile, ordinary life goes on. It can feel wrong but being fully present to the everyday reality of our own lives is also, somehow, how we discover what is ours to do for the bigger picture reality of our world. I suppose that’s mirrored by this letter which begins with a story from my own life and ends with some thoughts on what’s going on in our world and the simple, embodied way I’m holding onto hope (literally). As always, thank you for being here with me. Jen x

If you ever find yourself in Cambridge early in the morning and in need of good coffee and a warm chocolate croissant, go to Savinos.

It’s a cosy, family run, Italian coffee shop that has stayed the same for decades. On the wall is a collage of blurry photos of smiling faces, gifted by students from Emmanuel College across the road. I remember this photo collage from when I was a student at Emmanuel many years ago. Like most of my peers, I was a regular. For the 4 years I lived in the college buildings I would be there multiple times a week for a quick coffee before lectures or for brunch after a late night or for an iced mocha to go in the summer. At one point, a friend and I had a pact that if we were ever there when a fresh batch of croissants came out the oven, we’d text the other and tell her to come fast.

I left Cambridge 15 years ago and can count on one hand the number of times I’ve visited Savinos since then. Each time I do, though, I’m thrilled to find it just as it was. This Saturday, a friend and I treated ourselves to a day out in Cambridge and our plan was to stroll, shop and stop, regularly, for food. I told her we had to start the day at Savinos and, on the promise of a perfect pastry, she agreed.

I recognised the owner, Peter, immediately but since I haven’t been there in at least 5 years and it was busy, I got us a table while my friend queued for coffee. Later when we were finishing our pastries and Americanos, Peter wandered over, smiled and told me he recognised me.

“Did you used to be a student here?” he asked, “because I remember you.”

Reader, I can’t tell you how much this thrilled me. For all my happy memories of Savinos, never in my wildest dreams would it have occurred to me that I would have been remembered there. That’s not false modesty. Emmanuel has a turnover of hundreds of students per year and I’m guessing at least half of them were regulars during their time.

All day, those words “I remember you” stayed with me and seemed to be echoed by the familiar streets and cobble stones of the city centre as well as the steeples and courts of my college.

My time in Cambridge was complicated and I left with some trauma. For years I struggled to be there at all and would battle anxiety and occasionally panic every time we ventured a visit to see friends or show the children old haunts. Slowly that’s lessened and there’s been enough processing or healing or time for me to begin to enjoy it again, albeit tentatively.

I told Peter that he’d made my day and I meant it. What I didn’t tell him was that his words had completed some deep healing I didn’t even know I needed. Because we have friends who still live in Cambridge I’ve never felt completely forgotten to that time in my life but his words, “I remember you”, somehow helped me hear what I hadn’t been able to hear before - that this is a place that regards me with fondness. Before we caught the bus back home, my friend and I sat in a bar opposite Emmanuel. As I looked out of the huge window at the sandstone pillars of the entrance portico I knew in some deep mysterious place within me that I was remembered, that this place cares for me, that Cambridge was glad to have me back.

When I got home, I recounted the whole thing to my husband and told him that it had felt like Cambridge had smiled on me. “It reminds me of this,” I said before putting this lovely passage from John O’ Donohue in front of him:

Is it not possible that a place could have huge affection for those who dwell there? Perhaps your place loves having you there. It misses you when you are away and in its secret way rejoices when you return. Could it be possible that a landscape might have a deep friendship with you? That it could sense your presence and feel the care you extend towards it? Perhaps your favourite place feels proud of you.¹

Pause here, if you like, and reflect:

What stands out to you in this passage?

What place might remember you?

What landscape has a friendship with you?

What is it like to hold the possibility that your favourite place feels proud of you?

Maybe it seems sentimental or self-indulgent to imagine that a particular place may have a fondness for you but perhaps it's exactly the belief that we need in this moment in time. It only takes a quick scan of the news to know that there are many challenges facing us but it seems to me that two of the main ones are climate change and loneliness. Our planet is hurting and so are we. I see these twin hurts pulsing beneath the surface of so much I witness in what I read and see (in myself as well as in the world) and I know that easy answers are rarely real solutions. I do, though, wonder what might happen if we allowed ourselves to believe that the places that hold and house us are not just the neutral backdrop to our lives but are filled with care and affection for their inhabitants. I wonder what might happen if we opened ourselves to the possibility that the landscapes we love have a friendship with us.

Perhaps, wrapped within that trust, we would find the encouragement and motivation to make the inconvenient changes to our lifestyles that would help to protect or nurture the places we love. Perhaps we might feel a little more at home in the world or, even, in ourselves.

Then again perhaps not.

This week, as I’ve been writing this, I’ve been made painfully aware of the shadow side to embracing a friendship with the land. Instead of opening us up to care and belonging it seems that an affection for place can make us entitled and domineering, a danger to others and to ourselves. I see it in the news and I see it in myself - we human beings have a tendency to take what is gift and turn it into possession. It makes me wonder how we can belong to the places that matter to us without grasping and without harming each other. How can we feel the pain of what feels missing or lost while remembering we belong to each other? How can we hold firm to what I think, beneath it all, we know - that my children are your children and all children are our children?

In my living room I have a solar-powered rotating globe. Sometimes when the news feels particularly bleak or I feel angry with someone and I don’t know how to pray I’ll look at that globe steadily turning and remember that for all our individuality and difference, we are all spinning through space on the same planet. Today I look at it and think about all those places that human beings have tried - or are trying - to make theirs to the exclusion of others. Again, I wonder. Perhaps more than trusting that the places we love, love us in return, what we need is to trust that each of them is pointing us to a bigger place of belonging that can hold us all. Perhaps while each of us have places of belonging rooted in blessed moments of “I remember you”, all of us together are remembered by the earth.

I pick up the globe, watch it turn in my hands and hope that we will remember.

1. John O’ Donohue, Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, London: Bantam Books, 2003 p43