Morning Ritual
Morning. A constant negotiation with fate and luck. A series of small and available thresholds open up before me like a floating chain of ephemeral bubbles. One small ritual step after another, linked circus elephants, trunk to tail, each small miracle dependent on the one before, each one with a wild mind of its own, but trained to follow. The culmination—The Great Morning Ritual Of The Face-Washing. I’ll use a wet, still-warm teabag to first cleanse my hands, washing each finger of the grease, paint, mud, food and assorted filth that yesterday’s peace camp life has spackled onto me. I’m like a Jackson Pollack in progress, and an incubator of evidence. My hands looked like a 2 year olds’.
It has to be first thing in the morning. There are uncountable obstacles to cleaning up at night time—the convulsive darkness, the chaos of daylight’s disintegration, the promiscuous teacups, the lips and hips of love, the chords of her guitar. And so, I wake each day to begin to move towards my goal. To get that warm wet bag of possibility for this one tiny, tidy glory pulsing through these dirty morning hands, I play a mental accordion, inhale/exhale, stealthy, driven like a subway rat on an instinct search through a multitude of hiding places. Playing a silent tune on the inside, a heretic’s prayer, my dirty hands finger keys, buttons, and bellows.
Exiting the tent, keeping my hooded head down to avoid having to speak to anyone this early, I shove my feet into sodden boots and squish through muddy ruts that suck each step, through splattering puddles in search first, for the wood pram. Building up a fire in the early rain after a night of rain requires wood, fire-lighters, newspaper, matches, and most of these inanimates mock my efforts in their soppingness. Stinking now of petrol and wood-smoke, more layers of grime, I’ll locate a section of snipped fence, a kettle, and one of the great battered water containers, lift it and fill the kettle, bang it on top of the greasy, horizontal fence grate atop the finally-flaming fire to bring the water to boiling. Score a clean-ish cup, wipe the wet residue off with my grimy sleeve, find the pram-full of food, and dig within the mystery therein for a teabag.
Each of these thresholds a tiny liturgy, a string leading me to the next prayer bead, and the next flaming hoop. I’m nearing the goal of a hot splash of water in a cup with a teabag, ducking through the gate of time ticking on without me. Time is meaningless here; I haven’t known the time in years. I’m locked in my warm fantasy, the hot water filling the cup, the drinking that warms me, and finally, the warm bag in my paw squishing in tiny gushes, rubbed and worked into the grime of these hands until my fingers at last scrubbed dry on the kerchief kept clean in my pocket, I’ll wipe out a small pot or a bowl and fill it with a bit more hot water, and finally, I will rinse this face.
It keeps me feeling right with the world, feeling human in this barbarian existence. Maybe it’s an inheritance from my Orthodox Jewish mother, who never would have understood living like this, at war with Cossacks. It feels religious, washing up in the morning first thing. Feels like a cleansing of my spirit as well as my flesh, greeting creation fresh and new. It’s a lifeline that connects my existence here to my ancestors’ differently rough lives, yet each day starting like this. Water poured into a basin over a fire.
Except we are afflicted with evictions, an eleventh plague to add to the list; evictions that come at all hours of the morning, that roar up, sudden as an attack, it’s always an attack! Men screeching up in trucks, shredding our early peace through the rough grater of two police cars and a garbage truck, five bailiffs, four cops, and every woman up and awake here must skid to a stop in her muddy tracks, or wake bleary and too soon to scurry like a rodent from her nest and grab everything we own, all of us heaving together in a hundred more coordinated ritual movements, before the men can have a try at grabbing it from us, the physical content of our lives, and wrecking it all to gone forever.
Some mornings, just as I stepped into the sodden boots, or located the cryptic firelighters, or the clandestine teabag, or worse, today—just as the blackened kettle is beginning to rock softly to it’s boil, me squatting there beside the small fire, anonymous in the rain under my hoodie, armed only with cup and teabag, and a clean-ish handkerchief at the ready, they screech up, sending a tide of mud-puddle skyward, and the call will sail up in an Amazon voice echoing wildly through the camp—“Bailiffs!”
And I freeze reaching out my dirty hand for the kettle, gloved in my filthy, shredding sweater sleeve. I’ll close my eyes. Inhale. Exhale. Inside I feel stained, feel my breath solidify to rust, my mind shut down in desperation and piercing disappointment. Come on, you bastards, just three more minutes! Eyes shut, locked in a fierce column of smoke, I feel them insisting on supremacy, swarming menacingly closer and I want to scream and so I do—“Fucking Bailiffs!”—
My cry floats, hangs there for a water-logged rainy instant as the old man who always carries the rubber water bladder with the hose attached rudely shoves between me and our old kettle and douses the orange fire to a whoosh of hot steam. The time that had no meaning stops, dead. The fire, killed. Both of us standing there, inches apart, leaning over that dead fire floating in a char pool with ashes stuck to our lashes and brows. Both wide-eyed; one astonished,b the other victorious.
Inhale. I wipe the smoke from the eyes in my dirty face, lean my head back, exhale, and yell to the clouds above, watch the vapor rising, ethereal. It’s ghosting up over the fence, up into the rainy sky as mist to mingle my fury with dripping oak boughs high above the camp, and for just one amazing moment I feel every cell rushing up to meet that dramatic exhalation. My shout following my form, I rocket up, out of this small body to flow free, suspended in an immaculate hawk’s vision of the camp below, surrounded by warm steam and the whole base sprawling, the green fields, the villages, all of England and the sea beyond, opening, opening to another world, filled with space and oxygen, love and patience and peace and hot running water, before piercing the echo of my own voice and plummeting back into this body with a jarring thump, separated from everything again, stuck as the mud to my boots, pissed off, at war, and filthy dirty once more.
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