Kissing the Hag

On turning a bit of dominant culture upside down and emptying out its pockets

It’s taking a while to surrender to where I’m at.

In my head I’m 30, dancing all night on the beach. Or 43, cycling up a steep hill to forest school with two bickering daughters in the trailer behind. Maybe 50 even, wild Morris dancing (check out Beltane Border Morris) and belting out folk songs in the pub.

I just forget I can’t do those things right now.

I look in the mirror and she stares right back at me. She has silver hair and tired eyes and she’s battling a tremor all day every day and trying to mother, and work, and shop and drive and all those normal things. Let alone anything like dancing.

I summon breath and refuse, again, to see myself as broken. I am whole, despite or even because of my obvious limitations right now. And I am healing, every day.

I’ve had a few bad days recently - physical symptoms persisting. More than that though, I’ve come head to head with a whole cultural trope. An enchantment of our dominant culture here in the West (and no doubt elsewhere).

It shows up as the fetishising of youth and able-bodiedness. And it prizes activity, productivity, speed and achievement. It’s visual, showy and heroic. It derives its dopamine hit from popular approval of success, daring feats and the overcoming of limitations.

This cultural goblin whispers in my ear at 3am - “You’ve lost it.” “It’s all downhill from here.” He writes impossible lists ‘to-do’ at 7am and then waves the many unticked items in my face that evening. He throws up pictures of beautiful lives on Instagram and taunts me with my inability to ‘measure up’.

Meanwhile, I’m slow to the point of stillness. I’m painfully learning to sit on the grass and measure the success of my days by the amount of space I’ve allowed myself to do, outwardly, nothing. I bloody hate yoga. But I am making myself do it, slowly and clumsily, every morning.

Kissing the hag (or hugging the goblin)

In the Arthurian myth nestles the tale of Sir Gawain and the hag. The nutshell version goes like this - brave, handsome young Gawain agrees to marry an ugly old woman, a wild withered wise woman of the woods. The old woman turns into a beautiful maiden - well there’s lots more to it, but you can easily find the glorious full tale elsewhere.

The pithy teaching of this story for me right now is this; I need to turn towards the hitherto unacceptable face of my limitations. I’m not disabled, but my capacity to function ‘normally’ is severely curtailed by my Parkinson's. I’m not especially old, but I no longer have the endless energy of my youth.

Some days I really struggle against these chains on my ability to do anything I set my mind to. But willpower won’t help me achieve any goals these days. I have to surrender. Not in defeat, but in grace and with an open heart, just like the chivalrous knight Gawain.

So as I kiss this particular hag, or hug the cultural goblin, where’s the rejuvenation bit of the myth?

Where's the magic, the unexpected turn of events?

As I turn away from busyness, external action, heroic deeds and validations, I’m finding some inner treasures. I’m surprising myself at what I am learning. I’m figuring out how to manage my own state of mind and alchemise the dark cloud of my bad moods into sunshine, however watery the rays. I’m discovering an ever-present spring of gratitude - and even joy - that’s not dependent on whether things go my way or not.

A dear friend said to me recently that as he ages, and surrenders some loss of physical capacity, he’s discovering other untapped capacities.

There’s the maiden.

There’s the new life. Unexpected, mysterious and hidden from view until I surrendered to a greater grace than I could have imagined, before Parkinson's stopped me in my tracks. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not quite a happy-ever-after fairytale yet, but neither is it the dark passage I once feared.