Following the Julian Trail
My current book has a lot to do with someone I have never met but know so well—Julian of Norwich. I was first introduced to Julian, a 13th century mystic, when I was in college and my professors referenced a radical medieval anchoress who wrote the first known book in the English language by a woman…in the vernacular dialect, no less, considered highly inappropriate for women in those times. I came to cherish her well known phrase, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Upon sealing herself in her anchorage at the age of 31 after a series of visions following a near-death experience, she took to developing a theology around her encounter with the divine, whom she came to know as our Sweet Mother, using male and female pronouns interchangeably for God. She never left her cell—one window faced into the parish where she received communion and the other window faced the streets of Norwich where she would have interacted with locals.
I love Mirabai Starr’s book cover for her translation. I also had a grey cat named Julian of Norwich in my early 20s.
I didn’t set out to create a book about Julian, but she was there, waiting. Poems were infused with her spirituality, the divine feminine, and particularly her concept of “oneing.” Julian created the word one-ing as a representation of the permanent, eternal, unalterable state of human union with the divine. Upon first read, many of my poems might be described as “sad,” but there’s more to it than that—so much of my art and the art I respond to is imbibed with a yearning, a sense of “not yet” longing, a searching for the moments of being when without our striving, we find ourselves consumed by the divine.
Currently, I’m reading Susan Cain’s book, Bittersweet. I’m a big fan of another one of her books, Quiet, as well—which validates the introvert experience. In Bittersweet, Susan Cain has written another book, it seems that explains my whole existence. I’ve only just started, but Cain is using this book to explore how creativity and sadness, but not just sadness, the particular type of sadness that is “bittersweet,” are linked. Why do so many of us respond to sad stories, music in minor keys, rainy days? Why do so many of us love movies with unresolved stories, poems that express heartache, visual artworks that stir intense longing?
“The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.”
Julian’s most prominent teaching was that of the indescribable, inescapable love and communion of love with the divine—a love that we experience so imperfectly and long for so intensely. There’s speculation that during the Black Plague, Julian likely lost almost everyone she loved and that she was dying from a broken heart. The Black Plague wiped out 30-50 percent of the population in the years it ravaged England. From her writings, we only know that her mother was at her bedside. Within the furnace of this suffering she had sixteen visions, a new life surfaced, and a mighty act of creativity came into being.
I returned to poetry after and during a period of great loss, confusion, and pain. I too, believed I was dying from my broken heart. I write about some of it in my book, and I know I will need to keep writing about it because this pain has reshaped my entire being. When my mentor, Gretchen, confidently suggested that a poem I wrote called “Oneing” about Julian of Norwich should be the first poem in my book, everything fell into place. Though I have my doubts that most of the population would be interested in what an isolated, grieving and ecstatic medieval woman has to say, Julian is the thread that ties all my themes together: loss, spirituality, feminism, yearning, humanness, mothering, divine love, beauty, nature. She’s always been with me. The title I chose for my book, Endless Day, comes from a phrase Julian uses, and I will end with her words now, because she sums up all the love and longing I feel and want to express:
“The light is not bright enough for us to clearly perceive our endless day, nor is it completely hidden from us. It is just enough.”
