The Missing Hold

An interlude with things to listen to

Stanage Edge (Photo: Masa Sakano)

For much of my twenties, I lived in Sheffield. One of the first things I remember being told when I moved there is that a third of the city is in the Peak District National Park. That year, I lodged with a couple out on the Ringinglow Road. I could walk out the front door, turn left and set off running, and within minutes I was out among the trees and fields, bracken and gritstone.

Because of its location, Sheffield attracts rock climbers. There’s nowhere else of its size where you can get out so quickly to the crags. I had no head for heights in those days, so I never tried it myself, but I had plenty of friends who climbed.

There’s something I remember one of them describing: when you’re ascending a rock face, there will be places where you cannot see a hold until you can make use of it. It’s not even that it was hidden from view by the angle you were looking from, it’s that it can’t be recognised. Until it’s within reach, it doesn’t become a hold.

That image has stayed with me. It describes an experience that I’ve had in other settings, not least as a writer. I often carry a piece of writing for months before it makes it onto the page, but in the process there will be passages that I can’t see how to write until I get there, until the bit that comes directly before is out of my head and into sentences. Then the missing hold presents itself.

In the same way, there are pieces I write that move me up the rock face, so that holds I couldn’t see come into reach. This experience extends beyond the parts of my work that are obviously connected to writing. Having sent out last week’s essay, The Ruined Church, I’ve felt the connections, the way they pull at the shape of my life, what I’m doing and what I need to be doing.

So I want to say thanks to everyone who responded or shared that piece, and especially to those of you who made the leap to becoming paid subscribers. The response was strong enough, it gives me a glimpse of the possibility that I could centre my work on the writing that I’m doing here.

Part two of the Into the Deep series is taking shape and should be with you next week. In the meantime, I wanted to share with you a couple of things which seem to resonate with that series.

First, here’s an interview that

Elizabeth Oldfield

did with me this spring for The Sacred, which you’ll also find in all the usual podcast places.

Secondly – prompted by seeing Ed re-share it on Facebook earlier – I wanted to send you the ‘Get On Your Knees!’ episode of The Great Humbling, which is the one that people most often bring up in conversation. The theme of this episode was prayer – and it starts with me wondering, ‘Have there ever been humans who did so little blessing, as they went about their lives, who had so little literacy of blessing?’ Noticing the sheer strangeness of the absence of prayer from modern life, when set against the wider patchwork of our different ways of being human together, brings into focus a kind of cultural poverty that is worth talking about.

Finally, if you happen to be in or around Stockholm next Thursday night, I’ll be speaking at a screening of Mattias Olsson’s new documentary, Avtryck/Imprint, for which he interviewed me. There are still a few tickets available. The discussion will be in Swedish, so wish me luck.

Mattias also edited a podcast version of our interview, which you can listen to here. And here’s the trailer for the film itself.

Thanks again for your support in all the forms it takes.

DH