Gird Yourself: Alice Morrison's Episode

By Sandy Glanfield

"Gird yourself, woman."

Alice Morrison says it to herself out loud, in the third person, when the road ahead is hard and she has to walk it anyway.

Gird your loins. Brace. Armour up. That is how we usually hear the word, a call to harden before a fight. But the more I sat with Alice, the less that fit her. Her girding is not armour. It is something quieter, and to me far more interesting.

It sent me back to a piece I wrote a while ago about gumption, another word I have long wanted back in use. The two are family. Both are ways of summoning strength when the world asks more of you than you feel you have. But they move differently in the body. Gumption gets a hand under you and pulls you up onto your feet. Girding draws inward, a kind of corseting, gathering all your strength to your core and holding you together there. One lifts you up. One holds you in and braces you.

What I keep noticing is what Alice holds herself together for.

Because she does not look away from the world, and it costs her. She spoke, with real sadness, of losing an early belief that things would simply keep getting better. So many of us carried that belief. So many of us have watched it fray. There is a wrestle in living in a world that feels in decline and still wanting to live fully inside it, to have love and belonging, to enjoy the beauty and the activity, the sheer essence of being alive, while knowing all the while that we are part of the damage, that we owe the earth more care and more balance than we give it.

A person could close down under the weight of that. Armour would be the understandable choice. Harden, look away, stop feeling it.

Alice does the opposite. She gathers her strength precisely so she can stay open. She girds herself, and then she stays soft.

You see it in how she moves through the world. She breaks bread with people. She stops for food. She walks, she gathers, she takes her time. Watch any of her films and it is all there, the warmth, the lightness, the laughter, the curiosity as she sits with someone whose life is nothing like her own. She talks about the simplicity of courage, the simplicity of endeavour, and she lives simply too, in the Atlas Mountains, in community, in interest and connection. None of that is soft in the weak sense. It takes strength to keep meeting the world with an open heart when the world keeps breaking it a little.

That, I think, is the thing she has to teach, and it has almost nothing to do with deserts or rivers or the length of anything she has walked. Most of us will never do what Alice does. But any of us can learn the shape of it: to hold our sadness and our wonder and our joy all at once, without letting any one of them win. To gird ourselves not so we can fight the world, but so we can keep loving it.

And that is where it comes home to what we hold onto at Reboot. Treating others, and the planet, as we would wish to be treated is a simple idea, and a hard one to keep living, because the world wears it down. It asks something of us. It asks us to keep giving care in conditions that make care difficult, to keep our eyes open to beauty when looking away would be easier. That is what Alice does, step by step, meal by meal, conversation by conversation. She girds herself so she can go on caring.

Maybe that is the invitation in her words, for all of us. Gird yourself, not to brace against the world, but to hold yourself together tenderly enough to keep loving it anyway.