THE NARRATIVE ARC
When you are lost, look for a green wall
It might be right in front of you
When you can’t focus, look at a green wall.
This is sudden wisdom that I came up with just now.
How?
I sit in a coffee shop and a green wall is right in front of me. I see a green wall and a green plant, touching each other. A beautiful duo. I feel in tune and centred with my surroundings. Thoughts can finally flow, uninterrupted by doubt and absent-mindedness. That’s how I know — when you can’t focus, look at a green wall.
It’s easy to focus on it — there are no other green walls in this premises. Green plants are plenty here, however. I see several dozens of them occupying their pots. They look like people sitting in chairs. Only people don’t extend their roots. Unlike plants, we rarely stay put in one place. We are too anxious. We want to move all the time.
I’m just like that: an anxious human plant that is always on the move.
When you are growing up, the green wall grows up with you and around you.
I was born in Lithuanian wild nature, in a town surrounded by the green wall of thick pine trees. Growing up there sometimes felt suffocating and limiting, but also natural and instinctive. The forest was my fortress.
My hometown felt fairytale-ish in summer. The moist, therapeutic smell of pine needles floats in the air. A town lake rests deep in the pinery. I go there with family or friends to wash away heat and stuffiness. We eat crisps, cookies and home-baked pirozhki with different fillings: potatoes, cherries and cabbage. We swim. Everyone there knew how to swim. Pines are the greenest they can be.
Autumn winds rush me into a school, paving the path with brown, dehydrated maple leaves. I’m playing the piano, badly, and it’s raining outside, heavily. My mind is busy with worry. The pines are still green but most other trees fall on the ground.
Winter snows and covers everything around me: people, animals, buildings and trees, indiscriminately. Nature turns dark and inimical. Sunlight is scarce. Nights are long. Books are unputdownable. Pine trees stay green but their colour becomes cold and depressing under the layers of snow.
Spring puts the world into motion. The green wall gets animated and alive again. This season was always vibrant. Flowers bloom in all colours. Trees turn green again. Streams of melted snow wash over the town. Pines are getting their aggressively-green look back.
It’s summer again.
Pines are the greenest again.
The cycle repeats for the next eighteen years, but it always comes up with something new.
Even in its repetitiveness, nature never stays the same and wonders never cease to be wonderful.
The wall stays green — different shades — but green.
I grow together with it.
I stay focused.
When you move around, you meet new green walls.
Whenever I go next, I always look for some kind of green wall.
After school, I move to study in Lancaster. The green wall of English fields unfolds before me. Sheep run around. A duck crosses a bridge with her ducklings following behind. The sign says don’t feed them with bread. I go down from my dormitory, through the green field and towards the sports centre. I stand on the treadmill. I run. Huge windows open the view of the field. I run towards it. I’m surrounded by it for the next three years.
It’s magical, in its way.
This green wall feels like freedom, like calm, like wisdom, like serendipity.
I stay focused but I can’t stay here forever.
I have to leave.
When you can’t find the green wall, it’s time to leave and move on.
I leave the green wall of my university life behind and move to London. Here, the green wall becomes elusive, almost impossible to find. I become distracted, weak, frustrated, and unfocused. I go to London parks a lot. I lay on the grass. I walk through Hyde Park, passing by the lake, always wanting to swim but never doing it. People are everywhere. It’s hard to find an isolated spot. The wall here is just a sketch. It’s barely enough to keep me going.
In place of the green wall outside, I try to build it inside me. I eat lots of plants. I try to go green and healthy. It doesn’t help. I get alienated from myself. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. I can’t find my green wall. It’s the worst and most challenging year of my life.
I abandon London and move back to my hometown.
This time around, it doesn’t feel like a fortress.
This green wall is a prison.
It can as well be my parents' green wall, but it’s not mine anymore.
I don’t want to be a prisoner.
I lose my focus and I want to get it back.
When you are lost, look for the green wall to guide you
I soon find the green wall in the most unexpected yet expected place — in Ukraine.
Ever since my mother left the country — in search of her green wall — Ukraine has become my lost motherhood.
Who knew I would come back to find my green wall in the place where my mother couldn't?
Yet, I do.
I come back.
I find the green wall in Kyiv. It stands firm as white-blooming chestnut trees, cotton-ish poplars and zebra-ish aspens. It grows bigger and gets smaller depending on the season. It changes shape like a cityscape: from flat, сoncrete streets to hilly ascents and descents. Kyiv is the most impressive, surprising and dynamic green wall I’ve ever seen in my life.
It’s not just Kiyv.
I find the green wall in my boyfriend, too. His wall is different from mine — wide and spacious, like the steppe in which he was born, but also fixed and rooted, like a big hill at which he looked every day while growing up. He brings lots of green colour to my life. He buys and looks after plants. He buys green sheets for our beds. He wears a green sweater.
We look after each other.
We are each other’s green walls that create a green home even when a jealous neighbour comes to our door and sheds blood.
Our green is eternal.
I felt a little lost this morning, but now that I see that green wall in front of me, I know I’m in the right place.
It navigated me through many moments of my life.
Today I’m reminded of that.
I’m reminded to stay connected to it, remember it’s there, and never lose sight of it again.