Six reasons to be happy
1) The sun is shining and I can see blue skies out of my window.
2) When I got out of bed this morning I found a feather lying on the floor by my reading glasses. I love it when he does that.
3) I’ve done all the work I had to do and will spend the day packing…
4)… because tomorrow morning I will be driving to Heathrow Airport…
5)… because I will be getting on a 9-hour flight to Seattle…
6)… because I’m off to spend some time with some wonderful and inspiring women: Denise, Letha, Liz, Meg, Michelle and Thea…. All of us together under one roof (Letha’s)!
The idea was hatched months ago and now, with some sensational planning by Liz and Letha, it is a reality. If all goes to plan we will be writing, painting, singing (karaoke!), laughing (and probably crying a wee bit) and drinking a lot of wine. It’s my first visit to the States so I’m doubly excited to go see what all the fuss is about – I have a feeling I may not want to come home. I’ll be gone for a week so this is the longest I’ve been away from my seaside home, but I feel now is the time to stretch these new wings of mine and see if I can catch an updraft that will lead me to my future.
I’ll report back when I get home, so in the meantime look after yourselves while I’m away. :-)
Sunday Scribblings: Bedtime stories
When I was a little girl my favourite stories were by Enid Blyton: The Magic Faraway Tree and The Wishing Chair. My sister and I would get our grandmother to read these books to us over and over again, until finally we started reading them ourselves. Even now I can still remember the scenes I pictured in my head although I haven’t read the books in over twenty-five years. I wanted to be able to climb to the top of the Faraway Tree and have adventures in the magical lands there – The Land of Birthdays; the Land of Do-As-You-Please; The Land of Spells. If I were to go there now I would want to visit the Land of Endless Summer Days or perhaps The Land of Self Belief. This love of magic and fantasy morphed into horror and science fiction as I got older. Books by JG Ballard, James Herbert and Stephen King were always to be found in my clammy palms, and later the fantasy came full circle as I started reading Danielle Steel – her take on love and relationships is fantasy bordering on delusion but it was in those saccharine books I began to stitch together my romantic dreams. My teenage self wished for a man who would take her away from her boring seaside life and make her a real woman as they traveled the world and made love beside a roaring fire. Sitting here now in the Land of Hindsight I remember nights in Kenya with my love, and I see how the fantasy became reality; I also see how the tragic end could have been taken from the pages of one of my dog-earred books. Now I attempt to write my own book, one that fills in the gaps those other books left in my education – about grief and pain, about self awareness and empowerment. I write a story of survival, and of finding the grace to accept what has happened, of taking up the thread of the past and letting it lead me into the future.
For more bedtime stories, go here. Image borrowed from here.
Manifestation: Phase Two
So by now regular readers will know about my crush on Pierce Brosnan (ahem). What can I tell you? I’m a single woman (who’s grieving – have I mentioned that recently?) and in my mind there is an image of the sort of man I wish for in my future. And he just so happens to resemble a certain former 007. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that (at least it’s not someone really embarrassing like, I don’t know, Russell Crowe or Danny deVito. I imagine I’ve just offended a lot of 
What I felt today
Monday
Drowning in a tapestry
of grief; every thought,
every association, is threaded
back to him. I remember sex, the
touch, the pull, the slow
lingering push and wait,
and weight, and each
thrilling thought ends with
him; I remember talk, the
words embroidering the air
from my mouth to his, the
secrets, and lies, the
laughter and shout, and each
invisible ghost word
is sewn from my memory
of his lips, the flesh that
never rested until, finally,
it did. I remember steak eaten in
restaurants and in my
house, pans swimming in
water and suds, the clatter
of knife and fork to mouth
the wine drunk, us drunk
on each other’s skin, drunk
with food and love, and lust,
the dance to the bedroom
our bodies exchanged; I wore
his heart and he mine,
my hair woven around
his body, our entwined
embrace knotted together
like the silken threads of
a tapestry, threadbare in
places, but full of story,
full of the future tales we
would be telling each other
when we finally beat the
unravelling clock.
Poetry Thursday: Dead poets society
I was going to start by saying I’m not a big fan of my poetry forefathers and mothers, but I realized I haven’t read enough of their work to be able to make that assertion. I’ve always thought that ‘old-school’ poetry was just too clunky, the language too archaic, for me to find anything in it I could relate to. I like reading contemporary poetry about sex and death – the guts of life – and Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud just doesn’t cut it for me (having said that, I like Mary Oliver’s musings on nature, but let’s not be pedantic). And so it was that while carrying this prejudice I came across an old book of collected poems by the great man himself in my local charity shop.
Back home on the sofa with tea and the book, i spent the first twenty minutes of reading with my teeth gritted. It seemed so airy-fairy, so feather-light and – worst of all – so rhyming. I don’t know why but I don’t like poetry that rhymes – it feels too Hallmark-esque, and I skip along with the rhyme and lose interest in the meaning.
But after my initial resistance, I found a sonnet that spoke to me, that tapped into my thoughts of the last few days. The words were written 204 years ago on a bridge I have stood on myself, in a city I have lived in. I felt a flush of excitement thinking I could go back to Westminster Bridge and stand there now knowing this poem. And this reminded me of how much I love the architecture in the city, of how much history is contained in those streets. There are days when I marvel at how old this country is, and how powerfully its history makes up the foundations of my life too. It’s not often I muse on the fact that I am English; after ten years sharing my life with an Italian I tend to feel more European than ros bif. This country has done some fantastically stupid things in the past (and present) and no doubt more cock ups will be made in the future, but I had a moment of liking my nationality – and the fact that the language I am writing this in is called English… and all these thoughts were prompted by a poem by a dead bloke whose poetry I thought I would dislike. Next stop: Tennyson and Milton.
Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
Sept. 3, 1802
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
~ William Wordsworth
For more poetic inspiration, go here
Ink on my (London) fingers
I made a decision this weekend that, while not written in stone, feels right. I’m going to move back to London in April, when my lease is up on this flat. My one caveat is that if in the new year this doesn’t feel like the right path then I’m under no pressure to do it, but now I’ve made this tentative decision I feel lighter, and more hopeful than I have done in weeks. By April I will have been away for two years, and my love will have been gone for two years and one month. If I was to ask his opinion on whether I should move, I know he would say this: ‘why the fuck haven’t you moved already?’ – while saying this he would have a glass of red wine in his hand and we would be sitting in L’Escargot in Soho (our favourite restaurant). Later we would have rocked up to Gerry’s Bar and downed a bottle of champagne while debating the issues of the day (drunkenly) and kissing (shamelessly). This was us. And that was him; he liked the good life, and he loved London. And so do I. Since I started this blog I have gone through so many changes, veering from thinking I should live in a cottage in the middle of nowhere to wanting to never leave this flat again. But now I’m thinking of all the fabulous evening classes and poetry workshops I can sign up for. Of the galleries I can spend afternoons inside. I have a lot to do before April, emotionally and financially, and the thought of packing up everything I own again does not thrill me, but I feel my life can restart in the city – not the life I had before, but a new life, a continuation of where I am now…
One Deep Breath: Simple pleasures
another’s path found
takes me far
into
my
self.
Time
stops;
words feed
my bruised soul:
in this tender place,
I find my smiling reflection.
glass
of wine;
medicine
in Moroccan glass;
ignites the flames and breaks the pain,
oils the cogs of my mind, until
trapped emotion spills
through eyes, pen -
paper
turns
red.
For more simple (and less maudlin!) pleasures, go here. Image from shutterstock.com
Sunday Scribblings: Stopping time
I don’t want to pause time; I want to be able to jump forward or back instead, like Marty McFly. There are days in the past I would like to revisit, and a time in the future I would like to reach NOW, not in six months, one year, two years. I have plenty of time – tonnes of time – hours leaking out and minutes lasting an eternity. I have so much time on my hands I’d gladly share it out, if that were possible. Need an extra day? Have one of my mine. I have many afternoons going spare that I’m sure someone else could put to good use. I could auction them off on eBay.
What would be useful is if I could store up some of this empty time for a later date, say, when I have children. I’m sure I’ll be hankering after a spare weekend here and there, an hour to myself that I could keep in a time bank and withdraw when needed. All those hours I wasted last week should have been deposited into my horological current account.
Time has been the enemy for me. The bereaved measure time as if their life depended on it – and it does. We have to gauge how far from the event we are in order to evaluate our progress. In the first year I was obsessed with time. Two weeks, two months, six months, a year; all were reverently noted. I wanted to be able to measure my progress like my mother measured my height on a chart on the kitchen wall when I was a child. Yet where before I was counting back to the past, now I count forward; I want to reach the hallowed day when I am content, when I can forget about time and be happy where I am, in that hour minute moment. Sometimes I catch a taste of it, and I feel hopeful for the happier minutes coming, the softly curved hours that will wrap around me. Maybe that’s when I’ll want to stop time…
For more Sunday Scribblings, go here
Bottles thrown across the pond
I was going to share one of my poems today, but even I found it depressing, so thought it best to kept it to myself for now… It occurred to me this afternoon that if I want to write poems about topics other than death, I perhaps need to start living again, outside of the cage that I cling so tightly to. I’m waking up to the fact that by keeping my experience of life at this low frequency I may be blocking out potential new pain, but I also chase any possiblity of joy away too.
I’m thinking I need to make my escape, that it’s not just my home that is keeping me caged, it’s the town I live in too. This was only ever supposed to be a temporary stay, yet I’ve just signed for another six months in this flat. Today I’m trying not to freak out about this. I know what needs to be done to get out of this place, physically, mentally and emotionally, and I need to formulate my six-month escape route. All around me everyone else is seemingly getting on with their lives, falling in love, raising their kids, yet here I am, the observer, impotent as usual, shaking my head thinking no, I cannot do that. But this is it, isn’t it. This is my life. The further down this particular path I travel the more inert I become. I kid myself that I’m moving, but I’m not – I’m so stationary I have cobwebs covering my head. What the hell am I waiting for? For him to come back and make things better? That’s impossible, and I know this intellectually, but my heart hasn’t caught up yet. Hurry up, I shout into the wind… hurry up!
My beloved friend Delia sent this poem to me today, and I needed it so much…
When I Am Among the Trees
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile!"
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, "It’s simple," they say,
"And you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."
~ Mary Oliver, Thirst, 2006
For more poetic inspiration, go here. Image from shutterstock.com
