Hello lovely ones, you are welcome as always. A thousand times thank you for being here!
Good grief I’m fatigued by the brokenness of this beautiful world! I fold my concerns into neat shapes, manipulate them all carefully into normal minutes, hours, even full days but there are deep creases that no amount of refolding will smooth. Writing has felt like an unnecessary luxury, picking up my camera, taking photographs a guilty pleasure. There is a constant whispering in the wind, ‘how can you smile when everything is wrong, when sorrow is painted across every headline?’
You’re with me, I know… it’s ridiculously debilitating isn’t it? My usual optimistic, happy-go-lucky attitude has faltered, it feels suddenly wrong to believe that everything will turn out just fine and dandy when the evidence clearly states it won’t...
It is a strangeness, for me, to find that all the words and poems and stories I want to write are swirling somewhere in the in-between. That the sky that filled my kitchen not so many days ago is now stranded in the cave with the bats and the rats in the dark and the gloom. I feel voiceless. My throat is closed, my eyes are stinging, my whole body feels injured and raw by the knowledge of these incessant, inhumane acts of cruelty I will never, ever understand…
I am being destroyed, cell by cell, by the knowing that elsewhere so, so many innocent souls, whose lives have been abruptly, diabolically and violently halted, will no longer feel or taste any part of the exquisite grace of living on this earth. Their words and their poems and their stories are not just lost in the maelstrom they are gone, forever untold. That they have been deprived of knowing love and kindness by the hands of men—one barely literate-lunatic-liar in particular—is an unthinkable, unfathomable crime making it so hard to wade through the heartbreak, the concern and fear. I am lost, I want to cry, I keep wanting to apologise for the mess even though I didn’t make it.
I want the sky back in my kitchen!
I don’t want my topsy-turvy wild and usually deliriously content journey through life to be marred by the vision of these horrors turning like a record on repeat through my head yet I do not feel either honest or honourable in ignoring it.
So here’s the thing…
Art in all its diverse and beautiful forms is calming, healing even, and, perhaps even more importantly, a way of holding hands in communal acquiescence of our visceral need(s) despite everything. Regardless of influences none of us are able to control, art has united us both in humanity and harmony. Never has it been irrespective of war or cruelty but because for time immemorial there has always been cruelty and war and sadness and when harmony is close to ruins, we rally together, rebuild what we can, make it beautiful and share it.
Outside my window, robins are squabbling over their territorial rites just as they did last year; the noise at first light is extraordinarily loud, a mini feathered battle which far from being an orchestrated bloodbath or cruel is simply nature happening as it should, it rarely ends in death. The kestrels are building their nest in the east facing gable of my home, to catch the warmth of the morning sun but not the heat of the afternoon, while doing so the finches and sparrows and tits and all the other tiny feathered angels that visit my window sill are feeding elsewhere, just as they did last year. The apricot tree has blossomed far too early meaning none of the fruit buds have set, meaning once again no apricot jam will be stacked in my cave, the Mirabelle plum blossoms waited, they were wiser, just like last year, and, I swear I saw the tips of two pairs of heron wings swiftly leaving the river two mornings ago, perhaps more a whimsical trick of the eye on my part because they are also early, too early for young trout and crayfish, although I know they are there, just as they were last year…
Regardless of good or bad timing, nature has intricate ways of compensating for life’s antagonisms, the world keeps turning, mostly without catastrophic loss and always without cruelty, of course it does! Just as it did last year and all the hundreds of thousands of years before that. And, in turning, everything sways between birth and life and death, this magical cycle of everything living continues in all its beautiful miraculous ways. I see it in the petals landing below the apricot tree that blossomed too early, I feel it in the winds of this month of March, fickle on my skin, I taste its sweetness in the pollen as it awakens the bees, all gloriously normal, living, breathing, gentle and kind waiting to tell a story.
I don’t want to be bogged down in the wastelands of ruin, up to my knees in sorrow and despair, it’s not a place I like to dwell, and, meanwhile, spring is advancing, I am missing the show, so, please, will you excuse me while I pull on my wellies, trudge through the horror and the heartbreak with my camera in hand to find the colours again, not because I don’t care but because I do.
It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
Very, very briefly — Is it coincidence the Shepherds Purse — Capsella bursa-pastoris — a plant with heart shaped seedpods is blooming in all the meadows like tiny beacons of hope… That the dried flowers and leaves, if used as a tea, are said to be good for stopping internal and external haemorrhaging and that it was used for exactly this purpose in the Great War?
With forever love and hope that my wellies don’t have holes in…
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