Reading · Jane Killingbeck

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I wrote this last week, and rereading it now I might add that it still feels hard to do more than carry on regardless of my inner moroseness.

A busy week since. It began by catching the bus to Kerry to grant the birthday wish of an old friend by spending an hour in whisky barrels full of hot water and seaweed, looking out over the Sneem river estuary in a mild drizzle _ I had been dreading it but actually very much enjoyed the experience, especially when followed by a long lunch in a comfortable hotel. The week continued with the complicated journey to bring my old collie Joe back home, after his trial visit to stay in my friend’s kennels - complicated because it’s not possibe to take dogs on buses; but my friend kindly drove to meet me part way back, where we had a lunch sitting outside a cafe, surrounded by Joe and her three little dogs , drawing attention from many passers by. My son in law was going playing golf and drove me and Joe to the next town, where I then left him to his golfing and drove home, half an hour further on, deposited Joe , and came back to park the car at the golf course before catching a bus home. Did you follow that? Actually it was even more complicated, as was the rest of the week, but those are stories belonging to other people. Suffice to say I am wrecked tonight, the rain is falling relentlessly, and it doesn’t feel at all like summer.

‘Dear friends

A slough of despond afflicts me – that phrase from The Pilgrims Progress is so accurate – even though I don’t recall ever actually reading the whole of the book.

Sunk in a slough of despond despite the glory of the roses that have threaded the privet hedge in my garden, which I can see sitting here in my basket chair with a very late after-breakfast cup of earl grey tea.

As I waited for the kettle to boil I wandered up the garden as I usually do first thing when I come downstairs in the morning (though now I confess it is afternoon) and I noticed the yellow flag iris in flower, the comfrey too, and I picked one of the roses for my table; pieces of fern completed the posy, in a little blue and gold vase.

I cry and cry , for no good reason really; no thing is wrong in my life, unless you count the small disappointment that instead of my children coming here for a late birthday lunch in honour of my son, we will gather at my daughter’s house - an hour’s bus ride away for me, but for my eldest daughter , coming on impulse, an hour less of a long journey from Kilkenny. I cry for the tragic death of a friend’s son, for all the tragic deaths in the world, for the world.

And I am in no fit state to be cooking dinner for them all anyway; and my daughter knows I am upset when she rings me, and comforts me with the proposal of a walk to the waterfall, where we often went when I was living nearby her, and a dinner plan which she will cook; in which I only need to bring the venison I had already bought for the occasion.

I murmur in my mind the well known prayers of my heart but the despondency, the despair which I am sunk bewilderingly into doesn’t lift.

I am disappointed in myself for feeling this way; normally the kindnesses of almost everyone I meet warm my heart and create within me a hopeful way of seeing, but yesterday my heart was full of loathing at my critical way of judging the actions and ways of seeing of even my closest friends, and of myself too. We are all caught in a civilisation which is quickening towards the destruction of all that is good and true and beautiful, pushing and seducing us into unhealthy ways of living, while we advertently and inadvertently destroy the world around us, which in turn will destroy us; and there seems to be no way out of this web of corruption.

I sit into the car of someone who has kindly offered me a lift home after a meeting, and judge her for having a holiday house, when so many people are desperately looking for somewhere to live – yet she is one of the kindest people, and so my internal thoughts feel churlish, while I sit in her car chatting about other things yet holding that resentment, born I suppose of my own experience a couple of years ago of being made homeless and desperately searching for a new place to live.

So often these days my reasonable mind ignores those judging thoughts that are plaguing my inner terrain , seeking to connect as usual , to listen, to have empathy, to see the good in people, as I seek to do within myself, despite the things I do which I can so easily critique as abhorrent, and destructive; like flying to Stockholm and back later this summer, rather than organising and making those journeys in a slower, less harmful way .

I, like everyone else, am enmeshed in a society which is running away with itself. And it’s hard to make good decisions within that milieu.

I am disappointed, tired, yet I know not how to stop the tide, nor even to stop myself, for my desires and apparent needs have been formed by this world that I have grown and lived within, even when I sought to live on the edges, first by moving to rural Wiltshire and living simply there, and then to the mountains of Kerry living even more simply. Keeping believing that by living my own truth, I could retain my sanity and my hopefulness. By seeking to see a larger view, through exploring the world beyond our material world. But right now that feels far away though I mutter in my mind those well known phrases of the meditation I learnt long ago, or the Jesus prayer, or even the rosary.

And finally I come in to my computer to write all this down, and perhaps in so doing to regain my balance; to remember.

The words which I keep in front of me here – from the teachings of The Universal Order of which I am still a ‘Fellow’ though I have long since given up the system of study of Universal wisdom which it offers, as my mind doesn’t seem to be able of expanding enough to carry on.

‘The wise person seeks perpetually to eradicate pain and inordination but learns to be indifferent interiorily to the pain and imperfection not yet eradicated. Moral inordination and all imperfection in oneself or within the sphere of one’s own direct influence should be patiently and serenely eliminated; that which is outside and beyond one’s control should be viewed with equanimity and it’s victims should be the objects of one’s constant love and sympathy.’

And to Wendell Berry’s poem – which yesterday came to my mind but gave me no comfort, as lying in the midst of nature doesn’t help when all I see is a solitary bee on the borage flowers; when there are no moths trying to come in the window of an evening, no flies even in the kitchen, then I despair even more.

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When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

However by lying in a field earlier in the week I now have two ticks which I need to pull off me, with the new fear of the lyme’s disease they can carry, brought to our land by climate change.

All is askew, all is out of kilter

And becoming more so, and yet I want and need to regain joy in life, in the every day beauties, without allowing the larger world with all its tragedies to throw me out of balance.

I want to believe in the basic goodness of the universe, of a benevolent force behind it all, to believe that humanity will eventually come to it’s senses, that this age of increasing darkness will pass; and I am reminded by the Pope’s encyclical on the magnificence of humanity, to stay steady; most especially in his quoting from The Lord of the Rings

“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”

so said Gandalf.

Then the Pope adds his own line immediately after:

“The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.”

May we all be well, may we all be at peace with each other – in the end of my outcrying of sorrow to my friend on the phone yesterday I came back to the knowing that underneath all the judging of my mind, it is of course within my own heart and mind that I need to create peace, and so I begin to quieten the turmoil , to return from my rage and my frustration that people do not see what they do , and ruefully look to myself. and to remember that my thoughts come unbidden, and are not my responsibility, but rather it is that I have a choice as to where I put my attention, and so I can choose to give those thoughts no chance to breed inside me, for it is in acting with kindness, whatever the thoughts that float through my consciousness are, that peace lies, and the cultivating of love, despite everything .’

And it's still May

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