A piece of rare music....

Another day with my dear sisters and the archive.

 Our reward, when all the purple lidded boxes are full to the brim and labelled, is lunch - mushroom frittata with asparagus rice salad and left over puddings with custard.

 Back home the men in the field next door are shredding all the hazel saplings they have been cutting down and piling up in great heaps for the last few days.

The noise is high pitched and head-boring so I walk out past them and up the hill, along the field footpath and enter a world of the most wonderful, heart-stopping stillness. Not even a butterfly movement of air...no sound ...an occasional sheep bleating far away....a blackbird singing....as if the trees and the grass are holding their breath, waiting for something momentous to happen.

I stand and listen to this vaulted cathedral of quietness....like a piece of rare music I've never heard before....leaving its melody in my cells....so I can re-visit it anytime, anywhere. 

And when I return it's already dusk,  the men have stopped tearing the air with their shrieking machine and I'm so grateful for that.

This is the last blog for a little while....I'm going to Portugal at the weekend  - Robin and I used to go every March. This time a dear friend is coming to join me for a few days...and I'll be back here in April.

Making a family archive.

One of my father's books, a book of prayer letters, African Angelus written in 1950.

All day, on the day of our brother's birthday,  I have been in the company of  my sisters sifting through  hundreds of old  photos and letters and poems and manuscripts and copies of family trees and newspaper cuttings and our father's books. 

And reading our mother's letters out loud to each other. Her voice so clear on the airmail from...as if she was sitting with us at the table, telling us the story of their holiday with her sister in South Africa.

We are working towards a family archive stored in 7 purple lidded plastic boxes - in one place - my spare room, one sister's attic or one sister's studio.

But first we have to see what we have.

And it's a treasure trove of our ancestors' lives and loves and families and work...wondering who will want it when we, like them, are long gone.

The frontice piece of African Angelus - dedicated to his father

who "had the sun in him"

And just one random cutting in a scrapbook...

 a newspaper report about our father's protest fast in Westminster Abbey in  1968.  Our father, me and my middle sister in the photo. 

I was 16 and remember every detail and every feeling of that day and that night that we went up to join him.

So strange to think that life that I didn't know I was going to have has been lived now.

And one day I will be an ancestor too....a name on a family tree next to Robin's .... even with no descendants.

Dissolving Sadness...Old becomes new...new becomes old.

Rainbow over the sea in Sidmouth...

and wonderful views of the cliffs from the golf course while walking with dear friend and dog on Sunday.

Since listening to a Matt Kahn UTube video at the weekend called Dissolving Sadness I've been thinking a lot about what he says about the cycle of what he calls 

Renewal and erosion.

I can never remember  in detail  or encapsulate what Matt says in his talks but this time a few things resonate with me a lot. These are my notes...not quoting him exactly...just the gist of it. 

Reality - the natural order of things - is the movement  from renewal to erosion and from erosion to renewal.

Old becomes new and new becomes old.

Embrace this reality  and it will transform us. Or loss will destroy us.

Sadness comes when we try to control or change this natural order.

Dissolving sadness is having an equally loving relationship with renewal as with erosion.

True grief is the insufferable vibration of regret.

If we love without regret we can grieve without guilt. 

Regret goes as deep as our unwillingness to receive what is here right now.

Sadness is just the part of you that, like a child,

 doesn't know the way things are.

And that part needs great compassion.

Pain comes to show us our relationship with change.

Our inquiry is -

Who am I when I gain?

Who am I when I lose?

That is what it means to know yourself.

And to know that everything that comes and everything that goes will always leave you better than before.

Robin coming ....Robin going....leaving me better than before.

And knowing this....knowing it for sure in my heart...still I grieve...with guilt...with regret...

with insufferable sadness....the sadness that still doesn't know how things are...the natural order of things.

Maybe not yet...but  I could  have compassion for this sadness -  like a child who is too young, who knows nothing of erosion, to respect and love her - love her into dissolving into the new.

Heart Hurting and Burning

 I've had my head down most of the  day....making my self stay at  my desk...money stuff to work out...income and expenditure ...preparing for a review with financial advisor... and doing 6 months of filing.....not my strong point ....any of it.

As I haven't been out all day, except to the end of the garden to see what the men in the next door  field are doing - cutting down young trees with strimmers, Radio 2 tearing through the air  -  and to walk up and down the boundary hazel hedge ....hoping the dormice aren't as disturbed as I am, 

 I'm  just posting random photos of this day, or close to it, over the last 10 years.

March 2009 

Flapjack in our garden.

March 2010

In the top field of my sister's farm.

March 2011

Edinburgh

March 2012

The Algarve

March 2013

My first sweet great niece

March 2014

Carrot  and Orange cake for dear friend's birthday

March 2015

Lunch in spring sunshine in our garden

March 2016

Horsemanship in the waves along Sidmouth beach

March 2017

First time alone in the Algarve in our timeshare.

March 2018

Dunnock splashing in wedding present birdbath in our garden.

And all day while I've been embroiled in the smallness of my domestic life I've been haunted by the slaughter in Christchurch this morning, my heart hurting and burning  for New Zealand and its shock and loss.

A shock...and getting used to it.

Love them...

rare to see a sparrow on the feeder these days..

and even more unusual to see the goldfinch.

But not the pigeons who hoover up the seed in the ground feeder in seconds,

even this one with his scissor beak...unless that's his tongue.

I miss Edward.

 I got a shock first thing this morning when I drew the curtains back from my north facing bedroom window. A van parked in the field. Two men, in hooded jackets, in pouring rain and strong wind, looking for something on the ground.

This is the field between me and my farthest neighbour, the field running all along my boundary hedge at the side of the garden. The protected hedge where the dormice are hibernating.

When I bought the house I knew there was planning permission to build 5 houses in this field. This is the first sign of activity.  Because nothing has happened so far I was hoping that it wouldn't happen at all.

I pull on my wellies and a long mac and step out into the rain with the intention of finding out when the building may be starting. But they are just leaving, pulling out in the van so I flag it down and have a chat with the driver. Who doesn't really want to tell me much except that they will start on the 3 entrances to the road first ...and then the houses .....and they are just clearing some trees .....and a digger could be coming later ....and no, it could be months not weeks before the building starts.

I don't think he really knows and didn't want to commit himself to anything.

Later I go online to try and find the details of the planning application but can only find this artist's impression of what the five houses could look like. 

It's in an article in the local newspaper and there is lot of correspondence about how they are flat roofed 'boxes' and will be a blot on the landscape.

I don't know about that but I do know I'm in a kind of mourning already for the loss of the quiet open space and view around my house...for the loss of 'living in the country' feeling that I have started to get used to. I also know it is a great privilege.

Meanwhile the whole county is in constitutional and political crisis. Like the EU ministers in Brussels, I'm irritated, frustrated and weary. Grateful it isn't me who has to negotiate my way out - or in.

 But like the houses in the field which I don't want, somebody else does want them. And  I know change is inevitable, it always comes. For better or for worse.... I have to choose between love and fear. But actually I'm usually negotiating my way between the two most of the time.

I'm afraid the houses will ruin my experience of living here. But they might be really lovely people who move in.

My choice isn't what happens, it's how I live with it when it has happened.

Like being a widow.

I'm nowhere near getting used to that.

"Poems are like robins."

 Blackbird wings...

like fritillary leaves...

 lines in the sky....jet trails...sun burst.. and 

 telegraph wires and jet streams dissecting the clouds 

 above my front garden.

Wind flattened daffodils survive above the village...

and  newly opened in the sloping grass bank of my back garden.

More criss cross sky lines and garden daffodils...

and the line of the foot path I walk most days...laying down a habit track....

walk and feel the sky 

big above me....

walk in the tender green..

walk and feel better...

walk and go deep..

walk and forget...

walk and remember...

to love....

everything.

Brief sun lighting up bay laurel along the path opposite the village primary school...

 and brief sun lighting up grape hyacinth in the flower bed near the  liquid gas tank on the  driveway.

Back to fritillary wings.

I have been busy today.... with small things and loose ends.

Later I read a Robert Holden post where he says

Don't be too busy for your life - the one that is happening now.

I can't work out how to put a link to his blog, Shift Happens,

but he tells the story of taking a walk in Kew Gardens when he really didn't have time for it...sitting on a bench put there in memory of a friend of his who died ....being visited by a robin....and a rainbow...and ending up writing a couple of poems for his book.

He says,

Poems are like robins. They hop into your awareness when your mind is quiet and if you are not too busy for your life. 

Poems or any ideas or inspirations.

Sometimes I find it hard, even when I'm not too busy to let my mind be quiet. Even when I sit for a while after doing my yoga routine in the mornings my mind is always a spinning merry-go-round. 

Maybe it's walking and not sitting that helps poems to hop into my mind.

I know I had a very good idea about something when I was walking this afternoon.

But I can't recall what it was....