Change and Challenge
Jacob’s Ladder – William Blake
It’s been almost eighteen months since I last wrote a journal post, which is the first time in almost ten years that I haven’t managed at least one post in a year. That says everything really, about the level of change and challenge in 2017, in my life, and I know many others also found it a difficult year at both a personal and collective level. Brexit and political chaos, human migration, terrorism, environmental crisis… sometimes it’s hard to take in the news alongside the changes and challenges in our personal lives.
The poet, Adrienne Rich, writes in her ‘Transcendental Etude’:
‘No one who survives to speak
new language, has avoided this:
the cutting away of an old force that held her
rooted to an old ground
the pitch of utter loneliness
where she herself and all creation
seemed equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry
to which no echo comes or can ever come.’
I read this from my copy of ‘The Fact of a Doorframe’ given to me by a best friend that I lost decades ago, the pages read and re-read so many times that they fall loose leaved out of the volume and sometimes the poem gets re-arranged with its stanzas in different orders. I remember reading this when my first partner committed suicide and it seemed like one of the few remaining pieces of my long term love of the written word that still made sense… and I read it again when Adrian, my husband for almost twenty years (for all that we then spent nearly ten apart) died in Lent last year. I thought I knew love and loss so well already but there’s always more to learn.
Strangely I coped ‘remarkably well’ for several months, riding an adrenaline fuelled wave, with taking the funeral and clearing his island house in the Highland community where we raised our children and built a retreat centre in the last croft, in the last village at the end of a very long, single track road. Long before I created ‘Wild Church’ just getting to local church could be pretty wild, especially at this time of the year… going out behind the snowplough to get from sea level and over the 1,000ft ‘Pass of the Winds’ with no guarantee of getting back that day. Sometimes it’s easier to be tough in tough times and places and then it’s the gentle times, the quiet moments much later when it all falls apart.
So I made it through the summer and the committal service for my Father alongside my family in Kent. It was in the autumn that the storms of anger and grief really hit, after my son, Tam, left for University. There I was, for perhaps the first time in my life, living alone in what had been a family home. Now I understood better the heartbreak of my husband, for all that he was the one who chose it. I understood better the heartbreak of my mother, living alone after fifty years of married life. Ghosting around my own home feeling utterly bereft without my last child and all the light and fire of his creativity, his art and music, his love and humour… and being both so delighted to see him growing up and so lost in that ‘pitch of utter loneliness’.
November and Advent was full of flu, which gave me the excuse I really didn’t need to go to bed and get through several boxes of tissues. As I was beginning to emerge just before the Winter Solstice, 2017 delivered its final wave of change and challenge with the death of Jean, for whom I had been a soul friend for almost eight years. Eight years is a long time in weekly meetings, in which someone generously and terribly offers you access into the depths of their inner life. As Christmas was approaching, I found myself for the third time in a year, planning a funeral rather than having a holiday.
This time last week, I finished my part in co-ordinating the clearance of Jean’s home, having distributed her beloved books and possessions, as she and her family wished, into various academic libraries and to those who could most benefit, such as those in the homeless drop in centre in Totnes. On just such a sunny Sunday afternoon, as it is today, I took the owl statue that she loved (and I thought was hideous but kept by my hearthside for weeks) to place at the head of her woodland grave, as she had asked for. I dug wild flower seeds into the soil turned over her body and watched a buzzard lift up from the oaks beside the stream, beneath which the primroses were starting to flower already.
‘Vision begins to happen in such a life
as if a woman quietly walked away
from the argument and jargon in a room
and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap
bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps,
laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards
in the lamplight, with small rainbow-coloured shells
sent in cotton from somewhere far away,
and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow-
original domestic silk, the finest findings…
…Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity,
the striving for greatness, brilliance- only with the musing of a mind
one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing
dark against bright, silk against roughness,
pulling the tenets of a life together
with no mere will to mastery,
only care for the many-lived, unending
forms in which she finds herself…’