Post-Lammas Blues

Rain last night and I watched Billy Connolly on video being scathing and deliberately offensive and very funny. The writing has come to a standstill and I feel flat, exhausted and depressed. Nobody to blame and the mood will shift in a few hours or a few days.

 

When I think of my father lying in a coma in hospital on a tropical island, I wonder if he cannot die because there is so much still unresolved in his life. And verbal assurances do not change the reality he must live with, die knowing. There is no escape. The consequences of our choices and actions stay with us. When we lie or cheat or behave in cruel ways, the real unseen watcher is the self and at the end of the day that self is mercilessly truthful. Those we have victimised may be dead and gone or they may have forgiven us and moved on, but the self demands a true account.

 

Noting how often I hear through the excuses and self-pity of AA drunkalogues to the inner self looking on in a unsentimental and dispassionate way. that blunt inner knowing and naming. This is very much the case in my own life: ‘I know what my hand hath done.’ The guilt and insight and unsparing truth is all there — and that is also the liberating insight of that reality-loving self. To know what really happened. Neither victim nor monster but human, flawed and power-hungry and thoughtless.

 

When I went to bed last night, coming out of the bathroom  all steamy and scented with soaps, wrapped in a big towel, I paused at the door of the study and looked out, hoping to see a wild Welsh Lammas moon. Nothing there, just the black skies and rainy darkness. Autumn approaching, another season to be discovered anew.

 

Breathing through the fear and sadness and loneliness and trying to expereince all of this reality, to trust that I am moving forward, walking in the right direction, that a future is opening and not closing for me.

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