My neighbours had to have their elderly dog humanely destroyed yesterday, a sad day for them, and it was sad too not to hear his cheerful barking when I went out into the garden to fill up the bird bath with water and cut lavender before the bees wake up and resent the intrusion.
Tomorrow has been officially declared World Rabies Day, which makes me a trifle tetchy because tomorrow is my birthday, not a soberversary but a birthday-birthday. As a child in East Africa I grew up with rabies scares and support more awareness on the disease but I wish my birthday could have been named as International Ice Cream Day or something more festive. At the weekend I shall celebrate my birthday at the weekend with friends and plenty of homemade ice cream.
It is a week of mourning here because of the death of Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan eco-warrior, from ovarian cancer at the age of 71. A remarkable activist who encouraged poor women to plant 30-million trees and restore many deforested and arid areas of Kenya, went to prison, was beaten, harassed and threatened before receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.
“It is evident that many wars are fought over resources which are now becoming increasingly scarce. If we conserved our resources better, fighting over them would not then occur…so, protecting the global environment is directly related to securing peace…those of us who understand the complex concept of the environment have the burden to act. We must not tire, we must not give up, we must persist.”
Bunches of lavender on the windowsill in the bathroom, more bunches tied and suspended above the kitchen counter, tall airy wands of French lavender with a sharply astringent fragrance that fills the house. Outside the tapestry of trees is thickening with intricate deep foliage. A green world, tunneled, canopied and feathered with shadow.
Reading notes from a sober friend on her struggle with melancholy, a weariness and gloom that darkens each day, makes her reality darker than she knows it to be, sours her interactions with family and obscures what is vital and promising all around her. My own struggle this last year has been with anxieties, some realistic (the housemate’s angina, strained finances, unsafety) and some the wild imaginings that arise after the midnight hour. We share something though: the challenge of what to do with the feelings surfacing after years of chemical numbness and suppression. What cannot be changed must be endured, the difficulty of living with ourselves, cultivating patience. Waiting to glimpse light at the end of a tunnel, reminding ourselves there is both light and dark out there even if we are floundering in obscurity.
Lines from John Berryman come to both of us as consolation:
Forsake me not when my wild hours come;
grant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams;
achieve in me patience till the thing be done,
a careful view of my achievement come.
I love lavender. And I am forever amazed by the things that will appear real in the wild hours.
Not just real but larger than life and threatening. All my worst-case scenarios happen at 3am.
I wish I could embroider those words on my mind.
I’ve recently begun rereading John Berryman and he has some very moving lines in the late poems.
I sit through those melancholy hours and they pass. I think that the lavender would help soothe the spirit. My wife sprays lavender water on the sheets. It smells fresh and delicate.
The eco-warrior needs to be raised in each of us in order for things to change. I see so much waste and so little recognition of our being the problem. People don’t want to sacrifice anything for the betterment of all. Perhaps there is hope for the planet, but there are times that I sincerely wonder if it is too late for us.
I make lavender water from steamed and primitively distilled lavender flowerheads, use it for ironing white shirts and on pillowcases. Lovely soothing stuff. Syd I get despondent about eco matters. In the last 20 years I have planted so many indigenous trees and done endless guerilla gardening, but it is not enough.
Reminding myself that there is always light, sometimes faint, sometimes strong, Whenever I start to feel overwhelmed, I often think of Bill Wilson writing of “walking in the sunlight.”
Rays of sunshine everywhere, right here, below letting go!
Recovery so often has felt as though I walked out of a dark room into sunlight — good to be reminded of that.