Old year burning away

Peaceful happy-enough days, the  green oaks darkening, the summer filled with birdsong. And yet waking  with a darkness like grief, filled with panic and dread. Unremembered  nightmares?

Tending two new herbs given to  me as a gift, a pot of French tarragon, a pot of  silver thyme. Bright silver shining leaves, that totem power of healing and  turning  food to ambrosia. Some shadow leaning over my  shoulder as I  water and  call to  the dogs. In a while I shall make what I optimistically  call a ‘rustic plum tart’ , using aromatic small blue Normandy plums known as Quetsches, not too sweet. There are friends to  email and call, neighbours to see. Those I love and  who give this life meaning in love reciprocated. Doing all the right things, simple good things, and hoping something steadies me,  stops the inexorable  fall into  an old  black well of despondency.

This year ending, going into the unknown,  holding in my heart this deeply loved broken battered old  world, the crushed dreams, the horrors and and all that  improbably beauty and good will. Those I have lost this past year, who have  gone ahead into death and  whatever lies beyond.Those spared. Those struggling and failing and  stumbling  along a  stony path, those of us who have lost our way, those of  us waiting for  morning,  for a new beginning, another chance. Moving here in this quiet garden between  trust and  cold terror,  uncertainty, flickering hope.  Asking for courage, to open up the heart and  welcome the stranger at the door. To go forward, step by step into  whatever  must come. Each time the sea  retreats.

The poems of  Louise Gluck echo in me

Saints

In our family, there were two saints,
my aunt and my grandmother.
But their lives were different.

My grandmother’s was tranquil, even at the end.
She was like a person walking in calm water;
for some reason
the sea couldn’t bring itself to hurt her.
When my aunt took the same path,
the waves broke over her, they attacked her,
which is how the Fates respond
to a true spiritual nature.

My grandmother was cautious, conservative:
that’s why she escaped suffering.
My aunt’s escaped nothing;
each time the sea retreats, someone she loves is taken away.

Still she won’t experience
the sea as evil. To her, it is what it is:
where it touches land, it must turn to violence

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