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blue last
The sun is shining over Berlin today and I feel so glad of the blue it lights. All too soon it will be dark all the time, a world half-awake, candles staining fogged daylight windows and all the birds have flown except for ducks, pigeons, sparrows, swans. I wonder how it feels in the heart of a tiny brown bird, to cock your head on the grass and study the inner knowing that will bring you sweeping up into the slipstream to sail south, a sailing that’s more a machine, a relentless effort, the seamed world a faraway town under your belly feathers and your dream map: that you’re on the right path, that you have twelve days’ further of flying to go, eleven, eight, five, three. Imagine the chatter when everyone gets there first. Imagine the mournful little spaces here and there in the loud crowd of trees where one voice or another bird’s is missing, deleted by accidental death during the year or maybe simply falling out of the sky on the way over. Plummet. All labouring down the round world to beat the icy creep of winter, that consumes everything edible and buries all the seeds.
Birds know Berlin only in the sun. In Switzerland climbing a mountainside by steep red rail with its leather seats my friend said to me, in the dim clatter of the neck bells wooden-tongued and serene, the farmer can tell – if one of his cows is missing – he hears it from the herd in their song. Penguins find their young among twenty thousand birds all milling, every one screaming. I will search all winter for the one whose voice is silenced to me, out of my earshot, out of reach, a sweet subject I cannot leave alone like a sore tooth, a tree falling, a shot out of frame.
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Lovely
Thanks, Melissa
Some would tell me not to feel the absence of a loving companion and learn to be content within without such a one. You remind me that it’s alright to feel what I feel, and that’s actually more comforting.
Though it’s compassionately meant, Greg, I don’t think people should be telling you what to feel. Why shouldn’t we grieve? it is harder going through this life alone than with a deeply trusted partner by one’s side. It hurts me to be alone again. It makes my life more painful, and I grieve that every day. I will honour the man who’s gone and the man who may come by noticing the shape that is available for them in my intimate days. I will honour your loving nature and enquiring, delicate mind by celebrating the woman who may come, to occupy the love you are ready to let flowing.
Telling you what to feel – is that impertinence? What you feel is what you must, it’s become part of you for this while. Is ‘I know how you feel’ its equal? How can anyone know the personal thing that’s got deep inside another and taken hold? A thing we can never capture in one apposite word that will stick it to a piece of paper? Maybe I once had that thing, but do I remember it, can I still feel it? No. I can only recognise the presence there of a beast I might have known. Now I wonder, does it go away, or does it dissolve into the next new form of you, as you grow on with life? Am I up too late? Russell
Are you up too late, or are you arriving at the perfectly best possible moment? These are all very good questions I think, Russell. I sometimes feel it is a rather impertinent form of compassion, or attempted compassion. But attempts at compassion, if corrupted by our own selfishness, can do such harm… inadvoitantly, unfoitunately.
Russell, this is Greg. Greg, Russell. Two very insightful and kind, vibrant souls. Cx
Love this post CJ; beautiful blue reflection xxx.
Thank you so much, Debbie! X
I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Russell. Cathoel’s approbation is adequate recommendation to seek a friendship, wouldn’t you say? Thank you, Cathoel, for the introduction. I had just finished three books of some upstart anti-guru whose advice was to exorcise my ego, lobotomize my libido and undeify my desire for any emotion at all other than stoic acceptance that everything is utterly meaningless. Well, I had to say fuck that. I like to feel and I want to experience the full kaleidoscope of possible emotions so I can know more and more what it means to be human. It’s necessary, I think, for the path to empathy, compassion and right action.
I agree, Greg. And have always felt uncomfortable with what seems to me surely a misappropriation of the Buddha’s notion of detachment. I feel sure he didn’t mean it anything but lovingly – it wasn’t indifference. This idea so often attributed to spiritual practice that we should be more immune to the experience of life as it flows through us so confoundingly overwhelmingly, that because ‘there is more to life than this’ and ‘this too shall pass’ we can let this mean less to us and ought to just sit by and wait for it to pass… it seems to me unappreciative as well as banal. Much though some degree of numbness wouldn’t be welcome, on occasion.