CARL GUSTAV IN MY GARDEN

Sometimes we hear the train, Dad and I, as we perambulate the length of the garden. Sometimes we  hear only wind. I see the tops of trees, ours, but not ours; they could be found anywhere, in any other clearing.

May is rounding out her month and soon June will be sent our way. Is your honeysuckle out? We have the scent of Syringha, planted for Shelagh...

I woke up this morning with a burning left eye, and now even after the sun has set, the rice is on the stove, and the song thrush is harmonising her final duets, I have the look of a badger about me.

Delftia some weeks ago, and now Klebsiella - ought I to take comfort in the strange fact that even my colonisations of bacteria have poetic names? My immunology nurse mentioned the word ‘strange’ over and over again. ‘These are strange times,’ she said. Strange, strange, strange.

My heart does funny loops and a bell is tolling like an echo in some distant yet ever near place. Do you hear this bell too? The Great Bell in Buddhism is a reminder to return to ourselves. This quieter bell seems more sinister, pulling us away from ourselves. To where?

I am reading Laurens Jan van der Post on his friend Jung. My dearest Colette sent me her copy of ‘Jung and the Story of our Time’. I feel I have already loosened the binding of this 1976 Penguin edition as I carry the book around with me, and move forward, and return to passages, and read aloud to Dad. ‘Hopkins! Schweitzer! Meister Eckehart!’ He hails these old friends as they are mentioned. Reading of the great ‘thuses of life’, what the fourteenth century Dominican mystic Meister Eckehart called istigkeit, the ‘isness’ of time and place, what Buddha called tathagata or ‘suchness’ - I am glad of mystery and the uncomfortable comfort of consciousness.

What are you reading now? And does it bring you comfort?

RETURN OF THE ANAEMIC WARRIOR

This being the year of the Horse (my year, according to the Chinese horoscope), I ought to be leaping about the place like a Disney princess, astride my dreams..

Instead, this summarises me rather neatly…

I have it on authority that I am anaemic and osteopenic - while not wildly so (not enough to be hooked up to receive a blood transfusion), it is enough to have me stapled to the bed most days. In between I write. My masters is nearly over, and I am almost done with the final 15,000 word project. But since I am only at the start of my memoir and novel, I feel as though there are great mountains yet to climb and I am sprawled at the foot of them, scrabbling about for nuts and berries to sustain myself. And green leafy vegetables… my dear Uncle Z bought me a blender and I plug into myself these nourishments. Here's hoping…

Cheers!

Illustrator of first image: Quentin Blake

Rest via google 

THE GATHERING: A COLLECTION OF IRISH BEAUTIES

Give me peat fires
and candles lit
at the Church of Mercy

Give me soft haze of blue
mountains and sharp edges of ice
on our way to The Connor Pass

Give me Dingle
and Slea Head
and blue butterflies on Inch Strand Beach

Stop at Fermoyle
after kissing the Stone,
then touch the sands of Dun Chaoin

Time is a dandelion
but not the land
She is constant -

Waiting, waiting,
for the gathering
of the poet and her clan.

IT'S (NOT) A LONG WAY TO TIPPERARY!

So, apparently...

I'm not sure I need any more gift of blarney, having been blessed with a naturally chatty tongue, BUT who could say no to kissing the famous stone?!
Am only slightly (very) terrified about visiting Ireland at a time described by my Irish friends as Baltic, but I have dreamed of setting foot in Ireland since I first read Yeats, curled up in the heat of an ordinary Indian summer... Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths... I shall arise and go now, and go to Innisfree... and most of all, listening to my grandfather and great-great grandmother singing 'It's a long way to Tipperary, it's a long way to go...', which of course it was, from Bombay...

I was chattering to a Polish taxi driver today, spilling over with excitement about my trip to Ireland; he asked me where, in Ireland... Tipperary, says I, smiling. Never heard of that one, sez he... So naturally I had to sing him The Song. Clearly he didn't have ancient relatives crooning Irish tunes through his childhood. It was something to do with the war, I think... my grandfather was seconded to the British army (a captain), my great uncle (Brigadier Jim) led the Gurkhas, and music somehow passed through the allied nations, like a gentle daisy chain, unsuspected by the enemies. Who notices the passing on of daisy chains?
Here's my mother's portrait of her father... handsome, wasn't he? And the sweetest, gentlest grandfather a girl could hope for... can't wait to make him smile wherever he is when I set foot in (jump up and down like a crazy leprechaun in) Tipperary!!

VILLAGE DES PRUNIERS

For seven years I have dreamed about and visualised walking among the plum trees with Thich Nhat Hanh in his exiled home of France. I cannot believe I am actually about to make this dream come true. In a few hours I hope to board a plane that will take me to Bergerac airport and thence, onwards, to the monastic settlement in Plum Village.

We returned home late tonight from Gloucester where we said our final goodbyes to Aunty Saida. One final flurry of activity awaits before the pace of my life changes beyond all recognition. Everything I do will be in mindfulness harnessed by good, strong, clear energy, and when I eat, I will chew at least thirty times, like my grandfather taught us when we were little (and we never listened! There were games to be played! Comics to be read! Who had time to chew?).

Now I will chew. Think of me, as I will be thinking of you.

Lately I dream

of the dullest things. I long for a simple routine. A package of little tasks, not muddled through, but begun and neatly adieu-ed.

A cup of hot tea drunk politely, a walk through the village (they could set their clocks by me), tidy the dishes, water the plants, converse with the birds...

You may think I do these Littles everyday and anyway, but sometimes the hunger for larger dreams consumes me. World domination, whirlwind romance with Hollywood dish, Poet Laureate of the Hospital Genre, etc etc...

There are no windows on the Surgical Short Stay Unit. It is a box, with blue curtains and friendly wardens. Creamed potatoes for lunch, jam tart with my tea, needle in my writing hand and the life saving Human Immuno Globulins (The Goblins!) flowing through me.

In a place without windows, a girl can learn to dream, but also learn not to believe in her dreams. Dreams without flight. Lately I dream, without flight.