Loving the Particular
I love this tree..this wood..this river. The word is not too strong. And because I love, I feel at home here, safe, solid. I care about this particular tree in this wood and this river, the river who was my first friend here. I would grieve deeply if harm befell them.
Friendship
I think about that: this is the first place and the first time in my life, that I have felt a deep friendship with the landscape. It’s not the entire moor, 400 square miles of it, I don’t know that intimately enough to claim love. No, it’s just here, where I walk the dog every day, where I know the sequences of wild flowers – wood anemones and primroses, celandines, bluebells and ramsons, red campions and foxgloves. And now, after the blackberries, after the conkers have fallen and the beech nuts have been secreted away by busy squirrels, the ground is a mosaic of fallen leaves and the midstream rocks are gilded with copper. I’m never bored by the same walk; I appreciate the daily changes, greeting each flower and leaf as it emerges and unfurls, and watching as the seasons roll one into the other.
Wintering
I read the other day that ‘scientists’ in America injected adrenaline into some giant redwoods to keep them in perpetual growth. They all died within the year. Of course they did! We all need to winter. We need to winter alongside our trees and tortoises, find our caves and rest. But as well as our annual cycle, we have cycles within our lives -of which grief can be a pretty tough winter – and a whole life cycle. I am in the autumn of my life and I appreciate this autumnal beech tree teaching me the generosity of being bounty for squirrels, a resting place for people, home for families of birds. There is no stinting in that generosity and it’s not forced; it is a consequence of this tree being itself. And I also notice its ability to shed its leaves, lighten its burden in readiness for winter and snow, trusting in the cycle of things.
My relationship to this tree isn’t sentimental. It is based on appreciation of what is. I don’t know what the tree feels, I only know what I feel. It occurs to me, that this is how it always is. I loved my husband dearly. He was my friend, my home ground, my resting place and in his arms I felt safe like nowhere else. It wasn’t a sentimental love. I was never bored with him but appreciated bearing witness to the unfolding of who he was and that didn’t stop, even in his difficult winter which ended in his death.
Beauty
A friend told me the other day, that dear Swiss friends of hers were choosing to end their lives, together. As I write this, they will just have died. I respect their decision. And yet I ponder…… I could not have guessed what resolutions and healing would happen in those last months of my husband’s life. He could have swigged a whole bottle of Oromorph which I’d left carelessly on the table beside his bed, and I could have come back from walking the dog to find him dead. He didn’t. He chose to live his dying. Childhood traumas, behaviours in himself he had not forgiven, unfinished family business – these he faced gently, truthfully and with acceptance. And most importantly of all, finally and absolutely he understood that he was loveable and loved. Not because he had youth and vigour, nor because he had acquired status in the world, nor for what he could provide for others- all of that was gone after all- but simply by being who he was. Bloated by steroids, paralysed by the tumour as it consumed his brain, his short term memory shot, needing personal care day and night – he, this soul inside a decaying body, was innocent and beautiful, absolutely.
Coming Home
I have many challenges in the wake of his death: practical ones for sure, weathering the winter of grief, certainly, but also calls to understanding and maturity.
Can I see my own beauty?
For the first time in my life, someone had my back: can I have my own back now and believe in myself as he believed in me?
Can I understand that the beauty I saw in him isn’t only personal and that my longing for him is, at its most foundational, a longing for divine beauty?
Love is love. Why do I divide it up and make one love separate from another? The tree and the river are access points for me. So was my husband. Can my sorrowing heart find comfort, home and the ‘Friend’ of whom the Sufi poets write, in this autumn of my life? And will that acceptance and radiance carry me through the naked days of my personal winter? This is my longing and my prayer – to my beloved one now gone, to the ‘What Is’ that sustains me and to the land I call my home.
With love,
Nickie
News
In the last 10 days I have been given two poems by Rainer Maria Rilke: the first, by one of the women from my elder women’s group, and the second by someone from the Walking with Loss, Together group. I would like to share them here because I think they are relevant and beautiful.
You have not grown old, and it is not too late, to dive into your increasing depths, where life gives out its own secret. Let this Darkness be a Bell Tower Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.
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