Water Colour Bridge

Some days dawn grey and bleak and drear within.
It's hard to see where chink of light could break,
or that the sun is in its rightful place,
shining endlessly in clear blue skies above.

I walk and there is green and yet more green,
with falling tears of rain that make it so.
And there is brown, litter from the trees,
rotted leaves and empty husks of beech. 

The lichen here is luminous, verdigris;
the buzzards black against the moving sky;
and there are early purple blackberries,
plumpening and sweetening in the rain.

Pops of orange as 'lords and ladies' burst,
exposing their fertility of the spring;
the silver birch felled many years ago,
thriving still, with branches standing tall.

From here, my favourite perch, the sky looks white,
glimpsed through the ceiling of thickly opaque green.
The rain still drips its tears upon my face,
even as it fills the river flowing by.

And as I sit, I clear a space to make
a pattern, with the things I find about:
the fern leaves which I found here once before,
the nuts shells and the emerald velvet moss.

Then there's a golden leaf - I place it so;
and then I see another and yet more;
and I begin to see what I had missed:
that everywhere I look are golden leaves.

Golden leaves and silver threads of hope;
rowan berries, bright and red and full.
Now home, beyond the moor, is beckoning,
a yellow painted sanctuary calling me.

I think there are many things which can act as bridges: baking a cake to share, gardening with hands in the soil, talking with an understanding friend, playing with chalk pastels, singing, especially to the land or the river, putting on a favourite song and dancing, putting on a favourite song and weeping. What I realise as I write this, is that for me bridges are most often either nurturing or creative, in other words, something which grounds me and has the ability to move me. They are not distractions or escapism, they acknowledge this is where I am right now, they bring me into the present, but they also have the capacity to ‘unstick’ me.

I remember when I was very young, saying that I couldn’t die until I’d ‘fully done’ life – now I might substitute the word ‘appreciated’. I need to fully inhabit this life and this moment before I can jump off into what comes next. An image comes to mind of a diver, who has to ground himself into his board in order to get the spring he needs for his dive into another element. I practised homoeopathy professionally for 25 years and I think it works because a good remedy ‘recognises’ a person’s suffering, it gets alongside them in their pain, and that ‘understanding’ of the present state,  has the ‘right shaped energy’ to help move them through and onwards. For me creativity in all its forms has the potential to both bring me present and help me move – taking the raw material of feelings, ideas and things which are around for me in the moment and synthesising them into some kind of form. It is a transformative process.

This morning I may have transformed my mood but grief as a whole has been – is being – a transformative process in my life. It’s not easy, any more than the alchemical fire goes easy on the ‘lead’, but I can see now that transformation is possible. I think that’s a subject for another blog – or two or ten – but for now I am just glad to have navigated another rainy Sunday and shared some of it with you.

With love,

Nickie

PS for the purists (and scrabble experts): I know that “plumpening” is probably not a proper word! But I liked the onomatopoeia. And anyway, Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas made up words so the habit has good pedigree!

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