Just two weeks ago I approached the City Corporation for permission to site the garden, the permission letter is ‘in the post.’ 🙃
Manjula’s Garden
Category: our story
writing our story
is proving to be quite a challenge, partly as there is a
“paradox at the heart of the enterprise, the inevitable tension between the distance required for apprehension — for a perspective to emerge in which events can find their proper place — and the pressured immediacy of vivid narrative.” from The Art of Time in Memoir by Sven Birkets.
It’s telling a story when the trauma, the wound of: Manjula’s death, the circumstances leading up to it, the wider context and my powerlessness to act on what was happening is still very much with me and therefore makes it harsh and tender by turns. It’s necessary but hard, so the telling of the tale doesn’t progress at a speed or in ways that I’d like..
It’s about knowing when to focus-in the lens and when to pull back, with both “experience tasted and experience digested.”
In addition, I’m having to write in proper English with the handicap that I’m from Yorkshire.
Manjula, still with me, gently sighs, as she’s seen it all before.
Grief driven
a good friend, who will remain nameless, to protect the innocent, recently had a chat.
She valued past times, spent together when she felt able to talk through some of the challenges she was facing at the time.
she longed for that stephen and not the one she had now, the mr angry, bitter and guilt driven.
I’m reflecting and trying to manage my new situation, thanks K feedback from friends is always appreciated, it’s so difficult to not see the ‘wood for the tress’ especially when facing trauma.
Manjula’s Tree
Manjula wanted to return as a tree to provide support and cover, to help people. To me she already was.
Maria’s brain pickings helped again m, this time, with the tree but do follow the link for more about closeness and our reaching out. It begins with…. “When I am sad, I like to imagine myself becoming a tree. Branches that bend without breaking, fractal with possibility, reaching resolutely toward the light. Roots touching the web of belonging beneath the surface of the world, that majestic mycelial networksuccoring and nurturing and connecting tree to tree — connection so effortless, so imperturbable, so free from the fragility of human relationships.”
Follow the link and a lovely reflection on closeness….
CLOSE
is what we almost always are: close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, close to losing faith, close to being done, close to saying something, or close to success, and even, with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up.
Our human essence lies not in arrival, but in being almost there, we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending anticipated arrivals. We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity: an intimacy calibrated by the vulnerability we feel in giving up our sense of separation.
To go beyond our normal identities and become closer than close is to lose our sense of self in temporary joy, a form of arrival that only opens us to deeper forms of intimacy that blur our fixed, controlling, surface identity.
To consciously become close is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament, a chancing of our arm and our love, a willingness to hazard our affections and an unconscious declaration that we might be equal to the inevitable loss that the vulnerability of being close will bring.
Human beings do not find their essence through fulfillment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go. What makes the rainbow beautiful, is not the pot of gold at its end, but the arc of its journey between here and there, between now and then, between where we are now and where we want to go, illustrated above our unconscious heads in primary colour.
We are in effect, always, close; always close to the ultimate secret: that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach: the step between not understanding that and understanding that, is as close as we get to happiness.
We celebrate Manjula and our coming together
Lucie’s Liver 1
On top of losing Manjula, the house being really quiet for a whole year so missing the hustle and bustle of our lively home, Lucie has not been well.
Her Liver is swollen maybe due to a growth but her doc Bhaghya thinks it’s not cancerous as there’s no indication of it spreading.
So we plan another visit to Bangalore to a more sophisticated scanner and possibly an operation.
Fingers and claws are crossed.
Slowly step by step
Tuesday 2nd March the day after our immovable object wedding at the City Corporation.
Visiting the sites of our commemoration held on the fifth
So what’s the plan?
Who is this idiot? Talking about chapters? Drafts, my man, you’ve nearly completed the second draft, with many more to come.
He needs to get a grip.
We’re bonding. Lucie has chosen to lie on my feet immediately underneath the writer’s work station. She’s having liver and consequent digestion issues. Today’s medicine and food might have given her some relief and so I’m in the good books.
I like
“A pair of silver anklets poured out. He lifted them against the cheek of the evening sky and he shook them to unspool their rhythmic zhan-zhan-zhan. ‘Take them with you,’ was all she said. Years later he realised what she had really given him. The sound of her feet. The preface to her movements.
As I’m now officially a writer. Ha ha. Well I have pen and a blank sheet of paper.
I spend time reading with two perspectives: firstly as the reader, I always was, appreciating the journey I’m being taken on and secondly realising more about how the writer has created and revealed their story.
I quote another book to help reveal why I like the one above.
“This feeling resonated in me. It was the resonance that had lingered on, exactly as it does when the last page is turned of a book which reaches the heart.”
I want Manjula and my story to reach the heart as it did for me.
It’s three years today….
Manjula and I had our first wedding, the official one in the government office where they exchange contracts on immovable objects. We are undoubtedly immovable objects.
I was age 60 before I got married so there was a big build up and it took some time to move in that direction.
three days later we celebrated and married again in a field
What…
is this?
Me and MYCycle 