It is the moment just before that we live over and over in its only time and then recount to those who were not there the beginning still echoes in laughter but resounds unrecognized every time and never comes back to begin again there are no words for calling after it and when it went it left no memory but the sound of the running sheep calling to the evening from the darkening hill what they are calling as they run is Wait what each one of them is calling is Wait
W S Merwin, From Time to Time : Garden Time
I’ve greeted sheep, cattle, Blencathra and clear blue open sky today. And I’ve made a satisfying start on the late summer Lakeland garden trim, prune and clear-up. My face is glowing in sunlight and my every muscle feels stretched. I’ve been feeling very grateful to my dear friend Bob, who takes such great care of the place when I’m away. Gardens are sanctuary spaces, aren’t they? – they speak to our imaginations, gladden our hearts and minds, exercise our bodies, and touch our souls. Bob and I will lay new breathable membrane and 25 large bags of 20mm gravel this coming weekend, further design to keep the garden low-maintenance and well trimmed.
Sitting over words very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing not far like a night wind in the pines or like the sea in the dark the echo of everything that has ever been spoken still spinning its one syllable between the earth and silence
W S Merwin
It’s quiet in Lakeland tonight as I bring to mind some of the human encounters I have enjoyed in the year just past. It’s an enriching exercise: for all that there will have been innumerable encounters now forgotten – as in the blink of an eye – so, too, I revisit so many remembered.
Month by month – sometimes aided by a photograph, sometimes a remembered dance, poem, scent, sentence, song, taste, touch, laugh or cry – I see again the faces I’ve connected with: I feel again the berating, the beautiful, the bereaved, the creating, the fleeting, the holiday-making, the joyful, the laughing, the living, the loving, the sick and the dying. Ponderous window shoppers, kindly parents helping their children build sand castles, ninety-nine year old Mrs M telling me her glad story on a bench in summer sunlight at Holyrood. Awe-struck fellow sunset-watchers atop Edinburgh’s Arthur’s Seat.
Shadows, mine and theirs, touching one another, the hula-hoopers and the slack-rope walking, the community circus and its hand-painted tickets, the Hanover Street cupcakes, the Abyssinian acrobats, the nervous Festival comics warming to their being well-received, the picnics, the walks, the boat rides and the conversations at brasserie tables. Glowing people. Shining individuals. The thoughtful, the generous and the kind. Sharers. People who know me as neighbour. Others who love me without limit, or shyness, or any obvious reason.
The lovingly-tended campfires at the beach and the bothy, the faces glowing pink, the huge shared cooking pot, the miracle of poppadoms, the warm ease of friends gathered in an Edinburgh flat for a summer celebration party, the quietly spoken community seated in a warm circle in the dark on Salisbury Crags, the Lakeland walks and talks, theatre companions, good company at supper, the human contacts warming hearts across neighbourhoods, cities, towns, villages – and oceans. Those who will not, or do not, or cannot talk much but yet communicate deep truths in many another way. Rainbows. Sunrises. Sunsets. Streams, summer swimming, icy dips, rivers, oceans, mountains, plains, cloudscapes, cobwebs, frost covered fields, wildflowers, the urban fox in moonlight.
The shop assistant who will have forgotten me though I recall her kindness, the hugs and the warm encouragements, the quiet conversations and the vigorous, noisy ones. Grandchildren at the swing park, Christmas television with my mother, Christmas lunch at a grand family table, hot chocolate in a Christmas Market with friends who make a cold night warmer, those who remember me – and keep in touch, the war torn and the weary, the bright-eyed and patient soul sitting hopefully in front of the food hall who sleeps under cardboard at night and still smiles again next morning.
We’re made for these encounters and they grow us. I’d do well to make more time, in the course of a year, not just at new year, to recall them – the chastening and the happy, the celebratory and the sad, the murmurs like a night wind in the pines. I’m amazed at the panoply still held in the many rooms of my mind. Recalling rich seams of life’s being lived, I look forward to more such living – and more remembering – in a happy, hopeful 2023.
For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then
there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song
Our neighbour brought us a beautiful thrush, stunned after flying directly into her window. ‘You’re good with birds,’ she said.
And it’s true that, sometimes, after an hour or two of warmth and watching, breeze ruffling feathers revivifies, and we have known the joy of tentative flapping giving way again to flight.
But not this time ‘as I had found it the first time’. So there’s been another little burial.
