The charm of trust

Not long after my husband's death, I received a phone call from a charity organisation, offering me a calendar set. Swaddled in the cocoon of love, which my late husband had woven around me in his last weeks and days, I was naked as a newborn in the world. I did not know how I would be surviving, financially, emotionally and mentally.

The lady on the other end of the line was sympathetic and very real. She told me that they sent calendars to people who said yes to their offer. There would be an invoice and the client would be trusted to pay the charity.

"You send the calendars on trust?" I asked in disbelief.
"That's how we do it," she replied.

"I will take them!" I cried. "You have no idea how healing it is for me to hear that you operate on trust!"

She chuckled and took down my details.

When the calendars arrived, I saw they were comprised of artworks by Lisa Halstead.

I am not generally a fan of representational art, and my rather snobbish education had taught me to dismiss such images as kitsch - but Halstead's images showed skill and love for her subject matter, which, that year, was wildlife. Each calendar image was with me for a month, during which I learned to appreciate the specific intentions behind the artist's hand - her devotion to the animals, as well as to her craft.

For three years running, the charity trusted me and Lisa Halstead's art became a kind of emblem of something subtly and deeply strengthening in my life. I should add that the calendars were very competitively priced and always affordable.

As 2020 came to an end, however, I noticed that the charity had not called. I began to feel sad about the prospect of having to go through 2021 without the comfort of Halstead's work, which had also included birds and flowers.   

I searched online and saw that the charity only had year planners: lockdown had stopped their usual business. I went so far as to call them and they confirmed that they had not been able to commission the artist to produce more work, let alone print new calendars.

Early this year, I received a few phone calls from the charity. I was on the road each time and was forced to request they call back. They did not give up on me and eventually one of their volunteers caught me in a good moment.

I was disappointed that they did not have calendars. Instead, I was offered a coffee table book, entitled In My Nature, containing a wide-ranging collection of the artist's work. I accepted and then the moment of truth came: the charity did not have the funds to cover postage of ordered items. They needed me to pay upfront, whereupon they'd dispatch the book. They had trusted me for three years. Now it was my turn.

The book is a bit imperfect - some of the pages were still joined and I had to separate them with a sharp knife. Some of the images are cut off at the top, which is a pity.

However, even so, against my own expectations, I find In my Nature quite splendid - not least because of the way it challenges my education and everything I have learned about art. I have absorbed myself in images I would otherwise never have studied. If I have a pet hate, it is representational art featuring pets. It turns out that this range was in aid of the Animal Anti-Cruelty League and the Muscular Dystrophy Foundation. My heart and mind have expanded by contemplating the drawings. Truth be told, I have wondered whether I had previously dismissed such art as "sentimental" perhaps more as a result of clinging to a narrow, 'high-brow' identity than real understanding?

I was particularly struck by one of the artist's own favourite images, featuring two Afghan hounds. The differences in personality and character capture two souls. If I give myself over to the drawing, their windblown hair only enhances the spirit breathing the creation.

I have been charmed in ways I could not have imagined. Even if I might not choose to frame any of Halstead's images on my walls, my narrow-minded judgments have disappeared. I simply have no more need for them.

All because of trust.

Towards breakfast, a flower

Oh, my dear God,
sweet Christ: who would believe

this estuary of us -

who is the river and who

the sound

of

the sea?

Longer than the count of years,

my life has been, and now

you lead me to this threshold -

saturated by peace, and crabs,

kingfishers, and fish,

and fishermen, and other birds.

Keep me here, my darling Lord,

thank you for bringing me through,

to talk with you, at this kind hour.

Before me now: two fishermen,

oaring musically

their small boat, stacked with rods,

towards breakfast.

Ah, this Flower,

singing

on the water!

- Silke Heiss

Stand up, out of the blue

Eight or nine days ago, one of my lovely nieces messaged me out of that place of mystery we intelligently call 'the blue'.

"I hope you are doing well!" she wrote, adding, "I had been possessed by a memory of you recently."

Naturally, I replied to her questions, but I was not going to let niceties get in the way of the real (true-blue) stuff. 

"I would love to know what memory it is that possessed you," I said.

She then sent me a voiceclip with two stories. The first was one I'd as good as forgotten. I thank her for granting me permission to share it on my blog.

She was in Grade 6 - that would have made her roughly 11 years old at the time. She went to a party, safe and supervised and so on. A boy approached her, spoke disrespectfully - "rudely, very rude". He was "disgusting", and also flashed her.

She hit and kicked him, kicked him.

Back home, she told her parents, everything. 

Her father was upset - with: everything. The boy, her, just everything. Her mother was worried about her impulsiveness, the risk she'd taken by her spontaneous, violent self-defence. It was an unresolved issue in the home, and in her self.

A week later, I visited with my family. We were told the story. Apparently - I remember it, now that she's re-told it all - among all the adults present, I got up and went to her in the playroom, where she was watching tv or playing a video game, and I gave her a thumbs-up.

"You did good," I told her, "you gave that boy exactly what he deserved."

I remember feeling that it was important to let her know I trusted and approved of her body's spontaneous response to the disrespect, which had injured her spirit and person.

She said that I was the only person, until that point, completely to support what she had done. Coming from her aunt, it was clear: "It was okay for me to stand up for myself as a girl."

Photo by Sam Schooler on Unsplash

The second memory is gentler. It belongs in a separate blog, which will arrive in time, out of the blue.

Your Depression ... footsteps of a grounded butterfly

I often hear in my mind Mandela's words I once saw quoted - "It's not what you are given, but what you make out of what you have, that is the difference between people."

My darling Norman suffered from clinical Depression. You could say that's what he HAD. And what he made out of it were the poems he promised to write from the moment he'd made that pact with himself in 1979 faithfully to record the moments as he experienced them.

When we met, I'd experienced what I suppose might have been diagnosed as Depression periodically in my life; Norman persuaded me to go onto anti-depressants during one particularly hellish year we had together. (It was hellish for reasons external to ourselves.) But overall it was a condition I've never had the humbleness of spirit to pay attention to either in myself or others.

It's as if, during this second year of grief, I'm being ferried through a deeper understanding of my late husband and his heartaches. That's how I see it, anyhow.

I don't know where it's leading. There's a weird, blind trust. I've not lost my footing ... the fact that I can put together an image such as the one below I'd like to believe is proof that, step by step, I am still going ... somewhere ... not forgetting that, unlike reserved and private and strong Norman, I am, I guess, willing to be 'weak', that is to say, receptive to the most unbelievably sound support among my friends and community ...

So please see this post not as a desperate cry for help on my part, but as just a cry, a cry that, by crying itself, IS its own help ... that is to say, an expressive demonstration of what you CAN DO even if you are totally DOWN ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 

   

Helping Hand

This is another preliminary note that forms part of the story that has formed quite a few sort-of-poems telling the years. It says so much about the man that Norman was, the spirit he still is.

Helping Hand

When in late autumn I resumed my travels

back to you

– pursuing my new life,

our beckoning future –

the first night was troubled

by anxieties –

I lay in wakeful doom;

mind rewove the day's events

and past months' tests –

a manic loom that utterly refused me rest.

But you

in sleep

turned on your back

and took my hand

to squeeze it

several times

unconscious, deep in dreamland's instinct caring.

You warmed away my woman's quakes

and deftly eased my frowning fears –

Since then my trust

is sworn into,

palm-protected by

our pairing –

the fabric of our fingers

joining our best years.

6^th April 2011