Lost, or: The chrysocolla and the butcherbird. A blogpost in two chapters.

I've lost.

Lost you: my thinking, feeling reader.

Lost me: your writer, um, your thinker-feeler.

Now what?

Chapter 1

Got in touch with my late husband, desperately. He 'told' me to buy a fancy bottle of wine. A minute or two later, still standing in the supermarket aisle among the wines (before the latest lockdown), a dear, late friend of mine 'told' me to buy another, fairly fancy bottle of wine.

I meekly obeyed both of them. Opened the red on Christmas day and toasted my late husband vocally in the presence of my parents. Has ever a wine had a more soothing, centring, balancing effect on me? Never.

The next day, Family day, I opened the white and toasted my late friend in everyone's presence and, again, the afternoon turned golden.

My obedience to my heart and her loves is simply the right thing.

Need to put that in bold.

My obedience to my heart and her loves is simply the right thing.

But still, I was lost: in the tyranny of daughtering. When my father came into the kitchen the next day, where I was, as usual, cooking, and said, "You are SO kind!" I replied morosely, "Yes. It's awful."

He said he would help if he could, and so he polished the blackened silver cake forks, while my poor, paralysed mother audibly lamented her helplessness.

Unkindly, on the phone to my Beloved later, I ranted beyond reasonable about the curse of being kind. I guess I was balancing (cancelling?) my kind deeds with highly ungracious words revealing pretty septic resentment.

But then.

I confronted the disturbance in my heart, the ungraciousness.

Chapter 2

I'd made my parents a calendar for Christmas, as usual, and for the month of May, which is my birthday month, I used a photo of myself, looking at a bird. Underneath the picture I'd pasted the words: 

 Listen to the song in your heart, whether the sun shines or it snows.

The bird is a butcherbird and although the photo (taken by my Beloved) is stunning, and the quote does speak how I have by and large lived my life, the vicious reputation of the bird bothered me.

However, Google (butcherbird) told me, with exquisite immediacy:

The fearless butcherbird reminds us to protect our territory. If it has shown up, you may be at risk of being undermined or of losing a thing of value.

 

That same day, my mother, ill-advisedly or wisely (which is it?) tippling once again from early on in the afternoon to assuage "the bitter taste in my mouth," said, 

"I keep trying to think of the name of a stone, but can't get away from croissant."
"Chrysoprase!" I said.
Her eyes widened. "Chrysocolla," she retorted. "How did you ... ?"
"It's obvious," I retorted in turn.

The daughter is not that for nothing.

She sent me to fetch her big box of various pieces, designed and cut and polished and smithied by her, and gave me a necklace with a Chrysocolla pendant. The cabochon and every link is fashioned by her. In better times, of course. (was fashioned = simple past: upon a time)

I danced! How it suits everything I am and wear! (am, wear = simple present: true forever)

"I have never seen it," I said.

"I never wore it," she replied, "I made it thinking of you. I wanted to give it to you."

Google (chrysocolla healing and chrysocolla sound) supplied more than enough for me to begin to be able to dissolve the septic resentment and ungraciousness that had been holding my soul hostage.

By means of words.

To myself.

To you.

Truth is not straightforward.

Chapter 3

Please forgive the photo of the pendant, the evening was getting on.

Appendix Note

You can still see the pendant and necklace enough to get a sufficient sense of things.

Butcherbird and me (passing though Hermanus). Photo: my Beloved.

Chrysocolla pendant with handmade silver necklace, by Sigi Heiss. Bad photo: Silke Heiss

 

 

A fresh start - I'm done with fear

I'm stepping into my dear old blog (a good year old now) and at the same time into a new era in my own life.

The Parable of the Talents rings more loudly than ever at this moment: Matthew 25:14 tells Jesus' story about the servants who doubled their talents by investing them; and the servant whose FEAR of his Lord caused him to bury what he was given. His reward? He is "cast out" an "unprofitable servant".

It's as terrible a story as it is true. How does it relate, however, to me, and, who knows, possibly you?

Well, I don't know about you, but - can you believe it - I took a vow of poverty during my childhood: brainwashed by the books I read, I decided that having money condemned one, that it was impossible to be involved with money without being greedy. All the materially poor characters that populated the pages of my literature were pure at heart: like them I wanted to be! I was, quite literally, terrified of the effects of having money. I guess there is some sense in that, if you look around.

Still, what subtleties I missed! How foolish it is to confuse material poverty with poverty of spirit. The material poverty of the literary characters I admired was a FOIL for their richness of spirit, their sincerity and resourcefulness, their loving hearts.

Material poverty, I hope you'll agree, is one of humanity's inevitable burdens to bear; a burden that it behoves the materially wealthy to help carry; a burden it behoves all of us, rich and poor alike, to lighten communally by doing what we can to ensure that each of us has the few things that are needed to live a dignified and fulfilled life.

(By the way - on the topic of a dignified and fulfilled life: have you heard of Epicurus? I discovered his blissfully simple recipe on happiness in Alain de Boton's superb book, The Consolations of Philosophy - a must-read for anyone interested in life. Alas, that does not make all of us.)

Anyway. Back to poverty. It's spiritual poverty that's the REAL problem for humanity: poverty of spirit is, quite simply, an offence to the gift of life.

But what is spiritual poverty? Well, if you go back to the Parable - I'd update it into modern lingo and say that it teaches that to live in fear of being who you are, and to refuse to do what you know you COULD do; to refuse to MAKE SOMETHING out of what you have - however little that may be - it is THAT, which causes the "weeping and gnashing of teeth" the parable ends with - a beautifully grim description of the self-immolation that follows in the wake of bitter self-truths.

So. I'm done with fear. I'm abandoning the half-life I've lived, always kind of ashamed of what I know are my talents. The past one and a half years of pain and trauma have stumbled me into sharing my poems as never before, and finding them enjoyed by others to an unprecedented degree - so that now, for the first time in my life (old enough though I am to be a grandmother) I'm focusing without flinching on what I have to give, instead of FEARING that it's not going to GET me what I need to survive materially.

I've decided to invest in my poetry to the degree that I'm collaborating with an online marketing agency to help prepare towards the launch of Greater Matter in early October this year. I am breathing fresh air with the risk I'm taking. It feels good and it feels true. Yes, I could lose, yes I could fail, of course. I'm in any case such an old hand at failure that it's no longer scary at all.  But let fears NOT triumph over hopes, and certainly let them NOT stop me from trying my level best to reach towards the self I want and need to be: a self that wishes to give her late husband the biggest, most beautiful gift she possibly can: a book of poems celebrating her own emotional survival as widow; poems witnessing the good he gave me by the power of his love.

Norman's Gold

Norman's Gold

Words

are

cups –

you can't make

truth

with them,

only that

which might hold

gold -

just as

you can't make

wine

out of clay,

but only

goblets

to

drink

from.