19 -11-2011


MK: Sometimes a confluence of events and memories conspire to jerk you back to reality, they release you and provide reflection; from friends and IED’s to candyfloss skies and places of healing, the letters I wrote in September 2009, and some other things besides. The sum of these things form a pivot, and one single breath can tip the balance in a new direction, probably forever.

‘And the rest was 24 hours of waiting and chatting, monitoring and reflection. I lay on my bed, sat on my bed, all night long, thanked the stars and watched the sun rise on a brand new dawn, a brand new day. The most perfect pink ‘candyfloss’ sunrise; all around me restful bodies traversed their own nights, all slept well, except for me. I loved every minute of it. Whilst they peed in a bottle, I proudly got up, unplugged my machine and walked to the toilet, an unsteady lumbering parade, but it was my parade, and it only rained when I chose. I have never felt so alone but so alive. An intrepid metaphor for my new life, an independent stumble to a new world, my new world.’
September 2009

In the time that has passed since I wrote those words, not one bit of my life remains the same. It’s confusing to contemplate that what seemed so important then, so worth fighting for, can so soon become to mean nothing, can simply not exist anymore. People talk of things lasting a life time, they talk of ‘always’ but I am not sure that things can be always, nothing has fully traversed this time and space but for the single piece of metal in my heart, and my desire to continue on my path – an un-swervable belief and faith as I cross unsteady bridges between mountains!

So we must learn to park the past, its volume will consume us, we lose that lightness of being that allows us to breathe and live once more. But how do we let go and yet maintain its specificity somehow for the future? If I think of my fathers passing how do I lose the pain, suspend the past and yet keep his spirit as companion for the future, how do I do that? This journey of laughter and forgetting, oh my, this journey of letting go. I have learned that I wish to keep things for the future that shackle me now to the past, and to my present, things that are not a part of now, but might somehow oxygenate and suffuse my tomorrow. I hope that in letting this volume go, this manifest dimensionality, that my force alone will summon back its essence if I need it again in the years ahead. That unbearable lightness of being!

Picture of the week: Life is the question, but what is the answer?