A walking gilt trip and the woes of the journey packed into the old kit bag that bends your back and weighs down your shoulders.
Take care lest you stumble, for if you stumble you will surely fall, and every fall is a precipice that will never allow you to get back up again.
Where is the stranger, the faceless one, the as-yet-unknown one who will care just because he cares and will help you stand up once more on your own two feet?
Take root where you stand. Plant your feet solidly into the ground. The winds of change will blow, but they will not topple you.
Raise your eyes to the sunrise. Strive upwards, ever upwards, turn towards the light, that fragile lightness of everlasting light.
So soft, so subtle, this moment, when land and sea reach out and touch each other, sea hand offered for the land to raise up and kiss.
The Equinox draws near. This is the moment when sun and moon, day and night are equal. It is the moment when the world seems to stop, then moves again in another direction, from winter’s darkness into daylight and the spring’s delight.
And still I live in hopes to see the land of my birth once more, the land of my fathers where my father and mother met, the land where I first saw daylight, felt the land reach out to the sea, felt the joy of the sun-licked sea kiss, saw daffodils dance on the shore, and swans swimming on the sea.
“And still I live in hopes to see… Swansea Town once more.”
In the half-light, on my evening walk, the first pale-green spears of spring stuck out their tongues from the lips of leaf mold and dark earth to mock me.
“Back home,” they said, “the daffodils are in full bloom. In Ireland the shamrock refuses to surrender. It will not be trampled underfoot.”
“But this is my home,” I replied. “Believe: and spring will come,” the earth cried out. “La paciencia todo lo alcanza – patience achieves everything.”
The darkness deepened. Night came on. But the sun still shone within my heart, and filled me with hope.
It’s so easy to cast the tiniest pebble into the tranquil pond.
Sit and watch the ripples spreading, flowing outwards, touching unknown shores with a smidgen of warmth, a lapping of love.
Reaching out, from the center to the periphery, not knowing where the outreach is going, but knowing that the effort is never in vain if it helps someone’s suffering, reduces their loneliness, brings light to their lives, and relieves their pain.
Bread cast upon the waters, returned in great store, three, five, seven, ten times more than what you cast.
Your spider-web lines thrown inwards and outwards in a gesture of faith, hope, and a charity chest of tenderness to lighten a burden, to remove the dark from another’s heart.
It’s so easy to select a pebble, but who will throw that first stone?
Surrounded by beauty, a magical paradise trapped for a moment in a sunlit mirror, the past laid out before me, the thought, word, deed of a painted reality, of painted realities really, visions leaving the mind only to be caught in line, color, shape, and paint, and frozen in time, each one date-stamped, and placed here, there, everywhere on wall after wall, until I am surrounded, breathless, within this circular vista of visions filled with inherent beauty.
Striving onwards to the light I don’t need a ladder nor an Aladdin’s Lamp to transport me upwards, not to stardom but to the sun and stars that wait, day and night, outside my window.
Prince of Mirth, soon to be Lord of Light, I will wear my hibiscus crown for a short time, but with joy and pleasure, a treasure I will treasure until the natural end when stars, sun, and crown come tumbling down, leaving me alone, naked, yet clothed in, and surrounded by, light.
On days like these, the center must hold, but not just hold, it must writhe and strive to live longer, be stronger, to hold together so that the periphery understands that it too is at the center of an extended web of life that contains us all, you and me, past and future generations, in a great chain of being alive and knowing that yes, we are here, we are, at heart, really only one, and totally unique, is spite of the sameness that sometimes surrounds us as time’s spider-web unravels, oh so fast, so slow, and yet still we are here, and still the center holds.
On a sunny morning, the sun lights up my bedroom wall. Each day he arrives earlier and earlier, a minute a day. Now days grow longer, a sure sign that spring is on its way.
As I lie awake, waiting for the sun, I sing my morning sunshine song. It keeps me warm and comforts me. I also count the birds that fly across the garden in search of sunshine and food.
Crows come first. They perch atop the highest trees and watch and wait. Mourning Doves come next and their dawn song is a mourning chorus, “Who-who-who’s next? called from branch to branch. With the sun come Chickadees, Pine Siskins, lazy Blue Jays, Juncos. These are all regulars.
Irregular are my neighbor’s Cardinals, orange and red, American Goldfinches, two small woodpeckers, a Downie and a Hairy, a Nuthatch.
Gone now are the Gray Jays, Gorbies, Whisky Jacks, those ghosts of the woods. Lost too are the Greater Pileated, the flocks of Grosbeaks, Evening, Pine, and Rose-Breasted.
They may come back, but somehow, I doubt it. For now, the Blueness of Jays, the Blackness of Crows, and an unsubtle dawn chorus of Caw-Caw-Caw-Caw-Caw.
Some days the clouds roll in. Your world turns from gray into fifty shades of black.
These are the days when the sun seems as lost as you. But the sun isn’t lost. It hides behind clouds, maybe, but it’s there.
That’s where the sun storm comes in. Clouds have silver linings and the sun, once seen, will never, ever be forgotten.
Hold its image in your mind. Breathe in the sunshine. Let it flood through your body and shine out through your heart.
Now, you will never be alone, and the sun will walk with you, all your days, and be remembered even in the darkest night when paths disappear and all seems lost.
And this has been a dialog with my time and my place. But what is time? A river flowing? A long line leading from my beginning to my end? Alpha and Omega? An instant held between finger and thumb and so swiftly forgotten? A dream I dream when I am awake or asleep? And which is my real dream, waking or sleeping, sleeping or lying awake?
And what is my place? This house in which I now live? The garden I watch from my kitchen window? My town? This forested area where I think I belong? My county? My province? My region? And how do I relate to my “time” or my “place” to this being called “Roger”, this dream-Roger who dreams this post-amniotic ocean of life in which he now drifts? I dream I am male yet when I read Carl Jung I learn that a large part of me is female. I always thought I was masculine / macho / male, yet when a large part of me is feminine / hembra / female, I am no longer sure what I am. And how much does it matter?
I have ten fingers yet I use only two to type. Two fingers manipulate twenty-six letters, selecting some, rejecting others, making careless mistakes, organizing and reorganizing, shuffling all those verbal cards. I turn this black-and-white keyboard world upside down when I think my subversive thoughts and type them onto the computer screen and then print them out on what starts as a snow-white page that slowly fills with ant-size letters. Time and place, male and female: I lay on my side in hospital and the young urologist shot me full of female hormones so my prostrate cancer would not take over my inner organs and destroy my life. Place and time: I lie awake at night and shape disturbing dreams, dreams I have never before dreamed of dreaming.
Some nights I sense the end is drawing near. I fear it. In my beginning is my end. Beginning and end: both belong to me as do time and space, so central to the story of my life. For life will continue with or without me even if I am not there to bear witness. But I have been here, and parts of my story will remain embedded in the mind of each and every one of those who knew me and heard me speak.
Beethoven took the Fifth and rewrote it in his own image. I want to rewrite my life. I want my youth to return. I want to be young and athletic and lithe … I do not want to be this old man with a stick who bends double when he walks and sticks a blue sticker in the windscreen of his car.
I want to refuse to open the door when the postman knocks to deliver my mail. I know that soon he will bring me that registered letter, for which I must sign, with that last fatal message, the subpoena from which there is no appeal. I guess that like the snow and the wild geese, he’ll be back tomorrow, or the next day, in spite of those voices telling me that tomorrow never comes. And so, on an unusually Odd Sunday in a bar they once called Corked, or at another table in another wine bar with a different name, raise a glass to me when I am gone and leave an empty glass on the table for me. If you do, I promise I’ll be there.
Comments: This, as promised, is the final chapter from On Being Welsh. Chronotopos is Bakhtin’s theory that all our writing is a dialog with our time (chronos) and our place (topos). “Know me, know my time and place.” When we discover and explore our time and place we begin to understand ourselves and our roles in life. Then we can start rethinking who and what we are, what we have been, what we want to be, what we need to do in order to change. But first, we must know ourselves, for without self-knowledge, we are ships adrift, floating rudderless on a rising sea, or driven by the forceful wind of others into places where we may not wish to go. My friends, I raise a glass to you, filled, alas, with orange juice, because it is breakfast time, here in Island View, on the first Sunday, damp and cold and wet of 2022.
rogermoorepoet 