Category: ENGLAND

Before each trip in my list of preparations is the need to make a musical playlist. I typically spend a quite a bit of time driving and when not, I am rambling about alone. Music is a prescription I must always have filled. Throughout my life it has meant various things. Only one person truly knows who I am via the music I hear. My precious mother can detect the smallest tectonic shift over the songs I hum or phrases I reference. Most of my music taste came from my mother and her family. What was played at Christmas or birthdays or on those very long drives home from work. Yet somewhere along the way I acquired an affinity for Blues music. I’d be lying if I said when I found it but I can remember a very specific moment when the music felt so real to me that I could almost wonder if I could have written it myself. Billie became the other half of me.

The year is….I don’t even want to think about it so it was a long time ago. My little apartment above the garage on the west side of the house. I was far removed from everyone. “ You deserve your privacy” she said to me as she showed me the biggest bedroom I had ever been in. I had moved up north to care for her children and in some ways I felt, care for her. The truth is that my soul was what was in desperate need of love and care. I had reached a point in my very young life where the mistakes of my past had come to confront me and the hope I had for the future perished. I talk about this often but as a young girl I learned that the truth was freedom from the burden of lying but not freedom from the pain of its current iteration. There was so much truth I desired to bury deep within my belly. The cold patio offered refuge from the little boys that constantly called for me. I miss that. I miss being needed by those little ones, I miss waking them in the morning and reading them stories at night. They are big now and probably don’t even know my name anymore. The irony of that being that it was my name they would call out at night when their nightmares drew too close and the train light no longer enough to illuminate the truth of their safety. Down the long hallway they would run, their little sweaty feet slapping against the wood floors and before long silence as they stood at my door turning the handle quietly before pushing in.

I would unfurl myself and welcome them into my warm nook to get their rest. The oldest would make me pinky promise not to take him back to bed. I could feel him nestle his head into my hands and exhale and soon he would drift back to sleep, leaving me as gargoyle ready to absorb any of those bad dreams. It was here in that same room that grief would overwhelm me and Gloomy Sunday would play on repeat.

As you know…or should, I am on vacation in England; Cornwall to be specific. Having chosen the coastline for this adventure I can Only declare destiny that the wind howls as she does here or how heavens pour down. I have been kept inside from the many adventures I had planned. The first time I was kept in I felt almost a permission slip from God to stay in bed and just rest. When the next day arrived with the same outlook I began to feel this imaginary pressure to go out and explore, that I was being held back. With little choice I settled into the sofa looking out to the water with my book….”A Woman Destroyed”. I literally can’t make this shit up….anyways the book has had very little bearing on me, other than being an interesting glimpse into the future that seems to await every woman. However curled up on the couch with all the doors open and the aggressive sound of the water crashing on the shore below I was brought back to the cold of the house on Angus Lane which also meant the sounds of Billie filling the air.

Pause – Mama I promise I’m ok. I think for the first time I could hear her pain and detach myself from it. To remember my sadness but also remember that it sits in the past. Grief is not unknown and neither is the knowledge that I will live past this moment, this pain and these memories.

Ok back to it. This is aging, or growing up. My memories and their names are never far from me but I no longer believe I will be crushed by my need to have them back beside me and the life we were meant to have. One of the things that started on these travels was the parts of myself I would leave behind. I had framed all my trips in September for that very reason. It became a time when I would “lose” something of myself in each of these countries. It started as an exercise of my grief. I was alone in a country that didn’t know my name and I could openly grieve them both, I could wrap myself in those memories, that anger and yell out to my God for answers and only the sheep and rocks would hear me. I can recall what and where I left each of these pieces of myself. Scattered across the world so that no matter where I ever am they are never far from me. But it’s May and I expected all of me to return and yet…I sit on the floor before the French doors open to the ocean with only the white of this page to illuminate my face and pieces falling off me each time I breath out.

On Saturday I attended virtually a theology class I used to frequent often. I used to have a very close relationship/friendship with the professor and unfortunately one day that was dissolved. Much like the deaths that have trailed me it was abrupt, with no explanation and no salve to ease me. It’s been years and my heart has not forgiven him. I’m not sure what came over me but I followed the link and soon I was face to face with him ( and a few other people in the room lol). I listened intently, my microphone on mute so my tears would not provide any verbal resonance. The content of the lesson while important is for this purpose irrelevant, although in truth in defiance of it I was able to draw closer to God and truly hear what was required of me.

I would need to leave him here. I would need to leave the dreams I had, the desires I carried. They must be deconsecrated from my heart and tossed to the sea like the ashes of those i love that have left me. How will I do that? I cried out to God in desperation. I had only been able to leave pieces of those he already held in his bosom, how now was I suppose to grieve him when his face, voice and name would never be far from me. Then the gift arrived…Billie began to sing and as I sat hearing her words against the crashing of the waves I finally saw it. I saw all the parts of myself I lifted above my head as an offering to this mere mortal man. His clumsy hands dropping the platter as parts of me went flying. He was and is unworthy of me. “For my love is like the wind and wild is the wind.”

I don’t know what weather will greet me when I arise tomorrow but when I reach the top of the Tor whether it is tomorrow or the next day, I know now what will be left on the high peak. The memory, desire, dreams and lust for a man who never saw the diamond before him. Moreover the girl desperate to not lose anything else must also remain behind.

Eirinn Go Bragh. This Was the last thing my papa bear wrote to me as I made my way across the pond to Ireland. That phrase became so real to me as I settled into the countryside and rambled my way through her cliffs and valleys. I would return to the Emerald Isle a few more times over the next years and soon that phrase would change into a state of mind.

I returned to England yesterday. Another country whose lands I continue to reach out to for comfort and understanding. Much like that first trip to Ireland, I landed and quickly embarked upon the very long drive to the other side of the coast. I underestimated the weariness not only of my body but my mind and soon I found myself pulling off the highway and resting my eyes for just a few moments, careful not to allow them to turn to sleep. I continued on this cycle for the next 6 hours, stopping to eat, to rest, to cry.

Then just like that the roads lowered their head in reverence and revealed the mighty ocean and the cliffs below.

I had once again arrived at the edge of the world. I parked my car on the roadside as instructed, convincing my American side that this was the custom, assuaging my own fear of my car being taken. I looked around before I began to follow the directions to my new home.

“Make your way down the path to the Monument”. I knew the path would be a bit difficult, it was noted there was uneven steps and metal rails to assist and yet what I found was a tunnel of trouble. Emerging from this unscathed would take an act of God. I pulled my overnight bag from its resting place on my suitcase, lowered the handle and lifted. I would have to navigate this path with no hands, but even more frightening there would be no room for fear, it is always in the fear that I “lose my balance, graze my knee, graze my heart”. I took my time, leaning when I could, stopping to determine the safest rock to step upon. Just as the fear began to creep down my head to my feet the bushes that had hedged me in subsided and before me was that little cottage made of glass at the Edge of the world waiting to hold me.

I waited as long as I could before I gave way to the closing of my eyes. Slumber would arrive before twilight. The shades around the window barely able to keep out the sun that still shone late into the evenings. It made me wish for more energy and yet it reminded me of the girl who could not sleep until the Sun had risen. I had folded her into my heart and yet here she was demanding to be remembered. Perhaps more desiring for my adult heart to comfort hers. I obliged and curled deep under the covers my arms cradling my head and belly. I would stay this way till my breathing paced and my mind drifted. Soon I was deep under the cover of slumber. I had expected to sleep like that first night in Ireland, so desperate had I been for sleep that soon I had passed the acceptable hours and my hosts worried if they should rile me from the North bedroom. It was 15 hours before my eyes opened. I had never slept that much in my life. How did I feel so safe in an unknown country, in a home that belonged to strangers? I’m not sure the answer has come yet, but in its place has been the understanding that my true rest comes when I am no longer in a place that knows my name. Home is the place where I most guard myself, I think that part is obvious. There are dangers there that don’t exist with the chasm of water between us. Here is where my heart finds its rest, where my soul converts its desires into words and tears that flow like a waterfall.

I think this is why writers and artists tend to be creatures of solitude. Our hearts and minds feel and think deeply and those around us usually shun us or belittle us and our inability to create what they perceive to be healthy relationships and connections. How do we do that when every action brings forth a bandy in which all the spectrum of emotions rest. Nothing is by accident and every word containing a kernel of truth. In some way writers are much like scientists. Testing theories and working to prove something. Locked in a laboratory the only discernible truth is the one made thru a series of discoveries that build on each other, creating a base of understanding. Most of the time this is the part of me that vexes (Bridgerton vibes) people greatly, even if they don’t realize what “it” is. It’s not that I think so little of people or so highly of myself. It is that I have seen how far people will run to not hold their own pain let alone someone else’s.

Ok you know the deal by now….I jump around. When I was younger I developed a reputation for being a good listener. My mother called me “Mumford” ( I’ve discussed this before). My Godmother used to say I was a therapist without a degree. These are things they said about me as a young child. How had I so quickly adapted to listening to others, empathizing and offering comfort and at times guidance. When you are very young and are taught or told to keep secrets, you realize how devastated people must be in the world if they are all doing the same. I became willing to be a safe place for people because I didn’t have to imagine their desperation, I was living it. As I aged the weight of all these truths began to show, I became incredibly despondent and reckless. I had lost respect for the concept of family and friendship. I had found that they all betrayed and the safest place was within.

I’m not quite sure when I emerged from this unpaid position, I think some would say I merely went part time. Ireland was the first time I let nature be my Mumford. I cried out on roads, in tunnels, on cliffs and of course in pubs. A lifetime of emotions sprang forth from me in the safest place in the world. In the years that followed I would continue to travel annually my “big trips” as they were often referred too.

Three years ago I took a trip to France that resembled my first one. I rented a car and drove as many hundreds of miles of the French countryside that I could. Sightseeing by day and introspecting by night. At the start of the journey I had acquired a partner in crime, although he was not physically by my side I carried him with me, every night his voice was the last I would hear. I never took so many pictures of myself on a trip. There was a bliss, a certainty, a light in my eyes that I had not seen for such a long time. Words flowed but they were filled with love and hope. Wow that word was hard to write. I have lived so long without it. It’s not true by the way what they say that you can’t live without hope. You can be alive without it but thriving is out of the question, you simply exist passing thru the world and waiting for its end. See this is what I mean – some of you will read this and think “how dramatic”, but the truth is that perception truly is reality. The experiences that had made me a great listener had also made me a recluse of heart, mind and body. It was in France that I thought I had found a safe place in someone else but soon it would turn danger as so many others had before.

I was going to return to France this year as a do over. To try to make memories that weren’t colored by his name and his voice and all the things we had promised. But I could not return just yet, I needed more tears to fall before my eyes would clear and I could see the world without the blurring and pressing of Kleenex against my cheek. England would have to do.

I write this from the floor of the living room. The French doors before me opened wide while the rain stays just beyond the roof line. The wind is cold and the haze that hovers above the ocean causes its division with the sky to be indistinguishable. When

I began the sun was still shining and the tide had almost returned to its position tight against the cliff face, now the only light is from my screen, the water falling all around me. I am tired again. My mothers voice the last decibels ringing in my ears, gravity pulling me deeper onto the floorboards and the wine has finally made its way to my nervous system. Sleep beckons and I must oblige.

I leave this here – something I heard long ago that might finally be making sense. “Weigh the balance of the closeness you could form against your own vulnerability”.

Meli Go Bragh

I’ve taken to bed.

Being a world traveler hahaha, I’ll admit I take pride in saying that. I have found how varied the concept of vacations is to people. From my own travel companions to the friends I have met along the way. I have been fortunate that I have had such diverse experiences.

I arrived in England yesterday. A trip I had always planned to share with my mother who like me has an affinity for the countryside and the quiet noise it offers. Travel days usually have nothing of note, unless some small catastrophe happens and my patience is tested. Luckily we moved thru ours without incident. I remember the day vividly, having only been yesterday and yet there was a blur around it, much like the Portrait mode i love to take photos in.

I slipped between the cold white sheets with the curtains drawn and the last of the sunlight rounding its edges. My eyes could wait no more, peace had arrived and sleep was the only response. I left the window open in the hopes the cool night air would undo the warmth of the evening sun. Seems like such a wrong sentence and yet here the days are long and often times their sun lasts deep into the evening.

I awoke to the call of the birds, reminding me of my safety and pulling me from it’s slumber. Yet I could not find a way to have my feet touch the ground. So I have taken to bed. I have no desire to emerge from this well lit cave. I can feel the calm returning and I want even if for just a week to feel it live within my fingertips. I opened the curtains and allowed the gardens in and my emotions out. What will follow in these days is an eruption of work, love, restlessness and most importantly and hopefully a reflection of the change I pray continues to occur within my very soul.