SNU2. The reason i might have lost the thread is because i am writing up a bit of time in which there was a lot going on and i was mentally and physically exhausted and felt overwhelmed,  vulnerable, strung out and cranky. There were a lot of different tasks and deadlines going on simultaneously. Submissions for proposals for 3 exhibitions each with a different deadline and brief. And the deadline for the Creative Odyssey postcard auction. The UEA/NUA collaborative project presentation deadline. The deadline for making work to be invested for the next bronze pour. The MA symposium taking a day out from workshop time. Applying to help with a printmaking workshop for The Pilgrimage of the Animals event organised by XR and St Peter Mancroft with local print maker Maria Pavledis. Meeting with Maria to discuss the workshop and what she needed me to do as her helper. There was also an artists meeting for the sculpture trail. And through that a further meeting with another artist who gave me a link to a residency which in fact i did not apply for because covid19 made travel plans a little unpredictable. 
And i was feeling hemmed in because when i meltdown i need to retreat but all that was happening was asking me to push out. And i was dealing with Jon grief and unresolved child's grief for my grandpa and wanting to get in touch with my father to ask when my grandpa died but not being able to because my oldest sister was in the country and when she is in the country my family prefer me to stay out of the way and not make contact which added to the grief i was feeling about Jon because when i met him he'd been my home, my happy, my soft space, away from my difficult family. 
There's a book called "Talking of Love on the Edge of a Precipice" which i read some years back that spoke of resilience being born out of feeling loved. I wonder if that is why i hold the love affair i had with Jon so close to me. I felt loved in his arms, and his love gave me the courage to believe in myself, believe i was ok, not rotten, ugly, useless, horrible, but what i wanted to be, someone worthy of love. My anger towards his family stems in part from the way they refused to acknowledge our love affair as anything of worth when it was of huge worth to me, and maybe of worth to him too. 
One of the things that was also bugging me was the issue of some letters of mine that he'd apparently kept which his ex-wife had told me about about two years before. I'd assumed they were a couple of postcards and maybe a birthday card that i'd sent him after our break up when we were close but not lovers. Cards he'd stuck on his fridge maybe. After a session about copyright law in the symposium i was thinking about how i wanted my words to Jon even if they were likely to be disappointingly flat to be in my hands and not the seemingly hostile hands of his ex-wife. A part of me thought "let it go, it doesn't matter" but another voice kept saying "you need those letters". In the end the "you need those letters" won over and i sent an email to nudge the ex-wife into sending them not really daring to hope she still had them, but chancing my arm anyway. Our email exchange was a bloody fight but she sent the letters to me.
What i hadn't expected was a package nearly a kilo in weight containing, it seems, all the letters and cards i sent him when we were together and a couple of notebooks; a holiday diary we'd made together, and one with poems and pictures and things that belonged to us and my thoughts collected together for him at the beginning of our affair. The stuff was so personal it seemed mad that she'd kept it for so long. It was devastating to receive. But also amazing. It made me feel not-crazy for loving him and believing he loved me too because surely he'd not have kept all that stuff and taken it with him if he didn't care. It made me want to swear because damn fool i loved him and would have followed him to the ends of the earth if he'd asked. It made me feel better about making work about him. Not silly but honest. 
This post is an explanation, i guess, of the emotional landscape in which the SNU work was growing. I think that everything the maker-creator is thinking and feeling when they are making-creating becomes part of whatever is made/created so giving this much space to my heart-work feels appropriate if somewhat exposing.  
  

SNU. Having got into the studios my first push to work was taking photos i hoped to work with, and putting them into photoshop so i could play with them to greyscale them and accentuate the blacks and whites to make them better for making acetates for putting onto copper plates coated with a photochromic ink and also for putting onto screens for screen printing. 
I had a picture of Jon which i chose because it was the whole of him. Using photographs to make my etching plates allowed me to look with new eyes at my photographs, to view a picture as someone unconnected to the story and to see what drew my attention, held my gaze, was distracting, amusing, frustrating, divine, it gave me information about composition, what makes a picture work, what makes it worth a second look. This was/is valuable information, it is what i call hidden learning. 
I have mentioned in previous blogs how working with pictures of myself made me see my image as an object, this happened too with my Jon pictures. It made me sad and unsure, i wondered if i was being exploitative even though the intention behind working with his picture and my feelings about him was to give him place in my life, a belonging that felt important, was it alright to do that ? And it was strange having his photograph in the studios at university. It may sound weird but giving him presence there was both comforting and uncomfortable simultaneously, it is funny how opposing feelings exist as companions. The need to hold on and let go acting against each other. These contradictory feelings fed into my ASU2 project, the cross that Jesus bore being perhaps a metaphor for the swaying balance which is consciousness calling to us to constantly reweigh, reassess, rejig our values, notions, ideas and systemic patterns so as to keep them alive rather than dead weight, habitual. 
The picture of Jon that i used is one from our last holiday together. We have stopped in our walk and are taking a break, gazing over a view of fields, the sun is shining, a tractor in the distance is stacking bales of straw in a field of golden stubble. You can't see that in the picture. You can't see the rest of the walk either, can't hear the buzzards call, or the feel the fear when the farm dogs attacked us, or the relief of the trees in the woodland behind where we are taking pause. You can't know the conversations we had that holiday or any of the other details because you weren't there. All you see is a man, smiling, looking to the side, he has a roll up in one hand, the other hand holds his wrist, the time is a quarter to noon, he is stripped to his waist which means his tattoos on his upper arms are part visible. You don't know how it feels to be me to see those tattoos that were part of his skin, part of my waking with him for the time we were lovers. You don't know anything apart from what you see and what you project on to the image and so it is with all images. Is the power of an image its ability to draw the viewer, to give the viewer what they want to see, to allow a viewer to project their being on the picture ?
The other picture was chosen because of its weirdness, the statues, the chair, the wall, the house behind and the dogwood stems behind the wall. I chose it because it had meaning for me but also because its oddness conveyed the oddness of that day which being a return to soul place within a time in which i was so deep in grief i was more dead than alive. I may speak more about this in reference to an object made in a blog further along the line. For now perhaps i say that i chose to make this image one of my first plates and that i was planning to also make plates or perhaps screen prints from photographs of the statues but lockdown stopped that from happening. 
Also in this week i was looking at photographs i had taken of seagulls and planning to use them to make screens for screen prints. They were taken when my daughter and I visited the beach at Bray, nr Dublin, my daughter was feeding them chips and i was taking photographs. It was the weekend before my birthday in 2017. I returned to an email telling me that Jon had died. 

Ok ... keep going. Its been a week of grief and tears but like walking in the rain its no good stopping. The pain of losing someone you love doesn't seem to get easier. Sorrow this week has manifested as a great dark weight in the centre of my chest that hurts with an insistence that cannot be denied. One step in front of another. I can hear voices saying stop making a fuss, what a fuss, silly fuss, stupid woman, let go. But also kinder voices including Jon's. I think it was him nagging me to ask for the letters. He knew what they were of course, that it was important that they came back to me. That sounds a bit mad but the dead do seem to hang about. I used to sometimes appeal to my granny for counsel, my mother's mother, who was fierce and not to be crossed but fair. And i feel my great aunt Leska as a benign presence in the background. I have one of her rosaries, red plastic beads and a metal cross made of some cheap light metal. I also have a little painting of a nun that came to me after she died. They are not things of value to anyone but me. Its how it is with things that belong to people who take up heart space. The pecuniary worth is of less matter than the moment or person that an object represents. Objects carry secrets. A thing picked up by two on a walk may be of no consequence to anyone else but could well be a port-key to another time and place for either of those two. It is how the letters i received have been this week. I haven't looked at them all but some of them take me back to his living room seeing them on the mantelpiece below which stood the two chinese figures that had come from his parents' house when his mother died. Some i can remember being attached to his fridge with magnets along with other things. Of course it means i've been occupying his house in my mind. Remembering the feel of how it was when we were together there. The stairs, the porch, the living room and kitchen, the bedrooms and bathroom and the views from all the windows and his beautiful garden, the smell of fennel on my hands, bees on the flowers and dragon flies and tadpoles, gold finches on teasels, the plants we bought together.
Enough. Enough already. Nostalgia is an addictive drug. Its a trip. It is but it isn't. I can return to a place, feel what i felt there, but it is out of body material. One of the things that Jon's death made me very aware of is that that which physically touches me has a worth that is different to that which is distant, historical or geographical. I can go back to my grandparents houses or my childhood home or any number of other places in my mind and they are real places but it is not real in the way that my body returning is real. My grandparents house was knocked down and rebuilt when they died. And Jon's house is just a 1980's end terrace housing estate house now. The place it was when it was his house and my home from home is in me. I wonder if the walls remember me and him but houses have so many occupants, our ghosts may be there, but they are also here and elsewhere. It's strange how even the living have ghosts. 
And ghosts reside within our bodies too. Ghosts of our past selves and those whose lives have touched us for better or worse. The mediocre tend to not be remembered so well only the very good and very bad. This blog is surely not reflective journal writing but it will be handed in with all the others when hand in comes. Because my work is always born out of felt experience. It is where it stems from. 
This week past we were asked to make a Pecha Kucha presentation, 20 slides 20 seconds talk per slide. I can't say i was looking forward to it, but i could see the point. I was less prepared than i would have liked but time just skids past and so it felt like an achievement just turning up and having a crack at it. And tho' i was dreading it, good things about being asked to do it, were seeing other people's presentations and being inspired, going back over the term's work and realising how much i had done and putting it together as a story, and being given feedback. My class mates seemed to like it more than my tutor who wanted more information about my process. 20 seconds isn't really long enough to explain the difference between a two part mould and a three part mould or why i needed to make both or any of the other things i learned from making those moulds and filling them with wax and setting the cast objects on cups with sprue and risers and if i'd gone into detail about that i'd have had to miss out other stuff so i went with my heart and made the story the process that i spoke about. 
I am not sure if it was this week or last week that we had a lecture in which it was suggested we go back to our manifestos and remember why we started out MA. It's good sometimes to go back to why. I've been disaffected this term. I did have a hiccup a month or so back but the disaffection has hung about for too long. I need to remember how lucky i am to be studying what a gift it is that i'm giving myself. I am too uptight at the moment, irritable and not nice to be with. It could be my projects' subject matter both of which have been problematic. I am currently being nailed to the cross for my ASU 2 Stations of the Cross project which clearly is not great. And having spent the past couple of weeks focusing on my teenage self i seem to have picked up some of her post punk "fuck you" attitude. Not very helpful when trying to conform to learning outcomes. It could also be a desperate need to play make, to make for pure pleasure and it may be that i have to let go a little of trying and just let what needs to come come. It's been inspiring to be in the print workshops with the first year BA students working on etching plates. Being with so many people working on one project producing such different work reminds me that there are many ways to get to a place, be that place a finished etching plate, the top of a mountain or the end of a long rainy walk with a heavy pack or heavy heart. 

Why do people do what they do ? What is it that makes an artist pick up a pen and begin to draft an idea ? What is it that makes any man or woman do what they do, do what they do when they do, do what they do as they do it ? I am looking at motive. If living is an art, and i think it is, then we are all artists. 
I have had a couple of weeks at university i would rather not had happened. I was struggling to assimilate conversations i'd had earlier this month with my GP and the surgeon who would perform the operation they advise. I was feeling drained, my body was giving me issues, run down and exhausted i asked my tutor if i could be excused from a taught session that week because i did not feel strong enough to hold my fledgling ideas intact if i gave them to a group of other students i hardly know. I also felt too debilitated to engage with their ideas without damaging my wellbeing. I have been told since i should have emailed admin to say i was unwell and therefore unable to attend but i didn't i spoke face to face because it felt more honest and respectful and adult to explain why i felt unable to attend. I thought as a fellow artist he would understand. I was wrong. He did not understand. It has been implied that he thought i was being high and mighty and picking and choosing what i wanted to do. Anyone who knows me well will know that i have chronic & destructive low self-esteem and an inner critic that loves to take me down. I think because i smile it makes people think i am more confident than i am. Should i smile less ? 
As a result of trying to explain myself I received what felt like an aggressive email from the person above my tutor to whom i am given understand he had complained. The email seemed to accuse me of poor attendance and not engaging with other students. It felt like slap in the face, a denial of my need to self-care at that moment. I was hurt and bewildered. I asked others if they had received emails when they missed class. It seems i am the only one. It felt wrong and has made feel wary of certain people and my trust in the university is no longer as it was. I do not know how I will move forward. I hope i will re-find my flow. I feel less open and less free.
Trust is a gift given. If trust is given, be careful with that trust. Trust is like a rope. If trust is broken the cuntline within the rope is irretrievably divided and the feeling will never be the same. Trust comes into all our relationships. If we cease to trust our sense of safety is compromised. It is hard to regain trust. It is hard to trust again someone or a body that has broken trust. It is political.
How can errors be made good ? It has to be ok to fail. But what lies behind a fail is important. The intention behind an action or word makes all the difference. In shiatsu, as i have come to understand, it is the triple heater meridian that paired with the heart protector regulates and holds us to appropriate social boundaries.  I have been studying and practising shiatsu for over twenty years now. Intention is key element to my practise. How do i come into another's sphere what is my intention when i address another. My intention when i spoke to my tutor was to let him know that my absence was born out of my needs and was not a rejection of his teaching or the other students. I am sad i was misunderstood. I think it may be better not to speak if i can stop my mouth.
As an artist ... ugh, what is an artist ? As an artist, i want to give presence to ideas that i can't express in words, to make thought tangible, that i guess is my intention. Other artists will have other driving forces. Maybe one of the good things that has come out of a bad week is that it has forced me hard up against why i am doing my MA because when i considered leaving i had to think about what i would be leaving. What i would be leaving is the chance to explore further with people who i like and respect ways and means of doing the above, making thought tangible, giving ideas presence. And there now i feel like i've blogged the best of me and want the world to go away, not look, not see. 
I came to my MA with a desire to learn about printmaking, specifically etching, drypoint, mono print, collagraph and screen printmaking. Last term i occupied space in the print studios and this term i have too. I have been working with photographs exploring what makes an image worth a second glance or a longer look, how images connect, how to tell a story using my own story, and also how to print, how to print CMYK, seeing how coloured layers change a picture, how to print the same image unaltered, what is the difference. What is it that draws the viewer in. I love sampling it is a serious part of my creative practice. I sample and compare and by sampling and comparing i learn how i need to make what i need to make.
Currently i am making plates of an image of myself as a nineteen year old. It is a strange thing to look at oneself, to look at oneself over and over again. It feels peculiar and narcissistic at first and then the self becomes an object, a thing that could be a teapot or a flower or somebody else. A few weeks ago i screen printed a picture of my five year old self. I think it would have been around about the time my grandpa died and i need to look into that because this week while all the horrible-ness has been going on, as well as finding myself in the thick of Jon-grief, i also discovered i have a child's grief. 
My grandpa was the only adult i remember as playful from my childhood. He would swing us under his legs. When he got ill i remember being told off for showing him a book i'd been given and was proud of. It was a big book, he was in hospital and i lumped it onto his chest as a child would and was told off and he said no it was alright. He was dying but i didn't know it. Even dying he was kind. I remember the phone call we received when he died, "grandpa is dead" i was told. I was in my bedroom with red curtains reading "The Cow Who Fell into the Canal". And i remember going to see him at the morgue and thinking if i cried on him he might come back to life but of course i wasn't allowed close enough to cry on him and it wouldn't have worked even if i had would it. And now i remember his absence. Absence i think is a huge part of grief.
Photographs trigger memories. My nineteen year old self has flicked switches on the lack of self worth i had then. I have put in a proposal for one of the Curation MA students exhibitions, the brief is Self Love and my working with this image, whether she accepts my proposal or not, is an act of love back passed to the girl-woman i was then. I have over time learned to love myself a little more, i cannot change my past and my innate lack of self confidence is a demon i think i will always struggle with but i can give my self of then kindness and understanding i couldn't give myself then. 
For me understanding is the bedrock of my practice. Understanding on lots of levels. My SNU project is a lot about sampling, i am exploring the emotionality behind the images but also those images are giving me the opportunity to learn about the materials i am using and this for me is how i build my practice. If i know my materials i am better able to use them. I often say that thought is my medium it is true even if it sounds a bit pose-y, but university gives me the chance to explore the physical process under the guidance of experts. NUA has some fantastic technicians.
So what else have i been up to this week. Well last term i and others met with some Business school students from the UEA and we were given a brief and asked to give a presentation based on that brief which we delivered last Friday. That has taken up the best part of three days this week. Although we are in the same city our campuses are about an hour apart and collaboration has not been easy as we are all studying at MA/MSc level and have ongoing commitments to our courses. Still my group managed three further meet ups, a brainstorming session, a brainstorming for the presentation session, and then a presentation run-through, before presenting last friday. 
I learned from this presentation, i was a relatively silent party but I nudged to get things going when there was silence from the other side. My four partners were hard working and committed and we all made all the meetings and we all had a voice in brainstorming sessions. They made the questionnaire and slides but i gave ideas and i think created emotional connection to the subject matter. I was impressed by how cool they were and unafraid. I suppose if you have travelled from far away to study for a year in a strange country you have to be a bit plucky and able to handle yourself. I learned from their courage and self confidence as well as their skills and it was good to be in company with their self assurance. It was hard to speak in front of people especially as i was having a difficult week but i did speak albeit for just a few minutes. 
Also I finished making and made some new silicon moulds of things. I am learning and brushing up on mould making in case i should need to know how to do this for my masters project and also with a view to making things for my ASU 2 and SNU tho time is always a factor. Everything takes longer than i think it will which adds to the stress as the weeks and days tick down towards deadlines and finally leaving. 
And i had a meeting with Maria Paveledis who is a printmaker who works in Norwich. I have seen her work in exhibition and like it a lot. She asked on facebook if anyone was free to help her with running a print workshop for the XR pilgrimage of the animals this Easter and i said i would love to and so i am, it feels like a privilege.
Maybe on that note i have to give myself credit for holding it together through a rough week enough to make four extra-curricular meetings (3 x St Martin's Project & Maria), to have made six new copper plates almost finished and prepared one more to also finish next monday, I have made some new moulds and a two part mould and have begun exploring how epoxy resin behaves in a mould. And I have made new marks on my drypoint and hard ground test plates which has also led me thinking more about Judas' kiss. And yesterday i went to Holt Church to see the representations they have there of the Stations of the Cross. And by chance met and spoke to a retired Cannon about the Stations which was very interesting and he gave me the name of an artist to look up. Life goes on. Life always go on. 
My SNU began with grief as its seed and a need to look back and look forward. All the time this balance is something that i feel. Perhaps this is my cross. Maybe this is how i carry forward my ASU 2 work. And there again i say more than i want to about my creative process. Reveal too much. let myself fall and be vulnerable. But how can i make work if the work i am making asks that i be that and i refuse. It can't be done. If i must feel the scourge of whips, of nails in my hands and feet then so it has to be. But i must remember that imperfection is ok, for me and for others. And if i fall its ok too.  

Well there now, the new term has started. I got my grades for last term's modules on Tuesday evening, they feel fair to generous and put me in a mid bracket. The need was only to pass and i was worried that i wasn't good enough to have passed and so a pass feels nice, but then there's disappointment in myself that i do better, no question in me about my grades, they were as good as i deserved, but can i be better ? is this where i rest ? or is there another ounce or so that i can give ?
On Thursday we had tutorials with our main subject teachers and they were helpful and positive. I will continue to explore printmaking and trying to make "pictures" out of stories. In one of my last term's tutorials my teacher questioned me wanting to back off from my own story. I wanted then to see if i could make work that was not related to me, to take more universal themes and give them my mark but it seems that the way i give them my mark is to take them inside of myself and then re-release them as i have found them within me. 
I failed to get to grips with the RIPU project until almost too late. Thankfully just in time i broke in, breaking in has shown me new ways to enquire but i was not quite forward enough to really make the most of this module. It has made me aware that i need to dig deeper, to read other people's thoughts and go further with my own. 
Last term i gave myself a hard task, i set out to explore a story i was only slightly familiar with, from a culture that was not mine, and which i had only indirect experience and no real physical reference points. I think i took on too much. Maybe i needed to take on too much. But it meant that i was unable to go as deeply into the story as i would have liked and that researching the story distracted me from other research and meant that the MA modules barely linked. 
This term i'm exploring for my ASU 2 unit the stations of the cross, christ's journey to his crucifixion. Not a cheery subject but it calls to me so i'm going with it. I begin with an easier in because christianity and the Church of England church are part of my formative years. I have no religion now, i am perhaps polytheistic, interested in religion but not committed to one, i err most towards nature as my source, but a light christianity forms the bedrock of my being. And the bible as a storybook is no worse than any other book of stories as an aid to understanding. 
I am not sure how i will move with the Stations. At the moment i am looking at artists, poets and film makers for inspiration, taking in the journey, the passage, that Jesus took to his death on different levels, considering his life as it is given to us by the saints who wrote the gospels, thinking about those who according to those gospels shared his life and death. Wondering about telling the stations not from his perspective but from those whose lives he touched. I trust my creative process to take me where i need to go. 
That leads me to my SNU project which is coming from my own story, my memories, my being. I was drawn to do this because i found some old photos of Jon on a memory stick over the christmas holidays. It made me realise that i needed to allow myself to bear witness to the life i had with him, in part because there is no one for me to share witness with him, our life together was mostly just him and i. I have buckets of memories but no-one to turn to and say "do you remember ?" and cannot bring him back to life in that way. I cannot bring him back to life physically but this is how we bring our dead back to life when we have need of them. 
When Jon died my counsellor said glibly that my grief would be a complicated grief. She spoke truly. My relationship with Jon was both light and dark and to deny either would diminish the whole. So i have to take in the good with the bad, and the bad with the good, they are front and back, left, right, night, day, up, down, a pairing. Finding balance between the pair creates a tension that i must meet or else lose the truth.  
My feeling is that my SNU project and my ASU 2 project will have meeting places but it will only be by travelling their paths that i will find them. Already i have widened the scope of the SNU to a broader theme that is memory and remembering tho i think this theme will dilate and contract as the pupil of an eye dilates and contracts, to meet circumstance, both past and ongoing. Widening the scope changes the theme but maybe that is actually the need i am meeting. Placing my relationship with Jon within the context of my whole life. Giving him, giving us, our being together, the space, the worth, that he, that we, that i, that he and i together, that i think we merit. His family have been absolute in their condescension, i am sure i am written out or cast as worthless or worse within their narrative. I guess that hurts. No, i don't guess, i know. It hurts. Maybe this project is also part of healing that hurt.  
I linger too long on a delicate subject. Of course being blanked, excluded or cut is painful. It may be that it is in felt experience that my SNU and ASU meet. Feelings run clean through time. Feelings may be the path that connects one story to another. 

Back to my blog after an absence and thinking to again change the way i use it. I began it way back in 2012 when i was in the second year of my BA. I used it to catalogue and document my creative process back then as suggested by the tutor in a class session about blogging. He also recommended that we limit our blogs to our creative practice and not post personal stories and i pretty much kept to that for the duration of my degree but how do you keep creative practice and personal separate ? i think for those with a mathematical mind this is easier than it is for those who are more sense & felt experience responsive. 

Regular readers of my blog will know that in 2017 when faced with the death of someone i loved i used my blog to scream my grief, my pain, into the ether. I needed to give voice to my feelings and my blog was a safe space for me to open up and give voice, all the boundaries that others were giving me could be abandoned and i could express at least some of my need to speak, to tell my story. It belonged to me. My blog belonged to me. My story belonged to me. i abandoned the notion of right and wrong feelings which i think helps with grief and let myself be who i needed to be in that time. Now my grief has softened, it's still there but now i am more at peace with my broken heart and i don't need to talk about it so much.

Before 2017 i had used my blog to explain the process behind work that i was making for exhibition or sometimes to just muse upon life. Often story telling the journey i took with the seed of an idea to it's flowering as a piece of work in exhibition or not, sometimes just watching it grow.

 I wonder if this is something that others have found when blogging that their blogs evolve to suit their needs in much the same way a home evolves to suit the needs of those who live in it. 

Once upon a time my home was full of children, now my children are all grown up and as my youngest said a few years back on a brief visit it is now pretty much all art studio. He's right. Before my children were my life, now my work as an artist, be it good, bad or indifferent, is my life. The river keeps on rolling. 

Now it seems that i need to jiggle up my blog again. Almost to return to it's original being as i am studying for my MA and my MA has become the most demanding factor in my life. I am about six or seven weeks in to my one year course and time seems to be rushing rushing rushing by. It's fun and exhilarating but also i have a sense of if-i-am-not-careful-i-will-lose-things-in-the-rush. So it makes sense to use my blog as my reflective journal. 

I have tried notebooks and no doubt will continue with them, but they start off neatish and then become unreadable scribble, and maybe my thoughts on paper tumble out so completely unregulated by contemplation or consideration it is unreasonable to ask anyone to read them particularly some poor soul whose job it is to look at my work. I guess i will hand them in but i'd like to have something easier to read and access to give to my assessors and for me to refer to later when my MA is done. 

Also writing by hand on paper is not the same process as writing on a screen. I am a little more aware of needless words on screen. If you think i waffle here you should see my notebooks. And then also if i write a blog i can then post it to my social media platforms and may get response especially if i ask for a response and in my next blog i hope to begin to ask questions of my readers that if they are happy to give response i will be pleased to receive.

So what is this blog ? This blog may be a grandiose announcement "behold, look at me" but it's also a statement of intent meant more for me than any reader, i am changing, i can feel myself changing, i can feel myself sloughing off one skin to become a new being and my blog may be part of that sloughing off process. 

Oh hello blog, i may have neglected you as a way to get words out of me, as a way to understand how  the world feels to me. There are lots of ways to communicate and the how and the with who makes a difference. My notebooks are private, my blog obviously isn't. Emails may or may not be. Conversations are as private as the participants allow.
Before Jon died in 2017 we wrote emails to each other for about two years, back and forth conversations most days, often inconsequential chit chat, sometimes deeper stuff. When he died i missed his voice on the other end, the response, the return. I carried on writing emails for months, occasionally still i will email tho' i know he won't answer. But emailing dead-Jon feels unprivate, it's not me talking to him, it's me talking to an empty space, or a space that is Jon in my head, and i don't know if other people occupy that empty space, if i send him an email does it get seen by people who are not him the never-will-receive intended receiver. I guess we can never know these things. 
Privacy is something held within. People are more or less private it's a personal choice. As soon as a word is uttered or written to another it ceases to be private. Though there are people who hold our words private, counsellors, therapists and if we are lucky a few close friends we can trust with our secrets. 
Women who have been pregnant will know the super-secret wonder of a child forming in our wombs in the weeks before we tell anyone just in case the baby doesn't stick. I am lucky i have not had a child i needed to lose, or lost a child before it could live, how it feels to live with those feelings i will never know. There are feelings that are hard to express, that cannot be given voice, or which are terribly hard to voice. Those feelings become secrets.
Secrets can be good, can be great, but not always, some secrets are terrible. Holding feelings in can feel like safety but always holding is difficult and bad feelings held in and not allowed expression can become dreadful, unbearable. 
We are living in a strange political climate at the moment and some of the big frontsmen appear to be terribly damaged to the point of psychosis. When deep emotional wounds are left to fester within they may find outlet in cruel language and acts.  Or else terrible unfathomable depression. I know from my own bad self that mostly it is driven by things that cause me pain, feeling worthless, feeling rejected, feeling wrong. 
What is a bad self ? Why would i think part of myself is bad ? Is my bad self worse for being witnessed or worse for being shoved away, forced into submission and given no release, no breath, no light. When Jon died i was insane with grief, books and blogs say it's not insanity but it felt like insanity, insanity caused by grief but definitely not straight, not common place everyday normal. I think tho that maybe being insane with grief when someone you love deeply dies is an appropriate response so maybe that's why the books and blogs etc say it isn't insane. They also, all of them, state clearly that burying grief will not help, that each of us must live it as we need. 
I felt at the time that Jon's family would have liked me to grieve less, not for my sake, but theirs. Go away, be neat and tidy and out of the way, they brushed me away like rubbish and still that hurts and i don't know quite what to do with that hurt as over the past year and a half i have slowly recovered my sensibilities and begun to occupy my now and point my gaze to what next instead of what was or what could, or might, have been. 
Because what was still occupies space in me, and what is connects to what was, and what will be meets the was in the is. My lived experience with Jon was intense and marked me so of course it is still part of my now but i know that it is also done, that he is dead and who he was with me lives only in me. That won't be how it is for everyone grieving i think because often grief is shared with others who loved and cared for the deceased. But still each relationship is unique and i guess that's why mourning is such a lonely journey. 
For me it has been a kind of mapping process. A connecting of memories, places, moments, books, music .... and feelings. Feelings i think are the most personal of all our memories, I might see a mimosa tree for instance and it will take me back to the place we stayed in Italy where there were several flowering but as I fly back to that time i am at once again in the feeling of that holiday. I am in my now seeing a mimosa tree, but i am also in my past with Jon, on the platform of the deserted station, finding a boar's skull, looking over a bridge at the rubbish clogging the river, seeing Naples far in the distance from our bedroom window, exploring the roads and pathways around the village we were staying close by to, and so on. I am also in the future knowing that what is done is done and cannot be undone, that flights of fancy, what ifs, are strolls within my imagination and will never be reality but that my path keeps going. 
In that moment when i see a mimosa tree (other memory joggers are available) time meets time. And time meeting time is a place. A place in me. A cave within a labyrinth of caves. 
Ever since i was a child i've been a walker. There are lots of types of walker and i think maybe the way a person walks maybe matches their thought process. I'm a wanderer, maybe a roamer, i'm not a hiker, i'm mostly a solitary walker, there isn't a right way or wrong way to walk but different types of walker need different types of journey fellows if they choose to walk in company. 
When i was a child i used to roam the paths and roads and lanes around our home. We lived next to some water meadows and close by was a clay-pit where fishermen would sit in the gloomy shadows surrounded by midges in summer, once a pike stared up out of the water, it's head the head of a monster, still remembered, another memory that sits within my labyrinth of caves along with the gorgeous gloopy threads of toadspawn and the light on the water and the mud gap in the hedge that was how to get to the pool.  
I loved walking with Jon. Right from the beginning of our relationship it was something we shared. He took me to the paths at the back of his housing estate and the housing estate where his mother lived. We wandered together from word go. In many ways our wanderings were like the wanderings of two children. Two children roaming free in a beautiful garden world, our own garden of Eden.  Innocent and carefree we stopped to look at bugs and flowers, to listen to birds, got lost together and found our way out of being lost together. We learned to read maps together. I learned how to draw a map inside my body by treading paths, linking places together until i could draw them in my head. This is a practise i continued to do after Jon and I broke up and which i have found is a sanctuary process since he died. 
I apologise for going on about Jon, he was someone i loved, he wasn't perfect, and i could have grieved less if i had loved him less, as maybe i should have done, i would have grieved less but love is what it is, it's a feeling given free-ly not a creative accountancy game where you hope to get more than you give, tho i think maybe well balanced books make for easier relationships. 
When i was doing the sculpture trail in 2017 (blogs about this are from around about this time of the year in 2017) the area around the trail was unfamiliar. My friend David and I had a little explore and some of the places around the trail we'd visited before because he had family roots in that area and so we'd looked at Heckingham church and Hales church and walked around Loddon a little. My commute to the trail is longish but lovely. I catch a bus from Norwich to the road that leads up to and past Hales Church and i walk from there to the site, the walk takes about 40 minutes, i often see deer and hare and buzzards, some of it is grassy paths some of it is quiet roads, in good weather it's gorgeous. In 2017 i was my sculpture so my day was that, it was an odd enlightening experience, a chance to know how it felt to be seen being. It's all in previous blogs so i won't go on except to say that every time i walked to the trail i passed a crossroads. I came from one direction and took the turn to the right but the roads straight on and left called to me. Always i planned to go back to explore them and it is this that i've done as part of my research for this years trail piece.
Over the course of the past year i've been exploring the roads and ways around the trail site, building a new network of experienced wandering around my historical self. The first walk i took 4 deer crossed the road once, twice, three times, four times, i felt my knees buckle and my self crumble it was a moment i would have shared with Jon and weirdly at the moment i broke i felt his arms around me and his voice saying "it's alright, i'm here, i'm here"  i don't care if that seems mad it was my experience and it's mapped on that road and so i know that even tho he is gone forever as a body the feeling of him is always there if and as and when he is needed/wanted and maybe sometimes when he isn't wanted. 
My piece for the sculpture trail is giving me head issues at the moment because it isn't pretty. And it isn't clever. And maybe anyone could do what i am doing. In fact, yes, anyone could do what I'm doing.  I asked for a cave space within the shrubs at the end of the garden and have been gifted a beautiful space. I am wrapping the network of branches around the space, the space that is the cave, the inside of the cave. I want the branches to feel like the walls of a cave. I want them to feel like chalk lines marking out the paths that lead to the cave. 
Just after Jon and I split up in 2013 after my degree had finished and he had left for Gozo i went on a strange walking holiday in the Dordogne with a group of people i didn't know well. I'd been told about the trip by a woman whose work i'd admired in the degree show, i'd got in touch with her, we'd met for a cup of tea, we talked about walking, she told me about the trip, i got in touch with the man who was leading the trip, someone had bailed so there was one space in the minibus which i decided to take. It was a trip to walk and look at Lascaux amongst other caves with paintings and carvings and I'd wanted to see Lascaux for some years so it was sensible to go and i needed to pick myself up and get on with life after the shock of being dumped just when i thought Jon and I would be adventuring together. 
The trip to the caves was a beginning and ending, beginnings and endings belong together, sometimes they overlap and sometimes their meeting is marked by a sliver of thin air. Jon and I emailed semi-courteously for a while pretending to be civilised until my yoga teacher lent me the "Fuck It" book  and i decided that whilst he was quite within his rights to leave me neither he or his horrible family could tell me what to feel and if i still loved him, goddamn it (or fuck it) i was going to let myself love him. I knew i was supposed to behave, to accept rejection politely, to let him go without making a fuss but i decided to let my wild grow instead because it felt honest, because it felt good and i grew out my box, was unruly and thorny, gained mass and flowered and i'm glad i did. 
Oh, i must have needed to get that out.
I am talking about caves. I am talking about visiting caves and caves inside of me and the inside of the tree cave that i've been given to draw the map of the territory i've been walking this past year, this past two years, ten years, life. Inside my cave are my memories, my memories of Jon and the part of our lives we spent together, also my memories of other people, places, times, moments. Because inside of each of us i think is a cave, at least one cave, in which time and space and passage of time and presence all meet together in a place that is called Still. 

What do you do when someone you love dies ? Not someone you are fond of or someone you have an affection for, but someone you love, someone whose being resides in your heart ? When Jon died I asked my daughter this because I knew that she knew, she replied "you live, you live mum" ...
My experience of grief is only one experience of grief. My grief for Jon who I loved. It is different to the grief that other women who loved him will be experiencing because their grief is their relationship, the man he was with them, the woman they were with him, the chemistry between them that made them them. 
The interaction between two is always very slightly different, even day to day between the same two, one and an other is another recipe. Even if one of the two is a thing like a place or an icon. The individual within the story is the difference. 
Yesterday I watched a film about a little boy who died of Meningitis. A dad talking about his young son dying. A film of him playing with his little brother, performing and playing. It is an agonising watch. I have not experienced the death of a child. The pain is unimaginable. It stops me in my tracks, there is no breath. I see those who are having to carry their loss from a point of innocence, not knowing, of sympathetic pain, of understanding that is limited by my lack of experience, please god may that always be my good fortune. 
Experience is the teacher. I have my experience and you have yours. I know what I know and you know what you know. If we allow ourselves to meet with open hearts we may find that we have common ground and through that common ground we may be able to share our experiences and learn from each other how it is to be another. 
This is what has happened to me since Jon died. I was felled by his death, my blog is testament to that. And i have a stack of notebooks, and sketch notes in 2d &3d, and close friends who have held my space and listened when i have felt shot down, who have re-lit my light when i have been in darkness. 
My grief is not comparable to the grief some one feels when their child, their baby, dies. It stems from a different relationship, so how could it be ? But I think grief has meeting places, the loneliness seems to be common ground, sadness is too mild a word to describe grief, but it is in the mix a kind of whole sadness maybe, I can't explain this feeling it has no words in me, it is akin to love but love in darkness maybe rather than light, those who know what I mean maybe will let me know. 
I have felt since Jon died that I am occupying a completely different world. And this too seems to be a shared connection. The world itself has not changed, it carries on regardless as if nothing has happened, day breaks and night falls, relentlessly marking the time between the last point of contact and the end. Does no-one know that this great person once lived and now doesn't ? But it is only the few who love a body whose world has changed, the rest of the world carries on oblivious to the pain that those who are grieving are coping with day in day out. And all the videos and blogs and memes and poems seem to say this that grief is not a finite thing it is there and sometimes it is less pressing and sometimes more. 
Last week I decided to open the email that Jon sent me just after Easter in 2017. We had had an argument. His emails had become less frequent and more offhand and I knew he had started drinking again if he had ever really given up, he said he was drinking daily as a habit because I had asked him what he did with his days and he had told me that he'd have a couple of drinks mid morning before returning home in the afternoon. At Easter I asked if he was seeing someone, and if so i said i should back off, because I was not sure if the days when his emails didn't come were days when he was with someone or days when he was blacking out, and if he was blacking out that wasn't a good thing. He replied rudely, I replied rudely, we exchanged a vicious spat of words. I did not like the way he talked about the woman he was seeing. I decided on Easter Sunday that year that I had to let go so that the woman he was with had a chance to bring out the best in him without the jealousy of an abandoned ex creating more difficulties. The email i opened last week did not suggest he was giving her his best but it may be that he was being a better man with her than the person he was in the email, i hope so. 
When I opened my folder of Jon emails and scrolled back to Easter '17 I found a time-bomb. An unopened email he had sent in August '17 that I had erased from my memory. I believe i blogged (about a year ago i think) about how at this time I had repeatedly woken to loud banging on my door in the small hours of the night that my first thought on waking, or maybe still in dream, would be "it's Jon" but then i'd know it was not real, that he was not knocking on my door, that it was only a dream, that it was not Jon. But this unopened email spoke of his missing me, of how he woke thinking of me, wondering if I was married to, or "besmitten" with, someone else, asking me to email. I didn't see it. I don't know how it got in my Jon folder. I don't know how I would have responded if I had seen it then. I felt betrayed. I was furious and heartbroken. Furious and heartbroken is a very odd combination of feelings. It hurts now, knowing that he like me was wishing we were still in contact at that time.
One of the things about emails and letters and texts is that we don't know if the other person has received them. When I accidentally sent an email to Jon in September giving us our last conversation, and me now two still unopened mails, he will have assumed that i had read his August email. I hadn't. Would it have changed the way we communicated then i think so, tho' how i do not know. Embodied contact allows us a greater depth of feeling because we are witness to movement and shape, smell, sound, space, timing, and so much more, all the subtle signals that our animal bodies recognise without even knowing, the light in someone's eyes, the curve of someone's smile, the inclination of bodies, the touch and how the touch is received. I felt, and still feel, sure that if Jon and I could have met for a coffee we would have met as old friends who loved each other still.
A certain generation (type) of people may remember a computer game called The Sims. The Sims was a model for life, a way of telling people-stories, soap opera lives were lived out on a screen under the hands and in the mind of the game player. Births, deaths, marriages, work, love, money, learning, friendships were all there guided by a god-like handler. The first version of the game was quite manageable especially after you got the cheat that gave you unlimited finances. Unlimited finances make a difference to wellbeing it seems, funny that. As the game evolved with add ons and new versions and real time relationships it became more tricky. Want to get in touch with that friend, in the first game people didn't age with you but later they did, their friendship didn't just diminish if you accidentally dropped contact because you were busy building your house, or making out with your new lover, they aged with you, some of them died. I'm aware that The Sims is something my sons and I would recognise as a formative experience but it's not a catch all. My point is really that relationships need nurture and the easiest way to nurture a relationship is to give it time and space and love and light just like anything you want to grow to flower. A plant may flower without attention but like The Little Prince's rose that flower becomes your flower when you give it your attention. 
I wanted to blog today because this past week has been a funny one for me. Opening Jon's Easter 2017 email on the two year anniversary was a challenge i had met in my mind before I did it. Discovering the one I did not know about was a shock. It was kind of loving, so kind of nice, but it made me cry a lot. Last year at Easter his daughter's mother wrote to me saying they had letters I'd written to him and would I like her to send them to me (I said yes but I have yet to receive them). That made me cry too.
Sometimes when a feeling is difficult it is best to meet it, chances are it won't go away on it's own and will keep nagging and nudging until it is met so I decided I needed to go back to Bungay and to tread some of the soul paths Jon and I wore together in the years we were lovers. 
My relationship to Bungay did not begin with Jon. I was friends with a girl from school and I remember staying with her for a weekend and bicycling around the town. And later, when I was very nearly full term with my first baby, her father and I stayed the night with a friend of his in the old pit where he lived in a caravan with a goat and his dog and some chickens. Because I was only 20 and her father just 21 the friend seemed fantastically old, I suspect he was probably mid thirties or fortyish, but people in their thirties and forties look old to the young i think tho' they may not feel it. The caravan smelt of pee and I was very keen not to have my baby there so when the bus failed to turn up we walked and hitched back to Norwich. I think we walked about 9 of the miles and I suspect that my daughter's determined nature was in part forged by that experience. 
Since Jon and I parted company I re-met Bungay through the sculpture trail at close-by Earsham where/when I met my friend Andy who lives there. But Jon is a big part of my relationship to the place. So if I need to feel really close to him it's where I go. I think this is my third trip since he died and each trip has been for a specific reason, a need to connect with that which was best in us, to the time and place where we were most solid, where i feel/felt closest to him. Time passes, I cannot undo Jon's death. All I can do for peace of mind is endeavour to accept and understand what is. That's not easy. And as I said at the beginning of this blog, my grief isn't comparable to anyone else's because it is mine and something only I know. Someone who has lost a child or a sibling or a parent or a husband/wife may wonder why I am bleating on about Jon but their wonder is not really my business because grief just is, no-one in their right mind would ask for grief if they know how grief feels because it's like a stain that can not be over-painted, the pain of the loss is forever, i think. I'm sorry if that is un-comforting. But I am wondering if the pain i feel for Jon, because of his absence, is how he maintains presence in my life and reminds me of the pleasure we shared. 

I promised myself that I would write a blog in which I spilled a little less of my blood onto the "page" but I don't really know how to do that. I think I write in blood because I don't have any ink. Call ink style and blood passion. My blogs tend to come out of me when my heart is bursting with need to express myself, when my mind is on fire with thought and I can't hold it all in. 
But what I want to get started on is blogging a quiet pilgrimage I am taking. Using the word pilgrimage I hope gives a sense of the form of the journey I have embarked upon. I do not know if I will reach my destination but I have started the path and that is enough. 
Lots of people walk the coast of Britain. I've been following a few blogs over the past few years and most recently a man on twitter who is doing it the adventurer's way with a tent. But I am not an adventurer. I have however wanted to walk the coast of Britain for years now, maybe as long as twenty, thinking about it and not knowing how to start, where to start, making it all more complicated than it needed to be. 
Because in October last year I just began. I walked from Southwold to Lowestoft. Just because I could. I started in October because October was the anniversary of Jon's death. He gets the whole month because his actual death date is different from the day I found out by nearly two weeks so in my body he has two deaths, his actual death and the death of him that happened later when I picked up his sister-in-law's email informing me of his death  
Southwold was the beach Jon took me to on our first proper date. And we walked the length between Dunwich and Kessingland over and over again in different parts during the six years we were lovers. Starting at Southwold meant that my coast walk began with Jon as my journeyman, a ghost journeyman. I suppose that I hope that walking and walking will help me to lay his ghost to rest. He is not, for me, an easy ghost to lay to rest. I meet him everywhere. And sometimes I like that and sometimes I don't. 
I took the first step of this pilgrimage on a date that was before the actual anniversary of Jon's death but was the anniversary of a friend and I going to Southwold the week before he died. It was a strange day. I was tearful and thought I saw him on the bus and we found ourselves in places that he had taken me to on our first and last dates, places that connected me to him where memories had been made, and places he'd shown me that belonged to his childhood. I couldn't get him out of my head. I wanted to be there alone, or with him. My friend kept saying I had to give up on him. I had. I couldn't have given up more. But it hurt. I guess my head had given up, but my heart hadn't. Hope still defying reason.
I digress. I took the first step on my pilgrim path because all the time we have choices. October 2018 was the anniversary of Jon's death and I needed to force myself back to life, to seize the day, carpe diem. I took two walks in October and have taken four since then. Southwold-Lowestoft, Lowestoft to Gorleston, Great Yarmouth to Caister-on-sea, Caister-on-sea to Winterton, Winterton to Happisburgh, Happisburgh to Mundesley. 
Mostly I go by public transport and mostly I go alone. So far the exception has been Winterton to Happisburgh when my son, at my ask, helped me out by driving me to Winterton and then parking up at Happisburgh and walking back to meet me at Sea Palling. Mostly I like going by public transport and walking alone. Walking alone gives me time to think and public transport especially buses allows meetings to happen that wouldn't normally. 
This walk, this long walk, began with a trick. I was just walking from Southwold to Lowestoft, no big deal. The second walk was more conscious, on my birthday, the anniversary of the day after I found out he was dead. Lowestoft to Gorleston. One walk and then another and another, beginning. I needed to begin and then I needed to keep going and then when Amis joined me I needed to ask for help because I could feel myself stalling, and I wanted to share what I was doing with someone I loved, someone living, a tangible, physical presence. Ghosts and spirits are all very well but not the same as flesh and blood, body and living soul. Amis' help briefly made my path warmer and sweeter, less lonely. Time and space are gifts. I was glad that Amis accepted the gift of my time and space and gifted me his in return. Time and space are gifts worth treasuring. 
Following my day with Amis I walked Happisburgh to Mundesley, passing the shameful nets at Bacton a week or so before the sand martins return, the cliffs looked mean and grim and bleak. I am so thankful to the people who got those nets removed. They stand as heroes in my eyes, everyday people who rose to a challenge and beat a system that says birds lives are worth less than money and man. I wonder if that is the mark of civilised society, the ability to understand that that which is not us, is not "I", is as of much value as us, we, ourselves, "I". 
Food for thought maybe for my next stretch Mundesley to Cromer. My walks are not too long at the moment and it might seem like I'm dawdling, taking this walk at such a leisurely pace and with no certainty of reaching it's end but it's a choice I have made to allow myself to be slow, to let myself go gently. Going gently, taking things softly, means I will do what I set out to do, I don't respond well to a whip but I give all that I have if my heart is resolved. I want this journey to be a healing path. I am walking it widdershins, tempting the devil I suppose but my hope is that the pull of my road will give me time to work out where I am going and will find me moving forward even if my forward is met by sometimes going back in time. 

Here goes again ... launching myself into another blog ... many years ago when i was a child my dad used to sometimes take me as his sailing crew. I wasn't his preferred crew, my oldest sister Vicky was keener and more competent, but sometimes, not often i would be there in the boat with him. It would be planned the day before, getting up at whatever time was needed to catch the high tide, gearing up and going to the boat yard to rig the boat, it was a Tideway, a wooden clinker-built boat that my dad maintained well because that's how my dad is. When the boat was as rigged as it could be on land he would wheel it on it's squeaky trailer to the harbour slipway, along with all the other boats and their sailors, with me following. I was a bit of a puddle of a child, not sharp or clever or agile, I suspect taking me out sailing was a bit of a chore for my father, but the thought of launching into my blog brought back the memory of getting into the boat, leg deep in water and over the side before my dad pushed the boat out getting in as the boat sailed out into deeper water. I think of the salt smell and the clinking of metal ropes and the flapping of sails and the shouting and excitement and i think thats a good memory to have tho' i suspect i was really only part present as i was/am not really all with it, more often than not i am faraway in some dream world.
Memories are funny things. This year past has been full of memories of Jon, i think i've mentioned that before, and as memories of time i spent with him and without him have surfaced within the net are other memories and they are all very live, vivid and visceral in quality.
We are as living beings and bodies a container for the life we've lived, I think. I am repeating myself please excuse me. Repeat is a thing, part of our patterning. Here we go again, this way of living that actually doesn't quite work for us hitting up against the same or a similar obstacle and until we learn to meet it in another way. 
We, who is this we ? I've noticed i slip into this when i blog as if i can speak for others when i only speak for me. because how can i know how it is for someone else. Maybe it's only me that repeats mistakes, responds in the same way to some one or something that gets to me, makes me feel bad, or good, tho' feeling good would seem like less of a problem. But then what if good is an addiction, this drink makes me feel better, now i need this drink to feel better, now the drink doesn't necessarily make me feel better but i need it because if i don't have it i feel awful. I'm speaking with very ancient knowledge about drinking. Falling back into my late teens when my drinking was no more than any eighteen to nineteen year old's drinking but when if i hadn't had my daughter it might have gone bad. 
I am throwing up yesterdays because over the past few weeks i've been thinking about time. It began when i started using my instagram account. 
I'd had a look at Patti Smith's and looking at hers gave me ideas about how i could use that platform to make notes in a slightly different way. All social media platforms eat time. This blog is no exception. But if they perform a useful function then they are worth the time. This is a kind of diary. Twitter and facebook i mostly use as scrapbooks/notebooks often posting stuff to myself much as i might jot down a note on a scrap of paper. Face book memories are great. On twitter and facebook i get waylaid by national and global politics, then i become someone i don't like, mouthy and horrible, but i can't seem to help myself. I guess it's one of my patterns, it forces me up against a version of myself i am not comfortable with but can't let go, a part of me that has to fight when i think something is foul. A legacy perhaps from feeling desperately vulnerable when my children were small and Thatcher was in power. Anything that triggers feelings i recognise from those days tends to make me edgy and ugly. My body contains the fear and darkness of those days. Or maybe it is something even earlier in my life, something wary that hates to be confined. 
But back to yesterdays and why i am throwing those up in this blog it's because beginning to engage with instagram has made me wonder how long is an instant ? Is an instant a lifetime ? A lifetime of a species ? A lifetime of a world ? Is the lifetime of a thing that lasts less time, a mayfly for instance, of the same worth as the lifetime of something more long lived, a human, you or me ? Does their instant  weigh the same as ours ? 
Here I am a series of breath filled incidents that occur from the moment i'm born, or maybe conceived, until the day that i die. Does my instant go back into my ancestral past ? Does it go forward beyond my dying to my descendants and those i have touched whilst still alive ? 
It feels strange to me that a person's instant might end when their physical body ceases to live because those and that which i love and value is part of my being and so continues to be part of my being. Will that go on forever. I think of the me that got up early to go sailing with my dad, that me is still me, and the person i was before i had children, and later the young mother and the woman i am now. Every part of my being is part of my instant, my now, and in that instant, that now, even tho' some of the people and places i was once connected to are no longer accessible physically, their being still lives in me until i forget or die too, until i dissolve into the ether. 
I can feel resistance like a wall of wind as i write now. I am trying to finish this blog but i keep writing and then deleting what i've written and starting again. I don't know how to meet my next day.  I want to talk about Jon but also I don't. I want to stop grieving, I'm tired of grieving, is that a terrible thing to say ? I want to let go. But also i don't. I don't know how to move on without losing him. He was important to me and so the thought of forgetting him hurts. But forgetting will happen I think. Is that why i am calling my life a single instant so that the time we had together still retains some presence in my everyday ? He was far from perfect but a person doesn't have to be perfect to be loved do they. 
Understanding is a curious thing. The effort to understand can be unbearable, filling space with questions and mind-noise, but understanding itself, i feel, is quiet. I wonder if maybe the only path to understanding is to let go of some of the questions (some questions are un-answerable) so that silence and softness allow understanding to nestle gently in the steady beat of my heart, so the steady beat of my heart can carry me forward into tomorrow. 
I think this blog is to be continued ... this is maybe part one 

Two blogs in a row because the karma thing keeps coming up, my thoughts feel unfinished . And also because my blog serves as one of my notebooks, easily accessible and something i can refer back to, an old fashioned diary i guess. I write in notebooks too and sometimes i'll open one up and come across thoughts written years ago. The other day i found the one i was scribbling my pain into when i first heard that Jon had died, the first weeks when i was obliterated by grief. 
Why bring up grief, and Jon, again ? It's over a year since he died. Shouldn't i be over it now ? Shouldn't i have moved on ? Shouldn't i let go and stop making a fuss ? And of course that sort of is what happens. Life goes on, the absence is not exactly filled but becomes familiar. Tears which were daily are now not so frequent but sometimes, sometimes, grief grasps you by the throat and pushes you against the wall, and all you can do, all i can do is go with it, let myself feel whatever it is that i need to feel. 
There will be triggers of course. The spring weather last week did it, Jon loved those first few days in spring, he'd have been out in his garden with his shirt off in shorts, all hop-skippy in the sunshine. And, before the spring weather, the rugby which he loved. I remember him buying himself an England rugby shirt in the last year we were together, little things like that made him sweetly happy, he wasn't good at treating himself so it was nice when he did. Before i knew Jon rugby meant nothing to me, big blokes running round a field with an H shaped goal and mud was how i saw it. Jon explained it to me a little; and talked about playing rugby at school; and because the six nations was something he loved i loved it too; we'd arrange our weekends around the games he needed/wanted to watch and snuggle up in the warm to watch them together, it was all very cosy, wintry afternoons on his sofa  are cherished memories. 
And see that's how it goes with the missing of someone who is dead. In my head i can go back to those times and that's nice and i am glad to have so many gorgeous moments to crawl back into but it hurts that they are done, that there will never be more, that he can't feel the sun warming his flesh, or the rugby rush of testosterone. 
And so i return to karma. Because maybe that is also what karma is. Maybe it is the traces you leave in another, traces you leave whilst still alive and also after you are gone, after you are dead. 
Way back in the mid eighties when i was first pregnant with my daughter some members of my family were not thrilled. My paternal grandmother sent me a letter saying that she didn't want to see or speak to me again because the child was a bastard, and my aunt wrote suggesting an abortion. People have reasons for doing and saying the things they do and say. I was a feisty nineteen year old with green hair and attitude and no one was telling me what to do so i can't really claim to have been put upon tho' it wasn't the warmest of family welcomes for my daughter. 
But there was one member of my family who responded with extraordinary kindness. And with that kindness she left her mark. That person was my Auntie Leska. Auntie Leska wrote me a letter saying she thought it would be hard but that she was pleased i was keeping the baby. She knitted clothes for my unborn baby, wooly tights with braces in the bright colours i asked for. It meant a lot. Even the arrogant teen that i was knew that i was being shown how to be good. 
Here, this is what i mean about traces and karma. Our lives leave marks, good and bad. Some people leave us bruised or broken, some leave a stain or a scar. Others by their being give hope, make good, make things better. Our memories of those who have marked us is how their karma is carried forward. My Auntie Leska is long dead but what she did, who she was when she knitted my daughters layette made a difference and means she still lives in me as someone who showed me kindness, and my daughter, and maybe my grandchildren too. 
Last summer i went to Wenhaston, Suffolk to see a small art show in the church inspired by an artist called Becker. It was good to see the exhibition, the work gave me food for thought, but i was pleased too to have been drawn to the church because there is a fantastic medieval painting on one wall a part of which has the devil weighing out the dead's souls. Is this perhaps a version of karma ? There it is, the good deeds and the bad. And in the end by your life shall you be known. 
But a life lived looks different from different angles. I am very far from being saintly, when someone pisses me off i will lay curses on them, and hope that life slaps them down. But curses backfire so i try now to hope that people get what they deserve. However this too is unreliable, lovely people get hit with horrible things and horrible people seem to be able to be horrible with impunity. Hashtag Jacob Rhys Mogg for instance.
So that's what i mean about karma being more subtle than my British brain seems to be able to grasp. And i think it's because stories look different depending on your perspective. This i guess is at the root of most conflict. Two people with different ideas of what's right will fight it out, to the death if necessary, if neither one can find it in themselves to see, if only for a moment, the other person's point of view. If both parties are able to step into the other one's shoes then conflict resolution might be easier. The problem would likely be the same but seen through understanding eyes, listened to with understanding ears, felt with a body that recognises the other as equal, maybe then the problem becomes objective rather than subjective. I hope what i've said there is what I mean.
I can talk this talk, we can all talk this talk but conflicting interests are not easy to resolve even if everyone is tired of fighting and longs for peaceful resolution. What am i waffling on about now ? It sounds a bit Brexit-y, but it isn't so much that, what I'm thinking about is how i am struggling to let go of feeling angry with Jon's family, their manners seemed hard when we were together and drove a wedge between us. I have struggled to understand why they were the way they were then, and later why they didn't offer him more help, why they seemingly just let him drink himself to death. 
In the week after Jon died, before i knew he was dead, i was talking to my son who had just come back to England after two years in Singapore, i was saying how the time when i was with Jon was the only time in my life when i'd felt like i'd got it, that i was winning (winning is a word Jon gave me, if i was having a difficult time he would say/text/email me - "are you winning?").  i said how i didn't understand his family. He suggested that maybe Jon and his brother weren't close, as i am not close to my sisters. I guess that could be why. In 2016 after he had been hospitalised a second time I wanted to walk him dry, to get him close to nature which i knew from our time together put a spring in his step, an appetite for life and twinkle in his eye.  But i needed their help, i needed them to be on side. I wonder if they hadn't hated me so much they might have helped, i wonder if he would still be alive but it's neither here nor there because what is is. I guess that is their stain on me and maybe i have left a stain on them. My refusal to give up on the beautiful memories i have of him is perhaps annoying to them, maybe it upsets their story because i tell it from another angle and rather than join the dots they need and want to keep to their story and not connect to mine tho we were together for six years and shared so much. 
That's life isn't it. When Jon and I fell out and it wasn't worth fighting over i'd let hm know i'd given up by saying "hey ho" and i guess that's all i can do with his family, all i can do is say to myself "hey ho" and let go.  

A year ago today i was on my way home from a weekend away with my daughter in Dublin. I did not know that my still loved ex Jon had died. His sister-in-law had sent me an email on the 19th but she had sent it in the evening and we'd left in the morning. I am thankful for this because it meant i was able to enjoy the trip in blissful ignorance. 
I thought about Jon a lot that weekend tho', i think he would have loved Dublin. The pubs and bars i guess if was drinking, but I didn't know him as a drinker except in the later years by email. If we'd gone together as lovers we'd have had a different break because our relationship wasn't about drink, it wasn't what we did together, we'd have gone wandering, exploring the ups and downs, the arts and culture, found places that were out of the way, and made love, because that's what we did together. 
But after getting home, and seeing my son for about an hour before he left town i opened my emails. I was hoping there might be one from him but it was not to be. He had been dead for a good week and a half, dates were not given until much later. My blog is full of my grief then, it is different now. But it goes on. The missing, the sadness, special dates are difficult. I'm guessing anyone who has lost someone they love will say this, it's something i was dimly aware of before but not aware in the way i am now. 
A year on i have had time to run through the time we spent together, to apply discernment to chuck out the trash and make safe the good, the worth-keeping. i often feel him close by, and whether or not that is mad i don't know but i feel like he is with me, watching the birds out of my kitchen window, arms around me, walking with me, gardening with me. Maybe I am just re-tracing cherished memories, who knows. Often when I'm feeling blue I'll open a book and a note in his hand will fall out or a photograph or something we picked up together will turn up or i'll hear his voice in my head just saying my name. I imagine he is with other people who loved him too. 
Last night i opened a draw to put a belt away and there at the top was a postcard he had sent me, words up, i'm not sure when he sent it but the image was of a garden we visited on our first holiday together. I know that I loved Jon and I believe he loved me but our relationship was essentially just us two so it's comforting to find messages from the past that verify my experience, they are proof against those who make me feel that our relationship was a throwaway affair. Maybe it was but when i find a message like this I remember how i did feel loved by him and how even when things went wrong i still loved him because i knew him as the man behind the mask, a man who shone with love.

I know i wasn't the first to love Jon. And probably not the last. I know i was not the first because when we were together i found a book with a book plate proudly declaring the book belonged to the library of him and his ex-wife. I remember thinking someone else has thought like me, hoped for a future with this man, it was at a time when he and I were at our best so it did not worry me but made me sympathetic to his ex-wife, the mother of his daughter. I had been through relationship break ups and knew the hurt of betrayal and disappointment. Maybe i should have been less sympathetic and  made fewer excuses for her, but what was was, really it took Jon's death for me to understand his family and to know that my desire to be included/not socially excluded was never going to be met.
I wanted to blog because a year is a long time. And this has been a long year. Grief is a new country for me. I think that it comes in many shades of black initially and maybe for some it is always black and i've been lucky because through the cracks in the black i can see mimosa yellow in bloom, the green of a fig tree, the pale pink of an almond blossom, berry stained fingers, blue seas, goldfinches and so much more. But, still, now i have met death i am way more afraid of him/it than i was before. The desolation is much greater than i imagined, the despair cuts more deeply, erases hope more fully, and the pain and loneliness are much harder to bear than imagination allows. 
So there, so one year on. I grieve still, but my stare is not so blank i think. And in my grief I can now remember Jon as the best of himself. I know he wasn't all good. I know he messed me about. And I can't say for sure that he loved me only what i felt. But I know that i loved him and i feel immensely grateful for the time that we shared, particularly the time that felt like paradise. 

post script ... I remember the proposal ... i think i laughed ... what we had was enough already