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. 

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 

Yesterday, May 8th, was Jon's birthday. He would have been 51. I emailed him in the morning. There is no point in emailing him, no-one receives those emails but it's a slight connection to the man i loved, as a lover and then later as a devoted friend. 
The sun was shining and i had decided over the weekend to mark his birth date by treading some of the paths we used to tread together, reflecting and negotiating with the ongoing sadness that is mine since his death. Negotiating with death is an odd conversation. Someone dies, their material form no longer exists except perhaps in their possessions or objects connected to them whilst they were alive or places where memories were made. 
The memories count for most i think. It seems that i was able to scourge many of my bitter memories of Jon before visiting Gozo. While there i was able to reconnect to the life we had that was beautiful, the beautiful in him, in me and in us. That was a holy relief and since returning has been a source of spiritual uplift. 
There's regret in me that he isn't able to hear the glorious birdsong that this May has offered but it is met by memories of listening to birdsong in his arms, in my home and his and in various holiday cottage bedrooms. And the same as i walk in sunshine, on streets or green pathways, i know that once upon a time he was beside me, holding my hand, looking at the flowers and the butterflies and other bugs, enjoying life. 
I cannot change his physical absence, it is what it is. His death has in some ways allowed me to recall him with all the love i felt for him in our first few years when it felt like the honeymoon would never end. When you break up from a lover it is best not to give too much time to those memories because it makes the loss of the loved one harder to accept. In death it is different, the lines of conflict no longer exist, i no longer need to protect myself from further hurt and now he is dead the demons that took hold of our relationship have retreated and no longer threaten my wellbeing in quite the same way. 
For his birthday I took my usual bus. I walked past his house, his home, the home we shared for six years and took the path up the hill to the field that he took me to the first night that i slept over at his. I'll admit to a few tears. I loved him. I wish, of course, that he was still alive even with the pain his living being hung around my neck. But there it is he isn't and that's life. Death is going to hit us all sometime. And even if we'd lived happily ever after for forty years one or other of us would have had to go first most likely. 
I walked over the field to the road that leads to where the black dog still lives, old and slow and more portly now, still barking but not so game to greet or harass. Then took the short path that connects the road to the wide concrete strips that i assume are ancient war relic aerodrome tracks. There were buzzards flying in the bright-bright blue sky, and skylarks, and i stopped to watch a female orange tip on the short purple flower that Jon and i always forgot the name of and looked up in books after our walks. A bugloss maybe, i don't know i haven't looked it up. The sun was hot, the shadows sharp. I thought what is the point of marking the birthday of someone who is dead. I mean they are dead so they no longer have a birthday, who knows, if they have been reborn they may even already have a new birthday. But still a birthday is a calendared mark, maybe Jon's is more important to his blood family who generally took it on with a gathering from which i was excluded after the first year. 
After a while of walking i got to the tree that was one of our walk markers and sat and smoked a roll-up, and ate an apple, and thought about the fella, and the life we had together, and was thankful for the time i knew him even tho' it was not long. Then back past his house again, to my bus stop, enjoying the apple blossom and the ducklings and the horse in the paddock that let me stroke it's nose and forehead. All very soothing. Of course it's still sorrowful. I'm mourning. But my mourning has softened lately. I have a feeling that i will always miss the sweetness of him, but since Gozo that has returned to me as days and days and days of memories and nights of memories too it feels a bit as if he is with me anyway. Not in a creepy way, just as a kind of benign spirit holding me upright when i am finding life difficult, lonesome or sad. 
So there it goes. Jon's birthday and i hope it won't seem too silly that i marked the day or that i've blogged it but as my blog is kind of my journal it seems to make sense because Jon was important to me, he was important just because he existed and i loved him, and in all truth he remains important because he existed and i loved him, his death hasn't changed that. I think love transcends death. It does not cease but changes to accommodate the new circumstance.  

All of this time I've been talking about a man who has no face. So i thought i would give the name a face. This was taken in the last year we were together 

April 1st, Easter Sunday ... it is still dark outside. This is a day i've been dreading. It is a day of anniversaries. April 1st is when Jon and I got together. And it was on Easter Sunday last year that our relationship finally broke beyond repair. I think this may be a dark blog. Although i may refer to events that happened before Jon left me my aim is to focus on the four years when we were apart, sometimes unconnected and sometimes not. It may offer explanation for why i am grieving so hard. A grief that often seems foolish and incomprehensible even to me and i'm living it. 
Here just for a moment i'll flick back into our time together as lovers and say that from the beginning of 2010 our relationship became incrementally worse, 60% good, 50%, 40%, until by 2013 when Jon left it was really at best a mean 10%. I held to that 10% he held to the 90% bad i think and that determined the outcome of our relationship. 
In 2013 when we broke up, it could easily be said and seen that we were flogging an almost dead horse. My hope was that after i graduated we would spend time together playing after years of intense work, that we would soften into our successes, his and mine, give ourselves time to hang out, hang loose, i felt that the world was our oyster, that we could work through our problems, make new memories (jam for the cupboard), and so and so on into a benign old age that would see us glowing and happy at the end of a long and fulfilled life. My hopes were played against his reason, things had gone wrong, it was not worth fixing, it was better to bail and get a brand new life. Was he wrong ? No. My hopes were fantasy, romantic and dreamy, they required work to make them come good, but without that work they would never have come to anything. His reasons were valid, our relationship was awful at this point, if we had gone to Gozo together our problems would have surely come with us. There was no escaping the reality our relationship needed work and determination to survive. I wanted to give it time and space in the sunshine, he wanted time and space in the sunshine but he wanted it without me in the picture. 
The fact is a relationship is a mutual agreement and if one party does not want to be with the other it's a pretty much done deal. This is a dance we are all engaged in all the time, with everyone, at work, at home, in our everyday lives, to a greater or less extent depending on how close we are to those we are dancing with.
So there we are, Jon's reason trumped my hope and he left in a blaze of virtuous glory, off to a new more glamorous and exciting life. I too had a brand new life because all my hopes and dreams and plans had been taken from me, i too was starting anew but not out of choice.
At first i was like a bird whose cage door is open but who quietly sits starving on the floor unable to take the freedom it has been given. I didn't know what to do. For a while i was furious and behaved very badly. I wrote emails, raging, yearning, pretending i was fine. I sent some emails, no doubt as deranged as the ones i sent Jon, to his family. Of course I wish i hadn't, they didn't reply, i was Jon's godawful lunatic ex that he was well rid of. I didn't understand. I didn't understand anything. Jon's departure from my life had wrenched my heart from it's bearings. I didn't care what his family thought of me. I wanted him/them to see me. I couldn't stand the awful cool superiority any more. I imagine it just made his family feel more cooly superior. This is a hard thing to say, but looking back Jon's leaving could be seen as an act of kindness. He let me go.  
He let me go, and yet he didn't. His response to my crazy fuck-mess weirdness was magnanimous, his new happiness vindicated his decision, "you are the love of my life" he said "but things hadn't worked out". I, in my heat, thought "damn you, if i am the love of your life and you are the love of mine, why aren't we together loving each other". I wanted to know that all the other women in his life had been called the love of his life so that then i could discard the notion, put it in the box marked "empty words". Who knows what the truth behind those words was, maybe one day i'll meet one of his ex-partners and they'll say "oh yes, he said that to me too, it's just a string along phrase he threw out to keep his options open". 
And so and so and so on. I drive myself mad with my round and round thoughts. I don't really know where i'm going now. There are parts of the four years when Jon and i were apart where our stories do not link. Our lives went their separate ways. I know my life but the details of his that i know are few and sketchy. I know that at some point between our parting and our reconnecting he began to drink again. I don't know when it became problem drinking but i'm guessing it was a fair time before he and i reconnected in 2015 because he was hospitalised not long after we began a fragile exploratory friendship by email in early summer that year. I think he had injured his foot which had stopped him walking, he said that his girlfriend had wanted too much commitment, his sister in law said that his girlfriend had not been able to cope with his drinking. None of that belongs to me, it is his life with another woman. But suffice it to say by the time Jon and I "re-met" he was not well. 
I had continued to email Jon while he and i were out of contact but he had not answered and so i assumed that my emails went straight to his junk, or that he had a new email address. I don't know when he stopped responding maybe around autumn 2014 when i briefly was kind of seeing someone, kind of not really, walking and kissing and touching and eating together, a thing, but not a thing which lasted maybe a couple of months. Jon had informed me that he was seeing someone new the summer before which had put a full stop and a capital letter on to the end of our lives together. We were both moving on, as you do, as you have to. 
But in the summer of 2015 i was burgled and Jon was one of the first people i messaged. And he got back to me. Almost immediately. At first i didn't know what to do about his emails. For so long he'd been out of my life, and i'd begun picking up the pieces. I loved him still but i was scared. I was at that point volunteering with a support group for recovering addicts led by a gentle and generous woman who in lieu of wages got her volunteers on to a host of courses about addiction. This learning was eye-opening, i'd gone into my relationship with Jon in a state of innocence. When he'd told me about his past life i took him as tabla rasa, a blank page, not realising that the rest of his life was written on the back and sometimes the pen had been pressed so hard it had forced it's ways through to the front. So it is with everyone but to a greater or lesser extent the marks on the back of us make more or less of a difference to our life ongoing. I had not taken into account how Jon's life before me as a drinker, an alcoholic, would affect all the other relationships he had that were important. Naive to be sure. 
Back to the moment his name appeared in my inbox. I was grieving him. After i was burgled one of the things that i struggled with most was finding, a day or so later, the bundle of love notes he'd given me scattered and tumbled out of a draw that the burglar had rummaged through. That and the loss of my dad's camera made me feel sad everything else was replaceable. But there in my inbox was the name "Jon H" it brought me out in a muck sweat. 
I didn't open it immediately, fear and longing wrestled within me. I had spent two years getting over him. Earlier in the year I had submitted a proposal to the curator of the Waveney River Sculpture Trail for a piece of work that had taken me back to the early days of our love affair, making the piece had involved me re-treading the footpaths and life that we had shared. I was still in love with him. But I was also deeply wounded. Did i want to reconnect with the man who had left me so callously two years ago. In the end love got the better of me. I opened his email and so began the next stage of our knowing each other. 
He made no mention of his drinking at this point, i think he thought he could hide it. But just weeks after he fell down in the street and was taken to hospital. I emailed his sister-in-law to let her know. They didn't know. She got back to me told me he'd been ill, ill how ? drinking again, and so i found out.  
So that was the deal. Jon was in hospital for a few days, i think he then discharged himself, decided to go to Venice, asked me to meet him there. I wasn't going to go to Venice to meet a drunk ex who had dumped me without care even if i did still love him. That he thought I would pick up the threads with him just like that as if nothing had happened is a sign of how out of kilter with reason his mind had become. And anyway my son Richard was once again off to foreign lands, Singapore for two years, i was making the most of his last days in relative proximity, and also the WRST was up and running and i wanted to keep an eye on my work to make sure it stayed good and to watch how it weathered. He had built a new life, and i too had built a new life. 
Jon went to Venice, and came back very shortly because he got bored. We emailed. We emailed more. He made a will. Went to his barbers to get his hair cut. After his death an old colleague said that he'd said we were back together, we weren't we were just emailing but the intensity of our feelings for each other was still apparent. Our relationship had picked up, but how was still ambiguous, i asked him to come to England to meet me for coffee, for a walk, i knew my family would hate it but we had unfinished business, i was offering friendship, my trust had been broken, i loved him, i wanted him still, but i was wary, very wary, and needed him to meet me in my space. 
Over that summer i'm guessing he was drinking but maybe picked up a little, we emailed regularly, did we speak on the phone ? i'm not sure, it was still all quite tentative on my part, i was there for him but i needed to know he was there for me too. By autumn i think we were likely emailing most days. Both of us often up in the small hours of the morning we would check in with each other, we'd talk about life and love, it was flirty and sweet, there was old tenderness and new tenderness too. Our relationship at this point was still rooted in our love affair. There were times we'd argue i remember  but distance meant that our fights were more quickly resolved,  his silences were not so commanding, and his spite more easily repudiated and what could he do that was worse than leaving me and taking up with another woman ? 
I remember Jon as someone physically well. We never saw each other after he left. In my head he is still the man who left me, strong, handsome, lordly. He sent me a photograph of himself that summer, well two in fact, a selfie of him in his mirror, face obscured by the camera but wearing shorts and looking ok tho' in shadow. The other, he sent while he was in Venice, it was a picture of him on his balcony with a chameleon on his shoulder gazing lovingly at someone, not me, i didn't look at that picture long, I didn't want to see it. I thought it was probably taken by his last girlfriend and was their affair and not mine. Later when my friend David took pictures of me i didn't send those to Jon, not the good ones or the ones where i'm gurning or looking fat. My relationship with David was as friends not lovers but Jon was funny about our friendship. He was cross about me going for walks and visiting churches with David. I thought he had a cheek being jealous quite frankly. 
But I skip forward. There must have been a point in our re-acquaintance when we re-connected as something more than ex-lovers catching up. That he was drinking was clear, we had occasional phone calls that year 2015 when his speech would be slurred, and sometimes his emails were obviously the hand of a drunk, mis-spelt, mis-worded, sexually gross. I had known Jon as someone very careful, sober his spirit when dark erred towards mean-ness, drunk it became base but also sometimes i'd catch a glimpse of the light that i'd known when we were first together. Lux lucet in tenebris. It was this light i sought to reflect back at him. It was a dangerous game perhaps to have entered into but not one that i thought about. Our relationship was rooted in our love affair, that we talked about sex was not weird it was part of our knowing each other, it wasn't the focus, i would flip him pictures and songs and articles, names of bloggers i liked, we talked about books, films, life, walking, art, poetry, Jon was very clever. I'd tell him about going to the library he started going to his library and i think this was a life saver for him. And our relationship became a meeting of minds, in a way it became deeper than it had been before, without the softness of shared physical experience, touch, taste, sound, sight, smell, we were forced into an etheric connection, a meeting of consciousness if you will. We merged as we had when we were lovers but our merging was spiritual, he'd been my soul mate before and that soul bond became more entwined. I gave him my light, he gave me his darkness. Sometimes i gave him my darkness and he gave me his light. 
All this time he was drinking heavily, he said that he was living on vodka and milk. We emailed every day, quite often i emailed several times a day, not long emails, images more often not, not stuff that required a reply just nudges to let him know that someone was thinking about him and cared if he was alive or dead. Later after his hospitalisation in 2016 he said that my emails had kept him going, that otherwise he'd have had no human contact, and likely be dead, he said he was eternally grateful but Jon's eternally grateful never did last long. 
After his hospitalisation he seemed to plateau. He was still drinking, sometimes a lot, but he seemed to be out of his hole. I knew that the last hospitalisation had come after he'd given up drinking cold turkey, and i knew from the courses i'd done that he could easily have died and that he hadn't had been a lucky chance. After his death i read the term kindling which is used to describe the effect of these near misses, each time they happen the nervous system gets more broken and the chances of survival slimmer. Dark matter. 
But there, so Jon did survive that hospitalisation, that was the one where his family told me not to bother them again and that it was up to him to stop. I had thought that if only we could have pulled together and got him into rehab i could have got him long distance walking to take his mind off things, maybe that was my saviour complex kicking in. Maybe Jon needed and wanted to die, maybe he had stopped coping with life. He said when he left me that we couldn't fight our demons, i was cross with him about that i thought "i'm fighting my demons lets fight off our demons together" but maybe he knew that his had got him and that he needed to leave life as he he had led his life prior to our knowing each other drinking and sleeping with women who gave him no mental distress. 
I'm diary-ing. Am i being very boring ? I think i may be. But I'm getting out of me that which i am no longer able to carry, or carry alone, releasing by recording, and in so doing giving space in my being to life after Jon. There is no way i can set down the whole of the ten years we knew each other or put on a page the intensity of our connection, the page would burst into flame. But the little i set out may one day serve me as a memory jogger when the life we shared is trod over, invisible and overlaid by new experience.
I had begun this blog with the intention of taking it up to Easter Sunday last year which is when we lost contact again. But I realise that the events that led up to our losing contact are still too close for me to give form to. I suppose in all truth i am thinking of the year and half before he died really, from his hospitalisation in 2016 to Easter Sunday 2017 and then to his death later that year on October 11th. I have three unopened emails from Jon. One from Easter and two from about a month before he died. And an unheard voicemail on my phone. The emails sit ticking in the folder marked Jon, buried under the mountains of emails i have sent him after his death and the emails i made myself not send him and so sent to myself in the months between Easter and the time i knew he was dead. Will i ever read them ? will my regrets and my sadness ever be soft enough to let me witness the last few scraps of time he gave me ? The email from Easter is likely to be unkind. The two from the month before he died charming and sweet, tho' I cannot be sure of that. All of them will hurt i think. I have a feeling that one day i will hear the voicemail by accident and that it will drop me to my knees. RIP Jon. RIP Fella.  

It is gone 11am now  

It's time for a rambling blog, i mean rambling words, a walk through my mind rather than a walk through scenic landscapes, tho' i suppose a walk in a mind is not so dissimilar. I'm not quite sure how this blog will go tho' because the weather has not been good in my head of late, there've been heavy storms, torrential rain, thunderbolts and lightening, lots of grim grit-your-teeth grey and only occasional glimpses of sunshine. Is this a new stage of grief i wonder ? Is this how it goes ? Or is this not grief and just how my life is from now on ? Is this where i am stuck forever ? I hope not. 
So where do i start ? How do i manage this story ? Here i am, in a couple of weeks my daughter and grandchildren and i are going to visit the island of Gozo off Malta which is where Jon chose to move to about 5 years ago, he moved in the autumn of 2013. I booked this trip when i was deep in grief just before christmas, his family had still not told me the name of the cemetery he had been buried in and i was looking for something to hold on to, some concrete grasp on the reality of his death. They did tell me somewhat begrudgingly after two months of my asking. 
Now i don't really know Jon's family. I met his brother and sister in law and nephew twice. The first time, they seemed ok, Jon and i had only been together for four weeks so meeting his family felt a bit like being thrown in at the deep end but i liked him and went with it. I was surprised when his sister in law told me, in a very definitely private conversation, that "Hardy men don't have feelings". It felt peculiar, not warm, and certainly didn't seem to apply to the Hardy man i was getting to know at that point in time. That phrase has stuck with me ever since. It felt like an absolute, and that there was no negotiation with the statement.
Much later in 2016 when i begged his sister in law and, through her, his brother to help Jon after he had been hospitalised for the second time in less than a year. I said to them you need to help him or he will end up dead or disabled. They refused saying it was down to him, that they'd rung and he'd said he was fine, and that it was his choice.  It made me recall that phrase. I guess having no feelings allows you to wash your hands of another suffering. They told me to not get in contact with them again unless it was important i.e he was in hospital again. I asked them to tell me if he died. Credit due, they did do that. I did not get in contact with them again until after the sister in law told me of his death. 
Ugh why does all that matter ? I suppose it is back story. I am in a funny space, dreading going to Gozo if i'm honest, i don't know what i'm hoping to achieve by going. Initially it was a sense of closure, but closure is such a peculiar concept. It feels like locking in or locking down and i don't know that i want that. For sure i can't spend the rest of my life mourning Jon, but i have a feeling that the sadness i feel now is always going to be part of me. A something broken. Something that is always going to hurt, not least because our relationship wasn't all sunshine and roses. Because he did let me down big time and his family were nasty. Nasty in the way middle class people are nasty. Painfully polite and absolutely correct but clearly cutting dead. That's how it goes. I'm middle class i know those manners they are about control. Social exclusion and a certain kind of tone in this case piety that smells of contempt, a pulling of rank, these are ways in which dominance and disregard are administered. Anyone who has been on the end of it will know what i mean. It's a monkey game. 
So away from the loneliness of that, what do i hope to achieve from visiting Jon's grave and the island where he spent the last four years of his life ? A part of me is cursing myself for giving a damn. I mean, why ? He left me years ago, sure i loved him, and i knew him as a completely brilliant man, but i also knew him as a lousy jerk and he was nasty when he left. 
I have over the past week been filled with a grief that is ugly. I described it to a friend in text last night as foetid and globby and mean. It is related to his family who consistently feel like a secretly administered punch in the belly, a casual foot in the way as we pass "oh sorry", a huddled "you are not welcome" clique conversation, a curled lip, a stare through. Maybe they are lovely people, they have told me how lovely they are, it's just that it isn't how they feel to me. I could be wrong. In fact I am wrong on some level because i am sure they are lovely to those that they deem of worth. 
Anyways, well you see what i mean about globby, i keep coming back to Jon's family and really what does it matter. I suppose it matters because they broke in to our love affair. They broke in and took what they wanted and left me to sort out the pieces. And i dd it, i did it for six years. For six years he was dry, he wasn't always well, but he was dry. And being dry meant that he was able to sustain regular one to one unsupervised contact with his daughter, meant that he got a first class degree with the OU, meant that he could fulfil a long held dream of volunteering as a resident at Strumpshaw Fen, getting himself a chainsaw certificate whilst he was there. I think that period of time was the longest he was dry and what pisses me off quite frankly is that his family behave as if it happened by accident. They have told me how happy he was when he left me and arrived in Gozo but he began drinking not very long after we parted company and was surely drinking heavily enough to be hospitalised less than two years later. 
Maybe it is arrogant of me to think that, but while every other one of his partners that his family mention is described in sympathetic terms, i have never met with any real compassion and the strength of our relationship and what he achieved in the time we were together has never been acknowledged. That is a bitter feeling. It's an ego thing i guess but also a "fuck you for not helping him", a "fuck you for your self-satisfaction that  allows you to speak the way you do, think the way you do, act the way you do" ... oops, see, globby and mean. 
I wonder if i will "publish" this blog. Publish is the tab i click to make it go public. It's not the same as having a book published, a book that's been selected, and overseen by a publisher, an editor etc. Self publication is a much more degrading form of public exposure especially if the only censor is your self and the wits that you have the day you decide to put out there whatever it is that you have written or made. The bottom line is who cares what you think, need, want or feel ? 
That line is one of Jon's. He would say this to me repeatedly while we were together and he re-itterated it to me in one of the last emails he sent me in a slightly different form. While we were together if i was struggling with something he would say to me "no-one cares what you think, want, need or feel". Understand that is bad language from a lover. But by the same token turn it over and understand that if no-one cares what you think, want, need or feel it is a liberating statement because if no-one cares what you think, want, need or feel you have license to think, want, need or feel whatever you like. I think this where the self comes in to play, this is where we are guided by our self, our true self, our core being. Now that core being may well reference that which is outside of it's self, that reference is i guess the ability of the self to connect with that which is outside, to understand that it does not stand in isolation. But that capacity to interact with the outside as well as the inside is really born out of the life we have had. 
I've talked about this before in previous posts, the nature of being, of how experience teaches us our place in society, and how that place determines the possibilities available to us. Or maybe i've not talked exactly about that but words along those lines. The poor tend to stay poor and the rich tend to stay rich tho' there are exceptions they are not so common. It's like reading, or climbing trees, or dancing, or playing a musical instrument, or whatever, if you grow up in a culture where that is the norm you are more likely to find yourself engaged in those activities than if they are alien to your environment. 
Maybe now i will get on to an interesting bit of the blog. Recently i've been thinking about goodwill. We live in a world in which money is the big be-all and end-all god. But money in itself has no worth at all. A coin is  gesture of goodwill but it's worth is only the worth we give it. For a supposedly intelligent species it's a weird thing that we have given so much power to God-Money. I guess in a world that loves money, money can buy goodwill. I guess this is why the rich are so anxious about their wealth and holding on to it, it negates genuine goodwill. Let me return to goodwill. Goodwill that comes from the heart not the counting house. Real goodwill stems from inside of us. If our currency was goodwill then i think the playing field would level a little. Because goodwill has to be earned. Actually that's not quite right, because goodwill is also a gift that we inherit and that stems from the company we keep. But keeping it simple-ish as a running thread. There are some who are naturally benevolent and they are likely to hold greater sway in a world that leans towards goodwill. And there are some who are more inclined towards malevolence and they achieve order through ill will  Goodwill is nourishing. Ill will is not. Where am i going with this ? I don't know but i have an image of a dung beetle rolling a ball of dung. I guess that image is coming to me because goodwill feels like flow and ill will feels like interruption. And the picture of a beetle rolling it's ball successfully seems to represent a kind of harmonious beetle/dung/planet relationship. Maybe that's how goodwill as currency works. And maybe that's why ill will is so life and joy sapping. I don't know.
I've got in a muddle with this train of thought. Cut and edited it and made it no better so i'll stop. It's as far as it goes for now maybe, a random thought just splatted in the middle of a raging blog about Jon's family, raging because their manners feel hard and make me sad. I guess maybe the connection is goodwill. At how you spend goodwill, the goodwill gifted to you by another, is it re-invested in that other or spent elsewhere, is it received with thanks or demanded, taken, as a right. 
I was chatting on sunday to my son Richard about selfishness, the ideas we were playing with were not well formed enough for me to transcribe them to this blog but it was a conversation about the nature of selfishness and how it plays out and selfishness of individuals and individuals when they combine as couples or groups; and about the need to balance the inside and outside (that's my line); his thoughts were more interesting to me than mine because i already know mine and his were new to me and will surely shift my consciousness a little as i assimilate them into my being. I guess this is another example of goodwill in action, the sharing of thoughts and ideas which is a very close to source kind of goodwill. The sharing, the giving and also the receiving.
Hmm and i flick back to Jon's family again. They shared nothing with me in the time i was with Jon. And yet they took and took and took and after they had taken he would be tired and mean, and because i loved him i would try to fill him up, in the end it took it's toll on me, i got worn down and worn out, and when i was worn out he left taking the best of us and giving our life, the dreams we had made together to another woman. That was his prerogative, i forced myself to trust him right up until the last email he sent to me before we broke up, the break up email in fact. I didn't have to, i did it because i loved him. Trust is an act of massive goodwill. To put your trust in someone is a heart matter. Jon broke my trust, he took my heart and wasted it. Maybe i am going to Gozo to see if i can find a little of the heart he stole from me in 2013.  

Postscript - evening 27th Mar .. i'm adding this because i wrote this blog this morning and it's a weird blog but having made it public i want to leave it as it stands testament to feelings that i am struggling with. Hurt feelings. It may be that Jon's family did not realise that their manners came across as unkind or hurtful. My hurt was not allowed voice when i was with Jon .. "no one cares what you think, want, need or feel" ... and being always quashed they now seek outlet. I think this is often the way with pain that is unspoken or denied. It will eventually make itself felt one way or another.

I wish i could write about the darkness that Jon's death has visited upon me, but I can't, so i''m posting a couple of images that are maybe, hopefully, part of my journey back towards a lighter place. 
I am struggling at the moment. It would be a lie to say otherwise.  I am trying to make sense of the past ten years, to filter, to sort, the good from the bad, to let go of that which is worthless, and hold, if holding is appropriate, that which was good, that which is worth holding. It's not easy. I feel lost and not in control. Every so often i'll find myself resting in a moment's sanctuary, but those moments are still mere moments. 
I am posting on my blog to document this time for myself, maybe to some it may feel like i'm boring on and should shut up, the scold and the boor in me act as gags, binds and beating sticks, and tho' i know these heavy censors would have me quiet and docile, i do not want them to break my spirit again. 
So the work i've been doing is scribbling really, here are a couple of images. They are notes for  larger projects; mapping the galaxy and inside my mind

Ugh, feeling sad .. not much to be done about that .. i'm feeling sad about Jon, about the man who was easy to love, the joyful loving man ..  and i'm feeling sad about the hard and nasty man he was too. I feel sad that the he'll never feel sunshine warm the back of his neck again. 
Actually the sadness is overwhelming this week and has taken me aback because i began the year with a mind to be strong but my heart is faced the other way, so i am having to step back and accept that i'm still broken up and fragile. 
I have been in my studio making work of little consequence in the hope that working will act as salve - it does a little - but as my heart is a raw mess a little salve goes only a little way.   

So. Jon. Am I allowed to grieve a man who left me ? Am I allowed to feel as wretched as I do ? What is allowance ? Jon was that one love in my life, I have loved before but what we had was extraordinary to me. I'd not known love like that before. I wouldn't be who I am today if I had not met him, had not stayed when the going got tough, I couldn't leave him when things got bad I loved him too much. Loving him didn't mean I didn't get angry with him. Didn't try to fight back when he was unkind. It didn't mean that I was a saint. He got things wrong and I got things wrong. 
His death has made me realise what a waste of time all that anger was, both his and mine, how anger becomes a defence mechanism, how anger protects the heart but also walls it in. I loved him so much. That love is flooding back to me now. I'm remembering the way we played. How we made love, I'm not just talking sex, I'm talking about all the everyday things couples do together, the way you learn to read people that you want to be close to so that very tiny gestures become expressions of love. 
I only found out yesterday evening when he died and how. Those concrete facts help in a way. The solidity of information is ballast when I am feeling far away, out of body, and not really sure what who where I am. He died on October 10th* and was found two days later I do not know who by. I dreamed of him on the morning of the 11th, woke at 3ish from a dream about him. We were in his kitchen in his home in Bungay, a home that is mapped out in my heart, a home I thought of as home too although it was not mine to call home. We were baking a cake together. He loved cake. And laughing and flirting. And the room was filled with golden light. It feels good that we were together, albeit only in a dream, that last night. 
I'm blogging because I need to note down all the feelings I am going through. I am messy. Everyday is filled with tears. Sometimes my legs buckle and I have to stand still and let myself cry until the moment passes. Sometimes I want to curl into a ball. I want to hold him and tell him I love him. 
Today I have been in my garden. We shared each others gardens. My garden was bigger than his, more untidy and he'd do manly jobs that I didn't have the strength or stamina to begin let alone finish. He cut a fine figure in the garden, handsome and rugged. He glowed. And my garden for a little while took on a semblance of order which is long gone now though he created a bone structure, built beds and my beloved compost heaps, laid out the gravelled courtyard space by my back door, and dug holes for ponds. It feels like a lifetime ago now. It is a lifetime ago now. 
His garden was pretty in a different way. When I met him he had just moved in. We watched the tadpoles in his pond turn into tiny frogs, the solitary bees nest in the bee house. And the flowers he grew were amazing. Sunflowers and white cosmos and fennel. And all sorts of hardy perennials I'd never seen or heard of before.
We shared plants. He took forget-me-nots and jasmine from mine and gave me crocosmia and a purple plant that I had to ask him the name of every year and now I will just have to call "Jon's bee plant". These are some of my precious memories. Some of the light that is filling me, compensating for the dreadful darkness that is knowing he never will show up at my door and put his arms around me. That we will never go for another walk. I will never hold his hand. Or snuggle up on the sofa to watch his beloved rugby with him.
When we used to go walking we'd play going on a bear hunt .. say "we're going on a bear hunt, we're going to catch a big one, we're not scared, uh oh grass/mud/some-other-natural-obstacle" it goes on to "we can't go over it, we can't go under it, we've got to go through it" .. so it feels now, this awful grief, one day at a time, or more like moment by moment. I am in strange country now and  I feel lost .. like I am floating .. I'm not sure what is real any more .. I know I am alive but I do not really feel alive. Is that normal ? I have never had grief like this before. Please if you read this blog feel free to comment if you have more experience with death than me. 

*postscript Jan 20th 2018 .. just before christmas 2017, about two months after being told of Jon's death, his family finally gave me the address of the cemetery in which he is buried with a picture of his tombstone .. marked Jonathan Michael Tyndale Hardy (his married name) .. the tombstone gave his day of death as the 11th October 2017 .. i feel it's important to add this postscript so that factual references, days, dates etc are as accurate as i have been told or know. It means that when i had the above mentioned dream he was still alive as i was dreaming.  

And in detail ..

I thought maybe it would be interesting to see the Jon Triptych together .. 

It's been a little while since I posted on my blog, I've been playing with  paper,  folding it and crumpling it and using it as cloth. As I have mentioned previously one idea leads to another and so my Lux Lucet In Tenebris project has moved on a little. 
This project began as a response to a long and painful relationship with a recovering alcoholic. I had never come up against alcoholism before and in my naivety I thought that if he wasn't drinking he wasn't an alcoholic but he self-medicated with other things. Both my heart and spirit got broken. I was told I was nothing, a useless whore, worthless, that no-one cared so often that in the end I believed it. The final four or five years of my time with him were some of my darkest days. But. In that darkness is light. Being constantly told by your lover that your thoughts, your feelings, your needs are unimportant is emotionally abusive. But on another level it was a gift because being reduced to nothing allowed me to feel myself as part of a greater whole, connected in my nothingness to everything. My non-existence gave me a sense of belonging to something bigger than the small space my body occupies. That was the chink of light, the crack in the wall. It is that light that I found while plunged into horrible black space and that I am trying to put across in my sketches and notes for this project which I sporadically post on my blog. 
As a post script I would also like to say that the way he behaved was not o.k and I have tagged him because one of the things abusers count upon is your silence. This project is something I am doing to help me soothe the parts of me that are still blighted by years of being rubbished. It is a labyrinth of pain if I am truly honest with myself. I have gained a little understanding but lost trust. 

Lux Lucet In Tenebris - Sketch 9

It's nearly a year since I graduated, and at Christmas I signed up to be a part of NNOS 14 http://www.nnopenstudios.org.uk/ as I thought it would be a good way to mark the anniversary. My studio will be open for three weekends May 24th/25th, 31st/1st & June 7th/8th but I still have a long way to go before it is presentable so making work is on a bit of a back burner at the moment. 
However, over the weekend I gave myself time to play because the sun was shining and I had painted up some cloth and paper to begin experimenting with cyanotype printing. I did a little bit of this last summer but the sun is stronger in summer and the prints this time were more experimental and my motive less focused. Most of the ones that I made for a project about love were not very successful. There may be a metaphor in that. But the ones I made for a new body of work called "Lux Lucet In Tenebris" that I am sampling for were good for samples. The cyanotype process seems particularly suited to this project but I have also been working with discharge and devore and cut paper. I never really know where an idea will take me, and I have found that the best thing to do is to follow my fingers, and accept that whatever comes of it I will learn from making and playing and letting myself be. Occasionally I make something I love and that is such a tremendous feeling that the chance of that happening is enough to keep me going through the dull or not so happening days and work.