I keep writing and writing and writing, here and elsewhere, casting my words out as a thread so that if i get too far lost in the labyrinth that is my mind i have some chance of finding my way out. 
Over the past few days i have begun using movement as a way to explore space. I think i am practicing Butoh, but i don't know much about Butoh, i haven't read or studied the concepts or form, so maybe i'm just moving from what i have learned in life to date. I am negotiating a course between the shadow of death and the ephemeral brilliance of life. 
Casting my line back into my past, as i seek to recall every detail of my life with Jon, i am finding myself up against older memories, shoved away, out back. As i meet these memories through movement my body expands or contracts to meet or evade them. 
It is curious exploration because when i met Jon i loved him so much i let go of my life before him, it was my past, he was my now and, in my dreams, my future. But now he is dead. And however i eventually take in his death his living form will never take part in my todays, or tomorrows. 
It is an odd thing grieving an ex. This is my experience and i can't speak for anyone else but there's an element of shame. That a man who left you is still causing you so much pain marks you out as a fool, a Miss Havisham, a Corpse Bride. An ordinary person would have moved on, forgotten, or at least have enough sense to disguise their feelings. But no, there you are sitting among the remains of your wedding feast, shabby in your wedding gown forever caught in the moment when your dreams got broken. Stuck in limbo. Why didn't you move on ? Why didn't i move on ? What a loser ..
Now, i have no choice, i know how much i loved him because my response when i learned of his dying was so visceral, so wholly unadulterated by decorum, is still so visceral and not yet trapped by manners and/or common need. But now i have no choice but to let go. We will not ever find ourselves face to face in a cafe, we will not ever have the chance to say sorry, to make good mistakes, to look each other in the eye and know that whatever has happened something good still runs between us, the stream of light that courses between two who know and love each other in all their good and bad, as friends of the heart. We will not ever have that heart stopping unexpected encounter walking down the street, at an airport or station, even on a beach that i'd hoped for. I will not ever see him again. I may still feel connected. I do. But he is gone. He is split into pieces. The piece that lives in me. The pieces that live in anyone else who cares to remember him.
Away from Jon, or maybe looking at the air around him. I return to my above mentioned movement practice and also the black and white stones of the previous blog. 
After some days of active movement, yesterday i felt plugged up and glue-y, my head had been chock full of blistering thoughts all day and a part of me didn't want to give myself my hour of movement last night. I was clock watching through the hour, make of that what you will, and my body was leaden. There is an urge to fight through the weight and obligation of a heavy body with fire and forge-through intention but i just didn't have it in me, and being still with my discomfort felt more honest, so i was still and then moved just a little and was still, and then moved just a little, and so on, for a full hour. And here a body memory would flick up like a fish flipping across mud and my body would go with that memory until it met water or sank back into the mud. 
Just as my hour passed, i bind myself to an hour to give myself boundary. I found myself back with my stones. After i blogged on friday, i thought it is interesting to me that the black stone is always in my right hand and the white in my left. I wondered how it would be if i changed them from one hand to the other. In the space set up by the hour before i was able to meet this idea as physical possibility; to hold out my palms with an imaginary stone in each and to pass those stones into the other hand and feel them differently as my more passive hand held the dark stone and my more active hand held the light. After a while and some contemplation i put the stones down to rest and felt the weight of my empty hands held out before me. 
In a life that leads forward, there is no going back. Who knows if this life is the only life led but it is the life i think most us buy into. So only in my imagination can i imagine where the what ifs might have led, with Jon, or any other consolidating or pivotal factor in my life. Imagination is a free spirit and can run where it will but the body i am in is an ageing thing. If nothing else the death of someone much loved brings home the transitory nature of this gift we are given at birth, which is to live, and to live to our fullest until the day we die. Carpe diem. 

Two little cups for a tea party .. part of my ongoing scribbling for Alice's adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass .. also made me think of the two of cups in the Tarot deck  

 

General election week and the heat from the fire has been crazy. For reference; Theresa May got most seats but lost all of her majority, and some, and Jeremy Corbyn won seats, more than he had before -but less than May, so he now has more power to his elbow to oppose, which is good, but cannot follow through on his manifesto as he is not the government. 
It would be a hung parliament .. and for a wonderful half hour or so I wondered if maybe it was the beginning of a new politics in Britain. 
But, May has formed a government with the DUP ( a somewhat backwards Irish party with ten MP's) which my gut says is unwise and might easily undo the fragile peace brokered in Northern Ireland in the Good Friday Agreement. Time will tell. 
As a nobody all I can do is wait and see, and hope. Corbyn feels like hope, like a light in the darkness, but he can do no more than he is able. 
In my heart I believe that good will out .. that good will win the day .. I daresay my version of good is different from others. I suppose I see good as the weed that breaks through the crack in the pavement, the bees drinking from my birdbath, the small family of wrens that fluttered up from the ground when I was in my garden the other day, the robin on a gate post with a beak full of worm-y things. And in the people I know who lighten my heart and load (this is a good that my beautiful daughter wrote about yesterday, thanks for the reminder Jessamy) 
One of my long term creative projects is finding a way to illustrate the Tarot deck, both the major and minor arcanas. For the past couple of weeks I have had two cards at the forefront of my thoughts. The Hanged Man, still work in progress but close to being. And, the ten of cups, finished yesterday at about 9 am, after a hung parliament was called, and before May gave notice of her intention to form a government with the DUP. 
The meaning of the ten of cups as given by Alfred Douglas in "The Tarot" is; in upright position: a peaceful and secure environment. The search for fulfilment is crowned with success. Perfect love and concord between people .. and in reverse: disruption of an ordered routine, antisocial actions, selfish exploitation of the goodwill of others. Manipulation of society for personal ends. 
The image I'm putting up is of the ten of cups in upright position because that is how it came to me. I feel that May's political manoeuvres are more towards the reverse but my belief is that "lux lucet in tenebris"