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 

October 1st and i don't think i have blogged for a month but the first of the month is a doorway. And in my life, this year, i have also given myself a new story as a source to draw from on the first of the month. This month's fairy tale is The Tinder Box. It's the story that got chosen because it jumped out of the box and i decided to go with fate and choose the one that had chosen itself. 

Last month's fairy tale was The Frog Prince. This story was picked for me by my younger son, my youngest child, because he happened to be stopping over with me on the evening of the last of the month and asked if he could choose it for me. I had thought to ask him myself anyway so it was clearly meant to be. 

After August's tears I'd been a bit worried about how my fairy tale musings were going. I guess that fairy tales are open to interpretation and reflect back to us that which we need to see, not necessarily want to see. My son and I talked about how I had turned The Hare and The Tortoise into a rather dark story, where he being more upbeat and lighter took it as more obviously a horrible braggart, the hare, showing off and rightfully getting his come uppance. And the moral being don't be that horrible braggart. 

But how many of us really pay attention to that need to be humble. When our lives are going well, we are inclined to want to shout it from the rooftops, or at best are complacent about our good fortune, if our lives have taken a turn for the worse we may ask for support but it's harder, and so much of everyday life is just walking forward, not more or less than another day. If everyday was amazing and brilliant would our need for amazing and brilliant mean that we needed every day to be more amazing and brilliant, higher and higher pitched and never soft and low. 

But enough of The Hare and The Tortoise, and before I move onto The Tinder Box i want to make some notes on my journey through The Frog Prince. 

For those who don't know the story, it goes something like this. 

Once upon a time a beautiful pampered child princess was walking in the woods close by to her palace. As usual she was playing with her golden ball, which of all her toys was her favourite. She threw the ball up and caught it on it's fall, over and over again, up and down, up and down. But then once she threw it up and failed to catch it and the ball fell to the ground and rolled into a deep  deep well. The princess was grief struck and sat by the well weeping her eyes out for the loss of her precious toy. As she sat weeping she heard a voice "princess" "princess" .. she opened her eyes a little and saw a frog sat on a rock close beside her. "Princess" he said "why do you weep so" and she replied saying that her ball, which she loved, had fallen into the well and her heart was broken for the loss of it. The frog said "what will you give me if i go into the well and retrieve your ball ?" .. "oh frog" she answered "I will give you anything you ask, my father is a king and you shall have jewels and money and all the finest things" .. "these are of no use to me" said the frog " what i want is to live by your side, to eat from your bowl, to sleep in your bed, and be your constant companion" ... "ah" thought the princess "silly frog, how can he be that for he is a frog and i am a princess" and so she agreed to his terms and down into the well dove the frog and not so long after came up with the golden ball which he gave with grace to the princess. The princess was thrilled but she had already forgotten her promise. She ran back to the palace with barely a backwards glance to the frog, a mere thank you and goodbye. But the frog had not forgotten the promise, "princess, princess" he called after her "I cannot run so fast as you, pick me up and carry me with you as you are troth to do" .. but the princess ran faster, her promise had been empty she did not want to live with a frog, to eat and sleep with a frog. 

And so the frog went back to the well. But the next evening when the princess and her father and all the royal family were seated to dine there was slip-slop, flip-flop on the stairs and a voice called out "princess, princess have you forgotten your promise". The princess paled, said nothing and looked down at the plate before her. But the king asked what promise she had made and she had to retell the story of losing her ball and the frog and what she had agreed to in her distress. The father, the king, insisted that she abide by her promise and so the frog was brought into the dining room and sat by the princess' plate and ate with relish all the dainty morsels that were offered. The princess however had lost her appetite and only picked at the food and was glad when the meal was over. 

But worse was to come for when she rose to go to bed, the frog insisted that she take him with her, and her father too as point of honour. So with distaste she picked up the frog and took him into her bedroom and shut the door. She thought this would be enough but when she got into bed the frog asked "princess will you not pick me up and put me in your bed that i may sleep beside you ?". At this the princess lost her temper, enough, she had had enough and threw the frog at the wall. At which point the frog turned into a handsome prince who knelt before her saying "princess, you have broken the spell that was put upon me. I was turned into a frog and only if I could persuade a princess to take me as a frog to live with her would that spell be broken. I ask you now to please marry me". And of course the princess said yes and so it was that the princess and her frog-prince were married straight off and a carriage arrived with Hans the prince's faithful servant riding at the back as the footman to drive them back to the prince's lands. And as the carriage drove forth, a cracking could be heard. And what was the cracking ? The cracking was the sound of the three iron bands that Hans had wrapped around his heart when his master had been turned into a frog breaking. 

Hmm, so not such a brief retelling but once a story is started it's hard to stop. There have been a few things about this story that have piqued my interest this month. The golden ball obviously, but I have always wondered how it is that her throwing the frog against the wall worked. In later versions I think that she kisses the frog and that feeds into our current culture where women are supposed to be gentle and compliant. I had taken those versions as more acceptable but the darker story is more fascinating. So I did a bit of research because if something causes me to question it raises my curiosity and feels like an interesting path to follow. In my research i re-discovered Hans, or Iron Hans.  Iron Hans is sometimes the name of this story which changes the story's drift. Modern versions I have read often leave him out but he is an important character. So too the king, the father, I think. 

So how did I start out with this story, before my research I was fiddling about with paints and pencils, doodling, and scribbling and I thought about the golden ball being thrown up, up, up, into the air and then falling deep into well. Like the beginning of an idea when it first manifests and breaks into the light until it reaches it's peak moment before falling back down to be caught and thrown up again or else to fall into the unconscious. 

Now here is this ball that has fallen and the humble frog who offers to help the princess by bringing it back up to the surface, but the frog (with apologies to frogs, all animals are beautiful), but the frog is not who the lovely princess wants to hang out with and so she runs away. Only to find that her commitment catches up on her and she is forced to abide by it. I'm back to the day to day living, who would not rather be throwing a golden ball up in the air in a beautiful sunlit woodland glade rather than sharing an uncomfortable family meal with an unappealing and demanding guest. But there it goes the guest is there and asks more and more and more until the princesses patience with the situation breaks. Hellfire i imagine most of us have been there with commitments we unwittingly took on but are forced to endure. I think endurance, the capacity to endure, is a part of living, not every day is sunny and bright and those who are felled by a drop of rain are likely to have harder lives than those who take it and keep going. That's an observation rather than judgement because often we meet life as we have been taught to meet life by those who surround us, our families, our village. 

So when the princess loses it with the frog and after I'd done a bit of research I thought about how you could see it as a positive, she had taken the frogs demands up to a point but actually no, he needed to be better than a frog to get into her bed, that is a very reasonable ask. 

If you google The Frog Prince one of the questions that comes up is "how many frogs do i have to kiss before i get my prince ?" and there we are holding out for a prince and kissing the ones who will never be princes in the hopes that they will change if we kiss them. But here in the story the princess is allowed to say "no" and when she does that is when the prince emerges because any man with a heart will know that women too have breaking points that it's ok for us to say no, that no means no, and respecting the other person's "no" is not a big ask from any man, frog or woman. 

And here is where Iron Hans comes in, he is the faithful servant, but maybe we could also allow him to be the prince's better side. Maybe the prince has been forced to take the form of a frog because he has allowed his uglier parts to dominate. But there beside him was always Iron Hans, the man who bound his heart with iron to stop it from breaking when his master became someone un-servable. 

It has taken the princess' grace, albeit given unwillingly, to break the spell, but also the grace of the prince to know when he had pushed too far and to be at last the man she needs him to be if he wants her to be his wife. 

And what of the ball, well my quest is for consciousness so for me the ball is my consciousness and it's fall into the well is my journey into the unknown and unknowable. For others it will be different. 

Lastly, the king, who is an interesting male figure. As the father he has strong influence and forces his daughter to honour her promise. Is he right to do this or not ? He has power over her, is his power used well or badly ? Answers on a postcard please. 

As August draws to a close i have to admit that i have failed to produce any visual work of worth for this months story. When i lucky-dipped The Hare and Tortoise just before going to bed on the 31st July i breathed a sigh of relief. The Seal Bride and The Handless Maiden had been harrowing myths to get into, stories of coercion and brutality, from which it was hard to milk positive meaning. I let myself relax with my new pick, no difficult emotions in that one i thought. 
I was right and wrong, i will expand on that later in the blog but August has not let me off the hook emotionally. It's been a month of tears. The passage through grief is an odd one, perhaps having harrowing stories to work with let me meet my sore heart in a faery-world, an un-real world, taking that away meant that i had nowhere to hide. I think too that as the anniversary of Jon's death gets closer it is hard to think of him being alive a year ago he was a walking, talking, living, breathing man, a state of being that seems so ordinary until it is no longer the current state. Alive, then dead. That's that. Apologies for my dreadful bluntness, it's how his death feels. 
I can't remember when it was that the great dry heat we had this summer broke, but now as we head towards September the temperature has surely dipped and the air is moist. Often August feels a bit dry and dirty, not so much this year, this summer has been exceptional, and so the years rhythm  is a bit off kilter. It is damper than usual i think, and gardens parched by the hot July have taken the rain, soaked it up and thrown up green as a response.  The swifts left, their leaving is for me the mark of summer's end. And other markers, most notably Buddlieia flowers and Rowan berries, also signal time passing. But i think it all happened earlier than normal and with less of a ta-da.  
I have been tidying my garden. In the heat tidying wasn't important, it was watering that was needed and watering my plants with my bath water felt nice. Gardening has thrown me back into missing Jon and my tears. I suspect that when someone loved dies missing them is a forever thing and there isn't a time when wanting to tell them about this, that, or the other, that wishing for just one more day with them, or even just a moment's eye contact, again is par for the course. Gardening takes me back to the many many days we spent in my garden, i feel him with me when i garden but of course he isn't really with me and it's that that makes me cry.
Jon's death is the first that has hit me hard. I have grieved for pets and mourned my grandparents but the grief was sadness rather than obliteration. It has made me a bit scared of death. Death is not a negotiator.  The long-drawn image of a skeleton in a black cloak with a scythe feels quite real now. Mortality is our given. Death will come to us and those around us too. This is not a choice. Tho' how we get there may, or may not be. It has been along those lines that i have been tracing the race between the hare and the tortoise. 
For those who don't know the story it is one of Aesop's fables. The hare and the tortoise are charged to race. The hare believes he has the race in the bag, he is fast and lean and takes off like the wind at the beginning, the tortoise is slow but steps out one foot in front of the other. No rush, no hurry for him. About half way along the race course the hare thinks to himself that he can take a rest and lays down under the shade of a tree. Tortoise keeps going, one foot in front of the other, step by step. At the halfway mark he sees the hare sleeping under the tree and pays no heed just keeps going, straight on towards the finish line. At some point the hare wakes from his sleep, maybe the sun is just going down and the cool rouses him, he gets up and stretches and sets off again, secure in his speed he's still sure that he'll win. But when he gets to the end tortoise has already won. The moral of the story is slow and steady wins the race. 
Perhaps because my mood has been a bit melancholy this month i've looked at the hare and the tortoise as two on a journey from birth to death. I've also mused about it as a pathway to enlightenment. Or for that matter any life path you might choose. Raw talent can take you only so far it is practise and determination, the thousand hours, the thousand thousand hours, that make the difference. Surely raw talent helps but there is no shirking the work. 
I suspect i may be about to get very heavy and less than my best now, forewarned is fore-armed. I'm thinking about how "mindfulness" has been sold over the past few years. As if there is a fast track to mindfulness, that you can do a course and then say "oh yes i did a mindfulness course" as if that then means you are mindful. Mindfulness is a state of being, it is about giving attention, it is who you are, how you live, not something done for a weekend and then tick you are mindful. The weekend course may wake up in a person a desire to be mindful, it may be the first step, but being mindful is an ongoing practise. In the same way my shiatsu practise is ongoing, i don't just practise shiatsu when i'm working with someone, it's all the time, every breath in, every breath out, same for yoga, or my work as an artist, i hesitate to say it but even poetry and dance are things i endeavour to make whole life practises rather than just things i do when i'm in a class or reading a book. 
I mention dance and poetry with shyness because I am not a dancer tho' i love to dance, and i am not a poet or writer, tho' i love to read and i write for myself. It is perhaps the tasks we take up that force us to meet our fallibility, our lack of talent, that represent the tortoise's path. There is no reason why anybody shouldn't write or dance just because they aren't good at it. And if the race to the end is really just life it's ok to go slow, maybe it's ok to go fast and sleep a little too because if the finish line is death then we are all going to get there in the end and how we get there is not someone else's choice to make. 
So be slow and steady or be fast and furious, fall asleep or plod along, try things if they make you happy. I think maybe the only wrong way to be is to sabotage another because if you give too much time to sabotaging another it's likely that, as wily coyote finds with road-runner, you will end up falling foul of your own schemes in the end. 

Maybe it is time for me to reclaim my blog as a somewhere a little less exposed. In the days and months after hearing about Jon's death i needed it as a space to air the feelings in me that were too powerful to be held in. I guess if i'd been surrounded by close connections who knew us as two together i might not have needed to howl so publicly but i wasn't; and in those first months of grief my self was so completely obliterated it has taken me this long to come to any kind of self composure. Now i am writing my grief in notebooks, old-fashioned pencil and paper have become my sanctuary; and sometimes i write him emails, which is mad because he won't get them, but writing the emails is different from writing in my notebook, and very different from writing in my blog, the emails are i guess the things i wish i could say to him, things i wish i could share, questions that will never be answered and also sometimes gripes (i would not have got away with those when he was living).
So that's the story of how i am continuing my grief journey as the shock waves spread and i find that i am still standing, still living and breathing and that the world has not stopped. There is pain and various difficult feelings to process but other matters press in and take my attention. Matters that concern me and/or other people. Matters that make clear that the river of life is still flowing, and time and tide stop for no man. 
At the beginning of the year i decided to take on the study of twelve fairy-tales/myths over the course of 2018 in part to distract me from the grief that then consumed me and in part to get myself back to my working practice. The fairy-tales are chosen at random out of a "hat" (actually a pin box filled with folded up titles) and so far i have worked on The Billy Goats Gruff, Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves - these two i accidentally combined when i wrote Aladdin and the Forty Thieves on the spill of paper so February was split between them, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Puss in Boots and the Seal Bride. I am currently deep in thought, researching and making notes, written and drawn and mental, for The Handless Maiden. 
Because of my slip up in February i now have thirteen stories to work with, five of which are still unknown. My journey with each one has been very different. The first few months worth of notes are sketchy but I have a more connected body of work to be going on with for The Seal Bride, and managed to make ten linked images to illustrate and narrate the story of Puss In Boots from beginning to end. This taught me something about story telling, about beginnings and endings, and the bit in the middle.
I'm not saying any of the work i'm making is much to write home about but i am allowing ideas to flow, to pause, to flow again, to go backwards, forwards, upwards, downwards, sideways, letting the story seep into my bones, my being, my belonging. And because i choose a new story on the 1st of the month or more actually just before i go to bed on the last day of the month, i have a self imposed deadline which pushes me to work harder and to take the work i'm making to an end point even if that end is just a full stop. 
I tend to begin with a quick google search which throws up illustrations and blogs and to look at what Wikipedia says because it gives the background and the names of those who gave the story written form, and the when and where it stemmed from, often multiple locations. I also leaf through my own private collection of fairy tales for different versions. The Seal Bride and The Handless Maiden are both stories i have given head space and worked with before but all the others tho' known were less familiar. I was interested to read that during the period in which Perrault set down Puss in Boots the women in stories were notably dim and pretty and malleable because that was what was considered desirable then and there. I am not sure much has changed. The women in Aladdin and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves - the princess and the slave girl - are notably more sussed and sassy. 
At first using these "children's" stories gave me something to hold on to. A structure to lean into, a stable source of inspiration, stable but not inflexible, it is the nature of fairy tales that they bend to meet the reader, a story that has survived retelling over centuries will take on the quality of the story-teller and listener because to give a story body you have to inhabit it. 
This month is the month of The Handless Maiden and it has felt very uncomfortable. The handless maiden is a serious victim, she is betrayed by those who might be expected to care for her. The first betrayal leaves her quite disabled. As part of my connecting to this story i have tried to imagine a life without hands. As a shiatsu practitioner and artist my hands are my life, my being, my doing. Who would i be without them ? How would i live without them ? The vulnerability of that position is painful. Even eating is difficult. In one version of the story there is a moment when the maiden having lost her hands discovers an orchard and eats a hanging pear from a tree and thus is discovered. 
If you have a moment i recommend allowing yourself to imagine a life without hands. How would you live ? It's an other world, an other kind of being. Using the physical disability here allows me also to connect with the broken child, cast out, alone, betrayed by the father who pushed by sometimes the devil and sometimes the stepmother, was the villain who cut off her hands. The weak father is  common motif in fairy tales, see Hansel and Gretal or Cinderella for instance. The wicked stepmother too features often. Who are these people ? 
A motif is a figure that is easily identifiable either in ourselves or others. Likely we carry a box of scraps of many motifs. Some we love, some we love less. Looking at fairy stories is giving me insight into the stories i tell myself about myself and others. In my previous blogs, particularly in the months after Jon's death I spoke of his family. Called them out as monsters. Now this monster image is not one that they accept. I imagine that if i am given any place in their world it is as a monster too. So many monsters where do they come from ? Monsters are common, and some monsters are more monstrous than others.
The monster does exist; it is rage, it is fire, it is fight, it is flood, it is pestilence, it is denial, it is jealousy, it is greed, it is ugly and mean and violent, it is all that you do not want to be unless you are a monster. It is the devil. It is Donald Trump, or not Donald Trump if you are a Donald Trump supporter. For those who support Donald Trump he is a hero, a man who gives voice and license to feelings they have felt unable to express. Those feelings may be abhorrent to others but their existence is certain, and the strength of their existence seems to be growing. A thing which to me is alarming but to others is great .. "lets make America great again". What is great ? Is it strength or force or wealth or what ? Great could be humility, tenderness, care.
So i've been thinking about narratives and counter narratives and how the stories i/we create create the world in which i/we inhabit. And how there are times when a story no longer fits, like a garment that once was perfect but now is a little bit of a squeeze to get into. Or maybe a garment that never felt right. My mum used to make me wear red polo neck jumpers when i was a child and had my hair cut bowl shape, this was the identity she gave me, i don't know why, but it wasn't me and to this day i hate anything tight around my neck even necklaces and heavy scarves and i still don't love having my haircut tho i have a fantastic hairdresser and i like it once it's done. 
I am not knocking my mother for putting me in red polo necks, she didn't know i hated them, and probably most parents have dressed up their children in clothes they don't like. My middle one hated a pair of red trousers that i thought were great. And the waistcoat and cravat that he had to wear as a page-boy for his dad's wedding made him cry. This is part of life. And parents can be dumb when it comes to their kids because it is easy to forget that your children are not you and that their journey is their journey and not yours to dictate. 
In relationships that require long connection like parenting, partnering and child-ing we are inclined to create deeper and maybe more compromising narratives as a way of feeling safe. In this way the narratives can become entrenched to the detriment of all parties. I think that these relationships are surely the most difficult to break from. You may be good or you may be bad but if you have been given this role you can be sure that the stability of the social unit relies upon you being that. It can happen too in friendship circles but these are generally lighter and more fluid than family units. 
I am returning in this blog to the theme of identity which i addressed last year in my blog when i  presented myself as a piece of sculpture in the Waveney Sculpture Trail, i was told by a visitor then that what i was doing was dialogical art, art that inspires dialogue. It is interesting for me to go back there in my head, to what i was talking about. Jon's death knocked my world into another universe and my thinking before his death seems vain and vacuous. I don't know that it is less vain and vacuous now but it is met with new knowledge. The new knowledge is grief, the feeling that comes unbidden when someone you love wholeheartedly, the good and the bad of them, becomes a definite physical absence, when they can no longer reflect back at you the image they have of you, or you have of them, when your shared narrative becomes something you carry alone, when your living connection ceases.
Self-identity often carries with it a need to fix down other people.  Maybe this is something i am having to come up against as i recall my relationship with Jon and work out what it is that i want to keep and what i do not want to keep. Self-identity may be conscious or unconscious, how conscious or unconscious is up to each of us to decide now and with every breath we draw and who amongst us us is really conscious. 
Going back to the Trump supporters, or the Trump detractors for that matter. Those who identify with Trump may take some of what he says with a big dollop of "yes, that's me" but with that dollop of "yes, that's me" they may also have to swallow some "i'm not sure" or even some "i don't think this is right but for the yes that's me i'll take it". So it is that we take on compromises and every time we accept those compromises we bury a little bit more of our true selves. The Trump detractors are making similar decisions "no, not me" but maybe by demonising and externalising we, i include myself in this group, refuse to see that which is Trump-ish inside ourselves. My waste, my greed, my selfishness is not prettier than Trumps but if i put it all on him i do not have to deal with it. I am less bad and that makes me "good-er". 
See every time i eat cheap cheese or cream from the supermarket i know that my purchase has fed an industry that does not fit the self i want to be. And all the time i/we are taking similar decisions day in, day out. Mostly those decisions are hidden in a crowd, i buy cheese, you buy cheese, we all buy cheese (or palm oil, or food wrapped in plastic, or factory farmed meat or take flights or "need" the new phone or i-pad or whatever), we all buy cheese and there is safety in numbers. In fact those who stray from the crowd are often looked at askance, sometimes mocked and derided. However deviation can be a reclamation of personal power. 
One of the themes that runs through The Handless Maiden is her victimhood, more than once she is treated brutally and the subject of lies and malicious talk that force her into vulnerable exile. It is however not until she acts to save herself (her self in the form of one or sometimes two children) that she is able to make a life that is not so dependent on the goodwill of others. This act happens after she has been thrown out of the sanctuary she briefly found when she was rescued. Exiled and still handless the child that she carries on her back falls into a pool of water and without thinking she reaches for the child and miraculously her hands grow back. After this she is able to meet life as a whole person, the child who was brutalised and cast out and the rescued and then exiled maiden are behind her. Her circumstances may still be impoverished but she now meets them as a whole person able to make decisions of her own and not only the subject of other's will.   
It's no good looking at fairy tales too literally. Hands do not grow back. And for that matter the father's brutality and betrayal may not be so obvious or specific. And stepmothers can be lovely. What i am picking up on within this story is the need to take ownership of our lives and in doing so we meet in ourselves a capacity to grow and be something other than the role we may have had forced upon us previously, in childhood or later. 
I have meandered through this blog and i am trying to find an end point to draw the threads together so that i can tie a knot. I am still working with The Handless Maiden and my grief for Jon is ongoing and Donald Trump seems to be here to stay at least for a while so how do these three strands connect. And what of the story, the possibility of story, which i think is what i really wanted to blog about. 
I think it is story that is the connecting point. The Handless Maiden, Jon, Donald Trump are all stories. Donald Trump is part of a vast collective story and that story varies hugely according to who is telling it. Jon is part of my story, he is also part of a collective story, his family's story, our stories do cross but our crossing points lack grace and are not generous or gentle. Sadly that's how it sometimes goes, there are times when stories conflict. The story of The Handless Maiden, having come through centuries of story-telling and travelled far - from France to Italy to Japan in just my collection - has been distilled, there is variation but the essence of the story is pretty much as is. So it goes perhaps with stories that stand the test of time. 
Perhaps it will be ok for me to come back to a little note of sadness in me for a moment, tho maybe i am being self indulgent.  To come back to my own fairy story. One of the things that is painful to me is that when i die, all that i shared with Jon will die with me, the good, the bad, the beautiful, the awful ... i don't know what i can do about this, i feel a little helpless, maybe this is my handless maiden story, maybe i have to learn now how to reach out to save that which was born out of our union and in so doing regrow my hands and find my new independent self.  

So, I seem to be on a blogging roll, or maybe i just need to get words out of me. I don't know if the words are of worth or not but sometimes just laying them out on a page allows my thoughts to fall into place, or, if not exactly into place, like in "52 card pick up" the act of flicking them out into space at least means they have a moment to fly. 
I've been overthinking, thinking and thinking and thinking, and sometimes that gets a thought to where it needs to be, and sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it gets a thought to where it needs to be but it feels like a long drive without rest-stops and that afterwards the mind is a bit shot and dull. I think maybe that's how i've been feeling. 
Sometimes i wonder if that's how i've always been, thinking, my brain always buzzing with ideas but not always good ideas or ideas that come to anything. And, because before i act on one idea the next pops up and then i'm off on that one, and when that one finds itself at a dead end or somewhere i don't want to be i have to back up and try to find my way back to where i was, or where i wanted to have been, or where it was that the idea or notion went off course or germinated but return is never quite return because the light is different, or the nose, or gathering. 
Today I took a day off thinking. Or rather i stopped trying to nudge or direct my thoughts and let them go where they will. I mean i do that, but i guess, of late, they have been focused on Jon, and then intentionally focused on something else so i don't think about Jon all the time, and then also sometimes other stuff will come up and that will take up my attention, but that gorgeous free flowing space that feels like flight hasn't really happened much of late. There was insane just after Jon died, and now maybe to counterbalance i find myself steering towards sensible reality, sensible is good, it is steady and functional, but where i like to be really is somewhere in between, arms held out wide to help me keep my balance and my feet carefully treading the centre line. 
One of the things with having been so nuts after Jon died is that then it's hard to gauge how sane you are later. Often people who seem super-sane on the outside can feel un-nerving, a bit Stepford,  sort of borderline psychotic in there normalcy. I mean who is normal, what is normal, normal is not the same thing for different people. And normal in the uk seems to depend upon fairly fixed circumstances, like running water, supermarkets, electricity etc take those away and most of us would be stripped back to an inner being which may be decidedly less cute unclothed.  
Yesterday morning i heard a folk singer, apologies i forget her name, being interviewed on radio 4. She spoke about touring with her family; with her parents, who were folk legends, and i think her brother; and how families have a way of relating that is absolutely normal to them, or perhaps more likely to which they are accustomed, but once you've been stuck on a tour bus for 6 months you forget how to relate to the real world and don't know how to talk to people. 
We've probably all been there, in other people's families observing, uncomfortable, working things out, this is their normal but maybe not yours and likely our own family is met similarly by outsiders. Worlds collide. Each one of us is living in our own little world that revolves around us and our way of being, doing, thinking. How we are, who we are may or may not feel absolutely right, or maybe it feels ok but there is some yearning that draws our focus away from our family. Another lover, or an alternative lifestyle that looks more exciting or less exciting than our own, something which seduces our senses away from the everyday get-on-with-it functional reality that is the lot of the living. 
This gets me back to reality, which is one of the things i wanted to blog about, because despite my decision not to think, thinking happens. Well, reality, and time, and i guess normal too are all elements that have strange edges. On the surface they can seem quite fixed, but look closer, begin to explore time, reality or normal, and it becomes obvious that these apparent boundaries can bend and stretch, become tight and constricted or counterwise open and extended. They are not definites except by consensus. And consensus is also not definite because a shift in the make up of the those who create the consensus can change the consensus.
I was thinking when i went for my walk on Jon's birthday how small a life is, how brief a life is on the grand scale that is time, how what seems of such great consequence is not really anything. Life feels easier when i feel small and insignificant. And yet on another level i was thinking yesterday as i was walking home from the art school library how being seen is also important. I think maybe the desire to be seen varies from person to person but that being totally unseen unless you have chosen that course is uncomfortable. I often think that if i could have a super-power being invisible would be a good super-power, but would it ? Would it actually be quite lonely ? And in many ways are all of us going about our day to day mostly as nobodies to the people we meet, therefore more or less unseen. Unseen except by those who love or care for us.
I've been blue-sy this week. This that and the other, stuff causing me sadness and anxiety, and feeling odd after visiting Bungay too, lonely maybe, or just unseen, un-met. Jon met something in me that i had not had met before, i guess it was something he reflected back at me that i didn't know existed until i knew him, and i miss the way he did that. And by the same token i also feel a bit frustrated that he has eaten the past six months of my life up, that sounds odd, i think i'm frustrated with myself for still loving him maybe for not picking myself up and getting on with things, for not moving on, for being slow and not brisk, but also frustrated with myself for losing the something that was special between us, like missing the beat in a dance class and then always being a step behind and unable to find my grace. I've always been terrible at counting. And choreographed lines. Terrible ? Well slow to pick up choreography and often off count. Maybe Jon was very good at leading the dance and so falling in to his rhythm gave me a false sense of my abilities.
And then later on yesterday i was thinking about time again. Thinking about jumping back in time to when Jon and i were good. And to just before he died when i had finished a busy summer and was feeling like i was waiting at the crossroads for something to happen something to guide my way, my "if" time. In hindsight I wonder if i was waiting. Waiting for Jon, not knowingly but deep inside, it is odd that two people noticed my hand oddly shaking in the week or so preceding his death, in fact the second time was the morning of the day he died. The shaking stopped after his death. Did i already say that in a previous blog ? Sometimes things happen and in hindsight they feel like they were more prescient than was realised at the time. 
What if all those moments are all still happening, are still ongoing, all of them, as if they are one moment, even the moments that contradict. So there is Jon alive and well and showing me the flowers in his garden, or smiling and catching me in his arms as i walk through the door of his house, and offering me a cup of tea, eyes light and kind, or maybe i'm in a time before we knew each other, as a young mum, or way back in my childhood, playing in the sandpit, or learning to ride my bicycle, or picking blackberries and then i'm picking blackberries with Jon and making blackberry and apple jam, or crumble, or later after he'd left picking blackberries to dye cloth with. and all those times are one and the same because time is very long and a lifetime is very short so why make so much of it. 
And what if there are other realities. It's a balancing act living between alternative realities. There is the concrete reality which it is helpful to hold on to, concrete reality is accessed through the senses, i see, i hear, i smell, i feel by touch, i feel bodily, i taste.  And then there is less concrete reality that allows us to know that what happened before was once real and tho' it now exists as a back space on a linear scale it is still accessible in the now and still has some ties to concrete reality because the memories are often founded in sensual  and/or emotional experience. And there is the future which is unknown but made real in dreams and projected hopes or fears. Death is a bit of a gate crasher into that party because death steals the dead from the future, their place in the future no longer exists, they may be there but as an ethereal being which is all very nice but not the same as an arm around you or whatever, it easy in grief to wander the path of "if", it's quite a labyrinth, but it's a step out of concrete time, space, reality, it's a sweet, and sometimes a resting sanctuary for a sore heart/mind/body, but it is no way to live. A wraith's existence.
In life there's a fair whack of "suck it up" it doesn't come to everyone in equal measures. We meet ourselves in moments of great joy and great disappointment. In winning and losing. We find the company that keeps us going, we find the company that takes us down, we learn who to trust, who to not trust, who cares, who doesn't. Suck-it-up situations ask us to pick ourselves up, sometimes a helping hand, or guiding hand, makes all the difference. Alone we are vulnerable. We are vulnerable alone in triumph or defeat, and knowing ourselves to be part of one big body system allows us to play a socially co-operative part in the construct that is life. Life is bigger than us. Life is not birth to death it is birth and death, before and after, and all that is. 
I suppose that reality and time both feel quite infinite to me. How can infinite be quite infinite ? I mean infinite is infinite the quite defines the level to which i feel able to take them without totally losing the plot and finding my feet have lost the ground and that i am floating into outer space with only my imagination for company. 
Normal is maybe infinite too but perhaps normal goes inward, or maybe that's just how it feels to me, that normal reins in the imagination demands physical definition, that physicality is cellular, or particle, interaction and as the cells/particles become smaller the inside of infinite becomes apparent. Normal is sweet and comfortable, it sits in habit, but too much sweet and comfortable, too much habit, makes both mind and body flabby and slow. Too much normal can lead to sense of confinement which i guess varies according to how much the normal you are living suits/fits you. So again it's about finding a balance. 
And those balances are ongoing. All the balances are ongoing. The shifts and changes that happen to a lesser or greater extent have to be taken in and assimilated, or allowed to pass, understanding comes with time and practice, it doesn't stay the same because new layers, new stories, new narratives , new understanding supersedes the old. 
Sometimes i wonder what life is all about. I think what the hell am i here for ?  Much of life hurts. And then i think that life just is. That life is about life. That life is life. That it is all ongoing. And that whilst some hurts some too is pure light and brilliant and beautiful and that if the hurt is the sacrifice i make for the bliss it is  a bargain well made.  
I think that lives come together sometimes momentarily and sometimes for longer. That we are made up of scraps of moments, that life is those scraps of moments, each life a scrap of moment. I think maybe that life in the short term is  perhaps about what we do, but maybe more importantly that it is how we do it, how lives touch each other, that what we leave when our bodies part this world is the impression we left, the way we marked our journey through life, the presence we left. 
I wonder if the present is infinite and if maybe our presence too if infinite, if our presence is the air we breathe, in, out, the air we share. I think maybe air is life. 
I always struggle to know how to close my blogs. I guess if my blog was just a journal i'd stop wherever and it would make no odds. But because i put them out it means other people may read them and i want to finish them better than i do. It is something i need to learn. How to stop. In the mean time i will have to end with my threads still trailing. Maybe it is not until all those threads are caught up or cut that the end is finally met. 

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.  

More dreams. A dream about whales and water, and a dream about being late for a maths exam and an adopted baby. My unconscious is clearly asserting itself. In the first dream i was looking out to sea over a cold harbour wall, somewhere close to the arctic circle, in the distance a head popped up, a seal, all eyes and whiskers, then, closer to, a young orca came into the harbour and was swimming, playing, suddenly a great tail emerges and I am nearly caught in it's down thrust as a sperm whale rises up into the air and then plummets back into the water and swims back out to the ocean beyond. A hunter, a man, wants to kill the whale, he kills the orca and hides in it's skin with a gun waiting to kill the bigger whale, he craves the meat of the whale. I only want ice-cream, but the ices the vendor sells are strange, just blocks of flavoured ice with things floating in the ice. I settle for one with pecans in it. Lord only knows what this dream means. 
And then later in the night, after a dream i remember having but of which i can recall no details, i am in another dream, at school as a teenager/young person, i have an exam to sit but i go home first and my neighbours have just adopted a baby just born, we are thinking about the baby and i am late for my exam. Again the meaning is unclear. 
Dreams are a visual pleasure, a living cinema. I have been thinking much about fairy tales since the beginning of the year. A personal project that has allowed me to focus on something other than Jon's death. Before studying my long held desire was to illustrate fairy tales which are a passion of mine. And after Jon's death i had an image of a book in my head, my head was so lodged in the wilderness at that time i do not know if the image came to me when i was awake or asleep but it has stuck. Recently my calling has been to return to the realm of faerie to take that journey and to see where it leads. My frustration is that i am fairly awful at drawing, that the pictures i have in my head when i try to put them to paper come out weak and loose. 
I know that this is often how things start, that first steps can be discouraging and it is at this point that I am wont to give up, to go back to safer territory, places that i know, where i feel more secure. But what is security if it holds me back from where/who i want to be ? A tether. A prison. A known. But is the known really more fixed than the unknown ? And stepping into the unknown creates a chance to know more. And what, if not knowing more, am i here for ?
So here it is. If, over the next few months i post lame scribbles as i try to illustrate the fairy tales i grew up with and have collected for the whole of my life, please be kind, please know that i am trying, please know that if my footsteps meander, are tentative, or leave negative imprint they are no more than any other "hero/heroine" stepping out from their safe space. 
Since January I have read and researched and doodled work on The Three Billy Goats Gruff, Aladdin's Lamp, Ali Baba and the Forty Theives, The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast. There are five because for February i accidentally wrote down Aladdin and the Forty Theives which meant i had two stories in that month. 
Today I begin with Puss in Boots. Thus far my exploration into these stories has been both art play and meditative. The meditations are paths into the deep that afford me access to my own relationship to the characters, the places, the happenings. By building a relationship with the tale within i am finding out how i meet the beast in me, or the beauty, what i am feeling when i sell my voice to the sea witch in return for legs and the chance to love and be loved by the prince I have given my heart to, I have met with the clever slave-girl who saves Ali Baba, and the princess in Aladdin who also by using her wit saves both herself and Aladdin, and considered the troll and the goats in The Billy Goats Gruff, and the bridge that parts the goats from the field of their dreams. 
Having just spent two months with fairy tales in which the main protagonist is female it will be interesting to take to the road with a male character and his side kick. Is the side kick the male character or is it the cat ? After a day spent yesterday with my good friend, artist and illustrator  Janet Cranness, looking at her work I am setting out on this month's story filled with inspiration and ideas about how to make work that is more finished. I don't know if i will accomplish that but i will try, and i will keep trying because trying is one step forward and one step forward leads to the next step forward and who knows where those steps will lead.