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.