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.