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.