Oh hello blog, i may have neglected you as a way to get words out of me, as a way to understand how  the world feels to me. There are lots of ways to communicate and the how and the with who makes a difference. My notebooks are private, my blog obviously isn't. Emails may or may not be. Conversations are as private as the participants allow.
Before Jon died in 2017 we wrote emails to each other for about two years, back and forth conversations most days, often inconsequential chit chat, sometimes deeper stuff. When he died i missed his voice on the other end, the response, the return. I carried on writing emails for months, occasionally still i will email tho' i know he won't answer. But emailing dead-Jon feels unprivate, it's not me talking to him, it's me talking to an empty space, or a space that is Jon in my head, and i don't know if other people occupy that empty space, if i send him an email does it get seen by people who are not him the never-will-receive intended receiver. I guess we can never know these things. 
Privacy is something held within. People are more or less private it's a personal choice. As soon as a word is uttered or written to another it ceases to be private. Though there are people who hold our words private, counsellors, therapists and if we are lucky a few close friends we can trust with our secrets. 
Women who have been pregnant will know the super-secret wonder of a child forming in our wombs in the weeks before we tell anyone just in case the baby doesn't stick. I am lucky i have not had a child i needed to lose, or lost a child before it could live, how it feels to live with those feelings i will never know. There are feelings that are hard to express, that cannot be given voice, or which are terribly hard to voice. Those feelings become secrets.
Secrets can be good, can be great, but not always, some secrets are terrible. Holding feelings in can feel like safety but always holding is difficult and bad feelings held in and not allowed expression can become dreadful, unbearable. 
We are living in a strange political climate at the moment and some of the big frontsmen appear to be terribly damaged to the point of psychosis. When deep emotional wounds are left to fester within they may find outlet in cruel language and acts.  Or else terrible unfathomable depression. I know from my own bad self that mostly it is driven by things that cause me pain, feeling worthless, feeling rejected, feeling wrong. 
What is a bad self ? Why would i think part of myself is bad ? Is my bad self worse for being witnessed or worse for being shoved away, forced into submission and given no release, no breath, no light. When Jon died i was insane with grief, books and blogs say it's not insanity but it felt like insanity, insanity caused by grief but definitely not straight, not common place everyday normal. I think tho that maybe being insane with grief when someone you love deeply dies is an appropriate response so maybe that's why the books and blogs etc say it isn't insane. They also, all of them, state clearly that burying grief will not help, that each of us must live it as we need. 
I felt at the time that Jon's family would have liked me to grieve less, not for my sake, but theirs. Go away, be neat and tidy and out of the way, they brushed me away like rubbish and still that hurts and i don't know quite what to do with that hurt as over the past year and a half i have slowly recovered my sensibilities and begun to occupy my now and point my gaze to what next instead of what was or what could, or might, have been. 
Because what was still occupies space in me, and what is connects to what was, and what will be meets the was in the is. My lived experience with Jon was intense and marked me so of course it is still part of my now but i know that it is also done, that he is dead and who he was with me lives only in me. That won't be how it is for everyone grieving i think because often grief is shared with others who loved and cared for the deceased. But still each relationship is unique and i guess that's why mourning is such a lonely journey. 
For me it has been a kind of mapping process. A connecting of memories, places, moments, books, music .... and feelings. Feelings i think are the most personal of all our memories, I might see a mimosa tree for instance and it will take me back to the place we stayed in Italy where there were several flowering but as I fly back to that time i am at once again in the feeling of that holiday. I am in my now seeing a mimosa tree, but i am also in my past with Jon, on the platform of the deserted station, finding a boar's skull, looking over a bridge at the rubbish clogging the river, seeing Naples far in the distance from our bedroom window, exploring the roads and pathways around the village we were staying close by to, and so on. I am also in the future knowing that what is done is done and cannot be undone, that flights of fancy, what ifs, are strolls within my imagination and will never be reality but that my path keeps going. 
In that moment when i see a mimosa tree (other memory joggers are available) time meets time. And time meeting time is a place. A place in me. A cave within a labyrinth of caves. 
Ever since i was a child i've been a walker. There are lots of types of walker and i think maybe the way a person walks maybe matches their thought process. I'm a wanderer, maybe a roamer, i'm not a hiker, i'm mostly a solitary walker, there isn't a right way or wrong way to walk but different types of walker need different types of journey fellows if they choose to walk in company. 
When i was a child i used to roam the paths and roads and lanes around our home. We lived next to some water meadows and close by was a clay-pit where fishermen would sit in the gloomy shadows surrounded by midges in summer, once a pike stared up out of the water, it's head the head of a monster, still remembered, another memory that sits within my labyrinth of caves along with the gorgeous gloopy threads of toadspawn and the light on the water and the mud gap in the hedge that was how to get to the pool.  
I loved walking with Jon. Right from the beginning of our relationship it was something we shared. He took me to the paths at the back of his housing estate and the housing estate where his mother lived. We wandered together from word go. In many ways our wanderings were like the wanderings of two children. Two children roaming free in a beautiful garden world, our own garden of Eden.  Innocent and carefree we stopped to look at bugs and flowers, to listen to birds, got lost together and found our way out of being lost together. We learned to read maps together. I learned how to draw a map inside my body by treading paths, linking places together until i could draw them in my head. This is a practise i continued to do after Jon and I broke up and which i have found is a sanctuary process since he died. 
I apologise for going on about Jon, he was someone i loved, he wasn't perfect, and i could have grieved less if i had loved him less, as maybe i should have done, i would have grieved less but love is what it is, it's a feeling given free-ly not a creative accountancy game where you hope to get more than you give, tho i think maybe well balanced books make for easier relationships. 
When i was doing the sculpture trail in 2017 (blogs about this are from around about this time of the year in 2017) the area around the trail was unfamiliar. My friend David and I had a little explore and some of the places around the trail we'd visited before because he had family roots in that area and so we'd looked at Heckingham church and Hales church and walked around Loddon a little. My commute to the trail is longish but lovely. I catch a bus from Norwich to the road that leads up to and past Hales Church and i walk from there to the site, the walk takes about 40 minutes, i often see deer and hare and buzzards, some of it is grassy paths some of it is quiet roads, in good weather it's gorgeous. In 2017 i was my sculpture so my day was that, it was an odd enlightening experience, a chance to know how it felt to be seen being. It's all in previous blogs so i won't go on except to say that every time i walked to the trail i passed a crossroads. I came from one direction and took the turn to the right but the roads straight on and left called to me. Always i planned to go back to explore them and it is this that i've done as part of my research for this years trail piece.
Over the course of the past year i've been exploring the roads and ways around the trail site, building a new network of experienced wandering around my historical self. The first walk i took 4 deer crossed the road once, twice, three times, four times, i felt my knees buckle and my self crumble it was a moment i would have shared with Jon and weirdly at the moment i broke i felt his arms around me and his voice saying "it's alright, i'm here, i'm here"  i don't care if that seems mad it was my experience and it's mapped on that road and so i know that even tho he is gone forever as a body the feeling of him is always there if and as and when he is needed/wanted and maybe sometimes when he isn't wanted. 
My piece for the sculpture trail is giving me head issues at the moment because it isn't pretty. And it isn't clever. And maybe anyone could do what i am doing. In fact, yes, anyone could do what I'm doing.  I asked for a cave space within the shrubs at the end of the garden and have been gifted a beautiful space. I am wrapping the network of branches around the space, the space that is the cave, the inside of the cave. I want the branches to feel like the walls of a cave. I want them to feel like chalk lines marking out the paths that lead to the cave. 
Just after Jon and I split up in 2013 after my degree had finished and he had left for Gozo i went on a strange walking holiday in the Dordogne with a group of people i didn't know well. I'd been told about the trip by a woman whose work i'd admired in the degree show, i'd got in touch with her, we'd met for a cup of tea, we talked about walking, she told me about the trip, i got in touch with the man who was leading the trip, someone had bailed so there was one space in the minibus which i decided to take. It was a trip to walk and look at Lascaux amongst other caves with paintings and carvings and I'd wanted to see Lascaux for some years so it was sensible to go and i needed to pick myself up and get on with life after the shock of being dumped just when i thought Jon and I would be adventuring together. 
The trip to the caves was a beginning and ending, beginnings and endings belong together, sometimes they overlap and sometimes their meeting is marked by a sliver of thin air. Jon and I emailed semi-courteously for a while pretending to be civilised until my yoga teacher lent me the "Fuck It" book  and i decided that whilst he was quite within his rights to leave me neither he or his horrible family could tell me what to feel and if i still loved him, goddamn it (or fuck it) i was going to let myself love him. I knew i was supposed to behave, to accept rejection politely, to let him go without making a fuss but i decided to let my wild grow instead because it felt honest, because it felt good and i grew out my box, was unruly and thorny, gained mass and flowered and i'm glad i did. 
Oh, i must have needed to get that out.
I am talking about caves. I am talking about visiting caves and caves inside of me and the inside of the tree cave that i've been given to draw the map of the territory i've been walking this past year, this past two years, ten years, life. Inside my cave are my memories, my memories of Jon and the part of our lives we spent together, also my memories of other people, places, times, moments. Because inside of each of us i think is a cave, at least one cave, in which time and space and passage of time and presence all meet together in a place that is called Still.