It would be a strange diary if i didn't write about the death of my little cat Comfrey. On thursday October 8th i had to take him to the vets to be put to sleep. He was a brilliant cat and i loved him. They say its the final act of kindness we do for our pets, and maybe it is or maybe it isn't, but it never feels good and the memory of it never feels good. But seeing him in pain and knowing that death comes to only a few of us easily i made the call. Archie took me there because i don't have a car and i didn't want to carry his poor tired little body in a cage in the rain to his final moments and i wanted to be able to cuddle him home. Amis came over before and we cried and he said goodbye, and Rich video called him on wednesday and Jessamy saw him on sunday which was the day when it became clear that he wasn't going to get well again. I spoke to the vet, Tom, on tuesday in a phone consultation he had seen him a couple of times over the summer so he knew his condition and he had been his vet for the past four years. i made the decision that evening knowing it was the best course, it hurt. It feels like betrayal not mercy, but not doing it also feels like betrayal not mercy. 

Comfrey had been ill in January and it didn't seem like he had long to go then but he made a recovery. From then i knew really that i was on borrowed time with him counting each day as a blessing but also wondering if in the morning i'd wake to find him dead, everyday my heart would leap with joy when i came downstairs and was greeted by a little mew or if he came upstairs to wake me. 

The thing with animal friendships is that they are so innocent. I guess being different creatures we are not part of their politics and they are not part of ours. The connection is special if you love them. Watching him go downhill i was struck by the courage of old things which is different to the courage of youth. To be in a body that is letting you down and to keep going, keeping letting good in is no mean feat. 

I don't know how much of this is diary, how much blog, how much me thinking out loud but Comfrey was my Covid companion so it seems right he should have special mention in my Covid Diary. Rest in Peace little one. You were brilliant.  

Dedicated to Comfrey died October 8th 2020

October 10th 2020

Covid19 Diaries - part 3

Also thanks to Archie & Amis for helping me bury him.

....

And in response to stained glass artist Sophie Hussain's kind comments on his facebook obituary

"Sophie Hussain xx he runs past me in the garden when i go out in the dark to check for foxes so he knows it is safe ... is on the wall coming back from a roam ... is in his tiny old poor sad body on his bed in the hall ... is lithe and young and re-meeting his mummy who i had to have put to sleep in summer 2016 ... i hope she is looking after him ... he is a kitten in my son Richard's base drum bashing the skin with his paws ... and snubbing Amis on his way home from a night shift in the small hours ... he is exploring the house and the garden we used to stay in on holiday ... he'll always be my boy xxx"

SNU. ASU2. This is where my SNU and ASU2 projects begin to physically bridge. This old work used as objects takes me into the story of Jesus' journey to the cross simply because one of the models is Mary and child. If  Jesus' story is used as an allegorical tale then there is not really so much space between my personal history, the Jesus story or anyone else's story. The cross is the life you carry on your back and it is a lighter or heavier burden dependent on those you meet, the way that you came to that cross, and how long you have felt its weight on your shoulders. 
The models are human forms too, and perhaps that is also pertinent. The need to see outside of oneself to understand that our needs do not stand alone, they do not stand alone, and covid19 is giving us chance to see that, to understand that we as people do not stand alone, and we as a species do not stand alone. I have always baulked at the notion that man holds dominion over this earth that supposedly Adam was given in the garden of Eden, i feel that man has abused that gift. Again covid19 is letting us know that man does not have dominion. 
In older paintings of the crucifixion there is often a skull placed at the base of the cross, this is Adams skull and represents the banishment of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden. Jesus' death is meant to assuage the sins of the fathers and thereby allow passage back to the garden of Eden. Is there something we can learn from this whether we are christian or not (i am not). I'd add in here too the suffering of the two women left to grieve, his mother and his companion, their suffering should not be brushed aside. Their grief. Their pain. I wonder if the dead also suffer after death or if it is only the living, i guess i won't know till i die myself.
But here, the point where the SNU and ASU2 meet is with these models, the originals slightly bigger and the 3d models with scaffolding and base left intact. The hold between the two projects and perhaps any two living entities is understanding and compassion. 

It would be a bit daft not to mention covid 19 aka the corona virus in this blog. I am in England and it has begun to take lives and there is fear in the air. We saw China lock down Wuhan and we thought this is a Chinese thing, then it shifted to Singapore and we thought it's an Asian thing. Then it hit Italy and still it felt like something that happened to other people. Oh the innocence. Oh the wilful ignorance. 
A week ago when i was writing my blog i was blithering about this and that, all relevant then, all relevant now, but also very yesterday. To coin a phrase "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away". Britain is discovering who it is in crisis. Each of us is discovering who we are when trouble hits the collective. My university is apparently still opening on Monday. Academics are now teaching online - I imagine this will feel weird - but technicians are required to come in as the workshops will be open. Is this right ? I guess that what we see as all but essential workers pull in is who is essential and who isn't. I went in to uni on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday last week as i had things i wanted to finish or at least saw off their sprues and pouring cups so that i could take them home. I also had a few print things i wanted to do. On Monday I questioned my decision but also had shopping etc to do, by Thursday it began to feel really socially irresponsible to be doing things that were not essential and so from Thursday evening i have seen and spoken face to face with no-one. 
Ordinarily this kind of solitude would be something of a treat. I am reclusive by nature. I need solitude as much as, maybe more than, i need company. But in the current atmosphere its a little scary. Rough voices on the street outside on Friday evening remind me that not everyone has pulled in. Friday was supposed to be the last day of trading for pubs, restaurants and bars. I gather that many were packed. Of course they were. 
Of course they were ? Why ? Because for some the response to the proximity of Death is to want to go out in flames, do or die, i live to live let Death take me if he can. Why is Death male ? Is Death male ? I am shyer of his embrace. In retreat i worry that i have a temperature, is that a tickling cough. Will I die ? Am i strong enough to beat the thing that threatens my, and others, existence. 
It is odd to be so close to a disease that may or may not be biblical but surely is a reminder that many years ago disease took more of us than most of us can remember, measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis all common enough, my grandfather's parents died of TB leaving him an orphan at 17. Hard to imagine but TB has become a hidden killer in recent times, some strains resistant to antibiotics. Please fact check me on this. 
Death has stalked me all this year, in the form of grief for Jon, yes years gone now, but not forgotten and still loved for better for worse. And also poor Jesus sentenced to death by crucifixion, carrying the bloody cross to the site of his execution. This week i have been dying on my cross, it can surely only get better from there. Stations 13 and 14 are "Jesus is taken down from the cross" and "Jesus is laid in the tomb respectively". The resurrection is optional. I have cut out 14 pieces of copper and covered them in hard ground and i hope to scratch out marks on these over Easter. But whether i do the resurrection will depend i guess on whether the resurrection feels pertinent. 
The Easter story is a potent tale. It is one man, calling out for justice, willing to carry the sins of the world on his shoulders, to die for that world. Make no mistake this is a hero. No wonder the story has lasted. Its a shame he has too often been poorly represented by his priests and worshippers. 
One of the things about stories that last is that they resonate. They resonate with a part of us. My blogs about grief and Jon have had more hits because people relate to the story. Lovers torn apart, death, grief, all these things are invested in our body memory. If we have never loved, we may long for love, if we have loved we may feel another's pain, if we are a wretch we may scorn love and the ring is different but the call to our hearts path is still clear. 
Here i am blogging, let me say its my reflective journal. Because i went in to uni last week i have lots of bronze things to finish at home, they would have been finished amateurly even with Jim's help and guidance in the workshop at home their finish will be even less well executed but they are symbols of my trying. I doubt that it will be clear how much work i have put in in a digital portfolio. That's sad but not the end of the world. This term has been hard it has taken resolve and determination to carry on. There have been falls and i have had to get back up. But what i know is that in my body like invisible ink i carry the work i have done. This i think is all we can ever take out of life that which we have done is ours to bear. 
I think its awful that Jesus had to carry the sins of the world. I think if God was his father and made him do that then he was an awful father. I think that each of us must carry the weight of our being. Not in the manner that Thatcher's selfish-me-first cult decrees but as our belonging, as our knowing that that which we are is the trace that we leave behind when we die and to be mindful of the trace we leave for it makes a difference. 

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. 

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. 

I keep writing and writing and writing, here and elsewhere, casting my words out as a thread so that if i get too far lost in the labyrinth that is my mind i have some chance of finding my way out. 
Over the past few days i have begun using movement as a way to explore space. I think i am practicing Butoh, but i don't know much about Butoh, i haven't read or studied the concepts or form, so maybe i'm just moving from what i have learned in life to date. I am negotiating a course between the shadow of death and the ephemeral brilliance of life. 
Casting my line back into my past, as i seek to recall every detail of my life with Jon, i am finding myself up against older memories, shoved away, out back. As i meet these memories through movement my body expands or contracts to meet or evade them. 
It is curious exploration because when i met Jon i loved him so much i let go of my life before him, it was my past, he was my now and, in my dreams, my future. But now he is dead. And however i eventually take in his death his living form will never take part in my todays, or tomorrows. 
It is an odd thing grieving an ex. This is my experience and i can't speak for anyone else but there's an element of shame. That a man who left you is still causing you so much pain marks you out as a fool, a Miss Havisham, a Corpse Bride. An ordinary person would have moved on, forgotten, or at least have enough sense to disguise their feelings. But no, there you are sitting among the remains of your wedding feast, shabby in your wedding gown forever caught in the moment when your dreams got broken. Stuck in limbo. Why didn't you move on ? Why didn't i move on ? What a loser ..
Now, i have no choice, i know how much i loved him because my response when i learned of his dying was so visceral, so wholly unadulterated by decorum, is still so visceral and not yet trapped by manners and/or common need. But now i have no choice but to let go. We will not ever find ourselves face to face in a cafe, we will not ever have the chance to say sorry, to make good mistakes, to look each other in the eye and know that whatever has happened something good still runs between us, the stream of light that courses between two who know and love each other in all their good and bad, as friends of the heart. We will not ever have that heart stopping unexpected encounter walking down the street, at an airport or station, even on a beach that i'd hoped for. I will not ever see him again. I may still feel connected. I do. But he is gone. He is split into pieces. The piece that lives in me. The pieces that live in anyone else who cares to remember him.
Away from Jon, or maybe looking at the air around him. I return to my above mentioned movement practice and also the black and white stones of the previous blog. 
After some days of active movement, yesterday i felt plugged up and glue-y, my head had been chock full of blistering thoughts all day and a part of me didn't want to give myself my hour of movement last night. I was clock watching through the hour, make of that what you will, and my body was leaden. There is an urge to fight through the weight and obligation of a heavy body with fire and forge-through intention but i just didn't have it in me, and being still with my discomfort felt more honest, so i was still and then moved just a little and was still, and then moved just a little, and so on, for a full hour. And here a body memory would flick up like a fish flipping across mud and my body would go with that memory until it met water or sank back into the mud. 
Just as my hour passed, i bind myself to an hour to give myself boundary. I found myself back with my stones. After i blogged on friday, i thought it is interesting to me that the black stone is always in my right hand and the white in my left. I wondered how it would be if i changed them from one hand to the other. In the space set up by the hour before i was able to meet this idea as physical possibility; to hold out my palms with an imaginary stone in each and to pass those stones into the other hand and feel them differently as my more passive hand held the dark stone and my more active hand held the light. After a while and some contemplation i put the stones down to rest and felt the weight of my empty hands held out before me. 
In a life that leads forward, there is no going back. Who knows if this life is the only life led but it is the life i think most us buy into. So only in my imagination can i imagine where the what ifs might have led, with Jon, or any other consolidating or pivotal factor in my life. Imagination is a free spirit and can run where it will but the body i am in is an ageing thing. If nothing else the death of someone much loved brings home the transitory nature of this gift we are given at birth, which is to live, and to live to our fullest until the day we die. Carpe diem.