Two blogs in a row because the karma thing keeps coming up, my thoughts feel unfinished . And also because my blog serves as one of my notebooks, easily accessible and something i can refer back to, an old fashioned diary i guess. I write in notebooks too and sometimes i'll open one up and come across thoughts written years ago. The other day i found the one i was scribbling my pain into when i first heard that Jon had died, the first weeks when i was obliterated by grief. 
Why bring up grief, and Jon, again ? It's over a year since he died. Shouldn't i be over it now ? Shouldn't i have moved on ? Shouldn't i let go and stop making a fuss ? And of course that sort of is what happens. Life goes on, the absence is not exactly filled but becomes familiar. Tears which were daily are now not so frequent but sometimes, sometimes, grief grasps you by the throat and pushes you against the wall, and all you can do, all i can do is go with it, let myself feel whatever it is that i need to feel. 
There will be triggers of course. The spring weather last week did it, Jon loved those first few days in spring, he'd have been out in his garden with his shirt off in shorts, all hop-skippy in the sunshine. And, before the spring weather, the rugby which he loved. I remember him buying himself an England rugby shirt in the last year we were together, little things like that made him sweetly happy, he wasn't good at treating himself so it was nice when he did. Before i knew Jon rugby meant nothing to me, big blokes running round a field with an H shaped goal and mud was how i saw it. Jon explained it to me a little; and talked about playing rugby at school; and because the six nations was something he loved i loved it too; we'd arrange our weekends around the games he needed/wanted to watch and snuggle up in the warm to watch them together, it was all very cosy, wintry afternoons on his sofa  are cherished memories. 
And see that's how it goes with the missing of someone who is dead. In my head i can go back to those times and that's nice and i am glad to have so many gorgeous moments to crawl back into but it hurts that they are done, that there will never be more, that he can't feel the sun warming his flesh, or the rugby rush of testosterone. 
And so i return to karma. Because maybe that is also what karma is. Maybe it is the traces you leave in another, traces you leave whilst still alive and also after you are gone, after you are dead. 
Way back in the mid eighties when i was first pregnant with my daughter some members of my family were not thrilled. My paternal grandmother sent me a letter saying that she didn't want to see or speak to me again because the child was a bastard, and my aunt wrote suggesting an abortion. People have reasons for doing and saying the things they do and say. I was a feisty nineteen year old with green hair and attitude and no one was telling me what to do so i can't really claim to have been put upon tho' it wasn't the warmest of family welcomes for my daughter. 
But there was one member of my family who responded with extraordinary kindness. And with that kindness she left her mark. That person was my Auntie Leska. Auntie Leska wrote me a letter saying she thought it would be hard but that she was pleased i was keeping the baby. She knitted clothes for my unborn baby, wooly tights with braces in the bright colours i asked for. It meant a lot. Even the arrogant teen that i was knew that i was being shown how to be good. 
Here, this is what i mean about traces and karma. Our lives leave marks, good and bad. Some people leave us bruised or broken, some leave a stain or a scar. Others by their being give hope, make good, make things better. Our memories of those who have marked us is how their karma is carried forward. My Auntie Leska is long dead but what she did, who she was when she knitted my daughters layette made a difference and means she still lives in me as someone who showed me kindness, and my daughter, and maybe my grandchildren too. 
Last summer i went to Wenhaston, Suffolk to see a small art show in the church inspired by an artist called Becker. It was good to see the exhibition, the work gave me food for thought, but i was pleased too to have been drawn to the church because there is a fantastic medieval painting on one wall a part of which has the devil weighing out the dead's souls. Is this perhaps a version of karma ? There it is, the good deeds and the bad. And in the end by your life shall you be known. 
But a life lived looks different from different angles. I am very far from being saintly, when someone pisses me off i will lay curses on them, and hope that life slaps them down. But curses backfire so i try now to hope that people get what they deserve. However this too is unreliable, lovely people get hit with horrible things and horrible people seem to be able to be horrible with impunity. Hashtag Jacob Rhys Mogg for instance.
So that's what i mean about karma being more subtle than my British brain seems to be able to grasp. And i think it's because stories look different depending on your perspective. This i guess is at the root of most conflict. Two people with different ideas of what's right will fight it out, to the death if necessary, if neither one can find it in themselves to see, if only for a moment, the other person's point of view. If both parties are able to step into the other one's shoes then conflict resolution might be easier. The problem would likely be the same but seen through understanding eyes, listened to with understanding ears, felt with a body that recognises the other as equal, maybe then the problem becomes objective rather than subjective. I hope what i've said there is what I mean.
I can talk this talk, we can all talk this talk but conflicting interests are not easy to resolve even if everyone is tired of fighting and longs for peaceful resolution. What am i waffling on about now ? It sounds a bit Brexit-y, but it isn't so much that, what I'm thinking about is how i am struggling to let go of feeling angry with Jon's family, their manners seemed hard when we were together and drove a wedge between us. I have struggled to understand why they were the way they were then, and later why they didn't offer him more help, why they seemingly just let him drink himself to death. 
In the week after Jon died, before i knew he was dead, i was talking to my son who had just come back to England after two years in Singapore, i was saying how the time when i was with Jon was the only time in my life when i'd felt like i'd got it, that i was winning (winning is a word Jon gave me, if i was having a difficult time he would say/text/email me - "are you winning?").  i said how i didn't understand his family. He suggested that maybe Jon and his brother weren't close, as i am not close to my sisters. I guess that could be why. In 2016 after he had been hospitalised a second time I wanted to walk him dry, to get him close to nature which i knew from our time together put a spring in his step, an appetite for life and twinkle in his eye.  But i needed their help, i needed them to be on side. I wonder if they hadn't hated me so much they might have helped, i wonder if he would still be alive but it's neither here nor there because what is is. I guess that is their stain on me and maybe i have left a stain on them. My refusal to give up on the beautiful memories i have of him is perhaps annoying to them, maybe it upsets their story because i tell it from another angle and rather than join the dots they need and want to keep to their story and not connect to mine tho we were together for six years and shared so much. 
That's life isn't it. When Jon and I fell out and it wasn't worth fighting over i'd let hm know i'd given up by saying "hey ho" and i guess that's all i can do with his family, all i can do is say to myself "hey ho" and let go.  

I had not realised it had been so long since i blogged. I see from my posts page that i had an aborted attempt in late January but it stayed as a draft and won't get published. But it's not for lack of thought just lack of clarity of thought. And that may seem laughable as my blogs are usually just a meandering ramble through the inner workings of my mind. 
I have been wondering if that is good enough. I have been wondering if airing my thoughts as if they are of consequence is ok. I have also been conscious that words are one thing, and words are part of my work process, but that words are not my medium i am not a writer or poet, i play with words i do not work with them, maybe i will one day but at the moment my voice in writing has the timbre and crack of a young boy on the edge of adolescence. I have been thinking i should put more pictures in my blog, make it more about my work as an artist. But then where does my work as an artist start and stop. Vocational professions are not the same as sensible jobs that pay the bills. A vocation is something undeniable, whatever you do it calls you back. 
Many years ago i remember having a shiatsu tutorial while i was training. It was a moment when i met one of my edges and as i was walking home i remember thinking "oh no, i have a vocation to be a shiatsu practitioner" and then thinking "damn, now all i'll be able to drink is water, and i'll have to be  more perfect than i want to be" i did not want to be that person, i ran away, stopped training for a few years, refused the vocation. But then my body brought me back, my elbows ached so i went for a shiatsu treatment which inspired me to go back to my shiatsu books and complete my training and then my elbows were fine again. It sounds a bit mystical but i find life follows a truer path if i accept my body as my guide. 
Recently i have been thinking about karma. Now although i have practised yoga for about thirty years and read about other cultures the culture i stem from is white British christian. That's fine. It feels and sounds a bit heavier and more solid and unbending than i want to feel but that's my roots and because of those roots my relationship to the idea of karma can be a bit crime and punishment, eye for an eye, simplistic. My experience of karma is more subtle. I am sure i am not alone amongst the people i know to hope that karma will catch out the people who i feel have wronged me, or, who i feel are wrong per say (people who kill or maim animals, people who preach malevolence and so on) but damn that karma button it doesn't seem to work like that. And i think maybe it doesn't work like that because karma is not so caught up in the instant and my simple animal being is. 
Of course if someone metaphorically bites me i want to bite back but that is reaction not response. If i pause and think around a thing there is almost always a path that brought me and that other into conflict. The conflict may not even be about me, or them. 
The evening i heard that Jon had died my son gave me a book, i was still in innocence having been away and not picked up the email informing me of his death. The book sat on my shelves for over a year, books are like that, they are patient messengers. The book is called Frog by Mo Yan and there's a line it that caught me sharp "Can blood on one's hands never be washed clean ? Can a soul entangled in guilt  never be free ?" those questions seem to relate to karma and the trace we leave behind. 
Now about that vocation to be a shiatsu practitioner, it turns out that i am fine with being a person who mostly "only drinks water" and as regards being perfect that was always an impossible task because believing myself perfect would be the imperfection, perfect is not possible although sometimes for a thin slip of a moment it can feel as if perfection is a thing that we hold in our hands only to know that holding it too often breaks the moment and there's no going back. 
Because there is no going back. "Can blood on one's hands never be washed clean ? Can a soul entangled in guilt  never be free ?" what do you think ? I think that each of us leaves a trail, a tale, although seemingly we might start anew all that we left behind us is there in our wake. 
When i met Jon and fell in love, i took him as a blank page. But that was stupid. He said he was an alcoholic, had been to prison, had slept with his wife's best friend, Auntie S, and so on and so on, but in that blissful whirr that is head over heels in love i let myself believe that that was his past. But our pasts are never our pasts. Our present being may ameliorate the wrongs we have done another but they don't undo the wrong. And everyone gets things wrong. 
I remember asking Jon what he did with his daughter when she visited and he said "i couldn't even look after myself let alone a child so she has never visited" talking about the time between his time in prison and the time i knew him. He told me another time about breaking his parole and staying in a hotel and then in the woods before he was caught and it was in those heady weeks when we were getting to know each other and his sinful ways were not an issue because i had a small bucket of sin of my own. But i think now that, of course, that was his tail, his trail, his tale, the story/stories he told me were new to me, but were also lived by those who knew him while they were happening and were likely not good memories. 
What am i getting at ? Karma. Our lives are full of mistakes and the expectation that others will forgive or get over our mistakes is unreasonable, when we wrong another we violate their line. The knack is to try not to do that but life is constant compromise. If I make a mistake that mistake passes into the history of the world. There are many worlds, great and small, and each of our actions has a consequence within a world because not one of us lives in complete isolation. I think it's the consequences that are our karma. 
This is why i say that karma is more subtle than brutal desire for vengeance. Karma keeps going, it keeps going and going and going, it may not be you that reaps the dividend of your ill will or carelessness. See how for instance it is not the generation that has polluted that will bear the brunt of climate change but the generations that are being born now, that it is the children who are speaking out because those who are old have failed to respond with common sense to a real threat to existence.
That is a great example. It happens at lesser scale too. Our family lines are made up of the ancestors who bore us. Our mother's womb and the squit that our fathers invested in our mothers is our birthplace. We are the product of that womb, that squit. They are our inheritance, and more precious than gold, or land, is who we are, what we give to the world in our being. A child conceived and carried to term is witness to the connection it's parents made and bears the karma of that interaction. It comes into the world as a product of that union, carries the essence of it's parent's and their parent's and their parent's quality as it's non-negotiable life spark. 
Oh what ? Am i being preach-y ? I think i am. I think i am saying "be love" "be your best" because being anything other than that will ripple out into the wider world and that wider world will surely be sweeter for the love and the best of you than it will if give it your bad. 
I write, as always, as I think, the punctuation is lousy, please accept apologies, and whether this blog is my good or my bad i can't tell it is only me. Maybe now i need to sit on a rock for a little while and contemplate a little further before i throw more concrete words out into the ether.