keep going

I know both. So do you. So does everyone. The tangle wood clutches, trips, confounds, all of that tiddleypom. That’s on the outside of us. It’s in the running, the hiding, the defending, the fear, the confinements. Wherever we walk, we are wary of potential fetters. Those of us concomitant with endless tangle woods may well be ready for the twist and fist and the damn roots that grow sideways and strong as a boxer’s biceps, but even we can be felled. The thing is to learn how to fall. I have learned this, in my mind, anyway. Don’t fall flat, if possible. Don’t reach out arms to defend a fall. Roll. Learn to roll. I have experimented with this, in my mind. I watch how rolling fallers roll and thought wow. Pretty much. That twist away from a frontal stramash, impressive. Takes courage. Are there classes?

So, this damn tangle wood. I thought I knew it, but it denses itself in my not-looking days, growing thixotropic, unwilling to deconstruct, even for me, a long serving member. So rude. And, faced with that regrowth whilst I was busy not growing at all, scoots me to scuttlebutt thinking. I should, I could, I ought to have, I might have. Old voices, judgmental. I reside with Well, I didn’t. Not great. It feels me like the runt puppy or the also ran at a race meet. Or, better, the second son, the second daughter in those days when second really meant invisible and unimportant. It bemuses me that such complete and absolute nonsense yet infects some. It does, including me. This is Scuttlebutt.

Scuttlebutt. Inner talk, gossip. Outer gossip. Nothing positive about it. There are too many shoulds and coulds and didn’ts, too many chances to tangle a human doing the best they can, no matter circumstance, no matter judgement, no matter history. Keep going, that’s I tell myself. At least the tangle wood has no malicious intent.

The Sadness has come to visit. I’ve felt it all week long. At first, I berate myself, tell myself that my inner talk needs a thwack on the butt and a strong invitation to leave. But that doesn’t work. I busy myself with small chores, checking them off my check list, as if I was an early wife with no clue what to do next. But the small chores do not fill the aching black hole, nor do they last very long. I am efficient in my tasking skills and they are all completed by 10am. Good lord, now what? I watch my hands as they thread wool onto a needle, my fingers gnarled as old oak limbs but still they know their way. I rise from my sewing chair and walk through to the kitchen. I could cook something but don’t want to; I could change the sheets but I just did that; I could sweep the floor of pepper brown larch needles that come in without invitation and all the Autumn time. I could. I could. But with the Sadness heavy on my shoulders, as if I was carrying boulders in a rucksack, I am bent down, weary of the weight.

So, what to do? I ask this out loud and rather aggressively into a nothing space, empty and somehow consuming. The Sadness says not one word. Okay, I rise, swing around and face the nothing that is definitely Something. What do you say I should do? Standing there, uncomfortable and weighed down, I feel foolish and it’s not because I am talking to nothing. I smell the metal air and notice the lack of geranium fragrance within the sunroom. I swing round to them. Where did you go? I ask the salmon pink blooms, still salmon pink blooming even now. They just look at me and continue blooming. I do not know what to do with this Sadness, I confess. Just keep going, comes to mind and those are wise words indeed. Be thankful for everything. What? I interrupt rudely. Everything? Even the Sadness?

Well, yes, even the Sadness, because if you keep batting it away when it comes, it will just come back again. In fact it will come back again whatever fixing you fix, whatever you do because you are grieving and there is no end to that state of being. Just think, the voice goes on, is there ever a way to rub out a life, to pretend, now that life is gone, you can just forget all shared history? Oh, well, no, maybe not. I sit with a cup of tea and try not to think because thinking is just white noise in my head, no, not white noise, not ambient, but sharp needles of thought, of memories, switched and twitched and foundering on the rocks of my Now, my silent now, my empty now. Metallica sort of thoughts. I shake my head to clear it but that doesn’t clear my heart and as my head comes back to base, the thoughts scurry back in like ants when level re-levels. All week my wee dog has noticed. She follows me everywhere, looking up, those chestnut eyes wide and questioning. Her normal distant behaviour has changed. She comes to bed when I do and watches me from the floor until I flip the light. I can’t explain her intelligence but I am glad of it, nonetheless.

I walk out, me and the watching dog, in between rain showers, a short one today, too tired with all those boulders on my back. Then I shower and change my frocks. Now, this is a weird one. Showering, for me, symbolises change, as does the frock thing. It betters me, sloughing off old skin, old thoughts, old grief, old frocks. I come home to a warm fire and a darkling sky. I watch the garden fade into night and find a new sense of peace. I am accepting the Sadness. Sit down with me, I say. Welcome. I lay down the boulders and they turn to dust. I decide to let it be, whatever it and be means. I don’t need to understand, nor explain. This evening I think. There are those who just watched their loved one die. I look back up the track I have already walked, knowing they are out there right now, at the beginning. And, although I am thankful I am further into the wilderness, I can turn around to see them coming and I can smile and lift some light, saying Keep Going my friend. Keep Going.