To you, you alone I speak now,

Reach out, place hope

Before I end

Which is to say

Before I never was

My vain attempts

At a separate sanctuary

Fumbled

Failed

Only you can hear me, save me,

And I, you.

This past month of September, a difficult, shifting month, has felt like a lost month for me, as if my supply lines of inspiration have been strangled, twist by twist of the faucet.  A dull period of tiredness and anxiety, the two intertwined, disrupted external circumstances meshed with seasonal change and inner, underlying summer fatigue.

And as the perspective returns like it must. with the new stability of a season at peace with itself, strong sunbeams angled on different parts of the walls and paintings, renewed strength, there is a slight, temporary reluctance at first to look back in clear light on the past days, unfulfilled, stunted interactions, moments half-lived, piled unbreathing upon each other.

And though I feel as if I’ve been in flight for days and weeks, unable to land, to look anywhere but beyond, the return is always possible, ready….and no matter how far along a darkened path of conviction I have taken, the return to the start is always only one step backwards, as if the opening of the path has followed along behind the walking of it.

Flight, flight, flight has been the story of this life, the story of things feared, fled and then a return to this clear resting point….and like the albatross, so much more time spent at sea than at rest, just a handful of recollections in a whole life.  And the return is a return to knowing the full size of a day, its length, depth, height…dimensions uncurtailed by thought’s short reach, pretend sight.

And it is a return to the community of things, living and still, around me.  The trees resting in the park today, at ease in their green Sunday dress, the children, the parents, the conversations (“We must have an open dialogue” said one young mother to her husband, as they discussed something important while their child played in the sand…they joked a little later).

The day, three quarters over, feels as if it has been running for a lifetime, a life in a day, mayfly in autumn…I can’t even see the start any longer and still so much more ahead.  There is such a slow progression, a climbing within a falling, a spring within an autumn, and confidence again, for now, in this gait and gaze.

“Not something I’ll ever know” he thought, driving away from the conference centre, around the grassy edges of the empty parking lot, peering over the wheel beneath some untidy bushes that had once been tidy, wondering what it might be like to lie there for a while, inside their little worlds of twigs and stems.

The agility and imaginativeness and even humour that life shows in finding original ways of ensuring that every expectation of mine is not met…this, strangely, is what gives me hope.

If what we are looking at is Life, what is doing the looking can also only be Life.

Raising the backs of your little hands against your eyes
As you accept with fright in your little chest, tears held in
That your Daddy must say goodbye at nursery gates
Turning slightly, half to me, half away,
Turning, learning, feeling a dimension greater than me
A cradling that has held me all these years as it will you
Finding your feet, finding your ground, my boy.

The reason why I will never become anything is because there is nothing new. There is no new. There is no possibility of something new, on the level of living. There is no change. This is the extent. I am forced to accept that, on the level of living, I have not experienced anything new within myself, ever. Only what has always been. There is no new. There is no new.

We all have a spare room within us, a room that is rarely visited but felt all the more strongly because of its unfrequented emptiness.  It matters not whether we know of this spare room nor if we stumble upon it often, rarely or never at all.  It is still there, part of our structure, floor plan.  And inside this spare room, though empty, is where all communication happens.  It is, as if, this spare room is connected to all other spare rooms.  There is an instantaneous joining, a common nothing, stillness.  There is no staircase to this spare room, no obvious passage, but that doesn’t matter.  It is there.

This is as close as you’ll ever get.  There is no closer point.