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It was during the dream time. The time when we were suspended between universes, between light and dark, life and death. The time when I saw the falling star and the fox.
 
The world was in semi-sleep and dreaming, but as always with dreams, the dark mares flitted with manes like black water, through consciousness and unconsciousness. Tales of horror and trauma infiltrated those almost silent sunshine days. Echoes of far off battles, corridors and machinery, exhausted running feet, precious breath, the push of the ventilator and the beeping of monitors… the valiant and the dead… yes that was there, even in the quiet of the night and even in our deepest sleep. We were there, and not there.
 
Death waited in the touch and in the breath.
 
I had trouble sleeping. Woke at four each morning with heart pounding, and speeding, circling, go-nowhere thoughts. Fear prowled the room. What if. What if. Guilt blacked out all hope of dawn and made the future dark. I was alive. Did I deserve it. Would it even last? What if. What if. I rose. Made tea. Tried to read. Went to a window and watched the sky to the east and waited. Weeks… months… we were all waiting, so what was one more hour, to sit and watch and wait? We also serve, who only stand. And wait.
 
I thought of the Bristol churches with their watch towers looking eastwards, the faithful watching and waiting for another kind of dawn.
And waited.
And looking eastwards, there it was. My first ever falling star. A lonely Lyrid, falling… falling… briefly a light to our world.  Out there was hope perhaps.
 
As the sky greyed, things took form outside.
 
A moving shadow caught my gaze. It stopped. A glow of white fur under the body and face. Darkly silhouetted ears, inscrutable eyes, and stillness. Our eyes met through glass: the human being, trapped inside, locked in my own darkness and the small fox out there in the dawn. And I heard her, as if she spoke to me … no… not heard… sensed?... a message without words.
 
This is not a dream.
 
There is always hope.

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Pandemic

May 06th, 2013

6/5/2013

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Running to catch up

Apropos of the previous post on Time, there was a sea fog this morning, smothering the silent shore and muffling the lapping waves in a blanket of white stillness.  Walking along the beach was like being on the edge of the world.

My imaginary neighbour Mrs P  (a staunch traditionalist where weather's concerned) has recently declared for the Nth time 'Everything's Upsidedown. You don't know where you are from one minute to the next  - that's a fact.'  

And indeed she has a point.  At the beginning of May, there were still daffodils around and many trees were still bare.  Crocuses apparently went missing completely and are still unaccounted for in some places.  Even now, the feathered birches glisten in the weak morning sunlight with some buds still unfolded.  It's as though Spring, like The White Rabbit in Alice, is running to catch up... 

Scene: the stage is bare except for a tree with no leaves. The lights are low giving an impression of a dull, dank winter's day.  The tree stirs slightly.
Enter Spring, running, breathless and dishevelled clutching a large pocket watch with tea dripping from it: 'Have I missed it?'
Tree: No, but we've missed you. We missed you last year as well. Had hot weather instead. And we missed Summer too.  You need to get your acts together.

But perhaps Mrs P and the tree are being unreasonable. You can't possibly live in these islands and be a traditionalist about weather - unless perhaps you are traditional about the democractic right to drizzle.  

Yet rain didn't come in summer/winter 2011.  And after that we had too much very un-British water falling from the sky  - more monsoon it was than the genteel drizzle we lovingly call our own.  And you only need to juxtapose the quaint paintings of 17th century bonfires on the frozen Thames with the fact that grapevines and lobsters had flourished in the warmer mediaeval centuries, to know that weather and climate are possibly larger and more variable than we can predict - and that really you can't rely on them. 

However the fog-horn is still sounding its melancholy lower B flat across the water.  So in a way perhaps Mrs P is vindicated. We don't know where we are. And - in a sea-fog - that's a fact.



 
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