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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 07th, 2013

7/5/2013

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The thing about Dorset...

Driving along the A35 in the early morning by a long wall where there's a something-or-other estate with two gigantic arches one of which has a stag on top and the other a lion (Dorset dwellers will probably know where I mean) several thoughts came to me.

The first was that the Spring-new copper beech leaves are stunningly beautiful, rendered to glowing peach sparks by morning sunlight shining through their semi-transparency.

The second was about Dorset and its Tardis like quality.  Maybe it's because there are no motorways through the county or maybe because the few large connurbations are clustered around the edge, leaving what seems like a vast empty interior.  And when you think of vast empty interiors you think of vast continents and perhaps the 19th century European explorers who ventured into these interiors and often did not return.

The continents of America, Africa and Australia, though vastwith wild and majestic landscapes, were of course not empty but inhabited by indigenous peoples and civilisations who had lived and thrived minding their own business for aeons; there were rich natural resources and there were wondrously strange  (to European outsiders anyway) creatures and plants in almost infinite and fantastically coloured variety.  The concept of 'darkest Africa' - Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' is not so much the non-Christian/European (and therefore- to those 19th century explorers - unenlightened) wild interiors of continents, so much as the darkness in our own hearts.   We may think we know some answers but the sum of our knowledge is like a brief and tiny candle - a nightlight - flickering weakly in that great darkness of our vast unknowing.

Anyway - forgetting Livingstone, Stanley et al,  it's pretty much similar with Dorset. As an explorer from outside, you think you know that it's a big empty thinly populated county with not much happening and probably not much culture to speak of.  But then when you start to explore, you realise the county's natural resources are not only the beauty of the landscape but also the creativity of people among other things.  It's thickly populated with tiny villages - Piddles and Puddles and Bournes and Churches - and miniature towns - Bridport, Sherborne, Blandford etc full of dedicated and enthusiastic people making Music and Art as well as Jam and Cakes.

Of course some natives are hostile. Perhaps one can't blame them.  And sometimes the jungle drums beat and what they are saying is a mystery but one suspects it's nothing good.  Moreover, the Tardis-like quality extends  past Space and into Time Travel - sometimes Dorset feels like the Land that Time Forgot.  Yet there's enough beauty here in people and landscapes to encourage and surprise the intrepid explorer.  
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    May 19th

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