Tuesday 24 April 2018

a lovely lunch; Bluebell Photoshoot; one year


Hello dear friends!  It's been very, very busy.


On Saturday I went to London to have lunch with some wonderful friends in Blackheath.   P and C always entertain so elegantly, and their garden is amazing.  Since it was warm and beautiful we sat outside...it was so sunny that I had to put a hat and dark glasses on at one point!   The other guests were lovely...my friends always seem to bring together such interesting and articulate people, so the conversation was truly fantastic.  Quality time squared.

I then got back to BiFFO, but on the way had a text from Crissie & family suggesting that we meet at the Middle House in Mayfiel for supper. So we did.  After that,  we came home, and the following morning was the annual bluebell photoshoot .  Here are my two little flowers (granny-burbling warning now in effect)



This is the fourth annual bluebell shot, and it is so very lovely to watch the girls growing up ever more intelligent and bonny.  Here they are with their parents:



And here's one of me with my girls, in a pic photobombed by Dan the Cat:



At noon, we decamped to my favourite pub, the Star Inn in Old Heathfield.  Two pub meals in one weekend may seem a bit much, but we don't often get weather like this.  Here are my beautiful girls.



Then on Monday I was off to London to be interviewed for a programme called The New Orleans Strut, for Resonance FM.  Here's a link which I hope will work:


https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/the-new-orleans-strut-23rd-april-2018/

This was great fun.  L'il Koko, the DJ,  is charming and well-spoken, and we talked about the Southern Gothic and commented on some wonderful New Orleans tracks.

Today, however, has not been an easy day.  My sister died exactly one year ago.  On Sunday, Mariana came over to me and said, 'Where's Sallye?'  I said she was in Heaven.  Mariana, who's a very thoughtful little girl, said, 'I miss her and I love her.'  I replied, with a huge lump in my throat,'So do I, sweetheart.'  How lucky we were to have had those precious days together when she came over for Cristina and Liam's wedding...they were incredibly special.  And how wonderful that she and the girls were able to get to know one another and play together out in the tepee in the garden.  What a mystery it all is...how I would love to believe that consciousness survives in some form after death.  And how I hope she knows just how much we all loved her.

So there I shall leave you, dear friends.  I hope you have am excellent week.

love, Susan x

Monday 2 April 2018

The most special of Easters. Ravens and rebirth.

Good morning dear friends.

In my last post, I alluded to the fact that this was going to be a very special Easter. That may have been the understatement of the century for me.

I've spoken here about my long-lost cousin...long ago, my Mississippi cousin Ruthie was forced by the family to give up her baby for adoption.  Back then, there was such a stigma attached to children conceived Out of Wedlock...I so hate the cruelty of that phrase.  The day after I came home from my sister's funeral last year, I was contacted by someone who, like me, had had his DNA tested, and there was a link.  This was later confirmed by a link with another first cousin.  The place where he was born, and the date, coincided.  I was blown away by it...when I was going through the avalanche of emails when I returned from the funeral, it would have been so easy for me to delete the one from him by mistake.  But I didn't, and thank god for that.

Here's a link to my post from early June 2017:

http://thesalamanderandtheraven.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/amazing-news.html

Since then, we've corresponded a lot.  I'd been haunted for decades with worry about where Ruthie's child might have ended up, whether he'd been adopted by people who were kind to him, or not.  It was a huge relief to hear that he'd been brought up in a loving family by good people, and had made a wonderful life for himself.  So when I heard that he and his family would be visiting London, and when he invited me to have lunch with them in Knightsbridge (which is where they were staying), I was thrilled to bits.

We arranged to meet up by the Tube stop...He has such an extraordinary resemblance to my cousin that I knew that meeting him would be very, very emotional, so thought it would be best for us to meet first and then proceed to the restaurant to meet the rest of the family.  When he walked up, I threw my arms open wide and so did he, and we hugged each other hard...I'd promised him not to blub and not to emote, but I'm afraid my eyes were overflowing with tears.  What an extraordinarily magical and special moment it was.  Ruthie would be very proud of the man her son has become.  We then went on to the restaurant.  His family is amazing.  His wife is lovely...intelligent, charming and kind.  And his daughters are spectacular:  lovely, well-brought up girls with good manners and lively intelligent minds, and so much fun.  We talked about the vile weather, about London and the many things they're planning to do, about politics--one daughter had an anti-Trump badge, which I loved.  In the beginning, I was more than a bit nervous about how it would all go, but they received me with such warmth and kindness.  It was a remarkably special day.

I then headed home (Southeastern Trains, in its infinite wisdom, had scheduled engineering works over the Easter weekend, so there were replacement buses for part of the journey) and collapsed in a heap.  Since then, I've been trying to process it all...some beloved old ghosts, and some haunting sad old stories  are floating in my mind and heart just now.  I've spoken here before about survivor's guilt, which is an old friend of mine.  For years, I was guilt-tripped by different family members  about a) being alive and b) for having a living father who loved me.  And then I felt guilty about the anger that provoked in me, and I've had to work on forgiving, not just them, but myself.   But yesterday, for whatever reason, that guilt and anger has begun to dissolve and slip away, and that is such an extraordinary blessing. 

I wish with all my heart that my cousin, had been there yesterday.  No one can ever replace her, and it would be profoundly wrong for me to ever attempt to do so.  If I did, Ruthie would haunt me, and not in a good way!  But what I can do is try to convey to her son that he was very much loved by both his mother and his grandmother,  and to answer any questions he may have if I'm able to do so.  So we're meeting up later this week, one on one, for lunch.  I did feel such an extraordinary connection from the moment we met.  He and his loved ones will always be part of my family and my tribe, to the extent that they wish to be.  And what a huge blessing that is, and what a gift from the Universe.

Something that is seemingly unrelated, but isn't:  when I was waiting on the platform at Stonegate, I looked up into the trees and saw two nesting ravens:


As regular readers of this blog will know, I love my ravens.  For me they symbolise metamorphosis and the ability to shift between realms, to acknowledge the dark and live there occasionally, and still be able to re-emerge and embrace the light.  Nesting is all about home, and about creating a safe space for a family to grow and thrive.  So when I saw these two and their nest, it had a very special significance for me.

I am now going to chill and read novels with no redeeming literary value whatsoever.  I'd hoped to write some poems, but my heart is overflowing just now, and I fear (borrowing from Wordsworth) that they'd be awash in emotion but lacking in tranquillity.   But I will in time.

Take care, dear friends, and have a great week.The Universe really is full of messages and of magic,  if we let ourselves be open to them, and have eyes to see and ears to hear.


love, Susan xxx

Wednesday 14 February 2018

Vines Pruned! Tiles! Some thoughts on love.

Hello dear friends!

Lots happening.  I've finished pruning the vines! YESSSS!!! But boy is it cold.  I am now having a restorative cup of tea, and am beginning to feel my fingers once again.  I'll probably need to have another go in a week or so just to tidy up any stray tendrils I missed.  But by golly I am determined for my vines not just to grow but to flourish.  One day I would so love to raise a glass of BiFFO Wine to toast you all!

I've also been having fun painting tiles.  There's a project blooming, and I have a cunning plan...All will be revealed in due course.



It's also been a good week for poetry.  This one was published on Marie Lightman's The Writers' Cafe special issue on Love.  Here's a link:


https://thewriterscafemagazine.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/the-writers-cafe-magazine-issue-5-love-music/

but if that doesn't work, here it is:

Petticoats 


At square-dancing classes, under our skirts,
we wore petticoats
made of yards and yards of scratchy net.

We whirled and spun.  Allemand left,
dos-si-dos   swing your partner
fiddles dipped and wailed.

The boys tried their best to hold us tight
but were foiled by acres of lethal ruffle walls.
We were prickly female hedgehogs

encased in frothy chastity, fending them off,
laughing.

I was, I hasten to add, completely rubbish at squaredancing!  But it was great fun...That said, not for any amount of money would I want to return to being a teenager! Oh the shyness and self-consciousness and adolescent agonies...

I've been thinking about love.  Valentine's Day isn't easy for many of us...The absences make themselves felt so strongly.  That's part of what I was trying to say in this poem, 'Equation', published in Contour, edited by the Worcester Poet Laureate Nina Lewis.  Here's a link...do check it out, because there are some amazing poems there by some very fine poets.

  https://issuu.com/ninalewis3/docs/perfect_copy_contour_issue_2_love

but again, just in case, here's my own effort:

Equation

Sooner or later, all loves
end in death,
slope down to disappointment,
fade into distance.

That’s the paradox:
Our capacity to love,
let down barriers, trust,
look into another’s eyes,
find safe haven there

is directly proportional
to our capacity for pain
when love is ripped away.
As we skate on melting ice

the singing in our veins
persuades us loving’s worth the risk
of the abyss, of all the pain

that comes with loss.

Brazilians have a saying:
O amor e eterno enquanto dura
Love is eternal as long as it lasts.

There are so many different ways of looking at love, and there's a lot of bad love about.  So many songs go on about Love Hurts, and so many people are addicted to  heartbreak...It took me such a long time to learn that good love is based (for me at least) on shared interests and priorities, on friendship, on loyalty, on honesty, and on chemistry.  It's also true that love is not so much about flowery rhetoric, but about what people actually do for each other.  When we find The One--and so many never do-- it is the most magical thing ever.  Think Fred and Ginger dancing.  And when we lose them, it rips our heart out.  

The challenge is, I think, not to close down, but to remain open to life.  This is not always easy, and of course I have my ups and downs even now.  Still, there are so many different kinds of love...I am so blessed with the love of my family, both immediate and extended, and my friends, and my animals.   I do believe that the outer world reflects back what we ourselves are, and if we are loving, it does return to us in some form multiplied.  It's so important to focus, not on what we've lost, but on what we once had, and on what we still have now.  At the end of the day, we can either choose to fade into the dark, or decide to embrace the light, and live and live and live.

One final  bit of news: The Salamander and the Raven has had over 100,000 hits!  (100,062 to be exact, in 39 countries).  Astonishing!  Why people log on all over the world, I do not know.  Edith Wharton used to talk about her Community of Spirits, of like-minded friends, and I am so blessed with mine.  Your love and support do keep me going.

On a different, less idyllic note: I now have a FitBit, and the damned thing is buzzing and nagging me to get moving.  So I'm off to walk a bit.  I hope you all have a wonderful Valentine's Day, dear friends.  Hold your loved ones close!  I'm planning to ring my granddaughters' later to give them a Valentine's hug over the phone.Take care,  and see you when I get back from warmer climes.

Happy Valentine's Day!  Love, Susan x