Himself is Home

Himself is home. And not working nights, which is not home, as far as I`m concerned.

Let the normal times begin for the first time since February.

For a while at least!!

Hurrah.

Hoping for a white hot summer

It’s after eight pm and it’s still thirty degrees. Even though it’s only June.

Everyone is hoping this will be one of those summers. We haven’t had one for a while.

The first summer I was here was one of those summers. Endless. Hot. A constant glare of white light pouring down from a cerulean sky; so white that it washed some of the green out of the landscape, but not too much.

There was a day in August that we spent at Bear Cove and the sun was so white it felt like a wide-as-the-sky laser that burned every bit of physical pain and mental regret in my body right out of it.

It was so bright that day that the sea was pure silver and the spruce trees on the shore were pure black. The stones on the beach were cool under my feet, but they seemed to be made of glass, reflecting the sky back on itself.

It was so bright that from about four feet in front of me, I could only see down a sort of tunnel of light.

The sun did all this to me all day without burning my skin. But it burned every unnecessary thought in my head right out of it for about three months.

And when the sun went down and I started feeling a little chilly, Himself and the other guys there built a bonfire that could be seen from Grand Manaan across the Bay of Fundy.

That day I decided that I needed to live in this place where the heat and light could actually transport me out of my body. And sitting at the fire could centre me again.

Every year since then I have looked forward to that day in August as a kind of mental resurrection, a sloughing off of all the crappy little physical and psychic nagging aches and pains picked up in the course of a year.

Bear Cove is a kind of pilgrimage. Of the type I used to do to Mount Brandon.

I start thinking about it at Easter, when I should be walking Mount Brandon.

Last year we didn’t really get one of those days.

We went to Bear Cove, but we didn’t spend the night there, and Himself was so tired he fell asleep on a rock at eight o’clock. But although I was disappointed at the time, it turned out that we didn’t really need it because we were getting married and that was the day that carried us through the winter this time.

But this year, it’s coming.

It has to. If I don’t have a Bear Cove day this summer, I will not be able to get through next winter.

I would like to bring everyone I know to this place on that day so that they can be psychically lasered too.

You can arrive at that place on that day with a lot of anguish in your heart and leave feeling lighter.

I don’t know if it’s because I have spent a lot of time this year on my own, and I am starting to imagine things, but I am starting to get a little floored by all the anguish I feel coming off people at the moment.

A little flattened. But denser. Not lighter, the way it should be.

We had to go to a funeral today. It was the remembrance ceremony for one of our wedding guests. She slipped away far too early.

The vicar spoke about anguish and about how sometimes people are better off letting go of the burden of it if it is too hard to bear. Being the person I am I sat there getting furious about a provincial healthcare system and a culture that allows people to carry that kind of load by themselves in the first place, and wondering why the family had to pick up a new load of anguish now that will be equally ignored by our society.

Maybe I am just imagining things. But from where I’m sitting I see people who are carrying unbearable loads of sadness, stress or grief, people who are sick and expected to embrace wires and tubes and machines and all kinds of technologies that they would otherwise ignore just to get better, people who seem to have fallen off my map completely, people who are just suffering quietly, apart from the odd comment on FaceBook, people who can’t stop gnawing at their pain no matter what I say.

All kinds of people.

Good people.

I wish we could all go to Bear Cove on the hottest day of August, and lie in the long damp grass there and let the clover tickle our noses, and feel the heat unknot our bodies, and the sun blind us to what we’ve left behind on the mainland. And then when we are all completely transparent and light as a feather, Himself and I would cook a million lobsters and everyone would sit up and eat them with the juices running down their fingers watching the sun go down over the bay and listening to the whales blowing in the cove.

Just as it got dark, we would work together to gather enough wood to light a fire big enough to speak to each of us of those things in our hearts that we only take out and examine once or twice a year. But because we would be all there together in a circle it would never get too quiet.

And at some point someone who had found their centre again would wander down the beach and haul back the whitened bones of a fallen spruce, and we would lever it onto the flames and watch the sparks rise to the moon, carrying all those unspoken words up to whatever the hell it is up there listening to us.

The moon is up and very bright already, although it is still very light out. It’s a half moon tonight. It feels very near, just above my head.

Cancerian, I know. No sense of where I end and you begin. Near my birthday too. Yes, I know I talk a lot of shite when the moon is near.

But if anguish has made a pass at you right about now, you should come with me this time.

And if you can’t, promise me you’ll find your own Bear Cove this summer.

If we get a good summer this year, it will be because we all need one.

It’s nine thirty now and it’s starting to get dark. The bottle of wine has been opened. The peepers are peeping. The birds are calling goodnight to each other. Someone is tooling around the lake in a motorboat, but quietly. The dog is asleep under my chair. My inmyday list is echoing out into the night, that song that reminds me that I am just a speck in the cosmos.

Time to enumerate my blessings once again.

I don’t let myself stop until it’s completely dark. That way I know how lucky I am.

Solstice post done much better by Jeanette Winterson

She does it so much better than me. link is under the title.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/13/once-upon-a-life-jeanette-winterson

Formatting issues

I can't get the new template to do paragraphs, goddamit.

Or can I.

Heading towards the solstice... then the darknesss

 It’s hard to believe that we are almost at the equinox again.  It’s almost nine o’clock and I am sitting outside (unlike the other equinox) and it is still bright.  It won’t get dark for another hour and even then the last of the light lingers lingers lingers, as if it knows that soon the days will imperceptibly shorten again and it will fight the fight against the dark and lose. For me, the summer solstice is the saddest night of the year.  Ridiculous I know, but I feel it so strongly, the momentary nature of the triumph of light over darkness, before the darkness begins to ascend again. It also annoys me that the best time of the year lightwise is not the best time of the year heatwise.  Many nights you have to go indoors and sit looking at a beautiful evening that is too cold to be out in. Having said that, we have had a wonderful spring, and I have sat out on the deck on many nights, listening to music, or just listening to the birds settling down for the night; waiting for the peepers to start up, although they are fading out now as the heat dries up the muddy holes where they live. I am sitting here on my own of course.  This spring has been unbearably solitary.  Himself had to go to New Brunswick for 'two weeks', I think it was late March or early April. Apart from a couple of weekends, he only got back last night. We had to pretend I was threatening to divorce him to even get that to happen.   His employers don’t seem to think it’s unreasonable to make someone live in a hotel for nine weeks without any notice or consultation.    I think his bosses think I am the psycho from hell, I am always the reason why he can’t work unreasonable hours, or do the salting, or whatever.  Whatever works for himself I reckon.  If I ever meet these guys, I will be the psycho from hell, I am that fed up with their cavalier attitude to their workers.  Anyways, despite the fact that he was finally allowed to come back to Halifax, he is now working night shift at the refinery for the next while and he had to go to work at 6am this morning to do his orientation and then back for 6pm to work a twelve hour shift.  So even though he at least gets to sleep in his own bed and eat at his own table for the foreseeable, I won’t be joining him as I will be at work. Sigh.  At least the dog will be happy. I have spent most of the last few months just getting furiouser and furiouser with the whole capitalist schtick.   How did we let this happen to ourselves?     I know how, I saw The Corporation, I am being rhetorical. How did we let such a stupid fucking system become so dominant?  Why do so many people have to work so hard for so little and some others just muddle along for a bit more, and yet others make an absolute shite of the planet and all its systems and get paid more than anyone else put together? More importantly, how do you get off this bus? Of course, the beauty of it is that once you’re in it, you can’t get out.  So that’s why we ‘let’ it happen.  It’s pretty difficult to make it unhappen when you’re groaning under the weight of a mortgage and a car payment and a couple of kids to put through school, etc. And you’re lucky if that’s all it is. Usually there’s a whole pile of other stuff to pay for too. Anyways, I am rehashing a truth we all have known to be true for a long time.  And currently, I'm furious for all the usual reasons, global financial meltdown, government debt crisis, Gulf oil disaster, etc.  But I am also furious because it is so pervasive now, this ‘to hell with having a moral compass’ attitude that is rampant in capitalism, that it trickles down to the smallest cog in the smallest widget linked to the smallest wheel.  Hence Himself has to go to New Brunswick for months on end whenever ‘they’ feel like it without a penny extra for the turmoil, and I have to work on a rolling three month contract because public opinion wants smaller government. Also I am furious because the only way we have to moderate this is politics and politics is over. Politics is rubbish.  It is moribund.  It is about power and not governance.  Politics is ruled by opinion rather than fact and the people who give the opinions that apparently are all that matter to the politicians (apart from sucking up to big business) are the same ones that roll their eyes and say they’re never voting again... Here’s an idea, boys and girls... Stop doing telephone polls! Anyways, I guess I am grumpy because I never get to see my husband or if I do, we're both too grumpy to do anything.  I have been an obedient, albeit reluctant, capitalist for almost forty years now.  I am getting sick of being taken for granted. So are a lot of other people I think. Unfortunately, they are all joining the Tea Party. I think we should establish a Cabernet Sauvignon party. Much more relaxed and chilled out than tea. Maybe that will be my project for my forties.