Clearing (with too many metaphors)

The snow is melting, almost clear this morning after heavy rain, and there’s a mirror-image process in myself.

A break from work usually means travel, so the diversion of a new, or at least less familiar, place stops me plunging deep into the realisation of my own aimlessness and loneliness. This time, I didn’t go away, spent two weeks alone at home – needed the rest, but struggled with the void.

It’s taken a while to see a way out of the resultant fog, but I am, helped no doubt by a rested body. At the centre of the void, at the bottom of the hole, there isn’t nothing, but whatever’s rooted in the heart and survives on its own camel-hump: dreams, beauty, words and the astonishingly determined life-force that close-to-atheists like me cannot explain, but still experience.

The life-force is never stronger than in the face of death, and the death of a friend this week – not less raw and unbelievable for being long expected – makes me feel very sad, but very alive.

So, I guess it’s 'Onward!', as a buddhist monk I know is wont to say with alarming ferocity.