Samhain
All aboard the steamer...
In the engine where the furnace is being stoked.
Suitably scary reading to pass the time to Whitehead...
Self portriat with baby at the Apartment.
Ghin entertains himself with the mobile phone.
Jago and Oisin (Spaceman warrior and Dr Who) spar on our front steps.
It is Halloween. Peter and Oisin are on the Ghost Train. Ghin and i decided to forsake the steamer and take to the Apartment where we repaired for a lunch of bangers and mash with a glass of wine. It was very civilised. Prior to this, i had gone running - one full hour's worth. And then Peter went for his meditation. They plan to go to W5 after this. Such is the timbre of our Sunday this week.
The clocks went back today at 2 am. Both of us forgot that they had to be put back, although i had reminded myself of this yesterday evening. Oisin had gone for Shirelle's Halloween party and i came home. Ghin has gotten over the fever and his appetite is slowly returning. It really is a different baby - what i learnt with Oisin has had to be relearnt again. I thought oisin was hardwork - and he was in that he was an active, inquisitive baby - Ghin is ten times this.
So it is autumn in Belfast. It is wet - and the washing i had put out to dry in the cold winter sunshine was soaked when we got home. The skies are unpredictable. Dry and bright one minute, threatening and windswept the next. The beech tree is beginning to go jaundiced and shed its leaves. Soon the garden will be a seething mass of coppery coloured confetti and we will be ankle deep in leaf litter. I had asked the council if i could make a bonfire. It would have seduced Oisin into heloing me put the leaves together. No, they said, it would annoy the neighbours, the smoke. I thought of the hungry ghost burners during the festival and the interminable fires that are set alight every year, twice a year, outside people's houses, along four foot ways, on void decks, in parking lots, in open spaces. The huge sevenfoot high joss sticks that are burnt the whole night and the billowing soot and ashes that wreck the laundry, outdoor dining and the wax and stains the pavements. I must conclude that we are indeed a very tolerant bunch of people in Singapore.
It is impossible to put into words the sadness that the turning of the weather brings. Autumn is now truly on its way out and winter begin. The darkness comes and it comes an hour earlier as well since now the children will wake at what was six, but now is five. For about a week after this time change to the time it USED to be - i will feel the cold pulse every morning as i greet the blackness. No one dares hope for good weather, but steels to face the cold. A fried once said that Halloween was the Irish way of saying two fingers to winter... but is it? The celebration of death everywhere only a grim reminder of the coming cold and how it is inescapable as death. Putting up two fingers doesn't really do anything for you, does it? The hollow laughter is all you could be left with, and most eerie when that laughter is yours. And some don't make it past winter. After the feasting, the sensible silence. The sensing silences.
As for me... it occured to me, as i woke this morning, unknowing that i had woken in the future, an hour into it, that practising is nearly impossible when it is most difficult. The most fool it whispers to me as i attempt to break the patterns, the habits of a lifetime. Fool, it says, the demon whispers... and this is no ordinary demon. It is the demon of what is disguised as commonsense. It is not the voice of conscience or diplomacy, or niceness. It is what all my life i was taught as intelligent, canny behaviour. And here i was, attempt to contradict it. In the face of that practising is the most difficult, to the point of impossiblity.
But then, as i ran today - and when i run, the whole world returns to right usually - it occured to me as well, that if one can practise at this point, then one can go into any state and emerge unscathed. Like the Immortal Mother of Compassion. She does not pity from on high like some superior god, but she feels alongside the suffering and those who suffer. She too feels each of their wounds and she does not ask for recognition or forgiveness. And yet it isn't some sort of martyered self-sacrificing behaviour which derives its existence from a needy helpfulness. It is somehow pure, somehow infinitely sorrowful yet redeeming. It is what being a mother is about. And for the first time, i understood the appeal of the Mother of All Sorrows, or Kuan Yin. And that is what being a woman is about too. To breathe with the wisdom of the body. It takes the greatest strength to be this - to be vulnerable and human. To shed tears and then recover. To ask not for revenge or pain, but blessing and happiness on those which have caused that pain. And to really feel the pain, be thankful for its learning and know that if i really felt it, i would certainly not have to feel it that way again.
