This blessed evening

After Margitte's painting....

I love that blue... that blue and the lamp and the conservatory and the silhouettes. So pedestrian and so profound... i know that on my deathbed one day, if i am so lucky to have the time to recall anything, i will recall this suburban everyday evening and remember it with love.

Our backyard, with the neighbour's light in the distance. You can hardly see the night sky from the rest of the garden in this darkness.

I helped Lara clean the kitchen this evening. Which sounds rather dull. But what won't sound so dull is, actually we caught up as much as cleaned and it was so lovely, just incredibly fun and healing and joyful. 

The best part of the evening was walking home. The cold but bright summer had come to a wet hiatus. In the closing moments of the evening i strolled back and heard nothing but blackbirds serenade. Their melancholic melodic songs filling the damp night air, as raindrops pattered in mesmeric chorus through puddles. Cars rushed past, distant like some far off surf. In another time and place, i heard someone say, that's a blackbird... a blackbird singing.

How can you tell? Because you can. Because you can.

It is not a robin, or song thrush or mistle thrush...it is a blackbird.

And if anyone asks now, i know what they mean. You can tell, it is a blackbird.

And i listened to my empire of light. The unending reach of the evening that has stretched till it can stretch no further. The test of faith and belief, till we have past the point of testing. And then we can rest.

I looked at the pictures of the cashel and how flimsy, how tiny it was between those peaks. The volcanos that no longer are and the mountains that will always be. That measurement between survival and immortality and how we always occupy that space between. And yet, how real those stone walls were. Walls that would indicate the start and finish of someone's kingdom. The bounty, their largesse. Or, their prison. Their millstone. What was this place where stones cannot speak? 

Sometime today, in In Our Time, related the parable of the man who, chased into the dragon's jaws, on the edge of a cliff, hanging by a herb whose roots are being gnawed by mice, has two choices. To either try to get out of a hopeless situation by thrashing about and finally falling to his death, or simply licking the dew on the leaves, savouring its nectar, before falling to their death.

I keep thinking, there must be some place between the two. To lick the nectar and think of a way out. That must be it. To inhale this rain, the street light, the song of the blackbird, the surf roar of traffic, to delight in all and to know... there is a way out. And if not, a pleasurable plunge into the abyss is not so shabby either.

And so, here is to mice, men, nectar and the sweet hope it brings. Here is to closing my eyes and waking up, on the other side of the abyss.