Observations

On the last day of July

it is cold, the sky covered with white and grey cloud, the forecast for heavy rain this afternoon
the honeysuckle in the garden is blooming dark and pale pink, but sadly scentless
the sparrows are feeding their second brood inside the old burglar alarm bell on the wall just outside our bedroom
cows and calves in the fields around, all different shades and combinations of brown and cream, they stare as I walk past
the bees keep swarming and disappearing even when they have been artificially swarmed - full hive, empty hive, hunt the queen... all this I am learning from a distance, but L is now a fully fledged bee handler

August looms when everyone goes away, especially my therapist.

Days

There are days when there doesn't seem to be an inner structure holding it all together, nor a way to find one. When it all seems to have disintegrated, making any kind of approach to life uncertain at best. I think you could say I am slowly revisiting all those days. Some of them at moments of crisis, traumatic events, shocks, some of them the longer-term effects of those moments. Collapse, depression, grief. Also revisiting the inner world I inhabited when I had to know but not know devastating truths, the complicated and necessary strategies adopted to survive being lied to for a long time. Denial, dissociation, undoing, reaction formation. These the technical terms, for how we try not to know about what threatens our sense of safety, not to feel what seems unmanageable, how we make things just not have happened in our minds, and how we sometimes adopt the exact opposite attitude from the inwardly true but impossible-to-live-with one.

I truly believe that this process will help me to have more choice, to have a clearer sense of myself, my perceptions and feelings, to disentangle myself from the knots of futile repetition, to have more energy for now. Of course I do, I'm a therapist myself for god's sake. But at the moment I have at least one foot most of the time in various parts of the past, my heart is aching, I cry, rage, drink and mourn. My dearest wish is to be taken care of, my greatest challenge taking care of myself.

And the rain is back. Though it's a kinder rain. Not so cold, not so hard, not so relentless, and interspersed with sunshine sparkling the drops.

L has gone to see how the rain looks on Liverpool, and hopefully the sunlight too.

Short

Here

Petals drop onto the table from pink geranium flowers. With hyssop and nigella, alchemilla and perennial sweet pea, in a vase to honour our 24th anniversary yesterday.

A huge and ineffable sense of grief and longing.

M the builder, our next door but one neighbour, comes round to look at the leaking downpipe, tells L he'd like to keep bees if he had space.

Another mouse has died, so I'm using the laptop's hated mouse pad.

Evening sun despite met office severe weather warnings again.

I feel like I might be getting a cold. That prickle deep inside the nose.

My young client full of excitement, her life extending ahead of her.

Nothing is missing. Everything is here.

Pursued

Who I was
in the garden alone
in crepe-soled sandals
under a vastness of sky,
running as if from an assailant
as fast as I could up the lawn
under the canopy of the weeping ash,
throwing myself to my knees
at the edge of an empty flowerbed.

Who I was then
going dumbly into the house,
the wound in my knee
gaping and bleeding.

Down

What the lane was made of
bits of brick slant and broken
stones from the moor
stones from the town
gravel and mud and so many
vintages of asphalt
broken all broken now
the layers revealed
in deep crevasses
all the way down
to the wet silt at the bottom
jagged edges beside the verge
you can barely shuffle along
lumps and clods of millstone grit
all thrown out of the spaces
they were placed there to fill
holes and gaps cracks and rifts
all washed out like fillings
from teeth all gone down
down and on down
scattered wildly
spewing from the ends of lanes
tidemarks of gravel and mud
on the corners where the brown water
turned down towards the flood plain
down towards the level
down

Saturated

Monday's events have knocked me sideways and I shall be retiring to bed with a hot water bottle soon. Delayed shock and the after effects of a lot of anxiety seem to have rendered me exhausted.

The link will tell you the story. We are up high here just beneath the saturated moors, and as the heaviest and fastest rain we've seen yet descended for four hours, fast-moving torrents poured down through our village, washing out semi-made lanes and scattering mud and stones of all sizes, flooding the pub and some houses, and a little way down the hill the house of some friends - water simply cascaded through. They had no choice but to open the back door to let it in, the front to let it out. Later L and I helped mop up and move possessions and take out the sodden carpet. On went the water, down into town, flooding again all the suffering businesses that were just getting dry, getting their electrics fixed, recovering their optimism.

This evening the sky is blue, a sight we had all but forgotten, and evening sunlight slants across the still saturated fields. But it's cold. And the forecast still hints at more worryingly heavy rain to come. More when I have recovered my equilibrium a bit.