Autumn Cottage Diarist

Making an Appointment With Myself

Another visit to the Discovery Centre

Fiona Robyn gave me a 'heads up' this morning in the theme of her blog post  'Running on Empty...'...and Susie Grogan's blog title brought me up even shorter ...'No more Wriggling out of Writing', which made me turn my head here once again and ask myself the same question - am I 'running on empty' for ideas? Have I been 'wriggling out of (blog) writing' since I last posted here?

Far from wriggling out of it, my longing has been pricking me to do more of it, but...

 
...with temperatures last week hitting records for 'the warmest March' etc...etc....and a garden which has consequentially been bursting out all over and positively screaming for attention,
...With the lower garage still singing its siren song of 'clear me out' so that I can carry out the conversion to a library and workshop,
...With all the usual minutiae requiring daily attention which are  the detail of family life that we all have infiltrating our more lofty desires,
...and with the constant overlay of a body which is starting to creak and get tired faster than it used to...(dammit)

Any more - in the form of putting together a coherent blog post has just felt beyond me.

No - I am not wriggling out of it, but more pondering how I can more often, or rather, more consistently, wriggle into it. I haven't run out of things to share with you...on the contrary, (see list above!) - I have lots of things going on here at Autumn Cottage that you might find of interest (though I must admit, I do sometimes hesitate to write about what seems like trivia just for the sake of writing something).

I enjoy keeping this blog, and I really love and appreciate hearing from other people who take the time to write to share their thoughts on their own reading of 'Autumn Cottage Diarist' with me. So there is only one solution. It's the one I offer to all the attendees to my workshops (I am a Past Master at proffering advice to others and not taking it myself!) - I need to make an appointment with myself, in my diary, to meet myself on the (blog) page at least twice a week, and simply hit these keys and WRITE!!!

Now all you have to do is wait to see if I can follow my own orders.

Oh, and by the way...regarding comments from other readers...I think some of you may enjoy looking in at the website of one of my readers - An Historical Lady - I certainly did. Thank you, all of you out there, who do make that appointment with yourselves, sit down and write, and constantly interest and entertain me with the blog posts that YOU all create. You are all an inspiration.

Daffodils and Apple leaves in the garden

Fragments of Life as 'Small Stones'

Silhouettes
in pale sun through mist -
Blue-tits, suspended,
intently mining seedballs.

I've made a new, very simple, very gratifying discovery over the last couple of weeks - 'Small Stones' - the term given by Fiona Robyn and Kaspalita Thompson to the recording of one, intimately engaged and closely observed moment of your life and your interaction with the (inner or outer) world.

I've been enamoured with reading Haiku for a while now, but never felt that I get their creation quite 'right' - that I don't 'follow the rules' accurately enough, get the syllable arrangements all wrong...they just don't seem to come out well. (Who's got a vocal inner critic in this matter, then?!).

'Small Stones', it seems to me, don't have 'rules' as such - therefore freeing me from requirements of form and allowing me to just capture a moment in time. Being an avid journal-keeper myself and encouraging others to do so as well, I cannot think of anything more encouraging than to be able to say 'for just a minute - Stop. Look, listen, think... write'. A minute a day - we can all afford that, can't we?

We can spend many more minutes, afterwards, playing with the words, re-arranging them on the page, but capturing the essence, the fleeting moments of our lives (and what are all our lives but millions of present moments, linked together?) can be done in a minute.

The grave of Oscar Schindler

In Judaism, a stone is often left on a grave as a mark of remembrance, to show that the grave has been visited and that the incumbent is not forgotten. (I can't think that anyone who has seen the last scenes of 'Schindler's List' could be unmoved by this ritual). Having run my own memoir writing workshops, I can see 'Small Stones' utilised in future sessions in the same way. I will be encouraging participants to use them, beautifully employed to capture 'small stones of memory' which can later be further built upon.

Capture in a moment, savour forever. Sounds like a wonderful deal to me.

Thank you for formulating this concept of 'Small Stones', Fiona Robyn, and bringing the gift to my notice, Debora Palmer. I am grateful to you both.

 

Lambs and Slaughter

Mara Coblic

'Mara, daughter of Yitzhak and Bracha Coblic, was born in 1936 in Chisinau, Romania (today Moldova).  Mara and her family were incarcerated in the Chisinua ghetto, where she and her mother perished.'
(Testimony taken from The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names)

When we know their names, they become individuals, don't they? Not just one of an unimaginable '6 million'  (and many, many more), but one individual human being - human, just like you and me. Today, I weep for these sacrificed lambs and their families, whether they perished in the ghettos or the concentration camps:

ODETY KOUNYO  3 years old
EWA KOENIGSTEIN  8 years old
FRANYA WALDLIFERANT  7 years old
MOSCHE BONYHADI  4 years old
BUSJA BUCHBINDER  2 years old
IZIA BERI  6 years old
ELISABETH PAKKEDRAGER  4 years old
LOUIS KOOPMAN 2 years old
LIZA BARON SHAROVKA SHAROVKA  9 years old
CHAIM AUSLANDER  8 years old
BERL BANKIER  9 years old
LUNEK MILCH  3 years old
JAKOB FISCH 10 years old
ETI AROESTI  6 years old
YTZKHAK AJZENMAN  1 years old
RAHEL AJZENSTAJN  4 years old
RAHEL GANTS 7 years old
IZYA BUDMAN  3 years old
ISRAEL ANGELTCHIK  8 years old
YAKOV BAKUN  5 years old

(Page 1 of the Children's list of Names of those who perished in the Holocaust)

For Holocaust Memorial Day today, I invite you to choose just one name - from those above, or from the Database - and give a few minutes to acknowledging that person as a unique and precious individual. Then give a minute to acknowledging and honouring your own unique and precious self - for until we can respect and honour the self, our capacity to respect and honour others is, I believe, diminished.
Remember they were, and are, all individuals, remember the crimes, remember the courageous ones who tried to help, and remember that persecution does not end, but goes on..and on...and on. Never forget.

Today I remember the individual Maria Amici, born in Vienna, 15 March 1903, transported from Verona to Auschwitz 02 August 1944, where she perished.

Maria Amici, you are not forgotten.

Gold, Frankinsense, Myrrh - and Questions

'Adoration of the Magi' Gentile da Fabriano (d 1428)

From the detached sumptuousness of  Fabriano's Magi to the humane, engaged intellectual visages of Brueghel the Elder's Kings, images of the Christian Epiphany always intrigue me.

  'Adoration of the Three Kings', Pieter Breugel the Elder, 1564)

The Magi always seem to have been a bit of an afterthought here in the UK and I wonder if this is because their festival comes at the end of the Twelve Days of Christmas, when the Protestant work ethic was already kicking in hard during the last four centuries. And also...what to make of them? Were they actual Kings? I suspect the reality is more that they were more likely (possibly Zoroastrian) 'Wise Men' - astronomers, investigators, explorers, seekers after truth(s), questioners, asking 'who is this?' and 'what does this mean'? - Always a recipe for suspicion and a possible run-in with authority. Though they do certainly look pretty on Christmas cards, these guys have been under suspicion in certain quarters for a very long time.

It seems to me that many of the same questions asked 2000 years ago are asked today - with the same variety of answers, different ones appropriate for different individuals. Perhaps it is the questioning, the hard journey, the uneasy answers that are the important things..prompting us to continually make that journey, think hard, dig deep, not turn away from being confronted with other questions as a result of our own exploring?

T.S.Eliot's  'Journey of the Magi' - (who I envisage more closely resembling  those of Breughel than Fabriano) expresses to me quite strikingly this concept of hard journeying and continuing questioning, ...but also the never-ending need that we human beings have to do so - to question and seek for Truths that will shine in the darkness and make sense of the complications of the world for us, while at the same time revealing that some things may never be explained. What thoughts and questions does it bring up for you?


"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
hat this was folly.

 
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation,
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky.
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all the way for
Birth or Death ? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

You may care to explore this poem more deeply by listening to the episode dedicated to it in the excellent, 30 minute BBC 'Adventures in Poetry'

And since hard journeying and constant questioning is not comfortable, but constantly prompts new questions from any answers we may think we have found, here is an image that certainly jolts me out of my own illusions of prettiness and complacency.

  Gottfried Helnwein
Epiphany I (Adoration of the Magi) 1996 (Image from http://www.helnwein.com)

What questions does this modern image leave with you? ( This essay may illuminate your thinking and questioning...) What thoughts, what feelings, what indignations or protests? What truths and actions and further journeying does it present to you?

It seems to me that the journey is never easy...but what makes it worthwhile are the questions - and the continuing desire to seek for answers to some of therm.

May you all experience your own Epiphanies in 2011...and may you be energised by the adventure of your own journeys required to do so.

My Long Ago Happy Land

Working today on one of the personal memoir writing workshops I am offering in 2011, I was taken aback by discovering this photograph of the interior of my first apartment fourteen floors up in a tower block in South Wales - my first venture into independent living, back in 1974. How much a photograph can hold - so many of those items carry their own story.

There is the white 'swivel chair' that I saved up for over many, many months, convinced that was essential to give my apartment  an air of of elegance and sophistication :-).  There's the little TV - only black and white pictures, but oh, how much of a companion it was in the first weeks there, when I wondered if I had not also launched myself into eternal loneliness alongside liberating independence!

There are the cushions (pillows), that I patchworked, crocheted and Bargello embroidered with my early passion for textiles which still abides. There's my record player, with all my collection of (vinyl) discs stacked beside it....The Eagles, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel  (sigh) - and there is my great grandmother's oil lamp, temporarily converted then for electricity, but still with me today with its glass shade and put to use when we have a power cut.

There's the desk at which I sat to study for a zoology exam, and always, the books, the stacks and piles of books. There, on the walls, a Japanese woodcut, given to me by my boyfriend at the time. And there, in front of my trendy chair, the little occasional table which my Mother proudly bought for her own mother with her first week's wages as a 'clippie' bus conductress during WW2.

Such ordinary artefacts - such particular histories. Have you got any reminders like this of your own special "stuff" and the stories that the items carry? If you have, why not get them out soon and write down the stories  of the things that have made us who we are - you may be amazed at what you remember - and what other memories that story-telling evokes.

Let Evening Come...

Evening by the summerhouse

The online writing community to which I belong has been touched by death twice in the last few days. First, one of our much loved members succumbed to cancer, then today another member heard that a local elder, a climbing compatriot of hers, had fallen to his death on a climb, doing the thing that he loved. One death was awaited...the other came unannounced. Both have stirred my thoughts. Though I have met neither of the individuals involved 'in real life', I met my group member and was privileged to witness her courage on an almost daily basis on FaceBook.

No more detail of the particular is necessary - the broader picture is that any close encounter with death brings it into sharper perspective for those left behind - it makes us all think a little more. Sometimes there will be shock, sometimes, relief; sometimes infinite sadness, sometimes inspiration taken from the life that has ended. Permutations of these emotions and an endless variety of other thoughts and  feelings.

What to say? What is the right thing to say? IS there a right thing to say? I don't know. Because each death is different and each person touched by the death of another is different. My own belief is that if whatever is said, is said sincerely from the heart, there's a good chance that it will be OK. I'll take the risk, rather than say nothing, and cross by on the other side.

Some are helped by words of comfort...some by words of philosophy. In memory of 'our' Mary and for Dallas, and for those who mourn them, this gentle  poem, by Jane Kenyon, offers both...

'Let Evening Come'

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

Los Angelitos, Little Esther - and Me.

Child's grave, Overton, Hampshire

November 1st, All Saints Day - and in Mexico, the day on which Los Angelitos, the souls of little children are honoured. So today, I want to honour an Angelito in my own family...one I never knew, and only heard about in fragments - but one who's death, I know, affected my mother until her own dying day.

I don't even know her proper name - Mam always referred to her as 'Little Esther' - my interpretation of the name, but it could quite easily have been Hester or even, I suppose, Hesta - its something I need to speak about to the sisters who still survive, one more thing on the list of family history research to be carried out.

But today I will call her Esther, and I will honour her as an aunt who I never had the chance to know, and an emblem of all those who make faint but indelible marks on our own histories. For in writing about her, I also write about some components of the past which have made me who I am.

Esther was only two years old when she died - in around 1922 from my mothers recollections. Mam found it profoundly difficult to speak about her, and when she did, it was always with a deep sadness in her voice. The only fragments that I retain were her memories that "She was playing hide-and-seek under the tablecloth in the morning - by the evening, she was dead...of meningitis". In the days before antibiotics, this was even more lethal and rapid an infection than it remains today -  though it is still an illness which strikes fear into the hearts of any parent.

(Image from Horsefield Funerals)

 Mam also remembered that "we had the black horses for her...the carriage with the glass sides and the horses with black feathers on their heads". This indeed must have meant that a very special effort had been made to pay for a more costly funeral than might otherwise have been held for an older member of the family, in a family where money was more than tight. As the hearse-horses hooves clattered on the (still existing) cobbles outside the back entrance to Mam's old home, waiting to collect its tiny burden, it must have made quite an impact on the mind of my mother, still then only a child herself.

As I write this, I realise there are still so many things I do not know - or only half remember from my mother's telling. No photographs of her exist, that I know of...and where is she buried? I have a recollection of being told that she was placed in the plot which later held my grandmother (her mother), grandfather, and her brother - my uncle. Four in a grave, where only three was the 'official' limit? Yet again, I seem to remember Mam saying that 'officialdom' turned a blind eye to the fact - but we will never know.

And indeed, the death of this two year old did, I believe, make me partially who I am - for as the years went by, I could see the profound affect that her death had on my mother, who was acutely sensitive to the way that small children were treated. Even before my own children were born, hearing the most mildly rebuking word to any little child would cause her extreme pain - and when my own boys were born, 'little Esther' would often be on her lips - especially when the boys were around the age that she was when she died - and especially when boisterous two year old boys needed to be (gently - I assure you!) themselves rebuked, simply to be taught where boundaries lie.

So today, I remember Little Esther - but I also notice myself. I notice how much I have written - about other parts of the story, the facts, but also the opinions...and then cut, and edited, and removed, and how I am still sensitive to my Mother's words and feelings. Feelings which, in turn were shaped by the very existence of her sister....and which in turn also shaped me....all for the sake of sensibilities of others who may read this, sensibilities which could still be wounded by the fuller telling of the tale. A later telling will be different - but all tellings are, in some way, true.

Little Esther is gone...but her memory...and its impact, still filter down through the generations. So many people touch our lives....and make us who we are - the fact that we may never have met them, in many ways, makes no difference.

Addendum: New additions to the marvellous Free BMD (Births, Marriages and Deaths) site mean that for the first time, only minutes ago, I discovered this information. 

DEATHS - June 1929 - Silcox, Esther M - 2 (yrs old) Newport Mon

Studium into Punctum.

Blessed be, Little Angelito Esther.

Love That Will Not Let Me Go

Lilian Latham      7 Sept 1915 - 1 Oct 1998

She taught me how to love, from her boundless resource

I walk with her memory every day.

For One Who Holds Power - John O'Donohue's Words of Blessing on this Special Day

Warm wishes to all my American friends on this good day - and for the rest of us, also, hope for Change.

Baby, it's Cold Outside!

Pip and Lissie are doing the most sensible thing on this New Year's Day - hunkering down as close to a comforting radiator as they can - (Lissie using it as a pillow) and turning their back on the dreaded Tax Return!

It has been bitterly cold here for days, and though we did not have the hard frost last night that we had the night before (temperatures down to minus 6C), there is still a chill wind blowing. The best place to be right now is in this office, warm and cosy, with a nice cup of tea, a blog to write and sending Good Wishes to all my readers for richness of life beyond the financial in 2009

A Very Happy New Year to you all!