Homecoming

Monday is my new writing day, and naturally, I've spent the morning making pea soup, washing-up, re-vamping blogs, going to the doctors... anything but writing. Even writing here is a bit of a cheat, but I'm telling myself it's a way of easing myself into the avalanche of imagery that's waiting in the backseat of my mind, and that on some level, I do not want to face.

     
Often I feel caught somewhere in between childhood and here. There are days when a rose's scent or the dark green of a climbing ivy is enough to make me ten years old again. When  sunlight on glass makes time spin. As I grow older this seems to happen more and more. As I reach an age where there's no doubt that I'm clear of the boundary of youth, I increasingly feel  as I did before I even knew what puberty was.

     
I want to go home. Of course, I know that home doesn't exist any more - the home I remember is now occupied by strangers, a couple of kids, cars I don't recognise and pets I don't know about. It is re-vamped and re-constituted; lawns mown in straight lines, fences properly put up, the house walls now a yellowy white. Of course I hate it, this sanitisation of our rambling family home. The pruning of its madness. The killing of its dreams.

     
But more than this, I realise that where I want to return to exists mainly in those same parts of my brain that it always did, not simply out there, with the grass and the beetles, but in the home of my imagination. When I remember childhood, it isn't the real conversations I did or didn't have with my mother. It isn't how I felt when my father walked in a room. It's in how I hid under the cherry tree to feel protected. It's how I ran in a frail white nightie, rain on my reddening cheeks - around clumps of lavender, over wilting delphiniums. It's the crumbling grey brick of the convent wall as I crept unseen against it, chalk on my t-shirt, shielded by dark hedges. It's sunshine through poplar branches. The rooks lining up on a cold winter's evening. It's the crackle of crusty leaves around my ankles as I ran up our drive from school. It's the call of the wood pigeon, ever-etched in my synapses. When I awake to the memory of back then, it's a garden I always go back to.

     
And this garden is as alive for me today as it was back then. It's an Eden in my eyes. I feel its leaves against my skin, the grass between my fingers, the chill of evening air drawing in. Growing up took me out of the garden and into the world, it eroded the pathways leading back to the home of being. As an adult, I know I can't quite see what I saw in the veins of a dying leaf when I was nine years old. How that leaf glowed with it's own essence before me as I turned it over in my palm.

     
But writing takes me home. Perhaps that's why I do it. It takes me by the hand and leads me back through the shrubbery, up the winding tracks, over the wall to a vegetable patch and to toes peeping from under rough brown cloth; to next door at the Convent, where the nuns are singing, blue eyes to heaven. My hand is small, my fingers long; my shoes are wet and muddy. I rub my eyes and I can see again.

Thursday

12.30pm, at Shotton Station waiting for the train to Llandudno. We have just arrived from the tiny train station at my village, Hawarden.

My mother was raised in Shotton, my grandparents lived here all their lives, as well as my Great uncles and aunties and other relatives. This tiny steelworks town, grey and rainy, is infused with memories.

I used to love coming here as a child. Only a few miles from my Hawarden home, I would come to stay with Grandma at weekends. We would walk up the high street, she and I, and I would stare at my reflection in the shiny Tesco's wall, when I was younger, holding her hand, and when I was older, trailing behind her playing with my hair, pretending I was cool. We would go to the pick n' mix section at Woolworths and I would always get strawberry creams and a small packet of After Eights for 20p. Sometimes she would pop a toffee from the pick n mix into her mouth, giving me a naughty knowing smile as we walked up and down the aisle.

If she didn't have a pan of scouse waiting for us in the pressure cooker when we got in, or braising steak with thick gravy, we would get fish and chips from the chippy at the end of Shotton high street, with Angel Delight for pudding if I was lucky. Apart from my Grandma's jam turnovers, Angel Delight had to be my favourite ever pudding, especially when it was served in her cut glass bowls and kept in the fridge overnight. I could clean my bowl in seconds, and would lick the last streaks of pink mousse off the spoon like it was precious gold dust.

When Fridays at school were still half days, my Mum would drive me and a friend to Shotton, to the 'icey'. There I would watch packets of crisps drop from metal pincers in the crisp machine, slurp my Slush Puppie that turned my lips blue, eat Monster Munch and whirl around the ice rink to the sound of echoing music. I cherished those Friday afternoons, the smell of ice and children and the way it felt when I had finally laced my ice skates up, and was padding across the black rubber flooring to the entrance of the freezing rink.

It's raining. It's been raining on and off for days now. It has gone straight from Summer to the heart of a British Winter in four days, it feels. We are on the train to Blaenau Ffestiniog now, from there, we will catch the steam train and chug our way deeper into the heart of North Wales. A young girl on the train is teasing her mother in Welsh. I don't know what she is saying.

Everything is so cheap here in Wales, so unpretentious. It makes me realise what a blag so much of Brighton is. Yesterday, in Mold, I bought a pair of boots for £3.50, and shoes for a pound! Bone china cups for two pounds each.

My sister and I ate lunch in the kind of café I used to come to a lot when I was a teenager, with my first boyfriend. The entire place was heaving with fat old ladies with chronic health problems sitting on orange plastic chairs, smoking fags at the tables. We got a proper cup of tea, and a 'milky coffee', (instant coffee and hot milk kept warm in a huge pot on top of a stove.) It tasted fantastic. The owners were collecting money for one of their washer uppers, who has recently found out they have cancer. A fat lady in a wheelchair commiserated:

"I was in hospital recently, and they cut the wrong vein. Terrible it was. They don't care, you know, you're just a number to them. But then, as I was lying there, I had to think, when I was younger I was a matron in hospital, and I'd go and see all those men who had lost their arms and legs who were in the Paraplegic Ward, all there, back from the army, and I'd think 'there's always someone worse off than you.' Yes, there's always someone worse off than you. Anyway, I'd better be going, I'm on a hunt for Shredded Wheat, reduced sugar.."

With that, her son span her out of the café in her wheelchair, a somnambulistic look across his face. Somehow I feel like there is a woman like this in every cafe or bar across the Western world, telling such a tale, with a cigarette in her hand, and glasses, dyed hair and a son with an impenetrable sadness in his soul.

Wales, I always feel so much more at home here, and always such an alien.

The land is rising up. From the coast train past Rhyl and Prestatyn and Colwyn Bay, now we are deep into country where the hills are starting to rise, fir trees pointing upwards from their peaks. The grass is verdant, almost luminous in the rain. Slate walls, slate paving, slate rooves under the cloudy slate coloured sky. The Welsh landscape. Moving, primal. It's time to get my raincoat out.

So we did a trial run of the mountain in the rain on Friday, with the intention of just ambling up the Watkin Path to take in waterfalls and woodland and general picturesque beauty. In fact we ended up climbing two thirds of the way up Snowdon, so hard it was to turn back from the ominous magic of those blackening peaks that we gradually edged up towards.

Saturday, we were out of the house by half past eight, on the bus for nine, and at the foot of Snowdon before ten. A quick coffee and a fried egg butty for me and we were on our way.

My legs aren't used to this. This becomes clear after about five minutes. This is going to be no easy climb. But the mountainside increasingly drops away beneath us, and we climb, slowly, steadily, towards the distant cloudy peak. Fellow climbers surround us at every pass, for it is Saturday, and a clear fresh morning.

We climb for a couple of hours, aiming for the point where the path splits into the one to Snowdon and the one up to Crib Gogh, with its dangerously narrow snaking ridge. As we turn the corner of the path, the mountainside gives way to reveal huge green lakes, sunlight streaming over the waters. And we are standing on a giant halo, a crystal strewn mammoth of a rock. In front and behind us our fellow climbers, in all shape and forms, the same as me, pant their way forward, increasingly red faced, exhausted.

As we get higher and higher, I realise why I am doing this. From gentle, inspiring rolling green beauty, the mountain changes to a denser, darker presence which strikes me speechless and unnerved. Immense and watchful, Snowdon is power, and we are merely crawling across its vast body like tiny insect babies. At the same time, its power fills me up, imbibes me with a determination and desire to reach its top.

The further and further up that we go I realise, tears down my face, that this place can hold all the strongest stuff of life, love, loss and suffering, it feels like it can hold the whole of existence itself. And as I walk and I watch the grey and black and brown of Snowdon approaching, I can feel my mother, she is here too, she is in the mountain, she is the mountain, and this climb I am doing is life itself, is death, is ending and beginning, endurance, hope, struggle, surrender. With every step my body comes alive, despite the strain and soreness, despite the strong desire to rest. My legs haven't felt this way since I was a child, probably since I used to go walking in Wepre Woods with Mum. For miles on end we would go, through trees and over brooks, up steep banks and over styals, through mud and ponds and endless fields. And here I am, halfway up a mountain, and I am eleven years old again.

After three and a half, maybe four hours, we finally reach the top ridge and make the final walk to the summit. We are above the clouds now, and it quickly becomes freezing. We pile on extra layers hurriedly, wish we had a flask of tea or something stronger. Below us, an endless stream of climbers makes their own journey up to this place, but I can no longer see them. I can see nothing from the top, only cloud, but it doesn't matter, I'm here, I made it, and somehow, everything makes sense.

I Guess I Just Wasn't Made For These Times

In a post a couple of days ago I wrote about forgetting. How I want to keep remembering the bigness that I chose to forget the day my shoes became to small for my changing feet and the taxman came a calling.

Maybe this is just a process that happens over time, a gradual erosion of innocence in the mind, as experience rakes us over the coals and we become 'adult'. But I can also see how it can just take one or a few single experiences to do this to us, where life can never then be the same again and it feels like there is no going back. You can never go home again.

The dream is lost, the love is betrayed, the dog gets run over, the parent leaves, the child is never born, the talent goes unrecognised. Even the seemingly tiniest of things can change us irrevocably - that harsh joke at your expense from an otherwise all loving grandparent, that schoolyard taunt that never went away, the way he held you that one time and it made you feel all dirty and bad.

And yet on and on we go, forgetting because we don't want to remember it, the bad things, those embarrassing moments, the shame of the past, and how our innocence and naivety led us, again and again, into trouble and pain.

But if we ever stop to think of such moments, where everything got changed, where we made a decision somewhere to close down, or run away or be tough or never let anyone near again, we'd realise how often they'd been made in an instant, and a moment of intense or sometimes not so intense disillusion and betrayal has marked our future forever.

But we can open up the vaults and let the past through. We can sit in the complexity of our selves and let them be. If we can just give them space. Let the hordes through, let them rampage our streets and tear up our neat new lawns. And then let them leave, wave them off, show them the door - after all, you don't want to be stuck with that death metal listening teenager forever.

But I wonder, I wonder about what happened before even all the trials and terrors of childhood and adolescence, of birth even.

What about before life even came?

When I see pictures or footage of Antartica, I feel a sense of that, of the wilderness that was before life came. Before there was language and a civilisation of the senses. When I look at the blueness of glaciers, the whiteness of ice, the stillness of freezing water, I have some sense of what it means to be unborn. What it means to be deathless. Such landscapes are the gateway into a state that lives in the human psyche and beyond it. I recognise it when I see it and I say: there I am, there it is, this is it.

Nature mimics the mind, or is the mind. But my mind has forgotten itself, it has forgotten what it is, it has (necessarily) left behind its true identity, in search of Life and Order and the World. Because that is the way of things, that is the nature of living. And once you are born, it may fill you with awe to stare upon a glacial wilderness, but it is also terrifying, because it is all whiteness, it is ferociously uninhabitable.

And the only animals alive in these places seem like creatures from a childrens' story book, fantastical, hilarious, unearthly, zoomed straight from the unconscious into a billowing white pillow of nothingness.

The vast and uncivilised places will always have answers to the questions we seek or run from, will know more than we can ever hope to, with our silly clever minds, with our hard hats and our compasses. They are always beyond our reach.

I remember feeling this way as I looked across the Almerian desert last year, as I felt it all around me, amidst its stark branches and crystal rocks, a bigness I could not comprehend, but felt, that knew me better than I knew myself. It was eerie.

There is a place in the desert, perhaps the Sahara, where, for the time you stand there, all your memory of who you are and what your past was is erased. And there is only that moment. Apparently it is deeply unsettling, disturbing, and one who has stood there can never be the same again.

I don't know how true this is, but of course my first reaction to hearing it was "I want to go there". To a place beyond the reaches of the mind. And partly I do, partly I want it so bad that when I do see footage of wild places, such as Antartica and the desert, I am immediately in tears. Because it reminds me, of something I know but I have forgotten, somehow chosen to forget. And it grieves me - remembering a little more of who I am reminds me of how much I forget it most of the time.

And so also, I do not want to go to some place that wipes your memory, and maybe replaces it with a truer one. Where there is perfect recall. Because it is frightening. So I look at pictures instead, and dream of a day when I will set foot on the ice, of when I will let the sands take me.

But, as it is in the tiniest moments that we can forget who we really are, it is also in them that we can remember. I have been to dramatic places, literally and symbolically, that have changed me irrevocably. And yet also I have seen a picture or heard a sound or song which, in one moment has changed my life forever. We do not have to cross ten thousand miles to find what we are looking for.

But somewhere I want to. More and more I identify with the myth of the explorer, of the expedition, the journey to the centre of the earth. I want to pilgrimage. I want to cross the seas for no other reason than because my heart is moved to. I want to do it alone. I want to do it with others. I want to discover uncharted territory and bring back treasures. I want to live out with my arms and legs the poetry that brims in the corner of my eye.

My Grandpa and Great Uncles were Captains of ships throughout this century, and some of them died at sea. I like to feel I have adventure in my blood. Or maybe I've done enough travelling inside myself, I want the world too. I want it all in my arms like a greedy girl, with its red stained seas, its whitewash walls and frozen waterfalls. With its flippers and its mites, its dungheaps and its leopard's kill. The end of the road. The mouth of the river. The trail of dust.

And dreams are beautiful, messed up things. After all, they're what brought us out of the womb in the first place: and it is this beautiful hunger that makes us seek, and search, and want to live, and fall in love, and that desires it all and desires none of it, that is foolishly, heroically, doomed. It is what makes us both forget and remember, seek out the best and the worst and tie them both together in the strangest kind of knot. It is what makes us run away like cowards and stay and fight, right to the end.

And I can't help that naive, sometimes grandiose, romantic streak, that engulfing passion that sometimes swallows me up whole.

Beautiful, doomed creatures we are. Like penguins on the ice, we risk our lives every year to take the journey to the breeding ground, to find the mate, hatch the egg, and, if we are lucky, and still alive, see the baby born.

Tiny minds and Umbrellas

When I was little, I thought big. As I grew bigger, I learnt to think smaller. I realised that the visions I had as large as the Himalayas, I could never ultimately keep climbing. My knees would always break down somewhere half way up, or the snows would bury me. That no matter how many times I jumped off my front steps clutching an umbrella, I would never take flight across the roofs of Hawarden. Because there are certain laws to this universe that cannot be overruled even by imagination, such as gravity, and these laws are tougher than even our stongest idealism. There is always a pragmatic wind blowing through the landscape of our dreams, pulling it apart. Physics makes us all its bitches.
And so, from this perspective, this fatherly advice, creeps in that terrible phenomena which seems to haunt our world - the tinying of the mind.

I remember standing at my bedroom window when I was young and pointing to the night sky outside and saying to my Mum " but what about all this?"

I distinctly remember her reply " We all think about such things when we are young. You will forget. Life takes over".

I remember being devastated by this, more so because my mother had actually contemplated such things as the universe and what this life means, but then promptly seemed to set it aside when the correct time came. But I also felt defiant that I would never become what she said I would become - a forgetter.

Are we all forgetters, wandering the streets with convenient amnesia? It is a necessary condition of existence, huh, if we are not to go mad, run through the streets, our clothes torn to shreds, the predator of truth chasing us, chasing us to the edge of the endless drop? Every angel is terrifying, after all.

We are hardly going to look up from our bedsheets and our spreadsheets and our tiny calculations of life to stare at this winged being flapping its giant wings at us. But then, what about the loss? What is left when the dreaming departs, when imagination is crushed to the ground, and we stop believing in things we cannot see?

In and out of vision we can go. Grasp the mantle of a spiritual quest and follow until we are forced to let go, until we see even through the limitations of yearning for a quest at all. It is crushing. It is liberating, if you can stand the loss.

And so everything that ever meant anything, at some point, gets stripped away. And will continue to, as long as it is held and cherished as the answer clear. So that we can move on.

Dreams are born to live and to age and to finally, like everything else, to wither and die. We keep none of it.

And yet that is still not the end. How can it be? The walking is the best bit, we often just don't see it until the journey's over.

And so, when I was little, I thought big. As I grew bigger, I learnt to think smaller. Then I learnt to think big again, with the shadow of death and ending by my side, taking in all the little beauties on the way, whilst still walking the line, at least most of the time.

We bring into daylight the dreams that haunt our sleep, knowing even they will come to an end. To remember, and keep remembering, to keep jumping off that step, umbrella in hand, no matter what.

This is deep beauty, with these tiny, fragile eyes of ours, to embrace all that we love, all we know to be true, falling forever into the abyss.

Let us never forget.