Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: lover

everywhere at work

Berlin by night. Candles in the windows of quiet roadside bars. Soundless cyclists ignoring the lights. Puddles from the rain glinting under the trees, on the path alongside the canal. Pizza restaurant which has set out a yard full of benches and long trestle tables since I was here last, which was the end of a bitter, long winter. In the front corner of the yard are two spindly chairs, their feet looped about by overnight chains, standing perkily either side of a carved concrete round-topped table. A big quiet tree separates this lovers’ corner from the rest of the empty restaurant. We sit on the two chairs and watch quietly as the night evolves imperceptibly round us. This couple are walking their dog. A car is passing in a haze of invisible rain drops. This large tree on which I rest my hand is growing, sap rising, leaves unfurling and sprouting from the trunk in several places. Life is everywhere at work and leaves its carcases and traces.

June 5, 2013
a bush tissue

Almost a year ago I left Brisbane, on three days’ notice, to come to Berlin. I had looked up the weather map and packed a small suitcase and figured I would stay about a week. A very dear friend was in town and we wanted to meet up before he set off on his bicycling tour across Europe.

That came and went and the strange, metallic, leafy feeling of being back in Europe set upon me like moss. I decided to stay on and see what became of me. I met a gorgeous guy with a beautiful heart. Some weeks later the intrepidity or foolishness of what I had done came over me one afternoon in a storm of tears, and I just started crying and couldn’t stop.

We were sitting on a bench not far from here, under the trees, overlooking the murky canal. Swans then and now. My companion was alarmed by all this emotion but he was super-generous and sweet. It waxed into a burbling froth of mucus and salt water and he offered wouldn’t I like to blow my nose between his pinched fingers. Well, no: certainly not. I covered my face with one hand and kept crying, as quietly as I could. Sometimes it takes a man some time to notice that I laugh as easily as I cry and I guess this was one of the things on my mind as I sat there and people walked past smoking pot. Several benches down an Italian guy was playing guitar and crooning, three girls with long hair sat around him like groupies from the Sixties. One was perched on the back of the bench like a sweet bird. I looked up and there was my friend with a little wad of leaves in his hand. He had picked for me the softest, greenest, most tissue-like leaves, heart-shaped from a tree I don’t know, and had stacked them from biggest to smallest so I could mop myself up in stages. I remember the softness of the leaves on my skin and I wish now that I could remember the song that Italian bench star was playing.

May 28, 2013
all that love

Robert Peston’s preface to Sian Busby’s posthumously published last novel, as quoted in The Guardian. He transcribed the novel from her notes after his non-smoking wife had died of lung cancer. “My motive was selfish: I wanted to keep talking to her. I still do.”

He writes: “Life became punctuated by terrible shocks and emergencies. Yet those who met her at pretty much any point in this ordeal encountered the Sian they had always known: solicitous, supportive, witty, insightful, unselfish. The cancer did not haunt us. If anything, it helped us understand what matters in life: family, first and foremost; work that fulfils; friends, beauty and fun.”

As I read his words it occurs to me everything he values most highly in the face of bereavement is love. Even beauty is a form of love: isn’t it? A mechanism for our appreciation? “Work that fulfils” is our service to the world, as well as to our own character, daily life, and development. Love is all.

May 2, 2013