Twice on Tuesday the light just captured my imagination.
Here, the morning light is just hitting the studio and I loved the glow. It was a promising moment, and rare that I had my phone in my hand that early in the morning as well. I felt my heart swell with the rising light. Later, in the early afternoon, feeling more tentative and subdued, I posted a photo of the watery nature of reflected light in the downstairs hall on Instagram (here),
So much happened in the week that I was off that I struggle to make sense of it, while in a completely different vein of thought, so little happened that I now feel a bit like there are mountains piling up and threatening to fall. But that is not really due to the stuff, or time, or tasks piling up but simply due to sadness and grief. You see, when I signed out for a blog break, Poncho was sick, and I had a heavy week scheduled with a zoom conference occupying four days. It seemed like my whole week was mind-expanding zooms and inward pulling snuggles with my little guy.
Poncho didn't make it. He went into the ICU last weekend and never made it home. He died on Tuesday, shortly after I took the photo I posted on zoom. His absence has left a bit of a hole in my life. His collar is sitting on my desk, beside me as I write, just as a mere week ago Poncho lay at my feet as I sat at this same desk.
Poncho had just turned 12. He had lived with me for 3 months and one week. And they were a precious three months. He was loved. I was loved. I don't believe those studies or opinions that say that animals don't love. Perhaps not in the same way people do, true, but my argument there is that we humans let our brains get too much in the way, and that we don't really know or understand love. It is a lesson that takes us a lifetime.
Anyway I have no regrets. I am not the person I was three months ago. I am not the person I would have been today had I not adopted Poncho three months ago. And so there it is, the basic struggle, the enigma, of life. We cannot live without love, we cannot live without touch, we cannot know joy without pain. A life without these things is a life without meaning, no matter how much we might yearn for it to be otherwise.
The hellebores in east garden are in full flower. Those in the north (front) or west, not yet. They are just budding, their lives are shaped by more variation in sunlight and shadow, but they too will bloom, and soon. Yet it is this very progression across even one small garden that I find so simultaneously poignant and filled with hope: Light; shadow; death; decay; new buds; the tender petals of new flowers, all these elements of life existing together in one moment of time in one small piece of earth. Hope is fragile, sometimes fleeting, and yet part of the very earth of our souls and therefore always present, always ready to burst forth if given only. a moment's light.
I am posting pictures of flowers and of light shining through flowers not as a distraction, but more in the mood of a reflection. The flowers lighten my heart, but they do not mask or take away the sadness, nor the poignancy of loss, I often feel I find myself living in a culture that tries too hard to distract from pain, to shove it under the covers and mask it with happy things, and I don't find that beneficial to anyone really. That does not mean we cannot acknowledge beauty, cannot acknowledge grace.
One of the most beautiful things about winter flowers like hellebores is that they emerge in the midst of the remnants of winter, of death and decay. The leaves of the plants are browned. The earth is evident, not hidden by lush foliage, and this seems to elevate their beauty, making it both more precious and more fragile. I tend to be slow at the cleaning out of the garden, reluctant to keep everything groomed and polished, as if pretending this is a pristine world, leaving the old to replenish the earth, the seeds to feed the beasts. Perhaps I simply wish to hold on to the reminders that life is not so neat.
Poncho loved to bury his nose in decaying leaves, but also in the new shoots, as if he could breathe in the very essence of life. It is in these fragile moments we find meaning. In love and in the very act of putting aside the pressures we put on time in order to simply be present in time for those we love, we find ultimate meaning. And we are changed.
Farewell sweet guy.