Being pure spirit

Tomorrow is my sister's birthday, she would have been fifty-eight.  It is now five months since she died.  I think of her most of the time; more, in truth, than I did when she was alive, perhaps I didn't need to do so then.  But that's fine, she ain't heavy.  The thought of her is there in more or less everything I do, but I don't have to keep making reference to it.  I've written bits and pieces about her, but I've mostly been content to let them sit and settle for a bit. However, perhaps now's the time to start going over some of them.  I've tinkered around with this one for a while, taking a bit in here and letting a bit out there... 

Someone who isn't conventionally religious, but who I suppose believes quite a number of things I can safely say I don't, wrote me a very kind message shortly after my sister died, in which she said she had become 'pure spirit'.  I usually mistrust that kind of thing, whether from mainstream religion or its alternatives, as rather glib and precious, but I found I was comfortable with this, perhaps partly because she also said a number of other things which were intelligent and not glib, but also it just felt OK.  My sister had little time for anything that might be called religious or spiritual.

Being pure spirit

Being pure spirit suits you, it's what you did so well.

Why must we get so heavy when we die?

What's mortal remains with a weighty horror, then

a dreadful gravity of absence.

But you would make light of even this, and,

if we chose, with nothing mystical, 

mysterious, spooky, kooky, 

fey or strange, and - heaven forbid! -

nothing religious, your spirit could continue  

with us.  If we chose.  You know,

the one which used to ask 'Well, in the end,

does it really matter?'  Which shrugged and said

'That kind of stuff - like God, and dogs,

and fussing over food - is just not something that I do.

I'll leave that to the rest of you!' And smiled.

The one which used so easily that well-worn phrase

that women - wives and mothers, sisters, aunts - 

will always say, but won't quite always mean - you did:

I want you to be happy.

~~~

There will be a gathering in Sydney tomorrow of friends and family who are in that part of the world to mark her birthday, so I'm putting this up now as they are ten hours ahead of us there.  Tom, Molly and I are off tomorrow to our beautiful retreat on the Bay of Morlaix, which, by serendipitous, or whatever, grace, we happened on when we felt the need to get away back then in April.  We loved it so much we booked these few days for Tom's birthday, which is the day after my sister's, on Friday. I am intensely, deeply, quietly (fairly quietly anyway!), full of joy and delight at the thought of being there again.

See you next week.  

Oystercatchers

Dourduff-en-Mer, ramshackle, workaday, sea-girt and estuarine, limewashed and salty, where a living is made from oysters and scallops, and quiet tourists in white villas.  These Brittany fishing villages lack the picture postcard prettiness of their Cornish cousins, but are none the worse for that.

In the Cafe du Port, somewhat art deco, wooden chairs with curved backs like old kitchen chairs, darkened wood tables with only paper menus for mats, nylon deckchair fabric between us and the noisy stairway, we shared a plate of winkles - open their little doors, spiral them out with a pin, don't look at them too hard - of brown shrimps, a pickled sardine, a mound of mackeral rillettes.  I took the two oysters, swopping them with Tom for extra shrimps and rillettes, and in my haste to get them over with, forget the shallot sauce.  I never know if I really like them, or if it's morbid fascination and bravado that drives me to eat them.

The oystercatcher birds have no such doubts, I'm sure.

~~~

Off to Morbihan for the weekend, a trip booked some while ago for our wedding anniversary.  Looks like books and fleecies will be in order this time.

Kerbiriou

Kerbiriou may be located among the Islands of the Blessed.

For nectar and ambrosia, there was Paul's cider, light and sweet, made the traditional way, layered and pressed with fresh straw, and for breakfast, as we looked down to the sea, the pure apple juice, and a jelly made from it with the consistency and taste of honey.  And Yvette gave us piles of home-made warm crêpes, as well as good bread, and soft, fresh creamy cheese she made with the milk from the goats in the paddock we could see from the breakfast room.  A kid had been born the day before we arrived, it nestled in the bank, a scrap of black silk, small and point-eared as a cat.  Then there was very yellow butter made on the farm, and raw milk in big white jugs, warmed for breakfast coffee, and some cold in a smaller jug to take to the fridge in our room for tea when we wanted.  I skimmed the cream off it each time and ate it with a spoon.

We were sometimes joined for breakfast by an attendant spirit.

There were hedges foaming with blackthorn blossom, alive with insects, which promised a wealth of sloes for the autumn,

and there was blue.

Blue boats on blue water,

blue borage,

and blue bluebells, with violets, in the fields.

There was that perfume of wallflowers, in gardens and on the face of cliffs, which marries so oddly well with the pungency of seaweed and iodine of the seashore.

And there was this,

and this,

and this.

So that it was necessary to do this.

I have been so blessed.

Celtic Saints

In ages of darkness, it's said, they came

the saints, from Ireland and Wales:
Brioc and Suliac,Malo and Ronan,

Ilan and Gildas, Jacut and Jaoua,

and great St Pol de Leon, Paul Aurelian,
in currachs, in skin boats through Dorigen's cruel rocks,

into the bays and abers.

Their world was one of serpents and monsters

they banished, wild bulls subdued, wolves

made to do the work of the donkeys they'd eaten,
and donkeys turned back to front to mend their stubborn ways;

of obstinate wild pigs made tame and tasty,
and salmon who swallowed magic tokens, or which were endlessly renewed

as food fit for a saintly appetite; of severed heads

and springs that sprang from them, ...

...dastardly pirates and robber barons,
sweet blameless children slain or maimed, (a foot of brass and silver hand one had),

and Conomor, Bluebeard the wife-killer,

whose story does not want to die.

Their roles and archetypes fused and were confounded

with spirits and sorcerers, beings of sea and soil and rock,

consolidated in a thousand years, or more or less,

to what was needed by the powers or the people of this time or that.

Their faces lichenous, their chapels and cathedrals

become granite cliffs again;

homes for ferns, daisies, wallflowers and valerian;

raised from the earth and sainted,

they return to earth once more.

***********************

( Thanks to Tom for the first photo, which he took. The material is largely from Coop Breizh's translation of O.-L. Aubert's 'Celtic Legends of Brittany'. The pictures were taken at Traon Chapel near Plouguernau, St Jaoua's Chapel in Plouvien, St Pol de Leon Cathedral, and other sites in Finistere.)

Trees in a sandscape

Sheer hulks

Dunes and beaches

North Finistere is full of dunes



and beaches. Largely empty ones.



Molly was here. ( Observe the paw prints.) She's not a very zen dog.


Albeit one who seems to have the power to levitate (observe her shadow).

"All I really want is a seagull. Or a tern would do."

And a couple of gratuitous closer-up images of natural forms. Because I'm like that.

Egrets and others

One of the uses I've taken to putting the camera to is for birding. I have never really had a satisfactory pair of binoculars. The ones we have now were not cheap, but are somehow awkward, difficult to train on the object, inclined too need a lot of fiddling with, steam up, by which time my eyes are starting to twitch and the bird has usually flown.

The zoom on the camera is not as powerful as good binoculars, of course, and the visibility while looking through it is poor, but you do at least retain an image of what you were looking at which you can refer to later. At its full digital range, the image is usually rather fuzzy, like these oystercatcher and curlew, and tern

but adequate for identification. In fact the tern turns (the wind and the rain...) out to be a sandwich tern, which are a more unusual sighting than the usual arctic, common or little ones, and I wouldn't have known without the picture to check it.

A few are reasonable as photos, these curlews striking attitudes make me smile.

The subject of egrets has come up. I was disbelieving when, perhaps fifteen years ago, someone told me they had seen egrets on a river estuary in south Devon. Now here they are in abundance in northern Europe, bringing a touch of the Nile and the Carmargue to these greyer shores, not unduly timid and quite assertive with other birds, hobnobbing with seagulls,

their archaic elegance offset by the quaintness of their yellow feet on their long black legs.

We came to know them quite well.