Contented in my gardens, I still exist.

Thank you to those friends and readers who have left your kind remarks and good wishes. I will write again soon.

Ghosts I have been

Many more years ago than I care to admit, I remember creating a hideaway for myself behind the curtains of an out of the way room where behind the folds of heavy, moldering silk I had made a sort of bench for myself to lie on, covered in old velvet duvets and unused pillows which no one would have missed from the linen stock. There, three floors up from the side gardens and with a view extending over them and towards the distant Moray Firth, I would secret myself and spend countless hours reading, usually munching roasted sunflower seeds in the shell, which I had been told not to do on account of my braces, but bought them in secret with my pocket money regardless. Books upon books! I could have lived the rest of my life that way in happy bliss, other lives infinitely preferable to my own: The Chronicles of Narnia, the Anne of Green Gables series, and many whose titles escape me but whose plots I recall in great detail. Other names surface from time to time when I am not even conscious of thinking of them, obscure books such as The Secret Cross of Lorraine or This time of Darkeness, The Satanic Mill, and one I rediscovered recently which stands out in my mind, about a young spiritualist named Blossum Culp, whom Richard Peck wrote of in the novels The Ghost Belonged to Me, and my favorite of his works entitled Ghosts I have been.

It isn’t these books that I think of though, as I sit here in the late evening pondering whether to write or simply turn out the lamp and go to sleep: it is the simply the title “Ghosts I have been”. I wrote previously in my blog (before I took all the old entries down) of what it is to haunt one’s self—because I believe in a way that we do this. A rather crazy habit I have is to imagine a difficult situation I have been in, whether it was painful or frightening, stressful—any of those things, and I will meditate and try, somehow and someway, to send myself a message into the past, as if the me that was could somehow hear the me that is now, a reassuring voice intoning “everything will be all right”, so that now when I am faced with similar situations, I will strain my mind to catch, if it is there, the voice of the me that is yet to come reassuring me as well that all things pass away, that nothing is forever, even despair.

So what ghosts are haunting me today? The ghost of myself as a youth who believed himself jaded, but in retrospect understands what true innocence was, and that I was such? That is haunting, because as we grow we want so much to lose that, to not be innocent any longer but instead achieve some measure of worldliness which we equate with maturity. Ah! But to understand that it is not so, it can never be gotten back, it is the wave that passes over our heads which we cannot recall as it retreats from the shore. This is what lost innocence is like.

But is there a way, some way to return to a purer state, the gentle creature who existed without the perceived need for a thrill, a drink, a drug, an “experience”, an adventure—anything to break the duldrums of what, from the outside, seemed a perfect existence, a charmed and ordered life?

I stopped drinking two months ago, well longer really, since March 8th, and I stopped because I realized that it wasn’t doing me any good any longer: it no longer soothed, it did not make me feel relaxed, if anything it lowered my inhibitions—and I understand that it is for this reason that many people drink to begin with: to lower their inhibitions, but the older I get I understand somehow in this sick cosmic joke that inhibitions exist for a reason–to protect us, to keep us from situations and actions that come to no good end. It isn’t healthy for a man who lives alone to drink alone, to wait for the hot flush of vodka to animate tired limbs, to create emotional responses where none really need exist—a few steps further, and one is in danger of losing control. To me, this is not a good thing. I cannot control things outside of my own volition to control myself, and my propensity to drink has not been helping, so one realizes eventually that while not for everyone, sometimes abstinence is correct for one's self. I begrudge no one their martinis. Heaven knows I've loved mine.

It will be five years in October since my Adam died. I don’t cry about it any longer unless I’ve been hitting the sauce, and that’s when it comes out, and to me it seems somehow disrespectful. I’ve come at last to a sense of peace in losing him, it doesn’t haunt my every waking thought, even though I still think of him. I still remember him, and yes, I still love him and always will. That season cannot alter, that dream of innocence cannot be undone. But I must live, and I know in my heart that I must live a goodly sort of life–be a better person, a kinder person, someone who isn’t afraid to walk the paths with G-d because religion isn’t in vogue or whatever one might say. I’ve been praying more often. I now recognize the hand of G-d in works I previously took credit for myself. It is as if, of all the ghosts I have been, this newer something is emerging, different even from when I began writing Diaspora South over two years ago.

I know I will never again be the youth who hid in the alcove behind the curtains reading about the experiences of others, desperate to have “experiences” myself. I’ve had my fill, and half of them I wished I had never done, but mais helas, c’est la vie. C’est n’pas d’importance. In spite of everything, la vie continue.

And actually, I’m rather happy about that, that life does indeed go on, and that I'm going on with my own.

The Carolina Spring

This is what mid-morning looked like today, a visual highlighted by the soft noise of red-winged cardinals alighting from an ancient azalea.

I love my home.

After a long absence, here I am

Checking the damage to my azaelas after our recent cold snap.