In stillness

They excel in stillness. Sitting and watching. Waiting and listening. On the corner, on a chair outside the front door, at the gate to the garden.

Once I asked a Native American for a clue to the future. Am on on the right path I asked her?

She was supposed to be a seer of sorts and looked harshly into my eyes. Tell me about your life she said. So I told her about teaching and leading, about the emancipation of women and the poor, about trying to pass on knowledge and skills. She remained impassive.

I longed for some kind of reaction and so she said, "Yes, you are on your right path."

That wasn't what I wanted to hear. No. I wanted her to guide me, coax me, to soothe me onto some new path. I wanted her to have another answer. Like that I wasn't on the right path at all, like that I was on the complete waste of time path!! I wanted to be rescued, found, understood. Maybe I just needed a big cry and a hug!!

But now I know, that I only have to be still; that questions are the nub of the whole thing; that there is no one answer and that we are all in the same leaky old boat. 

And when I saw them, each one in such stillness, they left me wondering even more about striving and waste of time ambition.



There are more photos of Greek elders here 

Dark angels #Pilgrimage ~June

Like my own Grandmother in mourning for her mother since 1953, each one is wearing black. They peer from a chair in their doorways during the day but in the early morning or late at night they come out of their cosy seclusion. While the men are down in the bars drinking coffee, they take a chair out onto the street or work in their gardens. 

The Greek language is impossible to me, so there's no hope of a chat and I have to make do with the spell of their shadowy presence. I catch them watching me out of the corner of my eye and so badly want to photograph their faces. Far too wary of the ethics involved, I would never make it as a candid street photographer, and yet I sneak pictures of them when they I think they don't see me.

In a mountain village I spot one walking towards me and point the camera at her through the windscreen of the car. She catches me at it and let's out a tirade! The rest of the time I just get lucky now and then and they float into the frame like dark angels! 

We have nothing in common and yet we have everything in common. Reading between the lines of our signals and greetings there is a depth of shared experience. We look into each other's eyes, we smile and one even winks at me! Life is short, love is all and don't be deceived by appearances.......

See the Elders Gallery here

A slow parting

It was a slow parting, the end of many years of decline. Autumn came to echo this. Slowly, deliberately, and without an exit strategy. A one way ticket. And while he waited for the end, I photographed every fading leaf and naked branch.

Now September is dipping into a paintbox of change, yet again.

Another darkening autumn. Greens breaking into gold. Seed heads soft and ripening. Skies streaked with darker crimsons. Longer shadows stretching into the hedgerows. Spotlights of sun highlighting a leaf here or a fading flower there.

The world is turning away from the sun. And now all we have of him is this day and the beauty we can find in it........the wisdom he passed on.

More from the Autumn Gallery here

~ Mementos ~

I'm in Micky Macs place. It's been disturbed by party goers, doors open to the yard, a gentle sea breeze blowing through windows, cracked and broken. I once visited him here in his smokey room, walls blackened from the wood fire. I sat on a settle bed in a wollen blanket while he sat on that once pink arm chair with a once yellow cushion.

Even on the beach where he used to sit on summer evenings, he wore the whole kit; a long great coat, a flat cap and black boots. Surrounded by picnics and bathing families he stayed shyly at the edge, chatting to anyone who lingered.

His neighbour, used to wave down cars by standing in the middle of the road. A tousled head would peer through the window, asking mysterious questions;

"Have ye any cigarettes?"
"No we don't smoke"
"Well have ye any kittens?"

They are both gone now as are most of the older generation of my own family. Flimsy remains of curtains and occasional memories all that's left.

A way of life is dying out too. Small farms are being swallowed up and old walls, lanes and streams, absorbed into lawns for horses and feed for herds. No more cattle roaming freely along roadside verges, grazing the long acre.

At the top of the lane is another collapsing cottage. There's an eery emptiness there, a tweed jacket on a hanger in the bedroom, a candle on the kitchen table. The next neighbours, three stoic older siblings, recently lost their fine thatched cottage in a horrible blaze that took all they had. Everything seems vulnerable.

My Dad used to talk about the old days around here and return in his mind to the lanes of Kilkenny where he grew up. He could still feel the hunger experienced through the War. He remembered feet crossing the footpath windows above his grandmother's basement kitchen. The smell of laughing gas from his Father's primitive dental surgery. I have some audio of him singing every word of Run Rabbit Run which he learned as a small boy. Precious mementos.

Today I step into Micky Macs little house, falling down and forlorn without him. My strange ambition to become even more eccentric isn't any wonder, because for a lifetime I have studied the elders. I have loved them, admired their depth, questioned their mysteries, witnessed their fading. And I know that as they disappear I am an elder apprentice, creating my own mementos as I go.


PS To honour Micky Mac a plaque was erected by his friends right on the wall at Garrarus beach where he used to sit.




The Bealtaine Festival celebrating creativity as we age

Also posted today on Vision and Verb a global gathering of creative women sharing words and images.