An icy glittering winter solstice here, frost bitter on the grass and shrivelling the last roses, my old Crepuscule with its apricot blossoms. This past weekend I painted in the light-filled studio with my gnomic art teacher, aged 77, hovering and clucking under her breath at my imperfect brushwork. Skilled brushwork is like the Zen of breathing, letting the line flow as the brush wishes.
And this morning I woke chilled and bilious from eating unripe tree tomatoes, purply-red tomatillos, to discover I have become a great-aunt to tiny puce-faced Noah in the Antipodes. My youngest sister a grandmother, going through the water birth with her daughter, the niece I have never known, the last to be born in Africa.
Once I would have sighed and shrugged off the pssibility that I might ever get to know any of my sister’s children. I know nothing of my alcoholic brother’s children on a Pacific island. My family are scattered and incomunicative for too many reasons to discuss. But as I myself enter the crone years (a great-aunt!) I become more receptive and open to possibilities of true blossoming kinship.
Kinship is a myth, and I am learning with more and more intent and intuition to live by myth. So I shall send blessings and poems to this new child who may one day return to the Dark Continent Filled with Light. I know in my bones that my sister and brother yearn and hunger and thirst for the places of their childhood. The river gorges and savannah plains and msasa trees, the swooping fish eagle and samango monkeys, the smell of peppery dust and dried fish and mangos. Our pagan senses hold memory like a charm.
The year at its turning. My former lover in Wales climbed a hill to see the solstice dawn, with not a conscious flicker of reverence or mystic intuition. Never mind: the sweet man, the flowering rod, the disgruntled old curmudgeon, will make a Green Man yet. As a wise and witchy great-aunt, I hold the small tarnished keys to faery and that is a place, a landscape, that defies borders and the crushing tedium of reality, the philistine hour. My occult vegetal love remains forever green and unconquerable, the secret dreaming world hidden under the hill. Magick is finally all about plasticity and the outpouring of narratuve, the nurturing of creativity and that dark-bright visionary within each of us.
So as I paint at the easel set up on my verandah, I introduce hyena sorcerers and baobab giants and yellow-eyed African crocodiles into my cloudy landscape, dreaming up a playground for Noah, the little boy opening his eyes a day after solstice in the dazzling sun-rinsed light of the Antipodes.
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