sunset

I'm not sure I've ever seen a sunset quite as spectacular as last night's (even in a November, the sunset month par excellence here, when there are clear skies) driving across Dartmoor. The sky to the north was that limpid lemon-blue, but the west was an amazing fireshow: deep deep orange-red throwing the clean dark lines of Dartmoor's unique tors into relief, and beyond them the last hills of Devon and then the Cornish tors of Bodmin Moor folded in crimson, poppy, carmine, purple, and pewter-blue. Above all that a light effect that I want to call 'red shift', but I think isn't: a prismatic floating extra colour, superimposed on the red; some optic effect of lightwaves thrown back up from the descended sun, I imagine.

There was a poignancy to the sunset, so close on the time of the ancestors, and my own it seems prescient poem of last Monday (the mirror poem) that I posted a day or two ago, thinking of my own ancestors in the west who have seemed somehow to be gathering in memory lately. We were travelling to see my mum, who is suddenly critically ill. We are facing some of the hardest decisions in my and my sisters' lives about quality of life and quality of care of another for whom one is nominally responsible.

Can we do this possibly-ultimate – it's hard to know – threshold journey with grace, with love, with compassion, with faith in the life/death/life processes, and not be rattled by fear? Can we hold calm, as she is, with her face on the pillow peaceful despite the difficult physical processes, can we remember all the things we hold true and dear, in the face of uncertainty? Can we help her make this journey with as much of our hearts as we can, without being immobilised by our own needs, attachments, terrors? We all have to do this at some stage. That it happens may not matter as much as we think it does, from our fearful little loss-focused orbits. How it happens – I mean at a subtle level, not the physical alone – matters a great deal; and much of that may depend on how we, those who love her and are loved by her, deal with it all...

Think of us.



'... And life slips by like a field mouse / Not shaking the grass.' (Ezra Pound)