grief and gratitude

The moor in winter has a dark and commanding grandeur that is entirely missed by the summer trippers; winter suits it. It feels bigger, somehow, and more feral. I’m always amazed, too, how when you look, even though the amethyst of the autumn heathers has gone, its apparent sere uniformity is in fact a subtly dramatic palette of ochres, fox-reds and rusts, acid greens and peat blacks, linked by the white rush of one of the leats or brooks. Sometimes, in winter, coming out early into weak sun, a whole hillside will be winking  – sheets or ragged patches of ice where bogs sit, or where rills have left gloops of themselves as pendula, ice chandeliers, at their margins.

Winter is a time for the buzzards and kestrels and sparrowhawks; sometimes a peregrine or merlin speeds across your vision. Single ravens cronk from the tops of tors, and the foxes come down lower to hunt or scavenge, appearing even in daylight in the lower fields or on the shoulders of the tors.

So it's no hardship to travel across it, as I have done so many times since I moved in with TM this southern side of the moor nearly five years ago. The road I choose to take is one of the most beautiful in the universe, and every moment, every day, every mile is different, with fast-moving weather fronts gathered here on the hills between coast and coast, though there are also constants.

Sometimes I catch a glimpse, a silver smear, of sea in the distance. Sometimes the hills and tors of Bodmin Moor are visible as blue silhouettes. Sometimes a canny mist sits just feet above the road and it's impossible to know where you are unless you know each kink in the road as well as I do.

Always, always, it blows my heart open – which means I can bring more of myself to the heartfulness needed to deal with my grief about my mum's death two years ago, restimulated each time I drive from Ashburton to Tavistock, two of the bigger moorland towns near our individual hamlet/village respectively, by the memory of travelling across the moor most days to see her in her last few weeks, the double-edged-ness of gratitude for being able to see her, and knowing she was slipping away – as of course she had been with Alzheimer's over the previous few years. I had a very warm easy relationship with my mum, and I don't know if my sense that one never gets over the death of one's mother, not really, is because of that or if it's a general experience. I have of course learned to live with it, and I know that accepting death is also part of saying YES to life.

This all has another edge now that I travel to see my dad only, and to let myself absorb the pain of his stroke-induced dementia, the enormous unusual polyglot/polymath intelligence dampened, though still sparkling in a smile, or a self-parodying grimace, from time to time – adding extra poignancy as well as allowing us all to laugh.

Despair, sadness, grief – all just the other side of the coin that allows us to feel joy, hope, love. May I keep saying YES.

I'd so much rather this than numbing the feeling response to life. I think of this when I read Joanna Macy's quote in my inbox this morning: 'The suppression of despair, like that of any deep recurring response, contributes to the numbing of the psyche. . . Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to permanent war, none is so great as this deadening of our response.'

May my feeling response to the world never be deadened, but may I not be dragged hither and thither by transient minor emotions either. I wish that for me for 2014; and for you too. And for the wisdom to know how to hold it all lightly, too...