may day

We woke late after a bumpy rosé - tainted sleep, Manon snoring away between us being cat-essence and most definitely of this world. I wondered where Oscar was, and yet again, that feeling snuck in through the shutter light that this little grey soul could be too fragile for this world.

Two emails informed me that one of my oldest friends had given birth to a son, Daniel, and that a colleague and friend, K, had been found dead on a rail-track.

K was a wonderful cellist, playing classical, jazz and Scottish folk music with the same honesty, reverence and sometimes refreshing irreverence. He was a kind and sensitive man, a recovering alcoholic who, despite the passionate support of his friends and colleagues, and especially his beautiful wife, who all believed in his ability to choose sobreity and life, just didn't quite make it.

Over an al fresco lunch Julian explained to me how the song cycle of the nightingale (who was still serenading us even though it was way past his bedtime!) lasts three minutes whilst that of the whale lasts twenty four hours. Once slowed down and sped up respectively they are apparently very similar. As humans we are simply unable to perceive the frequency to which these animals are attuned. How much is out there that we shall never see or hear or smell; that we shall never know?

Suddenly I am full of wonder, at the secrets of the heart and of nature. One life ends and another begins. One is too, too short and yet we have no idea of the intensity, of the frequency to which K was attuned. Perhaps he had simply had his quota of intensity - both joy and pain - in his forty years and perhaps, like that of these spilling spring days which contain the blue shadow of the bleak winter, it was enough for one life? Who are we to judge or even comprehend?

I look at Oscar, merging with the vines - sunlit beacons of hope on one frequency and rows of grave-markings on another; I think of the brief time our little soul-child spent and wonder if he simply knew it would be too much out there; I remember the absolute knowledge, when in a coma for two weeks aged eighteen months, that there simply wasn't enough room for me. Then I changed my mind; I look at Oscar; I imagine how Sophie is looking at Daniel now, and I wonder, maybe as she is doing, how any being can contain so much, and for how long.

I pray that Daniel lives his life, simply, fully and that K's two small children will one day perceive their father beyond his abandonment of them, with love and forgiveness.