It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. With the slight change in temperature, the snow and ice at last receded, leaving the garden looking dull and bruised, as if it has been physically hurt by the burden of so much snow.
All over Christmas, the water in Colin’s side of the house had been frozen solid, while the temperature stubbornly refused to climb above freezing. We had assumed, naively perhaps, that once the temperature did just rise, the ice would thaw, and the water would flow as normal. Not so, sadly. Debbie heard the telltale sound of running water beneath the floorboards and decided that action was needed. Donning an old shirt and a pair of jeans, she wriggled down through the hatch into the space under the houses and saw that an “elbow” had been forced apart by the expansion of the water turning to ice, and therefore, now the water had turned from solid back to liquid, we had a leak. The only option was to turn off the stop tap, which she duly did.
So, throughout Christmas, which passed off quietly and peacefully otherwise, we had only one water supply, and not two, which was mildly inconvenient, but still one more water supply than say, a villager in the Sudan might have had. In the end, once everything started up again, a small honorarium changed hands to facilitate the purchase of parts from a plumbers’ merchant, and it got fixed. And the bloke who did it also fixed the dodgy tap in the bathroom at the same time, which was an unexpected bonus. In the meantime, we’d only had to carry water from one house to the next, when we needed it.
In the midst of all this turmoil, the animals have been enjoying their usual Christmas, which is to say, their usual life, since there is no difference in the amount of treats and spoiling they get, whether it’s Christmas or not. Kitty still hasn’t stirred far from the stove, apart from the odd cross-legged desperate dash into the garden to do her necessaries. Zak and Freddie packed their doggy bags on New Year’s Day and returned to the bosom of Granny (and other parts of her as well) on her return from her travels in Hampshire, visiting the furthest flung outposts of the extended family.
Tiggy plods on, meanwhile, having hesitantly agreed to go “walkies” with Grandad on at least two separate occasions, not that I am entirely sure that she was fully aware of what she was signing up to; these days, she reminds me more and more of one of those pensioners who joins hopefully on to the end of every queue, just on the offchance that it might turn out to be for a jumble sale. A few more years, and I’ll be joining her. Mind you, given Grandad’s increasingly bizarre running apparel (think Kelly Holmes crossed with any young offender of your choice) perhaps the jumble sale confusion is more understandable.
And so we came to New Year’s Eve, possibly the most loathsome night of the year. Apologies to any Scottish readers, but New Year’s Eve is all about loss. It’s all about sitting on your own and watching the old year out and the new year in, with a nip of Talisker, full of raw regrets and recriminations, and surrounded by the ghosts of people who you don’t see any more because they are gone; either dead, or they may as well be, because you have so monumentally screwed up your life (and probably theirs, too) that they are no longer amenable or available to talk to. As Henry Vaughan put it:
"They are all gone into the world of light
And I alone sit lingering here…"
Last year, 2010, of course, I might have joined them, parting the luminous curtain that stretches very thin between this world and the next, sometimes. I might have ended up being someone else’s regret (only in passing, though!) We acknowledged this fact at Christmas dinner, when I was talking to Grandad about it, as he was another one who might have been elsewhere this Christmas, had his pulmonary embolism not been dealt with so quickly when he keeled over. We both agreed that 2010 had been a lousy year (for me, easily the worst year since 1992, which still wins the platinum unflushed toilet award for the absolute rock bottom pits year of all time) and we can only look forward, in the hope that 2011 is better.
Anyway, once Freddie had finished hurling himself at the window in a paroxysm of fury at the fireworks, it was time to go to bed and wake up to a new dawn. January, the Monday morning of the year. Time to sweep out the ashes and re-light the fire. Sermons and soda-water, the day after, as Byron would have said. January, the month when all the unwanted pets are turned out of doors and left to starve, and the homeless are once more on their own. Time soon enough for a year’s worth of work to call the hands, and God speed the plough.
January means, also, for me, time to take and implement all those decisions which were put off over Christmas. I have got slightly out of kilter with Christmas, because technically, according to the calendar of the Church, we haven’t even had Epiphany yet, and I already talked about the journey of the Magi, or at least T. S. Eliot’s interpretation of it, in last week’s Epiblog. I quite like the word Epiphany. I once knew a girl whose birthday was 6th January who had narrowly avoided being Christened “Epiphiana”, which sounds very Elizabethan, but would probably have led to bullying, and quickly been shortened to “Pippa”. We have to wait until January 19th for the Eastern Orthodox churches to have their Epiphany, though, as I have said before, given their wacky calendar and their costumes, they are about as “orthodox” as ZZ Top.
“Epiphany” can mean more than just that one visit of the Wise Men to Jesus, of course: as a word more generally used, it has come to mean a sudden realisation that you have the last piece of the puzzle in your hand, and that what you have been looking at all along is in fact the answer. In that sense, I think I need an Epiphany, or at least, as Paul Simon sings, in “Call Me Al”
“I need a shot of redemption
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard...”
I love that song. “Why am I soft in the middle, when the rest of my life is so hard” – a question I could justifiably ask, as well. I’ve been asking that, and similar questions, in the continuing struggle with the wheelchair, which seems to have adopted the dual role of friend and foe, and I have been trying to re-read some of my books on Zen, preparatory to finishing off the text of “Zen and the Art of Nurdling” in order to get it off to press before the cricket season starts.
It is all too easy to satirise the gnomic, enigmatic sayings of the Zen masters, as in the Zen monk ordering a pizza, and saying to the pizza parlour “make me one with everything”. But nevertheless I did find some brutally apposite remarks in the volumes I was consulting, and I have to conclude that God speaks in many voices, and many ways, while I wait for my Epiphany, whatever it is. "The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step". Now that is very true, and I will make sure I share it with the physiotherapist next Thursday.
I also found the perfect answer to my continual wittering searches for messages from Big G:
“If you understand, things are just as they are: if you don’t understand, things are just as they are.”
So, that told me. Or, as I found the same sentiment, only slightly less bluntly expressed:
“A flower falls even though we love it and a weed grows even though we do not love it. The peach blossom still smells gorgeous, whether we are there to smell it or not.”
Which I take to mean, be grateful that you are still around this year to smell the peach blossom, Steve, and stop bothering me, I will get to you in due course. So, I may have to accept that I am currently # 47 on Big G’s to-do list, just below “Learn Portuguese”. As Eliot said:
“Teach us to care and not to care; teach us to sit still”.
There is still work to be done, though, in 2011, and while I wait for my next chance to see the mountains, whether there is "not a mountain" or there is, I am forced to remember that other saying of the Zen masters –
“Before enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water:
After enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water. After enlightenment, the laundry."
After enlightenment the laundry. After New Year’s Eve, the ashes. After the feasting, the work. After the Lord Mayor’s parade, the dust-cart. Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are, even if it’s only one water supply as opposed to two. When you realise there is nothing lacking, the whole universe belongs to you. Now, Steve, there is wood to chop, so it will fit in the stove, and, probably, water to carry.
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