I’m searching my brain.
Listening to a Bach cantata, lying in the sun, Lupin curled up at my side.
Outside it’s cold. Icy. Dusted with frosty crystals.
Robins, sparrows, finches…dancing and flirting around stiff stems,
Searching for seed and debris,
A spider, an aphid, cold but nutritious.
Distant lines of highlight cloud with a white gold sun glowing through.
The sky is faintly cerulean, greying overhead as a snowy front moves nearer.
Leaves have been gorgeous golden sienna for days now.
They’ll soon drop from their sleeping branches,
Revealing next year’s buds, already swelling.
Acorns uneaten twist a yellowy root out to worm into the ground.
In spring they will start stems reaching upwards, a couple of cotyledon leaves
Spreading to catch sunlight to synthesise a future great oak.
And so the world revolves, ever darker and brighter, on its infinite journey.
….
Bach wrote perfectly mathematical beauty in his music.
Passion, cruelty, pain and sublime harmony.
Mahler’s romantic giant leaps of emotion, and depths of despair,
Can soften the hardest concrete minds, leading them into
Switchbacks of feelings, lifted souls, and huge compassion.
….
Our worlds are contradictions.
Often cruel, more often compassionate.
Show me a person who does not suffer.
Yes, we do all suffer…pain, loss, loneliness, empty days of despair.
It seems, it feels, unending misery.
Hours of darkness, following one on another,
Drearily suffocating us as we wait for light.
And light will come.
Believe me.
Light is around the corner.
Our world continues to turn.
Buds emerge, breaking open their wraps, greening, growing.
Flowers, tiny flags of colourful joy, will open.
Trees will green and shelter you.
….
I am searching my brain.
I’m looking for a way of to describe my family.
And the infinite depth of joy and love I feel for my beautiful family.
Our loving, trusting, compassionate parents who keep us together are, well,
Like those trees that just exist and provide comfort and shelter.
We are the extended family members who love each other, the flowers that
Reliably reappear after cold, dark times,
Warmed by this endless well of love that surrounds us all.
We are DEEP.
We are our own universe, an ecosystem that symbiotically supports all of us.
Thousands of us form this hugely simple mathematical system of spheres that just continue to revolve.
We each fit in seamlessly, gently moving around each other.
Galileo was thrown out for discovering a scientific system without God or our Earth at its centre.
We’ve created another new solar system, our Milky Way.
All you need is love, sang the Beatles.
And all we need is DEEP.
Our family.
….
Yesterday, at the end of a week of celebrations of our family’s ten years,
I struggled to describe just exactly what I felt.
Now I know.
It was our family Christmas Day.
We were all, thousands of us, sitting at the same table.
Celebrating our closeness, thanking each other, just for being here,
Loving our parents for bringing us up, loving us, making our lives blessed.
We are the closest, most loving family anyone could ever hope to have.
We are here for each other.
We are warmth, smiles, hope, the future.
We’ve got you, whoever you are.
We are DEEP.
