Such a sky you never did see.
Who will tie it up with a ribbon?
And put it in a box for me.
Lionel Bart
Ever since I can remember, whenever I have been particularly moved, I have tried to hold on to that experience. It is a natural enough response and across the millennia it has no doubt been the creative energy behind everything from the written word to the photograph, music, art and beyond. It has helped to write the stories and histories, myths and folklore we share with each other, allowing us to become time travellers and explorers of the human mind, making friends with people we have never met. Wise, compassionate hands reach out to us as teachers, guides and benefactors, even though those hands never knew whose heart, whose unfolding mind, they might be nurturing.
For me it is the emotional energy that I seek so desperately to hold onto, and I hold it best through words. And oh, how I have loved those words, even as I have bewailed my clumsy grasp on them, seeking to clutch at something entirely beyond my reach. It is only recently though that I have felt also the fear behind them, the fear that I will lose myself if I do not hold and permanently record all the moments that matter. How is it possible that something intensely important can pass away in an instant, unseen and unheard? Does time itself alter with our feelings? Do we shape the universe with our passing? Or do the moments rise and fall like the waves, pounding shells into fragments, only to rise and fall once more?
As I speak my love to a silent room, I watch curiously my impulse to write it into a permanent record and know that I have captured it, even as Oliver once desired that someone would buy the morning for him so that “I could see it at my leisure / Whenever things go wrong”. I know that the words I write will enter the graveyard of forgotten letters, like so many before them, but still the urge is there, because, who knows? One day I might just find them again. And I might again know what was important to me once.
I watch my fingers twitch with the impulse to write and know myself remembered. I watch the underlying fear of emptiness and non-being. And I realise that I do not need to live in the past. All that is needful travels with me. It is true that tomorrow I might know a different love, a different desire, a different heartfelt prayer, but it is not a betrayal of this moment that I leave it behind. If I have the courage, I can recognise that wherever I am, it is the right place. If I have the courage, I can release my words and dreams to the air, in trust that what is, is enough.