Notes From The Wilderness

I have been loved but not totally, married, but not happily, qualified for professions I barely understood but in other ways I’ve drunk at life like a madman: walking the streets, connecting with strangers openly and reacting to the music of the time, often filled with a joy in the moment which can be difficult to comprehend given my circumstances. I  struggle by every measurable standard but somehow being part of this world elevates me daily.

What did you do in your life? some man asked and I replied, “ I enjoyed the view but without any sense of strategy!”

Hitchhiking across Europe aged eighteen, sleeping under hedges and living on carrots and milk, playing chess with some oddly competitive man in a cafe on the Croatian coast, and later walking into the sea to wash my clothes, launderettes being beyond my budget, were the memories I treasured.

I’ve always been among the dispossessed, oddly distracted from the day’s urgencies by passing events. Isn’t life wonderful, especially when we wander in a landscape untarnished by man and admire those species which dwell in it. 

Somehow, in this drifting chaos I connected with another being over a number of years whose steady kindness, understanding and beauty centred me like nothing has before: Caroline, a fellow volunteer at the shop where I worked became close to me over shifts and months until on the morning of the day she left she said, even though we’d never spent time alone, “If I wasn’t married I would love you till I died” and I’d replied, “It would be returned:” It was all I had to offer and the truth.

When she touched my arm I melted into her soul but, of course, she left me forever after that shift because she was a civilised lady and life with chaos in an unironed shirt had never been her dream. 

Whatever the different circumstances, we connected in that profound way outsiders can sometimes do, but life is not always about understanding:  the truth is her empowered albeit unimaginative husband, a thoroughly decent man, offered her security in a way I never could: I might be her dream but I was never a reality. We never kissed because some boundaries cannot be crossed, but she was as near Eden as I will ever reach: she left my side but she will always be my home !