David Hadley's Blog, page 126

Spring Rains

Spring Rains

Going hand in hand, we need the nakedness.
We need the cold bright water to awaken us
Coming down from the mountain's height

Where it lives through deep wintertime as snow.
Spring will fill it with the warm promise waiting,
So we go down and meet it at the river.

Where we will see life begin again anew
Out of the darkness of winter and into the light,
Where the warming sun takes us by the hand

And into the still cold river, half ice
With the memory of winter still inside it.
To wash away the dark season and become clean

Again to taste the spring rains on our tongues
And to kiss like bees meeting the new flowers
To taste the nectar of their bright new year.

There Are No Gods

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It was a long, slow winter. A time when it seemed the snow would stay forever. Some died, of course, the very old and the very young. Heads already bowed against the cold and the biting wind bowed lower in grief and forlorn hopelessness.



The midwinter festival was not the usual raucous revelry where people call on the drunken gods to wake from their long hangovers and bring about the spring. This time there was talk of the gods abandoning us, even talk that there was no such thing as gods. Talk the direst threats and tortures of the priests could not silence.



Soon, as the snows continued, the priests themselves ran for cover as the crowds in the increasingly bare market places turned on them. As I overheard one of my guards say to a serving wench, 'It is not often you see a thin priest.'



I – of course – have never had much time for gods and priests. I am more of a god than most of those the priests light the candles for and make sacrifices to. I have the power of life or death over some, but my Lord has that power over me. So perhaps it is easy to see that – to some minds – there should be someone, or something, that has the power of life and death over lords and kings and even over this world we walk through.



Myself, though, I have seen too much to believe in gods, both the worst and best that this world can do to people and the worst and best that people can do to one another.



No, there are no gods and no-one to blame for this winter that looks as though it will never end. We have only ourselves, one another, and this world and what we make of it.

Instead of Falling

It is often just a matter of getting through the next few minutes, finding the way through the shortest section of time. Taking each step, and then another one, without looking back, without wondering where the step after that will lead. Sometimes, it is like standing on the edge of some high cliff, knowing the next step is the one that will be on empty air, and the only way forward is to fall.

Sometimes, though, there is no falling. Sometimes that step into empty air is the first step towards taking off. Then, when you dare to open your eyes you find you are soaring way above that cliff, over the sea and far away from the hard sharp rocks you could have fallen on.

You are out there, floating free, flying, taking the updraughts that lift you higher and higher as you soar on up, gyre upon gyre, up towards a sky full of possibilities. A sky filled with the possible and limitless.

Looking back you can see the trail of worlds you have let fall behind you, right back to that place on the cliff. That place back before that one small step off into the empty blankness of the page, and knowing that – at least this time - you flew instead of falling.

Now is Not the Time

Of course, it was only a matter of time before something like this happened. After all, the human understanding of time hasn’t changed that much over the eons. Even after introducing more accurate timepieces and the chance to use clocks that are accurate down to fractions of a second, people still turn up at the most inconvenient times. It is still possible for someone to be late, or not to turn up at all, despite the accuracy and almost ubiquity of time-telling devices.

Consequently, certain physicists have begun to realise that time is not quite as rigid a concept as was previously presumed to be the case. Time itself is not really all that accurate and modern clocks are now more accurate than time itself.

Many of us are familiar with this problem with the nature of time. In the past it was assumed that when something that was meant to last longer is over in a fraction of the time, many people blamed subjective experience, while most of the women it happened to, blamed the man.

However, recent discoveries show it is time itself that expands and contracts depending on quantum fluctuations in the fabric of reality, mainly to do with what has become known as the Buggering-About Constant. This is a number that – despite its name – changes with pseudo-random occurrences, mainly dependent on just how many people are depending on a certain amount of time to last for that actual amount of time.

Just like in the quantum world where a the act of observation can change that event’s outcome, depending on a period of time to last for a certain amount of time can actually change that time period. Thus, things meant to last - say – several minutes can be over before she has even undressed properly. A train to arrive any time with a half-hour period both before and after it is due, depending upon just how many people are depending on it arriving on time.

Physicists are only now – mainly because of the uncertain nature of time in respect of applying for research funding – getting to grips with this new understanding the nature of time. Consequently, if there are any new discoveries made in this field they will be published here first, possibly sometime last week.

The Path Leads Down

As we walked, the path climbed steadily up the hillside. What had started out as a grey dull morning, earlier that day when we left the hotel, had turned as time passed into a warm summer day. Now the sun shone and – after a week of almost constant rain – it became a much more typical summer day.

‘Perhaps the weather is changing,’ Sarah said. She was glad to be out walking, she wanted the exercise, needed to be on the move. The last few days of watching rain through the hotel room window or over another cup of tea in some rain-soaked village café, had shrunk her; frustrated her. Now, today, out on this path, breathing in the air, brought back her willowy strength. She smiled at me as we walked. I, too, was glad to be out, feeling the walk putting life back in my legs, legs that had seemed tired and cramped the longer we waited for a fine day.

We came to a ruin, a wreck of a building of some kind. There was a wall built out of the local rough stone, more suited to dry stone walls than buildings. But there it was: a wall about seven feet on one side, the absence of a window then falling down to around ground level. We looked at each other and then sat down. I took the pack off and fished around inside it for a drink.

‘I need to…’ Sarah said, pointing off the side of the path to the bushes. I nodded as I drank, then put the bottle down on the wall as I waited for her.

‘Steve,’ she called. I picked up the bottle and the pack and followed her into the bushes.

‘What do you make of that?’ she said.

It was a path, stone steps heading downwards. I could just see a stream, tumbling over rocks, down at the bottom of the valley below. The steps had an old, very old-looking railing on the side, broken in places and overgrown with all manner of wild plants: from grass and brambles to some delicate things with tiny blue flowers.

I looked down towards the stream. ‘It looks interesting… shall we?’

Sarah nodded and off we went, just as the sun disappeared behind a dark cloud and the rain began to fall.

I remember thinking that I hoped the change in the weather wasn’t an omen, foretelling doom, but I was wrong. That was just what it was.

These Same Streets

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These Same Streets

It is all lost now, and forgotten,
we still walk the same streets,
but it is no longer the same.
It is all over, and deep down

we begin to know it.
We have lost and can taste
the sourness of our defeat.
We walk these streets now

only to walk away from then
and all it promised us of lives
that would go far beyond
these narrow empty streets

and out into a world waiting
ready to take us by the hand
and lead us to places far beyond
all these shabby streets can show.

How the Story Began

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She wore a summer dress the breeze pressed against her body. I could see through the light material that she wore nothing under the dress. I also knew, from the way she stood there, hand shading her eyes, as she looked towards me, that she knew I could see she looked naked under her dress.

She smiled. 'Good morning.'

'Good morning.' I walked up the dune towards where she was standing.

She let her hand drop, letting the warmth of the sun bathe her upturned face. As I drew closer, she turned to watch me.

'You always walk along the beach this time every morning.'

It wasn't a question, but I nodded. 'I've seen you here too, up on these dunes as I pass.'

'I've been watching you.'

'Oh?' I turned and walked back towards the sea, away from the dunes.

She pulled off her sandals and ran, sandals in her hand, to catch up with me. 'I wanted to meet you.'

I glanced at her, then turned to watch a seagull swoop down on some detritus. 'Why?'

'I've read your books.'

I stopped walking. 'Ah.'

'I liked them.'

'Thank you.' I took a few steps further.

'Especially Meeting on a Beach.'

I stopped, turned.

She was looking at me with that intensity again, eyes shaded with her free hand, the other holding the sandals at her side.

'You know,' she said. 'The one that begins with a man and a woman – two strangers – meeting on a beach.'

I nodded.

'Her name... the woman in the book, her name is Maria... my name is Maria, too.'

'I know,' I said.

Then I held out my hand to Maria. After a moment's hesitation, she put her hand in mine and then our story began.

The Particle Theory of Dinner

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Semblance Dromedary is – of course – these days a name well-known to almost everyone with even the slightest interest in the sciences, especially in the highly specialised field of high-energy particle physics. In particular, Dromedary’s area of expertise lies within the branch of contemporary physics concerned with making what scientists call 'a nice bit of dinner'.

Of course, it was the Ancient Greeks, especially Plato and Heraclitus, who first theorised that somewhere out there, there must exist the original ideal of a nice meal. Plato himself perfected the idea in his Theory of Forms. Stating that somewhere out there lay, not only the perfect mashed potato, light and fluffy, and without any of those mysterious lumpy grey bits so beloved of downmarket restaurants and cafés, but there was also a perfect lump-less gravy.

The epicureans too, through there must be some ideal meal out there, and so many of them devoted their lives to sampling as many meals as they could in their local area in search of the ideal meal.

Later though, it was Einstein himself who first came up with the two concepts that defined modern-day Dinner Theory with his concepts of General Good Food and Special Good Food, immortalised in his famous quote: 'God doesn't make lumpy gravy.' However, Einstein, right until his dying day, refused to accept the possibility of the existence of the yummy particle, as theorised by Niels Bohr.

The Large Lunch Collider brings meat and vegetables together at the speed of waiter service. It exists underground at one of London's leading restaurants. Recent work at this facility, run by Semblance Dromedary himself, produced tentative experimental data suggesting there is – indeed – a 'yummy' particle.

Consequently, although, it is too early to be sure, Dinner Physicists are quietly confident that they will confirm the existence of the yummy particle. Thus, mankind could finally be well on their way to a Unified Theory of Dinner at long last.

Strangers

What else is there?

There is this world and there is nothing beyond. Even the stars are out of reach now. There used to be a belief in some afterlife, some life beyond this, but now we know those were just deluded dreams. We are here now, and then we are gone. Even our pasts and any possible futures disappearing off into the mists of tomorrow and yesterday have something unreal, something imagined about them. After all, only a fool would believe they could foretell the future and everyone knows our memories reinvent the past, changing in it subtle – and sometimes not so subtle ways.

I look at you and see a stranger while you stare back at someone you’ve never met. We wonder how and why we spent so much time together when we are such strangers. None of us can ever know what others are thinking, or even if they think of us at all.

I have memories of you and your words and your body seems as familiar to me as my own. Yet we live so far apart, even though we share so much of the same space. Sometimes it does seem we are all strangers to one another and – quite often – even strangers to ourselves.

The Seasons of Our Lives

 

The Seasons of Our Lives

And the disappointing spring becomes
warm seasons like the summer rains
that bring the promise of autumn fruit
and fading like the winter sun.

The seasons of our lives pass so easily,
like the dawn becomes the day, then sunset
before we have done any of those things
we promised each other as the night

fell away and sheets were pulled back,
ready to face a brand new day.
We grow older quicker than we know
and find strangers stare back from mirrors.

Someone that could be our parent
watching us like a stranger, wondering
whatever happened to all those seasons
and all those days and all those schemes

and dreams that filled our young days.
We were not going to end like this,
just one more faded face in a mirror.
We were going to change this world
so it stayed spring for ever more.