"A warrior is always joyful because his love is unalterable and his beloved, the earth, embraces him and bestows upon him inconceivable gifts."
Nov 21st, she continues to surprise. For many days, every time I picked up the phone to try to organize cremation, it felt wrong and I put the phone down. Gradually, understanding dawned ... she is a child of earth ... we have to bury! Her affinity is to the soil and its creatures. She wrote,
"With all the recent rain, the terraces are already lush with new growth, attracting the sheep. Ah, now I remember, the excitement of the day! Funghi! For some years I have been looking out for morels, though none of our neighbours admitted to finding them (we are all rather secretive with our mushrooming finds, we fungaioli). Once many years ago, before I knew of the delights of mushrooming in this valley, I thought I had seen something like morels on the path by the elder. And today, as I was approaching the bamboo grove from below, there they were, at the bottom of the arbour. But I have to admit, they look quite different from the true morel, Morchella esculenta or elata. And neither are they the False Morel, Gyromitra esculenta. They may belong to the Helvella family, but resemble none of the ones in any of the books. I will not eat them."
And to the transformation of the soil. She also wrote,
"Perhaps we should regard our bodies with a perspective similar to that of the potter, who works with materials that have passed through the ages."
and she loved this quotation from a book about the early Ming wares of Jingdezhen:
"Knowing the secret ways of the winds and the rains, he penetrated deep among the slumbering rocks and learned their histories. He became intimate with cosmic affairs and was able to assist the divine process of decay and rebirth. He took the rocks and pounded them; using subtle mixtures, he formed the vessels and works of beauty from loaves of plastic clay. With precision he learned to blow upon the flames and transmuted his fragments of hillside into fragile bowls for the delight and use of man."
The Ridgeway is where we would go to picnic when we were living in Oxford. It was a great surprise, when I started looking, that there is a natural burial ground just 3 miles from the Ridgeway, opposite Letcombe Bassett where Allegra and I grew up and where Kinthissa liked to play in the watercress beds.
It is at Sheepdrove Organic Farm, in snug woodland under a wide sky.
I will write again with more details, but I wanted now to quickly let you know that they have pencilled in some possible dates for us, Tuesday 9th December, or Wednesday 10th December, or Thursday 11th December.
And also to say, maybe we shall make two parts out of what manytimes is done in one ... burial of the body and the pooling of memories.
Sheepdrove is a windy chalky upland and the weather could easily be terrible. What will happen there is focussed solely on burial, maybe with some chanting and singing ... her favourite song was Copper Kettle, sung too correctly by Joan Baez, and more subversively by Bob Dylan
The other part, reminiscences and the pooling of our memories of her ... let this be later on, a slow, gentle and continuous process, using all the magical resources for online communication that we have these days ...
Let us make it so, that it would be lovely if you could come to the chalky hillside, but that if you couldn't, you will still not miss any of the memories and reminiscences.
Yours in the internet age
Ben