To Have and To Hold

It feels good to be productive, again.

Perhaps because of the heat, and these long, open days, I'm reminded of last year's swimming at Bittangabee Bay. It presents a good analogy for my experience of a return to drawing.

I remember the first time I went to the cove on my own, before breakfast, and dawdled almost endlessly on the rocks, staring into the cold, ominous taunt of the lapping water. Ghastly fish remains - the careless debris of many holiday fishermen - littered the shallows in some places, and the deep threatened horrors. The whole enterprise became so unappealing that it was only pride, in the end, that forced me into the water.

Splash!

There can be nothing half-hearted, once you're in.

The shock of the cold caught my breath and my head reeled with instinctive panic. And then it was calm. No rearing sharks. An expanse of glittering morning water, and just me in it. The solitary plosh-plosh of my inexpert stroke announced to the silence my passage to the beach and return to the rocks.

After that, all the time we were camping, the cove whose waters had frightened me so much, now beckoned irresistibly every day.

***

I sent Lewis a Dorothy Porter poem, yesterday, and he surprised me, some hours later, by composing a poem of his own, in reply. So, I wrote one for him, late last night, and it was such a pleasure to play with words like that, again. I'm generally a little timid of writing poetry, but it's okay for an audience of one.

A theme to emerge in my poem - oddly it wasn't conscious - was the compulsion to have and to hold, to grasp and keep and present as proof. It's been haunting my drawing, with the jars... and it's inherent in the Lewis problem, too: though I can't quite pin down the thought (there I go again, pinning down!). But it's something about keeping and not keeping, and what worth I attribute to the joy of something when I can't keep it forever. I suppose I'm flitting around the notion of non-attachment.

I can rejoice in the secret wonder resulting from my failure to capture yesterday's blue-tongue lizard on camera. It makes the experience more intimate, more wholly my own... as though the very letting go allowed me to keep what was most precious. But my feelings on the whole are quite different when it comes to letting go of Lewis.

Does that sound ridiculous? To compare my love with a lizard!

But my mind insists on making a philosophical link between these two so disparate instances of joy and loss.

Can I reach a state of mind whereby it is possible to love and let go, serenely?

I don't even know if it's desirable. I have always prized passion and, in terms of love, to have and to hold are long-cherished hopes of mine. Perhaps the key lies somewhere in the question of what part of loving, what part of happiness, is one's own to keep. 

Ah... words confuse me further. I shall return to my drawing, and pay closer attention to the teachings of the little jar.