Seasons of Time

My eyes are low.

They land on his hands. They look at the veins between his fingers - veins barely drawn, as if erased little by little by the passage of time.

A few spots also, marking the flesh that crossed life, brown constellations on a sky of skin.

We have tea together.

I'm taking a little sip and I'm with her.

She's been harbouring me for a few months now, in this cabin that's just big enough for both of us.

We meditate in the morning, we meditate in the evening.

We're talking, a little.

We tell each other how happy we are to have met.

Sometimes I falter, feel lost and tell her how difficult it is to grow up - growing up is hard for me.

Remain a child while letting age come into the skin.

Being an adult while being faithful to the gold of our early years, faithful to the intangible promises we made to ourselves, promises made with dreams and forgetting.

She's telling me:

Difficulty is only difficult because it takes time, because it's long, because you find it long and you don't see the end of it.
Feeling that it's only a matter of time.
Feeling that time is not time but space.
To feel that this space is the occasion for a meeting, a meeting with you, with me, with everything.
A whole where joy abides, a whole where I can abide.
A house without limits.
Nowhere to come from,

Nowhere else to go,

The sacred mountain lies in your heart.

Nan Huai Chin wrote this, a Zen master.
Sometimes it is said: to see what does not flow in what flows.
What are eyes that can see that, live that?
When I was younger, I knew that the love that united us with my husband was everything to me.
I could say: love and patience.

I would come home at night tired - I was already tired, even when I was young.
I came to the table sometimes and I didn't dine, the day was too hard, both uncomfortable and beautiful but sometimes it was too hard for me to bear.
I stood there at the table with my head resting on my elbows, my stomach knotted.
My husband would come to me and lay his eyes on what I was then.
A precious look, a look that told me and me alone, me and nobody else: I love you and there is nothing to add, nothing to take away in what I see when you are there, in my eyes.

That look has taken me back in time.
He made me brave.
My shadow.
I saw my shadow. He had to see something else.
One day he just told me that where I was standing there was light and it was normal for there to be shade around me as well. And in me.
Younger, much younger even, I was really hard on myself.
I don't know if he taught me to be tender, to tenderness, to give me the right to be, really - to take my place.
In any case, the kindness of his eyes was contagious.

Now that he's dead, the hardest part is giving flesh to words, you understand.
To make the truth heard in what he told me, in what I felt.
Talk to you, and it's not just words.
It's the words, but it's not enough.
When he died it was difficult.
Ahahahahah.

Difficult. Even I'm saying that.
Do you mind if I rephrase what I just said?
It took me a long time to say goodbye and tell myself that I could live and that he was there in me.
I said goodbye to him and then let him go and, at the same time, he is there, always there, at my fingertips.
Aging.
It's not easy every day.
It's a bit like learning to say goodbye to more and more things, every day, every moment.
I say that but I like to age because, you see, over time, it's more and more my body speaking for me - the colour of my hair, the cracking of my bones.
My way of getting up in the morning (oh, sometimes it's terrible: I take time just to get to the edge of the bed).
Flexibility becomes interior.

Remark: I better. Sometimes I see myself moving I think, holalala, poor mummy goes!
One evening when it was still hot, we had gone to the forest together.

The one where she scattered her husband's ashes.

We were between the birches, the shreds of bark at our feet.

I let him talk to the forest, wind, moss and lichen.

I went for a walk to a cliff where you could see a stream at the bottom.

I could see the whole valley like that.

There were farms here and there.

And the fields, full of every shade of green and blond.

I inspired.

Blowing, slowly, slowly, slowly, I counted. Not the seconds.

No, I counted the time that would pass before everything disappeared, before everything was accomplished.

Before I too am ashes among the grass and bark, ashes in the mouth of a person who has loved me.