The colours of love

wonderings on rain, relationships and connection

This year began wet — drenching, howling wet. As though the world could not shed enough tears. How could any of us? The world grown strange and terrible, as the wise have been telling us it would for decades… and are still telling us:

Nobody likes to be reminded that the incipient takeover of the U.S. government by organized crime was widely reported well in advance, way back in the olden days when news still paid (us) a living wage and — get this — could safely report the facts without fear of political revenge.

Marya Hornbacher Going Solo at the End of the World

A world of water shortages while sea levels rise and drown communities; of forests burning, of genocide and political lies, of injustices so blatant we are left speechless. A world in which we wonder what might remain, and how…

It’s the only world we have… this place that is also full of more love than a heart can hold, crammed with such heart-piercing beauty it can leave us breathless, a place of compassion, yearning and hope where it is possible to reach out a hand to our non-human companions, to those we love, to communities as dazed and wondering as ourselves…

Connection — always it’s about connection — political and personal (when was it ever possible to disentangle the two?) — always it’s about love, about the good we can do, knowing we can’t do it all, but this is not a reason to turn away.

This month, Adam and I have been married for ten years. My previous marriage was thirty-one years. I began yearning to be gone from it in the first months… A long story with highlights along the way — most vitally my children… Afterwards, I was certain there would no other marriage, or even relationship.

It began with a glance at a broken wall beside a dam in the hills of North Wales. A story of the miraculous village — everyone ws out for the day to visit the travelling cinema further down the valley. So when the wall broke and all the houses catastrophically flooded, not a single life was lost.

It began with a shared phrase: the writing’s on the wall. With an outpouring of emails about books and film and life, the things and people we loved…

It began with Philippe Audibert’s cover of Sidney Bechet’s ‘Petite Fleur’ on a street in Paris one Sunday morning. It began with Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties:

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.

It began with a cake covered in rosebuds and a song that played as we signed the register. In different ways, each of us had been a long time at sea, searching for a harbour.

It began with a political act. A tiny civil service in the registry office at Dolgellau followed by a ceremony in a friend’s home, surrounded by community. Neighbours from Tanygrisiau, authors we’d worked with who had become dear friends, friends from pervious eras of our lives, family…

It began with the belief that private relationships are part of the web of wider community, that we need one another.

In The Star Thrower, the palaeontologist Loren Eiseley has an essay, ‘The Judgment of the Birds’. A raven snatches a tiny baby bird from a nest and sits on a branch with the nestling in its beak.

Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents. No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. … the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable. The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. … in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first… Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.

Community won’t always protect us from the predators, but it can gather to mourn, to resist, to insist that life is more than death, love greater than hate. Together we are more than those cowering beneath the brooding shadow of the raven.

Ten years on, the relationship is more complex, quieter, steadier. Deeper. It’s been saturated with rain that’s fallen on our lives, as it has on so many lives, some lost in the deluge. As I cook, I sing lines of the Unthanks’s song, ‘Caught in a Storm’

Oh the wind, the wind, the rain the rain,

It seems the sun won’t shine again

But in a world as exquisite as it is heart-breaking, the sun does shine again. This summer it has gone on shining and shining and now we long for rain, for the rivers to rise, for the ground to be watered. For the fires to stop.

We married in autumn — the season of the year and of our lives — on the wettest day I’ve ever known in Blaenau Ffestiniog (which is really saying something). The deluge was waiting, but between the storms, there was sun. And oh, the colours of summer tipping into autumn!

In the TV series, Life in Squares, focussing on the Bloomsbury group around Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, there’s a scene when Vanessa is discussing love with Duncan Grant. As artists, the three primary colours provide a metaphor for the most important values in relationships. Vanessa decides that her three primary colours are friendship, loyalty and sex. And the greatest of the three is loyalty. A secular echo of I Corinthians 13 in which faith, hope and love are held up as supreme values, but the greatest of these is love.

What do we build our relationships on — personal and political? It’s not hard to see that in a world ruled by oligarchs, the values of power, extraction and death screech loudest. ‘Values’ that are cynical, profit-based, dehumanising and eco-wrecking. It is an act of resistance to choose other values. Each of us might reach for different words, but whenever we choose attention over consumption, hope over despair, connection over othering, mutuality over ego… in whatever small ways are available to us… wherever there is love… it matters.

We’re on the cusp of autumn, a time of beautiful colours. The textures of crisp leaves drying into every shade of vivid, blazing scarlet and mandarin… Oaks in flashes of carnelian, sepia paper, brittling to the ground, birches fluttering ripe gamboge and amber, striating the light, beeches clinging to leaves of raw sienna and auburn, a single lemon flame of larch, hawthorn flaunting many colours — carmine edged in lime, golden syrup, cinnamon-mottled, and elders tendering coral, vermilion, rust…

The world goes on offering its many colours, even this late in the story of the human-made mess of the earth. Even when autumn threatens to darken into the longest, stormiest winter. Humanity is capable of such extremes, but still we can choose to reach out a hand, to connect, to love.

Here’s to the next decade, my love, even if it rains and rains.

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