Sunrise on Saturn

Posted by geoffmead on June 4, 2015
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Sunrise Saturn

Opposites attract, they say.

Chris was extraverted and sanguine, whilst I am introverted and melancholic. I’m quite content being introverted and melancholic by the way, but I was drawn to Chris like a moth to an arc light.

She lit up my life with her natural optimism (not that all would be well but that, in spite of everything, all was well) and her unwavering belief in my nascent creativity. She loved me in ways I could not love myself. At our wedding she declared:

I will encourage, support and dare you in your creativity – so that you grow fully and magnificently into yourself. I’ll be your best cheerleader. I will respect your space for you own private time, your memories, your family life and your stories. I will encourage you to be confident in your body – so that you live into and appreciate your vitality and energy. I’ll be encouraging if you are ill and when you are well. I’ll be at your side.

In return, I vowed:

You are my soul mate and my dearest friend, the apple of my eye and my heart’s delight. All that is mine to share, I will share with you: hopes and fears; work and play; life and love. All that is mine to give, I give you without measure; I am yours, whatever time and fortune bring.

She was true to her promise whilst she lived, and even now I feel her standing beside me, egging me on. I write, as I did before she died, both for my own delight and to warrant her faith in me as a writer.

Apart from loving her, it is hard for me to put my finger on exactly what I was able to give her. A necessary determination to see things through, perhaps? A concern for the essential? A willingness to face the shadow?

“You’re too Saturnine,” she would say, when I was particularly sombre.

Then she would smile like the sun.

Widening Circles

Posted by geoffmead on May 29, 2015
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Candle spire

There is a verse from Rilke’s Book of Hours that I often think about. The symbolism is complex and enigmatic but the words speak to me about the many ways in which Chris reached out to the world and beyond as she developed an ecological and then a cosmological sense of herself.

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

It feels very appropriate that this translation is by Anita Burrows and Joanna Macy. Chris and I both met Joanna when she ran a workshop at Hawkwood ten years ago and Chris visited her at her home in San Francisco where, at Joanna’s request, she ran a clown workshop.

Chris regarded Joanna – who used the image of Widening Circles as the title of her autobiography – as an inspiring role model. Like her, Chris had a mighty intellect, a loving heart and a deep commitment to the well being of the planet; both devoted themselves to education for sustainability; both lived artfully.

At 85, Joanna is still writing and publishing new works (in conjunction with some of her chosen students). What might Chris have achieved if she had lived as long? An academically inclined friend let slip the thought soon after she died that given 20 more years she would have been “bigger than Bateson.”

The verse and the picture above put me in mind of the widening circles of love in which Chris was held during her illness: the intimacy she and I shared; the visits of her family and close friends; the messages of love and support she received from well-wishers; the candles lit in her memory in dozens of countries round the world when she died.

And the circles continue to widen as we are joined by with those of you who read this blog; those who will be taking part in the celebration of her life at Matara next month; and all those who have been touched by her work or who will be touched in the future.

Homeward Bound

Posted by geoffmead on May 24, 2015
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boussole2

In August 2003, convinced that the performance would be sold out, Chris and I queued for half an hour for tickets to see Pirates of the Caribbean as soon as we boarded the ferry to Santander for our first camping trip in Spain. It turned out that we had miscalculated the likely demand and we ended up holding hands in the dark, the only two viewers in the tiny cinema in the bowels of the ship.

Chris loved Captain Jack Sparrow. Quite understandable. Who wouldn’t want to be Captain Jack when they (don’t) grow up? She also fancied Johnny Depp. Bit of a mystery that, when she already had me. Ah well. No accounting for taste.

One detail of the film that we both loved was Captain Jack’s compass. For those who haven’t seen the film I should say that rather than pointing North, this particular compass points to whatever the holder most desires.

In the end, after years of struggle and bickering, and even without the benefit of a magic compass, Chris and I discovered that we wanted exactly the same thing.

To come home.

Home to ourselves; to each other; and to the lives we were meant to live.

Home to the planet; and finally, to the cosmos.

Which is why I’ve called the memoir of the last 18 months of Chris’s life, that I’ve recently finished writing, Homeward Bound and why I’ve used the image of Captain Jack’s compass as an illustration.

 

 

This Clay Jug

Posted by geoffmead on May 20, 2015
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Clay Jug 3

This morning, I caught myself laying two places for breakfast. I put one set of cutlery in front of me and only then did I notice the spare knife and fork still in my hand. It wasn’t until I reached out to put them down opposite me on the table that reality kicked in.

“She’s not here.”

For fifteen years, Chris and I fought and loved and struggled; we are inextricably entwined; there is no part of my life untouched by her spirit. Yet I cannot reach out and take her hand; I cannot hold her in the night; we cannot laugh together, make plans together, talk together, dream together. I cannot call her on the phone to commiserate when something goes wrong, or to celebrate a successful venture. I see her wherever I turn, but she is not here.

I was trying to explain this duality of her presence and absence to my friend Peter Neall. “It’s like that poem by Kabir,” I said. “The one about the clay jug. It contains wonders but sometimes you just want to feel the earthy warmth and soft contours of the clay.”

Peter remembered the poem. We’d come across it together 20 years ago when our friend Jackie Levin incorporated a Robert Bly translation of it in a song on his aptly-named album The Mystery of Love is Greater than the Mystery of Death.

Inside this clay jug there are canyons
and pine mountains, and the maker of
canyons and pine mountains!

All seven oceans are inside, and
hundreds of millions of stars.

The acid that tests gold is there, and
the one who judges jewels.

And the music from the strings
no one touches, and the source of
all water.

If you want the truth, I will tell you
the truth:

Friend, listen:
the God whom I love is inside.

[Click below to hear Robert Bly and Jackie Levin]

The Road (Not) Taken

Posted by geoffmead on May 15, 2015
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two roads

The questions we ask, the stories we tell, and the choices we make are fateful.

Robert Frost used the metaphor of standing at the point where two roads diverge in a wood. The traveler must decide which to take. It is simply not possible to take both. Chris and I made such a fateful choice when, on the day she was diagnosed with a brain tumour, I asked her to marry me and she said “Yes.”

I like Frost’s poetry and The Road Not Taken has been a favourite for years. I used to be entranced by the idea that I had chosen the road less travelled (whatever that means) as though that made me somehow special. But I have let that fancy go.

What matters more to me now, is less the moment of choice than making a sustained and whole-hearted commitment to follow the road that has been chosen. Frost called his poem The Road Not Taken and the language has a wistful quality as though he will forever be wondering where the other road might have led.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

As a melancholic, I understand where that wistfulness comes from, but living with Chris taught me that regretting the lives we have not lived is a poor substitute for relishing the ones we have. We had a year as husband and wife and in the end it was enough to transform us both. It would be truer (if less poetic) to declare:

I shall be telling this, I forsee
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and we—
We took the same one, you and me,
And that has made all the difference.

Heaven and Earth

Posted by geoffmead on May 10, 2015
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IMG_2479

Yesterday I went to Ashridge Business School where a group of Chris’s former students were graduating. I’d met them before during their AMSR programme (Ashridge Masters in Sustainability and Responsibility). They had invited me to join them after the ceremony as they gathered to plant a tree in her memory.

We stood in a circle on the lawn around a magnificent, new, 10 foot tall cherry tree as they paid tribute to their friend and teacher. It was a touching, poignant and private occasion so I won’t repeat what was said except to say that their love and respect for Chris shone through.

Their other act of remembrance had been to register a new official name for a hitherto unnamed star in the constellation of Ursa Major. Henceforth, the star with co-ordinates RA: 11h 3m 43.7s – DEC: 61° 45m 3.0s will be known by the name engraved on plaque in the photograph above:

The Playful She-Bear – Chris Seeley

The combination of the tree and the star brilliantly reflect Chris’s genius: there never was anyone whose feet were planted more firmly on the ground nor was there a teacher whose very being inspired us more to reach for the stars.

So, a huge thank you to all the members of AMSR 4 and to Chris Nichols – Chris’s friend, colleague, and Ashridge playmate – for remembering Chris so beautifully.

Tuck Box

Posted by geoffmead on May 6, 2015
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Brentwood School

It wasn’t like this in my day.

I mean to say. Crikey.

Girls!

Actually, I don’t remember the Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds visual effects either, but this was the only picture I could find of Brentwood Preparatory School where I was a boarder from 1957 to 1961.

Boarding school life offered few pleasures for a lonely 7 year old. But one that Chris liked to hear me recount was the weekly visit to the “tuck shop.” For the uninitiated, this was a padlocked, walk-in larder loaded with boxes containing sweets and chocolates provided by our parents at the beginning of each term.

Each boarder had his own hoard; mine I remember was stored in a marbled plastic forerunner of a Tupperware box, with my name inscribed on a dog tag that my mother had attached by a split-ring through a hole she had made in the lid with a hot needle. At the time, I was both fascinated by my mother’s imaginative handiwork and humiliated by the fact that she had used a dog tag.

On Sundays, in the otherwise desolate hours between morning chapel and evening service, we queued to receive our weekly treat. As each salivating boy got to the front of the line, Matron picked his box off the shelf, removed the lid and – under her eagle-eye – proffered its contents for him to select a single piece of tuck.

Looking back, I’m not sure which was more exciting – the prospect of sinking one’s teeth into the chosen delight or the opportunity, in a regimented world where choice was almost non-existent, to choose for oneself which particular item to consume. I adored chocolate in all its forms: coconut-filled Bounties; unctuous, gooey Mars Bars; Kit-Kats with silver foil wrapping that could be rubbed to reveal the inscription beneath; improbably aerated, ribbed slabs of Aero; Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and strangely yellow-coloured Caramacs.

My class-mate Wignall on the other hand, preferred packets of Fruit Pastilles and Maynard’s Wine Gums which could be stashed and traded for favours during the week. Fiske was a sucker for Fry’s Peppermint Creme while Huxley indiscriminately wolfed down anything that came his way.

Winterbottom Minor rarely got to enjoy any tuck at all as his older brother Winterbottom Major would extort it from him as his dues for “protection.”

All this is by way of a preamble to saying that before she died, Chris secretly commissioned our friend Claire Nichols to procure for me a posthumous Christmas present: a tuck box full to bursting with 1950s retro-sweets.

I’m eating one piece a week and it’s still half full.

Confectionery of the Gods.

Thank you, my lovely.

Before the Fall

Posted by geoffmead on May 2, 2015
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IMG_2031

We took this picture on 21 August last year. It was Chris’s 48th birthday and we went out for dinner at Demuth’s (now the Acorn Kitchen) our favourite restaurant. The food there is fabulous but we loved it for another reason: it’s where we went on our first date back in 2001. Although, Chris didn’t actually know it was a date at the time.

At least, that’s what she always said.

“How could you not have known it was a date?” I used to ask her.

“You were just some bloke I was having dinner with,” she would say. “Meeting up for a chat.”

“Just some bloke!”

“You know what I mean.”

“No.”

“It wasn’t until afterwards, in the car outside my house, when you picked up my notebook and wrote your phone number in, that I realised something was up.”

“Something was up!”

“And the books,” she would say. “That was sneaky. Leaving a pile of interesting books on the table when you went off to the loo.”

“You looked at them?”

“Of course, I looked at them.”

We had the same conversation many times over the years, me refusing to believe she hadn’t known that we had been on a date, and she maintaining her innocence. It made us both laugh.

The night the photograph was taken, I’d found a parking space two streets away and we walked slowly to the restaurant, Chris holding my arm for support, her left leg dragging a little. I’d booked the same table as the one at which we’d enjoyed our asymmetric first date, set back on it’s own in an alcove on the ground floor.

We relished every mouthful and every moment.

It was her last birthday.

Perpetuum Mobile

Posted by geoffmead on April 24, 2015
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escher heads

The week before she died, Chris and I had been planning to share the soundtracks of our lives by doing our own version of Desert Island Discs. Our individual choices would have been very different, but there is one piece of music that I’m confident we would both have chosen: Penguin Café Orchestra’s Perpetuum Mobile.

She introduced me to their music early in our relationship when we were busy falling in love with each other. She’d seen them live many times and relished both the intricacy of their ensemble playing and their obvious enjoyment of each other on stage: a perfect metaphor for life as she wanted to live it.

Perpetuum Mobile is the track I will forever associate with Chris. The melody is constantly moving. It’s full of energy and life; somehow both playful and profound at the same time. It is her and for me (the romantic of the pair) it is symbolic of our relationship: it’s “our tune.”

We chose it to play at the Registry Office when we got married and I chose it for her funeral service. It accompanied us into this world as man and wife and it marked her passing into another.

I played it again this morning for our good friend Kathy Skerritt who visited Chris last year when she was in hospital. Our tears flowed freely and we laughed between sobs as the music evoked bitter-sweet memories of our beloved companion, and as we imagined her somewhere else, still in perpetual motion.

Listen to it now and think of her.

Well of Grief

Posted by geoffmead on April 17, 2015
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Well of Grief

In a beautiful turn of phrase, poet David Whyte invites us to slip beneath the still surface of the well of grief and descend through the blackness to find a secret source of cold clear water from which to drink.

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief

turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe

will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,

nor find in the darkness glimmering
the small round coins
thrown by those who wished for something else.

The metaphor is apt; each time I turn to the page to write about Chris, I visit this well. I know that its waters nourish me but, at first sight, they are black and uninviting. Each time I ask myself, “Do I really have to go there again?” and then, “Should I drink? Shall I jump in? Will I drown?”

People do drown in wells and sometimes in despair but shedding the hot tears and drinking the cold clear waters of grief seem to nourish and restore us. Why should this be? Perhaps because grief is not just a personal affliction. We all visit the well from time to time and, in a close-knit community, when one weeps all weep; when one drinks, all drink.

Chris had an extraordinary capacity for building and fostering community: a web of relationships criss-crossing the world. Few things delighted her more than connecting interesting and like-minded people together. This enduring community of friendship that now sustains and supports me is her last and perhaps her greatest gift. Some of you read this blog and either comment or contact me privately to express your love and solidarity, for which I am enormously grateful. I miss her desperately but I am not alone in my grief.

More than 150 of you have already said that you’ll be coming to celebrate her life at Matara on 29-30 June and many more will be calling in by Skype from far-flung places. During these two days, let us drink deeply from the well of grief so that we may swim more joyfully in the waters of life, rejoicing in her memory.

Let this be the treasure we find at the bottom of the well.