This Is All (78 page)

This is getting terribly po-faced and boring, so I’ll stop. Goodnight.

Icon

(
by Julie
)

Dearest Cordelia, Sorry I was too tired yesterday to explain about my icon. Sometimes I think I’ve reached my sell-by date, I’m so sick of school and the endless round of correcting coursework and pointing out the difference between a comma and a full stop, not to mention the semi-colon, which, as you know, I’ve now instructed the ‘punctuationally
challenged’, in other words most of the school, to avoid entirely. Or perhaps I just need some sun to build up my stock of melatonin while I sit in the garden and read something for myself.

We’ve meditated in front of my icon so often, and you’ve asked me to explain it so many times, and yesterday were so insistent, that I know I must give in and face up to telling you a little about it. In any case, I’ve decided this weekend to do no school work at all but to rest my body and let my soul restore my mind. Writing to you about my icon will help. I find talking about spiritual matters is tedious but writing about them as clearly as I can sometimes helps to reconnect me to that aspect of myself. So here goes.

You know a little about the background. Most people seem to need an object they revere, an ‘icon’, on which to focus their attention when trying to pray or meditate – like the cross for Christians or a statue of the Buddha for Buddhists. As I’m no longer a Christian or a follower of any of the institutional religions, but am trying to find my own spiritual path, I had to make my own icon. And like any icon, it means many things to ‘those who have eyes to see’. I won’t explain what these deeper meanings are. To be honest, I don’t really like explaining anything about my icon because it only has real value if you work it out for yourself during meditation. So I’m going to explain only the features that anyone can see. You should think of these as clues that will help you discover the deeper meanings on your own.

Where to start? In fact, it doesn’t matter. You can start anywhere and work from there to the heart of the matter. Because everything is related, everything is linked, one thing inevitably leads to another. But for me, an important feature is this:

My icon is round. Like the world. And like the world, I think of it as a sphere, a ball. Also like the human egg, which, you told me, is the only spherical cell in the human body. And like an egg, like a seed, it contains the whole of my spiritual life waiting to be born and to grow. It is also like the sun, a source of light and energy. Perhaps it is like the universe itself, all-containing of everything that exists. If you look at the rim you’ll see it’s painted a deep blue, cerulean blue, azure, the blue of heaven, the colour of peace. Colours and their meanings are as important in my icon as the material out of which it is made and the shapes, the ‘characters’, carved on it.

It is made of wood. A natural living substance. Not man-made, like metal or plastic. Even when we use it to make furniture or a sculpture – or an icon – wood still ‘breathes’. It is affected by temperature and humidity and our treatment of it. It ages and its colour deepens with age. Though no longer growing in a tree, it’s still alive.

Wood is made from earth, air and water by the action of the light of the sun. It grows in a tree, which we think of as rooted in the earth. But if you look at it another way, you can say it is rooted by its branches in the sky. (When trying to find the truth, all things in life should be looked at from the opposite way we usually think of them.) I’ve read that the roots of a tree take up the same space in the ground as its branches take up in the air. So the roots and branches together form the shape of infinity: ∞. Besides this, as tree-expert William Blacklin has explained to you, some of the oldest living things in Britain are trees. Trees are our oldest form of living history. And I’m sure Will has told you that
trees never die. You can destroy them. They can be killed – by people or other animals or by disease. But left alone, they keep on growing, even when they are blown over. New shoots grow from the old roots or from the stumps of the fallen trunk. In that sense, trees represent the eternal, the everlasting.

So it’s easy to understand why all down the ages people have revered trees, have worshipped them, and why there are many stories of their religious importance. In our culture, for example, as you know, the Vikings believed the first man was made from the Ash and the first woman was made from the Elm. It’s also easy to understand why each kind of tree is said to have its own magic properties. This is why my icon is made of five different woods, each one chosen for its particular magic. And each segment of wood has its name carved on it in two ancient forms of writing:

The Ogham
was the written language of the Celts, who inhabited Britain and all of modern Europe for hundreds of years before the Romans. They used a simple alphabet written in straight lines with one or more short lines cut at right angles on one side or the other from the main bar line. Each ogham represents a thought or idea or name.

Runes
were the letters based on the Roman alphabet used by the Nordic people between about 300 AD until about 1100 AD. They believed each letter had a magical significance. The Vikings brought their runes to Britain when they invaded after the Romans left.

So you see I chose two kinds of ancient British magic writing for the names of the woods used in my icon. The woods are as follows:

Oak
: Ogham: two bars to the left of the main bar. Rune: the shape of an arrowhead. Colour: red (passion, blood). Shape: a cross. Not the Christian cross, but a cross with equal-length arms, like a compass, pointing to north, east, south and west (an aid to navigation: finding your way).
Magic properties: strength, inner spiritual power, and health. Associated with the earth and with strong roots.

Four triangular segments are attached to the oak cross. (In engineering terms, the triangle is the strongest of all shapes.)

Ash
: Ogham: five bars to the right of the main bar. Rune: a character like an upside-down N. Colour: violet (the sacred). Magic properties: inner and outer worlds linked, the marriage of opposites (the ying and the yang in Eastern spirituality), quick intellect, clarity. Associated with energy, the Age of Aquarius (water, the feminine) and the crown (the head, the intellect).

Holly
: Ogham: three bars to the left of the main bar. Rune: an arrow. Colour: green (the natural world, growth, fertility). Magic properties: clear wisdom and courage, the magic of dreams (imagination), fire, everlasting life, balance. Associated with personal growth and the heart (love, passion).

Birch
: Ogham: one bar to the right of the main bar. Rune: like a B. Colour: yellow (sunlight). Magic properties: healing, beginnings and new starts. Associated with air and water and the solar plexus (the place in the middle of your body where all your nerves meet – which is why, when you’re nervous or worried, you get a ‘stomach ache’).

Apple
: Ogham: five bars to the left of the main bar. Rune: like a K. Colour: orange (warmth and fruitfulness). Magic properties: love, healing, poetic inspiration. Associated with water and the pelvic regions of the body (therefore, with sex and birth) and with the sacred. (I think it’s interesting that the apple tree brings together Love and Sex and the Sacred, which in my belief should always be linked. Also, it seems to me, Cordelia, that the apple is ‘your tree’, because its special properties suit you and your needs and desires.)

The oghams are coloured in the rich brown of the earth.

All the runes face outwards, directing their energy from the heart of the icon out into the world and the universe of which the world where we live is a part.

*

You see now what I mean: this makes my icon seem no more than a list of information put together by someone who must appear to be at least a bit weird, if not mad. This is true of all explanations of spiritual matters. Icons only make sense when you bring them to life in your imagination during meditation.

My spiritual life is not yours. You must find your own path. If my icon helps you, I’m pleased. If it doesn’t, I’m not displeased. In fact, I don’t expect it will. I’m not looking for converts. I’m not seeking disciples or followers or fellow believers. Quite the opposite. I discourage such attachments. I suspect them and don’t want them. But if, dear Cordelia, keeping me company helps you to find your own spiritual path, then I’m glad to be your companion and am glad to have your companionship while I try to find my own way. I can tell you that you do help me quite as much as you tell me I help you.

With love, Julie.

Jobs

I need part-time jobs to make extra money for the things I want, like books books books, CDs CDs, clothes, make-up, etc., that Dad’s pocket money isn’t enough to buy. And, says Dad, the jobs ‘give me a glimpse into the real world’. I hate that phrase. Does he think school isn’t part of ‘the real world’? When people use that phrase they really mean they want you to suffer more than you are already by doing unpleasant things you wouldn’t choose to do.

Judgement

That Will climbed the ash tree a second time, secretly, alone, branch by branch to the top, unsecured, to prove
himself to himself, stays in my mind for weeks, nagging at me while the leaves fall, autumn turns to winter, the branches to bare bones, the trees to skeletons.

By which time I decide I must do it too. I won’t be happy, won’t be content, till I’ve climbed alone, branch by branch as he did, to prove myself to myself and to him, to Will, even though he will never know.

It will be my present to myself for my eighteenth birthday. I’ll tell no one before or after. No boasting, no praise, no reward, except the satisfaction of doing it and the pleasure to be had from the purity of secrecy.

But for safety’s sake it must be a dry, windless day. So I give myself permission to make the climb on the first suitable day during the two weeks either side of my birthday, and keep an eye on the weather forecast.

In preparation I make a little commemorative plaque like the others by cutting a piece from a tin of baked beans using Dad’s secateurs, and inscribe my initials on it with the point of a meat skewer, leaving the date to be added when I know what it is.

Three days before my birthday one of those tacky sparky wannabe celebrity ballet-handed tv weather women, who I would willingly cosh with a hockey stick they are so pleased with themselves, announces that tomorrow, Saturday, will be ‘a
really
good day with
no
rain and
above-average
temperatures for the time of year, a touch of frost during the night but
plenty of sun
everywhere’. I inscribe the date onto my plaque, insert a nail and slip the plaque into a pocket of my backpack along with a hammer and climbing gloves filched from Arry’s room, and go to bed after taking half of one of Doris’s sleeping pills nicked from the bathroom cabinet, to make sure I don’t stay awake all night a-tremble with excitement.

I will make a day of it because I have to go by bike, which will take an hour and a half each way, I don’t want to set off till after ten and want to be back by four, before the winter
dark sets in. At least cycling will keep me warm and loosen me up for the climb.

I make a snack of cheese and tomato sandwich, banana, flask of coffee, bottle of water, and bar of milk chocolate, tell D&D I need time to myself and some exercise, and set off. Luckily, Arry, who wouldn’t believe my cover story for one second, is still fast asleep after a middle-of-the-night return home from a boozy party.

I love cycling. The air riding over my body, the push and swirl of my legs, faster than running but just as much in touch with the ground and easier to look around and take everything in. And the bike itself, a beautiful machine, simple, neat, efficient, non-pollutant, as user-friendly as a book, as elegant as a piano. My favourite objects: books, piano, bicycle, laptop.

I stop halfway there for a coffee while sitting on a gate looking across a narrow tree-lined valley. I remember sitting on a similar gate while being watched by Edward, a memory that makes me uneasy, as memories of major mistakes always do.

During the second half of the journey, I deliberately think of Will, picking and choosing memories in preparation for my climb, which I’m dedicating to him: Our morning runs with a pause at the kissing tree. Our music practices. Our early-morning and late-night phone calls. Our weekend camping trips, he researching trees, me reading and writing. Our love-making, in my room, in our tent, in the open air, and once after school in the English department book cupboard to which I have a key, being Julie’s helper (the dusty dry smell of the books, the hardness of the floor under me, the extra frisson of excitement because we might be caught by a cleaner). The old church, where we made love, our arrangement of flowers and bed, my lover’s sermon, and our first sex. I’m happy, I’m sad, I’m grateful for the times we had together, and I know, already I know, I will never love anyone
else, ever, in the whole of my life, however long it might be, as I loved, as I still love, my first lover, William Blacklin.