Note by JRW:  The following is an extract from an E-Mail by Myatt, sent to me. 


Julie: I have copied this from my Notebook. It was written early this morning.

 

A Walk In Snow

 

This is new - at least for me in my few years here, in this rural place. Several inches of snow; the pond of my repose frozen and covered in a speckling of the fresh-fallen snow of last night which followed many hours of snow in the middle and late afternoon; the glorious blue sky with a morning, warming, Sun which little by little begins the thaw.

The snow of yesterdays' cold hours enables me to wander and see in great detail the tracks of Fox, Deer, Badger, Hare and Rabbit. So much snow that even the branch of Oak which forms my pond-side seat had to cleared before I sat with a cold breeze raining down droplets of freshly melted snow upon me, this notebook, the white-hidden grass around. Yet the birds - Blackbird, Thrush, Robin - still sing, even though I think they must be hungry. But the Sun, surely, warms them, as it does me, bringing to me at least that relaxing peace I have often found here amid these fields of rural England.

So, Spring becomes poised, for a while, while this cold wind and whiteness lasts. And I - I myself am poised now between a now lost love and what I in my lowly human form desire and hope will be the promise of my future to bring again the warmth, the joy, of one more human love. She, my recent love, is gone and I try not to dwell upon her loss, upon the loneliness, for there is here that beauty which assuages, and that knowing, that learning which I have known and learnt these past years here, toiling as I did outdoors in cold, warm, heat, wind, cloud, Sun, snow, and rain. Thus am I but one connexion, one perspective, among the threads, the nexions, of life. But there is temptation, great temptation born from such loss: the temptation of deeds, the whisperings of those many words of the past prompting involvement in that world beyond this world where I sit, at peace under this life-giving god-like Sun. I need to resist; I must resist, remembering - what? Only those deeds done; only the suffering, the pain caused, bringing as such causal things did over decades that understanding, that feeling, presenced in empathy and made manifest in compassion, reason and honour. I need to resist - why? Because otherwise I know deep within the waste that such a return would bring. A waste of those lost lives; a waste of the suffering, the creations, the joy, the passion, the deaths, of others and myself, thousand year upon thousand year; a waste of the quest which has brought me thus far, from street to field, from battle-song to plainchant to rural silence, conveyed as I have been into and beyond the light and the dark.

Now, a species of causal time and thinking later, the Sun is so warm my feet begin to sweat within these green, old, well-worn Wellington boots as I still sit here on this fallen branch while more and more droplets of melting snow fall upon me from above. There is thus - and for the moment - a renewed apprehension of the truths evident in the unity of life. And so I smile, warm, peaceful, while the wisdom and knowledge last.

 

DW Myatt
Two days past Ash Wednesday:
Because I do hope to know again...