What is sacred to you?
We all have our very own sense of what's sacred, and when we identify it, we can use it to experience a much richer experience of the every day
What is sacred to you? Understanding how to answer that question helps me alchemise the pain of grief, which is always within touching distance, since to be human is to lose, all the time, into something vivid, powerful, satisfying in everyday life.
There are mulberries growing in Washington DC. The fruit, falling now from the dark green leaves of a tree I pass on the way to school with the boys, stain a corner of sidewalk with their dark purple blood. The children reach up to grab them, laughing as they strain to touch the fruit making the keychains on their backpacks full of school books jangle. I pull the branches down for them, as they rip the fruit from stems, staining their small hands pink. My boys Lester and Dash are brimming, overflowing, bubbling with enthusiasm for the mulberries, but something else distracts them - a friend further down the street, who has Pokemon cards - and the fruit are forgotten as they race down the sidewalk to meet him. I follow them, but the feeling that the scent and flavour and distinct purple pink colour of the mulberries creates doesn’t leave me, even after I’ve dropped the children at school.
To me there’s something deeply melancholic, and poetic, too, about mulberries. Mulberries are of the past, innocuous little fruit whose name alone takes me backwards in time, painful at first and then later more gentle, to a place where I can be with memories of my mum and my sister.
Few people grow mulberries in England, and I’ve only ever really seen them in one place, on the vast, spreading branches of a tree in the walled garden of a beautiful house in Norfolk, called Wiveton, where I spent every summer with my Mum and my sister until I was 16, staying with our distant cousin, who lives there. Even that name, Wiveton, is a kind of haunting, a place of memory, strangely tangible, since it exists as an actual location, but also a dream-like place in my memories, which I want to return to but can never find.
Those summer holidays ended when I was 16, after Mum had a terrible accident and was left brain damaged, and grief put a great violent thunderbolt through my adolescent life. My Mum and my sister are both dead now, too, the two people I associate most clearly with those summers at Wiveton, part of a past I carry inside me, as much a part of me as my DNA. This doesn’t stop the longing to go back to them, of course, as I gaze back to the time when they were alive, my face pressed up to a glass separating them from me, like a child staring into a darkened toy shop on a Sunday evening. My memories of them are a sacred thing for me - deeply personal, sometimes fragile since I also fear forgetting the sound of their voices, their mannerisms, and incalculably precious; and I’m aware that I’m always, consciously and subconsciously, searching for sacred spaces which inspire a kind of sense memory, allowing me to return to that place I was in with them both when they were alive. This happens, tantalisingly fleetingly, in dreams, but there are real places, like Wiveton, and things and tastes and sounds, like the mulberries, which also have the extraordinary effect of inspiring a sudden, unexpected kind of time and space travel, where memory and senses collide, and I can for a few moments touch a cosmic space where they are both present. But how to find those places and spaces? Can we create them, artificially, as a place to be present with the people we have lost? Or do they simply happen, like magic, or spirit, or perhaps coincidence? I think that this is how it works for me..