Seasons change, friendships fade, people die. You think you will never smile again, but extraordinary new experiences await
The heatwave may have left, but fantastic visions followed in its wake. Across the British and Irish countryside, crop marks in the scorched ground revealed the subterranean outlines of undiscovered neolithic henges, a phantom 18th-century mansion and a second-world-war airfield, among other eerie sites. In Gloucestershire, the heat apparently encouraged a colony of rare Andean flamingos to lay eggs for the first time in 15 years. In my flat, a man with too many oscillating fans and free hours is wondering if he can convert them into a rotisserie chicken arrangement. I can’t quite pin down what I find so magical about these stories – or at least two of them – but they represent the last gifts of a summer that is tipping towards being over.
As soon as the weather dropped out of the mid 30s, I sewed myself into a hoodie and started mourning. I’m so fearful of losing things that I always fixate on their end. I can’t even enjoy a pizza, as the disappearing slices remind me of the clock in Countdown. There is no clear way out of this relentlessly tragic worldview. My takeaway from the flamingo story is that the eggs weren’t fertilised, so will never hatch. Loss is an unavoidable part of life, because we’re attached to outcomes and people and things, which Buddhists teach is the root of all suffering in the world. (Personally, I think having to reset my Apple ID every fortnight is the cause of all suffering, but accept this view is blinkered.) Maybe that is why I love these strange stories, these unexpected legacies of the good times, because they tell us nothing is ever really lost. There is room for more, and magic left.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L72dFh
via
0 Comments