It has been a month of sadness and departures, whose first day was marked by me with a small solo ceremony on Allerheiligen (also known as ‘All Souls Day’, ‘Samhain’, ‘Dia de los Muertos’ depending on where you are and what you subscribe to).
Being of “Heinz 57”* ancestry whose major component is Latvian stretching back 45000 years I have no particular religious affiliations. I suspect my early ancestors worshipped nature, and I know that later generations included those who adhered to both Lutheran and Jewish faiths, I try as much as possible to practice kindness (though I confess to slipping up from time to time). Even though here in the south it is actually spring in November, my DNA is all from the north and my cell memory tells me it is a time of remembrance. Had I been in Göttingen and were my great aunt Rose still living, we would have gathered bucket and scrubbing brushes, candles and flowers and taken the bus to the cemetery to scrub the lichens from my great-grandparents headstone. Here in South Australia I walk to my favourite waterhole and mark the anniversary with a few flames floating safely in a bowl. I’m in the middle of my sixth decade and it seems it is always ‘jahrzeit’ for someone, but this year the world feels particularly heavy. Two more treasured friends crossed their rivers in the eleven days just past. Please note I’m not writing this for sympathy (that belongs to their families), merely stating fact.
When I set my bowl of flame afloat it was to honour ancestors and lost friends, and this year also as an acknowledgment of the innocent lives still being brutally destroyed by war. Humanity learns too well from historical atrocities; simply making more effective killing and maiming devices and finding more excuses to use them so that more people can profit from inflicting misery. Killing children and bombing hospitals and cutting off food, water and other essential supplies from civilian populations is wrong. Besides inflicting unfathomable miseries of death, maiming and displacement all that is achieved by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the brutal Hamas raid of October 7 and the horrific retaliation of the Israeli government (not to mention the things going on in Africa about which I am less well-informed) is a vast increase in the profits of arms manufacturers who supply these situations. What do they do with all this money? You can’t eat it, sleep on it or rub it in. It doesn’t smell nice. These days most of the stuff is never even seen, just a series of figures chewed back and forth between electronic devices.
Ordinary people who are just trying to live their lives peacefully (and in many cases already under challenging circumstances) are having their lives destroyed by people in charge, most of whom are safely far removed from the hellish scenes they are orchestrating. It is not that this is new, just that it’s becoming worse and (thanks to modern media) more immediately visible. In the face of this I feel stupidly helpless and ineffective. People are generally NOT their governments.
There is a particularly poignant video on instagram, of a small cat bidding farewell to its young human friend. Instagram has blacked it out, which is bizarre. I found my way to it via a screenshot on Jenny Balfour Paul’s page and while instagram is not permitting sharing of the video within the app, it was possible to copy the link by other means. Find it here. It is greyed out and instagram says the content may be graphic or violent but it is nowhere near as graphic as the images of bloodied bodies shown elsewhere, a small and tender moment of love and sadness in a mad world.
When my head and heart are this way it is hard to concentrate on much, so in quiet moments I am reaching for my sewing, though you probably know that stitching is a habit of mine anyway. Stitching words, adding text to textiles, helps. A kind friend shared some some silver trinkets with me last week, so I added those to my tidewanderer dress too, and recorded the process in case it might be useful for some of you.
* the canned bean sellers used to pride themselves on having 57 varieties. There’d be at least that many in my genealogy.