Home
Late September 2022,
Our frail and pinched mum, sister and I, exposed on the sweeping expanse of Godrevy beach.
A place thinly transparent to everything beyond sight, at least for a time.
We come together, we move apart, no one is in charge or knows how it’s going to go.
The three of us improvising, each in our own ways, towards answering what we are there to do.
It would be a stretch to call it a dance, but if it were, it would be an incoherent one to an outsider’s eye.
When you let go of judgement, you are part of whatever it is.
If it’s dysfunction, there is a buddha within it.
When both are forgotten,
You could no longer call anything merely dysfunctional.
In the midst of a chilling gusting wind (of course!)
With a yellow plastic spade made for a small child,
We buried my stepfathers ashes and wrote his name in the sand.
You really couldn’t make it up,
the raw beauty, the humour, the angst, the grace,
the poignant, the profound, the respectful and the clumsy.
What permeates it all, accepts it all – and is not constrained in any of it.
Below the beckoning tideline, mixing with sand grains like so many planets and stars,
The physical remains of a generous heart
Once so often frustrated in anxious childish bluster,
Now swirling in the boundless ocean of an ever tranquil universe
Every speck received without hesitation.
Dedicated with love to
A.C.
1938 – 2022
(It turns out that Godrevy was A’s favourite holiday beach when he was a boy. We didn’t know this until the next day when we visited his sister.)
Willard Lee, May 2024
