Archives for posts with tag: science

Set Theory

February 15, 2022 //
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Of Course, it rained back then and it’s raining now. It doesn’t help. So, I’ll think about maths instead. And if I were a mathematician, I’d talk about my Universal Set and it would be labelled with the 14th letter of the Greek alphabet, ξ, called Xi (pronounced zai or ‘ksai).

And I would draw on my page with a black pen and I would sketch out the overlapping circles, two of them, and call then A and B. It would be simple, clean and organised, unlike the chaos in my mind. Still, if I were a mathematician, I would control this. And A would be the set of a mother and B would be the set of a husband and I would represent them thus,

 A = {Mother}

 B = {Husband}

And I would consider each set with their myriad features of all the moments from our world, then they would overlap. And to be honest if I were a mathematician, it would be in the act of overlapping, where I’d find the greatest ease and I would be thankful. I would be grateful that I could simply label it as the intersection between A and B and I would represent it thus,

A∩B = {Loss}

It is much easier to compartmentalise the world in terms of number, to think with logic and use rigor every day and I would sit back in my swivel chair, chew on the end of my pen and admire my work. Overlapping circles, that is all, just some lines on a page to represent a world. And if I were a mathematician, I would say,

and hence, let us consider the union of A with B, and I would label it thus,

A ∪ B = {Qualities, values, beliefs}

And letters would represent the bedrock and catalyst in my world. And I would say, and thus, A and B are subsets of the Universal Set, both distinct from each other yet similar in their impact on my world and the overlap in the middle is the places where they merged.

And if I were a mathematician, I would I look at the Universal Set and label it thus,

ξ = {Love}

Life would be so much easier if I were a mathematician.

But, it’s still raining out there and if I were a writer, I’d say, my clouds know just what to do.

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Categories bereavement, cycles, Grief

The Fundamental Theorem of Us

January 1, 2020 //
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Early December 2019 – Hard Frost.

It’s very endings out there, very closings and while I’m tucked up warm inside I can feel the weight of people rushing and stressing but it’s not for me.
I am a winter baby and how many times in this work will I have mentioned this and how many times do I stop and feel thankful for this fact?

There is a resonance with my cycles and with the seasons and now, pivoting at the end of a decade, I feel full. I’m ready to wear monochrome clothes, to mirror the weathering and huddle down to wait for spring. But spring is a distant concept as we shuffle forwards towards Christmas. 

I’m so lost in number right now, so imbued 
with the elegance of maths and it comes from our boy. Our boy, the man on the train in this winter’s morning, heading out to where derivatives lie and he takes the integral between zero and infinity because he can, as it flows out from him like a song, like a melody that he has written in his sleep. But I can’t sing. I clunk and chug with number but I am drawn into it like a child, nose squashed up against the toy shop window, hot cheeks against the ice and deep inside, the toy maker carves his wonders. And I want to hold them, I want to be allowed inside to rummage and explore. I want to build and construct, to play with the forms in front of me but I can’t, not yet. I am outside the Toy Shop of Number but the door is open and a rounded man in red invites me in. 

I can do fractions now, I am learning and it’s very Me, very let’s take on something I don’t understand, like grief. Of course after a decade, well almost, of learning to breathe as a widow, my knowledge is deep, my enforced wisdom cocoons me and I know enough. 

But I’m a little too full to be honest as I try to tease out the threads of this work, as I stumble around my mixed metaphors but it’s alright, it’s now and I send an out breath into my quiet kitchen and up and out with the steam in the frost. I feel myself tiptoe to the summit of some vast mountain and I want to peer over the edge, I want to look behind me and see the footsteps we took to get here, crevices hacked into the snow, and how my hands ache from the cold, how they bleed into the ground, forming pink rivulets of ribbons marking out my path and here we are. 

At the edge, on the top, with the decade behind us, teetering with just mist and unknown lands beyond our sight. 

I sit down on the mountain and let the iced air trace its way down through my throat, my windpipe, to my lungs and feel its chill. Out in the mist, our boy melts the snow beneath him, uses equipment I don’t understand, to heave, then stride along and I can breathe. My breath dances out before me, rippled and white like a veil of grief that leads the way, that spirals up and out, dissolving in the chaos of sunlight as I sit here. And then the next breath and the veil rises and floats, expands and disperses and I’m so used to this. 

I imagine my struggle is between the rigour and logic of number, of its construct that underpins our world and the magic of its revealed beauty. And we count down, sleeps to Christmas, then days to the End of the Year and the media throbs with the lists and reviews, scooping itself up in a riot of memory, highlighting how we’ve aged and how we’ve changed. 

As we opened ourselves up to the new decade back then, we were safer, more certain of our worlds or were we just too immersed in our smallness to see the unfolding news? I suppose that’s my learning, and how linear everything was back then, how holidays were planned ahead and there was expectation and prediction but we didn’t predict widowhood – well you wouldn’t. And then thirteen months into the decade, linear graphing ceased. 

There were no formulas to map the areas under the waves which my life created, no way to simplify the expressions, to substitute out the difficult parts and craft a solution to its integral. There was nothing to be manipulated or calculated, there was just the number 2. Me and our boy.

And then time happened and then clocks just did their thing and that’s the problem. It’s all number-ticking-number, hours and months and years. I acknowledge it, I roll into it but sit outside and watch. Watch the chaos in the country, the Westminster circus, the pantomime in Europe, the unfolding uncertainty swaddling an aging planet, a turning solar system and then there’s us.

Me and our boy on a mountain top in the snow, in the coldest of days looking out. 
He carves calculus into the white with a big stick that he’s found while I photograph the icicles in a world tuned upside. 
And this is our mountain and we have climbed it.

And here in my one hundredth post I count in moments, in the abyss, in the joy.
One hundred times I’ve sat and tapped and poured my mind out, and ten years we have travelled. And 9 of them we have survived and inched in grief. 

It’s only number, it’s only time.

I need to stand up again and brush the snow from my cold legs. The sun warms us, melts the impacted white as we trudge on. 
Fur tickles my face, photons glint on our cheeks. 
The mother, the writer, the boy, the mathematician. 
Birds circle, sing above us.
Numbers change and we go on.

PS

December 31st 2019

This time last year we were in Hamburg, a re-imagined city, a Phoenix like ourselves, built on the remnants of how it used to be and we had sailed.
We’d sailed out on the same ship that held us close on our first journey, in the fractured chaos chronicled by my first post. And last year I took a book with me, Mary Wollstonecraft’s – Letters Written in Denmark, Norway and Sweden and she travelled with her baby as I travel with our son.
And now one year later as our boy welcomes in a new decade with his mates, I write through the silence, miles from our fireworks over Hamburg and I look back.
December 31st 2018
‘But eleven days of weariness on board … have so exhausted my spirits to say nothing of other causes’ she begins and dear Mary tells me she ‘adheres to determination to give observations, as I travel through new scenes,warmed with the impressions they have made on me’ and I breathe. I am in good company. 
Her words take me back to the start of my writing and in my first post, in fog I wrote. ‘Eleven years ago I could not walk, an unstable pelvis hampered my plans for a natural birth’ and there I sat and wrote on this ship, on THIS SHIP, in my younger pain -worn body and I was there in my unstable world of widowhood with our ten year old boy at my side. 
And you see why I am full. Seven years and three months have past in this unpredictable land and we are here again. Noting the structure, the shape of the rooms and whilst Mary has her baby with her, I have my baby, grown. Our tiny boy with the luggage he’s learned to carry is now 18, a young man by my side, with his father’s eyes and we weave down long corridors, we sway but hold onto the sides. 
How can this be? These cabins are the same, refurbished decor but the mirror surrounds reflect a solid me, a stoical me, a me that has soldiered on, like I always did, like I do and just beneath the reflection I remember her face, hair thicker and longer than now, features on the edge of what he knew. She ripples past me like the lyrics of a favourite song, like a passing wave and then gone. Here – gone. There – gone, bobbing, remaining, twirling around me and she calls out to me, pleads to me with her eyes, with her out stretched hands. 
‘But how do I live? How do I do this?’
And I say ‘hush, hush now and just breathe. Hold tight and hold on.’
xxx

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Categories beginnings, cycles, Grief, Loss, parenting

Green Fingers

June 24, 2019 //
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The glass in the sink is full, the tap drips shaking the surface tension of the water as it rocks. It seems to say I’m here. The venetian blinds shatter and reform, shatter and rebuild and they’re the only movement. The sounds change as the drop hits the surface, sometimes a ding, sometimes a tink and I seem the be the water. Still and smooth, then ruffled, then agitated, then quiet, settled. And this how it is. I am contained in the glass for now.

And next to the sink is my tomato plant, I’ve watered it well over these last few weeks and how it’s grown. How tall and willowed it seems now.  In recent days I’ve thought how it’d outgrown its pot, and every day I thought I must re–pot it, give it more room to spread. But there was always something else to do and so it remained in the pot that the seeds had been planted in. 

But it still grew. It’s too tall now to keep indoors and I can almost hear it calling out re-pot me, please re-pot me and I almost did last night. But not quite. This morning though, the day and the weather is perfect.

This morning the grey weight of clouds bandages our town like a sense of a mother in the background of it all, at a distance, keeping watch. And I will re–pot the tomato plant today as our boy makes his way to his last exam before the summer unfolds for him, before his sky opens wide and turns to blue, before autumn expands his horizon. And he will stretch out long and tall and wide, his roots anchored deep in familiar soil but there will be such space, a new pot, vast with potential, rich with extra compost around his wriggling feet and he will spread.

I need to re–pot my tomato plant today. The window is open.  The vague breeze trembles its young leaves, as if to say hello to me, as if to summon me to the soil. It needs a bigger pot and then its steady solid growth will burst up and out and it will flourish and later there will be fruit, soft, round and full of sweetness on our plates.

And we will be nourished by the things we’ve grown. The things tended and cared for and how glorious to watch fruit ripen in the sun, roots secure and leaves and new shoots reaching up. 

The tap still drips into my glass, its tiny tinkling sound repeats, as if a steady clock still marks time. And clouds drift, and things grow. A silent bee on foxgloves nuzzles into pollen. The day wakes up. 

My glass is so full now, I’ll use it to water the tomato plant, to settle it into new soil. It’s early. Our town is quiet, our boy is ready, he picks up his graphical calculator as I open the drawer to my left. 

I pull on my gardening gloves and step out onto the patio. We need a bigger pot.

xxx

 

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Categories cycles, Loss, parenting

Where the Limit Approaches Infinity

September 18, 2018 //
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September 17th

Our son is waiting for the 7:51 to town along with all the other morning faces. It’s 8:04 and everyone looks to the right in anticipation, they fidget and flick through their phones. And I’m waiting in today for balloons, the huge ones that arrive in a box, the silver numbers that will fill our lounge with their shapes.

Eighteen years ago, we were waiting. I remember I’d had a bad night, was helped to the toilet and then onto the bed, contractions had set off the spasms in my back and in the morning, this morning back then, while our son waits for his bus in the now, in the back then I was hanging on a little more. It was a Sunday then and the surgeons were away and so, after four days of waiting, when I’d let go of all thoughts of a natural birth, when I craved the theatre and our baby in my arms, I had to wait. One more day, just one more.

And now our son is on his way, the bus heavy and swollen with early workers, waddles its way into town, hot and heaving, lumbering to its destination, ready to spill its contents at the station, to release the people to the day. And our son will be there, birthed from the bus into daylight with the others, hurrying up the hill.

And so, it goes. Another day. The day before, the memories filling up and bursting, then filling up again and I prepare.

And our son, nearly there now, with an algebra test ahead of him, with his world spreading wide, makes his way to college.

And I can’t find the words and that’s my puzzle, my test that I am frowning over. I’ve been thinking about this post for a while. What themes will come up, which metaphors to use. What to reveal, what to keep to myself and I’m stuck. Right now, I’m bound up in the webs on my window, I’m spun in silk and cannot move. But it’s ok.

How can I find the right words to express what I feel, and yet it is ok? I keep reminding myself of that. Like the beautiful form that was curled tight inside me, like the potential waiting for air, it waits. The thoughts and feelings and words nestling low down, not quite ready for the outside world. But they will come.

Just one more day. I must be patient.

I watch the spider on my window frame. She knows what to do. And every day she starts again, every day she fires silk from her hard-outer shell and weaves again.  New, fresh webs to hold the food, while her babies wait in a sac, warm and protected from the outside world, looked after until they can do it for themselves. And she spins, every day, a new pattern, adapting to the weather and the places where her web was torn apart. She builds again, with babies safe on her back, their tiny legs wriggling until they’re ready to come out and I watch her move.

She’s waiting for food. I’m waiting for balloons and our son is waiting for the test to begin.

Tomorrow will come.

September 18th

And I watch as he strides off, his longer hair whipping in the autumn bluster. The long hot summer seems to be over today and I’m glad of clouds, of battered leaves. As he waits for the bus, I see moments of me, as they try to get the needle in my back, fragments of us flip and clatter up the panes and it’s so familiar somehow. Our son, on his busy day, with little time to think until tonight and me with baking and wrapping ahead, like I always did, like I do.

His bus is late again (like I was back then, two and half weeks to be exact) and now, eighteen years later when I look at him, when I look into his eyes, the eyes that looked at us for the first time, I see every hour. I see our lives reflected back, our stories in the sparkled flecks on steely blue.

I lie and wait back then, faces all around me, a succession of people to help me on my way. I’m still.

And now, he sits on the bus, with multi various calculus in his mind, he integrates and differentiates and under the gravitational constant his possibilities open up. And while he works on proofs, I see us in the comfort of autumn, in every leaf, I see a second of our life. Leaves fall, my weather changes and we go around again.

Our baby, our son, this man. I blinked and he grew up.

For the mathematician on the bus. Such love. Such pride.

xxx

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Categories cycles, Grief, Loss, parenting, Uncategorized

To Seek Out

June 21, 2017 //
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June 18th 2017

I prepared his lunchbox for the last of the school days, the penultimate exam, the final full day and I secured the sandwich in the tired out plastic box. And as I did, I recounted the changing faces of the vessels over the years. The turquoise Thomas box bought at a day out with a friend when the steam made our eyes run and we chuffed down the rails and after the Reception class came Spider-Man in primary coloured nylon as he learned how to write. Year 2 was Lazy Town, a soft cover which caught the crumbs before a Year 3 army camo box with a matching water bottle. Year 4 saw us chugging up the hill with Toy Story, with Buzz at his side, falling with style and it was this lunch bag which I stuffed with cold fish fingers when we rushed back to the relatives room, to sit and wait, to watch the walls close in around us in Year 5. And afterwards his Sponge-Bob garish lemon shape turned up, it grinned at us for the rest of the year when our muscles forgot how to smile and into the final Primary walks with a tin box ordered from Amazon, flown over from the USA with Star Trek on its side.

Then Secondary came without the merchandised logos, without the beaming smiles and we settled on the lime green nylon that supported him through the days, right up until this final year when the blue-black lunch bag was the way. I’ve just turned it inside out now, given it a symbolic good clean, old crumbs and straws tumble into our sink, the residue of things past and as it dries out I make one last sandwich and recall.

I remember dropping him in the Reception class and leaving him kneeling on the floor with things to piece together, a new track, a new map to construct and I walked away. I looked back, his hair was lighter then, his head bent down busy, engrossed as I left and I walked as the trees blurred in my path.
And now I iron the penultimate shirt, aware of the years and minutes. Feeling the hours that bought us to here.

June 19th 2017

Next door’s scaffolding should come down soon. It watches over me, grey struts at odds with the soft spikes of my bamboo, with spears that have grown over time. A bluebottle dithers, disoriented but stays outside and the garden is poised in the sunlight. It will be warm today, the soil where the roots and weeds used to be, heats up, beaks poke, legs crawl and I can see my garden to come, when the work has been finished. How like a meadow it will look with lupins with salvia and an area to walk, with places to sit and watch but for now it is waiting. We are in the lull. The old has been ripped away, bagged up and hauled onto their van but when they return, when the fence becomes solid, when the trellising goes up, then the grass seed will come, then the mulch and flower food. How dark the compost will be, rich with nutrients, particles to bind to roots, to wrap around them and hold as they grow.
And the shoots will come, sap bright, saturated with a need to pull to the sun and they will flower. There in our garden when the pond is complete, when the water flows without restriction and the stones bring balance, bring clarity.There in our garden colours will grow, earth will sustain and rain drench us all.

A magpie clattered down the roof of the summerhouse and perched on the edge. How strong the contrast in his feathers, how they pushed out, bold in black, in white, through my green and away. He paused before flight regaining himself, judging his next move. Like the old man I see on our lanes most days, with his cap and zimmer frame, out every day despite the weather, to make his journey to the shops and back again and he keeps going, keeps pulsing despite his obstacles.
And the old man on my summerhouse surveyed his land then flew, beat wings into the day with grace and power.

And I am waiting, it’s not long now. Our son head down again today.

June 21st 2017

The shadows stroke the trees, like a hand across a head, like a soothing touch against the day and pupils wander through the gates – the young ones with rucksacks almost too big for their small shoulders, the older ones, term weary weighted down by tests and work and then our son’s year – the veterans with end of school hair in their eyes, with rag-taggled uniforms  hanging on to the last. And they have the air of resignation after the build up, after the heft of expectation, they are almost there, almost done and now it’s a process to complete, a final hoop to jump through. And there goes our boy through the gates we used to know, for one more time, one last moment to follow their rules, in their system before the giddiness of the open door.

And as he sits at the desk, pen poised, waiting for the words ‘it’s 9:09, you may begin,’ I sit at my pc and pause. Outside in the park behind our house I hear the workmen’s radio and the distant throb of machines. The play-ground is being renovated and as the cement whirrs in the growing heat, they dig and prepare. There used to be bouncy tarmac out there, to soften the fall and in the places where I brushed stones from his knee, where I kissed hot skin better when I could, is a pile of silt now and the space where the climbing frame stood.

And in our home and garden as the curtain billows at the open door, I see flickers of our boy, of his countless faces, turning and changing, of his voice peeling out, giggling higher than it is now and he fills the space around me, he saturates our garden with all the children he used to be. There, as the light moves across my new bird feeder I see him running towards us shouting ‘charge!’ I see his pristine primary sweatshirt and, right now I see his broader shoulders as he marches off with all his mates.

its quiet, apart from the tweep of fledglings, apart from the flutter of wings and under the hum of machinery, I anticipate his end of school face at the door.

For our son – beyond proud.

xxx

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Categories beginnings, cycles, Loss, parenting

Entropy

November 15, 2016 //
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The tree outside my window is showing berries now, it’s so proud of its changing form. The leaves have turned; they crumble and slime on the lawn that I haven’t cut and winter’s near. I can hear the neighbour’s daughter outside my window, on her way to playgroup, full of joy. Her high voice filters through the glass and I can see our son sat by a bookcase years ago on a bright duvet cover, surrounded by new friends. His playgroup still ticks and churns near our home, welcoming and nurturing, then letting go of tiny hands as they move onto the next phase.

I saw someone I used to work with, the other day. She hadn’t seen me in years and as I gave her snippets from our life now I could feel myself being scanned, being checked to see what the years had done to me and there, in the hours in-between us, on the bus, we chatted and told each other the little pieces of our life that we wanted to disclose. And after the bus ride we laughed and joked with our son by my side, taller than me now and somehow in the words that passed between us, in the early evening chill I saw myself, leaning up the radiator in the hall at the pre-school where I worked, next to my colleague and we laughed while children played. It would have been a Friday lunchtime in my mind and we’d have talked of our plans for the weekend, before everything was packed away with care, in a community centre cupboard until the Monday. She invited me to go back to the group and have cake and tea with the faces that used to fill my day but I doubt I’ll go. I know where they are, I know that now, just after nine in the morning, as I type this, that they’ll be having a last coffee before they let the little ones through the door and their aprons will be ironed and the toys set out for play but I don’t need to re-immerse myself in the old world, maybe coffee in a café but not there, en mass surrounded by a life I used to live.

And now as people outside leave for work, I am waiting, waiting for a call about a bed. I remember a Saturday in Southampton years ago. In the pine furniture shop and amongst the cupboards and bookcases we found his bed, a dark wooden one for his new room. He found a toy car underneath, separated from the hand of some unseen child, left and lost to them but an exciting find for our younger boy and it served him well. We emptied drawers yesterday and tucked at the back behind bedding and clothes we found old things, boy things, the secret bits you need to keep and some arrows.  He s been watching a new YouTuber, sing Acapella Science, parodies laced with science fact and his favourite, the Arrow of Entropic Time plays around the room as we undo the entropy of years and turn the arrow forward and fire it from the bow. I watch our boy, his mind buzzing with potential as he sets up his music system while I brush up.

Now, waiting for the men to take the bed away, to fill the stairs with their loud feet and the rustle of plastic and boxes and by the time he gets in from his last week of mocks, his room will have changed, like our home changed back then, when men came in, loud in the grey February morning, their fluorescent jackets an insult to my mind and then they left. They left us with a new world but one we hadn’t ordered, one we hadn’t scoured the Internet for, a world that forced itself in around us and took the old us away when they left.

I noticed the calendar recently, how this month, the days and the dates are the same. I don’t count much these days, months come and go, hours play around me but now when Monday is the 14th and Tuesday isn’t far, I go back there. I see our home as it was the week before, with all the old things in their places and our settees as they were. And upstairs, our son’s old bed with him there, sleeping, as the strangers knocked the door.

And I must go. I need to parcel up the old mattress and hoover up once more. It’s nearly time. Today on the 14th as I remember conversations, faces morphing with alien words and I look out of our son’s window, over his music system, to the shedding leaves outside. Our garden coated with old things, crumbled things and trees becoming bare. Winter is close, a silence before the Spring and I am waiting, waiting for the new bed, the changes we have chosen, waiting to fill his room with the next stage and our neighbour comes back.  She’s dropped her little girl at preschool, she’ll be sat on a bright duvet somewhere, scrabbling around amongst bricks. And they build next door, their extension is growing despite the greyness of the cloud and it creeps and it spreads out, a widening of their world as we prepare ours here.

I look out for pigeons, they like the berries on my tree, to land fat and clumsy and the branches wobble under their weight and they eat. They peck and burst the ripeness, it floods their bellies with what they need.

We did well yesterday, we found so many things to look at, to remember and let go and we laughed as we sang to his new favourite songs. And as the pigeon lands on cue outside my window, I see our boy, scrabbling under a pine bed in shop miles and years from here, he comes out with dust stained knees, holding up his find, like a trophy, like a staff to lead the way. And here, now, in the quiet of the house, as he sits at school, head down thinking, studying – he leads the way again.

The heating has gone off; I need a drink.  It’s nearing the end of Autumn and I have a mattress to wrap.

xxx

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Categories beginnings, cycles, Loss, parenting