Lighten our darkness ...

It was still dark when I left the house this morning to get my messages over and done with for another week - with any luck that might do me, unless we're not in fact able to escape for Christmas! I think even fewer people get out when it's so discouragingly gloomy, and the shop felt more than ever like a Soviet experience, especially among the fruit and vegetables - huge gaps in non-exotic items like carrots. But that's it done, and the blackbird was singing on our telegraph pole as I went out to the car - it fair makes my heart sing with it.

I tried to organise my life a bit after that, but things didn't really liven up until my pal came round - with two small spaniels on leads rather than her own dogs - to go for a walk. We left her car parked nearby and walked up the back of town into the Bishop's Glen, which was looking serenely lovely under a slightly blue sky, the water in the loch a glassy calm that reflected the surrounding trees. We came back down the far side and through the graveyard of our church, with the church windows lit up and the faint sounds of the organ echoing among the gravestones as Himself practised within. We didn't bother him, but stopped for a jolly chat with Mrs Rector who was sneaking a breath of air in between conference calls. 

The blackbird was singing again as I let myself in the back door, and the musical influence was continued gloriously during dinner, when we listened to a marvellous recording of Rachmaninov's Vespers (St Petersburg Chamber Choir, conducted by Nikolai Korniev on a Decca recording, if you're interested.) I love this music; tonight it conjured up the dark, limitless forests that line the Neva/Svir rivers, the wind sighing in the tall trees, the silence of the snow, and an image of coming out of the trees into a clearing where a small, onion-domed church would be lit up and filled with Alleluias in the old chant ... Ever since childhood, music has tended to produce visual images; I can remember when the Home Service played five minutes of classical music before the news at 7am, and I would lie in my bed in the maid's room and dream before I had to get up.  

Today marked 17 years since the day my mother died; I felt at the time that there was a connection with the season and its music, and wrote this:

HEARD MELODIES

The days that followed your quiet end
were filled with bright, hard-shadowed light
and cold cut drily to the bones
and froze the tears as yet unwept.
The world seemed lit as if a stage
which you had left, your part discharged,
and music played like distant bells
heard on the road beneath the stars.
Was it to set the music free
you turned away from struggle then?
For if you chose the path you took
you left this lightness like a gift
with which we joined the search of those
who brought the myrrh, and bring it still.
C.M.M.