STRATHAVEN, SOUP AND A POEM

To Strathaven today, to record my meditation CD. The idea of a recording studio scared me, but I needn't have worried, Marshall at the Old Mill Studio really appreciated what I was hoping to do and put me completely at ease. It was a wrap in no time.

I haven't been to Strathaven for over ten years. Being a bit early for my appointment, I first nipped into the unprepossessing Strathaven Tearoom, where the service is warm and friendly and the coffee and walnut scones are to die for. I realised with a wee shock that it was in this very cafe, at this very table, where I sat and drank a cup of tea while my Mum quietly died just round the corner. I had been sitting with her for several hours and I think she just wanted me out of the way so she could get on with it in peace. Strathaven was never home, just a place where I once spent a lot of time , a place where first my Dad and then my Mum got frail and died in a care home.

So this morning was shaded with sadness, brightened with pride in them both and shot through with just a thread or two of lingering guilt. Waiting for my tea to arrive, I read a David Whyte poem (the joy of Kindle on the iphone). It was so apposite:

APOLOGY
Now I konw my great sucess
in the world
was your vulnerability,
my breaking through boundaries
the raw break in your heart
at being left behind.

Now I know
in going forward
you were waving me on
in my building sense of presence
lay the clear choice on your part
to be a foundation

But now after
all these years
going forward seems like
coming back to meet you again
and I want to sit with you
at the midnight table
and reach across
in the silence
and tell you
I shouldn't have gone
and left you the way
I did.

But you'll look at me again
with that old smile
and that sense
in the silence
that you are a you that can make
so many mes of me

You have those
eyes after all
through which I see myself
reflected,
journeying on
through all those beckoning
horizons radiating
from your stillness

They bring me again
to those frontiers
those arrivals
those circles emanating
continually
from the central fact
of your staying


I realised later that the title does not make a lot of sense, until I tell you that after the recording I went back to the Tearoom for a bowl of soup - and, it has to be admitted, two coffee and walnut scones to take away.