love | silkannthreades

All year long, I have been in the mood for nothing ~ glorious nothing. After a tough 2015, it was bliss to begin 2016 luxuriating in slow, slothful, living.

But, yesterday, my friend, Liz , (aka Mrs LeapingTracks) , introduced me to her zippy new blog, LeapingLife, and my fingers suddenly twitched, and expressed a desire to add a little something to my gaping, indolent, whole lot of nothing.

And this is what happened; my collage homage to those we loved and lost in 2015 ~ pets included.

In this collage, ‘Best Beloved’, I superimposed one of my mini-meadow photos on an old photo of a beloved friend who died last October. She was an important presence in my life for nearly 45 years. In the collage, the lighter area is the photo of my friend holding my baby son. The lightness represents my feeling that she remains nearby, but just ever so slightly out of my reach.

Best Beloved

The second collage is ‘Best Beloved’, subjected to some more tinkering.

The heart of the matter is love.

I used a Picasa editing setting called Heat Map, and, to my delight, my friend’s pale image became a green heart-like shape. Entirely appropriate since she had very green thumbs and one of her great loves was gardening.

Speaking of loves, what/who we love and how we love, Su Leslie asked me back in October to participate in the 3 Days 3 Quotes challenge. It’s a bit late to enter the challenge, but here is my contribution from a passage, (I Corinthians 13 ), which is pertinent to this post, and which always inspires me ~ “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

Ain’t that the truth! Love, the heart of the matter.

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This post is dedicated to love, loss, life, and love, and, in particular to my friend ( and her family), and to Lavinia and Rick. Lavinia turns loss into life by adding plants to her garden in memory of loved ones.

My friend’s family asked us to remember her by donating to the Millennium Seed Bank http://www.kew.org/science-conservation/collections/millennium-seed-bank/about-millennium-seed-bank coordinated by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. (What the excellent video on that link if you have time. ) Both are wonderful ways to express our love for one life, and all life. And much more useful than the collage homage. 😉

I am not one for blog challenges. I undertake very few ( too lazy, I am 😉 ). But what’s a girl to do when the lovely blogger you persuaded to find a special totem pole in Oregon, ~~nudges~~ invites you to get busy on the ‘Love in Ten Lines ‘ challenge. Well, not much you can do, except hop to, and fall in line.

Here are the rules for the challenge

Write about love using only 10 lines.
Use the word love in every line.
Each line can only be 4 words long.
Nominate others who are up for the challenge.
Let them know about the challenge.
Title the post: Love in Ten Lines
Include a quote about love ( this can be your own)
You may write in any language

And here , Britt Skrabanek, is Gallivanta’s response to your gauntlet. It’s a photo poem ( phoem?) , called Love Handles.

When you choose love

or love chooses you,

Remember love has handles,

for love needs holding.

Love is not froth
on the chai. Love

is earthy, love is

the china cup, love
is the pot, love

pours the tea; love.

Yesterday, I spent some time at the Canterbury Province Field of Remembrance in Cranmer Square, where our Anzac Day will be commemorated on April 25th. In the Field are 632 simple, white crosses, one for each man and woman from our region, who was a casualty of war in 1914-1915.

Canterbury Province Field of Remembrance, Cranmer Square, 2015

As I walked around the rows, I thought of the unprecedented grief which sat at family tables that year. The cup not used, the plate not laid, the tea not poured, the meal not cooked, the empty chair, the hand not there to tousle a child’s hair….. there was grief; there was love with nowhere to go*.

Grief has softened with the years, and love has found a place again. Some of that love is in these crosses, all with handles; most not known to us personally, but handles which we can whisper quietly, and hold faithfully in our collective soul.

For those of you reading in New Zealand, you will know there are many ways in which we are being encouraged to remember the centenary of the Gallipoli landings. One way which I have found meaningful is to place a virtual poppy on my relatives listed in the Auckland War Memorial Cenotaph Online Database. Perhaps that is something you would like to do for your family, if you have not already done so.

* “grief is just love with nowhere to go” ; a saying I read this week in an interview with Cambridge author, Helen Macdonald. It is my love quote for Love in Ten Lines.