It's all the more beautiful to have returned back here in the spring time. Nature seems to have advanced in leaps and bounds since we left a couple of weeks ago. With the arrival of spring sunshine, my internal sunshine seems to have firmly taken hold inside me. Thank goodness! I had some fear that returning would bring back some of the pain I left loitering here those few weeks ago, but somehow that's not happened. I've not had the slightest inclination to play poker and that raw feeling in my chest seems to have dissipated at last. I test myself of course - to check if it's quite real. I do the difficult things like read his old messages, listen to his voice recordings. For the first time I actually felt nothing much. Time to move on.
Perhaps quite fittingly I had my Cherry Blossom Tattoo done yesterday. 3 hours of solid work have left a beautifully gnarled branch grow up my entire left side with dark pink blossom blooming and petals falling. It is fantastic work, I never dared to hope it would come out so well, despite the comprehensive collage I'd left the artist with for her design. It's so stunning I can't help sneaking peeks at it whenever I go past a mirror, never mind it still being covered in cling film. So why the Cherry Blossom? On a simple level: I just fell in love with it. I'd played with a girl with the most delicate feminine tattoos and been inspired to have more myself. On the hunt for flowery tattoo motives, I found it - the most amazing image of a woman's body half covered in cherry blossom. Only after that did I read about its two-fold meaning. In Japanese tradition, the Cherry Blossom stands symbolic for life and its transient and finite nature. A cherry tree flowers briefly with vigour and beauty for a mere few short weeks. Everything ends, everything changes. It reads as an encouragement to me to savour those precious moments and it also reminds me that moments of pain also end, as surely as the petals must fall. In Chinese herbal lore (although I only ever seem to find this fact on tattoo websites), the cherry blossom is apparently a symbol of feminine beauty, power and sexuality. Well, let that be an unsubstantiated reference, but there is something in the darkness of the wood against my pale skin and the pink-red tone of the delicate blossom that expresses that state of being just the One Girl perfectly: sexual, sensual, loving, fierce. Perhaps all the more so, as I remember the pain and the blood that magicked this beauty onto my body. I won't forget this in a hurry.
PS: Yes, you will get a photo - when it's healed!
Oh the brushing of lips over a fresh tattoo. I have two cherry blossom in my garden and long to see Kyoto in the spring!
ReplyDeleteAh, Kyoto! How beautiful that would be in the springtime. Standing on the terrace of the main temple hall at Kiyomizu-dera overlooking its grounds, perfection. There is an underground shrine not far from there whose name I can never seem to find in any of the guidebooks again. It takes the form of a labyrinth through which you work your way in the pitch-black to a sacred symbol right in the centre. Dark Earth and pale cherry blossom side by side.
ReplyDeletePS: Thank you for welcoming me home. xx
The trip to Kyoto was supposed to happen with a friend of mine, now in her late eighties, who had been practically a legend in the film industry, (she began on"King Solomon's mines" and was second unit continuity on"The African Queen"). But, about six years ago, she had a series of small strokes that have left her without memory, of who she is, or what she has done. We knew the jig was up when I found her one day, sitting at her desk looking at her notes from "Laurence of Arabia", she looked up at me, "I wrote these?", "I must have been quite something". She lives in Kenya now, happy but unable to relate to anyone outside of her immediate surroundings.
ReplyDeleteI am so sorry. The passage of time and what it does to us is also cruel. I feel sad that you won't see the blossom together and sad that your friend has little memory of her vivid and strong experiences now. I hope however that she lived them fully and freely at the time and that you will see the spring blossom in Kyoto for yourself one day.
ReplyDeleteWe're living a sort of relay. She was supposed to go to Fuji-san with a friend of her's that was twenty years older than she, (she is nearly forty years older than I). He (Laurens Van Der Post), died before they could make the trip, so she went alone. I hope I too will go, though not alone and not at all sadly, (I'm a pretty cheerful chap, even happy go lucky!!)
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