Diaspora South

What you need...

2008-06-19T12:11:00.000-07:00

Summer mornings on the northern coast of Scotland are nothing like those in North Carolina or among the tall grasses and sand dunes of East Hampton. I've been waking very early as of late, anxious to be in the garden to turn, till, or clip, or simply to be out in the air: I'd grown accustomed to spending all of my days indoors, and with this, this tremendous shift in the pattern of my life, I find my preference has changed. I still avoid direct sunlight: I am now and most likely will continue to always be something of a vain creature, not likely to exchange the seasonal enjoyment of tanned skin for the longer lasting self-sure pleasures of unlined, unblemished skin. The sun's light is lovley still, the strange, cococut-like smell in the air of sweet gorse flowers in blossom, greenery crushed underfoot as I stray from the gardens paths and find my way into still undiscovered corners. This is what the mornings are like.

The last five years of my life are fading into something akin to a dream, albeit a waking one, still so very, very real. Time has been kind in fulfilling its promise that nothing lasts forever: not happiness, but neither grief; and if I needed this self-imposed exile to mourn my Adam, to understand the last spoken words of my grandmother, to comprehend what it means to have those you love leave you and in the face of these things to grow, to mature, to garner some measure of wisdom, to count myself very fortunate and be glad to wake each morning, eager to face the day, then so be it. I was moving too far away from my real self, confined, if one can imagine the sensation, within the yawning spaces of Rothberg House. I remember the day in February of 2003 when I first came and claimed it as my home, what I looked like, what I felt like, how many pills I must have had in my coat pockets, most likely smelling faintly of vodka. I'm inclined to pity that poor creature, to look on him and wish I could have spared him the grief, mine and his, all of it---but it was all necessary. Without it, I would not have arrived at this day.

Like so many, I often ponder the music that would comprise the soundtrack of my life. I borrow from and identify with popular culture when it echoes my own state of mind, "this town is colder now, I think it's sick of us", One Republic played over and again on my iPod: "steady feet don't fail me now, gonna run til you can't walk". "Stop and Stare"---I'm wearing it out. Did I become sick of life in Pinehurst, or did Pinehurst become sick of me? Who's to say, but when I made the decision to leave, to sell up, to end the sojourn in the south, I became happy again. It was a beautiful isolation, and after mother decided to come north and back to the U.K. again, there was nothing more to make me stay. I did and always will hold a special place in my heart for the south, the unhurried elegance of life there that mirrors all the stereotypes and flaunts others. I can say that I did hide in the shade of magnolia trees. I sought out their recesses and sheltered from the heat.

The gorse bush has a cousin; well, really a close family member---it's called whin, and it grows wild on the rocks in the highlands, covering them in a green skin of moss like velvet. I think it would be lovely if I could somehow bring some of it to the United States and propagate it in the garden there. It's hardy, some would describe it as invasive, but I can imagine it flourishing in East Hampton as it does in Nairnshire. I will be like that I think, flourishing on two coasts on opposite sides of the ocean, and prosper in both.

Stop and Stare

This town is colder now, I think it's sick of us
It's time to make our move, I'm shakin off the rust
I've got my heart set on anywhere but here
I'm staring down myself, counting up the years
Steady hands, just take the wheel...
And every glance is killing me
Time to make one last appeal for the life I lead

Stop and stare
I think I'm moving but I go nowhere
And I know that everyone gets scared
But I've become what I can't be, oh
Stop and stare
I've got to wonder why I'm here not there
And you'd give anything to get what's fair
But fair ain't what you really need
Oh, can you see what I see

They're tryin to come back, all my senses push
Un-tie the weight bags, I never thought I could...
Steady feet, don't fail me now
Gonna run till you can't walk
But something pulls my focus out
And I'm standing down...

Stop and stare
I think I'm moving but I go nowhere
And I know that everyone gets scared
But I've become what I can't be, oh
Stop and stare
I've got to wonder why I'm here not there
And you'd give anything to get what's fair
But fair ain't what you really need
Oh, you don't need

What you need, what you need...

Stop and stare
I think I'm moving but I go nowhere
And I know that everyone gets scared
But I've become what I can't be
Oh, do you see what I see...

A New Chapter

2008-06-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

It has been so long since I've posted anything and so many changes have occurred in my life, both public and private, that it would be difficult to enumerate them all. I feel as if I have stated a falsehood in my last entry by promising to write again soon, as if I have left friends, waiting for a letter, and me never taking a pen to begin the missive and answer the questions that were posed.

For those of you who were my original readers and can recall the events I wrote about in summers past, I can update you in this way: I am no longer working, having found that the day in, day out, time in, time out, for lack of a better phrase, bullshit that exists in corporate life is untenable and unpalatable. It is fortunate for me that I do not have to work if that be my choice, and so I have made it. I am relieved in the same way as a student must feel before taking the most important examination in his life, arriving at his lecture hall to discover the professor has been hit by a lorry--there will be no test today, there will be no artificial deadlines, there will be no necessities of having to lie to clients and mislead them, which is what the practice of private law seems centered on: lies and empty promises delivered with the best of intentions, but foiled by the rules of civil procedure or by the inadequacy of a legal staff, or worse, senior partners who self-centeredness and egocentricity is so colossal, so absolute, that it makes the Bourbon dynasty appear selfless and downright Socialist, so great is the disillusionment with which I view my former employers. I am not bitter, because that is self defeating and pointless, as are regrets, something I have learned over the last, say, eighteen months. I have reached a turning point, there was in my life some epiphany, some enlightenment which I will call grace, and claiming it, I am freed from the intransigencies and entanglements that had ruled my days. So, alas! No great mahogany desk, no door with a brass name plate: these are honors I can easily eschew. I used to wish to be anything other than ordinary, anything other than commonplace, but now I wish only to be those things and embody them in my own life: ordinariness, simplicity, peace.

My beloved and beautiful Rothberg House has been sold, the rooms I walked now emptied of my belongings, the ghosts I grew to know and no longer to fear left to rattle their chains to claim someone else's attention. It was there that I came to grieve the death of Adam, there that I allowed myself to degenerate into unhealthy obsessions, to drink too much, to smoke too much, and there that one day, spontaneously and without notice, that these feelings left me, and I found the strength to ask for help, found the will to accept that help, surrendered my will, and began a sober life. I once wrote that I begrudge no one their martinis, that heaven knows I've enjoyed mine, but that season too has passed, and I have no further need of it. I never did, but allowed myself to think it so.

In sobriety, I have been able to accept losses in my life that I believe would have crippled me before. Both of Adam's parents have died, his mother in February of last year, and his father following in November. I flew to Utrecht to tend to both, first helping Adam's father bury his wife, and then alone, to bury that kind and loving man who once introduced me to members of his orthodox shul as "the son our son gave us". I honor his name and his memory. He treated me as the father I wish I had always had. He was just and considerate, well deserving of the Keter Shem Tov. May his memory be a blessing, and that of his wife. The family van Cöons of Utrecht is now gone, just as the von Rothberg line will end when I meet my own. It is not sad, it is the way of life. I have learned this lesson. I know what it means to accept.

And so, with the gardens of my former home left to the care of another, I have made my way north again, and once more across the ocean to return home where my mother's family resides, in the care of my sister and brother-in-law on the grounds of Reynolds House in Nairnshire on the northern coast of Scotland, living in the dower cottage, new gardens awaiting my hand, different rooms enveloping my life, and a different heart open and embracing this life.

A new chapter in the Diaspora has begun.

Contented in my gardens, I still exist.

2007-08-28T11:33:00.000-07:00

Thank you to those friends and readers who have left your kind remarks and good wishes. I will write again soon.

Ghosts I have been

2007-05-16T16:57:00.000-07:00

Many more years ago than I care to admit, I remember creating a hideaway for myself behind the curtains of an out of the way room where behind the folds of heavy, moldering silk I had made a sort of bench for myself to lie on, covered in old velvet duvets and unused pillows which no one would have missed from the linen stock. There, three floors up from the side gardens and with a view extending over them and towards the distant Moray Firth, I would secret myself and spend countless hours reading, usually munching roasted sunflower seeds in the shell, which I had been told not to do on account of my braces, but bought them in secret with my pocket money regardless. Books upon books! I could have lived the rest of my life that way in happy bliss, other lives infinitely preferable to my own: The Chronicles of Narnia, the Anne of Green Gables series, and many whose titles escape me but whose plots I recall in great detail. Other names surface from time to time when I am not even conscious of thinking of them, obscure books such as The Secret Cross of Lorraine or This time of Darkeness, The Satanic Mill, and one I rediscovered recently which stands out in my mind, about a young spiritualist named Blossum Culp, whom Richard Peck wrote of in the novels The Ghost Belonged to Me, and my favorite of his works entitled Ghosts I have been.

It isn’t these books that I think of though, as I sit here in the late evening pondering whether to write or simply turn out the lamp and go to sleep: it is the simply the title “Ghosts I have been”. I wrote previously in my blog (before I took all the old entries down) of what it is to haunt one’s self—because I believe in a way that we do this. A rather crazy habit I have is to imagine a difficult situation I have been in, whether it was painful or frightening, stressful—any of those things, and I will meditate and try, somehow and someway, to send myself a message into the past, as if the me that was could somehow hear the me that is now, a reassuring voice intoning “everything will be all right”, so that now when I am faced with similar situations, I will strain my mind to catch, if it is there, the voice of the me that is yet to come reassuring me as well that all things pass away, that nothing is forever, even despair.

So what ghosts are haunting me today? The ghost of myself as a youth who believed himself jaded, but in retrospect understands what true innocence was, and that I was such? That is haunting, because as we grow we want so much to lose that, to not be innocent any longer but instead achieve some measure of worldliness which we equate with maturity. Ah! But to understand that it is not so, it can never be gotten back, it is the wave that passes over our heads which we cannot recall as it retreats from the shore. This is what lost innocence is like.

But is there a way, some way to return to a purer state, the gentle creature who existed without the perceived need for a thrill, a drink, a drug, an “experience”, an adventure—anything to break the duldrums of what, from the outside, seemed a perfect existence, a charmed and ordered life?

I stopped drinking two months ago, well longer really, since March 8th, and I stopped because I realized that it wasn’t doing me any good any longer: it no longer soothed, it did not make me feel relaxed, if anything it lowered my inhibitions—and I understand that it is for this reason that many people drink to begin with: to lower their inhibitions, but the older I get I understand somehow in this sick cosmic joke that inhibitions exist for a reason–to protect us, to keep us from situations and actions that come to no good end. It isn’t healthy for a man who lives alone to drink alone, to wait for the hot flush of vodka to animate tired limbs, to create emotional responses where none really need exist—a few steps further, and one is in danger of losing control. To me, this is not a good thing. I cannot control things outside of my own volition to control myself, and my propensity to drink has not been helping, so one realizes eventually that while not for everyone, sometimes abstinence is correct for one's self. I begrudge no one their martinis. Heaven knows I've loved mine.

It will be five years in October since my Adam died. I don’t cry about it any longer unless I’ve been hitting the sauce, and that’s when it comes out, and to me it seems somehow disrespectful. I’ve come at last to a sense of peace in losing him, it doesn’t haunt my every waking thought, even though I still think of him. I still remember him, and yes, I still love him and always will. That season cannot alter, that dream of innocence cannot be undone. But I must live, and I know in my heart that I must live a goodly sort of life–be a better person, a kinder person, someone who isn’t afraid to walk the paths with G-d because religion isn’t in vogue or whatever one might say. I’ve been praying more often. I now recognize the hand of G-d in works I previously took credit for myself. It is as if, of all the ghosts I have been, this newer something is emerging, different even from when I began writing Diaspora South over two years ago.

I know I will never again be the youth who hid in the alcove behind the curtains reading about the experiences of others, desperate to have “experiences” myself. I’ve had my fill, and half of them I wished I had never done, but mais helas, c’est la vie. C’est n’pas d’importance. In spite of everything, la vie continue.

And actually, I’m rather happy about that, that life does indeed go on, and that I'm going on with my own.

The Carolina Spring

2007-04-21T20:21:00.000-07:00

This is what mid-morning looked like today, a visual highlighted by the soft noise of red-winged cardinals alighting from an ancient azalea.

I love my home.

After a long absence, here I am

2007-04-15T18:13:00.000-07:00

Checking the damage to my azaelas after our recent cold snap.