I am doing zazen and reading Nishitani which I am not finding easy. John Middleton Murry (the father of my second father) commenting on a sentence of Keats (‘If poetry comes not as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all’) that it was too simple to be easy and then spends 40 pages analysing it! Nishitani and the Great Death are like that. I suppose it will all hit me some day if we survive that long.

I realise that I am living in a world apart. The family arrives in its over-packed rented car and bundle themselves tired and chaotic into the house with all its daily concerns such as putting on pyjamas and have you got your beach shoes. The absences which surround me seem to unravel away from the little nothings of the day to day. It all seems to make me feel even more lonely surrounded by crowds of relatives all intent on enjoying a holiday on the beach and at the table. Jokes, laughter, games, sandcastles and don’t forget your bucket and spade. I leave them all to it and go to the residence and feel a strange sense of presence and relief.

And anyway – amor fati – There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Or ripeness which is perhaps something else. Elsewhere there is the petty pace which creeps in from day to day.

And the builders are in downstairs putting in a shower room and there is a problem with the electricity and I have to renew my (already out-of-date) British driving license for a Spanish one which is impossible until the English one has been renewed so you ae involved with two national bureaucracies at once. Oh, and the car needs new tyres and quite unexpectedly all these horrors suddenly erupt together and the bureaucracy mist descends.

I realise I am speaking of her in the past tense. I had no idea that my sufferings had been rationalized and written down. The stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. All these stages tumble over one another as there is no time scale to reckon on, no closure to be struggled away from as it is still there waiting for you in the future, still waiting for you sitting in a wheelchair half dead and half alive at the same time. Half the desire and half its impossibility.

Later

I hate it that the moon is at the masthead and

The harbour cannot sigh us back into the colours of life

Over a sea that is awash with silences.

Our eyes blind pearls here on the deck

vivid with invisibility.

The land is gone that grants the fuse of dirt.

The claw and burn of our defiance are spent.

Our eyes seek nothing in the air heavy with dew.

Birds do not nest at sea.

Even the albatross winged with wide sails of seraphim

knows its limits as it floods the snow with the raw fire

of our impossibilities.

Bless me for I have . . .

Angel smile on beyond the kiss

of wakefulness and think not of the last sun’s shadow

as it dials our world to sleep

and yet I know

and yet I know in part

It is myself I grieve for.