Simple and Beautiful

I was walking in the Bavarian forests in the outskirts of Munich just a little while ago (and no Tania... not the one inhabited by those fabled "little black bears"!). There is something of the "Brothers Grim" in the forests in Bavaria, and your imagination flutters ahead of you urging your eyes to conjure every tree into a wizard... every flower into a faerie.







Everything in Nature is lyrical in its ideal essence... tragic in its fate... comic in its existence... Somewhere along the dirt forest floor beneath the leaf-flecked sky I picked up a little work of art - a collection of six pebbles. Simple and beautiful! And as I held that little mosaic masterpiece in my palm, I had to smile. Six singular volumes of lithic-literature! What stories would they have to tell? If I put them close to my ear and kept really quiet and listened really hard, perhaps I would hear them whisper...


Do you remember your first lessons in geography in secondary school when you clustered around your teacher and learnt "that rocks come in three basic forms: igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic". I prefer to remember what a very wise person told me "Rocks go wherever they want, and no one can stop them. If you see a rock anywhere, it's there because it wants to be." And as I look at the six smooth adamantine gems in my hand, I know somehow in my heart that they wanted to be where I found them...

There is a deep power that rushes and roars beneath the smooth ripples of a river, and yet hides behind the turn of a leaf and between the rings within a tree's trunk... There is a flawless and simple eternity of wisdom that our busy minds attempt to convolute into equations, and we fail to understand... and fail again and yet again. It is the same magic that coaxes daffodils into the Spring air every year... that sculpts each snowflake... that wrings tears from a cello and that teaches the most hurt of hearts to dare to love again.

And as I look at these six pebbles in my hand, each kneaded, chiseled and personalised out of the myriad combinations of terrain, gradient and earth from places I have never known and may never ever see in my lifetime, I know that this same wonderful and unexplainable magic brought them to me.

I will not attempt to understand. I will simply hold them and smile.

So simple... and beautiful.



flawless light in a darkening air alone...
and shining there
love will not elude you
love is simple


i worship this tenacity and
the beautiful struggle we're in
love will not elude us
love is simple


be sure to know
that all in love
is ours
and love, as a philosophy
is simple


i am calm in oblivion calm,
as i ever have been
love will not elude me
love is simple


be sure to know that all in love is ours...
is ours...
that all in love is ours
and love, as a philosophy is simple...
and ours...

~~~

On the drive home...

Beer makes you sleepy... and think too much!

I realise this after I squeeze my way out of a bar, hug my mates goodnight and amble down Tottenham Court Road towards the Tube station under a blanket of lethargy. I manage around 100 metres and then succumb to the soft leather seats of one of the black cabs parked along the road. Remarkable how cleverly those little devils position themselves on route to public transport from a watering hole... Cheeky b*stards!

I lie back on the seat and close my eyes, and somewhere between the on-off-on-'n'-doze, my mind goes a-wandering... and it settles now on a little question has been eating away at me for the last week or so. Maybe you can help me with it Reader!

Tell me: Can you ever learn to love and trust someone all over again?

A little over year or so ago, I wrote a little song. It was a tribute I had written to eight years of love and longing across space and time between me and the person I had hoped to spend the rest of my life with.

Tonight I recall that wintry fall

when I fell in love and I knew

that only you were what I'd been waiting forever for

to fall in love all over again.

The way that your eyes reflected the skies

and brightened up every room, and made everything bloom all around me, as far as I could see...

I'd fall in love all over again...

How much of Love is Trust? Is one the product of the other?

Someone once told me that if you love someone, you can decide to trust them i.e. that love creates the decision to trust. The question is whether Trust can create the decision to Love. I have always believed that you can trust someone and love them but they don't go together necessarily - you have to build Trust but Love is unexplainable... you simply know it's there.

I have been thinking of my mother and father recently. Thirty years of marriage have welded them in symbiosis. What started off as an arranged marriage between two very different people, has probably concluded in what I could cynically call a "collaborative companionship", and yet, there is no mistaking the depth of feeling and tenderness between them whenever I see them together. The only word I have to describe that magic would be "Love". When I asked my mother if she loved my father when they first got married, she answered truthfully, "I learned to love him." In her case, Love seemed to be a decision, and as much of a decision as I believe Trust is.

What happens when Trust is broken? Does Love automatically die with it, or does it remain in some desperate form - straining against the weight of reality and clinging on to fragments of history? If I can will myself to Trust, can I will myself to Love?

So how do we know, just where we may go?

Does the way we've come so far give a clue?

For every goodbye and every Hello,

just promise me one thing that we'd do:

That through each passing year, cloudy or clear

we'd hold to what we know is true, and me and you

together, we'd outdo the weather.

We'd fall in love all over again....

I write these words down, and stretch them out in front of me - a jigsaw of investigation... but behind all the intellectualising and shotgun-philosophy, I am aware that the truth that really matters in all this confusion is my heart - and my heart is simple. My heart does not intellectualise and at this point in time it tells me the truth.

It tells me that I am afraid.

Afraid to trust, and afraid to love. Afraid because I have been hurt, and afraid because it's a horrible thing to be hurt by someone you trust.

Still I know in the deepest part of myself that even if it cannot be willed, Love means exposing yourself to the pain of being hurt, and possibly deeply hurt by someone you trust. It is no wonder that the term is "falling in love" - for there is a helpless abandonment of reason and calculation and a recognition that you will lose control. It is a terrifying surrender to not-knowing how and when and why, but simply letting go.

So Reader, let's put away all this philosophic contention of what constitutes Love and Trust. The real question is whether I dare to fall - Fall and possibly get hurt.

Well, I know one sure fire way to pump up the dare-devil in you and me Reader! What say we get out of this taxi at the next pub and get another pint just before we try the bungees over Canary Wharf!?

~~~