Wednesday, February 22

Sanctuary

I have returned to my Sanctuary and there can be no doubt that that is indeed what this little patch is. I have spent the morning basking in Mum's garden; thinking that it truly has never been so beautiful and trying to imagine what my life will be like without this Heaven to retreat to. We will of course, have a new Sanctuary and not so far away; but it will be different and I don't think there is a member of my family who won't consider themselves honestly blessed to have been able to experience the beauty of this home.

I am also in a fog of Victorian Romantic literature as is probably showing in my own proper and verbose tone today. Hell, I even just used the word verbose! It has long been curious to me, how comfortable I am with rediculously pompous and lengthy phrasing. During my schooling, my ever succinct and practical Mother used to edit out massive swathes of writing in my essays and exclaim that she had never met anyone so capable of saying basic things with such a large volume of words! It seems I have slipped back into old habits ...

You can attribute all this wordiness to Possession, by A.S.Byatt and the fact that after my recent trip to the NGV International I went on a bit of an Ebay binge. I have this received The Works of Emily Dickenson and an anthology of English Romantic Poetry this week in the mail; it's so exciting getting parcels! Now, I have banged on about the brilliance of A.S.Byatt before, here. This novel, a very popular one in the early 90's - which I have only just come to - has created for me another fantastical web of imagery and words that seems to constantly echo in my real life. I thought, when reading The Children's Book that Byatt couldn't have combined more of my favorite topics and themes in one book. Yet it seems to have happened again, whereas before I was tangled up in the Edwardian arts and crafts movement, the renaissance of fairy tales and magical puppet shows and the eager adoption of Ruskinian ideals. This time I have been absorbed by romantic, metaphysical poetry of the Victorian era. Again fairy-tales and celtic story telling feature strongly; but this time with a Breton influence and thus the inclusion of French language - yay for me :-)

Now that is, by far, enough talking for today. I'm off to research traditional herb lore and read poetry...
I fear hitting the publish button on this one; I think I might look back on it and cringe. Oh well folks, you're laughing with me, not at me!

"Just keep following the heart-lines on your hand."