New life etc ...

Quite a predicable image, I know. This is out the back garden of my old place; I was up there for yet another bagful of me-ness I forgot to bring with me. Mostly books.
I chose this image though because it really is a hopeful one. The back garden has been unloved for a long time, and with the apocalyptic amount of rain these last months there's a thick layer of mulch. A mulch of dead leaves sodden together and slowly rotting it's way back to the soil.
Likewise, the mulch of the past. Each leaf of a day falling and dying into the others before it. Becoming one big receding mass of days past, of personal history, slowly rotting one into the other. Decaying to memory where the individual days become just one mulch of memories and the tickle of past emotions.
I think of a poem Michael Ondaatje wrote where he created this stunning image of the complicated life he suddenly found himself in, having met his first wife and all the people and problems that brought into his life. In Billboards he writes..

  Nowadays I get the feeling
   I'm in a complex situation,
   one of several billboard posters
   bleeding together in the rain.

And, through our complicated lives of mulched leaves - or billboard posters - , pop these green shoots. New life fed by the mulch, not strangled by it. So, feeling  hopeful, fed by all the complications of my life bleeding together in time into history, I choose this image of spiky, verdant promise. A promise of budding and bloom ; of colour and fragrance, all thrusting skywards to air itself.

Onwards