The Bird of Luck of Tomorrow's Day

And so it ends. With magic in my eyes I shall come back from Lyonesse tomorrow, as Thomas Hardy wrote in a poem I learned of this week, back from Lyonesse into what will seem a gray surreal reality, after a time when everything, and I mean everything, even the waiting for the buses and trains, even the arguments, even the pondering of laundry, even the sleepless hours --- was magical. With time we remember only the good things, as Luc Besson said in Wasabi. But all things come to an end.

There was no pain,
No fear, no doubt.
Till they pulled me out
Of Heaven...

And I am sure somewhere in London, some person would find a vacation to Canada, to Ottawa, a tenday of magic, and their own city a dull humdrum stressed existence. So there you are, there lies my refrain: I  need to find a way of carrying magic onward inside me, in finding joy again, and the walking on air with a grin on my face, even when the skies are gray over the Rideau Canal and the snow comes down on the bronze body of Maman, that spider-goddess channeller of hatred and fear and anger and trust, in front of the National Gallery. One cannot live only looking forward to the next vacation, and life, unlike a movie, does not set the credits rolling to music in front of me walking to the Heathrow departure gate. Unless you die, and I do not intend to any time soon,

Life's not a song,
Life isn't bliss,
Life is just this,
It's living.
You have to go on living...

So here is to the songs of sunlight  and fireworks in the winter of my discontent. Here I write this to remind myself that it is my own choice what I make of life, and I cannot rely on other countries, or others' paintings, or even wonderful, wonderful friends, to supply it for me. Here I remind myself that although I may cry on coming down, out of the sky back across the Atlantic, cry a little, as I would when a fireworks display bursts its last great golden dahlias and silence comes after, that there are other things than fireworks that can give me the same feeling, and whether I know them when I see them --- is my own choice.