Wild Brush and Autumn Breeze

I stood on the top of the moorland amongst a thriving crop of dandelions, chrysanthemums, daisies and wild grasses bound with thistles. I turned slowly taking in the panoramic view of the hills to the west carpeted in forests with the carriageway cutting along its edge delivering traffic to the city. The green land faded into modern urban blocks of apartments as sharp and functional as a razor blade lining the waters edge and a quiet white noise of tyres on tarmac filling to air.

It was the perfect end to the morning run event. I had done all the chatting at the end that is so enjoyable. A community spirit in this one morning each week that I can really be myself without any judgments or negativity. An escape from people with people. Even so the walk to the view was inspiring. Burning sun between spacious kettle-fresh clouds, it was the right place, the right time, a moment captured that any other time just might not have produced the same feeling. A feeling that time just wouldn’t move – providing I stayed on that spot.

Who would have thought in such a short a space a time as three or four years I would be standing in my home town in the running gear that I want to wear with the way I want my hair and interacting with people without a care of what they might think and, it would appear, they don’t think anything, at least nothing bad. Accepted amongst people with a similar interest in keeping fit.

It’s funny how I feel so comfortable there now without a thought of worry and yet the odd moment elsewhere I can, at times, feel a bit frozen, not like years ago, but I guess its all part of the dipping-the-toe in the water kind of thing when it comes to gender identity and once I find the shallows of the lapping tide is summer-tepid everything become clear.

It would seem a huge departure to the rest of these last few weeks. A return to my career, at least a short return to keep me going for a year or so, became poison and toxic once again. It wasn’t long before I found myself tending notice. Despite the looming count down of my bank balance and limited time to figure out what I will do next I find that standing amongst the wild brush, and the August breeze that had a hint of September about it, I was calmed and reassured that things just happen and as long as I’m honest with myself, not just about the gender thing but also with what I do with my time. Forty plus hours is a lot of time to spend in a mix of hot and cold toxicity, especially one where I certainly wouldn’t see myself progressing to any kind of gender contentment.

I suppose this year could well be the most important in my life in every way possible and be as subtle as standing alone in the sun in exhilaration after running a few miles. There was a brief moment when I thought of that famous line, “I could die here.” It wasn’t the place, take away the sunshine paint across that grass and the pathways cut by feet, and replace it with a grey sky, rain and some drunk scumbags and suddenly it’s not that place. But it’s not just the place at that time, it was the feeling – at that moment and at that place. Contentment and oneness.

Isn’t this is what life should be about. Finding those moments of contentment and being able to recreate them.

– ❤ –

Every key press feels like blocks of wood talking for my heart. I feel and hear the fibres in the felt on each hammer scratching at each metallic string shedding a tear for all the memories. The piano, an outlet for memories of the last ten years all wrapped up in a few two or three minute solo songs. When I play I play with emotion and allow myself to express feeling through the varying tempo, and yet it is only when I play it back I realise what is behind those songs.

I suddenly realise that what I have written in music without words is telling a story. The welling-up of the high notes with their plinky delicate shade of sombre and the thunderous low notes of the tears and sadness that have ever fallen.

Expression through music is an enhancing and liberating experience just like a pen on a diary or the exploration with a psychologist. I feel gifted to have been able to find the ability to write through music and yet it can also feel like watching the pain on playback listening to my past self telling me what I had been through in my thirties from self female discovery and the loss of a long relationship ending with living alone with my own memories and company.

It is a life of depth of thought. Nights of glowing candles and intellectual reasoning with myself. Hannah, always thinking – again. There is a choice of course. Do something else, something to move a little further forward, or stay where I am. Settle on a comfort spot. A gamble just a like a game of poker.

Isn’t moving and change what makes life – well, life. Without movement nothing happens, darkness, stillness, frozen, yet a painting, as far as our observation is concerned, still and locked in a moment of time and yet can say so much. I find myself at another subtle junction in my life and a time where I see life racing by. I sometimes feel like for every heart beat others have beat ten times.

I suppose it comes down to this. When I look back in twenty or forty years time, am I going to say to myself, “if only” or will I raise a small smile and a small glass and say – “great choice.”

Until next time,

Hannah x