last night's weather

unbidden blades of wind
unshackled at the midnight corrugations
of my mind

Strangely enough, someone actually reads my blog. Or she claims to. That someone is a bit of a blast from the past and I have often wondered where she is and whether she is happy. I have some reason to think that she is, and that her life might start to settle down into more familiar patterns. So I will pray that she is blessed and, even though life is difficult and unpredictable, she will find joy and satisfaction in the small and the momentary.

Healing Ankh

Sometimes my mind takes a little excursion back to Japan, and rather than the places that I somewhat prosaically catalogued a few years ago in this blog, I recall the people. Today, for some reason, Miho popped into my head and I was flooded with recollections.

Miho was a middle-aged woman who lived with her parents not far from our place in Mukogaoka. She had decided to take English classes with us, though I'm not sure why. She worked for her brother in a curious new-age style shop in Takarasuka called the Healing Ankh.

It was a curiosity because of its location and its business practices. The shop, which sold CD's, polished stones and other new age paraphenalia, was on the fifth floor of an apartment building that was largely residential. It was my custom to ask students about their day to get them to locate their English in the real world. I always asked Miho how business was at the shop and she always replied with the same response. "We had no customers today." Now I knew that Miho was being paid a wage and that there would be a hefty rent too. So I couldn't figure out how the business stayed afloat. Perhaps neither could she.

Dismissing pet theories about yakuza shop-fronts and the like, it dawned on me that her brother had a regular job that paid the bills and subsidized his loss-making enterprise. When I last checked, the Healing Ankh had moved to a sensible street-front shop, a far better location. Though whether it had any customers - who knows?

Well, it's starting to look like the rose cupboard is going to be bare this year. Allowing for the last minute delivery, which seems very remote from this standpoint, I will just have to wait until a fresh blooming of love in the future. That love that I alluded to briefly in my last post.

One might think that after a number of relationships and one marriage, I should have tired of the whole process of falling in love. But no, I find that, with over 12 months having passed since the end of my marriage, I am very open to whatever might be. By which, I don't mean just anything for the sake of it. Rather, something desirable, mutual and enduring.

I am not really comfortable on the dating scene (whatever that is), though I've had a couple of dates recently. In the past I have been accustomed to relationships falling from the sky. And the proverbial tap on the shoulder. That's made it all too easy for me. Maybe I have to face the chasm of rejection and know that I can bounce back. There is no joy without some attendant risk.

Tom is back at school and now in second grade. His school pools the first and second years into a composite that works around stage one. Which does mean something, but I've forgotten what. He seems happy enough with the age mix. He is just not at all keen on work and understandably inclined towards play with his friends. Nor does he like boredom, hardly a modern affliction, but one seemingly suited to modernity. Unreflected life, I would like to tell him, is hardly worth the effort. Boredom is part of that self-examination.

So things have started up again after their long antipodean summer sleep. I'm back at Anglicare doing what I love and the cafe is providing the weekly dose of getting my musical act together. Moo choir began last night with much joy and hilarity. I'm wondering what this year has in mind for me - for work, life and love.

Yes, wondering.