EMOTIONS
It has been quite a day. Not easy to convey. We had a discussion in the early hours of the morning - one of those where you are not entirely sure what you are talking about but you know it is important. The past few days there has been something between us, like a glass wall. In the early hours you wake up thinking about such things. Between dawn and breakfast we were able to tease out that a certain parallel existed between how we had been treating each other and how one of us had been treating a third party, all of it resulting in messy consequences. Eventually, we unearthed a resentment that had been growing and that had got acted out in ways that had put the distance between us. What a power there is sometimes in confessing and naming something, even (or perhaps especially) when it is something shameful. At that moment it was as if the dam broke. Suddenly we were back together again, souls in contact once more. It was joyous but also rather weird that one is so much in thrall to emotional currents determined by things that it is so difficult to become conscious of. A few words and all felt different. Nothing practical had changed, but the ice was not just broken, it had melted clean away.
WORK
The rest of the day we have been busy. Elja has been washing and cooking and I have been digging the garden. I could feel that my body was craving the exercise. After so much travelling it is wonderful to get home to the land of Eleusis, to feel the soil in one's hands. Here at Eleusis life is quite hard and simple and although I do cook sometimes and Elja does do things in the forest, there is an almost irresistible tendency for one to revert to old fashioned gender roles here. There is a lot of ground to be dug and it is hard work. It needs a man. While the man is thus occupied, there are a lot of other domestic things that need doing. Consequently, the way the world always used to be soon makes a lot of sense. By the end of the day, a substantial patch of ground was turned over, the washing lines were full and we were well fed. However, while Elja was harvesting leeks to go in the curry, I was fetching in the washing and hanging it high in the kitchen to finish drying in the heat from the wood burning stove. Cosy life in the country.
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Nice to be home again. It was a lovely day... :-)