I was talking to a friend yesterday and by that I mean in person, physically. We were in a physical place having a drink and a person facing encounter, where you can see their expressions and pick up all those nonverbal cues. We referred to this blog and I said that I had always loved writing and have so many ideas pop into my head, which I used to write down on scraps of paper and then there were too many and it became a fire hazard ( I am exaggerating a little there, just my humour) so I binned them, some intact and some torn into fragments.

I have always loved words. I see them as playthings. I used to spend my pocket money on books and they were piled up to the cupboard ceiling. They were all pony stories actually and by that I do not mean in the cockney rhyming slang way, they were stories about ponies with fantastic owners and riders who won everything. They represented one of my ideal selves, the owners not the ponies. Although, I have always had a very active imagination.  Dad used to drive us round and round the country lanes in his Triumph Herald looking for villages. His sense of direction had always gone awol and we used to just about negotiate sudden sharp bends, my mother used to sit in the passenger seat saying look out for the bird, watch out, there’s an ant and on more than one occasion grabbed the  steering wheel and spun the car towards the ditch. The car also used to stink of petrol and what with that aroma and the wheeling and dealings in the front, I used to get car sick and rather spaced out. To blot this out I used to focus my attention on the grass verges and pretend that I was a horse running alongside the car.

Anyway I first started this blog because I just like writing and I thought it would be a good repository for random thoughts and ideas. A way for me to keep a record of my mental explorations. But it started to evolve into something else too. Maybe it is because I lost my Mother on December 5th last year and my dear cousin, Linda who was like a sister to me just two months later on February 6th that I have begun to look back over my life to track the important people and influences that made me ME now. Also, Dad asked me write and present my Mother’s eulogy on his behalf, which I did. To accomplish this I had to look back over my Mother’s life to find out what her life really meant to her, what her legacy or if you like, message was.

I was actually shown the wedding album for the first time and Dad presented  a framed photograph of my Mother in her wedding dress to me. I look at her and wonder what she was like then, this person represented in this image. This person, I did not know. What were her dreams? What were her plans? I did not know her. By the time I came along she had lost my brother at only three months old and people have told me that she was so different to the person that they used to know. Dad’s younger sister and my Mother were estranged during my childhood.  But she came to my Mother’s funeral and she cried, not for who Mother was when she passed over, but for who she once was. My Aunt said that she used to look up to my Mother and wanted to be like her. In later years neither of them would be in the same room, except for that final time, at the funeral.

So this blog seems to be evolving into multi levels. It is a space for me to store my ideas, to clear my head of them to make room for more. It is a space to explore past people and influences and to acknowledge them, yes, I think acknowledging the people who help us to create our paths is important, kind of like a bibiography. Acknowledge the sources of You. I realised that this is also a place for my daughter to come in the future to find out things about me that I might not have presented to her or told her about. We are all multifaceted. We are all layered. She knows me as her Mother, and a friend, I think. But there is always more.

I have a great interest in Ancient Egypt. I am starting to see blogging and the internet in general as akin to the writings on the walls that the Egyptians did. It is for the present too but it is also a record of the future, unless there is a cyber war and all things like this are eradicated. But if so, someone, somewhere in the future might find the key to resurrect it all.

It is a also fitting to look at past people at this time as we are approaching the time of Samhain, the time to honour and commune with the ancestors. So I will probably write a few more pieces on past people. I am choosing to honour not just blood relatives but I suppose what I would call soul relatives, or wyrd/web relatives.

Rose Dixon