Just missing you.

So I wrote a long post to you, but it got posted to the P'kaboo Blog.

Had to fix that first, before the followers got allergic.  P'kaboo is a business. You know.  It was one of our babies.

I have found the song for your wake.  Except for "Who Wants To Live Forever", which is of course your favourite band.  It's Jaqueline du Pre:  "Jaqueline's Tears" by Offenbach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pmBJLI4kVw

Bright Eyes

Happy New Year Bright Eyes.

I miss you being alive.

 

Being "It"

So life doesn't get any easier as I discover the hundreds of ways in which I leaned on my soulmate for 26 years (we both leaned on each other, make no mistake, this was a full partnership on every level).  I miss being able to bounce my ideas off him and getting his creative feedback.  I miss the sheer levels of his creativity (though, actually, now he is moving all sorts of stellar positions for me in the spirit realm, which is beyond amazing - the partnership endures).  I miss his go-get, his mojo, of which he had an overabundance - once again, on the spirit level, I feel it, it is definitely there and he is keeping me company even right now as I'm blogging.  (Now and then he peeps over my shoulder while I'm typing - the mischief, he knew it made me all edgy when he did this in life - but mostly he sits across, on the couch, just watching me and - doing, I don't know what it is that angels do when they are taking a break.) And yes, I'm publishing this, for two reasons - firstly, to honour the Truth!, and secondly, someone who needs it will read it and feel better about their own situation.  And the people who think I'm crazy...  I can only smile... but if it takes "crazy" to accomplish stuff after such a tremendous transition, then so be it.

I am getting more insights as this process rolls on.

We've launched (when I say, "we", I mean Iain and me of course) the Young Writers Contest, the first one in Ireland, and the first one whatsoever.  (Another will follow next year for South Africa, and I want to see how I can slot in UK and Scotland into it all.)

Launching it went a bit like this:  I came up with the ideas; discussed them with the school principal, a few people at the Life Centre and my Ideas Buddy here, a lovely lady who is a mom of one of my kids' friends.  Then I mulled and mulled and mulled, and hung in there waiting for permission, and procrastinated...

Yesterday, I had an "epiphany", I realized that I'm It!  Hey, if I don't give the start signal, nobody will!  This is my project, it may be nationwide, it may become worldwide, but nobody is creating it except me, so I'd better step up on that springboard, look around, check the dizzying distance to the ground, take a breath and jump.

So I created the web page, put it up and the ball is rolling now.  I'm on my way down from the diving tower, falling towards the water, aiming to make as huge a splash as I can...

Am I prepared?  Here's the thing:  One is never prepared.  Never.  You step up and jump.  Or you turn around and climb down, and then it never happens.  Ready, fire, aim!

And my angel is cheering me on.  "You can do it!"  His favourite words.

Love you, my angel.  Remember your achievements?

The colours of heartbreak

Old photos on my desktop.

They are not that old.  My daughter's 9th birthday.  That's only 11 years back, for crying. The colours in our front room. Wine red couches, handed down from friends.  Paired with a graded blue-to-green symphony that is created with table cloths and fabric draped to cover up ugly pieces of furniture.  It looked sweet; young; colourful; and surprisingly:  Calm.

When we went through heavy years - there were challenges of all sorts - the interior deco fell by the wayside, calm made way to chaos. I discovered Mary Kondo and tried desperately to implement her advice, and we got somewhere... not overly far, but we were beginning to make headway.

Then came the forced move to Faerie Glen.  It was a damned-if-we-do-and-damned-if-we-don't situation.  Dismantling our home of 19 years, that had got - frankly - overly chaotic; and trying to reestablish a new one in a place that was full of OPF (other people's furniture) and OPK (other people's knicknacks). But we nearly got there, basing our colours less on the blues and greens and more on beige, brown, and rust-reds.  We nearly got there.

Stuck inbetween this style change, disaster hit.  And here we are, back in a place filled with OPF, not even in possession of our own things (they are in another country)... bringing it home acutely how much we have lost.  With our Daddy, we have lost our home, our circle of friends, our favourite things, our income, our entire lives we'd led up to that point - and we've had to leave behind my parents in SA, and it hurts!

2006, when the photo was taken... I had just established that it's okay to write.  I'm allowed.  I need to give myself that permission again.  He's not there to read my writings back to...  in a big way I wrote for him, to entertain him.  But I will have to allow myself to carry on anyway.  To give myself that time off from reality, from mourning a lost life, a lost partnership, a lost everything...  to immersing myself again in the fantasy worlds I created (with him always on the edges commenting).  Will it hurt? You bet it will hurt!  I remember every little comment he made...  every laugh, every grin, every time I glanced up and he was there across the room just watching me, with that thoughtful look in his eyes.  His hearty belly-laughter baring all his teeth to the very gums.  He had an immense laugh and it was so contagious! 

I'm going to revisit and re-edit the Solar Winds, even though they already are well-published and have reviews, because they need to be updated for this generation and its sensitivities.  When I wrote them, saying "gypsy" was not a big deal, it carried the connotation it always has in European culture, that of music, mystery and magic, and flary dresses and dances around bonfires - but there has been so much abuse of the word that in the interim, it has become one of those no-no words in certain parts.  So I'll fix that wording. It is a pity to lose the richness of the connotation. 

But face it, perhaps the Free Tzigany of the Solar Wind's era are more an invention of a mythical people than anything else.  It's the romance of the idea that Europe had its own half-invisible folk of wanderers, living like Tolkien's wood-elves off the land and having their own unique culture and music (which they do!!).

I'm studying into ways of scaling a business.  Our brave venture that we started, Iain and I - P'kaboo Publishers - it must survive.  It is another of our babies.  So while I'm looking for dayjobs and teaching on a volunteer basis to pick up more experience locally, and giving some violin lessons, and building a network too, or rather various networks related to various different fields, I'm also thinking on what P'kaboo needs to swing back up.  

Time for me to step up and be a mother again, and the entrepreneur I was capable of being together with Iain.

They said it would be hard.  Yup.  It is.   But not impossible.  So, it shall be done!

Still beaten-up and confused...

... I can't even say the fog is clearing from my brain.

I have been running in small stupid circles trying to get income going now for 7 months.  Results:  Basically none.  Here is why: 
Some days I feel good, energy levels high, the part of me that misses Iain is quiet and content with being just a little sentimental voice in the background, and I feel his encouragement from the other side to go for it, step out, make it work.  Those days when I feel strong, I believe I can make enterprise work again.  I set things up, do things, get things ready, make calls..
And then there are the other types of day, when I wake up and there is this blackness edging everything, I can hear the abyss, and sadness sucks all the life out of my day.  On those days, apart from crawling into a corner and howling, I just want to be protected, have someone come and look after me, have him come and put his enormous golden wings around me and wrap me in his arms and tell me it will all be alright, "a plan will be made" like he was always assuring me.
On such dark days (and it has nothing to do with the weather), all I can do is hang in there and go through the motions, make sure the kids are okay, and hide.  And on such days there's this voice in me that says, "you're not strong enough to make business work again - every time you want to hide in a corner, it will deal a blow to your business".  Unfortunately, enterprise is built on energy, and if one doesn't have consistently high energy levels, enterprise becomes an impossibility.
I even have that one person in my circles who tells me that I can stop pretending to mourn now.  That's really cute.   That's really, really cute.  "It's been a year" (said at a point when it was 11 months).  Frankly, people with such a lot of amazing empathy...  I hope that she must never experience what we've experienced.  I hope she is allowed to remain that ignorant.  Because in a way, such ignorance is downright fluffy.

So on Friday it was actually a year. But it started hitting me on Tuesday, remembering that entire week that had gone before.  A weird week; a good week, starting the year.  And then ending it again right away.  With the disaster.
So Tuesday I was down.  Wednesday you could write me off.  Thursday I was numb.  It was a Thursday when they came in to cut us down.  It will haunt me forever, because I can't figure out why.  Even if I could it would still haunt me. 
So Thursday was a Parent evening at my kids' school.  It was a good thing to do.  I need to take up contact with humans again.
So on Saturday, which was the 20th, I almost went up to Tullamoore but because Wildest One was sick I didn't.  Instead, Wild One (a.k.a Thing 1) invited all his friends and the teenagers sat and played cards until well into the evening.  It was good to have teen energy fill up the house.  Teens are awesome.

I still don't know what I'll do this year.  I have a few ideas, a few leads.  And Federi is calling me to write.  Iain is egging me on to write again... he knows, it was our story I wrote.  I haven't yet connected back into it.  We'll have to see.

The Publishing Will Continue.

Re-reading the last post, I spot a dread negativity.  "Life is a burden" - except, of course, that I say thank you every day that my children are hale and well, and that is also exclusively due to the ultimate sacrifice he made.

I'm starting another blog and another project.  This blog will of course continue, as will the others.  But the new blog is specifically there to outline acts of heroism, and what is happening in South Africa. 

It has come to my attention that here in Ireland, murders only happen to those who are "known to the Garda", meaning they already had a criminal record, and that there is a lack of comprehension that South Africa is a war zone and a slaughterhouse.  "Garda" are a mythical concept in South Africa!  But, Iain was of true Irish hero stock, the Hound of Ulster would have been proud to call him a countryman.  Ireland needs to know this;  the northern hemisphere needs to understand what is happening in that dark county down south.  Iain's story is not unique.  We have unsung heroes, and we have all sorts of dark tragedy as they (the criminal and political elements that want us gone) keep up their relentless butchering. 

40 000 farm murders in 2016.  Wait:  Forty thousand.  Forty thousand incidences where a family who legitimately bought land from a government some generations back and has been farming it since, gets invaded and butchered down, to the last baby and little-old grandmother.

Forty thousand.  Do you have a concept of that figure? 

That's the entire County Longford, murdered out to the last baby.  Not a soul left alive.  In one single year. 

And this year they've already murdered out all of Leitrim, if the rate is the same.


And this has been happening, year after year, for the past twenty and more years.  Do you comprehend the size of this concept?  And here comes the most staggering part:

"We're not at war.  Crime?  What crime?"  Such is the narrative of our ruling party the ANC.

If one of the Irish political parties were getting away with that?  Could you imagine this?

If you think the South African farmers stole the land, you can think again.  Each one of those families paid dearly for their land.  If you bought land from your government at the full price, would you expect to own the rights to it?  Or would you feel happy to hand it back without compensation just so that you and your children would not be killed? 

But the farm murders are only a part of the statistic!  We didn't own a farm.  We merely lived in a house - in a suburb - a house that didn't even belong to us but was being passed down, from the owner (Iain's mother) to her son via the totally legal route of inheritance.  That was the sum total of our crime - to live in a house, in a city.

I will blog about this.  But not here.  I will create a fresh blog, and others may contribute if they have stories similar to ours.

And the publishing of books is going to continue.  Especially since moving here I have seen that the world still has a dire, dire need for stories, children's books, novels, escapism etc.

Will be back soon.

Getting metaphysical

This post has little to do with the books and publishing, and a lot with my best partner, co-author, first-editor, business partner and soulmate.  It's an emotional post but hopefully with some direction in it.

I know now, on a deep level, that for those that have lost their soulmate to death, life becomes something it was never supposed to be:  A burden.

But:  He is waiting for me on the other side of that door.  I know this.  Don't try to argue with me about it.  End of story.  I also feel his presence, by now it's not as frequent as in the beginning, but every so often, there he is, chatting to me, giving me one of those hugs wrapping his golden angel wings around my shoulders.

Seeing that I'm alive only because he chased them off, and only so that our children can still have their decent chances in life, what I do doesn't really matter too much as long as I keep my promises.

I promised to get them to safety and give them their start in life as we had planned.  I promised to remain a good mother.

Stability for our children includes:

• Getting them to safety.  Done.  We are now in Ireland.
• Getting them into system education (schools).  Done.  Oldest One is at college, studying what she always wanted (following her dream, as her Daddy drilled into her) : Art.  The two younger ones (Wild Ones no longer) are in high school.
• Financial stability:  A job for me.  Sadly, self-employment with all its exciting and wonderful bonuses simply takes too long; we need the income now.  So, I'm looking.  This may still cause a lot of stress.
• Financial mobility:  Additional income.  This would then pay for little holidays, small extras, who knows.
• Financial freedom:  This was always part of Hubb's plan, and entails generating multiple small streams of passive income.  Like, royalties from books, or commission from a networking business.  

Looking at that list, I realize that the books have always been part of the big picture ("I'm going to write us to freedom!").  And he had such a lot of fresh ideas, beginning of this year.

Some of the ideas he shared with me, and they entailed relaunching the whole P'kaboo.  With him, it was a good idea if it involved a big event.  I like that...