Memoir
This place holds the start and end of my relationship.
We come here in the afternoon, right at the beginning of things. Over the phone he stammered and choked; I wanted to reassure him. I told him I needed to go to the bora ring, my direction of the South-West. I brought the pages I wrote a week or so ago where I tried to get down, finally and definitively, what I felt for him. It was easy after I started—all those years of friendship and connection flowing out of me into liquid words, my emotions less complicated than I imagined. In the end there is mainly love, although I do recall stages of confusion, uncertainty, thwarted communication, and misunderstandings; those long years where I put barriers firmly around any intimacy or friendship, and the more recent years when he cast me adrift.
I don’t think I’ve got anything to lose; I feel remarkably free. I was about to move to the city to find my son a fiercer, more testing education for his last few years of schooling and just to be somewhere different. This man has stopped me in my tracks, demanding my attention, and told me not to move to the city just yet, and on one level I hardly believe him—I never thought he had any interest in me; not in that way, not romantically. But I’ve seen him once a week for a few weeks now, and gradually this new reality is filtering through to me. Not enough for me to be invested, not yet; but enough to start that entrancement that, once it really kicks in, nothing can compete with. Not even the city.
We drive out to the bora ring. It’s quite a way, and we talk unendingly; he talks a lot and is shocked at himself in it, he says it is not like him, he should shut up. We talk literature and politics and ideas and families; we intrigue each other, fascinate with the unknown, the partly known, the yet-to-be-revealed. It’s a fine day although it’s mid-April; in fact, it is more or less the time associated with this direction, Samhain. So it’s the time of year, it’s the position I’m in, it’s the place we’re going to. It’s odd to be starting a relationship in the evening of the year, the drawing-in, but the Celts celebrated their festivals from the evening before; their days began with dusk and ran through to the next dusk. Samhain is associated with beginnings as well as with endings. And this is a beginning.
When we are there, I show him the simplicity of it. There’s almost nothing to see, really, once you’ve driven through the cemetery; it’s more in the depths of the place, what it holds and has seen and symbolizes. There’s that stand of gum trees; the bora ring a faint raised circle in the ground, surrounded by a low pine-post fence and a few little, lonely graves nearby, out of the cemetery proper and nestled near the bora ring as if seeking its shelter. There’s a wide view, it’s a high point in the land; you can see fields, the road, stands of trees here and there, the hills in the distance; nothing in particular, but the wind blows through.
I make offerings. I’ve brought honey for the ants and water from my spring for the land, and we sit in silence for a while near the entrance to the bora ring. It is a place holding its own history and magic that has nothing to do with us. I work my rituals and musings nearby, parallel, like the few graves placed oddly near. Seeking connection but not imposing. There is a majesty here, a dreaming thousands and tens of thousands of years old, and it’s as if such depth doesn’t need to be marked very deeply on the land; it carries all the energetic layers though all the worlds. I can imagine this bora ring stamped through time and into the million realms of the multiverse, the same; simple but unendingly itself. A fixed point in existence.
We sit on the ground in the shade of the trees on the faded pink picnic rug I have had for years; we have to keep picking ants off it. There are a lot of ants and they’re investigative, keen explorers and hunters and gatherers. They’re like the business of life and death itself, their jaws munching up and recycling the discarded and the dead into their eager, bustling lives of order and increase. They are the busiest thing here, otherwise the place exudes peace and timelessness, punctuated mainly by visitors who look around for five minutes waiting for there to be something more dramatic to see and then, in its absence, leave. It is only sitting here quietly for an hour or more, an afternoon, a day that the place begins to make itself seen, to hint in the wind at a secret or two.
We eat some lunch, and I read him the piece I wrote. I don’t feel nervous, not anxious, though it lays my deepest feelings bare; anticipatory, maybe, and I think there is a good chance it will turn him off completely, repel him by my intensity or truth or willingness to be open. But as I read I feel the shifts in him. I feel his eagerness for it, his acceptance; as if he has swallowed me up already, these words and all I will say in the future. I can’t believe it’s that easy; I am not, after all, making a declaration of forbidden longings, just exploring, piece by piece, the history of our connection. But it is as if it reaches him on some much deeper level, reminding him, perhaps, of all the length and breadth of our history; reminding him of himself.
Of course I love him. I have always loved him; it has been simple to love him. I have loved his intensity, his interest in me and the world, his easy generosity with so many people, his occasional flamboyance and the ferocity of his opinion, his original way of viewing complex issues. I’ve always thought he admired much the same things in me, with variations; I thought he marveled at my daring in relationship, where he has been so much more conventional. But now he is the daring one, leaping forward, and suddenly we are already there, in a deeper flow of connection than I expected or anticipated.
This is the real beginning, here at the bora ring; a beginning ten years past that other beginning. I remember seeing him for the first time at a party, laughing and with his arm around his lover; when I was introduced to him, a clear, unbidden thought came into my head: stay away from this man. I attempted that for several years while he sought me out, determined to pursue conversation, connection. He remembers a later day, in someone’s kitchen, where he tried to engage me in a debate on feminism. But I still had those words pounding through me, stay away from this man, and I gave curt answers and more or less ignored him, fueling his interest. Both of these remembered meetings have a powerful awareness of the other and all the reasons why we couldn’t and shouldn’t connect. But now, here, there are none of those reasons. Here, now, is another beginning, and I don’t have to stay away.
I am aware of the time of year, of the place. Still I decide to trust, to let the wheel turn with me and into this new place. What choice is there, after all? It’s as obvious as the change of seasons; past summer there can only be autumn, followed by winter. It doesn’t go any other way. Past youth there is middle age; past that, old age and dying. That’s what we live with: simple truth, as simple as the bora ring. Here is this man I’ve loved as a friend, with tenderness for who he is in the world and how he’s been with me, in a clarity that came from not being involved with him. Now suddenly we are swept forward into relationship; like the waterfall falling off the cliff, it’s all different now. We’ve begun again.
I hardly know where I am in it, but I do remember it is Samhain. Our relationship begins as the veils between the worlds part, as the year slides into the other realm. Our relationship begins among the ancient vibrations of the bora ring, resonances that ripple outwards, unendingly. This is a place deeper than the rest of our circle, the place circle is born from, the dark vortex from which life emerges, the ending of worlds where all is swallowed. I feel small here, small and human and not certain of anything but the present moment. It is a beginning mired in history. His past relationships, mine; my child, his children; our ages and all of our histories; the fact that, though we’ve known each other for ten years, perhaps we don’t know each other very well at all.
Six years later, the bora ring is where he comes after he’s left me. It’s nearly that time of year again, a little earlier. March instead of April, the equinox and the stepping into darkness rather than the time of deep mysteries. I don’t know what the weather’s like, what the mood is, how the trees have grown, because I’m somewhere else. It somehow seems appropriate that he comes here to explain himself rather than to me. Of all the directions it’s been my favorite; the time of year I was born, given to the mysteries, stamped by them as I entered the world of the living. The shadows have always beckoned me, those other worlds sung into my ears, my eyes have been entranced by things just beyond the visible. It’s the place of the liminal where realms overlap, one into the other, dreams into truth into mystery, dancing the eternal dance of becoming and unbecoming, loves and endings.
He comes to apologize, or that’s what he tells me later—to apologize for hurt and who knows what else; the failure of relationship. Maybe to seek comfort or lay memories to rest, with all those other memories that are laid here; those countless rituals. All those lives the cemetery holds such slender memories of, all the feet that have danced this earthen ring, the voices that have sung and chanted through it. Maybe he’s drawn here on a thread, the thread that takes you round the circle and round again, completing what you’ve begun and winding back and back to the beginning, as well as on and on to the end. I don’t know because I’m not there. I can’t say I understand any of it, unless you see it purely as the turn of the wheel, not in human terms. If he’s going to vanish, I suppose this is a good place to do it; sacred, circular, complete. Samhain and the South-West are places of endings, after all.