Being Nobody.

I’ve just come in from having my Beltane Eve fire. It was a good one this year, fanned by a gentle wind and still smouldering as I write. I thought that maybe I should grace the old blog with one more post before spring bows out in a little over two hours time (according to my Celtic ancestors on my dad’s side, that is.)

So…

I was walking up The Hollow at lunchtime today, mesmerised almost by the vast swathes of wild white garlic flowers, when I was taken in hand by a strong fit of nostalgia for my teenage years. I remembered the fishing trips, and the rugby games, and the girlfriends, and the not-too-wild parties, and the building of a bonfire on Berry Hill on which to roast potatoes and discuss those matters which preoccupy the teenage mind. I remembered the school field study trip to Swaledale in Yorkshire, and the playing of the trombone (at which I excelled of course…) in the school orchestra on speech nights and Christmas carol concerts. And plenty more as well.

I knew who I was then, but I don’t any more because one day, some way beyond the teen years, I heard the hum of mother culture. And so began the first hints of profound musing. Life became more of a struggle when I began seriously to deliberate on, and search for answers to, the meaning of life and the nature of reality. I haven’t found a satisfactory answer to either yet, at least none on which I can definitely rely.

And now I think I’m really nobody at all, and maybe that’s a good thing. The one aspiration left to me is to engage in a long conversation with the Lady B before I die, but it’s not likely to happen because aspirations don’t usually bear fruit for people who are nobody. Do they? Probably not.