‘Even now there are still places where a thought might grow.‘ – Derek Mahon
I wrote the phrase ‘keep the burning world at bay’ in a notebook during a deep sense of uncertainty at the start of the global pandemic and partly as an answer to my young daughter’s worried question when her school closed – ‘Will it be like this forever?’ I didn’t know, bluffing I told her it would be back to ‘normal’ soon.
Weeks turned to months, as our new life of home schooling and all day gardening became the routine. We had entered a strange utopian experiment. Even as the restrictions closed in every evening I drove around the lake road to visit my elderly mother who had ‘cocooned’.
There were glorious summer sunsets, I met a fox in my headlights, out night hunting. Nature was going on as before, possibly less harassed. Unable to travel or go on holidays, I took to local drives on obscure back roads. How come I had never thought of painting them before? The landscape seemed eerily quiet and empty, as if I had found a gap in time, to an obscure past life. The night journeys around the lake back from my mother’s became moments of existential questioning. Then I noticed the full moon, and that the lake’s darkness had some deep inner light and my mothers phrase came back to me- ‘Paint your way out’.