The Cashmere Diaries.   London:  Literary Legacy

A Change of Season.

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.” 
― Anais Nin

“I can’t let you do it, Squiddie,” a look of horror etched her face.  Her honeyed northern English accent was endearing.  “But the weather,” she pleaded, “you’ll never be able to wear a sundress again.”  Flabbergasted, my sweet friend’s eyes froze wide.   

“I know, I know, Sponge Boo.  But I’ve got to go there so I can be published.”  It also meant saying “see you later” to the dynamic duo friendship we had forged during the summer working together on a sailing yacht out of Palma.  We toasted with Cava then took one last dip in the jewel-toned cala.  

Maybe I was crazy to leave the Mallorcan life I loved so much and relocate to London.  I had to check myself with a heavy dose of, what the hell Christin?  But dreams were hardly accomplished from the “safety seat.”  With my first novel complete and the sequel underway, to get this book series published and garner the success I desired, I had to do the uncomfortable.  Push my boundaries, leave the Mediterranean island that had grown to be my home for the last two years and plant my energy in the literariness of London.  Leave the sun and sea.  An impossible ask for a mermaid like myself.  I had to trade in my sundresses for cashmere.  But it was time for CHANGE.  A new season was upon me. 

“Dude, you’re in London!” my literary mentor keeps messaging me.  The relocation was a mournful start for me I must admit.  I missed the sea, her presence, her smell, her air, her vastness.  Sand, skies, sunsets, mountains, friends.  Fast forward to two months now, and I feel I’m only now morphed into Londonness, city life, gray sky normality and screeching sirens.  I’ve had to generate my own inner sunshine.  Adopt new customs . . . like never leaving the flat without a “brolly” (umbrella slang) buried in my bag.  Take the red double-decker buses, or the tube to get across town.  Learn which way to look before crossing a street.  It was a whole new world from my sunny swimming lifestyle. 

Opening my eyes to positivity, the advantages around me were becoming clear like glass.  Sparkling mosaic glass clear.  Kaleidoscopic variety swirled around me.  Every ethnic food I could ever crave at my fingertips.  Argentine Tango dancing any night of the week.  Every gourmet market, shopping brand, blues bar, gorgeous park to keep my creative juices tingling.  Opportunity at my doorstep.  Just the other day I went to a talk by English poet, mystic, Richard Rudd, author and founder of Gene Keys.  Besides an incredibly inspiring dip into the philosophic pool of our planetary and human condition, it was also incredibly resonant to the sentiments of my novel, Unforgetting, and awakening to our inner divine essence.  The Wednesday evening talk took place in St. Paul’s church in Piccadilly, which among numerous other boasts, just happened to be the church where 18^th century Romantic era poet, William Blake, was baptized.  Emblematic symbology for such a night.  Humming out from an old mind-filing-cabinet, fluttered his poem:  

“He who binds himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy

He who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise”

All this and more.  It donned on me too, I was vibrating in the legacies of my literary heroes.  The ones impacting me most during my university days.  Those whom gave voice to the awarenesses simmering within me, shaping thought forms with inspiring prose.  Molding me.  Most notably Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot.  Just up the street from me is Kensington, where Virginia Woolf grew up, and over in Richmond was where she and her husband, Leonard, founded the Hogarth Press– now a Penguin Publishing imprint.  Just over in the Bloomsbury district was where she and her sister, along with other artists, intellectuals, and philosophers, were gathering as a coterie come to be known as the Bloomsbury group.  While walking in the footsteps of literary legacy, my own footsteps would have to find their way.  Network, meet, connect, persist.  Trudge.  Through “slush piles.”  Through puddles to publishing.  

Change in the air.  The Smiths blasting from my EarPod.  “There is a Light That Never Goes Out . . .”  Indeed, I hoped it to be true about my own light.  I could only describe all of what I was experiencing with this bold move through the means of one of my saviors:  poetry.  My mind writes:

If I am not that

That which is so finely tuned with limitless effort

Then I am no longer capable of unfurling into this divide.

The divide, the crossing

The harkening to remember that which we truly are.

My thoughts stemmed on . . . past my own plight.  What would it be like with poetry reinvigorated in society?  Could we raise it again to common popularity standards it once held for centuries?  Feel its necessity.  A way to give voice and understanding to this, the great mystery we find ourselves in.  What would it be like to create a new movement steering from tiring screens and into crisp book pages?  Campaign ReRead, I’d call it.  Ignite designated “Page-Time” instead of “Screen-Time.”  Include a revision to that niggly Sunday report notification on your phone.  I envisioned the dance steps from Postmodernism into Metamodernism.  Waltzing from rejections of ultimate truth, across the ballroom towards hope.  

To my left I was passing another jewel of a book shop–windowfront eye candy–vintage books, special editions, artsy covered hard backs.  I was transfixed; it was like staring at artifacts in a museum.  Authors throughout history.  Something which could potentially be a dying art form, yet so much care still existed for such collector items, and it invigorated me to my core.  The pages surely smelled amazing.

Trudging on, I detoured, dipping into Hyde Park.  I needed to get lost in the trees.  More surrounding kaleidoscopic variations presented; this time with changing of the season cascades.  I blinked and Autumn was underway.  Its harbinger scent filled the air with spiked coziness.  Sycamore leaves were dulling, skydiving from recumbent limbs.  Orange squeezed through greens.  Reds popping.  Bronzes spreading.  Goldenness. Embossed in the rays of setting sun.  The Cure’s, “Just Like Heaven,” blasting in my ear.  A few more months and the trees would be naked.  I too was shedding.

Here I was, my new life, layered in cashmere, contemplating the chaotic state of the world, my future and the launch of my literary career.  What would this new season bring?  What colors would shine forth in my life?  Morrissey now invoking in my ear, “Please, please, please, let me get what I want this time.”  

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”  –T.S. Eliot

Fall Leaves 

Magical the turning of seasons
  feeling it through senses, 
 crevices–crucial corners–
stirring their unexpected colors 
clacking sounds cracking, 
 shoes kicking a few mid stride.
Their scent, enlivening decaying staleness 
 I lick it all up. 
Wet leaves, mushy leaves, stinky leaves, 
burgundy magenta, 
painted greens- verdant to sycamore pale, 
golden leaves, all gradients of brown
leaves, 
  the ones fluttering down in wind current, 
 waving hello when I see them. 
Soon forgotten
  added to the pile
 stepped on, stomped on, 
 dog paws, dog piss, 
  all matter of defeat…
But they sparkle from my eyes
 For that I’m grateful 
Full immersion of Autumn 
 a season long forgotten for the those of us 
swallowed in southern swamp endless summer