J H Martin is from London, England but has no fixed abode. His writing has appeared in a number of places in Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Website: acoatforamonkey.wordpress.com
Marbàn
It is beautiful. Truly beautiful.
All I can hear is the cry of birds and nothing else.
No cars. No sirens. No planes. And no machinery.
Yes. It is strange to think that these rusted gates in front of me were the entrance to the private grounds of some-Lord-or-other. An enclosed and expensive wonderland of statues, swimming pools and tennis courts. A place which like so many others around the world, now looks like some obscene relic from an age of gilded ignorance.
Now the bath-stone walls of the mansion and this gravelled driveway are no longer home to a resource-rich family and its limousines but to vines and weeds and roots. Springs of green that are rising up from the earth to reclaim what is rightly hers.
Stood on the cracked patio, where children used to play with the latest toys, I see the tops of the canopy which has taken back the skyline from all that gruesome glass and steel. At nearly seventy-years-old, I never imagined that I would see this. It wasn’t prophetised or predicted in any of those books in the family library in the west wing of the house. They only spoke about breakthroughs, progress and development. An end to suffering. A cleansing of disease. A sterilised and synthesised vision of an artificial and manufactured utopia. All laid out in neat and tidy numerical equations, which never tallied with my own experiences on this and other continents.
I don’t blame my parents or my family for that. They only wanted what they thought was best for me. Their expectations were only things which they had been conditioned through their cosseted environment to expect me to accept and to achieve. Clearly, as the ruins of the city show, they were not alone in that.
No. My rejection of those expectations were not a rejection of their love. Nor was it a rejection of my love for them. Quite the opposite. Standing here now, after nearly fifty years away, I see and feel their true presence and not the one which the bubble of their society forced them to dress up and present. In those vines, I see their strength. In those lawns of wild flowers, I see their natural beauty. And in the moss, the lichen and in the mycelium, I see we are all one with infinity.
Yes. It truly is beautiful.
Hasta la primavera, para siempre.