{"id":1375,"date":"2019-08-07T02:48:37","date_gmt":"2019-08-07T02:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/?p=1375"},"modified":"2019-07-30T02:54:08","modified_gmt":"2019-07-30T02:54:08","slug":"marban-by-j-h-martin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/2019\/08\/07\/marban-by-j-h-martin\/","title":{"rendered":"Marb\u00e0n by J H Martin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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: <\/em>acoatforamonkey.wordpress.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n


Marb\u00e0n <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is beautiful.\nTruly beautiful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All I can hear\nis the cry of birds and nothing else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No cars. No\nsirens. No planes. And no machinery. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes. It is\nstrange to think that these rusted gates in front of me were the entrance to\nthe private grounds of some-Lord-or-other. An enclosed and expensive wonderland\nof statues, swimming pools and tennis courts. A place which like so many others\naround the world, now looks like some obscene relic from an age of gilded\nignorance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now the\nbath-stone walls of the mansion and this gravelled driveway are no longer home\nto a resource-rich family and its limousines but to vines and weeds and roots.\nSprings of green that are rising up from the earth to reclaim what is rightly\nhers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stood on the\ncracked patio, where children used to play with the latest toys, I see the tops\nof the canopy which has taken back the skyline from all that gruesome glass and\nsteel. At nearly seventy-years-old, I never imagined that I would see this. It\nwasn\u2019t prophetised or predicted in any of those books in the family library in\nthe west wing of the house. They only spoke about breakthroughs, progress and\ndevelopment. An end to suffering. A cleansing of disease. A sterilised and\nsynthesised vision of an artificial and manufactured utopia. All laid out in\nneat and tidy numerical equations, which never tallied with my own experiences\non this and other continents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t blame my\nparents or my family for that. They only wanted what they thought was best for\nme. Their expectations were only things which they had been conditioned through\ntheir cosseted environment to expect me to accept and to achieve. Clearly, as\nthe ruins of the city show, they were not alone in that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No. My rejection\nof those expectations were not a rejection of their love. Nor was it a\nrejection of my love for them. Quite the opposite. Standing here now, after\nnearly fifty years away, I see and feel their true presence and not the one\nwhich the bubble of their society forced them to dress up and present. In those\nvines, I see their strength. In those lawns of wild flowers, I see their\nnatural beauty. And in the moss, the lichen and in the mycelium, I see we are\nall one with infinity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes. It truly is\nbeautiful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hasta la\nprimavera, para siempre.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 Marb\u00e0n 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. … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa867U-mb","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1375"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1378,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375\/revisions\/1378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}