When I do my morning practice, thoughts often turn up in my head, potential poems, phrases from somewhere else, or bits of songs. This morning I decided to put all my incense cones into one box and mix them up, and while looking for a box I found a tiny box of matches which I remember once set me off into reminiscence and caused me to write a poem, some time last year, I think. Memory squared. I’m going to look out that poem later.
I had the song ‘Dust in the Wind’ in my head when I woke up (a song for our times if ever there was one) and as I started on my yoga stretches, and was thinking about that and the poem inspired by the matchbox, the phrase ‘the woman that I was’ popped into my head. I knew that it, or a phrase very like it, was from a song; the word wasn’t ‘woman’, but it was sung by a woman, and it wasn’t Joni Mitchell, but if I could work out what that two-syllable word was, I’d know. Then it came to me in a flash that it was ‘Gypsy’ by Stevie Nicks. I’ll have to fish that out later as well. And ‘Dust in the Wind’ – which is by Kansas, but I always forget that, or I think it’s Toto, and when it popped up on Amazon Music the other evening I had a laugh because I saw the connection between the two and why I mix them up.
The poem was about the woman that I was, though it wasn’t so long ago, about ten years. And the woman I was in it was who I was for a very short time and I’m not her any more – all we are is dust in the wind. I liked her, I liked being her. She was a bit wild, Bohemian, a dreamer, and she called herself Melinda – she came and went – like Ruby Tuesday – and she had a Bohemian adventure in 2013, but it didn’t work out the way she was dreaming of – nothing ever did – and perhaps that was her last gasp. So who am I now? Cat-by-Herself is my current persona, she emerged from the shadows – ooh, how long ago? Somewhere on a train, between the Camargue and the Balkans, perhaps, or Sofia and Istanbul, or on the shore of the Black Sea. She was the fourth corner (according to CG Jung, all threes need a fourth for completeness) – and she was the resolution of what someone flatteringly called ‘the Lovely Triad’.
I thought I’d left them all behind – Belinda, Melinda, Cassandra – but they all pop up from time to time. Melinda is the poet, after all; and Cassandra, the gloomy prophetess, the brain-the-size-of-a-planet whom no one listens to, but who still gets excited over the flash of intellectual connection; and sad Belinda sitting in chaos with her permanently aching heart. I still need to find a way to reconcile them.