4. W.I.H.E. Festival: Re-Member - Matthew Nash - Plumpton, England

 Remembering How to Heal

When the sculptor found her, she was sick. She just sat and stared blankly out at the hill, and it felt as if she had been through much trauma. She wore thick, stuffy, drab clothing, she was in mourning. The bad spirits swirled around her; the dense pines of grief and neglect surrounded her and encroached on her, keeping her always in the darkness.  

The sculptor immediately wanted to help her. The sculptor saw a faint glimmer of hope in her eyes and knew that she could be revived. 

She was dirty and cold, so we took her in, washed her and cared for her. We brought her healing honey wine and pure living water for her malaise. 

Her condition improved a little, but something was still stuck. She needed more movement. There was only one thing for it. The sculptor called the vicar. The vicar rode in like a cowboy as if coming to help a wounded cow, and yet riding on a breeze of beauty. He helped her to open her eyes to see life anew, to allow the sun and the wind into her heart again. As she did so, she started to breathe more deeply once again and was healing. She felt lighter, as if she had been given a new lease of life.

When she had learnt to open her eyes, to see properly again and to wash her own face, word spread of her situation. A white wizard came to visit, bringing his spells and charms. And she saw that they were good spells, so she started to believe in magic once again. As she opened her soul to the flow of life, she welcomed many animals to her side – owls and bats, frogs and cats, who all brought their own magic to her witchy garden. 

Occasionally, she was still haunted by her former nightmares. The horns would blare, and the hell hounds would pour through her dreams like a torrential river, scaring away the cats and snapping at the chickens, and breaking down any boundary in their path. But soon, they would be gone, calm would be restored, and eventually they faded into memory and stopped haunting her. 

By now, she knew she needed some more colour. A new wardrobe! She wasn’t even sure what colours she liked, or how to decide. One day, she found a little bottle in the fridge with the label ‘Drink Me’, and after accepting the invitation and imbibing a drop of the magical fluid, she knew immediately what colour she liked best – Lilac! Of course, it should have been obvious, the clue was in her name all along. So she went out and got herself a new lilac dress, and tried it on in the bathroom.

It was around the time that she had gotten the new dress – (I don’t recall the chronology exactly, as you know, Time and Memory are slippery customers) – that she started to attract more attention from men. The gardener started to visit more regularly and started living with her. At first, he had arrived in a silver spaceship, which was so shiny and alien looking, that she wasn’t sure about him, and didn’t really believe that he was a gardener at all. What a strange vehicle for a gardener! But once he had started living with her awhile, the gardener realised he didn’t need the spaceship and, so as to avoid the curious glances from the neighbours, he decommissioned it and bought a little blue van instead. 

He also tried to fix up her leaky shed, which was when he realised why he was a gardener and not a builder. Also, it seemed that the shed was full of dreams, and the patchy roof and the holes in it somehow helped the dreams to leak out and escape into the garden. They enchanted the gardener, who dreamed fleetingly that he had a perfectly muscular torso – an idealised Hellenic form – until he realised that it was just an illusory ego trip, and his form was made of plaster of Paris. 

The sculptor knew that she needed some pets, and so brought her two cats who love to play in her garden. It didn’t take long for one of them to find a wild, surly boyfriend, who looked like the type who didn’t wash much and was into heavy metal and motorcycles. Within no time at all, five children were born. Since he was an absent father and the family home was now so busy, they all left home early to live with friends from afar or go to study.

The gardener, meanwhile, had realised that she of the lilac dress needed some complementary colours. She needed more brightness, so he brought her yellow flowers for the garden, forsythia, and eventually a shiny new yellow van. She also started to make friends with the new neighbours, and that  turned out very well indeed, since the neighbour was so warm and welcoming.  

Not so long after the gardener arrived, another man started to show an interest in her, an enigmatic gentleman herbalist. The gardener was maybe a little concerned, and did not want to be outdone, but soon realised that the herbalist was not a threat, and they developed a friendship. The herbalist’s main gift was Honesty, which bore more shades of lilac flowers. Soon, the herbalist wandered on his way to other realms, and the horse whisperer came to stay with her awhile. 

The sculptor, the gardener and the horse whisperer wanted to help her be even more comfortable, and since she had always liked to take a crap at the bottom of the garden, they built her an outhouse amongst the trees. She loved watching the birds, it made her so happy. 

Everything seem rosy, but, as is so often the case, it is just before the bumps in the road that things seem to be going most smoothly. 

There was un unfortunate incident where the gardener accidentally brought a dragon home for the weekend, but at that, she put her foot down, and the sculptor and the horse whisperer had to chase it away. Once this was done, the horse whisperer decided it was time for her to ride onwards to a new calling. 

She was so much healthier and stronger now, almost unrecognisable from how the sculptor had first found her. 

However, there was some shit that she hadn’t fully dealt with. it turned out that the outhouse was encroaching on the neighbour’s land, and the smell of it came back to bite her. The neighbour was haughty and unpleasant and couldn’t resolve the feeling of being offended. This led to some bitterness, and so it seemed that it was again time for change, time for movement, for another transformation. 

Now that she is back to good health, who knows where she will go next? It has taken several years and a lot of interventions for her to come back to good health. The gardener and the sculptor will wend their way but will be keeping an eye on her from a distance to make sure she is being properly looked after!