Dear Gareth
In the course of two and a half years l have got to know you well enough to understand what your life is all about. Your story and its ramifications, trials, terrors, tribulations, temptations, truths and untruths told so searingly honestly, has been a veritable education to me, who thought l had one.
It is a tale of profit and loss, courage and endurance such as l have not encountered in all literature.
Having covered most of the journals there are still many questions l want to ask, but you must be so tired of them by now that l must ask them after my work is almost done.
It is a modern story of gathering and scattering according to the seasons as recorded in Ecclesiastes.
Most impressive is the underlying faith you have, despite the hostile environment regarding that.
I hope l live long enough to complete this so that justice to your cause can be done.
The journals map the route you have taken through family, friendships, education, army, profession, business, life experience, need, compensation, fortunes gained and lost, freedom won and lost, and existential angst, trauma and pain in the very core of your being. At this point you are surrounded by positive people all working in your cause. These appear as bright stars in a darkening universe, with Gavin, Carlos, Nick, Kim and Yianni, Kim S and Shireen prominent among them.
The brief trouble in Kim S's life caused by her son's erratic educational progress and flirtation with harmful substances occasioned intense night prayers in sleep and out of sleep from me. They saw a psycholgist today.
Then Shireen's trauma that night has similarly brought about night prayers through broken sleep and quiet awakenings.
My own mother, an imperious lady with whom l had a strained and difficult relationship, would say l can't live people's lives for them.
True, but one of my characteristics is empathy.
I suppose it is this feature l could use to train emotional casualties and social misfits at school through drama the rapy. But now all that is gone, and here l am still doing what l did all those years ago. Healing through story telling.
Some folk, like the two ladies recently introduced, are capable of great and vivid articulation. This is what becomes so clear to me - all possess a strong presence, and an incisive style of relationship and recording of their stories so vividly that l am in awe of such reality, and what l must learn still. There can be no substitute for real life when it comes to writing.
You have it, l have it, they have it.
All as individual as a fingerprint and as universal as a galaxy of stars.
You will know then, there is not a page in your collected writings that does not affect a visceral response in the reader. Because your experience is so real it must reach a wider readership. I am only a courier.
TS Eliot, one of my favourite poets, says in Little Giddings, something to the effect that, after all we have experienced we arrive at the place where we began, and know it for the first time.
This is indeed what has happened to me. I just hope l don't run around in circles like a marble in a revolving cup.
Yours, as always, in the cause of free spirits
AXEL B
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