Some time ago I wrote about the song that helped me through a very difficult patch. That song was "Light a candle in the darkness". I had heard it at the Morrinsville Intermediate School end of year prize giving service. The other song that stayed with me that morning was "Tumbling tumbleweeds".
Last night I heard that a distant relative had died. Her son had, only recently, described himself to me as "a tumbleweed", someone "nebulous and insubstantial", but using these descriptors in a positive, air-borne kind of way. That positive interpretation of the words so often used as negatives fits for me, as I have always been fascinated by tumbleweeds, and loved to see them dancing along the sand dunes at Mahia.
This morning I heard that the choir mistress has died. She was also my friend and my choir mistress many years later. I was not surprised at the news, but I was a little sad. I thought of those two songs, and I wondered what the tumbleweed link was.
Robyn was a strong, positive, assertive and at times controversial woman. Many choir practices were a little fraught. The results, however, were always wonderful. She also taught very well. I could tell which of my students of English had been in her class. Grammar, correctness, there were no half measures with Robyn. I am sure many a student quivered in her class until they recognised her warmth under the strictness. By the time they got to me at the next school they had learned their lessons well.
In church she was a forbidding figure, as well as a wonderful one as her voice filled the chapel. She also used her voice to question the church administrators and congregation when she thought it was necessary. Listening to her gave me the confidence to do the same. She will be remembered by some as challenging, perhaps even "bossy".
I prefer to remember the warm, intelligent, witty Robyn with a deliciously wicked laugh, the painter who was too shy to exhibit, the woman who set incredibly high standards for herself. I remember trying to get her to re-interpret a scene rather than reproduce the photograph. She wanted to know how to get the colours exactly right. She won, of course. I taught her how to mix exactly what she wanted.
My tumbleweed friend challenges me with questions, lets my brain wander and shows me that there is nothing certain, all can be an illusion, all can be interpreted and reinterpreted in many different ways. Robyn, if she heard those conversations, would link the ideas back to the Bible and speak with absolute certainty.
We need tumbleweeds to float on by, giving us something nebulous and insubstantial to consider, to challenge our idea of gravity, to help us see things from the air; a different perspective. And we need rocks, solid decisive people who are well grounded, are great support, and teach us the importance of detail.
I am very lucky to have met rocks and tumbling tumbleweeds along the unformed path.
Dear Robyn,
Thankyou for being a rock. And most of all (yes, I began the sentence with "And" for emphasis), thankyou for the music that fills my soul.
Somewhere, I know, the Halleluia chorus has just become much stronger.
Love,
Kay
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