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Thank you for visiting arifahhardy.com. This website is primarily to display the work of Sofia Hardy who is an Artist and Writer, and our companion site farlanhardy.net is a music site where you can hear some of the beautiful songs written and sung by my husband Farlan. Although I have also painted and written creatively in my time, I now focus my efforts on caretaking the work of Farlan and Sofia and to that end I thought it would be appropriate to write a little piece about myself. It turned out much larger than I expected and will be added to in time. It's a brief description of my early life in Glasgow, how I met Farlan and Sofia, and details some of my experiences as a young adult, leaving home, leaving Glasgow, finding out who I was and what the rest of the world had to offer - quite a lot, as it happened! Most of Sofia's paintings are for sale, so you can buy paintings from this site or you can commission Sofia to do a painting specially for you, and at Farlan's site you can purchase a CD of his music. Everything is home produced, and as both Farlan and Sofia have spent a lifetime dedicated to their art their work also has great individuality and originality. I hope you will find something that you enjoy here, and if you would like to write to me about anything that you see on these sites I would be very happy to hear from you. Arifah Hardy Updates We'll be a bit longer on the book than we originally thought (see below) It's being edited at the moment. I'll keep you updated. Meanwhile you can have alook at what I've been doing artwise. I ran an art class for Subud Perth - see and read about it here 31 October 2009 Read the first chapter of Sofia's novel "Stonebreaker" below. Available to purchase soon. 
STONEBREAKER
chapter one
There was a young man, and he had lost his way. He was a student, and, if you had asked him, he would have said he was quite happy. As he was so young, he had no idea of his real situation in life, he looked at everything he saw without understanding, and without recognition. And he thought he was happy. One day, his professor asked him to go to a little place called Shawlee, to look at the relics that might be there, as the military were about to take the place. So the young man, who's name was Tom, went down to Shawlee, but when he got there, he found he did not know his road, there was nothing to be seen, just a dark forest. His life, to him, seemed so ordinary. He had grown out of fairies when he was five, he had grown out of unicorns when he was eight; he had grown out of Father Christmas when he was eleven. He had grown out of looking for dark forests, in which might be found adventure, when he was thirteen. He had studied hard, and he knew what the world was; his teachers had told him, his books had told him. It was September, but the sun was shining as hard as if it was late august, and the trees had not even begun to turn golden at the edges of their leaves; the sky was blue and the day was warm. "It might just as well be full summer, there is no hint of autumn in the air yet," He thought to himself, smiling at the day, because he liked the summer; being young, he felt an affinity with it, and he put up with the winter as the old man's season. The weather had been dry, there had been no rain, and the small country roads were white with dust. There were two roads, both small roads, and he did not know which one he should take. There was no sign of any kind, and he did not know the district, so he was rather put out, because he had expected houses, a pub at least, some sign of habitation; but all there was to be seen were dusty roads, and the wire fence, and behind the fence, the dark trees. "It must be forestry land," He thought. He ran his fingers through his hair, and he sat down on a fallen log that lay beside the road to look at his map. Looking over his shoulder, behind him, he could see the road which he had walked, the road from the public highway. It had been a long walk, and now he was here, and there was nothing. Behind him, more promising than the trees, there were fields, sleeping under the sun, and in the distance he thought he could see a farmhouse; but the map refused to tell him he was wrong. His path, is seemed, led forward. "I should have checked the way before I came," He thought. Reluctantly he ducked under the wire fence and he made his way onto the trees. He was nervous that he might be on private land, and it was all so inauspicious; the trees were so dark, and now it seemed there was a brooding air on the place; and, once he had walked a few steps, with the dark trees all around him, he felt there was not enough air to breath, the trees pressed him so closely. "I do not want to be here," He said. "I do not like it here, and it promises nothing, only more dark trees, and I may get completely lost." He was cheered by the thought that he could easily turn, and tell the professor he could find nothing; the old guide books had it wrong, there never had been a hamlet at Shawlee, there never had been a church; that ancient holy monk they called Daniel had never lived there, and a healing brook had never run its path, and pilgrims had never walked this road. Or if there ever had been all of this, it was all too long ago, and nobody remembered any of it, and now the trees were here, so it did not matter anyway; it was all forgotten, and it was all lost. "If this is Shawlee," Said Tom out loud, "The military can take it over tomorrow, if they wish, with my blessing." He hesitated. In such hesitations as this our lives are formed; in such hesitations are our roads carved out, before us, so that we find there is only one road for us to walk , and all the choices have been made. "I could tell him I scouted about," Thought Tom. "I could tell him I walked all through the trees, and there was nothing." But then he scented something, and it was green, and it was like something fresh and new, something astringent, and it reminded him he had already walked a long way under the hot sun; and he was very thirsty. "This is madness," He thought. "I should go back up the road, and find the farmhouse, and knock, and ask for a drink of water; then I should trudge all the way back to the bus, and get myself home." He stayed, because he suddenly felt sad. For some obscure reason, he was thinking of his grandmother, and she had passed away from the earth recently. A few years earlier, and he would have been crippled by the knowledge; and still he found it hard to understand that she was gone; but the blow of her loss had been softened by the fact that he was away, he was out on his own, he was grown, and he was strong. He was not there when she went, had not even known she was ill. She was the kind to keep such things to herself, and any way her illness had been short. There had been two letters, and they came in the same post; they came from his elder sister, Barbara, the first saying grandmother was ill, and the other saying grandmother was dead. Just that, for Barbara had not liked grandmother Frost. So it had been a shock, particularly that Barbara had been the bearer of the news; and Tom had felt keenly that Barbara should not have been the one to tell him; even through the short lines of her letter, he had suspected a kind of gloating in it, as if Barbara had said, there, you see! Didn't I always tell you she would come to no good. "She didn't come to no good," Thought Tom. "She came to death, and that is different, and she was a good and kind woman to me when no one else was kind, and I loved her, and she made me laugh." "I'll walk on a bit," He thought. "I"d better look around, for any trace of the hamlet of the church, if I can find it, in all these trees; and who knows, I might find a river or something, where I might take a drink." He walked on, the trees were thick and it all seemed impossible. He was dispirited, and found he was thinking of his grandmother more and more. "It is as if just being alone is enough to make me realise I miss her," He thought. He stood still. The trees pressed close, almost like people, he thought, a grim tribe, clothed in dark green. They seemed to hustle him, to poke at him as if he had come upon a hostile mob who particularly disliked him, Tom Frost, and had waited for a long time to get him alone, and to get their own back on him. He felt beleaguered, and oddly superstitious. "This is ridiculous," he thought. "I am Tom Frost, I am a very promising student at the university, I got great exam results, I have a very promising road before me; money, respect, a career that will bring me everything; all the good things of life, and in time, no doubt, a wife and children; and together we will live in a fine house, and it will be a life that many would envy, for we will want for nothing, but have the best that is offered. This is the life I have, this will be my life." But it was as if, to the trees, it meant nothing. As if he was nothing, and the trees poked at him with a repellent curiosity, as if Tom Frost and his achievements meant less than nothing to them; so they scratched him with branches that were like the fingers of inquisitorial and bitter old woman, and they prodded him as if they asked what are you, and why do you think you can come here, into this, our domain. Irritated with himself, and perhaps a little afraid, for it was dark inside these woods, so dark that it was difficult to imagine the glories of the summer day beyond the trees; he pushed forward, and, in an instant, he found himself in a wide and a spacious clearing, and the evergreens were behind him; here, there were large and lofty oaks, ash, holly, and even, sparkling in the muted rays of sunlight, he could see birch, the silver trunks gleaming as if they were made of true silver, and not wood bark. "Why, it's beautiful," He thought, incoherently, because he was so surprised; he had never really been interested in the joys of nature. Or never until now; he had grown up in a straggling town where countryside and development had mixed unhappily, to the detriment of both. There had been the scrubby field where he used to play as a child, and the little river he would cross on the bus getting to school; the hill behind the small council estate where his grandmother lived, where he had flown a kite as a child; there had been trees, fighting without spirit beside his school, and there had been the tight little front gardens in the better area where his sister lived. A flat, tamed, uninspiring landscape it had been, and of course there had been trips but somehow, nowhere had ever caught his eye. If someone had rhapsodised over the clematis, or the present magnolias of the season, he would have looked around at the same magnolias and said, yes, they are alright, I suppose. "I don't think I've ever really seen nature before," He thought, and then he felt guilty, because here he was, twenty years old, and he should have known this was waiting for him somewhere, in the wide world, but he had not known. "I have been ignorant," He thought. as a leaf detached itself from its tree and he watched its curling fall. The woods were lush and the scent of the autumn that would come was in the air, and it was strange, almost like entering a different season. "It seems the trees know," he thought. "The trees know the winter is coming, even while I still thought it was summer; I think I was so insensitive I thought it would be summer for always." He was quite enchanted, when he had never been enchanted before. He walked forward, across the deep green sward; he heard a songbird, and before him there appeared a thrush, and it came quite close, so close that he did not move until it flew away. "I am having the best afternoon," He thought. Then he was disturbed, because he would so have liked to have gone home, and run up the stair with a cheery hullo, where are you? And to have found someone, and to have shared all of it with them, and to have brought them here with him, another day, perhaps in the winter when the snow would have been a graceful presence in the forest. But there was no one like that, and it was surprising to him, he did not think he had ever felt so alone before. There was no one who would have cared about this place, no one he could have brought back, if he told the others in the house he shared about it they would just have looked at him politely, and waited for him to finish while they talked about their girlfriends, or the work for the university, or their financial difficulties. There was no one, not his professor, not any of those he called friend. No one could have shared this moment with him, no one would have cared that he, Tom Frost, had been touched to his soul. The grass was deep and in the grass there were blue shadows, as if the grass knew and welcomed the coming of the night. "It is all so lost," He thought. "We are not far from the road, but it is as if no one comes here." So he walked on until he found a little steam; and it spoke, as it made its way over its stones, as if it was some busy silver backed creature on its journey through the forest, talking to itself as if it had been a man alone in the streets, a man poor, alone, but happy because he was also an honourable man, who had held and kept all his promises, and who hoped for better times to come. "The stream is old," He thought, and he was amazed at how fiery was its shining threads of silver as it ran, molten, between the grass and the wild flowers at its edge. Stooping down, he said to himself, "Well now, I think I have found something." Even the air above the steam was refreshing as if to drink that air would have been a relief, from his long walk, and from the sun. It was not that he did not want to go back, he had everything waiting for him when he went back, the wonderful life that welcomed him like a smiling woman wearing a garland of flowers around her hair, his exams, all of it, but there was something here he would have liked to keep for a while, if he could; and now he thought he had found an excuse. A link, perhaps, from his real life, as he thought of it, and this magical and unexpected afternoon, for there, at the edge of the little stream, was a stone, and once it had been shaped by man, and there was even a part of an inscription on it, and a carving, gone all soft, shivering, moulded by the molten stream. Gently he took hold of it; the water was so cold it was like touching the very essence of shadow itself. The stone would not move; and he began to think that once it might have been part of a wall. "I believe this is it," He thought, excitedly. "I think I have found the holy well they say was here, in the old books." When he stopped struggling with the stone, he knelt, and he cupped his hands and drank draught after draught of water. "I am not sure if you are supposed to do this," He thought, as he drank. "After all, I am no country boy." But the water was amazing; so cold he began to think it had come all the way from the ice cap, and so refreshing he thought he had never drank, had never tasted, before this moment. He sat back on his heels, looking about him. "It seems I have a feeling for nature I never knew about," He thought; and he began to consider joining a walking club, or, more ambitious, perhaps going into the hills of the west, where there was some good hiking, he had heard. "Perhaps I should get out into this kind of thing more often," He thought. "After all, for some time now my life has been about books and ideas, and it is time I looked at it from a different perspective." Walking on, he found a path. "I must not lose my way." He thought. The path was wavering, just a thin track that meandered through the trees; but, after about ten minutes, he found himself on a slope, and before him, between the trees, he saw the squat, short, unadorned tower of the early church. Excited, he hurried down the hill and towards the church. "This is it," he thought. "And it really is old!" He stood in front of it's door. It was a terribly unassuming place, the grey stone whitened by exposure to the long years it had stood there; it was so old, the rock of it’s walls looked like a part of the landscape. There was nothing beautiful, or special about it. It was quite small, and it could never have held much of a congregation. Odd then, he thought, walking around to the side, that there was a side chapel, it looked like an afterthought; built on, only the stone was as weathered as if it had been here from the beginning. Walking back to the door, he studied it; the wood was very thick and ancient. Around the door there was nothing, no carving, no embellishment of any kind. It was just a door in a very old wall. Amazing, he thought, how the old time whitened stone carried the look of winter about it. "It must have been that long walk in the sun," He thought, ruefully. "It has made me dizzy and fanciful, but now, with my back to the forest, it seems impossible to think that behind me there is any road, and any summer day, for, looking at the stone of the walls, I think only of winter, and cold places, and snow on the desolate stone of grim faraway mountains. Of frost, and of icicles hanging from this old roof.” It was not a ruin though; so out of the way, and he could not imagine that anybody cared about it but there was glass in the small windows, which watched him like white robed monks who had kept a vow of silence, who watched him like chess pieces, and hoped, while they watched, that he would not disturb them. The wood of the door was dark and it was roughhewn, but polished, too, as if thousands of hands had knocked, seeking entrance. He touched the door, caressing its smoothed out inconsistencies, and to his surprise it opened with never a whisper, not a squeak; it fell open to his touch as if it had been pulled back by an unseen hand. From out of the empty open dark that it offered him there came a fragrance, subtle, so shallow that as soon as he sensed it, it was gone. "What was it?" He wondered. "Roses?" No, too flowery. But it was sweet, like wild flowers, and it had about it a scent like fires, it made him think of ragged bygone gypsies with their vagrant fires in the evening, by the hedgerows; but it was bitter too, at its heart, and somewhere behind it there was frost, and snow, and high, forbidding mountains. Walking into the church, he found that the air was not fusty or damp, the walls did not reek of decay, of old things and of cold stone; of ancient stale incense and prayers which had discoloured the old walls but no, there was nothing like that, just very faint, that fragrance again, and perhaps a feeling of novelty that should not have been there; as if he walked into a new house, all painted and spruce, a house that had as yet no memories except the piny scent of the forests from which its floors had been recently hewn. A sense of emptiness, and intrigued, he walked forward. There was nothing, of course. He knew the church had been no church for a very long time, and nobody cared; it was of absolutely no importance, except that it was so old, nobody knew quite how old. It was already here when they first made records. Just the white walls, no altar, and no crucifix with its image of a tortured and a supplicating god. Nothing; not a bench, or a pulpit, or even a baptism font. "There could not always have been nothing," He thought, with a learned dissatisfaction. "Once, there must have been something, paint on the walls, a cross, something." But the inner walls of the church gazed back at him with their mild stone eyes, and told him nothing.
On walking forward, there was the entrance to the side chapel, such a discrepancy, in this little out of the way place, and so odd, and unnecessary. In the side chapel there was something under the window. There were trees outside the window, they had come too close to the church, and the leaves themselves pressed green up against the glass and gave the air an aquarium, surreal quality, as if Tom was walking in a dream, glass green; as if, should he turn his head, he would see water weed drifting by, and perhaps a few little striped fishes. The leaves were like a face, unformed, but altogether curious, prying, looking for entrance, as if the forest itself was curious and wanted to come in. But under the window, there was something that looked in that unhallowed light like a stone bench, but on it, there was something lying, and Tom felt the inward shock that he might feel when he discovered that he was not alone, when he had been absolutely sure he was alone. "And it's funny," He thought. "For some time now, since I came past the evergreens, I have felt alone, but so secure." He stood, and looked, through the gloomy, leaf shadowed air. Was it a tramp, perhaps, that had walked into this open building, or a vagrant, or worse still, a prisoner on the run from justice? He did not know, and he did not know why he thought these things; only that he felt very shaken, suddenly, because he had been alone, and he had felt safe in this beautiful forest, and now he did not feel safe any more, he felt nervous. It could be just a bundle of old clothes, he thought. Whatever it was, on it's stone couch under the window, it lay very still. Too still he thought, and he nerved himself to go forward, and there it was, no tramp or bundle of old clothes. It was a statue, of a figure lying down, from a few feet away he had the perspective all wrong and the bench was much wider than he thought; it was a stone bed, and on it lay a sleeping figure, all white, under the shadows of the window. "But it's recent,” He thought, disappointed; because this was no ancient artefact. The young man so precipitously emerging out of the gloomy shadow was most exquisitely made. So perfect, that each hair and fingernail were displayed; so perfect, that his stone eyelids seemed closed on stone dreams, and as the sun moved across the invisible sky, so the shadow changed, and so the dreams seemed to chase across the stone of his forehead, lending him expressions, as though cold, and stone white as he was, he thought and felt and dreamed; and hoped, and nearly, he smiled. "I wonder who he was," Thought Tom, leaning forward to look into that face that was so thoroughly asleep, in the stone. "He looks to be about my age, even, perhaps, a year or so younger." There was nothing to say who he was. The white stone of the figure lay on a white stone couch, and he slept, easy in his sleep, one hand under his head, one reaching out, over the edge of the stone couch. There was a pillow, in the stone, but no decoration; there was no clue in his clothing, which while it had no zip or button or fastening, might have been such as Tom himself would wear; or might have been something an ancient celt might wear. His hair was neither short nor long, and he had no beard. "Somebody's son," Thought Tom. "It's very sad, somebody must have cared about him deeply for this monument to have been made." But the face slept on, and gave up none of its secrets to Tom Frost, who was moved by compassion; because he felt sure that, while this was a mystery, that such a plethora of magnificent detail should be lost in so deep a forest, it must have been a sad mystery indeed, for he could think no other than that this was a burial, and a memorial, and a tomb; and under the couch of this beautiful stone there lay cold white bones, and the young man in the stone, he was over, he was gone, except for the illusion the artists wonderful skill had made of the stone. "I have never before seen work so detailed," Tom thought. He rose, and moved away; but he reached out with his left hand before he turned to leave the church, and he touched the foot that lay in its stone repose. It was an instant, it was a choice. Tom felt a sense of sadness for the young man and he reached out as if he could share some of the warmth of his own living humanity with the still, carved figure; it was a touch, no more, like a butterfly landing on a sleeping face; it was nothing; there was the moment when Tom was all of himself, complete, and he had not touched the naked stone foot, and then there was the moment when the searing pain shot agonizingly up his left arm and through his shoulder and to his heart, he was sure it reached his heart. All he could think of was, "Cold, it is as cold as fire!" And he looked around for a moment, helplessly, because all he could think was there had been some viper concealed in the carving that circled the leg, imitative of wrinkled cloth; as if he expected to see, in all the snowscape of that sleeping figure, a silver serpent with its fangs bared. But there was nothing, except the pain which was unbelievable; it was his whole arm, it was his chest, and his left arm hung loosely by his side, and he held his chest with his right hand, and he thought he screamed but he could not hear his own voice. His heart felt cold, and it burned. He burned; and in that burning there was the most exquisite of pain.
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