Linden

Onward, onward, but where are we going?

I have a bicycle now. It's pink and suited to an eleven year old girl, so that fits me perfectly. I've taken to racing Thistle down the mile-long drive and back. She flies. I swear she goes forty miles an hour, as fast as her little legs will carry her, determined not to be outdone by the evil wheels. Whizzing about on bikes is good for the soul. I would imagine similar exhilaration may come from hula-hooping or bouncing on a trampoline. A friend of mine put on a pair of old-fashioned roller skates, as made popular by Melanie in 1972, and skated around her neighborhood in Sherman Oaks, California, before anyone but the birds were awake. It's this kind of rebellion that we need, don't you think?

Dettol is my new best friend. I love its smell. I feel put to shame by my friend Vivien who wanders around the house each day in a pinny, with her bucket and mop and feather duster and makes her house spic and span. She pointed out when she was last here (in the kindest possible way) that my windows were awfully dirty. I hadn't noticed. I have cleaning shame. I've always been the one with the lovely housekeeper (it's really not unusual for working women to have lovely housekeepers or cleaning ladies in Los Angeles, and not as elitist and bougie as it seems). Before I moved here I don't think I had ever mopped my own floor. And now I love the smell of Dettol in the morning.

Speaking of Robert Duvall, Eleanor Coppola's diary from the making of Apocalypse Now, is well worth the read. Simply written, yet profound, it explores the relationship between a man and a wife when the man is one of the most powerful filmmakers in Hollywood, and how she somehow addresses that balance, as an artist and a mother. It's marvelously descriptive and very insightful.

I'm almost embarrassed to write this, as I'm sure most of my readers (all three of you) will think that I've lost my marbles after that last post about The Shift, but that night I dreamed the most wonderful dream. The kind of dream that you wake up from feeling refreshed and ready and changed and calm and soothed. It was a balm of a dream, a tsunami of a dream. I realized that every single person in it was there to show me something; they were showing me a new way. It was very simple, really, as I walked through a market square (has to be some Bowie allusion there) arm in arm in a friendly way with a young man who took me to a room where the people were learning how to elevate. There were some ropes, but just as helpful props, rather like a yoga class. A few young women were suspended from the air, as if in flight, their arms moving gently like women, as delicate as ballet dancers. But I understood that I didn't need the ropes. All I needed was to choose to fly, to choose to step into the sky and into a higher place, a higher consciousness, and there it was waiting. Once I walked into the sky, it was easy, I whooshed from place to place with other smiling souls, and realized, really quite profoundly that every single one of us is connected to everyone else, and that we aren't put on this earth, we choose to be here, and our job, once we are here is to try to elevate everyone else, to love, to be kind, and to lift each other to a higher consciousness.

Are you still with me?
If so, I hope you're safe.
Sending you love from the birds of Nettlebed; the blackbirds on the lawn, the swallows in the stables, and the goldfinches darting in and out of the linden tree at the bottom of the garden.