Miserere

This is more about healing, which is the thing I'm thinking about most. It's understandable that this won't be for everyone. So feel free to swipe.

It's not quite light outside but I can hear the first birds on my left, through the window, despite Ola Gjeilo playing with great fervor next to me. Music is massively important first thing in the morning.There is a fragility to waking now. I want to not hold on too hard, but to save the mood, the delicious spaciousness of coming out of the dream state. Especially waking on a Sunday without a a lot of to do's already whirling around in one's head. I lay for a few minutes and do my checklist: puppy sleeping - check, Thistle snoring - check, Charlie breathing beside me, do I need any more sleep? I don't think so. Has the heaviness of yesterday lifted? I think it might have. Breathe? Oh yes, must breathe. But which breath? The double one. The one where you do a deep breath in and then another short sharp deep one at the top. I do this a few times for good measure. I know the breath will bring me back to equilibrium. I whisper "would you like some tea?" to C. I quietly pick up the little whippet puppy from his crate and we wander downstairs.. All Is Well. The puppy goes out, pees, he knows the drill now. I've left the heat on in the kitchen and the wooden floor is warm on my bare feet as I make the tea.

And yet, it might not have been so. Yesterday was not like this. Exhausted (a word I use all too frequently now) from being in the city, around a lot of people, shadowing as I do in my job. We are half people. We exist to make sure other people are okay, that their artistic visions are understood, that their worlds are illuminated for other people to see. These are good and lovely and talented people, and I have done this job for many years now, more than forty years, and the job is to uphold, support, enable and defend another's creativity. Perhaps it's the electromagnetic activity in the heavens, the solar flares, the aurora borealis, but my shadow job didn't feel like such a good idea. Somehow my body was done with the stuckness, tired of holding everything in, exhausted from being in a Medieval court, from playing the Fool, from the petty humiliations and unspoken slights and didn't really want to play the game any longer.  (I can hear the crows getting up, greeting each other, chatting, gathering around the oak now. We have hundreds of crows; a well-organized bunch). Despite good and kind people, and meaningful subjects, there was a pushing through, an extended effort, that you know means you're not in alignment.

As my father said to me twenty years ago when I first struggled with my job and wondering if it was indeed what I was meant to be doing, "you are lucky to have a job like this and to be successful at it." Yes I am. 

My depletion was so intent yesterday that I wanted to roll up in a ball like a pill bug, turn off my crazy mind, cover myself in a duvet and shut down. Maybe there could be plug in stations for human beings? Especially now everyone's getting rid of their Teslas. Rock up, connect and sleep for an hour or two while your body and mind and soul is replenished with magic vitamins, nourishing fluids and much-needed dopamine. Here's your little sleep box with its fluffy duvet, here are your headphones playing 432hz, here's your eye mask with just a little bit of rose-scented aromatherapy on it, and here are two smooth clear quartz crystals for your hands. Here is your prayer. Here is peace and tranquility. (Here are the two pink/white dahlias on your desk put there by your beloved; here is your cup of tea that he makes you every morning; here is the dog that sleeps at your feet warming your toes; here is the morning light where you can glimpse the optimism of the sun. Here is the morning when you feel strong and calm and loved.)

My exhaustion was so great that I cancelled my good friends who were coming to dinner. I love to cook I said. I do. I love the rituals of the dinner party. The making the house pretty, the hunting for flowers, laying the table, choosing what to make. Spreading books on the kitchen table, connecting again with the house, remembering that this is how we love, this is how we show people we care. But I had nothing to show and nothing to give. And because I am married to a beautiful saint of a man, he made salmon and vegetables and it was delicious, and I went to bed early with my copy of On Pilgrimage by Jennifer Lash. Actually I got into a hot bath and lay there reading and willing myself not to sleep, and watching the puppy chewing on the bath mat. It was the first time in quite a long time that I thought, ah, a glass of pinot noir might go down well now, in the bath, with my book. A perfect glass of reset. It was a bleak day. I wondered if I might be slipping into madness. Nothing really seemed to work properly. My house isn't in order, it's broken, I said to C. I think he thought I was referring to where we live. I wasn't. It's funny how dramatic one can sound when distressed.

So here's the elephant in the room (the baby hippo in the mud): I am actually one of those trite people that has self-diagnosed with ADHD. And boy, was it a long time coming. I am so proud of myself for not having done it years ago when it was really popular and all the cool kids were doing it.  But you know, fifteen years ago when I had a high schooler and a kid about to go to college, their diagnoses seemed more compelling, and important I suppose. The focus was on them. boom boom. And my husband was obviously neuro-divergent, as he had obvious physical signs - hyperactivity (which was both massively inspiring and exhausting to be around, total focus on new hobbies including all the equipment, an inability to sit still at all). Our family was loving and loud and chaotic, in the best ways. So with all this activity and furor (it's not quite the seven fishes episode of  The Bear, but you get my flow) and madness, it was (looking back) easier for me to sit quietly and observe. Or at least play the anchor in some way. I now know that this is called masking. Masking. Not just for those on the autism spectrum. My hyperactivity is in my head, not my body. (Although I did get frowny looks when I ran down the corridors in my heels when I was an executive at Fox.) How do you know, indeed, that the messy soup of thought that is your brain isn't the same as everyone else? How do you know that the way you're experiencing the world isn't the way everyone else is experiencing it? You don't. We didn't talk about these things. My time blindness was just laziness or something. My inability to leave the house, or go to a meeting I didn't want to go to? She's a bit crazy.  My desperate need for a glass of wine at 6pm to bring me back to a settled, calm state? Borderline alcoholism. My inability to face a crowd of people? Antisocial behaviour. My massive lack of focus while trying to write my thesis?  Too many drugs? Not being able to sparkle on command? No-one knew. I'd just hide on days like that. Fake illness. Feeling everything acutely, every single vibe in a room? I don't know. Growing up with a volatile father?

So rather like that joke about the nervous breakdown - I've waited patiently and now it's my turn - here I am, trite as hell, sitting with an idea that seems to fit all the weird behaviours of my life. I am not entirely alone. I've discussed it quite a lot with my therapist, and she concurs, or at least can see the thread that connects everything. And even said something like "that must have been a lot" and it made me cry. It's all been a lot, always, forever, since I can remember. And that's what I was told too. A lot. Too much. Or, in the immortal words of my matron, Miss Collier (who also had a broom named after her) "Bumble by name, Bumble by nature." A really lovely, positive thing to write in the book of a struggling, spotty, slightly fat thirteen year old. And you know what? Sitting with all of this, all the time, for the last few days: It feels like grief. It should be a revelation, and definitely things are shifting, but it sits like grief in my body, heavy and sludge-like, unmoving, stultifying. And the thing about grief is that it doesn't give your the opportunity to enjoy change, or the new season, the color of the leaves, sweater weather, because you're stuck in regret and the constant unfolding of the idea that you missed so much. Where is my summer day? Where is my ten minutes of swimming in the Aegean sea? Why didn't we barbecue the day the sun was out? Why do I even bother having summer clothes?

Yo-Yo Ma, man, he brings you back every time. Him and Bach, what a team.

Here's the word that goes through my head constantly: excuse. This revelation is an excuse for not being better, because being better, fixing yourself, is what life is about, right? Self-improvement. But here's a radical idea: what if you are perfect, as you are? What if all the weird little divergent nooks and crannies and rough edges and bizarre quirks are exactly what the universe needed, and every little crinkly line fits perfectly into the big jigsaw? What if the world needed something that was exactly the same shape as you? And that no-one else is even slightly the same as you. You are a note in the symphony, a note that no other instrument can play. (If you're finding this trite, you may not be my people, no offense or anything, but this is where I am and the simplicity of this idea is what is healing.)

And one more sweet thing. I met a young woman this week from Los Angeles, who was a light, a shiney light in the midst of it all, guileless, sweet, kind and good. And she shone so bright because there were no rough shadow edges. Every single emotion was true and direct and there was no guilt or shame attached to any of it. She was exactly as she was meant to be, in alignment, perfect, in her lane in the best possible way, so she brought shimmery illumination to everything that she came into contact with. My daughter in law is the same. It's not an English thing to be this way, or not in my experience. There is no shame, no guilt, there is just being.

Here is something beautiful for your Sunday morning. Allegri Miserere in the Sistine Chapel. Inspired by Conclave.

I do like a list. And here are a few things I would suggest if you're trying to overcome overwhelm:

• Nature. Get outside as soon as you can in the morning. Just having your feet on the grass will ground you, bring you back.
• Walk in the trees either on your own or silently. Touch and hug them. You can actually feel the energy, and it is good. Walk far enough that you suddenly forget you are walking.
• Water, either drunk or bathed in, is good for the soul. Some say water is the magic elixir (Masuro Emoto, for example, or author Elif Shafak There Are Rivers In The Sky)
• Sing or chant. Check out Krishna Das. If you'd like my healing mantras playlist, let me know and I'll send it to you.
• Breathe. I do 4-7-8 breath, or the double intake breath with a long exhale. Magic right here.

And one more thing that I love is this:

Greet everyone as if you love them. Try it. It's quite magical how the energy you give is the energy you receive. 

(Yesterday is gone.)

Love to you.

Thursday & rain & is it all too much

The lovely and smiley lady at the Whitchurch/Pangbourne toll bridge, who favors bright pink cashmere sweaters, and is always so put together at seven in the morning that she puts me to shame with my scrubbed face and pony tail and grubby jodphurs, told me on Monday that a nice gentleman had told her that this rain that we're having is going to last a month. I didn't believe her then, but here we are on Thursday and it's still going. The morning was one of those pink and optimistic ones where you actually for a moment glimpse who you are again. I remember taking Charlie's hand and saying something platitudinous like "I love it when the sun shines." This is what happens in England. A nation fixated on the weather. And because the weather is so completely and utterly crap most of the time, we are, most of the time, depressed and miserable and down in the mouth. Down in the mouth is such a wonderful expression because it describes not only the electronic speed limit signs that flash your speed at you with a smiley face or a glum face (and they're so effective you come sliding to a stop as if your headmistress is glaring at you), but it's also the face of the guy coming at you from the other direction when you're in traffic early in the morning on a grey day. Glum. I think that's the old-fashioned word for it. I tend to be jovial in traffic. I tend to smile and let people in and roll down the window to wave heartily when people let me in. Today, in fact, a man in a Lamborgini backed up under the railway bridge near Pangbourne High Street to let me through because there was a butcher's van in the way, and I felt somewhat triumphant. And it changed my view of men in Lambos, albeit it purple metalic ones (cars not men). This is the fundamental difference between the English and the Americans, though. Not the backing up of Lamborginis, of course, but the resting state. Americans have a resting optimism. The English, I'm afraid, have a resting liverishness. They are (I could say we are, but I choose not to, not today in the rain) a bit miserable, a bit full of shame, and a little down in the mouth. And I think it might have everything to do with the weather.

Stephen Fry who is very good on this stuff, draws the parallel between mental health and the weather. He doesn't say that mental health is affected by the weather but that it is like the weather, that even though there are clouds, one should remember that the blue skies are always there but hidden. He probably says it with a "hey-ho" too.

I would go one step further. I have noticed how different everyone is when the sun is out. How there is a general brightness and hilarity with the sunshine. How even the most grumpy of organs (Daily Mail, anyone) will give up their endless attack on the Labour government with a "Phew wot a scorcher" headline and a lovely picture of comely Samantha in her bikini in Primrose Hill.

I've been cheering myself up, somewhat childishly, by playing on repeat the clip of Keir Starmer calling for the return of the sausages in Gaza. It's very silly, I know, and it's a very serious issue, but I've been laughing so hard that I almost fell out of my chair. I can't help myself. It's the most English thing I've ever seen.

Yesterday, stuck between meetings at the elegant & welcoming Covent Garden Hotel in London I was witnessing (eavesdropping, let's be fair) a meeting between two English writer/producers who are responsible for a very successful show that did well on both sides of the Atlantic and an American executive and his cohort who started the conversation with "no-one needs to come to Hollywood anymore because everyone is in London" and then continued to blow smoke up the arses of the writers to such an astonishing degree that I wondered whether I should take notes for posterity (or posteriority). The man was so nimble, so silver-tongued and elegant in his flattery, that the Englishmen didn't really know what had hit them ("I don't suppose you've tried directing yet, have you? You really should." "Are you swamped with offers? You guys are such hot shit." "Man, this script is Fargo meets Shogun with shades of The Godfather. It's a masterpiece.") And soon they began to drop their English reserve and became comfortable with the warm, oozy feeling of being bathed in compliments. Their defences down, suddenly they behave completely out of character, sprawling in their chairs, their voices raised, and responding to the flagrant flattery like it's heroin. I felt a bit awkward. In situations like this I don't really know which team I'm on or who I'm rooting for. It's a little bit like when you're fourteen and you unwisely try to play your parent your favorite album. You just can't hear it through their ears without hating on it just a bit. I did this with Blondie's Parallel Lines after a dinner party my parents had with some of their best friends. David B, a lovely ex-arm man, picked up the sleeve and read the lyrics out loud in his aristocratic, rather mellifluous timbre "One way....or another... I'm going to get you, get you, get you...." You can imagine. Oy doyed as they say on Lawng Island.

In other news, what have we done? We're in puppy heaven (or hell). Pip is a sweet-natured-very good-boy, a little whippet. Charlie wakes up with him at three in the morning and takes him outside onto the lawn where they both pee. It's a male-bonding thing in a house full of women. I'm so grateful for this matey stuff, because it means I can sleep through. But omg, what have we done? We actually can't go out to dinner, or really do anything social together because of the puppy. For the next few months, we have to be hyper vigilant and hyper aware that every journey will involve a puppy cage. Everyone said to me, oh puppies are a lot of work. And I laughed at them. Ha ha ha, I thought. I can do this. I've had puppies. I'm a dog person. I know what I'm doing. No I don't. I've just managed to stop him gnawing on all of my favorite cookbooks, which I keep in the kitchen at dog bed height (the ones I like less or use less are on a bookshelf in the other room.)

It's been an insane few weeks. I've discovered that I'm one of those people that is super sensitive to the moon. I know, I know. Mock me now. But I am! I listen to Kirsty Gallagher and every day she says exactly how I'm feeling. I wake up intensely anxious and wonder what's happening to me. "Did we swap" I said to Charlie? "Are we in some weird Jamie Lee Curtis movie?" I'm the one who used to wake up with the massive burst of optimism, that would skip downstairs, breathe in the air and smile, and the bluebirds would fly down and land on my shoulder. What on earth happened? Has this happened to you? Have you been affected by the Mercury Chryon or whatever it's called? Have you felt like your head is exploding? 

And on top of this, I've chosen to migrate this blog to Substack, which is sooo scary and big and surrounded by Really Important Writers. I have complete and utter stage fright.  

We've emptied my mother's house. Well, a nice man called Hugo and his team did all the hard work and they couldn't have been more fantastic, but have you ever had to wade through reams of old photos, old books, childhood memorabilia, clothes, furniture, bedding, favorite Christmas decorations and be the executioner? Keep/Charity/Chuck. It's hellish. And even if you don't feel it at the time, there is an emotional toll that's hard to shake. Old scrapbooks, and Dawn Palethorpes's My Horses & I, my mother's battered French copy of "Le Petit Prince" and Norwegian sweaters, old albums, tablecloths from my grandmother, my father's old cufflinks, some of them made of coral from the far east, letters (oh, the letters and love letters from and to everyone in the family). And then the most beautiful dresses my mother made for their yearly grown-up trips to Barbados. I think they ran with a fast and glamorous crowd there, and my mother, refusing to be outdone by all the London Grande Dames who shopped at Harrods and Harvey Nichols and Biba, made beautiful long dresses, in groovy fabrics befitting of the era (1970s), a lot of them stitched by hand, lined in silk, with bows and ruffles and large blowsy silk flowers. There was a bar called Greensleeves, which is no longer there, where my mother was rumored to have said "Oh my goodness, this is the jetset." My father laughed about it, about her naivete, but I've always found it quite touching. She is and was her mother's daughter, and wanted to dress the part. There are pictures of her on the beach with the sunset behind her, rum punch in her hand, in a flowery, floaty dress, just slightly sunburned, her teeth white, her eyes sparkling. She was so beautiful. She still is.And so the only thing we can count on is change. We cannot lament the end of summer or say what summer?, because here we are, and the blackberries have already started to rot, and the Virginia creeper is glowing crimson on outside walls, and people are making plans for Christmas. The only thing we can do is to stay here, right here, in the present moment, as the days darken, and the crows become more insistent as they do their rounds of the oak trees before bedtime, and I suppose greet the blue skies with joy even if they are less frequent than we would like. I keep coming back to this idea that we have to

"Accept yourself as you are and life as it is." - Jeanne de Salzmann

As opposed to how we'd like things to be.  Again, one step closer to equanimity. One hopes.

Oh, and one more thing I've been thinking about. Do you ever feel that you are flawed? Do you ever feel that every day you have to somehow fix yourself?  I was noodling this idea at four in the morning and I mumbled something to Charlie, who'd actually just been pee-bonding with the dog on the lawn and was still awake, with dew-stained chilly feet. It's probably a particularly neurotic position, but I think I spend a lot of time thinking about self-improvement. Now, wouldn't life be so much easier if you came from a position of believing you were okay? Maybe it's just not possible to be a strategic comms professional and a  brilliant cook and a terrific gardener and a great rider and a voracious reader and a good friend and a thoughtful parent and a dutiful child and a responsible pet owner and an inspired thinker and a seeker and a writer and an artist. And maybe you can't have a minimal house (the new fad according to HTSI is merchandised clutter, or something like that - it's maximal to the max but in lots of very arty piles) and good handwriting and be able to throw together a watercolor, a mulberry cardamom cake, a boeuf bourgignon AND do the dance sequence from the opening credits of "The Perfect Couple." It's all so exhausting, isn't it? How much, really, is enough?

Honestly, it's enough to make me want to escape to a Greek Island with a book and a hammock. Oh but I forgot. I have a puppy. 

 

All the feels & quite a lot of other things including metal detectors

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

• Emily Dickinson

Delilah, our most petite and blonde hen with an indefatigable spirit, is missing. There is no evidence of anything that might be awry, no scattering of feathers, or God forbid, body parts. But she has not come out this morning to eat, which could of course mean that she is broody and sitting on a massive pile of eggs behind a tree in the garden. Charlie and I have walked and searched and whistled as we do, and brought with us sunflower seeds, her favorite treat, but nothing. It's pouring with rain, and her two compadres, Margot and Prune, are fluffing up their feathers underneath the awning by the back door, making disapproving noises. It's a sun awning really, but they like to be there, outside the dining room window, so I have reeled it out a couple of feet as shelter, and brought them something to eat and drink as they ruffle themselves up against the downpour. They are our happy band, our curious, friendly, intelligent ladies, who patrol the garden by day, and come sit by us while we have lunch or a cup of tea under the silver birch tree. But, there has been an infestation of red mites in their hen house, and I use that perfect tense optimistically. It's probably still home to a family of mites, and despite scrubbing, bleaching, power washing, spraying with mite killer, and rubbing great handfuls of diatomaceous earth into each crack and crevice (wearing yellow rubber gloves, gumboots, old shirts and dish towels around our heads), these tiny, mighty bugs are very hard to get rid of. Therefore, Margot and Prune sleep on the perches outside of their house (still within the protection of the cage) but Delilah has gone rogue and prefers to live in a tree (like that book by Calvino). Our garden is walled on all sides and where there are gates there is also chicken wire and we feel that it's pretty well protected. No bunnies (fingers crossed) and no foxes (one hopes fervently). The lower garden, where the raspberries, the apple and plum trees, the courgettes and pumpkins and spinach grow, is less protected and is surrounded by normal post and rail and barbed wire fencing leading onto the fields where the horses from the livery farm next to us graze.

But one of the results of red mites in a hen house is that hens a) refuse to go in side, and in extreme cases b) stop laying. Mine haven't laid since the day Charlie left for the Cannes film festival, which is early May, unless of course Delilah has a secret stash of eggs somewhere that we've yet to find. I live in hope. I blamed it on Charlie for months. "You're too bonded!" I lamented.

Delilah

Here's the funny thing about having chickens, even a few of them; one does become fiercely attached and protective. I love my girls.

One of the things that happens to you in late middle age (this is probably old age but that's just a step too far for me) is that you start to think about your purpose and why you're here. Think about it, you are a child and then you're a student and then you work your arse off trying to make something of yourself in the world, and then raising your own children while still working hard. The only stillness I can remember, the only times I haven't actually been working is either on a horse, walking a dog, or, frankly, slightly drunk at a party. The slightly drunk part, the squiffy part, the oh-aren't-I-sparkling part is what you needed to do, what I needed to do in order to deal with the stress of the work in the crazy business that I chose to be in, and still am in.  I wore "good at dealing with difficult men" as a badge of honor, without looking at all at the toll it was taking on my already traumatized little body. The habitually waiting for the yard arm to hit 6 or 7 depending on how desperate you were. ("It's cocktail hour somewhere in the world," my elegant east coast friend would say.) How satisfying to open the fridge and grab a cold bottle of white burgundy, filling up a glass. It was a sturdy companion to whatever you might already be doing (cooking supper usually) and became a daily ritual, come rain or shine. Now, when you take alcohol away (as I did six hundred and two days ago**) there leaves a really interesting space, a vacuum, a void, that needs to filled with something. And I've filled it with seeking. I've filled it with a great and intriguing journey of discovery and healing, and it's quite revelatory. You see, when you stop doing and start being, everything changes. Every little thing in your life changes, because suddenly everything is more expansive. There is spaciousness in your head, room to breathe, and room to feel. Everything shifts deeper inside, and suddenly you're not interested in surface things (I mean, let's not exaggerate, I love silly things too!) and you don't have time for any bullshit. I dread dinner parties where I'm sat next to a man who wants to talk about nothing. I laughed so much when one of my besties told me she was stuck at a dinner like this where she became desperate to find something to talk about when the man next to you turned to her and said "Do you Ski?" Later, walking out, she turned to her dinner companion and said "just remind me of your name - it's Johnny Clayton-Smith yes?" and he smiled and said "I'm the 4th Baron Leicester." We laughed and laughed. And yes his name has been changed for this purpose.

"Trust in the slow work of God" says Pierre Teilhard De Chardin. "Your thoughts become your reality" says someone else, mostly all the accounts that pop up in my algorithm on Instagram. I try to remember this. If you want anything in the world you have to trust that as long as you show up and do the work, the universe, or God, or the divine intelligent design, whatever you call it, will meet you half way.  But you have to have clarity about what you want. You have to be able to picture it, to imagine it, to bring it clearly into your mind, well defined and without fuzzy edges. And this, for me, is hard. My mind works in a very strange way; I see endless possibilities and options always. Here are a thousand ways you can spend your day, and each of them feels meaningful. Which one pulls you in the most compelling way? And how do you decide? For me, and maybe for you, I've realized that like one of those metal detectors with the very satisfying buzzing sounds that vibrates higher and louder when it gets near a treasure, my body reacts with a trembly fizzing sensation when it's near something that it vibes with. And similarly, it sends me an "I don't like this vibe" when I'm about to embark on something that isn't in my best interest. (It works very well near baked goods too, particularly croissants from my favourite bakery in Nettlebed). 

+++ I interrupt this transmission with this note. I just heard a bit of an inquisitive 'bok bok' sound outside my window. Delilah is back! +++

I believe it's easier to be in touch with this inner radar if you don't use alcohol, at least for me. The numbing effect of alcohol - and I say this with love as a years long fan - doesn't allow you to feel the bad stuff, but by the same token, doesn't allow you to feel the good, so all the tiny, fine tuned little hairs that feel energy are blunted. And in blunting them we lose our way, we lose sight of where we are supposed to be in the world and what it is that keeps us in alignment, in our stream, in our flow. (Wonderful piece in the Guardian on Flow here).  And stay with me here. In finding that track, that stream, where you're supposed to be, in completely acknowledging that you are where you are supposed to be, perfectly and beautifully aligned, and by not questioning that, just being in it, everything will miraculously become available to you. All the things you need. It's as if by being still and quiet and as Ram Dass says "Be Here Now" then everything collides and colludes to give you all that you need. Your job is to accept things as they are and not as you think they should be. This is equanimity.

I have a friend who is so connected to the creative project that she is working on that everything she touches becomes a tiny thread which is inextricably linked to the whole world she is exploring. Everything she tugs at reveals something even more marvelous and relevant and revelatory. It's quite inspiring.

This post is about hope and how it exists in the world. If you allow yourself to be still and be with it long enough. Our purpose here on this planet, for this minute of time that we have, is to heal ourselves and to put healing back into the matrix, back into the world. I think so much about the Maharishi Effect whereby the consciousness of a whole group of people can be raised by one percent of its population practicing meditation. ie similar to the Meisner Effect in physics, individual consciousness can affect collective consciousness. It's massively hopeful and it's something to hold onto when the atrocities in the world are flashed before our eyes daily in the media and we feel less than powerless to help.  And it's not just through meditation. There are very simple ways that you can change the lives of those you come into contact with in your daily comings and goings; smiling genuinely, asking people how they are, letting people through in traffic, calling a friend. Random, tiny things that will radiate out in ever-expanding circles.

There is no need to be afraid of it, to be ashamed of it, or to think it's not cool. We're not 16 (do you remember when being an enthusiast was about the most uncool thing you could do?) and so why not embrace it?

I wish you all a very happy weekend.

** I said a few weeks ago that if I cared about what people thought of me, it would prevent me from expressing myself clearly and accurately, so I stopped. But my intention is not virtue signaling. This is only my experience with alcohol and I know many many people (98% of my friends) who are lovely and kind and wonderful and effective and drink alcohol without it any adverse effect. You do you as the kids say.  

mental & why mornings on the fjord are the best

Norway. 6am. July 25. I can hear bees, the quiet whir of an early cyclist, a runner, one or two morning birds, a single bark, but mostly just ambient stillness by the Oslo fjord. I have sat here in this place at this time of day, with a similar cup of tea, perhaps in different pjyamas for many years. The same pale blue skies, the same golden white sun, the same oak saplings and wild raspberries, and the same feeling that this is a magical place on the edge of the world, this little Norwegian island where the weather clouds part so that the sun can shine through (this, according to my grandfather, an eternal optimist), where cares dissipate so that the soul can bathe in light. Blue tits follow me wherever I go (also crows) and I can hear two in the rowan tree on the side of the house. A jackdaw has woken up further down on the deck. All is still. My housemates haven't stirred but soon shall. The sun is beaming into my throat and chest, warming my skin. Everything is the same and everything has changed.

July 22, Mink Island, Tjøme

In a world filled with darkness and conflict, there is always light. And it's this: every day is a new opportunity to start again. Wake up, choose differently. Blink open your eyes and choose to flood your brain with the happy hormones (oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine) that comes from gratitude and love. Energy flows where attention goes.

Stopping the train before it leaves the station is hard task to master. I have found that I can limit irksome thoughts by choosing not to check my email first thing in the morning, instead starting the day with either a short prayer or meditation. It can be something like this "Thank you for a good night's sleep and the sound of the geese flying by and the sun on my back." Or "Thank you for this small fat dog who lays next to me." Something about the feeling of the sun's energy seeping into your pores is very invigorating. Have you ever lain down in the grass under a tree and seen the dappled light play against your closed eyelids, and that sense of aaaaaaah that comes with it, the light? However, on hard days - haven't we all had those days - when you wake to the sense of doom, a different strategy is needed. These are the days when you have to shock your body back to a sense of who it is, to a state of remembering. A few little tricks I have learned (and try hard to remember on those not so good days) include:

• Drink a full big glass of water before doing anything else.
• Jump into the shower and just when you're feeling warm and cozy and coddled turn on the cold tap and allow yourself to experience two minutes of iciness.
• Immediately put on your shoes and your coat (even over your pyjamas if it's a particularly bad day) and walk outside. If it's warm and dry, take off your shoes and let the soles of your feet come into contact with the ground. If not, just walk, with purpose, and focus on breathing long, slow, deep breaths. Listen to the birds, look at the way the flowers have changed from the day before, what is coming up, what is blooming.
• Find a playlist of 528hz music - the love frequency. Or play September by Earth, Wind and Fire at full blast. Alternately, find Krishna Das and listen to Baba Hanuman. Sing along with him.
• Hum or whistle (or sing or chant).
• Hum or whistle (or sing or chant) while walking.
• Do ten minutes (or more) of yoga.
• Listen to a guided meditation from the wonderfuly resource that is Insight Timer, or remember your own sit, your own practise.

Mostly, I have found, the body needs to be jogged back to remembering. Dancing, walking, running, swimming, jumping jacks, sun salutations, shaking, moving it in some way or form does bring relief, and almost immediate relief. The wonderful Prune Harris offers other methods to stem anxiety including crossing your arms across your chest, sticking your hands into your armpits and hugging yourself hard. Self-administered oxytocin.

You are whole and perfect. We all believe we have flaws and bits missing and ugly pieces, but these are things we've been told for so long that we begin to believe them. You are the shape you are because you're like a tiny piece of jigsaw that fits perfectly and exactly as you should into the immense fabric puzzle of the universe. There are no mistakes.

When depleted, it's much easier to focus on these flaws and gaps, and then we create our own flawed and gapped energy which others pick up on and so suddenly the flaws and gaps become us. This is false. I think sometimes I'm like a slightly sad, semi-deflated balloon in the morning and I have to pump myself fill of lovely warm positive energy air so that I can bob around in the jolly way that I'm meant to.

But you get the picture. Back to oxytocin. Oxytocin is the bonding hormone. It's why new born babies and put on their mother's chests skin to skin. It's why we feel better after a hug (don't get me started on those annoying "I'm a hugger" people who hurl themselves at you unasked; I am nothing if not a paradox). It's a central part of Bowlby's attachment theory (Attachment & Loss, John Bowlby, 1969). But if we don't get enough, or haven't historically, it leaves us feeling depleted (see my reference to Prune Harris above). 

Since I've been here, a flock of housemartins flew circles over the dock in front of me, a single kayaker glided across the milkglass bay, and a lone Norwegian yachstman getting his boat ready (ie banging around loudly onboard) yelled "Ow" with a great deal of intensity. I have also made a second cup of tea, and realize that all the Oolong in the world couldn't take away my devoted love of Yorkshire Gold on a sunny morning.

But I'm Ronnie Corbetting.

Stopping the train before it leaves the station. I think this is a little like the pause between the in-breath and the out-breath, the little bit of magic that happens that might be a glimmer of the infinite. As the negative or triggering thought arises, there are a couple of choices: Greet it with open arms. Push it away sharply. Sit with it in Zen-like splendor. Grasp for an image of puppies and kittens playing happily together with frosted edges. Or, perhaps, in the best of all worlds, manage somehow to notice it, recognize it, allow it, and instead of indulging it and getting wrapped up in its innate somewhat perversely delicious drama, coming back to the moment, the quiet, the glimmer of the infinite. THIS IS VERY HARD. We all know how it is to feel so very justified and righteous in our pursuit of these negative thoughts, how the triggering is both horrible and weirdly comforting. But, I suggest humbly (& oh how I struggle with this) it won't bring you anything but more negativity, more shakiness in the body, more dry mouth and jelly hands, more frozen, curled up unsafeness. So here's the trick. The very very very hard trick. I try to take a very big breath at that moment. The biggest breath you've ever taken, really deep and slow, and let it out for the longest time you can manage. Something will shift.

But the biggest and best thing I've learned (and by learned, I think it might have come to me as a divine download on July 5, a crazy day of celestial raves and fireworks, when the whole world seemed to be shifting on its axis) - I said to Charlie in a text which I wrote from the kitchen at 4.47pm and I quote it now:

I have realized that I need to use my time wisely from now on. There is no point wasting it on things that don't matter or that you don't care about.

And this is how I translate this little morsel of insight, which may sound bleeding obvious to every other observer, but I don't care:

Do not give a jot what anyone else thinks about you. It doesn't matter. As long as you are kind and ethical, then let your damn freak flag fly. Be that weird little jigsaw piece in the 500,000,000,000,000 piece puzzle that is the universe and smile. You are loved.

The whole bay is now shimmering in silver light from the sun. It's 7.41am and the dog next door has woken up to wholeheartedly yap in his big boy voice at every jogger, now coming by frequently, the sound of trainers skimming the sandy road. We are on an island protected on all sides by a guard of skerries, stretching out to meet each other, but not quite, with channels of still salt water in between, and rows of fir trees on top of the warm gray granite. If you looked down from above, you'd see the dark forest green star patterns and the silver blue fjord, and as you focus in you would see the branches, and the fat cherries bursting their skins, then the grasses, the purple willow herb and creamy meadowsweet and blue harebells, the wild raspberries and blueberries, the luminous green of the moss forest speckled with ladybirds, the little beige mushrooms, and then underneath the beetles, the ants, the tiny milipedes, and further down the chocolate brown composted earth, the pink worms. I am zooming in like Carl Sagan, thinking about his pale blue dot. I am zooming in like a seagull or an alien who has not visited this place before. I am zooming in and zooming out and soaring and imagining whether it is possible to find anything so beautiful or kind. 

You are the wave but you are also the ocean.

The ultimate luxury (except for the sea)

Everything has its season. There are now fuchsia clumps of rosebay willowherb* lining the hedgerows, in this still-grey July. After a lesson, my mare and I walked down the road. I whistled and she galumphed on the buckle of the reins, swinging her neck from side to side like she was a horse in Don Quixote and half-heartedly swishing her tail at the lacklustre flies. There are wild cherries nearby, the pale yellow and pink kind, the ones no-one thinks are ripe, on the mile-long driveway to Ewelme Park and we went to investigate (which is code for eat greedily) but were thwarted. Birds -- squirrels too probably -- know a good thing when they see it. I am sad not to be able to stuff my face with cherries, but they too have their season, which came just before fat squirrel season. The willowherb followed the foxgloves, which followed the ox-eye daisies, which followed the bluebells. Next we have pale pink mallow which grows with mustard-yellow ragwort or tansy. 

*I first learned about rosebay willowherb at pony club camp at Rossway near Berhamsted, from Mary Rose (MR) Haden Paton. I am eternally grateful and to this day they remain some of my favorite wild flowers.

Astrology has never held me in her thrall, but lately that seems to be shifting. After being shaken up by the new moon on Friday I am aware that I need to pay more attention.  (I'm delighted and relieved to see I'm not alone in this. Thank you to the MissW readers who told me that they too had borderline out of body experiences due to the planetary shifts). I can't express it better than by saying it felt like tripping. I was doing the things I normally do, going through the motions, but felt outside of myself, watching myself, and porous as a a sponge, pulling everything in, connected to everything, and being drawn outside, to the trees. My friend S said that maybe because I don't drink I'm feeling everything more. If this is more, I can't imagine what most feels like. That might be a full-blown shift in consciousness. But, just in case there was a wee chance I was losing my mind, I booked in for acupuncture, and did a bunch of kundalini kriyas and breathing; Lots of long exhales to help the parasympathetic nervous system, and lots of walks with the dog to recalibrate with nature. I also baked a fruit cake, a plum torte, and other things that made me feel useful and busy and flour-covered. I'm not making this seem smaller than it is, although that is my tendency. 

I’m not screwing around. All of this pretending and performing—these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt—has to go. Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy and lovable, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever. Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can’t live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. You were born worthy of love and belonging. Courage and daring are coursing through your veins. You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It’s time to show up and be seen. -- Brene Brown

Brene Brown is all about the "what would you do if no-one was watching" and I've had a version of this thrown at me three or four times over the last couple of days. I'm so tired at having to excuse myself. I'm not ashamed of being out there and embracing alternative healing. I'm really not! So I'll just say this: My Chi was off. I knew it and although I had to kinda keep it to myself, I found a great acupuncturist called Anna in Henley. I loved her face so much in her photo (and she's an ex-Olympic hockey player) that I thought, she's my woman. I just sort of knew she'd get it, and she did. I walked in to her light, bright office and I'd hardly sat down before we'd mentioned all the things we have in common. And "what brings you here" she said, "this might sound a bit woo woo but I think my Chi is off," I said. "Hallooo...I'm an acupuncturist, I live in woo-woo" she said. (I had a similar experience with a friend/client to whom I suggested a book. You have to be careful. People can be very conservative and unwilling to shift the views that they've inherited from their parents. "I loved James Doty's 'Into the Magic Shop' I said, "but I'll warn you, it's a bit woo woo." "I grew up in Northern California. I have woo woo in my dna" she said. Oh God, it's such a relief not to have to apologize for who you are anymore. It's such a massive weight lifted.) So, forty minutes later, with a needle in my third eye point, two needles in the fleshy bit between my thumb and forefinger, another two at my knee and ankle, laying on her comfortable table and staring at rays of sunshine playing on the ceiling of her treatment room, we were gabbing away about Esther Hicks and James Doty and Rupert Spira. But she asked me this question, what would you do if no-one was watching, and also, what would you want if you could have anything. I said "safe." This of course was a slightly provocative thing to say without context. "Oh I'm not giving you secret code or anything. I don't live with an abusive partner. He is the kindest man on the planet!" But then I thought about it. What does safe mean? Safe is curled up in a warm duvet with a dog for comfort. Safe is lying on the grass, covered with a horse blanket, staring at the clouds and watching them change into animals. Safe is homemade cake and tea next to your person. Safe is being present to the now. Safe is no surprises. Safe is not putting anything off, not hiding anything. Safe is being allowed to be yourself. Safe is, actually for me, not having to sparkle, and knowing I will be loved nonetheless. This is a very hard thing.

Part of the reason I miss living in Laurel Canyon so much is the liberating lack of judgement. "It's all good" isn't code for "you haven't passed the salt, you ill-bred cur." People are just open.  And kind.

So if this is the time to cast off all the things that aren't serving you, what would you choose to lose? What have you carried with you all your life that you've inherited and have chosen to adopt because it served you as a child or as a young adult, but really doesn't help you one bit now. Let me give you an example: A popular notion when I lived in Los Angeles was potluck. It was something you'd accept from your child's school for a get-together picnic, but it would creep into other social gatherings - you'd find "pot luck" written on an invite in jaunty comic sans and your heart would sink. At least my heart would sink. Why? Why exactly did this bother me so much? It's a conundrum. And why is a pot luck so much worse than a picnic, a thing I adore? Fear of a bad dish? Fear of something you don't like? A lack of control? Ridiculous, isn't it? Potluck is joyous. What an opportunity to try a food from another culture, or something you've never had before! No-one brings something they don't love to potluck. It's delightful. 

Also, I'm not saying that potluck is a major curse I need to drop. I think I'm being overly dramatic. ;)

But I'm doing a Ronnie Corbett. I digress.

(I met an artist at a dinner the other night who was most definitely the Ronnie Corbett of women painters and I told her so. She wore it as a badge of honor. I love people who talk too much, particularly when their stories are fascinating. Actually, only when their stories are fascinating. Sometimes people who are anxious speak too much, about nothing, and it tends to bring out the worst in me. She made painting incorporating blood and bones and hair and even her mother's ashes. Which I suppose is a great way to be memorialized.)

I think what I'd like to say is that everything has its season. Nothing blooms all year. And neither do we. Slowing down is what we can do for ourselves. It's okay not to sparkle all the time...because when you do, it will be that little bit sparklier. We are so powerful. But, as I told my lovely acupuncturist yesterday, we need to charge our batteries.

And to the question, "What would you do if no-one was watching?" - what would you do? It's such a lovely question to think about. That wonderful idea that you could revert back to the stuff you loved as a child, and throw yourself completely in it, naked, and abandon yourself to it, not worrying not even once whether anyone was going to judge you. WE ALL DO THE BEST WE CAN, people! Give us a break! Do you remember that feeling of being on the beach and building a sandcastle, totally focused, salty-skinned and probably sunburned and totally drooling with childish focus? Or building a fort in the bracken? Do you remember how it feels to be so enveloped in your own creativity that nothing can stop you? We had a version of this. My brother and I were always out playing in the woods or the fields, or on our bikes, or exploring, and so my father installed a bell, a huge bell on the side of the house, the size of a church bell, and it would be rung at supper time by a long rope, because we would become so engrossed in our projects that we would easily forget to eat, our legs like jelly from running around in the dusky summer evenings. I'd like that again. Wouldn't you? We're so tribal, so tightly knitted together, so intent on being part of the groupthink surrounding our consumer culture - these shoes but not those, this dress, but definitely not that color (that's so 2023) - we're all pulled in to it. Imagine the bliss of a world outside of space and time where you can just be who you love and do what you love, and nothing stands in your way. In fact, the whole universe is collaborating with you, meeting you where you are, so that you can birth your creativity, whether it's a sandcastle, a flower arrangement, a cake, or watercolor. Just imagine how blissful that would be. That, I think, is the ultimate luxury.

That, and the turquoise blue sea to swim in.

PS. I gave my mother a pile of flowers from the garden this afternoon and she made these. How very beautiful.

Greetings From the End of the World

I'm not sure where to begin. It was the moment when I was meditating in the churchyard, under the great yew tree which is either 500 or 600 years old, depending on who you talk to, which sits kitty corner from the field with the great barrow in it -- where apparently the dead were buried during the Black Death -- when the nice young Irishman I was listening to on a guided meditation on Spotify was instructing me to listen to my breath, and then the sounds around me, to the left, to the right, in front of you, behind you, to the more distant sounds in the wider world. I could hear a tractor to the left of me, the rain all around me, the faint hum of a train, the wind in the branches of the tree, but no birds. Not one bird. My face crumpled up into the strain of listening and I felt an ache akin the pain I feel seeing the two dead badgers on the side of the main road (the A4 - I say a prayer for them each time) and I tried again, even harder, through the rain, while listening to my breath, to hear a bird, but nothing, just a grim, grey birdless silence. And then, quietly and in the distance beyond the church, maybe in my garden, the faintest sound of a little wood pigeon, 'oh my pooooor tooooe betty,' it sang. And the tears welled up. The relief was so profound because recently I've been pretty sure in my anxiety-strewn state, that the world is ending. I'm not saying this to be funny, or with irony. Every day there seem to be signs of it. You know how you're supposed to note glimmers of joy or gratitude? You know how the great mindfulness teachers give you instructions to find the path to happiness? This is the opposite of that. At first it was the ox-eye daisies, hundreds of them, everywhere, on the sides of the motorway and in the woods and places you've never see them before, even in our garden, doh-see-doh-ing with the roses against the wall, and then the foxgloves, as if people had lain down great carpets of foxglove turf, like those wild flowers squares you can buy to create a field in your garden, so that everywhere you looked there were pinky-mauve bells, whole woods dedicated to them, in astonishing abundance.  You could only stop and gape. And then, only yesterday, my brother posted a whole field of meadowsweet, close to the Oslofjord, in a place where in years gone by, there were only one or two bushes of the stuff, amongst sparse bits of vetch and some wild raspberries, enough that you would think twice before snapping off a bit for the table (meadowsweet is legendary in being tough to snap, mind you, but it always looks lovely in the wildflower bunches we pick on the island in Norway). My theory, which is a little feeble, and not well thought out, and comes from a feeling rather than anything scientific, is related to the time my father cut an almost full inch-wide loop of bark from the apple trees so that they would produce more fruit. The strip almost meets itself, allowing a tiny gap for the sap to get through, tricking the tree into thinking it's dying, thereby producing a bumper crop of apples. First the daisies, then the foxgloves followed by the meadow sweet, and then the birds? 

My world is ending theory is compounded by a few things, and has been thwarted by a few things, for example, Le Pen not winning in France on Sunday. A Good Thing. And Keir Starmer's appeal to everyone to help him reset the country - and frankly, I thing we should all stop bitching and help him do exactly that. I mean, why not? Everything is a complete mess. We all need to pull on our big girl panties and start thinking about the good of the nation. We all need to help the Daily Mail realize that their way of thinking is just sooooo ten years ago. It's dull, isn't it, when there they are splitting hairs, creating great storms in their teacups, pursing their lips at everything that can get a reaction out of their readers. It's so dreary. There will be great swathes of the world that will be uninhabitable by 2050 (twenty five years time, less than one generation from now), mostly sections of the Middle East (ironically where the modern world was formed) and Africa, but a band across the center of the globe, where people will be unable to regulate their body temperatures enough to live because of the excessive heat. And God knows how many animals will be wiped out (41,000 species are endangered, including lions, tigers, leopards, rhinos, elephants). So I'm wondering exactly what is more important that putting every single resource into saving this one planet of ours. Please watch this beautiful film by Carl Sagan. This point of pale light, the lonely speck in the great cosmic dark. 

But I digress. I'm not proud of my theory, but it's not really a stretch. Everything is always dying, from the moment it is born, so why not the earth? And do we really deserve this place? Mankind is the invasive species and has done more harm than good, arguably. (Exceptions include miraculous stuff like the seed depository in Svalbard and the Hadron Collider, as well as divining for water, Mozart, quantum theory and so on. This piece of music too (we heard this at the 50th anniversary concert of the Pangbourne Choral Society, and I was not alone in bursting into tears when the voices came in. O, Zadok! Just imagine this in the Falklands War Memorial Chapel, light pouring through the stained glass windows in at the height of midsummer.)

The chickens aren't laying either. And I really don't know why. We've checked for red mites and doused their pen with disinfectant. Andy the rat guy has been here three times and placed ominous black boxes of death all of the garden, held down by bricks. I thought at first that perhaps I was spoiling them - mixed sunflowers seeds, blueberries, chopped up apple and cold pasta on a daily basis - and maybe this was messing with their laying ability. So austerity crept in and now it's just layers mash and water and a tiny bit of scratch in the morning. Margot is an ex-battery hen and too old for laying, but the girls Delilah and Prune - are barely a year old, so it's a conundrum. Maybe a cockerel would inspire them. But have you seen the way those boys behave? Poor, poor ladies would need special padded knickers. I've recently seen a video of a trained crow on Instagram, and I'm wondering whether I should train them to do something more useful as they're not producing eggs. They follow me around the garden and rush to greet me in the morning, like tiny feathered dinosaurs so I know they're biddable. And they are awfully sweet, the way they clatterr up onto the bench outside the kitchen window so they can watch us while we eat breakfast. Delilah will do anything for a half strawberry, strumpet that she is.

Meanwhile, the rain continues. I am cheered by India Knight's Substack and you should be too. Do join!

Alas, it hasn't stopped raining for, I don't know, a decade? This is NOT good for anyone's mental health. It's July, for goodness sake.

When I struggle, there is a lot of breathwork. I battle, I really do, with being myself here, in England, by saying things like "breathwork" knowing I will be judged. "Honey, you're not living in California anymore, with your iced matchas, your kundalini yoga mantras, your breathwork, your spiral dynamics."  It's not that radical a concept. I believe I might have hit my Who Gives A Flying Fuck decade. I don't really care if people think I am mad. I am. I have to be true to myself. I am a nut and I am outspoken and eccentric and I'm overly emotional and hug too much and talk to strangers in the market. And when I struggle, I struggle HARD. Since Friday, (the new moon in Cancer I am reliably informed) I've felt absolutely haywire. As if I've been hit by lightning. Like Doc Brown in Back to the Future, with lightning bolts coming out of the sky behind me for pathetic fallacy. In fact, I had four friends for dinner on Friday night and I could hardly get through the day. "It's as if I've taken mushrooms" I said to Charlie early in the afternoon. "Listen, guys, I'm just in the weirdest mood, I'm so sorry," I said to my friends who had arrived early to watch the football, hoping to God that they wouldn't judge me. I had managed somehow to put flowers around the house (it's amazing what you find in the garden when you think all the flowers have disappeared; enough for four or five vases and the dahlias haven't even started yet!) and lay the table (one of my great pleasures in life) and sort out relatively simple food (local beef, asparagus, new potatoes with chives and parsley, apricot torte with cream, some cheese) but it was such an effort. It's never an effort. I don't drink so wine couldn't help. Everything was hard. My whole body was vibrating as if my self had evaporated. It was hard to stay in the room. I wanted to crawl up in a cozy ball in my bed with the dog. There was no sparkle left. No pizzazz. Nothing. Just a shell of who I thought I was. Thank God for good friends who understand. The thing I fear most in the world, if I'm honest, is losing my mind. Going mad. Going properly batty. And then I think of Julian of Norwich, being boxed in with bricks, being fed through a crack in the wall, and using that to commune with God. It's both terrifying and a relief. But you have to have faith in the process, don't you? You have to have faith that the only way through the crazy is through. There is no burying it or dodging it or thinking about something else, or blanking it out with wine or anything else. It's just there, this crazy, nutty, vibrating now. Put on your hardhat (put on your red shoes and dance the blues), it's going to be one hell of a ride.

I think the moral to this story is that if you ever think the birds aren't singing anymore, just wait and trust and have faith, and you will hear the wood pigeons. Charlie always tells me that there is blue sky behind the clouds; we just can't see it. I think about this all the time. I think about this when I check in on my girlfriends who are suffering. I think about it when I wake up in the morning and I've forgotten to remember to be happy (as in "happiness is a choice"). I feel as if I should have it printed poster size and pin it to the ceiling above my bed so it's the first thing I see, so it isn't groundhog day again, and we have to go through the same process to get back to homeostasis (this feels more like stasis, or freeze mode). I've listed here before all the things that we have to remember to do to feel okay, and it isn't getting any better. We can't ignore everything that's going on in the world, even if we avoid the newspapers. Everything Is Really, Really Bad.

You know I can't end on such a negative note. It goes against everything I believe in. Here are some things I love at the moment. Hopefully they may bring you joy too.

1. Meggan Watterson's book on Mary Magdalene.

2. This amazing interview with Ken Wilber by Elise Loehnen.

3. This song by Villagers, which I discovered while driving home late on Saturday night, quietly through the lanes and hedgerows of the Chilterns.

4. Tomato tonnato, purloined from India Knight, but via the NY Times app. The best lunch!

5. Now You See Us, Women artists in Britain 1520-1920 is a wonderful exhibit currently at the Tate Britain.

Cali joy

"You've been to The Source," said Cecilia, who is veh veh Insightful. 'Tis true. California is the place for good. It's as if you are dropped down, very carefully, by a giant benevolent hand, into a magical place where everything is set up to work in your favor.  And you can take one, two, three dance steps with pointed toes to meet the pavement where it meets you. (Quite a few of) The people you love are there. The friends are there. Even people you haven't seen for years are there, and you bump into them frequently during the day, as a reminder that you're on the right track. The food is delicious. The trees are blooming. You discover the Eastern Redbud tree, filled with its tiny fuchsia colored orchid-like flowers. There is an Orange-Crowned Warbler outside your window at five ayem, singing its heart out. A small child called Otto, who thinks you're really, really funny, even when nobody else does, likes to sit next to you. He also stares at you intently, observing everything, waiting for the next sign to laugh.  You see a sliver of eclipsed moon on your first evening, and a mist that could have been from Avalon, floating over Wilshire Boulevard the following morning. There are long forgotten loquats, that plum yellow fruit, in almost every garden, bougainvillea falling over every wall, palest blue skies, new restaurant build outs on Larchmont, along with overpriced (but delicious) match and cardamom pastries from Sweden, and yes, your sister-in-law, by chance, wearing vintage earrings, hugging you unexpectedly. Also lunch with girlfriends you haven't chatted with in years. Walks with your son in the rain. Biscuits with cheese and chives in Griffith Park. Italian take-out with friends who've tucked you in a white blanket by the fire because you have jetlag and are complaining, like a baby, of exhaustion. There is green rice and black beans and seared fish and massaged kale salad, and churros, hot from the pan, served with either warm caramel or warm chocolate sauce. There is the old friend who has the new Great Dane puppy, already a hundred pounds, and spotted like your second Dalmatian who she loved so much. But BIGGER, Monica! Much bigger than a Dalmatian. Similarly adored. And your dress shop friend, the chicest person you know, with her new chin length haircut with the faintest sign of a flip, who makes cardigans and neck scarves look fresh and clever. Your journalist friend eating breakfast in the farmer's market with the same group every morning for thirty years. The booths that carry sound waves like speakers at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where no-one plays polo. The tv writer who trained as a quantum physicist. (Everyone carries something. We all carry something. We all do our best. I must remember this.) But yes, this is the source of optimism and hope and joy. This is the place where people root for you to win, not fail. It's where you belong, where you put in your years, where you found a home in that weird bit of manicured and watered desert, where you fell in and out of love, where your children put down their roots too, deep down where it's no longer dry. It doesn't matter what people say about California and how the dream has failed, or that the homelessness is out of control. All these things can be true. (There is a particularly moving opinion piece in the NY Times about the unhoused problem here.) It's still there, the source, the very true and brave and real and heady idea that you can do whatever you want to do, follow your dream, and you can succeed at it. That there is something you can plug into that will pull the best out of you and manifest it (ugh I am so not a fan of that word, but what is a better word?) It's filled with people with big dreams and big ideas and big emotions and the desire to talk about it all. You can almost see the ideas floating just a few feet above the people as they walk down the street, forming as they walk. They are out there, with light shone on them, sunlight...not held inside and twisted and shamed and tamped down, but lifted up for the world to see. Curiosity did not in fact kill the cat. It launched a million dreams.

Incidentally The Source was a very groovy Vegan restaurant on Sunset Strip when I first came to LA. Perfect, right?

 ‘Do what you want, just be kind’ - 
Father Yod of the Source Family

I've been thinking so much about this:

What you seek is seeking you - Rumi