Peaceful Observer with blackberries

View from my bedroom window. 5am. Tjøme.

(Sunday morning. West Berks.) The wind is howling through the parched garden, and the huge fennel plant is scratching against my kitchen window. I'm here with two dogs asleep on sheepskins, a huge bunch of sunflowers and dahlias left here by a dear friend,  a scratched shopping list, my red Swedish clogs, the sound of pigeons cooing gently outside, and the general sense of relief that comes with a quiet house. There is an array of birthday cards on the shelves across from me. I am alone but for the dogs. Charlie has set off on his epic driving trip to France and Spain, with three audiobooks loaded and a small bag of apple slices. It's just odd weather. In fact, let's be honest, everything is odd. Unsettling. The fires everywhere make me jittery. France, Spain, Algeria, Scotland, Finland are on fire, and no doubt great swathes of North and South America. I've collected some windfall apples in my pockets from the farm next door as we walked down to the river; they're sour and sweet and fragrant all at the same time, the flesh slightly pink. I am happy for the normalcy of the wood pigeon, the gentle sound of sleeping dogs, the hum of the refrigerator. 

But nothing is as it seems. Madness and lunacy, the whole world is upside down and inside out, and it's all we can do to keep ourselves grounded, or distracted. I'm trying not to be distracted; I'm trying to stay focused on what is going on around me. Not the news, not the maps of the spreading wildfires, but the realization that the grandchildren will be here with me tomorrow, that the pink roses are bursting forth for their third time this year, that the dogs are my heaven-sent companions forever and ever, that my beloved has left me the most beautiful note on the bathroom mirror, that the pink fleshed apples taste like late summer, that when I close my eyes to meditate I find a safe and richly creative wavy gravy place deep inside of myself that I believe is shared with other people who meditate.  I also have Pam (Gregory), David (Clements), Kirsty (Gallagher), Michael (Meade) and all the other friends who bring some kind of out there joy and structure and sanity to the whole of it. They are shapers of the insanity. They have created a community of people who are for want of a better word, light workers: people who aren't afraid to embrace who they really are and who understand implicitly and without shame that we are here for a purpose and that our purpose is much, much bigger than we can imagine. People who understand that there is a prize and that it's glittery and pure and beautiful and elusive but that we need to remain focused on it, especially because there are others that can't and won't.

Mostly life takes a strange form of denial or distraction. That's how we're getting through it. But I'm trying not to. I am trying to be present. I am trying to remember that being here now, on this planet at this time is a tremendous honor, and not something to be overlooked. It is a privilege. I googled it in fact and it said :

"The statistical likelihood of you existing exactly as you are right now has been calculated by some scientists and mathematicians to be roughly 1 in \(10^{2,685,000}\) (a 10 followed by 2.685 million zeros)—a probability so close to zero that it is effectively impossible."

(Monday. There is a strange pall over the skies on Monday morning. A mottled grey you'd imagine more in Key West than rural Berkshire. I've braved the security Daleks next door (who speak, ominously, in a Northern Irish lilt) and I've pilfered three fat figs from their tree. I also ate a greengage which I devoured like a starved dog till I realized it was full of creepy crawlies. More protein! As my mother says.)

Back to denial and distraction.

This is what I understand is going on at the moment: we haven't lived at this pace of change before. Ever. Not in human history. 

And what is our role in it: peaceful observer.

That's it. That's what we're here for.

Not to engage. Just to allow. It's all coming through now but it's on its way out. If we engage we spiral into it, we exacerbate it.

Just let it come through and be still with it.

Also 2. we are moving  from head to heart. We can no longer hide behind intellectual arguments. Consciousness is about paying attention to what we are feeling.

And 3. we're moving away from being separate. We are more connected than we have ever been. 

I made a rule on my birthday that no-one could talk about politics. I was quite bossy about it. People looked at me as if I were nuts.  I said "you can talk about politics tomorrow when it's not my birthday and I won't be able to say a word about it." No-one thinks they're going to talk about politics, but after a couple of tasty beverages the conversation naturally sways towards righteous indignation; it feels good doesn't it to say how much you're against what the American president is doing in the world? I think you have to resist it. None of it matters. All the NYT opinion pieces. All the people pontificating. All the outrage. It's just air. This is something incredibly, wildly shitty that we're going through collectively, and the less we engage, the sooner it will go. (And that does not for one moment mean that I condone it. And it doesn't for one moment mean that I'm not fully aware of the quote by John Stuart Mill about good men doing nothing. This is not that.) 

If it's helpful, I'm struggling. I'm struggling to find what my purpose is. I'm struggling to know who I am in the world. I'm struggling to be a peaceful observer. I want to rage with the rest. I want to not feel everything.

(I've just walked outside to put down some water for the birds, and I have to say that the white cosmos in the garden is quite spellbindingly spectacular and held my attention for much longer than I expected.)

Yesterday because nothing else was particularly helpful I set off with Pip the whippet on a huge walk through the fields of Ufton Nervet and the oak-lined paths that take you down to the river Kennet. It's the kind of English summer day that you remember from your childhood, illustrated in railway stations, with fluffy fair-weather clouds, bicycle clips, picnic baskets filled with red gingham cloths. The poor maize is small and shriveled and I tried to tell it to wait patiently for rain. (I said the same thing to the little black calves who've just been born). Everything is brown, scorched, and I try not to think too much about the little birds, but at least, I suppose, we are close to the river. The vegetation by the river is magnificent in its verdancy, bowing elegantly in the warm wind. It's like a microcosm of a country - the dry plains and the river valleys all under the same unrelenting blue skies. The thing about walking is that the further you walk the more you realize that you've forgotten why you started to walk in the first place. All the stuff that you carried when you set out miraculously melts way. Almost like an ego eradication. And suddenly it's you, the dog, the maize, the oak trees, and a field filled with at least 500 crows, having a pow wow. I've take to talking to everything (I said "taken to" so I don't sound weird but I've done this for a long time) and I say "crow, don't worry, I'm just walking across this field, I don't mean you any harm." And rather wonderfully, they didn't move, even when Pip did a bit of a loop de loop near them. Clearly this was an important meeting of the Crow Council. They all but ignored me. The ground is hard, dry, brittle underfoot. But the blackberries are everywhere and so the walk became a blackberry walk, with stained fingers and mouth, fat juicy berries on hardy bushes amongst the drought-ridden fields. But you melt, don't you? You forget who you are and why you're walking. 

Until a Land Rover drove up behind me. A voice says "This isn't a footpath." So I am trespassing. Or rather, trespassing-with-lurcher. Gordon, the gamekeeper, admonishes me gently. I apologized heartily and told him it was a genuine error. "It's the pheasants" he said. "Oh I know," I said. "I hate shooting but I grew up in a shooting family. I understand."  "You're not a VEGAN are you?" said Gordon, looking terrified. "No." I said. Not yet. I thought. I'm on a blackberry diet at the moment. "It's your lurcher I'm worried about, chasing the leverets." "Well, he's not entirely in tact so I don't think his prey drive is what it was," I said reassuringly, "and plus, he's a whippet." "Oh greyhound, lurcher, whippet, they're all the same to me. I should tell you about some of the unsavory types that come in here with lurchers..." he trails off and looks up ahead. "We're here at night too, sometimes with infrared cameras, trying to keep the foxes out of the pheasant pens. There's a lot of foxes at the moment." "Well, I'm awfully sorry," I say. (Peaceful observer. Ha ha.) "Oh you mustn't keep apologizing. I mistook you for a town type. You should hear the things they say to me." I realized staring in through his passenger side window that there was a single barreled rifle with a silencer on the end in the seat next to him And in the back a very sweet, wiggly black Labrador bitch with a pale yellow collar. Pip and she were eyeing each other waggily. "I've been walking this path for five years, though, so it's an honest mistake. I was sure it was a footpath on my OSmaps app..." I taper off. Gordon says "Well I grew up round here and I've been gamekeeper for 23 years and I can assure you it isn't." Touché. I back down.  "Well have a good rest of your day, Gordon." "You too!" Never fight with a gamekeeper. It's just not worth it. Especially if you're in ego-less reverie on a day when the world is changing beyond our wildest imaginations.

The people who used to live in our house are beloved by the farmers who live around us, and most everyone in the area. If I say the name, people practically take their hats off. It wins us a lot of brownie points, especially in the country stakes. I am a farmer's daughter. I grew up in the countryside and participated in country pursuits as a child (hunting). My brother participated in the other country pursuits (shooting, fishing). My father raised pheasants. And cattle, and sheep and pigs. And knew everything there was to know about trees. And had a healthy disregard for those who live in towns. My brother now owns a shooting/biodiversity-focused estate in Scotland, so I do have some country credibility. But, having lived in Los Angeles most of my life, and learning the new language of Hollywood (woo hoo?) I'm now, I suppose, country-adjacent. I can speak country if speaking country is required, but I'm not down. I really don't like shooting at all, and I feel guilty about the brace of plucked partridge my brother kindly put in our freezer and we haven't touched a year later. 

Pam says that she wakes up and says "Show me how to embody more light today." And I think that this may be the way to go.

(I'm in the kitchen peacefully observing my whippet with a rabbit carcass he has found in the lower meadow, fur in tact. It makes him inordinately happy. He hides behind the Smoke Bush and nurses it, gently.)

It's almost as if we're living on two different timelines. Here is work, zooms, doing the grocery shopping, pilfering figs, reading the New York Times, organizing suppers. And here is upholding the good, finding the joy, being the lighthouse, grounding, holding the whole thing together, avoiding the dark forces. How on earth did we get here?

I said that in Norway a few days ago. "How on earth did we get here." We had a Chinese electric rental car, a ZEKR, which I of course fell in love with and declared, "I am now officially going to get an electric car." I love parking it outside of the supermarket to charge it. I loved how responsive it was. I love how a feather could be on the road and it would swerve violently. I love how it told me "you are distracted" (though not in a Northern Irish accent), but then one day I didn't love it so much. We had been to my second cousin Anne's 80th birthday party, a joyful affair, with dinner outside, and Norwegian strawberries and numerous homemade cakes and puddings, and wonderful poems and stories, and even a trumpeter, all set against the Norwegian dusk on a cliff facing the Oslofjord. Lots of sailing folk and people who'd known her for years (she's a spright, and  I was driving because I don't drink. And all of a sudden, just in Kjøpmanskjær, as we were driving along silently, under melon-shot skies, Kylie Minogue's voice blares out from the radio into the quiet car FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER "la la la, la la la la la." It was so loud that we all jumped. And laughed. Ten minutes later we turned into the little place where we park below the cabin. I was probably going about 3mph doing the full u-turn to park when the ZEKR suddenly gained its own consciousness, I kid you not, and drove full-force into the back of my cousin's car in front of us, and would not stop when I applied the brake. My cousin's car spun around from the force, knocked the concrete top off the sewer drain, and smashed into a tree, which finally brought the rogue electric car to a stop, smashed and battered. If the tree (a row of lindens) had not been there, we would have dropped down to the road. I was shaking. "WTF! What just happened? No seriously. What on earth just happened?" I know I sound utterly batshit when I say that the car had a mind of its own, but I have no other explanation for what happened. Even Kylie tried to warn us. 

Yes, so a lot of weirdness. Everywhere. 

Stay safe, stay open, drop into your heart. Sending so much love to you. We are all in this together, my friends.  

 

The land of little wooden houses

We're back in the land of little wooden houses, yellow and red and white, and of blonde shirtless men walk their long haired dachsunds, the land of magical good-sowing football players and cardamon buns. The house has had a brand spiffing new coat of paint and the garden is no longer a wilderness of wild raspberries, but we've left enough around the edges so that the woman next door and her six year old daughter can pick some, as they did this morning, for jam. There are a lot of geese, a whole family of seventeen, teenage Canada geese, plonking and honking about. I am sitting on the deck that looks over the little harbour across the archipelago towards Sweden, and I'm suddenly interested in sailing boats and watching a woman at sunset glide gently across my view on her paddleboard. A gentle slosh of boats on water, a clink of ropes, little blonde girls in pink helmets on be-ribboned bicycles, the sounds of little boys running across the sandy parking lot and calling out to their mothers. I can't wait for my grandchildren to be here, to be able to run around so easily, to be in the place we spent all our summers. Nothing really changes. A lick of paint, yes, but the same familiar faces, the same drawers stuffed with useless treasures from fifty years ago, wine brochures from the Monopoly, old shopping lists, bits of fishing line, old lead weights, board games with fraying edges, red and white checked napkins that are old as I am, our wooden napkin rings that we carved on a particularly wet summer in the 1970s. What happened to the wet summers? What happened to the daily onslaught of rain that led our parents to marathon poker tournaments? Compared to most of Europe it's cool here, but it swelters by Norwegian standards. No problem. We fling ourselves in the sea, which is an inviting 22 degrees C. My father's toweling swimming robe still hangs in the main bedroom. He died a long time ago, twenty seven years ago, but here it was only really twenty seven fortnights ago. It's easier to remember him here where not much changes, instead of in the real world where everything whizzes by, new houses, new friends, new dogs. Here time just laps against the boats, gently, with an occasional shimmer of sunlight across the sea.

I will sit here when I'm ninety, I think, and nothing will be very different, slowly watching the world go by, waiting for grandchildren.

We meet Nils, the affable chap with the swimming jetty next to ours, who I remember as a tow-headed little boy, on our way to our lunchtime swim yesterday. The Oslo fjord is closed for fishing all around us and as far out as half way to Sweden, and as far south as a good way past Færder, the lighthouse. The baby fish breeding grounds have gone, he says. Too many nitrates in the water. Algae, everything turning brown. Years ago we pulled out mackerel and cod for supper; there was an abundance of fish. My brother tells me that it's something to do with the sewage systems that no longer work. The sea is a self-cleaning organism, but we've hit peak clean: essentially we've put so much shit in the sea that it no longer knows what to do with it. The first Climate Change conference took place in 1995. Apart from electric cars and a few more windmills, where are we exactly? My brother grumbles about politicians who want to be popular and how no-one has the balls to put unpopular laws on the books. There is no Planet B. "And we only see bumble bees" says Nils, "no honey bees." It all feels a bit bleak. We dive in nonetheless and put our faces into the salty water. I gargle with it as my grandmother did, because my throat is sore. What are we doing?

Today at 9.44 UK time is the new moon which according to a lot of people who know more about this stuff than I do -- a lot of learned and serious-minded people who study the history of astrology and its implications on our lives -- say that this is a gateway into a new era of consciousness for mankind. That we are ascending, and maybe not elegantly, maybe in dribs and drabs. And that this horrible place that we're in -- multiple wars, seismic activity, conflict, climate change -- is just part of the process, part of what we need to go through, as nature does, in the death and rebirth cycle. There is a rebirth happening and I guess you're either with us or you're not. My question is, does rolling ones eyes actually achieve anything? Wouldn't it be lovely to just take a leap of faith and join the happy band, to turn off our radar that pays attention to the awfulness and focus only on the higher good (of mankind, of the planet).

The same astrological alignment was present in 1789 when the people of France stormed the Bastille and the French monarchy ended.

And it's also my whippet Pip's second birthday.

I'm not sure why I'm so convinced of this stuff. I know it's an out there opinion. But, it's gaining traction. It's not the easy route. It's hard to be oneself and not defensive around people who are cynical (and frankly not particularly curious - isn't that the worst?) And I have a little club of about three or four people I can speak to honestly. One is a very old friend from school. We send each other surreptitious links. But doesn't it happen at this age, the moving into crone? I'm proud of that.  And Pam Gregory is our bright shining light, sane and strong and kind.

Be well, dear friends.

Monks, Miniature Dachsunds & The Very Lucky Day

When I'm worried, I move the furniture. Today, I've lugged an old Georgian desk with three drawers in it all the way up the stairs (upwards, step by step in a wiggling movement, rounded foot by rounded foot) to my office. I've jettisoned the white IKEA desk, more fitting, I think, for an architect, and now I've balanced my laptop, a lamp, a glass of water on the desk from my parents' drawing room where the phone used to be. Behind it on the wall (in the house I grew up in) was an old and flattering mirror, with a pretty, rather ornate wooden frame, so you could look at yourself while speaking on the phone. It appealed to my teenage self. The desk is awkward and I can't fit my knees under it from my ergonomic chair, so I'm sitting cross-legged and facing the window and the thankfully blue sky. What it lacks in comfort it makes up for in solace and safety. I like that one of the drawers is filled with years of November paper poppies with green plastic stems. I've pushed the daybed against the wall, topped it with my rainbow horse blanket and the ancient Frenchie. I'm remembering to drink more water than I think I need.

The day started oddly. I dragged myself and the dogs down the field to the river at about a quarter to 6, in my Birks, through wet grass, in order to stem it (the oddness). Both dogs walked into the stream and drank. It started to rain. We galloped back up the hill. I did deep breathing exercises because I thought that might help the crazy thick energy. I know you're all feeling it too. Water with electrolytes, a cup of tea. Then 35 minutes of YogiGems. Instead of choosing a set of kriyas randomly I searched "depression" which revealed 30-minute kundalini yoga to remove tension and negativity. Having a tough time? Dealing with difficult energies or people? Bingo. I love her so much. The breathing helps massively. Then the ho-oponopono meditation. Then TM (with a nod to dear Pam Gregory and all the people who meditate at 7 for a harmonious and peaceful planet). I say it, along with my prayers, the lists and lists of people and animals that I must remember. I know, it's insane. It's like Daryl from Mallory Towers who says a prayer for the earwigs in the garden shed. All this just to put myself together in the morning. We are in the most intense of times. We are all holding on by a thread. I think this and then I chide myself for even allowing the thought. I remember positive affirmations. I remember water. I remember my to do list and the water device and the refresh the flowers on the altars. I do some more breathing. I think this is called magical thinking.

The first thing I saw on my phone was a message on The Hub, our local community What's App group, lovingly curated by my friend L, was 7.39am Looking for a male long haired miniature dachsund to mate with mine. She's coming into season shortly. Quickly followed by the helpful reply: Champ Dogs is a respected website for doggy dating.

I took the dogs to Yattendon to grab coffee and sit with people and my journal. C is in Brussells voting on films with the European Parliament. I live in the middle of nowhere and I thought to myself, today is not the day to be alone. Dear little Pip curled up in a ball next to me and I struck up a conversation with the woman on the next table, who has a five year old Spaniel. Eggs, coffee.Admiration for the lovely woman who runs it. I should do this, I think. How much more satisfying a life it is to give people delicious breakfast. Everyone loves breakfast. A conversation behind me about the viral meningitis break out in Henley and all the news crews that stalked the college. It was hard for the students as they were in the middle of exams. "Sky News was really aggressive" says the young woman. Yattendon has pleasingly green doors, a good little shop which tempts you in to buy things like Tunnocks Snowballs and bloater paste, a lot of people with dogs. On the way back I stopped in to see L in her nice shop. We really should have a secret handshake. "How are you doing with this, you know, energy" she said and I could've cried. "I'm doing everything I can" I said. I'm not sure I can let her in to my crazy morning routine, but no doubt she has one too. I see some adventurine. It's pleasingly green and both dull and sparkly. I'm wearing all green and it matches me. We talk about crystals and her beautiful amethysts. She tells me how to clean my crystals. She offers me sage. I say I have palo santo and don't say that I want to call it palo alto. I tell her that The Hub is the reason I've stayed in West Berks. All the lovely crazy ladies and their crickets bats, and teenage sons who need garden work, ten pound Zara dresses, chocolate Guinness cake, and questions about where to eat in Marrakech. I look at L and see a kindred spirit. I know she won't laugh at kundalini and have seen her save people from themselves when they're a little drunk in charge of the Whats App group. She is, I think, a Good Egg. Also the cafe across from her is being taken over by the pub so she's expecting an influx of people this summer. Good.

The police are doing their thing next door training their very howly dogs so that Pip lays by the bedroom window with one ear permanently raised. It's all very serious. Guns pointed. Men with stuffing in their arms. Grown up faces. All of that. They train on the grounds of the big house next door to us until it's sold. Sometimes when they include the ambulance teams too there are tents erected and hamburgers grilled. And they leave half eaten buns in the leaves, much to Pip's delight. I take him up the drive to pick up something from Amazon. The Julia Elliot book Hellions. I'm rather pleased. I think of my friend H in LA who married a man who did nothing but order from Amazon while she worked her arse off. I could never understand it. He also went on a silent retreat in real life ie not while away with likeminded people staying in yurts, and they'd turn up to dinner parties and only one of them would speak. Poor H would walk in and announce gently that her husband was taking a talking sabbatical  My friend Lucy said it was quite boring sitting next to him because he could only nod or shake his head. Thank goodness she is a good conversationalist. But, she said, he was apparently very good at sex, so I suppose grunting and moaning was allowed. Quite a good way to appear gloriously enigmatic and interesting, don't you think?

I'm not avoiding the subject. All my gang are talking about it. When I say gang I don't mean my friends. It's a bit like being in the resistance, you don't really tell people about it for fear that they may think you a bit mad. But my most straightforward and sensible friend J says that people don't mind because they know me and I've always been this way (which is true; I've signed my emails with "everything is connected" since about 1996) but it doesn't mean that you can out yourself. I sit at lunches and dinner parties and try to be witty and funny because I'm sure I used to be that way, but it doesn't seem to work so well. Either I'm the "intense" one - which is fair - or I've gone beyond the age where being eccentric is both charming and sexy. Poor C, after every single lunch we have here I say "Am I boring? I know I am." And he says "no you're not boring, my darling." And I look for cracks in his armor and hesitation in his usually Jeremy Irons-like delivery (I'm not joking. He sounds exactly like Jeremy Irons. I love it.) But my gang (Kirsty and Pam and David and Lee and whathaveyou) are talking a lot about this massive shift that is happening in consciousness. And that it's not just humans that are shifting, but mother nature, the whole planet. There are a LOT of earthquakes now, for example, and solar flares, and wars (at least 8 conflicts in the world currently, and 10,000 or more combat-related deaths), and disputes, and utter madness, things we've never seen before, certainly not in my life, certainly not from people in public office.

I've resorted to a happy patch. It's yellow and filled with things like Lion's Mane. Previously known as a dopamine patch but they were sued for copyright infringement or some such thing. I've stuck it on the most hairless part of my body per the instructions, which happens to be on the side of my ribcage. Actually it's called a Kind Patch. I hope it helps.

While I was illegally scrolling on Instagram yesterday, I came across an interview with a man who used to be a monk. He was tall, elegant, dressed in a button down shirt, chinos, wearing a hat. His skin was tanned and his eyes twinkly. He spoke gently, kindly, as you would expect. It made me want to do that so much. Not that we can hide anywhere when the world is turning upside down. But I wonder if that is spiritual bypassing? There are two approaches to spirituality, by transcendence or embodiment. Maybe the embodiment one is more challenging, and maybe it's the one we should be aiming for. Nobody said it was going to be easy, all of this. But I didn't know it was going to be quite so hard to own everything, to be responsible for one's whole self in this way. To be accountable for your behaviour and to acknowledge your role in what is happening in the world. We are all culpable for the strife, the wars. And, I think, I believe, until we see how much we are responsible (we are sovereign) the discordant stuff will continue. There is no-one else to help us other than ourselves. The blaming and shaming doesn't help. The judging doesn't help. Nothing is better or worse. We can't hide. There's nowhere to go. It's just us attempting to take the plank out of our own eye (feels a bit Monty Python, I know) and being ready to walk our sisters and brothers home. Preachy as fuck, I know. But I really don't have anything better right now. It's where I am. Or rather, it's the conclusion I've come to while trying to make head or tails of the whole thing.

PS Yesterday was the Luckiest Day of the Year because of the Venus Jupiter conjunct (they were closer together than they have been in many years). Therefore all people, even those who are prone to humbuggery, were expected to have a little bit of a skip in their step. I dropped my beloved at the train station early to catch the Eurostar and whizzed over the Thames via the Whitchurch Bridge to go see my horse, Bella, who's actually on gardening leave, while her lesion on the fetlock bone heals. She gardens her paddock, mowing the lawn extremely well with her short teeth (why the long face?). Jan, the lady who mans the bridge booth in the mornings, all cashmere and powdery and fragrant, was smiling as usual. "Today is a very Lucky Day" I said. "Venus and Jupiter are closer than they've Ever Been" (I'm prone to slight exaggeration; I do think it makes thing more fun.) "Oh, what a good start to the day!" she said. And I thought Yes! What a good start to the day. Think of all those people who will be driving through that toll booth, and she will be greeting them with the knowledge that Today is the Luckiest Day and all that Magic Juju will be sprinkled on all of them to bring to their places of work. Hooray. The road was closed and so I drove around Woodcote and Stoke Row, via Highmoor and Nettlebed. Bella was awfully happy to see me. For two reasons: 1) I'm the bringer of carrots and 2) I'm the itcher of her teats. It's almost comical, and she doesn't do it with anyone else, but every time I see her, after a few minutes, she lifts her near hind leg and cranes her neck left towards me as if to ask "Could you please give me a scratch?" And dutifully, I rub her teats and get rid of all the muck that lodges itself there, and she puts one of those horse smiles on her face where they stretch their mouth at you comically. "Well clearly Bella is having a Lucky Day"said Kathy. We had a little more Beauty Parlor which included pulling on her ears with a piece of sheepskin, and washing her eyes and nostrils with a warm sponge. She closed her eyes in bliss and then we wandered back to her field, eating some Tasty Spring Grass along the way.

The dogs were with me and I knew I had to find a place to walk them but with the Road Closed signs on our usual routes, we came back via Highmoor (after of course telling Tom and Marny at McQueen's where I get my coffee that this was The Luckiest Day.) I parked up down a byway, got the dogs out of the car and walked into the middle of a beech wood. Huge, old oak trees, mulchy roads, squirrels, and a criss cross pattern of footpaths, dotted with a few very pretty cottages. I met two women with a red labrador and a viszla and managed not to tell them it was a Very Lucky Day. Instead I said "Oh, I grew up with red labs. Aren't they the best?" On the left of us was a huge park field, with a few chestnut trees, a hay meadow probably, and on the right a pretty white gabled cottage that had a thirties feel. I realized I was on the Nettlebed Estate otherwise known as the Fleming Estate. There are 2000 acres of historic woodland including 560 acres of protected woods. (The legendary pond from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang isn't far off in Russell's Water). And then it happened, my brain went into one of its frequent vortices, which happens a lot when walking in the woods, where I started to imagine living in a cottage in the Chiltern Beechwoods of the Fleming Estate. How perfect! Close to my horse! Close to my friends! In the Chiltern Hills! Feels like The Faraway Tree. Check. I called Charlie who by now was actually on the Eurostar beaming through rural France. "I think we should rent a cottage on the Fleming Estate" I said. "I'm on the train surrounded by people" he said in his Grown Up voice. "But isn't this a good option?" I said. "We could live in the middle of the woods. It's beautiful here." "Are there any pubs?" he said. "Oh, masses." I replied. Sweet man knows me well enough to indulge me.

As I drove closer to home I gradually drifted away from my fantasy of living in a fairytale cottage on the storied Fleming Estate (Robert Fleming bought the estate in 1903 and his son, Ian Fleming was born in Joyce Grove Manor House shortly thereafter) and towards the awning man I was meeting at home. I parked my car and in the moment between turning off the engine and opening the car door, there is always a moment when the radio comes on. The voice on the radio said, "The Ian Fleming Estate has announced..." I love a bit of synchronicity. How was your Lucky Day?

Spring light

Hello dear friends, I talked to an astrologer the other day. A really good one. (It was fascinating, let me tell you!) And she said, what do you write about, and I said, well, I don't know really, it's sort of about how people relate to each other and how we're connected to the world. And she said, no-one has ever said that before. Usually people know their genre, which shelf in the book shop they want to be on, and how to market their ideas. Hmmm, I thought. Not me. If you don't mind the not knowing, please do read on. If you do mind, maybe skip it?

The world today is striped green and white as we come over the ridge on the tire track chalk path, wide swathes of fresh grass in between. To the right, beans planted in neat rows in the pale soil, to the left a hedge adorned in white hawthorne for Eastertide, and further beyond the Wessex Hills and the lovely mounds of the Wittenham Clumps, just across from the remnants of Didcot power station. The larks are loud, protective, and high above us the red kites, circling, not one, but three, now five. The sound of my mare's hooves on the drying ground. My dog close by. The mysterious Russian Oligarch's house perched on the hill in front of us. We walk around the little woodland between the fields; the branches are too low especially now that spring is here with its blossom. Despite the birds, the wind in the trees, the hoofbeats, the clank of the bit and the leather reins, there is a hush that descends out here. You're in a vacuum of quiet and peace. There is no rushing home, no anxiety about where to be, just the quietness of one foot in front of another. Synapses slow. The mare's neck is warm against my hand. The dog pounces on tufts of grass. Fat bumble bees hover a few inches off the ground. Time slows down. You're connected to all of it. We gallop home, the horse, the dog and me, in unison, side by side, dog and racehorse. My hands are soft. The mare feels soft. We're in a rhythm. And together.

Yesterday we walked in a wood in West Sussex, near Chichester. The little village, Graffham, is nestled against the downs. It's full of ancient paths cut into the downland. We parked at the church, and followed a steep upward path, chalk, dotted with tiny blue violets and ground elder. I pretended to stop to look out at the view, but I was trying to catch my breath. No such vertical climbs in West Berks. The dog came with us, hunting about, a hundred yards in front of us, resplendent in his dark green fleece coat, a necessity apparently for whippets who have no body fat and virtually no fur. I used to worry about him and now I know that he'll come back to me, since I've been riding with him. He has his side hustles, and then he comes back. Once when he didn't I took a painter friend's advice, and walked in the other direction and hid behind a large tree. He was most confused and cocked his head to one side, and it made me laugh so much, I jumped out to surprise him. But a useful tool for my dog training kit, I supposed. We came down through a tall pine wood, with a soft brown floor, and hardly any sunlight. This sucks you in and seals your ears. You can feel the blanket of calm covering you, all of you. I wonder why I haven't noticed this properly before. I wonder why when we were young and we walked through the bracken and hid from the dogs with my father I hadn't noticed this feeling of being covered with a quilt of peace. All the little mitachondria slow down and sigh and chill out. They have a double membrane, and I seem to remember something about consciousness being stored in membranes (this will need footnotes, apparently).  I say "astonishing" a lot. But that's what it is. It's impossible to be anxious in a pine wood with a dog. And what's to stop you sitting down in the wood?

On Monday after a long weekend of engagement parties and family lunches and friends for supper and general chit-chattery, and much love-lovieness, my social battery had puttered out. I don't know if that's what it's called, but that's what it felt like. I was so tired I could barely move, and threw myself in bed at about seven and napped for two hours, deeply. It was the day the clocks changed too, so I suppose that didn't help. It felt something like grief. For no good reason, I suppose, but my ex-husband was here and while we are the very best of friends, I'm sure it can't help but bring up the stuff that was left unsaid or unhealed. It doesn't feel that way. It just feels like tired. I watched him on Sunday morning sitting comfortably on my pink sofa, with the papers spread out around him, the huge jar of yellow forsythia in front of him, the sun and the tulips outside by the beech tree behind him, and he was soft and quiet for the first time in as long as I can remember*, and I offered him coffee, and it was all strangely formal, a new way of being together. It's been ten years, but here we are, and I'm back where he found me, living in the country in England, surrounded by dogs and blue and white plates and gumboots and mud and sunshine and apple trees. And I'm walking with him, and I'm saying hello to the birds and the goats and the cattle, and we're not in familiar territory. Well, I am, but he isn't. We're not in LA where we both know our way around, me sometimes better than him, because all I did was drive when I first got there so that I could out-Thomas the Thomas Guide, or because maps give me comfort, and the most soothing map is the one in my body. There is a shift, a weird dynamic dosey-do, and although we're not looking at who is where and although it doesn't matter, it feels like he's on the back foot, and that relaxing is required. Hence the newspapers. I've put flowers in his bedroom, ornamental quince and white alliums, and fresh towels, and even that seems strange in its formality. Here we are after having lived together for thirty years or more, being polite to each other.

* I wonder if this is the definition of relaxation; being able to be comfortably with someone who is not asking anything of you?

And it's not just California that brings optimism. He does too. Everything is commented upon with such sweet kindness and positivity. The house. The flowers. The countryside. The books. My beloved. He loves all of it. And he is genuinely happy for me. This has to be said. This is what I find so touching. He is genuinely happy for me. And like me, does not regret any of it. Today two men came into the bakery where I get my morning coffee after I ride. They both wore black baseball caps. I stare at people. My children are embarrassed by this. I stare at the man's hat. It has a BMW and a California grizzly on it. I say "is that a California bear on your hat" and he says, "yes, I got it at a driving school; I'd give it to you but my hair looks terrible right now." We both laugh. I drove home with my coffee and I thought about the man from the US, probably Southern, who was about to give me the shirt off his back. There is so much generosity and openness in the best kind of Americans. I am so touched by it. I drive and the sun whizzes along with me, through the trees, and I think about optimism and bigness and generosity and how much your day can be changed by a small gesture of kindness. He doesn't know why I love the California bear so much and it doesn't matter. It's so big.

So there's a mixture of grief at what was and a massive sense of everything being okay and more than okay as it is. That's the feeling. This house, I thought at the weekend, is even better now because he is here and we are okay, and even more than that, the three of us are okay. Just three souls who have probably been together many times, chilling on a sunny Sunday morning, looking forward to good friends who are coming to lunch.

I walked with a bramble man to the field behind the house to see if he could help with the years of neglect, not wanton neglect of course, but a patchwork of mended fence bits and overgrown blackberry bushes and gnarly old fruit trees. Two weeks ago the tree in the middle looked dead (we diagnosed it as living after seeing one tiny bud at the end of a branch); today it's bursting with white pear blossom. "Nice tree, that," says bramble man, whose name is David. He's wearing a cap that says Wellington International and it turns out that he's the father to a horse girl and husband to a jump judge. We walk around and survey and I realize that everything, absolutely everything including every tree is covered in brambles. I am overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. He is unfazed. He's seen this before in his bramble ramblings. He tells me wooden fences are expensive. He tells me he needs a digger. He says that a meter of briars all around the edge of the field once removed will bring much more grass. I'm impressed with what he knows. I feel I have to register my country credibility. I feel the need to say "my father farmed at the other end of the Chilterns" so I don't appear to be a Johnny Come Lately. Why do I worry about such things?

We teeter on the edge, don't we? I sometimes think that the world is going to collapse into the void like so much California coastline wobbling on the edge of the Pacific, rocks crumbling off the Palisades cliffs, were it not for a few great people, mostly women, who are holding up the sky. I thought there were just a handful of people (you know the ones; they check on you, they send out uplifting notes, they remind you why we're here, they offer to give you the hat off their head) but last night in bed, exhausted, as I was writing in my journal a long long list of who I'm grateful for, the list went over two pages, in scrawly black Tempo felt tip pen that doesn't do much for my writing but I'm strangely drawn to because it was the pen my father used. It's not duty so much as purpose, even divine purpose, the way that they light the way. And any time I'm lost or tired or fear that the light is dimming in me, I find them and listen to them or read them, and then shake my body out like a dog, hoping the light will settle over the unsettled miasma and push its roots down far into the soil and bring back that glowing feeling of being connected to everything, and being a small fractal part of the whole that reflects the whole unity of consciousness. 

Everything is Connected. I had it written at the bottom of my email signature for years. Like some hat tip to David Bowie or Echo & The Bunnymen from My Year of Living Dangerously and trying to sort out what on earth was going on and why we are here. Only Love. 

The sun pours in now. It floods us because it's so pleased to be out after being hidden away behind rain clouds. Let there be light indeed. It shines on the pelargonium geraniums in the kitchen and their shadows light up the white wall. The dogs lay next to me, golden bits glimmering on their fur. The trees are stretching up to reach it. Light is what we all need to find.

This is what you do

This is what you do: you spend the weeks of the new year scanning for signs of Spring, searching for new life; the tiniest green shoots, any hint of optimism. The world is asleep, almost dead, stone-cold and wet, leaden. You are weighed down with the waiting so that you forget that you are waiting. You forget what you are supposed to remember. You're in the fog of winter. The pointers sneak in stealthily, unheard, usually at night. And each one appears miraculously, snow drops, aconites, narcissus, daffodils, hyacinth. One day not here and the next waving madly from the ground in yellow and mauve and pink and white. "Hello! We have arrived!" It's as busy as can be. A fat bumblebee buzzing against my window, two yellow Brimstone butterflies, Blue Tits, yellow and blue and white, fat, too, playing together in the magnolia tree (did you know that their breasts become more bright depending on how many yellow caterpillars they have eaten), horses laying down in the field together, eyes closed, faces towards the sunshine. The tiniest beginnings of ornamental quince, hazel buds. Rose branches bent together in circular prayer.  Greenfinch, Goldcrest, Chaffinch, Wren. Skylark, Graylag Goose, Swan. Scores of Swans, heads down in flooded fields, as we whizz by marveling at the saturated water table, as we ooh and aah at the newest lakes. As we walk to the river and the path is a stream, and we stomp and slosh in rubber boots.

Tonight six planets line up in a cosmic parade: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Venus and Mercury. If you look towards the west half an hour after the sun sets you'll see them. I have a small telescope that I gave Charlie for Christmas and I shall line it up, like the boy in my Alexis Smith piece "Imagination Is More Important Than Knowledge." I am giddy. I stand on the kitchen bench to take pictures of the sunset because we haven't seen the sun for so long. An alignment of planets feels like an Event. It feels like a jolly exciting party. (And how lucky are we to still feel that sense of awe! How lucky are we to be alive right now in this universe, when things are dying and being reborn, better, stronger, with more love, more joy, more harmony.)

Outside you can feel it, the unfurling of joy. The trees stretching their fingers up towards heaven, pandiculating their trunks, reaching towards the sun. I can't contain it (the joy) as I drive home from the horse. I stop on the side of the road, confusing other drivers (on a lane that entertains about eleven cars a day, three arrive just as I pull over). I run along the road, jump up on the verge and I take a picture of five horses lying on the grass. Two are rugged. Three aren't. One has its head on the grass, sleeping. There hasn't been a lot of laying down on the grass since Christmas. In a world where everything is guidance, this too is important. The horses are saying, laying down in the sun, kick off your shoes and walk on the earth, ground yourself, literally ground yourself by laying flat on it and letting the earth's energies flood through your starved system.

At six o'clock this morning we still didn't know what the world would bring. Dawn could go either way really. We sat at the round table in the kitchen and drank tea - his with a lump of sugar, mine in my grandmother's white cup - and talked for the first time in a while because he has been away in Berlin, birthing movies into the world. I woke up with this thought: Words are Magic. Everything we think and everything we say will shape the world we're creating.  And that is what we're doing, sitting here, across from each other, with our tea, with the rosemary and jade and oxalis, the green candles and orange tangerines between us, co-creating the world that we're stepping into. We have no say in it and we have every say in it. "Every moment," says Eliot, "is a fresh beginning," and that's how we're starting today, not looking back at things we did in the past, but gliding forward, together, cognisant of the fact that there are maybe twenty more summers. Twenty more days that mark the start of spring, like this, with tea and sorrell, and the faint hum of Radio 3 which turns itself on somehow at about a quarter past six every day, and I have no idea how to make it not do that, or how to change the station, so here we are, captive, with Thomas Tallis and Ralph Vaughan Williams and the Tawny Owl that has been hooting first thing in the morning and as I go to bed for the last three days. Creation, Michael Meade reminds me, isn't an event that happened once in deepest pre-history, but something that continues to happen every single moment of every single day, little spiral fiddlehead ferns, bursting fractally into life. My ballet teacher when I was five, Mrs Behrens, told me that the arms never stop moving in dance, and the same is true. Nothing ever stops moving, coming into being, moving through the cycles of life and death and rebirth. 

Joy for the Spring that's coming in. Joy for the stuff that's been shed. 

And then it comes, this sun, bathing everything, begging for us to be out in it, making everything sing.

May you be well. May all people and animals be well, and happy, and at peace.

Some Thoughts on the Twenty Second

There is a fork in the road; one way is the path of love and the other is the path of fear.

Only good things happen on the twenty second of the month according to my mother. Understandably, as both of her children and her mother were born on that date. Twenty two is my random pet number for holding my breath or taking gulps of water or counting steps. I like its rather pleasing symmetry. But the weather in West Berkshire on the twenty second of January lists heavily towards miserable and the wet green branches and muddy paths, the flat grey skies and mossy walls are better experienced in person than viewed from the window in front of my desk. In it, it's fine. Outside of it, it's separate and doesn't beckon.

I have to gather reasons to be happy in January. I pick up things everywhere in the hope that they'll be useful. I speak into my phone on to my notes app when I'm driving, and write gratitude lists before I go to sleep. I also shove fistfuls of Vitamin D into my mouth. I like this though: 

"Every moment is a fresh beginning." - T.S. Eliot

Pam Gregory, who is an uber astrologer, in that her background is astrology but she is an all round wise woman and energy healer, one of the women I believe are holding up the world so it doesn't shift off its axes, believes that everything is energy (and science backs this up) and that your inner state shapes your outer reality. She chooses every day that it will be a day of happiness, or joy, or peace. Similarly, the lead monk in the Buddhist Monks Peace Walk, Bhikku Pannakara shares his simple practise by beginning each day with the affirmation "Today is going to be my peaceful day." He says you write it down, then you read it inside and then you read it out loud. By setting this intention, we plant a seed of peace in our hearts, and we continue to choose it no matter what life throws at us. (The late neuroscientist and founder of the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Jim Doty walks Mel Robbins through a similar manifestation technique on her podcast.)

This period leading into 2026 - now (and I say this with some urgency) - is all about choosing the life we want and stepping into our power to create that very life. It's no longer about the victim mentality of life happening to you, but rather the choosing exactly what you want ie, life happening for you. There is a lovely thing that happens when you realize that each one of us is a tiny little part of the whole, a bursting, blooming fractal extension of spirit or source or the great creative energy of the universe, or God. So we take responsibility every day and choose to live from a place of higher consciousness. Or at least, I suppose, we choose to be kind and not allow the coarsening of the world to do the same to us.

There is a lot of stuff out there, an endless pit of woo-woo philosophy and advice that would take you a few thousand lifetimes to get through. I have a read a lot of it and my criteria, although a little hazy, is pretty well marked (or boundaried). I trust people who have done the work and I trust those who have a clear academic background in science the most. But the intersection of science and spirituality is boundlessly fascinating to me. Yesterday for example I looked up "thirteen dimensions and string theory." It's butting up against each other all the time, and people are popping over to the other side in order to get a better view. I think (and I will admit to my own limited brain power here) that we are at the point where some questions just cannot be answered by science and spirituality (or, the notion of allowing that there are things that cannot be proved materially and that we have lost somehow our very keen gut and heart connection to the rest of the natural world) might provide some answers.

Case in point, Dr David Clements, a physicist who has advanced degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, and is now someone who communicates with ("channels") Pleiadians and Arcturians. Yes, I know. You probably saw the word "Pleiadian" and decided to stop reading. I was the same. But he is such a sweet and believable man, so grounded in science, and so self-deprecating, and makes so much sense, that it's hard to ignore. His conversation with Pamela Gregory is available on her YouTube channel from January 16 is utterly riveting.

The other astonishing thing is Season Two of The Telepathy Tapes. I think the shame around believing in this stuff has dissipated as I am noting many sceptical friends who are fully embracing this mind blowing podcast. People are allowing themselves to wake up so that they can witness the world evolving. Of particular note, the episode on creativity featuring Liz Gilbert and Ann Patchett, and the one ones on plant and animal communication. After I listened I couldn't get away from the feeling that I'm so lucky to live in a world where these things exist.

I was married for a long time to one of life's great enthusiasts. If he took up a new hobby, he fully committed to it and dedicated his days to it. Even if it was something I wasn't remotely interested in (going for hundred mile bike rides in lycra and cleats, for example) I was fully on board for his enthusiasm for life. It made Christmas presents a doddle. It's exciting to live with someone who is passionate about stuff. And often stuff I didn't understand. I learned to nod and smile at the necessary moments, because sometimes having something explained was even more complicated. My thirst for knowledge in the area of non-duality is something not really shared by anyone in my family, although I am grateful to them for being tolerant and embracing my eccentricity. It's not new. I had an imaginary friend when I was three or four, could feel ghosts in houses when I was ten or eleven, and had the full on psychedelic experience (woah, hay is just sparkling energy) by the time I was at Oxford, with my dear friend A, who has disappeared quietly no doubt into his beloved inner sanctum. Mushrooms weren't for partying; they were sacred. Always taken in the fields (Christchurch meadow), the woods, or, best of all on the wild moors of Ireland, amongst glittering verdure, sunlit heather, surrounded by curious, loving sheep. We knew it was about finding God although it was never said, and we knew that everything was connected. And I never forgot. I was a little disappointed that my philosophy degree didn't include more Huxley or Kesey or any of those cool guys, but there you go. I remember parsing the lyrics to "Over the Wall' by Echo and the Bunnymen and explaining to my aunt that it was about transcendence. Bless her for being so kind, and listening, wrapt.

My sobriety, I sometimes think, makes me dull. Occasionally I get the giggles and I relish those moments, but mostly it's me, drinking water, sitting at a table with my oldest friends while they drink delicious red wine and tell funny stories and I somehow seem to miss the point. It's awful feeling boring when you're used to being someone who sparkles. But it's also hard to have conversations about things you find utterly fascinating with people who think you are just slightly mad, not least because you don't drink. I think the assumption is that if you don't drink you judge those that do. It's the not the case. It's more about trying to match the energy, or get on the same wavelength. 

This new hobby, which isn't new and isn't really a hobby, could happily fill every waking hour and certainly does dominate car rides and late night reading. I am so sure of the goodness of it all. That it comes from a place of love, and that this is the way to exist in the world, with love, and through love. Slowly I'm finding my people, a network of women mostly who work with energy, or plants, or have a healing practise. I've stopped being self conscious and start inserting my research into conversations. There's a poetry group here, a sound healing forum there, people who recommend books, instagram friends I've never met who I know I'd love in real life. But rather like being a member of a secret society, it's not exactly something people want to speak about all the time. People like gossip, I've noticed. And it's something for which I can't really muster up any interest. Just this morning while waiting for the Oscar noms (in my day job) I realized that every single ad for every single tv show was so unbelievably awful that I couldn't believe that people watch such dross when there are so many other things in the universe of such mindblowing significance just waiting to be discovered. The world is a magical place, and yet we are pulled down into this swill with the American president in the middle of it. None of it means anything. It's Orwellian. All we need to do is start paying attention to what's really going on. All of the other stuff is just designed to keep us cowering. There is another path, and it's a path that involves love, kindness, nature, animals. And that's the path the Monks are treading. They're leading the way, all we have to do is follow.

If you're interested in a reading list or a podcast list, I'd be happy to send one your way. Sending lots of love to you and yours on this rainy, grey January day. We live in the most amazing, miraculous world.

 

A case for quiet and light

Hello from Boxing Day and happy holidays and merry merry my friends. Don't you love these days between Christmas and the New Year, when nothing is expected of you? We went for a long, long walk in the woods, with the whippet in his Newmarket jacket, red and yellow and alert, and saw other people similarly bundled up, with their dogs, their children, trundling along, with the crows above, skies white/grey, pines blue/green, one foot in front of another, realizing we're all doing that walking each other home thing Ram Dass talks about. Home for mince pies and tea and lighting the fire, and remembering this piece I wrote two weeks ago.

Last Tuesday night we went to our first Christmas carol service of the season. My oldest friend sings in the Battersea Choral Society and they do an annual Christmas concert to raise money for a local charity. I'd like to say we were gleeful on the way there, but it's funny what we bring to these events; reluctance, residual bits of work (because this seems to be the busy season) - anxiety for things that aren't done, worry about missing important calls - a bit of a sense that Christmas is only for children, a tiny bit of bah humbug, honestly. But we dutifully piled into the church, startled and happily surprised by the lights in London -- a wall of shimmery sparkles covering Peter Jones department store in Sloane Square, all kinds of jolly wreaths and twinkling baubles -- wearing our coats and gloves and hats even though it's not that cold. I wear my mother's double breasted brown tweed coat and one of her scarves, a jaunty red, covered in white horses (so hopeful), and I put on Christmas earings with red pomegranate jewels. We stumble into our row, where dear friends have saved seats, and we're a bit late, of course, and climb over people's bags and legs to get to our chairs. People are holding plastic glasses half filled with mulled wine and showing their teeth to each other. No doubt there were mince pies too, long devoured. Hello we say to our friends and the family of our friends and to the friends of the friends in the row in front, and we lean across each other and catch as much as one can, smilingly, hello, hello, are you ready for Christmas, is all well, making future plans of which 75% won't be kept, but are meant kindly and truthfully in the moment. The orchestra warms up. And the music starts. The nice conductor welcomes us. "He looks a bit like Sam Mendes, doesn't he?" I say to Charlie. "Well, I s'pose.." says Charlie. And the choir is there at the front of the church, men in black tie, women in black dresses, and sparkly things in their hair, different looks and hairdos, rows of black against the stone of the walls. I see my friend Vivien there in the middle, utterly poised and focused on the conductor, warm light on her face, her shoulder-length hair shimmering, her glasses perched on her nose, and I think about how I've known her since we were twelve when we sang in the school choir together in our blue cassocks (and Ian Dury at home). I'm so proud of her. I know how hard she has worked. I feel my heart swell when I see her there, with her book of music, immersed. The hymns come and some involve audience participation, the old favorites "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear," "Hark The Herald Angels Sing." We mumble in our chair, shuffle to our feet, sing heartily, with relief, remembering what it is to be singing carols again. We imagine we're children again, or think of our children, and nativity plays from Christmases past.  A funny reading; a woman reads a recipe for a fruit cake which includes frequent testing of the whiskey; brilliantly, she acts drunker and drunker, hiccuping up on the pulpit, the audience in fits of laughter. I hold Charlie's hand. I sing too loudly. I'm now glad we're there and glad that we're all there together.

And then "O Holy Night" arranged by John Rutter. It might be nice, perhaps, if you don't know it, that you listen to it for maximum effect. It's here if you'd like to.

It's a sacred song about the night Jesus was born, written in 1847 by a Jewish composer Adolphe Adam, adapted from a french poem named Minuit, Chretiens written by an atheist wine merchant, Placid Cappeau. There is a rumour that during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, there was a temporary cease fire when a French soldier stood up and began singing it in the trenches, which inspired a similar response from the other side. 

O holy night, the stars are brightly shining/It is the night of the dear Saviour's birth/Long lay the world in sin and error pining/Till He appeared/And the soul felt its worth/The thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices/For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn

There is a swell in the music, a crescendo, and the altos come in during the next line:

Fall on your knees, Oh hear the angel voices

Now, I don't know about you, but I burst into floods of tears at this point. Tears of relief, of joy, of feeling understood. It's the most powerful hymn.

(I said to my friend afterwards, "I totally fell apart during O holy night," and she said, thank goodness, "Oh I always do. I sob!")

So why do we sob? Why does this simple carol have just a profound effect on us? I would like to suggest that whether you are a believer or an atheist you can relate to the idea of falling to your knees, of literally being knocked to your knees as you give up trying to hold it all together. When you loosen your grip on the ironclad framework you've created to pin everything on, and fall to your knees, metaphorically or not, there is massive relief. You discover you are not alone. Somehow there is enormous strength in the idea of no longer holding on and yet feeling totally supported, as if you're not alone, that you're never alone, and that the universe, or God, or the angels in this case, have your back.

Fall on your knees, Oh hear the angel voices

Imagine everything leaving you, all the stress and the anxiety and the clinging to the small ego, just to experience the awe of the angels singing.

This emptying is what Cynthia Bourgeault calls "kenosis." I've always imagined this to be the state one achieves through meditation. That quiet stillness which allows you to hear what is intended for you. But it's easy to achieve by walking. Walk out into the trees, into the middle of a field, or just sit in your garden quietly, and it will come over you, the stillness. We are so busy! We fill each living moment with things. How wonderful to stop, to fall to your knees, to allow space for the angels. It's a childlike point of light that lives in each one of us.

The song continues

Truly He taught us to love one another/His law is love and His gospel is peace/Chains shall He Break for the slave is our brother/And in His name/All oppression shall cease 

There is so much anxiety and fear in the world and none of us are immune from it, even if we actively avoid reading the news. (I merely glimpse at the New York Times front page, but the crazy has a way of pulling you in.)  I'm aware that the planets are all over the place, that the world is chaotic, that peace and joy have been usurped by the cynical, the power-hungry, the greedy, and everything feels wobbly. Therefore, I urge you to take time every day for a little bit of quiet where you can feel still and just listen for a bit.

I am drawn back again and again to Mary Karr who writes about how she came to prayer:

Okay, I couldn’t stop drinking. I’d tried everything but prayer. And somebody suggested to me that I kneel every morning and ask God for help not picking up a cocktail, then kneel at night to say thanks. “But I don’t believe in God,” I said. Again Bill Knott came to mind:

People who get down

on their knees to me

are the answers to my prayers.

—Credo

The very idea of prostrating myself brought up the old Marxist saw about religion being the opiate for the masses and congregations dumb as cows. God as Nazi? I wouldn’t have it. My spiritual advisor at the time was an ex-heroin addict who radiated vigor. Janice had enough street cred for me to say to her, “Fuck that god. Any god who’d want people kneeling and sniveling—”

Janice cut me off. “You don’t do it for God, you asshole,” she said. She told me to try it like an experiment: pray for thirty days, and see if I stayed sober and my life got better.

And you can watch her talk about this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUrz6tWfBxY

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On Christmas Day, Charlie was ringing the bells and I wandered over after meditating with Nigel at 8.30am  (a long walk, all of about 100 yards) to catch the nine o'clock service. The vicar was late. He often is. I'm not much of a fan but I decided to give him a chance because last year's Christmas sermon wasn't bad at all, and my view of him had begun to shift. But at 9.15am people were beginning to fidget. The man next to me, Derek, and I discussed dementia and old people's homes. Gwen, who was in the pew in front of us turned around and said "Oh I hope the vicar hasn't overslept." I was contemplating that the thought "you had one job" doesn't feel like a very Christian thing to ponder, especially next to Derek and behind Gwen at 9.15am on Christmas morning in a church built in 1100. He lumbered in a few minutes later and sped us through the service. There was no pianist or organist and he was clearly in a rush for the next service a few miles away, so half way through the first warbling verse of Hark The Herald Angels Sing, he shouted "Last Verse!" & of course we were all so surprised that we all dutifully obeyed. No chance of a Blessing of the Animals, then? And then in the call and response prayers, he started speaking the next paragraph just as we were speaking the "and with thy spirit" bit, which was a wee bit rude, don't you thing. By the time we got to the sermon, my arms were firmly cross across my chest and I had a "this better be good" expression across my face.

He did the thing that seasoned speakers do where he started to look from one pew to another, one face to the next, in order to try to connect, and refused to give him anything. I was having a Christmas Morning Mexican Stand Off with the vicar.

But then he said this bit about the light. About coming to a stable and experiencing the coming of the light in the form of the divine birth. And he talks about the light and how the light allows us to see things clearly and as they are. And how we need to see life as it is. And somehow I dropped my cynicism and I forgave Father Paul for being up too late last night because I remembered that the only way to find equanimity is to choose to see the world as it is and not as you wish it to be. Not because I am good person but because I remembered for a glimpse of a moment the person I'd like to be.

The only place to come from is love. 

The only way to be is kind. 

The only way to live is now. 

And to see things as they are, without judgement. 

Again and again.

 - Jon Kabat-Zinn

I think that we choose to walk in the light. I think we look at the finite number of days we have on this planet and we make a choice. Actually, I'm not sure we have a choice.