Birdie' s lightness of being

My neighbor Birdie, who is long and lean and blonde and used to be married to a professional tennis player who was by all accounts quite a Man About Town, and has the calves to show for it, is standing in her garden at about 7 o'clock, staring into the middle distance where there is a red and yellow Little Tikes Ride On Car abandoned under an apple tree. It's the hottest day of the year, according to the tabloids. She has one hand up to her forehead to shield the sun and she suddenly waves her hand in front of her face dismissively. 

"I can't even look at that car" she says. "Get that awful thing out of my sight! I got into it the day before yesterday to impress a grandchild and I got completely stuck."  

She has kindly walked out of the house, despite doctor's orders to stay in bed, to bid us goodbye because she is kind and she has very good manners. It's the day after a back operation for something I can only describe as like kissing spine in horses. She should be taking it easy and eating soft foods, or something like that, but she has insisted that we come over to visit and cheer her up, and so we have, with bowls of bloody mulberries and purple French beans.

We'd arrived to find her propped up in front of the evening news in an elegant, butter yellow short-sleeved linen blouse and a pair of shorts.  The dog, an almost human Irish terrier, sits next to her and raises her head happily when my whippet walks in. They run off together, not bothering to use door but leaping on to the sofa and straight out of the sash window into the garden, like Romeo and Juliet. Birdie's legs are smooth and brown. She's smiling. "Let me show you my scar!" she says, like a seven year old boy, struggles to her feet and proudly lifts her shirt to display a wide white bandage with some dried blood on it. "Rather neat, don't you think?" I admire it dutifully and make the kind of noises I think one is supposed to make when staring at a wound. The room is cosy, full of jolly oil paintings by Birdie, comfortable shabby chic chairs and sofas, tartan wool rugs, the ubiquitous drinks trolley that might fit well in Palm Beach.

"God, it's hot" she says. But she hasn't given up to it as I have. I'm grumpy and not enjoying the weather. Spain is supposed to be this hot.  Sardinia is supposed to swelter. England is not.  I'm completely off-kilter and not being brave at all. Birdie is the opposite. She's This is the Englishness we need, I think, the keeping calm and buggering gently on as if nothing is wrong. This is drinking a gin and tonic and adding an extra cube of ice as a nod to the weather. 

"Not very impressed with the eclipse. Were you?" she says. "Bit of an anticlimax. Thought the skies would go black." "No, we were only at 91%." I replied. "But how on earth do you know that, you clever thing?"  "Oh, I don't know - Google?"

"We lay on the grass and looked at the meteors last night." I say. "How extraordinary. That's awfully woo-woo," she says. "Come to think of it, I'd rather like to do that. James! James! Do you think we can lie out on the lawn tonight at midnight to watch the meteors?" "Darling, you've just had a back operation. It's probably not the best idea." "Hmm" she pouted, charmingly.

Her husband, who is an army man, a guards man in fact, who rides horses and wears a rather rakish bearskin hat, is in the kitchen in a gingham pinny, peeling mushrooms, and about to put a chicken in the oven for dinner.

"James is awfully good," she says.  She lowers her voice conspiratorially, "I mean he hasn't put the chicken *in* yet, but he's here cooking for me, his invalid wife. I am lucky."

"I want to live by the sea" I say. "Oh you mustn't leave," she says, "we've finally found neighbors! No, you really mustn't leave." 

I describe my various sojourns to places on the south coast. The brilliant idea I had of going to West Wittering on a Saturday morning in August in the hottest year on record. How there were three or four football pitch sized fields full of parked cars, camper vans, caravans, tables and chairs, and a whole array of picnic items. How the whippet who hadn't encountered spits and bars and sand dunes before, flung himself into a pool of sea water mistaking it for terra firma and sunk quickly.

"Norfolk is a good place to live," I say. "Interesting, Bohemian people, good food, artists, potters, writers, beaches, not too many tourists. And Holkham."

"But you never *get* there," says Birdie. "I mean I went there once with Andrew, my first husband, in his little convertible and we were driving for hours! Hours and hours. I couldn't believe how long we were driving for. Does it actually exist? Do you actually ever get to Norfolk? Maybe it's an imaginary place made up by people. It could be."

I've brought her a t-shirt from Pam Gregory, mostly to make her laugh. She's an avid Telegraph reader, not quite a Reformer, but awfully close. It says boldly on the front "an ever-expanding consciousness of love." "But what on earth does that mean?" she says, quite amiably. I don't bother to explain. 

Birdie has lightness of being. It's a marvelous thing that some of the more fortunate English upper classes possess. It's a way of not taking life too seriously. To feel deep things but never to say them out loud.  To feel that it rather dull to complain and weak to express any kind of emotion other than delight, except if it's related to an animal. (Because you can tell dogs everything.) My mother had a friend exactly like this and I'm reminded of her, my adopted godmother, who was naughty and lighthearted, and silly quite often, and so not like any other grown up we knew. In fact, she was more of a child than a grown up. Always a smudge of red lipstick, always a grin, always an immaculate white stock, velvet hunt cap, a polished silver hipflask inherited from her grandmother who hunted sidesaddle with the Bicester, out hunting. And lots of very naughty stories deemed absolutely inappropriate for children that she would share with us liberally and with relish. We rode together and she would encourage me and my pony to jump enormous tree trunks scattered across Northchurch Common. I was never afraid when she was around.

Birdie told me in the first ten minutes of meeting her, after a glass of wine, "I'm really rather right wing." We were in my garden having a drink before Sunday lunch.  Such a brilliantly Tourette'sy type thing to say to someone you hardly know. I looked her in the eye, smiled broadly, and said without a hesitation "Well, I'm really rather left wing so I'm sure we'll be the best of friends." And we both laughed.

We walk back down our little lane, aimlessly picking blackberries as we go. The whippet walks slowly and close to the hedge where there is a little shade because it really is awfully hot. My mind is stuck on an image of a beautiful tall woman fighting to get out of a child's car. "I think Birdie has learned how to live lightly." I say.  I don't really know what this means, but it feels as if I think too much and feel things too much and I want to be more like Birdie, the way she looks at the world. What's the point of being eccentric, if you can't amuse people? I know I'm getting very serious about everything. He hums at me, the hm-mm hum he does when he wants me to know that he's paying attention, but can't really be bothered to engage. We keep walking, with the setting sun on the horizon on our right, then the river, the parched and ochre-colored hayfield, the massive oak where the rooks congregate, the hedge, the blackberries, the whippet, us. 

Comma (solvitur ambulando)

I woke up at sunrise, took the dog and walked down to the river. The grass is brown and dry, but there was a cool mist, a cheeky little low cloud right in the corner of the field where I saw the barn owl. It floated just above the parched earth. The air had a tiny bit of a chill, cold enough to make you feel as if autumn was coming. Cold enough to make me pleased I was wearing my sweatshirt. On the other side of the little footbridge, where the cricket bat willows grow in their straight, regimented lines, the thistles had burst their flowers and it appeared almost as a dusting of snow in the misty field, a few bits of effluvia in the air. This is what happens when you walk; you forget why you set out or what you were feeling before you started walking, because all of a sudden, your mind quietens and your consciousness moves into your heart, and the only important things are putting one foot in front of another, and picking the occasional blackberry. I am very choosy about blackberries. As I told Selma, Charlie's grandchild, they have to be fat, darkest black, and shiney. But the variety of flavours is quite stupendous, ranging from soft and bland, to fragrant and exotic, to sharp and sweet together. When I walk, fragments of stories come into my head, usually first lines of things, but the lines are so fat and fertile that the words themselves seem to hold the entire story. And by the river itself, the Kennet, foot by foot on the palomino path, a cloud hung in front of me, as made up of tiny specks of white organza, in the most curious shape; a comma. A comma, I thought. What does this mean? (I know clouds don't have to mean anything, of course I know that, but yesterday at the yard I saw a penguin doing back stroke, one wing up in the air, purposeful, and I showed it to my friends Lizzie and Christine and they saw it too.) What is a comma though? When you get up in the morning after sleeping out on the roof outside your room because it was the hottest day of the year, and you stay awake with your glasses on, and your dog in its bed beside you, because you want to see the metorites again, and you wake up to the wood pigeons, but you feel slightly off and know that the only way to get back on track is to walk, that there is actually no other way, and that there is all this pressure to enjoy this "amazing energy" brought in by the eclipse, and that you are somehow behind, and will be left behind, again, abandoned, but at least there is the dog. When it is a day like this and you see a comma hanging in the sky above the path you are walking on, (imagine a paisley pattern, or a mango) then this is good. This means that you are on the right path and that there is more to come. More to come! Space for more!

My favourite response to the eclipse is "is that it? I thought it would get darker." It's the most British response you could imagine. In Mallorca and Barcelona and Poland, according to the New York Times coverage, people are wearing their eclipse glasses, and brandishing their cereal boxes and colanders, and standing in the ocean, and whooping, couples with their arms around each other, people grinning into the dissolving sun, bespectacled babies strapped to their backs, but in England, people are lying around in parched parks, beers in hand, being woozily underwhelmed. Charlie made a tiny hole in a piece of printer paper and we sat in the garden next to the fruit cage and marveled at the tiny emerging image of the crescent as we baked. Later on, when it was dark, we lay down in the same spot, wrapped in blankets, and watched the Perseid meteor shower. It takes a full fifteen minutes for your eyes to become accustomed to the light, and then you can see everything. Stars shooting across the sky, disoriented planes, the jiggedy movement of a supposed ufo, the milky way. What on earth having we been doing all our lives that was so important that we haven't done this before, I ask Charlie? Why aren't we here every night. This whole show is here every night!

We're all blundering through, aren't we? I forget and then remember what I'm supposed to be doing. I forget that there is another place to be that isn't the bad place. I forget that there is just a step to be taken and you will be met. I forget that I won't be saved. That we are the ones that save ourselves. That everything is here. Everything you need is here. (Dont' forget.) Everything you need is here and available, but you have to ask, or move toward it, or find the tools to get you from here to there. There are no free rides. You will be lifted if you jump into the air, higher than you can possibly jump. But this is true: the universe will meet you, but not if you stay in your safe and rigid box. Honestly, I get stuck in the box a lot. The box shapeshifts too. Sometimes the box is my chair, my desk, my laptop, my work. Sometimes the box is my thoughts when I believe them too much. Sometimes the box is the shadow I think I've ditched the other side of the Mississippi while taking the long road to Damascus. The imaginary ogre. The egoic reaction. Two steps are all that is needed. One foot. And then the other. Repeat. You will be met.

I work with a company that takes the day off on Friday in the summer. So civilized, right?  Today I've been dreaming of taking the dog (the two year old Whippet, not the fifteen year old Frenchie) to the beach on the south coast. It's probably an hour and a half away and it's all I could dream of yesterday on The Hottest Day of the Year, as I made endless glasses of iced lemon squash. I dreamed of a secret beach that no-one had heard of, with seagulls and white sand and millions of shells and soft lapping waves. I know this will not be the reality. I know there will be red-faced middle aged men with beers in their hands and a beach awash in umbrellas, but I don't really care. The sea is the sea. Sea. Walking. With dog.  And journal. What's not to love?

If not now, when?

I don't know about you, but I think a lot about where your attention goes, energy flows. It's all the witchy woo-woo stuff that I love (why not, seriously? what's the alternative? dreary stuff...if now isn't the time for magic and dream fulfillment and spreading love and joy, I don't know what is). Today Pam said (because I hang on to every word that Pam Gregory utters) "I definitely say that whatever you're focused on this solar eclipse will get bigger." Watch here at around 7.47. It's quite a thought.  Whatever you are focused on will get bigger.

This is the very thought that derailed me on the 8.8 portal - the Lion's gate. Everything will be manifested and magnetized, they said. Me: In tears in the garden, feeling like a failure. Dude, it's a lot of pressure. Not only are you struggling to keep afloat, you're struggling to keep afloat with the knowledge that it's going to be more of the same. My only analogy is acid, to be honest. That awful thing of trying to keep the bad thoughts out of your mind, scary as it is, because it will only get worse.

I am teetering at the edge of the precipice, one foot in each world. My left foot on the parched earth, locked into my persona as a crack PR person, my myriad hands scrolling through endless emails, my brain filled with creative ways to unlock puzzles and crises. Snap your fingers and I know what to do.  It's a business suit that no longer fits. The buttons are just a bit too tight. And my right foot dangling over the edge, remarkably calm and cool, feeling the soft, salty ocean breeze, ready to step off and float like a bird into a new world, a new existence. It's calm and uncluttered out there. I can see trees and deer and horses, and laughing grandchildren, and the vast blue sea stretching out ahead of me. It's filled with possibility, in every single moment.

They call it flow. It's the feeling you get when you are doing something you love and you can't stop because one thing magically turns into another. This happens to me when I start. Starting is hard, as those with neuro-spicy brains can attest to. And persecution is real. I remember when it started on Sunday  morning. I woke feeling the weight had lifted, but with a thin residue of paranoia. An amount not assuaged by tea, but once I stepped out of bed and walked past an open window, the cool dawn air blew in, and I heard the wood pigeons cooing gently outside, and like a slap, it all changed. It threw me into moving tables and whipping up curry mayonnaise (lemon works to bring a bit of sour if you're doing this for non-dairy folk), and stripping roast chickens, and picking the dahlias I'd forgotten were there, because they were crisp and perky in the morning breeze, and pulling vases out of cupboards, and finding tablecloths, and choosing glasses and gently peeling the baking paper off the Claudia Roden inspired orange and almond cake which I'd made in a silly tin that wasn't nonstick. The night before I'd stuck cocktail sticks in it as it was cooling, and the hedgehog cake now magically stuck together, sponge clinging to sponge. I don't ever want to stop when I'm like this. Choosing each flower feels bursting with possibility. The satisfying way the table comes together. The way in which we inhabit the garden, all of us who live here; the birds, the trees, the flowers who are struggling through this heat. But this is morning and this is when the world is full of optimism. It's bursting with it. And the opportunity offers itself every single morning, no matter what the day before was like. No matter what. Wrap it up. Go to sleep. Start again. Start better. I knew I was in it and it was where I was meant to be when a black, orange and white butterfly, a Red Admiral, landed on the orange and white tablecloth I'd just put down, only a few inches from where I was standing, and did gentle jumping jacks with her wings, as if she were clapping.

We have no control. This idea of free will is false. I'll acknowledge that something like compatibilism exists. And exerting control as if we have it is worse. Holding on tight to the ideas that you formed years and years ago will not serve you. Let them go, I tell myself. Just let them go. Be the peaceful observer. Even if the worst pain you can imagine is happening to you it's not about you. And you can't fixing by engaging in it. Even if your child isn't speaking to you and you don't know why and you feel betrayed and bewildered and as if your heart is being pierced with daggers, the only way to survive this is by neutrality. By wishing good for them. By unhitching your cart from theirs. By letting them go. It's as trite as that saying on the Holly Hobby lunchbox you treasured as a thirteen year old, "If you love someone, let them go and if they come back to you..." I can't remember how it ends.

We're fighting a losing battle with this heat. Our gardens are slowly going brown. The grapes, the figs, the roses and the dahlias (the larger ones) are surviving. Other  plants are withering. It's just too much drought. In Spain, it feels okay, natural, expected, but no-one is prepared here, not the birds, not the deer; I have seen at least five lone does in brown fields standing still, looking tired, disoriented. And yesterday a fledgling blackbird on the ground in the churchyard. I gave him water in the top of my water bottle. He didn't really want to move and didn't back away from me as I knelt down next to him.  I checked this morning, and with the help of the internet I've ascertained that juvenile fledgling blackbirds may indeed spend a couple of days on the ground, within earshot of their parents. Empty nest and all that. 

As I look out now, I swear that our false acacia tree has expanded its canopy to cover more of the house, more of the tiny plants, to protect us all from the sun. Thank you false acacia, or Chinese Pagoda Tree as you are called on Martha's Vineyard.

What does any of it mean, anyway? Love is all there is.

This struck me hard while in Spain for my nephew's wedding to a wonderful Spanish woman named Asunta. In this particular family, and perhaps in other Spanish families, it's customary to write and sing songs to the bride and groom the night before the wedding. We stood in an old house surrounded by trees, looking out over a pristine valley and distant hills under a sky shot with pale orange, as hundreds of cousins sang songs to the happy couple, who were perched on a veranda above us. Joyful songs about dreams and falling in love. Old men, young children, a dog even, all singing loudly and clapping along in time with the music. We Americans and British stood by, amused, transfixed, caught up in it all, wishing we too were Spanish, and able to sing out our joy so loudly. There is a charming politesse with the Spanish of this kind of gentility. They are doctors and architects, investors, and their great great grandparents found their fortunes in Argentina, not quite conquistadors, but brave young men who needed new maps, new horizons, new fortunes at the end of nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The world was lighter then. Tales of courage and the pioneering spirit existed. The choice was the church, the army, or exploring the world, with a slightly naive and delightfully brave can-do spirit, in breeches and excellent straw hats and the kind of boots made from Spanish artisans that could last a while exploring the barren land of Patagonia.

What I mean is, it's time to do the thing you've always dreamed of, and to dance as if no-one is watching. Why not?

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.