Puddles & grace

Good morning from a rainy Friday in West Berks, on the fringes of Storm Austen. The leaves are beginning to fall, but we don't have the variety of color you hear about from the East Coast of the United States. I listened by mistake to a wonderful piece on NPR from New Hampshire where the colors of the trees were being described, "marmalade, marigold, goldenseal, burgundy." When you live in the country and you have a dog you really have no choice but to go out in it and once you're do you're happy to have done so because your slightly recalcitrant personality swells with the dampness. Because it's rainy and because it's grey, and because my lovely kundalini yoga teacher Gemma said, "in Ayurvedic terms, in Autumn we are all vata," we drink large glasses of water and head out on a walk to our local team rooms in Aldermaston for breakfast. We sit among cakes and millionaire's shortbread, rocky road bars, glossy brown chocolate brownies, sip flat whites and order eggs on toast with avocado (or envy-enducing sausages in Charlie's case). Pip the whippet, who my daughter says looks like a sardine, and he does, long and thin and smooth-haired and blue grey, settles in a pool on the floor, on my puffa jacket. It's a test for him, the proximity to the cakes.

All of life feels to me like a succession of puddles that you step into always surprised to find how deep they go. You think you're on one track, but you step into a puddle and there you are, whoosh, transported to another world, like Alice or the children from the Faraway Tree. And being in one means it's hard to remember that there are others.

I am happy. Despite everything that is happening in the world (the government in the UK is suggesting we stockpile water, crisps, sardines, twiglets, borlotti beans). I think of the scene at Costco this morning after this announcement and I feign a faint, back of hand to brow.) 

We need bigger maps by which to measure what is going on. But that is another topic.  Note to self: Cynthia Bourgeault on this subject. If you're interested into a deeper dive, this conversation with Cynthia Bourgeault is worth a listen (aka transformational).

On the subject of pools you step into, I took my mother who is 91 to the hospital in Oxford yesterday for a biopsy on a skin rash she developed over the summer that seems to be confounding the GP. I imagined this to be a routine visit, but I was wrong. My mother has not left the retirement home where she lives in the whole year she has been there, except for a notable bicycle ride on a large tricycle with a seat at the front where the lovely Mary, who is Strong, Muscular and Brave, and usually the sous chef, took my mother, wrapped in a blanket to the local pub and back. She couldn't go in because she didn't have her wheelchair, but she loved the experience, wind blowing through her hair, smiling at passers by, getting a view of the village she lives in. Because of the wheelchair we had to order a special kind of taxi, and because I was nervous of helping her if she needed the loo, we were lucky enough to have a carer come along with us too. Vanessa is tiny and smiley and has just moved to England two years ago from Ghana. They refer to her as "little Vanessa." Grainne our driver is an Irish former teacher with two grown daughters in the arts. Her dark red van is customized with pulleys and clips, straps and carrabiners that pull the wheelchair up the ramp and set it in the back, looking out.  Off we went on a sunny, crisp, blue October day, up into the Wessex Downs, to Blewbury, Upton, Abingdon and on to the city of dreaming spires. "Thank you, Bente," said Vanessa, "I've never been to Oxford before and because of you I'm going there today." The green fields and yellow and orange leaves whizzed by and other than a few whispy distant hill-looking clouds on the horizon, the sky was a relentless, glorious pale blue. The kind of sky you expect on Thanksgiving, the kind of sky you expect when you are off work and you are a little out of your routine, not unpleasantly. We were on an adventure. And had I known I would've brought a picnic and a thermos of tea.

The hospital waiting room was packed with all kinds of people, and the requisite woman with a large white bandage wrapped around her head, another man with stiches all over his face, a kind couple who offered us chairs next to each other. There is a certain generosity of spirit the English have in these situations. I am reminded of my late sister and the way she spoke to people she didn't know, with an intimate, conspiratorial tone.. A small boy in a jumper depicting sheep and tractors, who was with both his grandmother and his great-grandmother (his grandma and his nan) greeted everyone as they came in. "I like your shoes," my mother said. "They're waterproof," he replied, proudly. His nan came out of the consulting room, wobbling a little on her stick and he rushed towards her like a labrador puppy, shouting "Nan, Nan," and you are reminded of the big hearts of small children whose love has not yet shrunk.  A nurse came out to tell us the doctor was running late ("How late?" "I can ask?") and sent us down to the Costa coffee place at the other end of the hospital. We navigated the wheelchair up and down ramps and through a glass corridor with fig and mulberry trees on either side of it, through a passage with framed pieces of Japanese wrapping paper, and then asked about the coffee which we could smell, (coffee like bacon is very inviting whether or not you like either) but not locate. "Oh there's a League of Friends upstairs" said a helpful woman in a lanyard. We took the elevator up and found ourselves in the most charming place which wouldn't have been out of place in 1961. Two slightly grumpy but very efficient ladies in pinnies serving tea and coffee out of enormous pots. Wartime sized pots. Handwritten signs on scraps of paper in leaky biro. No cappucino, no fancy teas, just good old English builder's, and the kind of weak, milky coffee we had at school or you can get at American diners, also doughnuts, KitKat bars, egg mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread, tomato cuppa soups and so on. My mother and I shared a cup of coffee and a doughnut (she generously refused to eat the jammy bits) and Vanessa nibbled on some chocolate. My ma, who as you know is Norwegian and forthright, and now a nonogenarian Norwegian with no filter and takes enormous pride in saying what she thinks no matter who hears, who had been complaining bitterly about the doctor running so far behind, now settled in at our little table and I realized she was enjoying our little adventure. We looked up Ghana on the map and found it was next to Côte D'Ivoire and many miles away from Senegal where I'd imagined it to be.  North of it is a country I'd never heard of - Burkina Faso. A good geography lesson. 

The doctor was lovely. An overachiever of a young woman, prone to anxiety, no doubt, who apologized at least five times for being and hour and a half late. My mother, in her typical fashion did not let her off the hook. But even my mother warmed. The best news was that the biopsy was ruled; no pesky and painful scraping of the skin. The doctor took my mother's face in her hands, gently, as if in prayer, as she scanned it. It was a loving gesture. She was genuinely invested in my mother's wellbeing, something you expect from a doctor but isn't alway present in the days of budget restrictions and a dirth of resources. I could feel my mother relaxing, knowing she was in these able hands. Imagine the indignities of realizing that your faculties, your movement, your decision making abilities are diminished. Imagine realizing that you can no longer make yourself some scrambled eggs, a cup of tea, that you are fully in the hands of people that aren't your family and that you have to trust for your wellbeing. I say "it must be awful, mamma." And she says "you don't know, you have no idea what it's like." I don't, it's true. But today, I saw her shoulders drop and the anxiety (which she keeps well masked, inside her little cashmere sweater and pearls) dissipate slightly.

Our journey home was epic; instead of taking the ring road from Headington, we drove into the city center on this bright blue day to point out to Vanessa South Parks, Magdalen, Christ Church Meadow, the Isis, Blackwells. Bustling tourists everywhere, with folded umbrellas and backpacks, the familiar and yet not so familiar buildings passing us by, a flicker of a memory from the Covered Market where John and I used to go for breakfast when we were barely twenty -- bacon, eggs and even fried bread. Dark brown tea from a massive silver or aluminum urn with a spigot, yellow and green formica tables. In our burgundy chariot, my mother in the back like Boedacea, we her underlings protecting her from the front, our magnificent warrior woman of a driver, we marched through the center of Oxford, a happy little band. "We really should have brought a picnic," I say. It was not as I expected it to turn out. We had not anticipated this unexpected joy.

Grace is an unearned kindness. 

As Annie Lamott says:

“Grace is-well, it's a-it's a gold star, except you didn't earn it and you'll never be able to pay it back.”

 

 

Mystery of Meteors

I discovered this poet today. I am so delighted to have done so. This is Eleanor Lerman. 

 

Mystery of Meteors

​

I am out before dawn, marching a small dog through a meager park

Boulevards angle away, newspapers fly around like blind white birds

Two days in a row I have not see the meteors

though the radio news says they are overhead

Leonid’s brimstones are barred by clouds; I cannot read

the signs in heaven, I cannot see night rendered into fire

​

And yet I do believe a net of glitter is above me

You would not think I still knew these things;

I get on the train, I buy the food, I sweep, discuss,

consider gloves or boots, and in the summer,

open windows, find beads to string with pearls

You would not think that I had survived

anything but the life you see me living now

​

In the darkness, the dog stops and sniffs the air

She has been alone she has known danger,

and so now she watched for it always

and I agree, with the conviction of my mistakes.

But in the second part of my life, slowly, slowly,

I begin to council bravery.  Slowly, slowly,

I begin to feel the planets turning, and I am turning

toward the crackling shower of their sparks

​

These are the mysteries I could not approach when I was younger:

the Boulevards, the meteors, the deep desires that split the sky

Walking down the paths of the cold park

I remember myself, the one who can wait out anything

So I caution the dog to go silently, to bear with me

the burden of knowing what spins on and on above our heads

​

For this is our reward: Come Armageddon, come fire or flood,

come love, not love, millennia of portents—

there is a future in which the dog and I are laughing

Born into it, the mystery, I know we will be saved

 

-from The Mystery of Meteors by Eleanor Lerman

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.