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.