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?