“I felt free and therefore I was free.” Jack Kerouac Jacky was off on her hols last week, in a camper van and wandering free. I was here left at the helm (anything could happen!), on the computer, feeling a bit miffed, and slightly, ever so slightly jealous. I love the open road. As…
We have a soul at times. No one’s got it non-stop, for keeps. Day after day, year after year may pass without it. Sometimes it will settle for awhile only in childhood’s fears and raptures. Sometimes only in astonishment that we are old. It rarely lends a hand in uphill tasks, like moving furniture, or…
Over the past month of my holiday and especially my week of home retreat one of the things I have recognised is how susceptible I am to chronic stress. I noticed this at the weekend, where we had over 50 new students online for their first weekend of their Masters in Mindfulness with the University…
Last week I had a busy work week, lots of busyness going on at home, a wee holiday up to North Wales with family and then I had my young grandchildren to stay – they are 7 and 5… And so although I have many tales to tell about all that – it wasn’t exactly…
Where I live is very prone to days of fog. It furtively appears, seemingly out of nowhere. It can be hot and sunny with cloudless blue skies and then suddenly the whole landscape disappears into white nothingness. Even in my garden I can sit and watch the wet mist swirling around just feet away from…
It’s all change again, as the months of solitary lockdown in one place, give way to travel and company. The ground shifts again and we negotiate our way to a new new normal, with face masks and the opportunity for a hug within a bubble. Since the beginning of lockdown, I have been living in…
This morning as I walked along the lakeshore, I fell in love with a wren and later in the day with a mouse the cat had dropped under the dining room table. In the shadows of an autumn evening, I fell for a seamstress still at her machine in the tailor’s window, and later for…
It is possible, I suppose that sometime we will learn everything there is to learn: what the world is, for example, and what it means. I think this as I am crossing from one field to another, in summer, and the mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either knows enough already or knows enough…
The washing never gets done. The furnace never gets heated. Books never get read. Life is never completed. Life is like a ball which one must continually catch and hit so that it won’t fall. When the fence is repaired at one end, it collapses at the other. The roof leaks, the kitchen door won’t…