Once, we hunted. Now we drive to the supermarket. Once, we cleared ground, cleared forest, made tools out of stones, made fire, discovered the workings of seasons and seeds and water, raised what we needed, feared the anger of clouds, marked days and time, accepted the spirit-shapes of our imagination, stored food for the winter, ate and celebrated the turning of nature's seasons and our own, gave names to the incarnations of nature, raised children, saw fish in the sea and went out over the sea, built homes, gathered into settlements, became communities.
    Now we have the vegetable aisle. We had Gods and now we have Religions. In my local supermarket, a sign on the wall tells me that every time I re-use a plastic carrier bag, the earth says thank-you. Uh huh. Imagine an ancient ritual fire, bright against the night, the young (wo)men dancing, painted faces, high on their tribe's fermented elixir, invoking the spirits of the earth to acknowledge their transition into adulthood. Lightning flashes. And out of the fire, the voice of the earth and all the elements says something like, "Thank you for re-using your drinking vessels."
    Perhaps the Goddess's message, after all, is more along the lines of, "Drive carefully." Or, "Remember to check the sell-by date."
    Perhaps.
    Not.
    Perhaps the earth hasn't changed as we have changed away from it. Perhaps the earth has stayed as it was. Remember?
    This safe world is all that we worked for, as we worked out how to build walls to keep out the elements, how to fish, how to plant seeds so that they would give us bread next year, how to make bread, how to live. All along, this is the world we were making.
    But I wonder if the earth, when it sees us re-using our carrier bags, picking the organic lettuce, driving carefully home, thinks: what's happened to these guys? 
   

So we've cleared rooms and made decisions, moved furniture and burned rubbish, fixed the mower, fixed the cars and the motorcycle, fired up the barbecue and eaten outside at the (moved) table, carried bags of clothes and whatever else to charity shops, visited the dump and the recycling, talked, shared, made plans and necessary phonecalls, discovered ties, drawbacks, better ideas, managed to get some work done, booked rooms, train tickets, appointments, sat outside together and talked about the present and the past and the future.
    One week. Much left uncleared still, much left to do. And this was a week in which the things done were not the things planned; we got nowhere with the things we intended to do; everywhere with the deeper business of making a difference. Thursday's Child went down well with the Group [Decision: capital G], and I'm committed to bringing more for next week. "Keep going," said Kath at the end, and that's what I want to do. It may only be a scribble-pad exercise for the Group, but I'm curious now, to find out what happens next.
    Thursday's Child has far to go, as we were saying on Thursday; it was just a name because the Group meet on Thursdays, but it sort of helps things along ... although it has been taken, several times; see the Wikipedia disambiguation page (where the rhyme itself is Monday's Child). Too many links to choose from, so why not listen to this instead?  
   

To remember: the little blue car buzzing along, close to midnight, first long-ish run. It has a sun roof and four doors, thus four windows to roll down and let in the air. New things; prosaic, but new. How to keep that pleasure in the new, once it becomes old?
    The ferry - same question: the tourists pointing at the boats, the laid-up ships, taking photographs, calling each other to see the heron(s) and occasionally the seal(s). [That evening last Summer, with the shoal of mackerel come up the river.] The local woman, reading her magazine. That thing we used to say to each other, parked on a cliff or overlooking a beach: we live here!
    And to remember: seeing the little blue car for the first time, thinking - that's my car! Acting on impulse and then the doubt setting in: taking the car to the garage, and waiting. Triangulate back from the all-is-well phonecall to the first impulse, and think on what went between.
    Every day this week has been full of movement, full of change. Every day this week we have talked, found time for each other, found time together. Perhaps time is at its most valuable when there is so little of it.
    And yet - time.
 

Imagine that all of this, all of today, yesterday, all of life, that early conversation, the sunshine and that long breakfast outside by the lavender; imagine that it's all a daydream. When we wake up, who are we?
    All endings are beginnings; all beginnings are opportunities. All complexities, all the tangled things, require the finding of a single, simple thread. And let us begin - we have begun - with that simple thread. You've found the number; I'm making the phonecall. The slow morning, product of the long evening, gave us the conversation and today's first beginning.
    Clarity, simplicity, answers without questions. We came here, didn't we, because this was our destination? Our end and our beginning? The birds fly out from the cliffs and back to their young. The spray from the breakers catches on the wind. There is salt on the air, and distance.
    Thank you, my sister, for your clarity. 

So it's a sunny day, and all we have to do to get the grass cut - is jump-start the mower. Last night. Statement: "It's good to be doing this as a family." Response: "We never do this as a family." Laughter. Now we do this as a family, all of us, sitting round in a big circle, talking, finding laughter, the barbecue flaming up and giving us crunchy, charcoaled sausages as a consequence of the oily marinade. Salads, jugs of Pimm's, the speakers propped in the open window. Bob Marley. Voices from the past.
    Down in the house, clearing out cupboards, boxes to storage, boxes to charity shops, boxes to eBay, the bonfire and the vanloads to the dump. Clearing energy by recourse to the movement of physical things. Rooms opening out, spaces revealing themselves to be larger than they were. Light that wasn't there before; the pleasure of only finally noticing obstacles by their sudden absence. The blocked initiatives suddenly in prospect.
    That question from a week ago.
    "So why did we come here?"
    The immediate answer.
    "You have always known."
    And my companion, departed from the empty church with the dry leaves blown in through the empty windows, moved on from the wild, tangled garden to the open fields, not waiting because I am with her, no longer in need of patience. From here, we can both see the horizon.
    "Let's go, my love. Let's find the river."

   

Think of a destination. Any prized destination. The journey might be long, perhaps difficult; perhaps it might seem to offer both of those qualities before it has even begun. There are, let us suppose, mountains in this imagining, forests, rivers impossible to cross, false paths, maps that prove suddenly unreliable. Or maybe this is a city on a rainy evening - no taxis, the public transport's on strike, the instant umbrella stands have all sold out. You left your coat at home this morning.
    And yet, despite all you believe about the journey, despite all you bring to it and feel that you have failed to bring to it, you hold to the belief that the destination justifies the journey. The struggle will be worthwhile. So you set out, not looking back, braving the rain, over the first obstacles, into the all-absorbing task that is the journey. You keep your face to the wind in the way that an early navigator would have kept, let's say, the sun in his eyes. Before this tangle of obstacles came into being.
    Then, perhaps, you arrive. The destination is everything that it promised to be. It is not quite as it is depicted in your maps, nor is it quite as you expected. You are, perhaps, just a little - surprised? But you can rest now, ease the aches, perhaps find an audience for all your stories about your journey. You are here, after a life of feeling yourself to be there.
    The people you meet here - some of them have lived here all their lives. Some of them found a short cut to get here; they came by the easier journey. Most of them want to hear your stories of the journey, but over time, you are surprised to detect that their real interest is in the place where you began. "Tell us where you came from," they say. And you do.
    And in your heart, another journey begins.

Here at the beginning of the day, the trick is often to find an opening sentence; to go straight in and find out what happens next. At other times, it's to read what's gone before, pick up on the rhythm of it, and move with the rhythm of the words to the new sentence that links what's already there with the blank space ahead.
    Done well, the task in hand is a process of discovery. There is a space for planning, and ideas, and thoughts, and random words, phrases, paragraphs scribbled down on scraps of paper. There are times for drawing up plans, diagrams, lists. Notes on characters, maybe, and the exact sequence of some plot development.
    But you can't really do any of that - not do it to any purpose - if what you have at the heart of your project, is a blank space. Notes upon notes. People you can talk about, even describe in detail, but not show. Reams of words, none of which tell a story.
    How does Katie (scroll down, 'homework' box) spend the day, after that early shock? All the technicalities, all the how-she-gets-from-there-to-here, the thoughts around what - and who - needs space, what/who needs to be travelled through in a sentence, can be planned, and usefully. But write the words first. Open up to the possibilities.
    As above, so below. Simple phrase, too many links to choose one, and if you Google it, you'll find lots of analysis and history. But the phrase, not the analysis, delivers the meaning.

Visualise, if you will, a complicated day. Yesterday, perhaps, or if you prefer, make this a twenty-four hour real-time visualisation, and start - now. Best of all, make it an 'ordinary' day, with or without the inverted commas. Today, yesterday, an ordinary day, complicated in parts, frustrating, fulfilling, full of the things that get in the way while you're - where have I heard this phrase before? - making other plans.
    Now bring to mind the idea that this day, in all its complexity, et cetera, was designed and constructed - in all its apparently humdrum detail as well as its complexity - just for you. Every moment of this day was laid out before you in accordance with your purpose. Or destiny. Or shall we use the expression 'life plan'? Take a moment to consider: life is not just a sweep of days and ages that we interpret and give meaning; life is one tiny moment - now - and all that we place around it.
    Add a splash of free will - the spice to this recipe - and spread your arms, your wings, your soul's light in celebration of the freedom to experience. To feel; to be. Let this be the moment of your silence.
    And in the after-moments of silence, let us choose to imagine, as an exercise in believing (or, if you prefer, as a temporary suspension of disbelief) that the maker(s) of this day are around us now, happy and smiling to have been discovered. They gave you this gift, and they have been with you as you have unwrapped it. How will you visualise them? Do they cluster around you?
    What are they saying to you?

So that was Penryn Library, and that was what it feels like to 'perform' a commissioned 1,000 words on Great Food Disasters half-way through an evening of poetry and prose on the theme of food.
    The Irish woman, beforehand, who couldn't direct me to the library but who talked about coming from the West Coast of Ireland via London in an old Volvo, with partner and children; about waiting for the laundry to spin with the family in the bar next door; about the AA membership having kicked in, so the car's next problem would be covered ...
    ... then the young-ish bearded man who did know where the library was, who led me down the narrow pavement solicitous that I might be run down if I walked beside him, whose dreadlocks weren't obvious until you worked out why he seemed to have a tail hanging down under the back flap of his shirt. Who held my arm, who made sure I could see the library sign; his goodbye.
    The narrow streets up the hill from the car park, tiny tucked-in terraced houses, narrow gaps to houses behind houses, a town without straight lines, built on an absence of flat ground, running down to the - yes, the sea, but first, Commercial Street (was that the name?), widened to let the traffic through to Falmouth. Penryn, cut off from the sea.
    The librarian, the initial lack of a corkscrew, Patricia's poems (The Poetry Diet, to be published by www.thingleypress.com, or rather, Thingley Press), other contributors, the lady with the spontaneous haikus, everything rushing along, handing out cake, wine; that old and very true thing about making eye contact, connecting, sharing; conversations afterwards with most of the audience (20?) staying to share.
    Home to find a disassembled motorcycle and a hunt for a missing screw. A replacement found. The last twenty minutes of 'The Sixth Sense': the father watches the video; the boy tells his mum; Bruce finds it cold at home. Ends.

We will start the day, here in [what turns out to be] Universal Time Plus One, by switching on the machine. And picking up the overnight voicemail on the phone left in the car last night (after yesterday's 476-mile round trip, to Wales and back, to pick up a motorcycle). And in  a moment, letting out the chickens and the ducks. And, and.
    And writing, scribbling, devising 1,000 words of a performance for tonight. Put that aside for later - no, seriously, because rehearsals inside the head are always glaringly there when it's real and everything is going - not necessarily wrong, but differently. So think about ... the final working day of this busy week, and the sense of change coming, and the actual change already happening.
    Conversation yesterday, in the car. The cure for so many conditions is to engage, no? To take action, commit, do. The body language of two people in a car: side by side, sharing a destination. Maybe serious discussions should be saved for car journeys - or just journeys in general, and maybe ...
    That opening piece yesterday; a thought overnight. Focus on Jo next time: she's in Katie's life for a reason. We have the man on the pavement who's coming for her; we have Katie already living in Jo's flat. It's the place of safety. The next trick, though, will be to dispose of the day - to get out of starting where it left off.
    Scroll down to yesterday's entry for that one. A more interesting link for today would be Julia Cameron and The Artist's Way. I wonder if these entries count as 'morning pages'. No rules - of course they do.

Wouldn't it be great if we could just turn our selves off occasionally? By 'selves' in that question I mean all the stuff, all the agendas, all the emotions, all the stuff generally that makes up today's "I", and tomorrow's, and yesterday's. Turn it all off, step outside all this, that and the rest of it, and truly communicate. Maybe talk through how it's going, re-commit to the sharing, and maybe even plant some hint of an understanding to take back into the "I".
    But then, maybe we do, sometimes. Maybe we do more often than we realise - only, we don't do it in big, solid, conscious, deliberate words.
    Today's addition is a piece of writing for the Thursday Group. Not sure what I think of it, but hey - it takes us back to the original purpose of this site (see 'Visitors', right), which is to write. The Thursday Group meets every other Thursday (last week, next week), and the commitment is to bring along 2,000 or so words. If you're interested, I've written - I'll give you the link in a moment - what looks like an opener. It started from the word Thursday, became the title Thursday's Child, and then spun out from the opening sentence.
    Kind of darker than I intended, but if it's a beginning, and if it needs to end within the life cycle of the Thursday Group (six sessions altogether, I think), there'll be a happy ending before too long.
    The link? Oh yes - sorry. Almost forgot. Scroll down this page until you come to a box entitled 'Homework'. It's in there. Not exactly hidden. But.
   

Such beautiful rain. Straight down, direct, noisy on the roof. But it was a constant noise, low, steady, I want to say that it was somehow comforting. And now there's no rain, just a kind of downwardly mobile mist and the faint sound it makes on the leaves - and nicely chilled, cleaned air coming in through the open door of the barn.
    If it hadn't taken about ten minutes to persuade this dozy old laptop to switch on and function, this entry would have begun with the words I had waiting on my fingertips - 'So many new beginnings'.
    So many new beginnings, so many reports of new beginnings, and so much of a sense of movement. Decisions made, decisions unmade and remade, but above all - so often the small thing is the big thing - first steps actually taken. Not 'so many' first steps, because you only need one, but you can build a whole journey on a first step taken, in a way that you can't build it on time spent searching the maps for a route.
    We're talking here - aren't we? - about the kind of journey that is best taken - no, not without maps, but with the maps not taken too seriously. We're here, aren't we, and we're going in roughly that direction, but the squiggly coloured lines, the colours and the contours, aren't really much good as a representation of the path ahead. Not when you have the scenery, the weather, the sun or the stars in their places. On this journey, use the reality provided.
    You can stand still for a long time, and we'll wait for you, because we do, but there comes a moment when the restorative thing is no longer to rest, but to take your first step. Is it today?
   

"They fall, and falling, are given wings." Rumi, translated (as Google tells me) by Coleman Barks. It's a poem about love, and Google took me here to find it. Hello, Cynthia Large, Quaker artist, resident in Berkeley. Thank you also for the beautiful magic lanterns.
    Today would be a good day on which to make sky-circles of our freedom, yes? To take those chances, to find that the sky lifts us, never lets go of us, asks only that we trust that it will do what it has always done. The birds here nest in the eaves and above us in the - what's the word? - porch, outside the back door where we stack logs, keep ranks of flowerpots, our boots and the box for the post.
    They chatter a lot, those birds, with the excitement - let's keep this going - of everything that goes into being a bird, and every year, they come back for more. And then at night the bats make their sky circles. How would it be to have such a high-speed freedom, flashing through the peripheral vision, making sound beyond [my] hearing?
    In the inbox today an invitation to three days of "Dreaming the New World" in late October. From Sue Weaver and Marcus Mason at Heaven & Earth. Three days of "Teaching, Meditation, Ceremony, Personal and Planetary Healing, working together in the Medicine Way" near Redruth. This is going to stick in my mind.
    And here is the thought that came of it.

Curious, how the weather seems to be forever.
    A week ago, maybe two, it was hot sunshine, set fair, sitting out in the garden - and hard to conceive of anything else. Now it's grey, breezy, intermittent heavy showers, trees full of movement, air fresh against the skin - and it has been like this since the world was made.
    There is a line of trees, too big to be called a hedge, marking the boundary between the two fields, laid diagonally down towards the creek. An elementary lesson in seeing is to notice all the colours in a landscape; another might be to notice all the movement. The rain is pervasive but barely noticeable, an overlay that just slightly complicates the view. Barely a shimmer.
    This week will be busy.

Those 3am call-outs really trash the schedule, don't they? Mind you, it was the right thing to do, and the dream afterwards was a vivid, happy dream lasting into hours-later-than-usual wakefulness.
    One of the radio stations in the car - Radio 2? Yes - was doing a '3.46 club', full of dedications to people who had texted in their reasons for being reluctantly awake. More band members driving home after gigs than families driving off on holiday. A man who had pitched (?) his caravan under a tree in driving rain; a woman sleeping - not sleeping - in her car because she had locked herself out.
    Here's a question for a rainy, breezy Sunday morning in Summer holiday country. Who is my self? Ask it in the context of soul work, of spiritual work, of "I've been doing some work on my self" work - I heard that phrase the other day.
    And who is it you touch when you join hands, or embrace?
    Two questions. How many answers?

That felt good.
    We can choose to live our lives as though everything is possible. We can become "Yes, and ..." people rather than "No, but ..." people. I don't want to be told about the difficulties; I want to share the potential. How do we move forward if we tell ourselves that an obstacle is insurmountable before we even start to tackle it?
    Food disasters. 1,000 words. For Friday. Okay ...

Perhaps the thing about the car was just that the 'mythology' of buying cars is so full of stories about getting it wrong, making mistakes, et cetera. All those stories come into the moment and populate its aftermath.
    I shall take my new car to be checked over - again, professionally - and then I shall drive a thousand miles in it, and then I shall ask myself: what have you just done? It felt right, buying the little blue car that's now sitting out front waiting to be insured. But I have let that feeling be elbowed aside in my mind.
    And buying it came at the end of a long go-with-the-flow sequence, including a long drive, that ... what ? If meditation is still water, how best, and how easily, to still the water? The asking of that question suggests, doesn't it, that you have something other than a meditation to address? Including a long drive through - this metaphor has been through the blender - turbulent water.
    There are moments when (1) the mind tries to put the brakes on, and then (2) another part of the same mind objects to putting the brakes on, and then (3) it's an effort to, er, tune back into the music. Consciousness. That insistence on putting questions before answers. Pinning the infinite quality of an answer down to the finite qualities of a question.
    As the saying goes, listen to the answers - listen to the music. I shall add the link to this later. Now I am off into town again, to what feels like an engagement with the future.
   

Thinking about the way decisions sometimes just click into place, behind all the conscious deciding and planning. I could do this, I want to do this, I want this to happen ... but actually, I'm going to be doing this. Because when I stop wanting it to be one way, it's there in my mind already, the other way.
    The dust is already settling around it, as though it has been there some time without my noticing.
    "How was it last night?"
    "What, you mean the Thursday group? Oh, it was really interesting."
    "And?"
    "Sorry. Hold on ... Yes, it was really interesting. A lot of 'should' and what the rules are, but a lot of really interesting comments."
    "Actually, just a splash more milk? That's it, thanks. Comments on something of yours?"
    "I didn't take anything. Would have, if I'd thought. No, we did most of the time on how to comment - the word was 'critique' - without hurting each other's feelings - "
    "This woman doesn't do housecalls?"
    "Ha ha. Comment on each other's work. Then there was this screenwriter, a woman just moved to Cornwall, who had written a really good opening chapter."
    "A woman?"
    "A really good piece of work, and the point is, the comments were really worthwhile - just participating, I mean. I've never done anything like that before."
    "Are you taking something next time?"
    "Oh, I think so. But the point is, I've changed my mind about what. I think it's just what I need for - "
    "I'd love to come with you."
    "Come with me? That would be lovely, darling, that would be really lovely, but you see, you have to sign up in advance, you have to pay, and it's a group of seven ... "
    And now we cut to commercial as I really have to go into town.
    No resemblance intended, et cetera, et cetera.
    What decision, what change of mind?
    And what about that car you mentioned yesterday?
    Tune in tomorrow, same time, same channel, et cetera.
    Roll the credits.

Wake up early, and sometimes, there is a cloud in the valley. Sun risen but still behind the trees, sky clear (that tiny aeroplane with its trail, an enclosed world unaware of us), grass wet, the small flowers (weeds?) in the grass still closed. Sit on the green metal bench with a mug of tea and watch the edges of the cloud move, as if there is also a wind down there. But it is a still morning.
    Thought for the day: move forward and things come to you. Or rather: move forward and the world moves with you. Perhaps that sense of moving forward, that sense of positive, is the spark that gets the world moving with us. We don't notice it any more than the people in that aeroplane are aware of how rapidly they are travelling across the sky. They know it, although they don't feel the rush of movement and everything that goes into carrying them where they're going.
    Tonight is the first meeting of 'Thursday's critique group', as Kath's email puts it. This group, for me, also has the purpose of providing a deadline (see under 'Visitors', right). But we're supposed to have brought something along - 2,000 words of something, seven copies - and no, I haven't written anything for the occasion.
    Cue potentially productive guilt trip: I can take something old, but next time, in a fortnight, I will definitely have something new. Promise.
    Bought a car yesterday. Interesting experience. More on that perhaps tomorrow.

We talk about life as a gift. We talk about life as an opportunity to grow. We choose these lives, and they're our gift to our selves. That sounds great when we're all sitting in a circle and we've just been walking through a garden with our eyes closed. It's warm, and it's restoring, and it's reassuring.
    But it's also true during an argument, after an embarrassment, while we're washing up. The shameful things, the painful things, that cramp and the ongoing nuisance of myopia - who put those things in the gift box? And why?
    To speak of life as having a purpose means sooner or later acknowledging that the inconvenient details are also there for a reason. What good is the anger that you later regret? The clumsy moment that you hate to remember? What is their gift?
    Bright morning. Crystal-clear in the near distance, but the other side of the valley is silver-grey, mist-coloured on a clear day. A quality of the air? Just a reminder of its presence?