There is an idea, I think, that happiness comes from fulfilment, and fulfillment comes from doing things as well as they can be done. It's not what you're doing, but whether you're doing it consciously and with the intention of leaving it as fully, perfectly, completely, even beautifully achieved as can be. There is also an idea that the task of washing up the dishes can be undertaken as a meditation. Set aside the mat, the cushions, et cetera, and fill a bowl with warm, soapy water. Let your mind drift (empty?) as the plates become clean.
    And I suppose set aside the instruction manual: a walking meditation is more likely to be a walking meditation if it starts freely as a walk. We make experiences finite by knowing in advance what they will be. Open the mind to the possibility that it doesn't matter whether there's a traffic jam on the M5 this afternoon. Perhaps an obligation is an opportunity seen from another angle. Et cetera. There are crows, songbirds in the trees outside the open door, and through the window facing me, the two small palm trees are waving. They give a measure of the wind: slight, because nothing else moves.
    All this, because yesterday morning I was up and out early to meet somebody who never arrived; missing these morning pages but in the event, getting a lot done that I wouldn't otherwise have done. Meeting Patricia to talk about the not-quite-imminent publication of her book, talking to her about her website, about setting up a PayPal account, about being able to sell copies of her own book from her own website; it was one of those "You should do this" conversations in which - yeah, it would have been a good thing if I'd had the presence of mind to substitute "could" for "should".
    And then - this serves me right - back home to a challenge. Talking about the conversation, the response "Okay, wise guy. I want to buy a book of yours from your website, and I want to buy it at 8pm tonight. If you're so clever about what Patricia can do, you do it. Then you can help her."
    And do you know - it worked. Several hours and a lot of faffing about with the "selling preferences" of the (never used) PayPal account I set up several years ago, and just short of 8pm, copies of the two books I put up were bought, with p&p added, and the order has come through. Now I have to post them off (I'm doing this properly, see above) and account the money back to Thingley Press. And yes, at some point I will unclick the "hide page" button on the page where you can find the books, shopping cart, et cetera. And add more books.
    And help Patricia. Or rather: Patricia Finney, The Poetry Diet, coming soon from Thingley Press.

Such a sunrise. Driving out to meet the school bus, the contours of the landscape made into lines by the early mist; the trees drawn with such a fine pencil against the light. The sun red on the horizon, not moving for that first stretch over the high ground, then as we went down into the lane, the tunnel of road closed over by the trees, the horizontal bars of light. Stretches of wet grass where the bus was waiting, the sea in the distance, the sun getting its act together and properly bright.
    This room full of light from the end window, laid over everything and now slowly withdrawing like a tide. The bushes moving in the window ahead of me; there's a wind coming round the South end of the house. Consider this line, from a poem by Maya Stein, found while I was in Canada. "But what can I say? I am more river than rest, more flesh than bone." I think I am warming to technology: the use people were making, in that convention centre, of their devices. I have seen the other side, but there are two sides.
    The obligation to know these things, fully, without judgement. But the pull to a means rather than an end; the distraction and comfort of scene-setting. And the day ahead. Silence, the bushes moving, bright light, a barometer that says clouds and rain. A chill that, this time of year, is to be described as Autumnal. This thought: trust, and/or faith, we'll use your word, is of greater value when it is tested, partly because that is when it is needed, but also, partly and more importantly, because that is when it is proved.
    The River is always deep, always full of stillness as it moves. Sometimes, when the light catches it just so, you can see the colours of the depths, and the movement itself.

Huge shifts continuing here too, but the change is: more clarity since the week away. Or more exactly: a clearer appreciation of the need for clarity. There is such an enormous value in absence, complete absence. In coming back to see everything, first, without the same patina of familiarity, but secondly, in the light of the faint glow of imagining: to have thought about a familiar place while away, and then to come back to it and see the thinking as well as the place.
    A faint glow. If that makes sense. And the breakthrough that is communication. The other breakthrough of the return: talking to each other. And (here we go again with the layer-upon-layer) talking to each other about talking to each other. This time round, the future will be discussed and planned rather than leapt into. It will be as unpredictable as ever, as guided, as meant, as felt, as unforeseeable, but in the middle of it all, we will be talking about how we want it to be, and how to make it that way.
    Whether that makes any difference to the outcome, no idea. But let us carry forward the communication we make, the habit of communication, the kernel of togetherness in the paradox of separation. A bird flies when it believes it can fly.

Okay, I'm back, and there's much to be done. Words to write, notes to write, words to edit. And pictures to sort out. Changes? A week of work in Toronto is a neat way to leave Summer behind: no question that it's Autumn now. And something else: the trip itself felt like a visit to a life I no longer live. Haven't felt that so clearly before.
    And returning has such a pattern to it always: emails, endless emails; imprinting a new routine; resolutions, even. I'm here, but I think I need a day of being here before I'm fully returned. This is a transitional time.

Cold, bright, chilly morning, sunshine, dew on the grass, spiders' webs in the apple trees, condensation on the windows of the car. Everything damp but just starting to be dried by the rising sun. Very still. Birdsong and, er, bird croak - a crow has just woken up. Not a sound, just at this moment, that isn't natural. I shall be gone tomorrow, back probably around the 25th.
    Thursday Group tonight, last session although there was talk of carrying it on. It's not my turn to read, but I'll take something along. Today: get the pictures into order for the first Shadow book (by Chare Brant, forthcoming from Thingley Press, more on that later), move The Poetry Diet forward (by Patricia Finney, ditto, ditto) and then finally get round to packing.
    Oh, and find the tent pegs for the trampoline. [Did I mention this? We moved the trampoline round to the South end of the house, no windows, no light pollution, clear night skies, trampoline becomes hammock, lie back and look at stars. But it's windy at the South end - and the trampoline has been flipped over before. So - tent pegs, guy ropes, hold it down.]
    Enough. From tomorrow, I'm out to work. Back around the 25th. Be happy.

It's Wednesday, isn't it? I think I'd better pack. Turned on the radio, coming back from the rendezvous with the school bus, and they were babbling on about the "elusive particle", the Higgs Boson. This, if I remember (and heard) rightly, is the entirely theoretical microscopic doohickey that has to exist if all the scientific theories about Creation (as in: there was a big explosion without any cause that we're prepared to acknowledge) are to be proved correct. They built the - what was it called? - Hadron Collider at CERN (don't know what it stands for) to find it, at a cost of several bank bail-outs.
    It would be a kindness to let them find it, although the net result would only be that they know a little bit more about how the engine works - and still nothing about who's driving the vehicle. They're looking the wrong way, I think. They've got to the stage - this was the nub of today's radio item - where they're beginning to say that it will be an even better result if they don't find it. Hm. Until this point, the search for the Higgs Boson has resembled the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, remember? But I don't remember the "It will be even better if we don't find them" stage, do you?
    If it was up to me, I'd arrange for a bunch of hard-line CERN enthusiasts to discover a choir of angels dancing on the head of a Higgs Boson, and a white-bearded old gentleman dressed in a sheet and standing on a cloud looking back up the microscope at them. Would they reveal that as though it was theirs to reveal? As a 'scientific' discovery? But it isn't up to me, so perhaps those angels could drop-kick their Higgs Boson back into the endless loop of scientific enquiry. Life responds to what we believe it to be - here's your Boson, sir. We thought you'd like it in blue.
    Always a mistake to turn on the radio first thing. The door's closed today, and I'm disconnected from the air. It was raining a moment ago, soft sound on the roof, and I wish it would again. Perhaps I shall light the fire later.

One truth of the human condition - of life, more accurately - is that every experience - every emotion, every success, every disaster, every kindness, cruelty, childhood trauma, every breath of air, every meeting of eyes, friends, souls, every jealousy, relationship failure, dislike, love, every moment of beauty, every experience, explanation, everything you could put in this parenthesis - is held in common. What happens to you today, happens to me. Your moment is mine, mine is yours. Always.
    Celebrate happiness because it is yours; offer kindness because when you do, you are receiving kindness. One option for belief: there is enough time in eternity for every one of us to live every life that has ever been and will be. Or you might say: we are all here, crowding in; we are on each side of everything, in the eternal present. This is the truth of the duality and of the journey: we are many, and we travel to become one. With us to that destination we bring our experience, which is what we have found on the journey. All of that experience is our collected wealth.
    You might say that the Creation is not complete until it has been experienced. You might even say that the condition of life embodies division, and by that means, enables union. You might reflect on three words that we could discard: judgement, understanding and forgiveness. If you are both judge and judged, how could you not grant yourself both forgiveness and the right to forgive?
    Or you might say: the way to live is to live. With all of us, with all forgiveness, all understanding, you might say: I Am.

Rain last night so hard and so sudden that we went outside to find out who was throwing ball-bearings at the windows. The gutters were overflowing - noise and volume as if you began to tip a full bath onto its side, pouring from a height - and the covered, er, porch was filing up because the mat had gone over the grating. Stair-rods. And since then, the weather has done its English thing, and first thing this morning, I lit a bonfire in bright sunshine. Large piles of hedge-trimmings, mowings, garden rubbishings do dry out in the sun, but when the rain comes, they stay dry at the core. Big flames.
    Now it's breezy and blowy and airy and bright, and there's air in everything. Daughter and dog have set off to Falmouth for a dog show, and this is about the time I was meaning when I agreed with myself that I'd go round the point for a walk before lunchtime. Sun and wind, airing myself like a sheet hung on an outside line.
    Keeping a note, in the back of my mind, of the difference between here-time and New York time. In New York, the radio told me, they are holding a sequence of silences, to mark each impact, each collapse, crash. My silence will be somewhere between the tenth anniversary of Tammy coming in to say, "You'd better come, there's something going on in New York," and the tenth anniversary of realising what I was hearing/seeing. The announcer saying something about helicopters to get people off the roof, and - there can't be people on those windowsills? My God - I don't believe it - that guy jumped!
    Now I remember.
    All those things I did, last night and this morning, not really remembering. Just casually living. Listening to the radio, not really remembering. Starting to write this, thinking about time zones. Not really remembering.
    Ten years ago, while I was wondering whether I had time to be interrupted and come to see what was happening on the TV, that guy, his friends, colleagues, were standing between a fire and a windowsill. Deciding what to do.
    Now I remember.

There's a bird outside my door, at 6.30am in the morning, with a lot to say. There's another one, now I tune in, with an equally large amount to say back. Bird Two sounds like he/she is over by the bench, a distance away through the open window in front of me. I forget whether it's the hes or the shes who make all the racket in the bird world; I suspect it's the hes. I wonder what a guide to humans would say if it focused on the same things as a bird guide. I doubt this dressing gown would qualify as plumage.
    Sheep always seem to be saying either "Where are you?" or "I'm over here", in the sense that they exchange noises - answer each other - rather than just making noises, so they're listening, speaking from "I", participating in their social network. I'm guessing they don't feel the lack of ... let's see ... opposable thumbs, mortgages, caffeine in the morning, working hours, any more than I feel the lack of wings. It must be wonderful - okay, normal - to live in a world containing grass, weather, companions and the frequent exchange of reassurance - are you there? Yes, I'm here. And unlike humans, they don't know they're going to die.
    There was going to be a third paragraph today, but that line has so much of what Frank Kermode and now Julian Barnes would call 'the sense of an ending', that I think I'd better stop. Sunrise was a horizontal strip of colour in an otherwise clouded sky - but it did add a little purple to the grey of the clouds. The day thick with mist now, and stillness.

That was a good start. Wake at half five after a really interesting dream. Go outside. Twice-dark: clouds and night. Faint rain. Make tea. Leaves bought yesterday, not a teabag, in the old green teapot. Cut to: meet the school bus at 7.35. Drive on to Pendower Beach, go walking with the dog. Tide gone out to the flat sand after the slope; one other walker in the far distance towards Carne. Back to the car, back to the house, feed the hens and the ducks, make coffee - bought fresh yesterday - gather up some sticks for the log burner, open up this thing - and it's not even nine. Follow that.
    I shall go to The Cave later and ask Hazel if she has anything feng shui for these windows. Struck me last night, maybe I dreamed it, that this room is on a slope going down to the water. Not exactly Hong Kong; this isn't a financial district and there aren't mountains at the top of the slope, not real ones anyway. But it would be interesting to address issues of flow, access, wind and water. The windows. Candles and light. Actually - thinking of Hazel's shop with Hong Kong in the background - dragons. I wonder. I found the bells again, which is a marker.
    Theme: the impact of small changes. Moving the cast-iron table and its two chairs under cover; not letting clutter develop; not just setting things aside to do later. And on that subject, the time to unpack that suitcase so that I can repack it for Toronto - the suitcase, I mean, that I have been stepping round since the weekend - is now.

First really windy night of the season. Really blowy rain, and the trees really moving. But the trees aren't ready to let go of their leaves quite yet. Perhaps we're still in the Summer-feeling-Autumnal rather than Autumn-but-still-quite-Summery. We do have plums, yes, in abundance, and blackberries, but the real glut seems to be runner beans and courgettes - every year there's a vegetable that the locals are offering to each other. I shall bring the cast-iron table and the two cast-iron chairs in to the covered space outside the back door. Warm enough to enjoy the weather; covered enough not to be part of it.
    Three girls and a dog came to stay last night, although the dog (and one girl) went home shortly afterwards because the dog had chased the chickens. Lots of laughter, talk, energy, cooking of cheesy chips, cooking of popcorn. All very polite, totally self-contained, even the washing up got done. Several films watched, I think, and how pleasant it is to be past the age at which there's even a pretence of taking me seriously on the subject of bedtimes. No, dad, of course we won't stay up late. Good night, dad. Their turn to start school tomorrow, so I guess that was the last sleep-over.
    To return to the original purpose of this blog (see under 'Visitors' and 'Homework', left), I know where I'm going now with the story in 'Thursday's Child', although there was a bit of a hump there (and if you don't mind, it's very fiddly to upload). Lots of dialogue to work out what's going on, most of which for cutting but not now. Kath talks about making notes on the characters, but I think they come up with their best surprises in the writing, not the note-taking. Keep that for later. Patricia talks about initially writing a 0th draft, as opposed to a 1st draft, full of everything that falls onto the page, as though you're disgorging a pile of bricks, some usable, rather than attempting to build a first version of a house.
    That metaphor kind of holds up. Thingley Press will soon be publishing Patricia's 'The Poetry Diet', which is a diet book with poetry and a lot of chocolate-based recipes (truffles, etc.), and I hope after that, with any luck - well, I know there's talk of publishing her notes and emails on 'How to Write a Novel'. Might even have finished my 0th draft by then.

Emotional weekend. I don't think it became real until the last minute, and then all the bravado evaporated. How hard it can be to arrive. All the reality shorn of expectation. But the welcome well handled, and the people kind. The kindness that sits somewhere between flexibility and attentiveness. And then that airy room, taking up the big table, a difficult goodbye. Rain on the motorway, clouds of rain, billows thrown across the windscreen by the lorries. The Somerset levels? That flat stretch around Weston-super-Mare where you can see the water, and of course the Drains - West Sedgemoor Drain signposted - perpendicular to the road.
    Sleepless night. And now this windy morning. Another expected day suddenly real. A beginning. What is done today has the potential to be a template for tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

Away this afternoon, back tomorrow evening. Twenty-four hours on the road. All the preparation, and now it's happening. This is a morning for slow talk and sharing, before it all ends as it is now and begins again differently. There was fog yesterday morning, going early into town, and down at the ferry, the flat water merged with the grey air. Hear the chain clanking in the fog, then, a surprising amount of time later, two white lights, then - again, a long interval - the ferry itself taking shape, taking solidity maybe, in the grey.
    On the ferry, first car, looking up to see that the other side had begun to appear. Odd, to see the slipway and the few houses without their surrounding context of trees. The ferry landing looked like the beginning of a village, as though it might be surrounded by more houses, the makings of a filmic little settlement around the one slipway. Seemed for a moment that we were in Scotland, although that's an association with something seen on a screen, rather than reality. Full tide under the fog.
    Then a hot day. As predicted by the woman in the alleyway. "Looks like it's going to turn out nice, after all this fog lifts." She was smoking outside the back door of the shop where she worked. Going by a narrow patch of sky. But she knew her weather.

First of September and we're already talking about how autumnal it's feeling. Chilly evening, restless wind in the night, and now the trees talking. But this morning, pleasantly cool in the fresh air, coming out after breakfast. There is an art to having a conversation that isn't practical, just sharing rather than giving information or instruction, just as there is an art to being in the moment rather than being in the moment in a moment after I've just done this vital chore. Things "need" to be done? But harmony, the pleasure of each other's company, don't "need" to be achieved. They're necessary in another sense, as an ideally frequent way point on the road that we're not taking at the moment. But no need involved.
    Let us celebrate Maya Stein. American woman, living in California somewhere. I know nothing about her, and yet, in another sense, I do know her. Maya sends out the '10-line Tuesday' poems, once a week via email, and yesterday, under the poem, I just happened to click on this lot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjWYWQ2j0D8. Pasted in like that because I don't trust myself to transcribe it accurately. Try it. She's on YouTube. You can also go to - let's wait for the line return - www.thiseverymoment.posterous.com. Her blog. I know Maya publishes on paper as well, because I've looked her up on Amazon. She's not published in the UK - yet.
    Meanwhile, back in my life, it's Thursday and there's a Thursday Group meeting tonight. Last but one of the set of six. I need another one. I'm getting ahead of myself - having taken two instalments of the required 2,000-words to meetings, I've now written five (so, 10,000 words). This whole thing of writing for a meeting gets past a lot of blocks - no time to worry about consistency, deal with that later; no time to edit as I go along, the end will put the beginning and the middle into perspective. I'm interested to know what happens next, and it's good to be able to think: that only happened because I sat down and wrote. So sit down and write.