Holiday Holiday Holiday Time

Clambered through a crazy week and joyfully left my university job today. And tomorrow we head for Wales and the coast for a week. Peace. Notebook goes with me.

What For

What love is for. What life is for. What touch is for. What water is for. What the sun setting like a red ball is for. What trembling is for. What the green tips of the spruce are for. What a young man running is for. What a fly on the window is for.

Right!

Grapes

Tomato pips drying sticky red and yellow on the chopping board. Dark grapes in a bowl catch the light in the soft sheen of their skins. I bought them, and spring onions, and pak choi at the greengrocer's, a pork chop at the butcher's, a bottle of wine and some goats cheese at the cheese and wine place. The paper and a pint of milk from the post office. Decision after small decision I weave through my life. The taste of grapes and goats cheese and sauvignon suffuse my weekend. I buy this and not that, do this rather than that other thing I might have been going to do. Choose this film randomly from the library, my mind now full of its close-up loving of faces, my thoughts of spiritual yearning, suicide bombing, mopeds in Paris.

The client who asked if I'd seen other people like him, with thoughts like his, been able to help them. Treading a line between reassurance he's not the only one, and the unavoidable aloneness of his absolute uniqueness. I have your appearance but I'll never have your reality, as one of my training supervisors was fond of saying.

Thinking of all the sperm that died when the one that made me arrived and embedded itself in the egg in early 1962. The fantastic statistical remoteness of the chances of ever being here at all.

Planless

Alone for the weekend. Peaceful. The fire glowing. Leftover flapjack and 'extremely chocolatey' mini bites from my last session with the students this morning on the table tempting me. The dear students sweetly disappointed I won't be teaching them next year. I had a moment of almost wishing I was, I liked them so much.

Fantastically tired and looking forward to a long time in bed, and then, who knows what tomorrow? Planless.

Moment

I remembered today something Thich Nhat Hanh said when I went to hear him speak in London years ago. Surrounded by monks from Plum Village, one of whom opened a flask and poured water for TNH with such clarity, gentleness and economy of movement I remember it still, he sat quietly, a slender figure not taking up much space yet utterly commanding of attention. And he said at one point that this, now, sitting here talking to us was the most important moment of his life. And what he was saying really was that each and every moment is that, none more important than another if one is truly present. And I loved that. I was thinking of it because I was looking beyond my two sessions with clients this afternoon and beyond my morning with the students tomorrow, to my weekend and time to myself, and then wondering about how that looking ahead impacted on my ability to be present in those settings with those people. Remembering too how guilty I used to feel before a session with a client if I noticed myself looking forward to it being over. I loved what TNH said because it made the moment so vivid, made me feel so attended to, so cared about, but also because I wanted to bring that kind of presence and attention to my own life.

Present moment, wonderful moment, as he used often to say in guided meditation...

Spring

Yesterday hailstones like petits pois tinkling against the windows and doors, lying melting in the grass. Today blue sky and sunshine, the young cows grazing contentedly, walking about slowly with muddy ankles.

Bluebells

The sun was shining through the curtains early this morning, something we have not been accustomed to during this wet and grey spring, and we're both suffering from early waking problems anyway, so we decided to get up and go out to see one of the best bluebell woods in the North of England, at Park Wood, Elland. We were there before nine!

Thick And Thin

Friday brought the more than disappointing news that I have no work at the school where I do counselling beyond the end of the summer term, having been told categorically in February that they wanted me back in September. Gnashing of teeth. This currently represents about a third of my income and the work with adolescents the thing I have been most excited about developing, and was going to apply for a training course in... which you have to be working with adolescents in order to do. This situation is a test of my resolve, confidence, resilience and steel. A test which in the short term I have failed miserably (home in tears yesterday, collapsed in bed believing I am no good at anything.) Medium and longer term, I am beginning to see I have resources I didn't previously recognise. Time to build the private practice. Time to create the website!

Also a lot more rain, also a plague of small flies in the room where I see clients for therapy, also sleep problems.

Also the first rhubarb from the allotment, cooked in a divine sponge pudding, also good books and lovely L knitting away and as ever holding my hand through thick and thin.

11.50 To Manchester Piccadilly

And one day you see that it has always been the same, it has always been you and at the same time not you, not anyone at all. All those memories - the weeping ash tree, the summer evening light through the orange blind, the constant vague unease inside this body of yours. No mystery after all, just something unfolding always on the same screen, all so precious and so provisional, the blue tractor beside the tall pylon, the April sunlight after pounding rain, the young man with a golden Chinese character swinging forward on the chain around his neck as he leans towards his iPad, and you remember notre dame de Rocamadour, the Black Madonna, how many steps you climbed up the cliff side to see her shining face in the darkened church, how you longed for the small coin-like medallion to wear around your neck, watched it drift with you in the waters of the Dordogne. Where is it now?