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I don’t know about you, but I think a lot about where your attention goes, energy flows. It’s all the witchy woo-woo stuff that I love (why not, seriously? what’s the alternative? dreary stuff...if now isn’t the time for magic and dream fulfillment and spreading love and joy, I don’t know what is). Today Pam said (because I hang on to every word that Pam Gregory utters) “I definitely say that whatever you’re focused on this solar eclipse will get bigger.” It’s quite a thought. Whatever you are focused on will get bigger.

This is the very thought that derailed me on the 8.8 portal - the Lion’s gate. Everything will be manifested and magnetized, they said. Me: In tears in the garden, feeling like a failure. Dude, it’s a lot of pressure. Not only are you struggling to keep afloat, you’re struggling to keep afloat with the knowledge that it’s going to be more of the same. My only analogy is acid (LSD), to be honest. That awful thing of trying to keep the bad thoughts out of your mind, scary as it is, because it will only get worse. And no, Desmond, orange juice doesn’t work.

I am teetering at the edge of the precipice, one foot in each world. My left foot on the parched earth, locked into my persona as a crack PR person, my myriad hands scrolling through endless emails, my brain filled with creative ways to unlock puzzles and crises. Snap your fingers and I know what to do. It’s a business suit that no longer fits. The buttons are just a bit too tight. And my right foot dangling over the edge, remarkably calm and cool, feeling the soft, salty ocean breeze, ready to step off and float like a bird into a new world, a new existence. It’s calm and uncluttered out there. I can see trees and deer and horses, and laughing grandchildren, and the vast blue sea stretching out ahead of me. It’s filled with possibility, in every single moment.

They call it flow. It’s the feeling you get when you are doing something you love and you can’t stop because one thing magically turns into another. This happens to me when I start. Starting is hard, as those with neuro-spicy brains can attest to. And persecution is real. I remember when it started on Sunday morning. I woke feeling the weight had lifted, but with a thin residue of paranoia. An amount not assuaged by tea, but once I stepped out of bed and walked past an open window, the cool dawn air blew in, and I heard the wood pigeons cooing gently outside, and like a slap, it all changed. It threw me into moving tables and whipping up curry mayonnaise (lemon works to bring a bit of sour if you’re doing this for non-dairy folk), and stripping roast chickens, and picking the dahlias I’d forgotten were there, because they were crisp and perky in the morning breeze, and pulling vases out of cupboards, and finding tablecloths, and choosing glasses and gently peeling the baking paper off the Claudia Roden inspired orange and almond cake which I’d made in a silly tin that wasn’t nonstick. The night before I’d stuck cocktail sticks in it as it was cooling, and the hedgehog cake now magically stuck together, sponge clinging to sponge. I don’t ever want to stop when I’m like this. Choosing each flower feels bursting with possibility. The satisfying way the table comes together. The way in which we inhabit the garden, all of us who live here; the birds, the trees, the flowers who are struggling through this heat. But this is morning and this is when the world is full of optimism. It’s bursting with it. And the opportunity offers itself every single morning, no matter what the day before was like. No matter what. Wrap it up. Go to sleep. Start again. Start better. I knew I was in it and it was where I was meant to be when a black, orange and white butterfly, a Red Admiral, landed on the orange and white tablecloth I’d just put down, only a few inches from where I was standing, and did gentle jumping jacks with her wings, as if she were clapping.

We have no control. This idea of free will is false. I’ll acknowledge that something like compatibilism exists. And exerting control as if we have it is worse. Holding on tight to the ideas that you formed years and years ago will not serve you. Let them go, I tell myself. Just let them go. Be the peaceful observer. Even if the worst pain you can imagine is happening to you it’s not about you. And you can’t fixing by engaging in it. Even if you feel betrayed and bewildered and as if your heart is being pierced with daggers, the only way to survive this is by neutrality. By wishing good for them. By unhitching your cart from theirs. By letting them go. It’s as trite as that saying on the Holly Hobby lunchbox you treasured as a thirteen year old, “If you love someone, let them go and if they come back to you...” I can’t remember how it ends.

We’re fighting a losing battle with this heat. Our gardens are slowly going brown. The grapes, the figs, the roses and the dahlias (the larger ones) are surviving. Other plants are withering. It’s just too much drought. In Spain, it feels okay, natural, expected, but no-one is prepared here, not the birds, not the deer; I have seen at least five lone does in brown fields standing still, looking tired, disoriented. And yesterday a fledgling blackbird on the ground in the churchyard. I gave him water in the top of my water bottle. He didn’t really want to move and didn’t back away from me as I knelt down next to him. I checked this morning, and with the help of the internet I’ve ascertained that juvenile fledgling blackbirds may indeed spend a couple of days on the ground, within earshot of their parents. Empty nest and all that.

As I look out now, I swear that our false acacia tree has expanded its canopy to cover more of the house, more of the tiny plants, to protect us all from the sun. Thank you false acacia, or Chinese Pagoda Tree as you are called on Martha’s Vineyard.

What does any of it mean, anyway? Love is all there is.

This struck me hard while in Spain for my nephew’s wedding to a wonderful Spanish woman named Asunta. In this particular family, and perhaps in other Spanish families, it’s customary to write and sing songs to the bride and groom the night before the wedding. We stood in an old house surrounded by trees, looking out over a pristine valley and distant hills under a sky shot with pale orange, as hundreds of cousins sang songs to the happy couple, who were perched on a veranda above us. Joyful songs about dreams and falling in love. Old men, young children, a dog even, all singing loudly and clapping along in time with the music. We Americans and British stood by, amused, transfixed, caught up in it all, wishing we too were Spanish, and able to sing out our joy so loudly. There is a charming politesse with the Spanish of this kind of gentility. They are doctors and architects, investors, and their great great grandparents found their fortunes in Argentina, not quite conquistadors, but brave young men who needed new maps, new horizons, new fortunes at the end of nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The world was lighter then. Tales of courage and the pioneering spirit existed. The choice was the church, the army, or exploring the world, with a slightly naive and delightfully brave can-do spirit, in breeches and excellent straw hats and the kind of boots made from Spanish artisans that could last a while exploring the barren land of Patagonia.

What I mean is, it’s time to do the thing you’ve always dreamed of, and to dance as if no-one is watching. Why not?

(Sunday morning. West Berks.) The wind is howling through the parched garden, and the huge fennel plant is scratching against my kitchen window. I’m here with two dogs asleep on sheepskins, a huge bunch of sunflowers and dahlias left here by a dear friend, a scratched shopping list, my red Swedish clogs, the sound of pigeons cooing gently outside, and the general sense of relief that comes with a quiet house. There is an array of birthday cards on the shelves across from me. I am alone but for the dogs. Charlie has set off on his epic driving trip to France and Spain, with three audiobooks loaded and a small bag of apple slices. It’s just odd weather. In fact, let’s be honest, everything is odd. Unsettling. The fires everywhere make me jittery. France, Spain, Algeria, Scotland, Finland are on fire, and no doubt great swathes of North and South America. I’ve collected some windfall apples in my pockets from the farm next door as we walked down to the river; they’re sour and sweet and fragrant all at the same time, the flesh slightly pink. Not great, exactly, but wild nonetheless, and nostalgic somehow. I am happy for the normalcy of the wood pigeon, the gentle sound of sleeping dogs, the hum of the refrigerator.

But nothing is as it seems. Madness and lunacy; the whole world is upside down and inside out, and it’s all we can do to keep ourselves grounded, or distracted. I’m trying not to be distracted; I’m trying to stay focused on what is going on around me. Not the news, not the maps of the spreading wildfires, but the realization that the grandchildren will be here with me tomorrow, that the pink roses are bursting forth for their third time this year, that the dogs are my heaven-sent companions forever and ever, that my beloved has left me the most beautiful note on the bathroom mirror, that the pink fleshed apples taste like late summer, that when I close my eyes to meditate I find a safe and rich place deep inside (yes, it’s the whole universe, Karen) that I believe is shared with other people who meditate. I also have Pam (Gregory), David (Clements), Kirsty (Gallagher), Michael (Meade) and all the other ‘friends’ who bring some kind of out there joy and structure and sanity to the whole of it. They are the shapers of the insanity. They have created a community of people who are for want of a better word, light workers: people who aren’t afraid to embrace who they really are, and who understand implicitly and without shame that we are here for a purpose and that our purpose is much, much bigger than we can imagine. People who understand that there is a prize and that it’s glittery and pure and beautiful and elusive but that we need to remain focused on it, especially because there are others that can’t and won’t.

Mostly life takes a strange form of denial or distraction. That’s how we’re getting through it. But I’m trying not to. I am trying to be present. I am trying to remember that being here now, on this planet at this time is a tremendous honor, and not something to be overlooked. It is a privilege. I googled it in fact and it said :

“The statistical likelihood of you existing exactly as you are right now has been calculated by some scientists and mathematicians to be roughly 1 in 102,685,000 (a 10 followed by 2.685 million zeros)—a probability so close to zero that it is effectively impossible.”

(Monday. There is a strange pall over the skies on Monday morning. A mottled grey you’d imagine more in Key West than rural Berkshire. I’ve braved the security Daleks next door (who speak, ominously, in a Northern Irish lilt) and I’ve pilfered three fat figs from their tree. I also ate a greengage which I devoured like a starved dog till I realized it was full of creepy crawlies. More protein! As my mother says.)

Back to denial and distraction.

This is what I understand is going on at the moment: we haven’t lived at this pace of change before. Ever. Not in human history.

And what is our role in it: peaceful observer.

That’s it. That’s what we’re here for.

Not to engage. Just to allow. It’s all coming through now but it’s on its way out. If we engage we spiral into it, we exacerbate it.

Just let it come through and be still with it.

Also 2. we are moving from head to heart. We can no longer hide behind intellectual arguments. Consciousness is about paying attention to what we are feeling.

And 3. we’re moving away from being separate. We are more connected than we have ever been. We are each connected fractally to everything else.

I made a rule on my birthday that no-one could talk about politics. I was quite bossy about it. People looked at me as if I were nuts. I said “you can talk about politics tomorrow when it’s not my birthday and I won’t be able to say a word about it.” No-one thinks they’re going to talk about politics, but after a couple of tasty beverages the conversation naturally sways towards righteous indignation; it feels good doesn’t it to say how much you’re against what the American president is doing in the world? I think you have to resist it. None of it matters. All the NYT opinion pieces. All the people pontificating. All the outrage. It’s just air. This is something incredibly, wildly shitty that we’re going through collectively, and the less we engage, the sooner it will go. (And that does not for one moment mean that I condone it. And it doesn’t for one moment mean that I’m not fully aware of the quote by John Stuart Mill about good men doing nothing. This is not that.)

If it’s helpful, I’m struggling. I’m struggling to find what my purpose is. I’m struggling to know who I am in the world. I’m struggling to be a peaceful observer. I want to rage with the rest. I want to not feel everything.

(I’ve just walked outside to put down some water for the birds, and I have to say that the white cosmos in the garden is quite spellbindingly spectacular and held my attention for much longer than I expected.)

Yesterday because nothing else was particularly helpful I set off with Pip the whippet on a huge walk through the fields of Ufton Nervet and the oak-lined paths that take you down to the river Kennet. It’s the kind of English summer day that you remember from your childhood, illustrated in railway stations, with fluffy fair-weather clouds, bicycle clips, picnic baskets filled with red gingham cloths. The poor maize is small and shriveled and I tried to tell it to wait patiently for rain. (I said the same thing to the little black calves who’ve just been born). Everything is brown, scorched, and I try not to think too much about the little birds, but at least, I suppose, we are close to the river. The vegetation by the river is magnificent in its verdancy, bowing elegantly in the warm wind. It’s like a microcosm of a country - the dry plains and the river valleys all under the same unrelenting blue skies. The thing about walking is that the further you walk the more you realize that you’ve forgotten why you started to walk in the first place. All the stuff that you carried when you set out miraculously melts way. Almost like an ego eradication. And suddenly it’s you, the dog, the maize, the oak trees, and a field filled with at least 500 crows, having a pow wow. I’ve taken to talking to everything (I said “taken to” so I don’t sound weird but I’ve done this for a long time) and I say “crows, don’t worry, I’m just walking across this field, I don’t mean you any harm.” And rather wonderfully, they didn’t move, even when Pip did a bit of a loop de loop near them. Clearly this was an important meeting of the Crow Council. They all but ignored me. The ground is hard, dry, brittle underfoot. But the blackberries are everywhere and so the walk became a blackberry walk, with stained fingers and mouth, fat juicy berries on hardy bushes amongst the drought-ridden fields. But you melt, don’t you? You forget who you are and why you’re walking.

Until a Land Rover drove up behind me. A voice says “This isn’t a footpath.” So I am trespassing. Or rather, trespassing-with-lurcher. Gordon, the gamekeeper, admonishes me gently. I apologized heartily and told him it was a genuine error. “It’s the pheasants” he said. “Oh I know,” I said. “I don’t like shooting but I grew up in a shooting family. I understand.” “You’re not a VEGAN are you?” said Gordon, looking terrified. “No.” I said. Not yet. I thought. I’m on a blackberry diet at the moment. “It’s your lurcher I’m worried about, chasing the leverets.” “Well, he’s not entirely in tact so I don’t think his prey drive is what it was,” I said reassuringly, “and plus, he’s a whippet.” “Oh greyhound, lurcher, whippet, they’re all the same to me. I should tell you about some of the unsavory types that come in here with lurchers...” he trails off and looks up ahead. “We’re here at night too, sometimes with infrared cameras, trying to keep the foxes out of the pheasant pens. There’s a lot of foxes at the moment.” “Well, I’m awfully sorry,” I say. (Peaceful observer. Ha ha.) “Oh you mustn’t keep apologizing. I mistook you for a town type. You should hear the things they say to me.” I realized staring in through his passenger side window that there was a single barreled rifle with a silencer on the end in the seat next to him And in the back a very sweet, wiggly black Labrador bitch with a pale yellow collar. Pip and she were eyeing each other waggily. “I’ve been walking this path for five years, though, so it’s an honest mistake. I was sure it was a footpath on my OS maps app...” I taper off. Gordon says “Well I grew up round here and I’ve been gamekeeper for 23 years and I can assure you it isn’t.” Touché. I back down. “Well have a good rest of your day, Gordon.” “You too!” Never fight with a gamekeeper. It’s just not worth it. Especially if you’re in ego-less reverie on a day when the world is changing beyond our wildest imaginations.

Pam says that she wakes up and says “Show me how to embody more light today.” And I think that this may be the way to go.

(I’m in the kitchen peacefully observing my whippet with a rabbit carcass he has found in the lower meadow, fur in tact. It makes him inordinately happy. He hides behind the Smoke Bush and nurses it, gently.)

It’s almost as if we’re living on two different timelines. Here is work, zooms, doing the grocery shopping, pilfering figs, reading the New York Times, organizing suppers. And here is upholding the good, finding the joy, being the lighthouse, grounding, holding the whole thing together, avoiding the dark forces. How on earth did we get here?

I said that in Norway a few days ago. (We’re going full Ronnie Corbett here.) “How on earth did we get here?” We had a Chinese electric rental car, a ZEKR, which I of course fell in love with immediately and declared loudly to anyone who’d listen, “I am now officially going to get an electric car.” I loved parking it outside of the supermarket to charge it. I loved how responsive it was. I loved how a feather could be on the road and it would swerve violently. I loved how it told me “you are distracted” (though not in a Northern Irish accent), but then one day I didn’t love it so much. We had been to my second cousin Anne’s 80th birthday party — a joyful affair, with dinner outside, and Norwegian strawberries with vanilla sauce and numerous homemade cakes and puddings, and wonderful poems and stories, and even a trumpeter, all set against the Norwegian dusk on a cliff facing the Oslofjord; lots of sailing folk and people who’d known her for years (she’s a spright, 35 years old in spirit) — and I was driving home because I don’t drink. And all of a sudden, just in Kjøpmannskjær, as we were driving along silently, under melon-shot skies, Kylie Minogue’s voice blares out from the radio into the quiet car FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER “la la la, la la la la la.” It was so loud that we all jumped. And laughed. Ten minutes later we turned into the little parking place below the cabin. I was probably going about 3mph doing the full u-turn to park when the ZEKR suddenly gained its own consciousness, I kid you not, and drove full-speed into the back of my cousin’s car in front of us, and would not stop when I applied the brake. My cousin’s car spun around from the force, knocked the concrete top off the sewer drain, and smashed into a large linden tree, which finally brought the rogue electric car to a stop, smashed and battered (and no doubt embarrassed). If the tree had not been there, we would have dropped down to the road. I was shaking. “WTF! What just happened? No seriously. What on earth just happened?” I know I sound utterly batshit when I say that the car had a mind of its own, but I have no other explanation for what happened. Even Kylie tried to warn us.

(I tell my friend Tara this story and she says “You could have been killed.” I have a bite of nasturtium leaf in the fruit cage and she hands me a radish she has just pulled. I realize I have been sitting at my desk in the kitchen too long. I walk around the garden to get my equilibrium back. I think about the man who fell from the fourth floor of a parking garage in Sandvika, Norway when his electric car went rogue and burst through the concrete barrier. He was about 92.)

Yes, so a lot of weirdness. Everywhere.

In other news, a peacock butterfly landed on my hand when I was sitting at my aunt’s house in Norway. I think this is a good sign. I will take this as a good sign, anyway, and hope above hope that I’m on the right path. And call in some light. It’s all we can do, right?

When I’m worried, I move the furniture. Today, I’ve lugged an old Georgian desk with three drawers in it all the way up the stairs (upwards, step by step in a wiggling movement, rounded foot by rounded foot) to my office. I’ve jettisoned the white IKEA desk — more fitting, I think, for an architect — and now I’ve balanced my laptop, a lamp, a glass of water on the desk from my parents’ drawing room where the phone used to be. Behind it on the wall (in the house I grew up in) was an old and flattering mirror, with a pretty, rather ornate wooden frame, so you could look at yourself while speaking on the phone. It appealed to my teenage self. The desk is awkward and I can’t fit my knees under it from my ergonomic chair, so I’m sitting cross-legged and facing the window and the thankfully blue sky. What it lacks in comfort it makes up for in solace and safety. I like that one of the drawers is filled with years of November paper poppies with green plastic stems. I’ve pushed the daybed against the wall, topped it with my rainbow horse blanket and the ancient Frenchie. I’m remembering to drink more water than I think I need.

The day started oddly. I dragged myself and the dogs down the field to the river at about a quarter to 6, in my Birks, through wet grass, in order to stem it (the oddness). Both dogs walked into the stream and drank. It started to rain. We galloped back up the hill. I did deep breathing exercises because I thought that might help the crazy thick energy. I know you’re all feeling it too. Water with electrolytes, a cup of tea. Then 35 minutes of YogiGems. Instead of choosing a set of kriyas randomly I searched “depression” which revealed 30-minute kundalini yoga to remove tension and negativity. Having a tough time? Dealing with difficult energies or people? Bingo. I love her so much. The breathing helps massively. Then the ho’oponopono meditation. Then TM (with a nod to dear Pam Gregory and all the people who meditate at 7 for a harmonious and peaceful planet). I say it, along with my prayers & the lists and lists of people and animals that I must remember. I know, it’s insane. It’s like Daryl from Mallory Towers who says a prayer for the earwigs in the garden shed. All this just to put myself together in the morning. We are in the most intense of times. We are all holding on by a thread. I think this and then I chide myself for even allowing the thought. I remember positive affirmations. I remember water. I remember my to do list and the water device and the refresh the flowers on the altars. I do some more breathing. I think this is called magical thinking. Or it’s falling into the crazy.

The first thing I saw on my phone was a message on The Hub, our local community What’s App group, lovingly curated by my friend L — 7.39am Looking for a male long haired miniature dachsund to mate with mine. She’s coming into season shortly. Quickly followed by the helpful reply: Champ Dogs is a respected website for doggy dating.

I took the dogs to Yattendon to grab coffee and sit with people and my journal. C is in Brussels voting on films with the European Parliament. I live in the middle of nowhere and I thought to myself, today is not the day to be alone. Dear little Pip curled up in a ball next to me and I struck up a conversation with the woman on the next table, who has a five year old Spaniel. Eggs, coffee. Admiration for the lovely woman who runs it. I should do this, I think. How much more satisfying a life it is to give people delicious breakfast. Everyone loves breakfast. A conversation behind me about the viral meningitis break out in Henley and all the news crews that stalked the college. It was hard for the students as they were in the middle of exams. “Sky News was really aggressive” says the young woman. Yattendon has pleasingly green doors, a good little shop which tempts you in to buy things like Tunnocks Snowballs and bloater paste, a lot of people with dogs. On the way back I stopped in to see L in her elegant shop. We really should have a secret handshake. “How are you doing with this, you know, energy” she said furtively and I could’ve cried. “I’m doing everything I can” I said. I’m not sure I can let her in to my crazy morning routine, but no doubt she has one too. I see some aventurine. It’s pleasingly green and both dull and sparkly. And it sounds like that Antonioni film. I’m wearing all green and it matches me. We talk about crystals and her beautiful amethysts. She tells me how to clean my crystals. She offers me sage. I say I have palo santo and don’t say that I want to call it palo alto. I tell her that The Hub is the reason I’ve stayed in West Berks. All the lovely crazy ladies and their crickets bats, teenage sons who need garden work, ten pound Zara dresses, wellness retreats, chocolate Guinness cake, and questions about where to eat in Marrakech. I look at L and see a kindred spirit. I know she won’t laugh at kundalini and have seen her save people from themselves when they’re a little drunk in charge of the Whats App group. She is, I think, a Good Egg. Also the cafe across from her is being taken over by the pub so she’s expecting an influx of people this summer. Good.

The police are doing their thing next door training their very howly dogs so that Pip lays by the bedroom window with one ear permanently raised. It’s all very serious. Guns pointed. Men with stuffing in their arms. Grown up faces. All of that. They train on the grounds of the big house next door to us until it’s sold. Sometimes when they include the ambulance teams too there are tents erected and hamburgers grilled. And they leave half eaten buns in the leaves, much to Pip’s delight. I take him up the drive to pick up something from Amazon. The Julia Elliot book Hellions. I’m rather pleased. I think of my friend H in LA who married a man who did nothing but order from Amazon while she worked her arse off. I could never understand it. He also went on a silent retreat in real life ie not while away with likeminded people staying in yurts, and they’d turn up to dinner parties and only one of them would speak. Poor H would walk in and announce gently that her husband was taking a talking sabbatical. My friend Lucy said it was quite boring sitting next to him because he could only nod or shake his head. Thank goodness she is a good conversationalist. But, she said, he was apparently very good at sex, so I suppose grunting and moaning was allowed. Quite a good way to appear gloriously enigmatic and interesting, don’t you think?

I’m not avoiding the subject. All my gang are talking about it. When I say gang I don’t mean my friends. It’s a bit like being in the resistance, you don’t really tell people about it for fear that they may think you a bit mad. But my most straightforward and sensible friend J says that people don’t mind because they know me and I’ve always been this way (which is true; I’ve signed my emails with “everything is connected” since about 1996) but it doesn’t mean that you can out yourself. I sit at lunches and dinner parties and try to be witty and funny because I’m sure I used to be that way, but it doesn’t seem to work so well. Either I’m the “intense” one - which is fair - or I’ve gone beyond the age where being eccentric is both charming and sexy. Poor C, after every single lunch we have here I say “Am I boring? I know I am.” And he says “no you’re not boring, my darling.” And I look for cracks in his armor and hesitation in his usually Jeremy Irons-like delivery (I’m not joking. He sounds exactly like Jeremy Irons. I love it.) But my gang (Kirsty and Pam and David and Lee and whathaveyou) are talking a lot about this massive shift that is happening in consciousness. And that it’s not just humans that are shifting, but mother nature, the whole planet. There are a LOT of earthquakes now, for example, and solar flares, and wars (at least 8 conflicts in the world currently, and 10,000 or more combat-related deaths), and disputes, and utter madness, things we’ve never seen before, certainly not in my life, certainly not from people in public office. The veil is thinning and people are beginning to realize that they are part of nature, not separate from it.

I’ve resorted to a happy patch. It’s yellow and filled with things like Lion’s Mane. Previously known as a dopamine patch but they were sued for copyright infringement or some such thing. I’ve stuck it on the most hairless part of my body per the instructions, which happens to be on the side of my ribcage. Actually it’s called a Kind Patch. I hope it helps. ADHD sucks when combined with Whatever This Is.

While I was illegally scrolling on Instagram yesterday, I came across an interview with a man who used to be a monk. He was tall, elegant, dressed in a button down shirt, chinos, wearing a hat. His skin was tanned and his eyes twinkly. He spoke gently, kindly, as you would expect. It made me want to do that so much. Just retire to a nice monastery in Big Sur, overlooking the Pacific. Not that we can hide anywhere when the world is turning upside down. But I wonder if that is spiritual bypassing? There are two approaches to spirituality, by transcendence or embodiment. Maybe the embodiment one is more challenging, and maybe it’s the one we should be aiming for. Nobody said it was going to be easy, all of this. But I didn’t know it was going to be quite so hard to own everything, to be responsible for one’s whole self in this way. To be accountable for your behaviour and to acknowledge your role in what is happening in the world. We are all culpable. And, I think, I believe, until we see how much we are responsible the discordant stuff will continue. There is no-one else to help us other than ourselves. The blaming and shaming doesn’t help. The judging doesn’t help. Nothing is better or worse. We can’t hide. There’s nowhere to go. It’s just us attempting to take the plank out of our own eye (feels a bit Monty Python) and being ready to walk our sisters and brothers home. Preachy as fuck, I know. But I really don’t have anything better right now. It’s where I am. Or rather, it’s the conclusion I’ve come to while trying to make head or tails of the whole thing.

Also, are you allowed dogs in the monastic life?

PS Yesterday was the Luckiest Day of the Year because of the Venus Jupiter conjunct (they were closer together than they have been in many years). Therefore all people, even those who are prone to humbuggery, were expected to have a little bit of a skip in their step. I dropped my beloved at the train station early to catch the Eurostar and whizzed over the Thames via the Whitchurch Bridge to go see my horse, Bella, who’s actually on gardening leave, while her lesion on the fetlock bone heals. She gardens her paddock, mowing the lawn extremely well with her short teeth (why the long face?). Jan, the lady who mans the bridge booth in the mornings, all cashmere and powdery and fragrant, was smiling as usual. “Today is a very Lucky Day” I said. “Venus and Jupiter are closer than they’ve Ever Been” (I’m prone to slight exaggeration; I do think it makes thing more fun.) “Oh, what a good start to the day!” she said. And I thought Yes! What a good start to the day. Think of all those people who will be driving through that toll booth, and she will be greeting them with the knowledge that Today is the Luckiest Day and all that Magic Juju will be sprinkled on all of them to bring to their places of work. Hooray. The road was closed and so I drove around Woodcote and Stoke Row, via Highmoor and Nettlebed. Bella was awfully happy to see me. For two reasons: 1) I’m the bringer of carrots and 2) I’m the itcher of her teats. It’s almost comical, and she doesn’t do it with anyone else, but every time I see her, after a few minutes, she lifts her near hind leg and cranes her neck left towards me as if to ask “Could you please give me a scratch?” And dutifully, I rub her teats and get rid of all the muck that lodges itself there, and she puts one of those horse smiles on her face where they stretch their mouth at you comically. “Well clearly Bella is having a Lucky Day”said Kathy. We had a little more Beauty Parlor which included pulling on her ears with a piece of sheepskin, and washing her eyes and nostrils with a warm sponge. She closed her eyes in bliss and then we wandered back to her field, eating some Tasty Spring Grass along the way.

The dogs were with me and I knew I had to find a place to walk them but with the Road Closed signs on our usual routes, we came back via Highmoor (after of course telling Tom and Marny at McQueen’s where I get my coffee that this was The Luckiest Day.) I parked up down a byway, got the dogs out of the car and walked into the middle of a beech wood. Huge, old oak trees, mulchy roads, squirrels, and a criss cross pattern of footpaths, dotted with a few very pretty cottages. I met two women with a red labrador and a viszla and managed not to tell them it was a Very Lucky Day. Instead I said “Oh, I grew up with red labs. Aren’t they the best?” On the left of us was a huge park field, with a few chestnut trees, a hay meadow probably, and on the right a pretty white gabled cottage that had a thirties feel. I realized I was on the Nettlebed Estate otherwise known as the Fleming Estate. There are 2000 acres of historic woodland including 560 acres of protected woods. (The legendary pond from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang isn’t far off in Russell’s Water). And then it happened, my brain went into one of its frequent vortices, which happens a lot when walking in the woods, where I started to imagine living in a cottage in the Chiltern Beechwoods of the Fleming Estate. How perfect! Close to my horse! Close to my friends! In the Chiltern Hills! Feels like The Faraway Tree. Check. I called Charlie who by now was actually on the Eurostar beaming through rural France. “I think we should rent a cottage on the Fleming Estate” I said. “I’m on the train surrounded by people” he said in his Grown Up voice. “But isn’t this a good option?” I said. “We could live in the middle of the woods. It’s beautiful here.” “Are there any pubs?” he said. “Oh, masses.” I replied. Sweet man knows me well enough to indulge me.

As I drove closer to home I gradually drifted away from my fantasy of living in a fairytale cottage on the storied Fleming Estate (Robert Fleming bought the estate in 1903 and his son, Ian Fleming was born in Joyce Grove Manor House shortly thereafter) and towards the awning man I was meeting at home. I parked my car and in the moment between turning off the engine and opening the car door, there is always a moment when the radio comes on. The voice on the radio said, “The Ian Fleming Estate has announced...” I love a bit of synchronicity. How was your Lucky Day?

The world today is striped green and white as we come over the ridge on the tire track chalk path, wide swathes of fresh grass in between. To the right, beans planted in neat rows in the pale soil, to the left a hedge adorned in white hawthorne for Eastertide, and further beyond the Wessex Hills and the lovely mounds of the Wittenham Clumps, just across from the remnants of Didcot power station. The larks are loud, protective, and high above us the red kites, circling, not one, but three, now five. The sound of my mare’s hooves on the drying ground. My dog close by. The mysterious Russian Oligarch’s house perched on the hill in front of us. We walk around the little woodland between the fields; the branches are too low especially now that spring is here with its blossom. Despite the birds, the wind in the trees, the hoofbeats, the clank of the bit and the leather reins, there is a hush that descends out here. You’re in a vacuum of quiet and peace. There is no rushing home, no anxiety about where to be, just the quietness of one foot in front of another. Synapses slow. The mare’s neck is warm against my hand. The dog pounces on tufts of grass. Fat bumble bees hover a few inches off the ground. Time slows down. You’re connected to all of it. We gallop home, the horse, the dog and me, in unison, side by side, dog and racehorse. My hands are soft. The mare feels soft. We’re in a rhythm. And together.

Yesterday we walked in a wood in West Sussex, near Chichester. The little village, Graffham, is nestled against the downs. It’s full of ancient paths cut into the downland. We parked at the church, and followed a steep upward path, chalk, dotted with tiny blue violets and ground elder. I pretended to stop to look out at the view, but I was trying to catch my breath. No such vertical climbs in West Berks. The dog came with us, hunting about, a hundred yards in front of us, resplendent in his dark green fleece coat, a necessity apparently for whippets who have no body fat and virtually no fur. I used to worry about him and now I know that he’ll come back to me, since I’ve been riding with him. He has his side hustles, and then he comes back. Once when he didn’t I took a painter friend’s advice, and walked in the other direction and hid behind a large tree. He was most confused and cocked his head to one side, and it made me laugh so much, I jumped out to surprise him. But a useful tool for my dog training kit, I supposed. We came down through a tall pine wood, with a soft brown floor, and hardly any sunlight. This sucks you in and seals your ears. You can feel the blanket of calm covering you, all of you. I wonder why I haven’t noticed this properly before. I wonder why when we were young and we walked through the bracken and hid from the dogs with my father I hadn’t noticed this feeling of being covered with a quilt of peace. All the little mitachondria slow down and sigh and chill out. They have a double membrane, and I seem to remember something about consciousness being stored in membranes (this will need footnotes, apparently). I say “astonishing” a lot. But that’s what it is. It’s impossible to be anxious in a pine wood with a dog. And what’s to stop you sitting down in the wood?

On Monday after a long weekend of engagement parties and family lunches and friends for supper and general chit-chattery, and much love-lovieness, my social battery had puttered out. I don’t know if that’s what it’s called, but that’s what it felt like. I was so tired I could barely move, and threw myself in bed at about seven and napped for two hours, deeply. It was the day the clocks changed too, so I suppose that didn’t help. It felt something like grief. For no good reason, I suppose, but my ex-husband was here and while we are the very best of friends, I’m sure it can’t help but bring up the stuff that was left unsaid or unhealed. It doesn’t feel that way. It just feels like tired. I watched him on Sunday morning sitting comfortably on my pink sofa, with the papers spread out around him, the huge jar of yellow forsythia in front of him, the sun and the tulips outside by the beech tree behind him, and he was soft and quiet for the first time in as long as I can remember*, and I offered him coffee, and it was all strangely formal, a new way of being together. It’s been ten years, but here we are, and I’m back where he found me, living in the country in England, surrounded by dogs and blue and white plates and gumboots and mud and sunshine and apple trees. And I’m walking with him, and I’m saying hello to the birds and the goats and the cattle, and we’re not in familiar territory. Well, I am, but he isn’t. We’re not in LA where we both know our way around, me sometimes better than him, because all I did was drive when I first got there so that I could out-Thomas the Thomas Guide, or because maps give me comfort, and the most soothing map is the one in my body. There is a shift, a weird dynamic dosey-do, and although we’re not looking at who is where and although it doesn’t matter, it feels like he’s on the back foot, and that relaxing is required. Hence the newspapers. I’ve put flowers in his bedroom, ornamental quince and white alliums, and fresh towels, and even that seems strange in its formality. Here we are after having lived together for thirty years or more, being polite to each other.

* I wonder if this is the definition of relaxation; being able to be comfortably with someone who is not asking anything of you?

And it’s not just California that brings optimism. He does too. Everything is commented upon with such sweet kindness and positivity. The house. The flowers. The countryside. The books. My beloved. He loves all of it. And he is genuinely happy for me. This has to be said. This is what I find so touching. He is genuinely happy for me. And like me, does not regret any of it. Today two men came into the bakery where I get my morning coffee after I ride. They both wore black baseball caps. I stare at people. My children are embarrassed by this. I stare at the man’s hat. It has a BMW and a California grizzly on it. I say “is that a California bear on your hat” and he says, “yes, I got it at a driving school; I’d give it to you but my hair looks terrible right now.” We both laugh. I drove home with my coffee and I thought about the man from the US, probably Southern, who was about to give me the shirt off his back. There is so much generosity and openness in the best kind of Americans. I am so touched by it. I drive and the sun whizzes along with me, through the trees, and I think about optimism and bigness and generosity and how much your day can be changed by a small gesture of kindness. He doesn’t know why I love the California bear so much and it doesn’t matter. It’s so big.

So there’s a mixture of grief at what was and a massive sense of everything being okay and more than okay as it is. That’s the feeling. This house, I thought at the weekend, is even better now because he is here and we are okay, and even more than that, the three of us are okay. Just three souls who have probably been together many times, chilling on a sunny Sunday morning, looking forward to good friends who are coming to lunch.

I walked with a bramble man to the field behind the house to see if he could help with the years of neglect, not wanton neglect of course, but a patchwork of mended fence bits and overgrown blackberry bushes and gnarly old fruit trees. Two weeks ago the tree in the middle looked dead (we diagnosed it as living after seeing one tiny bud at the end of a branch); today it’s bursting with white pear blossom. “Nice tree, that,” says bramble man, whose name is David. He’s wearing a cap that says Wellington International and it turns out that he’s the father to a horse girl and husband to a jump judge. We walk around and survey and I realize that everything, absolutely everything including every tree is covered in brambles. I am overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. He is unfazed. He’s seen this before in his bramble ramblings. He tells me wooden fences are expensive. He tells me he needs a digger. He says that a meter of briars all around the edge of the field once removed will bring much more grass. I’m impressed with what he knows. I feel I have to register my country credibility. I feel the need to say “my father farmed at the other end of the Chilterns” so I don’t appear to be a Johnny Come Lately. Why do I worry about such things?

We teeter on the edge, don’t we? I sometimes think that the world is going to collapse into the void like so much California coastline wobbling on the edge of the Pacific, rocks crumbling off the Palisades cliffs, were it not for a few great people, mostly women, who are holding up the sky. I thought there were just a handful of people (you know the ones; they check on you, they send out uplifting notes, they remind you why we’re here, they offer to give you the hat off their head) but last night in bed, exhausted, as I was writing in my journal a long long list of who I’m grateful for, the list went over two pages, in scrawly black Tempo felt tip pen that doesn’t do much for my writing but I’m strangely drawn to because it was the pen my father used. It’s not duty so much as purpose, even divine purpose, the way that they light the way. And any time I’m lost or tired or fear that the light is dimming in me, I find them and listen to them or read them, and then shake my body out like a dog, hoping the light will settle over the unsettled miasma and push its roots down far into the soil and bring back that glowing feeling of being connected to everything, and being a small fractal part of the whole that reflects the whole unity of consciousness.

Everything is Connected. I had it written at the bottom of my email signature for years. Like some hat tip to David Bowie or Echo & The Bunnymen from My Year of Living Dangerously and trying to sort out what on earth was going on and why we are here. Only Love.

The sun pours in now. It floods us because it’s so pleased to be out after being hidden away behind rain clouds. Let there be light indeed. It shines on the pelargonium geraniums in the kitchen and their shadows light up the white wall. The dogs lay next to me, golden bits glimmering on their fur. The trees are stretching up to reach it. Light is what we all need to find.

This is what you do: you spend the weeks of the new year scanning for signs of Spring, searching for new life; the tiniest green shoots, any hint of optimism. The world is asleep, almost dead, stone-cold and wet, leaden. You are weighed down with the waiting so that you forget that you are waiting. You forget what you are supposed to remember. You’re in the fog of winter. The pointers sneak in stealthily, unheard, usually at night. And each one appears miraculously, snow drops, aconites, narcissus, daffodils, hyacinth. One day not here and the next waving madly from the ground in yellow and mauve and pink and white. “Hello! We have arrived!” It’s as busy as can be. A fat bumblebee buzzing against my window, two yellow Brimstone butterflies, Blue Tits, yellow and blue and white, fat, too, playing together in the magnolia tree (did you know that their breasts become more bright depending on how many yellow caterpillars they have eaten), horses laying down in the field together, eyes closed, faces towards the sunshine. The tiniest beginnings of ornamental quince, hazel buds. Rose branches bent together in circular prayer. Greenfinch, Goldcrest, Chaffinch, Wren. Skylark, Graylag Goose, Swan. Scores of Swans, heads down in flooded fields, as we whizz by marveling at the saturated water table, as we ooh and aah at the newest lakes. As we walk to the river and the path is a stream, and we stomp and slosh in rubber boots.

Tonight six planets line up in a cosmic parade: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Venus and Mercury. If you look towards the west half an hour after the sun sets you’ll see them. I have a small telescope that I gave Charlie for Christmas and I shall line it up, like the boy in my Alexis Smith piece “Imagination Is More Important Than Knowledge.” I am giddy. I stand on the kitchen bench to take pictures of the sunset because we haven’t seen the sun for so long. An alignment of planets feels like an Event. It feels like a jolly exciting party. (And how lucky are we to still feel that sense of awe! How lucky are we to be alive right now in this universe, when things are dying and being reborn, better, stronger, with more love, more joy, more harmony.)

Outside you can feel it, the unfurling of joy. The trees stretching their fingers up towards heaven, pandiculating their trunks, reaching towards the sun. I can’t contain it (the joy) as I drive home from the horse. I stop on the side of the road, confusing other drivers (on a lane that entertains about eleven cars a day, three arrive just as I pull over). I run along the road, jump up on the verge and I take a picture of five horses lying on the grass. Two are rugged. Three aren’t. One has its head on the grass, sleeping. There hasn’t been a lot of laying down on the grass since Christmas. In a world where everything is guidance, this too is important. The horses are saying, laying down in the sun, kick off your shoes and walk on the earth, ground yourself, literally ground yourself by laying flat on it and letting the earth’s energies flood through your starved system.

At six o’clock this morning we still didn’t know what the world would bring. Dawn could go either way really. We sat at the round table in the kitchen and drank tea - his with a lump of sugar, mine in my grandmother’s white cup - and talked for the first time in a while because he has been away in Berlin, birthing movies into the world. I woke up with this thought: Words are Magic. Everything we think and everything we say will shape the world we’re creating. And that is what we’re doing, sitting here, across from each other, with our tea, with the rosemary and jade and oxalis, the green candles and orange tangerines between us, co-creating the world that we’re stepping into. We have no say in it and we have every say in it. “Every moment,” says Eliot, “is a fresh beginning,” and that’s how we’re starting today, not looking back at things we did in the past, but gliding forward, together, cognisant of the fact that there are maybe twenty more summers. Twenty more days that mark the start of spring, like this, with tea and sorrell, and the faint hum of Radio 3 which turns itself on somehow at about a quarter past six every day, and I have no idea how to make it not do that, or how to change the station, so here we are, captive, with Thomas Tallis and Ralph Vaughan Williams and the Tawny Owl that has been hooting first thing in the morning and as I go to bed for the last three days. Creation, Michael Meade reminds me, isn’t an event that happened once in deepest pre-history, but something that continues to happen every single moment of every single day, little spiral fiddlehead ferns, bursting fractally into life. My ballet teacher when I was five, Mrs Behrens, told me that the arms never stop moving in dance, and the same is true. Nothing ever stops moving, coming into being, moving through the cycles of life and death and rebirth.

Joy for the Spring that’s coming in. Joy for the stuff that’s been shed.

And then it comes, this sun, bathing everything, begging for us to be out in it, making everything sing.

May you be well. May all people and animals be well, and happy, and at peace.

I have a 45 minute commute each morning, two ways, to see my horse, which is a lot of time to think. These are notes I’ve taken while taking the scenic route, along the Thames, looking at misty bare oaks in the greyness while trying to remember that there is blue sky and sunshine on the other side of the clouds.

Remember the words of Michelle Obama: “We have Twenty Summers.”

• Feed the birds. It’s SO WORTH IT. I have finches in the tree outside my office window. I watched the blue tits on the feeder with Charlie’s nearly two year old granddaughter yesterday. We were both utterly transfixed.

• Run as often as you can in quick spurts as if a tiger is chasing you. Run up the stairs as fast as you can. I look ridiculous. I exaggerate the movement with a bit of Knees Up Mother Brown action. Sexy, I know. (h/t Dr David Kearney, my lovely acupuncturist in Santa Monica, for the tiger analogy).

• Drink water as if it’s going out of fashion. Water is magic.

• Say hello to everyone, including birds, sheep, trees. (Attention is love). Embarrass your children by speaking to strangers in shops. It’ll make your day, and maybe theirs.

• Get out of bed the minute you wake up. I believe this is a game changer. Also Mel Robbins does this.

• Whenever in doubt breathe or move stretching out your backbone like a dog or a cat. Particularly useful also is shaking out your whole body like a horse. (This tip from Kundalini yoga, and h/t YogiGems and Tej).

• If you live in a northern climate, whenever you see the sun run outside and greet it, stick your face in it and breathe it in. (Duh).

• Do not underestimate the power of music to shift your energy and your mood. (I have a happy playlist on Spotify. It includes September by Earth, Wind & Fire. No-one is immune to this song).

• Believe that you are fundamentally good & make that your baseline. This is hard for the British, I know. (H/t my daughter-in-law Sarah for the book “Good Inside” by Becky Kennedy which she employs to raise emotionally healthy children.)

• Get out of the habit of listening to your critical voice; stick your hands in your ears and say “blah blah blah” whenever it starts. It is not useful. It is not kind. And you don’t need that shit in your life.

• Do not read Newspapers with negative headlines. Do not give in to click bait. Why on earth would you do that to yourself?

• Be curious about everything.

• Employ critical thinking even when noodling cosmic ideas.

• Remember you and most other people in the world are fundamentally good and want the same thing: JOY

• Take the world as it is and not the way you wish it would be; therein lies equanimity.

• In any kind of conflict - and let’s face it we will have to deal with conflict - stay grounded in the moment. Period. Citing the past, or the future, will not be helpful in the moment. (This is all we have. Right here. Right now.)

• Read poetry whenever you can.

• Be around good Art whenever you can. (Thank you, Julia Cameron).

• Be with animals whenever you can. (Thank you, Thistle, Pip.)

• Be near trees and hug them whenever possible. (It is always possible).

• Your thoughts might be wrong, it’s usually never about you.

• Honor your father, your mother, your children.

• Be grateful for your friends.

• Whenever possible eat fresh organic food, and more vegetables than anything.

• Sing as much as you possibly can and loudly. Also whistle and don’t care about the people that stare at you because they are not your people. (They aren’t.)

• Every day is a bloody miracle and should be greeted as such.

Take what you need. Sending you love. xo

Good morning everyone. Everyone has asked for books and things to listen to, so here are a few ideas. I must say that it gave me so much joy to receive notes from people who said, I am so interested in non-duality and I’ve no-one to talk to about it, you’ve helped me come out of the closet. Hooray! It helps me feel less alone too. We must find our peeps! Thank you! xo

• Podcasts:

  • Buddha at the Gas Pump podcast: The mother ship and north star - nearly 800 interviews with spiritually awakening people conducting by Rick Archer — former teacher of TM, early fan of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, walker in the woods, all around lovely guy and critical thinker —

    Cynthia Bourgeault, Father Thomas Keating, Rupert Sheldrake, Adyashanti, David Ditchfield, Constance Casey, Angelo Dilullo, Iain McGilchrist, Bob Harwood, Rupert Spira, Anita Moorjani, Diane Hennecy Powell, Ken Wilber, Stanislav Grof, Swami Sarvapriyananda, Llewelyn Vaughan-Lee.

  • The Telepathy Tapes by Ky Dickens, especially Season 2.

  • Living Myth with Michael Meade. Meade uses myth to access inner wisdom and present a different narrative for confronting the problems of the world. Imagine a modern day Joseph Campbell.

  • This interview with Cynthia Bourgeault by Jennifer England, which I go back to again and again. She weaves in Gurdjieff, Teilhard de Chardin, Benedictine wisdom, Jean Gebser, The Buddha, Adam & Eve. So hard that you have to replay sentences. (Which I love).

• Film: Brother Sun, Sister Moon by Franco Zeffirelli, about the Life of St Francis of Assisi.

• Books:

  • The Eye of the I by Sir David Hawkins

  • Eye of the Heart by Cynthia Bourgeault

  • Help, Thanks, Wow by Anne Lamott

  • The Cloud of Unknowing

  • Sacred Psychiatry by Judy Suzanne Reis Tsafrir, MD

  • The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer

  • Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda

  • Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich

  • I May Be Wrong: Wisdom from a Forest Monk Björn Natthiko Lindeblad

  • Mary Magdalene Revealed by Meggan Watterson

• YouTube: I really resonate with the grounded, sound, wise astrologer Pam Gregory, especially this conversation with Dr David Clements.

Only good things happen on the twenty second of the month according to my mother. Understandably, as both of her children and her mother were born on that date. Twenty two is my random pet number for holding my breath or taking gulps of water or counting steps. I like its rather pleasing symmetry. But the weather in West Berkshire on the twenty second of January lists heavily towards miserable and the wet green branches and muddy paths, the flat grey skies and mossy walls are better experienced in person than viewed from the window in front of my desk. In it, it’s fine. Outside of it, it’s separate and doesn’t beckon.

I have to gather reasons to be happy in January. I pick up things everywhere in the hope that they’ll be useful. I speak into my phone on to my notes app when I’m driving, and write gratitude lists before I go to sleep. I also shove fistfuls of Vitamin D into my mouth. I like this though:

“Every moment is a fresh beginning.” - T.S. Eliot

Pam Gregory, who is an uber astrologer, in that her background is astrology but she is an all round wise woman and energy healer, one of the women I believe are holding up the world so it doesn’t shift off its axes, believes that everything is energy (and science backs this up) and that your inner state shapes your outer reality. She chooses every day that it will be a day of happiness, or joy, or peace. Similarly, the lead monk in the Buddhist Monks Peace Walk, Bhikku Pannakara shares his simple practise by beginning each day with the affirmation “Today is going to be my peaceful day.” He says you write it down, then you read it inside and then you read it out loud. By setting this intention, we plant a seed of peace in our hearts, and we continue to choose it no matter what life throws at us. (The late neuroscientist and founder of the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Jim Doty walks Mel Robbins through a similar manifestation technique on her podcast.)

This period leading into 2026 - now (and I say this with some urgency) - is all about choosing the life we want and stepping into our power to create that very life. It’s no longer about the victim mentality of life happening to you, but rather the choosing exactly what you want ie, life happening for you. There is a lovely thing that happens when you realize that each one of us is a tiny little part of the whole, a bursting, blooming fractal extension of spirit or source or the great creative energy of the universe, or God. So we take responsibility every day and choose to live from a place of higher consciousness. Or at least, I suppose, we choose to be kind and not allow the coarsening of the world to do the same to us.

There is a lot of stuff out there, an endless pit of woo-woo philosophy and advice that would take you a few thousand lifetimes to get through. I have a read a lot of it and my criteria, although a little hazy, is pretty well marked (or boundaried). I trust people who have done the work and I trust those who have a clear academic background in science the most. But the intersection of science and spirituality is boundlessly fascinating to me. Yesterday for example I looked up “thirteen dimensions and string theory.” It’s butting up against each other all the time, and people are popping over to the other side in order to get a better view. I think (and I will admit to my own limited brain power here) that we are at the point where some questions just cannot be answered by science and spirituality (or, the notion of allowing that there are things that cannot be proved materially and that we have lost somehow our very keen gut and heart connection to the rest of the natural world) might provide some answers.

Case in point, Dr David Clements, a physicist who has advanced degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, and is now someone who communicates with (”channels”) Pleiadians and Arcturians. Yes, I know. You probably saw the word “Pleiadian” and decided to stop reading. I was the same. But he is such a sweet and believable man, so grounded in science, and so self-deprecating, and makes so much sense, that it’s hard to ignore. His conversation with Pamela Gregory is available on her YouTube channel from January 16 is utterly riveting.

The other astonishing thing is Season Two of The Telepathy Tapes. I think the shame around believing in this stuff has dissipated as I am noting many sceptical friends who are fully embracing this mind blowing podcast. People are allowing themselves to wake up so that they can witness the world evolving. Of particular note, the episode on creativity featuring Liz Gilbert and Ann Patchett, and the one ones on plant and animal communication. After I listened I couldn’t get away from the feeling that I’m so lucky to live in a world where these things exist.

I was married for a long time to one of life’s great enthusiasts. If he took up a new hobby, he fully committed to it and dedicated his days to it. Even if it was something I wasn’t remotely interested in (going for hundred mile bike rides in lycra and cleats, for example) I was fully on board for his enthusiasm for life. It made Christmas presents a doddle. It’s exciting to live with someone who is passionate about stuff. And often stuff I didn’t understand. I learned to nod and smile at the necessary moments, because sometimes having something explained was even more complicated. My thirst for knowledge in the area of non-duality is something not really shared by anyone in my family, although I am grateful to them for being tolerant and embracing my eccentricity. It’s not new. I had an imaginary friend when I was three or four, could feel ghosts in houses when I was ten or eleven, and had the full on psychedelic experience (woah, hay is just sparkling energy) by the time I was at Oxford, with my dear friend A, who has disappeared quietly no doubt into his beloved inner sanctum. Mushrooms weren’t for partying; they were sacred. Always taken in the fields (Christchurch meadow), the woods, or, best of all on the wild moors of Ireland, amongst glittering verdure, sunlit heather, surrounded by curious, loving sheep. We knew it was about finding God although it was never said, and we knew that everything was connected. And I never forgot. I was a little disappointed that my philosophy degree didn’t include more Huxley or Kesey or any of those cool guys, but there you go. I remember parsing the lyrics to “Over the Wall’ by Echo and the Bunnymen and explaining to my aunt that it was about transcendence. Bless her for being so kind, and listening, wrapt.

My sobriety, I sometimes think, makes me dull. Occasionally I get the giggles and I relish those moments, but mostly it’s me, drinking water, sitting at a table with my oldest friends while they drink delicious red wine and tell funny stories and I somehow seem to miss the point. It’s awful feeling boring when you’re used to being someone who sparkles. But it’s also hard to have conversations about things you find utterly fascinating with people who think you are just slightly mad, not least because you don’t drink. I think the assumption is that if you don’t drink you judge those that do. It’s the not the case. It’s more about trying to match the energy, or get on the same wavelength.

This new hobby, which isn’t new and isn’t really a hobby, could happily fill every waking hour and certainly does dominate car rides and late night reading. I am so sure of the goodness of it all. That it comes from a place of love, and that this is the way to exist in the world, with love, and through love. Slowly I’m finding my people, a network of women mostly who work with energy, or plants, or have a healing practise. I’ve stopped being self conscious and start inserting my research into conversations. There’s a poetry group here, a sound healing forum there, people who recommend books, instagram friends I’ve never met who I know I’d love in real life. But rather like being a member of a secret society, it’s not exactly something people want to speak about all the time. People like gossip, I’ve noticed. And it’s something for which I can’t really muster up any interest. Just this morning while waiting for the Oscar noms (in my day job) I realized that every single ad for every single tv show was so unbelievably awful that I couldn’t believe that people watch such dross when there are so many other things in the universe of such mind blowing significance just waiting to be discovered. The world is a magical place, and yet we are pulled down into this swill with the American president in the middle of it. None of it means anything. It’s Orwellian. All we need to do is start paying attention to what’s really going on. All of the other stuff is just designed to keep us cowering. There is another path, and it’s a path that involves love, kindness, nature, animals. And that’s the path the Monks are treading. They’re leading the way, all we have to do is follow.

If you’re interested in a reading list or a podcast list, I’d be happy to send one your way. Sending lots of love to you and yours on this rainy, grey January day. We live in the most amazing, miraculous world.

PS. I’m not particularly whizzy on Substack; I don’t spend enough time here. Please accept my apologies if you are a new subscriber and I have not acknowledged you. I promise you that if I am aware of a new reader or a new message I will reply immediately. Thank you for your understanding. Liking my post does help other people see it, so thank you in advance!

Last Tuesday night we went to our first Christmas carol service of the season. My oldest friend sings in the Battersea Choral Society and they do an annual Christmas concert to raise money for a local charity. I’d like to say we were gleeful on the way there, but it’s funny what we bring to these events; reluctance, residual bits of work (because this seems to be the busy season) - anxiety for things that aren’t done, worry about missing important calls - a bit of a sense that Christmas is only for children, a tiny bit of bah humbug, honestly. But we dutifully piled into the church, startled and happily surprised by the lights in London -- a wall of shimmery sparkles covering Peter Jones department store in Sloane Square, all kinds of jolly wreaths and twinkling baubles -- wearing our coats and gloves and hats even though it’s not that cold. I wear my mother’s double breasted brown tweed coat and one of her scarves, a jaunty red, covered in white horses (so hopeful), and I put on Christmas earings with red pomegranate jewels. We stumble into our row, where dear friends have saved seats, and we’re a bit late, of course, and climb over people’s bags and legs to get to our chairs. People are holding plastic glasses half filled with mulled wine and showing their teeth to each other. No doubt there were mince pies too, long devoured. Hello we say to our friends and the family of our friends and to the friends of the friends in the row in front, and we lean across each other and catch as much as one can, smilingly, hello, hello, are you ready for Christmas, is all well, making future plans of which 75% won’t be kept, but are meant kindly and truthfully in the moment. The orchestra warms up. And the music starts. The nice conductor welcomes us. “He looks a bit like Sam Mendes, doesn’t he?” I say to Charlie. “Well, I s’pose..” says Charlie. And the choir is there at the front of the church, men in black tie, women in black dresses, and sparkly things in their hair, different looks and hairdos, rows of black against the stone of the walls. I see my friend Vivien there in the middle, utterly poised and focused on the conductor, warm light on her face, her shoulder-length hair shimmering, her glasses perched on her nose, and I think about how I’ve known her since we were twelve when we sang in the school choir together in our blue cassocks (and Ian Dury at home). I’m so proud of her. I know how hard she has worked. I feel my heart swell when I see her there, with her book of music, immersed. The hymns come and some involve audience participation, the old favorites “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear,” “Hark The Herald Angels Sing.” We mumble in our chair, shuffle to our feet, sing heartily, with relief, remembering what it is to be singing carols again. We imagine we’re children again, or think of our children, and nativity plays from Christmases past. A funny reading; a woman reads a recipe for a fruit cake which includes frequent testing of the whiskey; brilliantly, she acts drunker and drunker, hiccuping up on the pulpit, the audience in fits of laughter. I hold Charlie’s hand. I sing too loudly. I’m now glad we’re there and glad that we’re all there together.

And then “O Holy Night” arranged by John Rutter. It might be nice, perhaps, if you don’t know it, that you listen to it for maximum effect. It’s here if you’d like to.

It’s a sacred song about the night Jesus was born, written in 1847 by a Jewish composer Adolphe Adam, adapted from a french poem named Minuit Chretiens written by an atheist wine merchant, Placid Cappeau. There is a rumour that during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, there was a temporary cease fire when a French soldier stood up and began singing it in the trenches, which inspired a similar response from the other side.

O holy night, the stars are brightly shining/It is the night of the dear Saviour’s birth/Long lay the world in sin and error pining/Till He appeared/And the soul felt its worth/The thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices/For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn

There is a swell in the music, a crescendo, and the altos come in during the next line:

Fall on your knees, Oh hear the angel voices

Now, I don’t know about you, but I burst into floods of tears at this point. Tears of relief, of joy, of feeling understood. It’s the most powerful hymn.

(I said to my friend afterwards, “I totally fell apart during O holy night,” and she said, thank goodness, “Oh I always do. I sob!”)

So why do we sob? Why does this simple carol have just a profound effect on us? I would like to suggest that whether you are a believer or an atheist you can relate to the idea of falling to your knees, of literally being knocked to your knees as you give up trying to hold it all together. When you loosen your grip on the ironclad framework you’ve created to pin everything on, and fall to your knees, metaphorically or not, there is massive relief. You discover you are not alone. Somehow there is enormous strength in the idea of no longer holding on and yet feeling totally supported, as if you’re not alone, that you’re never alone, and that the universe, or God, or the angels in this case, have your back.

Fall on your knees, Oh hear the angel voices

Imagine everything leaving you, all the stress and the anxiety and the clinging to the small ego, just to experience the awe of the angels singing.

This emptying is what Cynthia Bourgeault calls “kenosis.” I’ve always imagined this to be the state one achieves through meditation. That quiet stillness which allows you to hear what is intended for you. But it’s easy to achieve by walking. Walk out into the trees, into the middle of a field, or just sit in your garden quietly, and it will come over you, the stillness. We are so busy! We fill each living moment with things. How wonderful to stop, to fall to your knees, to allow space for the angels. It’s a childlike point of light that lives in each one of us.

The song continues

Truly He taught us to love one another/His law is love and His gospel is peace/Chains shall He Break for the slave is our brother/And in His name/All oppression shall cease

There is so much anxiety and fear in the world and none of us are immune from it, even if we actively avoid reading the news. (I merely glimpse at the New York Times front page, but the crazy has a way of pulling you in.) I’m aware that the planets are all over the place, that the world is chaotic, that peace and joy have been usurped by the cynical, the power-hungry, the greedy, and everything feels wobbly. Therefore, I urge you to take time every day for a little bit of quiet where you can feel still and just listen for a bit.

I am drawn back again and again to Mary Karr who writes about how she came to prayer:

Okay, I couldn’t stop drinking. I’d tried everything but prayer. And somebody suggested to me that I kneel every morning and ask God for help not picking up a cocktail, then kneel at night to say thanks. “But I don’t believe in God,” I said. Again Bill Knott came to mind:

People who get down

on their knees to me

are the answers to my prayers.

—Credo

The very idea of prostrating myself brought up the old Marxist saw about religion being the opiate for the masses and congregations dumb as cows. God as Nazi? I wouldn’t have it. My spiritual advisor at the time was an ex-heroin addict who radiated vigor. Janice had enough street cred for me to say to her, “Fuck that god. Any god who’d want people kneeling and sniveling—”

Janice cut me off. “You don’t do it for God, you asshole,” she said. She told me to try it like an experiment: pray for thirty days, and see if I stayed sober and my life got better.

And you can watch her talk about this here:

+ + + + + + + + + +

On Christmas Day, Charlie was ringing the bells and I wandered over after meditating with Nigel at 8.30am (a long walk, all of about 100 yards) to catch the nine o’clock service. The vicar was late. He often is. I’m not much of a fan but I decided to give him a chance because last year’s Christmas sermon wasn’t bad at all, and my view of him had begun to shift. But at 9.15am people were beginning to fidget. The man next to me, Derek, and I discussed dementia and old people’s homes. Gwen, who was in the pew in front of us turned around and said “Oh I hope the vicar hasn’t overslept.” I was contemplating that the thought “you had one job” doesn’t feel like a very Christian thing to ponder, especially next to Derek and behind Gwen at 9.15am on Christmas morning in a church built in 1100. He lumbered in a few minutes later and sped us through the service. There was no pianist or organist and he was clearly in a rush for the next service a few miles away, so half way through the first warbling verse of Hark The Herald Angels Sing, he shouted “Last Verse!” & of course we were all so surprised that we all dutifully obeyed. No chance of a Blessing of the Animals, then? And then in the call and response prayers, he started speaking the next paragraph just as we were speaking the “and with thy spirit” bit, which was a wee bit rude, don’t you think? By the time we got to the sermon, my arms were firmly cross across my chest and I had a “this better be good” expression across my face.

He did the thing that seasoned speakers do where he started to look from one pew to another, one face to the next, in order to try to connect, and refused to give him anything. I was having a Christmas Morning Mexican Stand Off with the vicar.

But then he said this bit about the light. About coming to a stable and experiencing the coming of the light in the form of the divine birth. And he talks about the light and how the light allows us to see things clearly and as they are. And how we need to see life as it is. And somehow I dropped my cynicism and I forgave Father Paul for being up too late last night because I remembered that the only way to find equanimity is to choose to see the world as it is and not as you wish it to be. Not because I am good person but because I remembered for a glimpse of a moment the person I’d like to be.

The only place to come from is love.

The only way to be is kind.

The only way to live is now.

And to see things as they are, without judgement.

Again and again.

- Jon Kabat-Zinn

I think that we choose to walk in the light. I think we look at the finite number of days we have on this planet and we make a choice. Actually, I’m not sure we have a choice.

i. Heat

The weatherman has told us that it will be 32 degrees today on our little island in the Oslo fjord. I've used a Los Angeles tactic of shutting the curtains but leaving the windows and doors open so that breeze can blow through. Yesterday the skies darkened to a shade of indigo (I love that word, comes next to violet) and there was massive rumbling of thunder and flashes of lightning on the horizon. Daisy and I drove back from an ice cream expedition on Hvasser and she said, do you think we'll be struck by it? No, I said, of course not. And later that day I read in the New York Times that a Norwegian, an Olympian of a mere 49 years had been struck dead by lightning right outside of his hytte in the mountains.

On the rocky hill behind our summer cottage there are aspens which make the most marvelous and delicate rattling sound in the wind. They shimmer, really. There is rowan too, juniper, honeysuckle clinging onto the granite rock, little ferns, an apple tree that has seeded itself into the side of the face, nestled among the moss. We've propped up an old iron fire place outside. It was the inside the house before we put in a wood burner, and I can't bear to get rid of it. There are oak trees, dogs, an old fashioned grumpy paysan boy lifting his fist, a rooster, some hens all molded into the iron relief. It's leaning against the rock with optimism. We walk past and consider building an outdoor fireplace and imagine ourselves sitting around it on these long, light evenings telling stories or singing perhaps. We’d be wearing shorts and old button down shirts which live in the cupboards and smell of stale pine and sea salt. This dream is a bit silly, I know, because, well, it's going to be 32 degrees today.

No-one can find the vimple, the standard isosceles triangle shaped flag hat goes up every day, so we only put up the big flag on Sundays and birthdays. I love the red and blue and white of the Norwegian flag, and it makes me feel different than I do when I see the American flag or the Union Jack. It feels bold and bright and jolly. You see them on the backs of boats too, flying bravely over the sea. The Norwegian flag makes me think of happy summer days, of Firkløver chocolate, of hanging out in the boat smiling. As my mother said to me yesterday on the phone, "If I think about it I don't think I've spent happier times anywhere but Tjøme."

I've managed to lose the others to a boat trip. Not that I didn't want to go on a boat trip, especially one to Mink Island, where my grandmother saw the mink all those years ago, an island which only has good memories, but I did relish the idea of spending the day alone in this little cottage, sitting out back as I am now, listening to the sound of the aspen (populus tremula, I’ve learned), and the clink of the boats on the jetty, the seagulls, and to do nothing all day. What I love about this island right now is that everyone is doing nothing. Whole families of people doing nothing but pottering about in boats, lying on the grass by the sea in swimsuits, eating a lazy sandwich. I saw a man and his daughter, in a red gingham smocked dress with a white collar, not quite done up properly at the back, half the hem tucked into her knickers, sitting on a chair just outside the supermarket, counting buttons from her little embroidered purse. The father was as fully engaged as the little girl. Another mother with her son walked into the bakery with the golden pretzel sign hanging on a chain outside, as I left, to order boller (cardamom buns). People with little children get up early. It's the best time of the day. Everything is fresh and quiet, sunny but not yet hot, and full of promise. I've brought boller with raisins home and I've sliced one in half and put a bit of brown goats cheese it for my breakfast.

A greek salad with tomatoes and feta and dill and cucumbers has been packed, (I added some garbanzos and pomegranate seed) some chocolate, some apples, the delicious local spelt bread and butter, two bottles of water, in an old ice bag from LL Bean. And they're off in the boat, on the blue, blue sea. My ex-husband was awfully good at building up the supplies in the summer house. Special candle burning hurricane lamps which could double for warming up things. Useful trivets. Spare pairs of boat shoes. Mosquito spray. A barbeque chimney. Smart, efficient plastic boxes for fishing line. All from LL Bean of course. Funny how you appreciate these things so many years later. At the time it just seemed like so much more to pack.

C & I swam early this morning, before the people in the little house opposite our jetty were awake. Our neighbor was already in the sea. "Is it lovely in the water," I asked in Norwegian. "22 degrees" he said, also in Norwegian. Yesterday it was close to 24 degrees. The water was so smooth and calm that little pools of bathwater temperature water had formed, so that you could swim through hot patches that would almost halt your motion, and you'd lie on your back luxuriating in it. This morning it was more choppy. I swam with long, even strokes out towards the old fishing boat that hasn't moved from its place in the bay for years. You can stop and lay flat and stare at the faces in the clouds. The water is the darkest shade of navy blue, not grey or green, but clear, deep blue. It makes you want to put your face in it, to dive into it, to move like a seal. It holds you. You realize you don't have to move at all, that the water has you and it's all going to be fine. This is our favorite thing. Him. Me. The sea. The sky. That's it. All will be well.

I'm glad people are speaking more about recharging their social batteries. Mine is pretty flat. Two or three friends have used that expression and it gives me a sense of relief that other people too feel this way. I am sure it would seem rather dull to my younger self to see me now, sitting on my own listening to the trembling leaves and thinking about when I can jump in the sea. Probably with aging comes the sense that everything you do needs to be nourishing, life-affirming and that there is less time for confection, however sweet it may seem at the time. "Let the water hold you" a friend said, and it's that sense of relief when you realize you don't have to take action all the time, you can just zen the fuck out, and not do a thing and know that you will be okay. That's what it's all about; totally letting go.

ii. Heart

"And what exactly is that metaphorical thorn for you? It's madness to hate all roses because you got scratched with one thorn, to give up all dreams because one of them didn't come true, to give up all attempts because one of them failed. It's folly to condemn all your friends because one has betrayed you, to no longer believe in love just because someone was unfaithful or didn't love you back, to throw away all your chances to be happy because something went wrong. There will always be another opportunity, another friend, another love, a new strength. For every end, there is always a new beginning..... And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." - Antoine de St Exupéry

The joke is that I've created my own room here at the end of the tiny lawn we sometimes use for badminton. I have a pale blue hammock tied to two cherry trees, a table and a chair, a glass of water and my notebook. Nothing more is needed. We walked in clover fields this morning, the kind of grass that would cause my mare to do an Irish jig. Lush and bright green from the thunderstorm yesterday afternoon. I woke at five and meditated on the little bench outside our room, looking towards the sunrise, wrapped in a duvet and a pink sweater, remembering why it's important to get up early here on Tjøme to catch the magic. I am barely awake as I stumble out with my phone and take pictures of the sky, shot silk of terracotta, melon, marigold and tangerine, overwhelmed by the beauty. And then I fold my legs under myself on the bench and close my eyes. I am grateful to Bob Roth, who reads this piece from The Little Prince (above) at the end of the meditation. There is always a poem or a quote and it always aligns to exactly where you are (you are exactly where you are supposed to be) and I think of Cynthia Bourgeault, of Buechner, of Ram Dass and his golden meditation. We walk and meet a man with a doodle named Lotta. He, like us, has lived here in the summer for generations. He tells me that when he drives over the bridge onto the island his shoulders drop. He mimes this movement and I know what he means. I think of my grandfather swimming across the strait from Nøtterø to Tjøme with his doctor's bag and a change of clothes in his hands during the war.

There is a necessary compulsion to map the island every year. It's a small island, only 24 square kilometres and still in the sixty years that I've been coming here, we haven't explored the whole thing. Always a new path, sometimes barely wider than a fox path, appears, as if by magic, and how can you not follow it?

iii. Nuvle

I love the nights when we make plans for the next day at supper. I love waking up with a plan. I love the excitement of an expedition. We decided to take the boat to Nuvle on my brother’s last day. And we’re going early. It’s a small island directly east of our bay and on the way to black rock where the good cod fish hang out, and it’s shaped like a croissant. I haven’t been there for forty years probably, but I have memories of my uncle driving us out in the big wooden boat, shirtless, with his tanned barrel chest, cracking open beers while we jumped off the boat into the sea. It’s known as a swimming island. And people take tents and stay overnight. There are smooth, rounded rocks everywhere providing shelter from the wind, and in the middle of the island is a verdant tropical bit (well not really tropical, but the flora feels unusual for an island in the middle of the Skaggerak.) We climb off the boat onto the warm rocks barefoot, as my grandmother suggested, and wander about, quite silently, my brother, my daughter, her boyfriend, Charlie and I, like a band looking for a tune. We’re children again, somewhat speechless, mumbling perhaps, in the quiet of the morning, with the sun low in the sky and no boats or people about. There is a teenage seagull viewing us. We don’t really know what we’re searching for, but we search nonetheless, awestruck really.

iv. Mackerel

There's an indelible imprint after a holiday. Your body has returned to ease. There is something incredibly powerful about being in a place where everyone is on holiday and doing very little. Lovely, bright marker-style delineation between everything. Work and play. Eating and sleeping. Reading, swimming, playing cards. Wondering about in Norwegian woods, stepping on pinecones, and picking tiny blueberries and lucky clover shaped sorrel that is sour in your mouth. Standing on top of the little mountain (hill) and looking out over the bay of tiny islands, all connected and yet not, like clouds in a mackerel sky. Everyone isn't just on holiday, they're on holiday without trying to prove anything. No having to be at the tennis club, or the smart restaurant, or the pickle ball tournament, or dressing to impress. There is some urgency. The loan 6am runner for example, or the one or two ski-skaters you see on the road to Hvasser. The people at the place we buy our bread and coffee who don't even have time to swim because it's the summer season. "We'll swim in October" they say, smiling. Every day is packed with what? Most urgently for me is the desire to explore, to map the place, to immerse myself in the magic of it all.

Maybe it was on my birthday, I don't remember, but one morning we got up very early to walk because we realized that by 9 it was almost too hot to go out to exercise unless you were in the sea. It's a familiar feeling. It's what we do in LA; 6am hikes with the dogs before the sun shows its face over the San Gabriels. We found a map app that took us round the back of the houses in Flekkeveien, towards Mågerø and we met a rather nice man with a doodle kind of dog called Lotta. He had thick white hair, cut smartly, and was wearing navy blue shorts and a white shirt. "Don't take the seaside path," he said, "I know it's tempting, but there is some dispute over whether it's allowed." Lotta wagged her tail at us as he spoke. "I've been coming here for a long time" he said, assuming, I think that we were tourists. "Oh my grandfather used to swim across the channel at Vrengen Bru [the bridge that connects us to Nøtterø] with his clothes on his head during the war" I say. I don't know why I say this. I have a need to prove I'm not a tourist. Also I like to brag about my Bestefar, who had a white moustache tinged with orange nicotine, and a captain's hat from the Royal Yacht Club. "They've opened up the land at Mågerø, the forest this side of the King's house," he said. "You can walk there now."

Thus armed, the very next day we drove around the island urgently (for we were on holiday and such things were urgent) to get closer to this new forest. It's just across the bay from us, but longer by foot. If you imagine Grimestad bay as a circle, our house is at 6 and the forest we're talking about is at 11. So the car became the best option. We parked up and somehow found a path that went diagonally across a piece of scrubby ground filled with juniper and blueberries, between two houses, and wiggled up a little hill on a sandy path, between little rocks and gnarly tree roots until it began to drop down towards the sea. Fir trees, raspberries, silver birch and aspen, pine needles underfoot, some birds. Plenty of berries shoved into mouths. And then we found the sea stretched out in front of us, between the trees. The first bay we reached had a small sailing boat anchored in it, but as we followed the path along the sea to our right, there was a small swing comprised of old boat ropes and a thick dowel or piece of broom handle. I can't resist a children’s swing, so I swung on it as C continued walking. We clambered up a smooth rock and through some brambles, leapt over a small, dead but glistening snake to a tall cliff where there was a wartime concrete bunker, rigid and angular amongst the smooth, rounded rocks. He is very chivalrous and holds his hand out for me as we go up and down the rocks, but I learned from my grandmother many many years ago that you’re safer on your own because you know where your balance is, and if in doubt, scoot down on your bottom. Also, you are often safer barefoot.

The third bay shimmered and twinkled at us. It curved in front of us like a scythe, the sand giving way to brown seaweed and shiny pebbles in dark, warm colors, the size of my hand. The sea lapped gently in and out in a steady rhythm until a motorboat went by in the distance and I was aware of how the gentlest ripple can affect everything, gently shifting the sand, moving the pebbles, shunting the little yellow snails up and down the beach. (And thus it is with thought, I ruminated; just thinking about a thing can change it, as suggested in chaos theory. These are the things you think about while lying on your back in the ocean). We had left our swim things in the car and so we swam without. He walked in from the beach and I climbed down some rocks, carefully stepping over barnacles. He’s a walker inner. I’m a plunger. There was no-one within more than half a mile of us. C suggested that we should keep our underwear on for the King out of respect and I imagined all kinds of hidden cameras, but it didn't really bother us. Is there a nation on earth that embraces their nudity like the Norwegians? My grandmother swam naked every single morning, holding the steps (trappen) with one hand and her bottle of Bliw, saltwater soap, in the other. The sea was smooth and darkest blue, the sun reflected on it, so swimming was effortless, and the water held us. Time stopped completely. Nothing needed to be done. Nothing much happened. It was just us and the sea and the little beach and pine forest in the distance. Simple, elemental. We climbed out and lay on the warm rocks to dry out, pointing out animals we were seeing in the clouds. Isn’t it funny how you can see so much when your mind isn’t cluttered with thought?

I've decamped to Los Angeles for a couple of weeks for work, yes, but mostly to see my family here. As I gathered my things at home the day before my flight, I realized I find it impossible to fly without getting my whole world into order, as if death is imminent. I can't just pack, I have to organize each drawer. I pulled a piece of paper out of my work notebook, something I'd written hurriedly during a zoom meeting on a train:

Now couldn't be a more important time to experience, create, promote lovely things. More than ever, this is what we need to fill our souls. I'm staring out of the train window and yelling "thank you, thank you, thank you" in my head (as the dappled trees whoosh by). Everything will be all right.

The mistake we make is waiting for someone else to say something, to do something. When actually the saviour is you. And it always has been.

My friend has lent me her guest house. It's huge and beautiful, with white sofas and white curtains and seagrass rugs on the floor, naive paintings on the walls, and blue and white porcelain lamps in pairs. The kitchen is stocked with good English tea bags, jars of biscotti, local honey, a fridge filled with salsa and hummus and tiny organic carrots, a piece of ripe cheese under a glass dome, yogurt and snacking tuna in pouches. The bathroom has a mountain of fluffy towels and malin+goetz essentials. She has thought of everything. The first night I'm too jetlagged to pay attention but this morning I'm marveling at her thoughtfulness. I have my own little haven in the the middle of LA with a smart speaker that plays Aad Guray Nameh miraculously while I look out at white roses and lavender in the garden. I'm in Los Angeles at I'm sitting at a table in a white wood-panelled house with my laptop and I'm powering through emails and there are humming birds in the garden, and on the street there are gardeners with leaf blowers who say "good morning" as I walk past. I'm taking pictures of bottle brush trees and gingko trees and pink bougainvillea flowers scattered over a sidewalk, and a veritable field of rose-scented geranium that brush against my legs as I walk. I pick a leaf, crush it in my left hand, drop it in my pocket. I want to make scented sugar with it, use it in a Persian Love Cake.

LA has all the bullshit and all the brilliance one would expect. The effortlessly casual Loro Piana clad and earpodded writer sashaying down Larchmont and speaking too loudly, virtue signalling into the phone. The private school mother and daughter in matching black work-out lycra. The daughter orders another coffee because a fly has dropped into her cup, annoyingly. The mother looks into her phone as her daughter speaks for her. The parents in the bookstore with their distracted three year old son, his face painted like a tiger; they patiently deal with his tantrum as other parents nod with knowing appreciation. There is kindness too, the lovely server who tells me with the greatest diplomacy that I can't have Danish Rye bread with my eggs as they only sell that by the loaf, but would seed bread work? (It does). The local cleaner where I take my pile of shirts (seven for each day I've been here). "Name, please" he says as he counts my order, "Emma" I say. It's my Starbucks name. "Let me find you in the system," he says. "Oh I haven't been here before," I say. And I look up at the string of Christmas cards above his head and see a beloved friend and her family smiling into the camera. I feel immediately at home.

I read a piece in the New Yorker this morning by Michael Pollan about a psilocybin study by Johns Hopkins on spiritual leaders, a Buddhist, and Episcopal priest, a Rabbi, an Iman...you almost know the punchline although they don't walk into a bar. The playlist that was piped into the headphones of the participants as they lay comfortably under a blanket, their eyes covered in a mask, is available on Spotify and I'm listening to it as I work. Lovely lovely transcendental stuff. But here's the thing, the overall takeaway from all of them, each one of those people in the Johns Hopkins study, is that LOVE IS ALL. That's it. That's the simple truth.

I was lucky enough to learn transcendental meditation on April 26 (thank you E). I'd been meditating on and off for a few years, but TM always eluded me. My friend Karen Taylor tried to bring me to a class in Oxford when we were there. It was in St Giles. I remember we had our bikes and we were walking and there was a sign on a lamp post. I don't know what stopped me. The death of David Lynch brought so much more awareness to it, and suddenly the socials were flooded with the benefits. I've been doing twenty minutes twice a day for almost a month now, and everything is changing, in a very way. The initial benefits are interesting: there is space between things, things taste more, colors are brighter. I am kinder. But where I would be a bit hesitant before I'm now an eager beaver to get to my chair, to sit. Before there wasn't time for it, and now everything has shifted around so that there is time. (If you are interested, do let me know and I'll introduce you to my teacher). As my friend E said to me "it's the best high, everrrr." Perhaps these ways of softening ourselves, of coming back to our higher selves, of trusting and allowing are the only ways we have to spread love in the world. There is a ripple effect, because your edges become smoothed just a little and the way you react out there is just slightly softened. You become less judgey...just a little...and more able to step into another person's shoes. And the cumulative effect (one hopes) is that those rings of ripples spread out into the world.

By the way, there is nothing more irksome than someone forcing you to be calm. Have you ever wanted to punch anyone more than when they say "just calm down"? Thankfully, it's not like that. Apparently everyone has thoughts that float in. The point is just to be easy with them, not to overreact, not to judge yourself (how many times have you heard "I can't do it" "my brain's too busy" or "i can't clear my mind.") No-one can. That's the point; it's coming back every time, realizing that you're thinking about scrambled eggs for breakfast, and coming back to the mantra, easily, without fuss.

The morning birds are waking outside my window. I saw finches in the jacaranda trees yesterday, playing. The birds are still here, thank God. I've sat on this post for days so I'm just going to put it out there, and I have to walk before my work day starts. Wherever you are in the world, I'm sending you love. Let's be strong (soft) together.

Safety Net
This morning I woke
thinking of all the people I love
and all the people they love
and how big the net
of lovers. It felt so clear,
all those invisible ties
interwoven like silken threads
strong enough to make a mesh
that for thousands of years
has been woven and rewoven
to catch us all.
Sometimes we go on
as if we forget
about it. Believing only
in the fall. But the net
is just as real. Every day,
with every small kindness,
with every generous act,
we strengthen it. Notice,
even now, how
as the whole world
seems to be falling, it
is there for us as we
walk the day’s tightrope,
how every tie matters.
~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I am thinking this morning of Pope Francis who died earlier today, who chose his name in honor of St Francis of Assisi. May he rest in heavenly peace. I am sharing the words of the prayer of St Francis here. Whatever your belief, these are words to live by:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.

I keep a tattered piece of paper tacked to the wall in front of my desk to remind me. We have everything we need. We are not alone. We need to keep coming back to being instruments of peace in this beautiful green place we call home.

This is how the Pope lived. In a statement announcing his death, the Vatican said:

"He taught us to live the values ​​of the Gospel with fidelity, courage and universal love, especially in favour of the poorest and most marginalised."

If there is ever any doubt this is the right course -- if we are for one moment swayed by the nonsense which is overtaking America -- let us all come to our senses and remember this humility.

* * * * *

In a side note, I should mention that he managed to come to the balcony at the Vatican yesterday in a wheelchair to greet the crowds and wish his brothers and sisters a happy Easter. We had our own Easter celebration in the garden, with five grandchildren, with dyed eggs and radishes, a tomato tart, bundt cake and berries, under the magnolia tree who has surrendered her blooms, surrounded by tulips in pots and our first potted lilac. There were dogs trying desperately to grab chocolate dropped from the hands of small children, and the odd sausage that no-one would miss. Thistle, a thirteen year old Frenchie who grew up in Laurel Canyon, who can't see or hear very well, still has a fine sense of smell. She made her way to where the small children were picnicking on the lawn and surveyed the plates for her Easter feast. Sausages? No. Chicken drumsticks? No. A fully loaded toasted sesame bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon? Yes please. She carried it gently back to our table, gloating. "Oh you can tell she's an LA dog," said Kate. "An English one would've gone for the sausages."

My mother joined us, pretty in a pink sweater and pink pearls. "How are you, Mamma?" I asked. "I'm in good company," she said. "The Pope and I in our wheelchairs, enjoying Easter."

The children and the whippet tore about the garden, shrieking. People were very kind about my collapsed Bundt (a rookie mistake, using an elaborate Christmas pan, replete with candles and fir trees, for an Easter loaf). "Is this the Bundt recovery hotline?" I said to my friend Jack who lives in Sag Harbor and offered me a most excellent almond and lemon cake recipe. "Honey, dip it in a hot bain-marie to save it" he offered. "If all else fails, glue the two pieces together with a lemon butter cream and smother the whole thing in whipped cream." I love him so very much.

Recipe https://pamelamorganlifestyle.com/almond-olive-oil-bundt-cake/. Would work just as well in a regular cake pan (also less margin for error).

Sending love to you wherever you are in the world.

I suppose the elephant in the room is the widespread anxiety and mild panic caused by the current President of the United States. I'm not being an ostrich but I refuse to engage with his bullshit. However, if you are a relatively sensitive person and even if you don't read the news, you will feel this stuff. You will feel the anxiety. This is posted as an antidote to that feeling. It's about frontloading your mornings with good stuff that will help you deal head on with the stuff that hits you during the day.

Dear Friends and Readers,

I realize that we're bombarded with good advice, from all over, all of the time, and that it becomes overwhelming. The downside of working on oneself or being on a healing journey is the underlying idea that something needs to be fixed, that we're somehow flawed. I don't believe this. I love the idea that we have everything that we need and it's just about accessing it deep inside of each one of use. In these doolally, upside down, unsettling times one of the most helpful things I've found is to frontload my day with useful stuff so that I feel full and strong and ready to meet the day. It hasn't been always very easy. For months during the winter I struggled with a morning routine; I wanted to find something that allowed me to do all the things I wanted to do before the work day started. These included walking outside (with dogs), yoga, meditation, writing and some kind of prayer (or gratitude practise). I'm sharing with you some things that I have found useful, and I hope they might be useful for you too. If this isn't your bag, please feel free to move on.

1. Greet every day as if it's going to be the best day ever. Simple advice, yes, but actually grounded in science. If you are looking for good things you will find them. (And the opposite applies).

2. Drink a full glass of water before your morning tea or coffee. You will be more dehydrated than you think after 7-8 hours of sleep. (Water of any kind: splash your face or have a shower. It shifts the energy.)

3. Time expands and contracts depending on your perspective. When you are anxious, for example, there never seems to be enough of it. If you are in a flow state (this happens to me on a horse, or walking the dogs in the woods) time stretches out luxuriously.

4.For a long time during a difficult period of my life, I did kundalini yoga almost every day with Tej in Los Angeles. I hadn't found a practise in the UK that spoke to me until I found this: Yogigems has bite-sized kundalini yoga videos, from 10-30 minutes long and delivered in a clear, warm and organized way. She has the loveliest voice, is a proper kundalini yoga teacher, and doesn’t talk too much (not useful first thing in the morning). I find it soothing and useful and its effect is very powerful. I've now done this practise for 10 days without a break and it has taken away the annoying racing thoughts that I've become so used to.

5. Be in nature. The marvelous Mel Robbins says that you shouldn't make any kind of decision until you've walked on it and find this to be true. Out of the door goes a tight, irritated, grumpy person, back comes a calm, happy, connected person. We've been gifted in the UK for the past couple of weeks clear, beautiful, sunny Los Angeles style weather, which has made it very easy to be out in it. There is so much going on! Yesterday we saw tortoiseshell butterflies and cowslips on the Berkshire downs. Check out this lovely advice from Michael Mosley about the power of phytoncides.

6. Write down first thing ten things you're grateful for, send love to 3 people you find a little irksome, and sit quietly for five minutes and ask the universe for guidance. That's it.

7. Allow yourself to be outdoors. I read a wonderful account of a man who took his work outside for just an hour a day every day of the year, come rain or shine.

8. Be here now. This super simple piece of advice from Ram Dass is so clear. Everything happens in this moment. This very moment. Not the past (spoiler: you can't change it) or the future.

9. Greet everyone you meet as you would someone you love. (It helps, miraculously. You can be the change and all that.)

10. Eat some protein. Eggs, avocado, spinach, rye bread make a very good breakfast.

I hope some of this helps you. Take what you need as they say. Go well and peacefully.

With love from,

Miss Whistle

Life's like this: You're driving along listening to "The Hustle" (to which, I have to let you know, my ex-husband learned the steps at Beverly Hills High School on a rainy day sports period, another reason I'm jealous I didn't have a California education) and watching the freakily huge and mesmerizingly gorgeous hailstorm depositing buckets of small white frozen balls onto the road, and marvelling at the beauty of it all, passing a lorry, and a couple of people walking, standing on the side of the road and waving as you drive slowly past, and the next you've been hit by a car going about 50 mph that has slid on black hail-ice and is shunting you across the road and on to the grass verge. It's intense, actually, but there is this moment when you notice something blue and fast moving out of the corner of your right eye and then suddenly the world slows down and you're watching in slo-mo as the car comes closer and closer and closer. And for a moment you are utterly, beautifully speechless, completely calm and you feel nothing but peace and contentment, almost the way you see heroin addicts depicted on screen. I think I am writing this to tell you that guardian angels are absolutely and without question a thing. A real, and serious thing, and that they are there with you, lifting you, gently lifting you through the slomo and the underwater soundtrack, so that you are no longer in time, you are pulled through a little rip in the space time continuum, on a soft soft cushion where you are cosseted, gently, velvetly, as if in warm saltwater, but better. There is softness and quiet and a sense of pure calm just before you hear your own voice say "Oh fuck, someone hit me." When I was small, my brother and I believed that we flew downstairs. We would lift off the ground with just the tiniest touch of a foot to the floor, and we'd float to the next landing before touching off again, down three soft layers of stairs to the hall. It was effortless, easy, un-rehearsed, and just like this. A softness of protection surrounds you.

The policewoman rang and told me that my phone had called in the crash. I'd just staggered out of the door, underneath the airbag. Perhaps the door had opened in the crash, I don't know. I just know I couldn't get back in that way when I tried. I must have been slightly in shock. "The hail just started out of the blue and then the whole road was covered in it," I said to her. "Oh I know," she said, "we had dozens of calls of crashes all at the same time as yours." So, just like that, or just like something out of "Magnolia" the sky opened a crack and the earth went off its axis just long enough to let a cloud release a mountain of hail onto a little country road in rural Oxfordshire, just long enough for scores of cars to lose control and spin out, and smack against each other, and then seal up again in a matter of minutes, with no visible sign of inclement weather. There's a disaster film too (we disagree; Charlie actually thinks it's a scene from "Carnal Knowledge" with white cars) where a bunch of Teslas are programmed to smash into each other one by one. It felt like that. It felt as if the laws of nature weren't working for a moment. It was mayhem but it was okay. As if you'd just given up control of everything. As if your ego, your little self, had stopped trying.

The woman in the other car was holding her head and pacing and repeating "I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid." Poor woman. It seemed like a grief response. She had blonde hair and a navy blue parker with a fur collar, but it was unzipped. My fingers were fiddling with my phone which didn't seem to be working. I was wet from riding and cold from standing outside and colder and shaking from shock. But, extraordinarily, we both seemed okay. No broken bones, or blood, but I'm reminded off falls from horses and adrenaline is a powerful drug. I hugged her. Hard. And then I sat in my car with the heat on to get warm, but the heat wasn't working. It was blowing cold onto my already frozen legs in their wet breeches. I found two dog blankets in the back and wrapped myself up in them. I wished I'd left some polos in the car. And then I texted "I'm okay" to Ned and Honor who'd gotten emergency contact texts. Somehow I got it together to video where the cars were and the skid marks on the road in the melting hail. I'd travelled. As they say.

The police and the ambulance teams were amazing. I had a full MOT and despite a stretched trapeze muscle, a sore neck and a bit of whiplash, there wasn't much wrong. I said "I feel a bit hypoglycemic" and she didn't know what I meant so maybe I was using the word wrongly. Brain all over the place. "Do you have any pets?" she said as she shone a torch into my eyes to test for concussion. She pricked my finger. "Your sugars are good." I was dying for a warm cup of sweet tea and a biscuit. Isn't that why people give blood? Sweet tea on a grey day in the back of an ambulance on the verge of the A4074. Heaven.

But I can't shake this feeling that someone is watching over, that someone is watching over all of us. That we each have our specialized team of super-duper on-it angels, just guiding us. I heard somewhere that there have been 144 generations before us, and if you think about that; that you're carrying all of those generations with you and they're all there to wish you well in the world. That hand on your back which is always there, pushing you gently in the right direction, that's many, many people, all of whom have your best interest at heart. It makes me cry thinking of that. I'm thinking of my grandmother and her mother, who I didn't know because she died when I was very little, and all the Scandinavian women, and how we're all pushing each other along with those warm, strong hands on our backs.

I woke up the next morning at 3am and grabbed my journal and by the light of my phone I wrote: "This is a wake up call. Go inward. This is the Universe smacking me upside my head the only way it knows how." A little like when you're high, you do think you sound rather profound in those liminal spaces between sleep and waking. But, you know, go inward indeed. Spend some time alone, in the quiet, without any interruption, without the clutter. Create some spaciousness, just you and your angels. Remember why you're here. Remember the thing that you forget every day and have to re-member. It's something to do with purpose and why we're here (it's so close I can almost touch it sometimes, and other times I'm on my tiptoes on a chair reaching up to the stars to grasp it.)

PS I haven’t quite got the hang of substack. Thank you so much for your kind messages. If I haven’t responded it’s just that I’m a bit useless. But your support is much, much appreciated. Thank you. (Actually if you could just heart this post if you do in fact heart it, that would be wonderful.)

I went to see Warhorse last night. In Woking. Not the most inspiring of towns, but the theatre was fine, stuffed into a badly designed shopping mall that the English are so good at, shops crammed into odd spaces, compromised lighting and everything closed by six. The theatre was packed with school groups of loud teenagers trying to out-swagger each other, in their sweat pants and hoodies and Nikes, swooshing their hair, chewing gum, whispering behind their hands, being generally adorably teen. We sat two rows in front of them, and I stared, as I do, at everyone (luckily without my children to tell me not to). I love people watching. I love trying to imagine what people are thinking, what their relationships are to each other, whether they are in still in love, or whether they've given up. There were plenty of big necklaces, fleeces, and horsey women (I know this breed well as I am one of their ilk). There were plenty of family groups, plenty of couples who weren't speaking to each other. I thought about my friend Lucy, who has no boundaries whatsoever in a way that would be horrendous on anyone else but on her is lovely, coltish, affectionate. She would immediately start chatting to people next to her. She would offer to share her sweet and salty popcorn. She would make friends. I remembered that I was English and that the English aren't keen on that kind of thing. I remembered to move my elbows and not take over the arm rest on my right. "Do you have tissues?" said Charlie. "Why?" I said defensively. "Do *you* have tissues?" I asked rudely, like a teenager. "Well it might be quite emotional" he said kindly. "Oh, I'll be fine," I said, brushing it off, doing my best Kevin or Perry.

The stage was very plain, with a large swath of something that looked like a thick piece of ripped wallpaper in the shape of a sweet potato, which became an ersatz screen onto which pencil drawn animated scenes were projected: the village in Devon the boy comes from, the battleground in the Somme, horses galloping, drawn in HB pencil. A troubador woman in country clothes sings a ballad in a rich voice and the scene is set - a horse auction at a local town where our hero is bought as a colt by a drunken farmer who spends thirty nine pounds of mortgage money on the horse - a half draught, half thoroughbred. Joey. The farmer's son bonds with the horse and trains it. You know the story. I believe that my whole persona changed the minute the little colt, made of wood and metal and cloth, appeared on the stage. How does a puppet, so clearly animated by two or three people with sticks attached to it, move and breathe and flicker with something so closely appropriating life? How does the puppet colt look and move and twitch with such playfulness, such inquisitiveness, such a beating heart? I think I started to sob when the young horse makes a Herculean effort to show that he can pull a plough and didn't actually stop crying until most people had left the theatre. At one point Charlie said to me, "Are you okay, darling? Would you like to leave?" "No," I managed to sniffle back to him, my chest heaving, the breath caught in my throat.

Warhorse is transformative. You walk in as one person and leave quite simply as another. There is no doubt that a transformation takes place. For me, all the armor fell aside. It broke my heart open, as I think all good art does, to allow you to receive. It's also magic. You suspend your disbelief completely, as the puppeteers dance across the stage.

I've been listening to Michael Meade's podcast Living Myth today. I have a long drive every morning out to the horse, and this is an ideal time for listening. Today's episode is on gratitude and grace. "A broken heart is the only heart worth having," ie the eye of the heart is the seat of the soul (Cynthia Bourgeault has a book about this too.) Watch Michael Meade here. "Some people find it through a spiritual path, some people find it through creative arts, some people find it through making love, there's many ways to find it, but the idea is to find that which opens the heart...and that allows the soul to grow." - Michael Meade

But the idea of great art being transformative is a heady one. And perhaps that is why we pursue art.

Horses have an electro-magnetic field that is so huge, that just being a few feet away from them is transformative. (I just googled it. Ha ha.) My friend Angela, who is part of the morning riding crew said to me today, "how do other people deal with depression?" and I know what she meant. About three minutes after you are in contact with a horse, everything falls aside, all the petty worries, the little anxieties (the big anxieties), the tension, the tightness, the small things just disappear, melt into thin air, and you experiences wholeness; you experience your heart opening and you are suddenly part of a unity, not a tiny little lonely creature living with your own metallic worries, your fears, your rigidity. Suddenly, everything is possible. That place (also called flow, I believe) is where all good things come from. That place of vast abundance. So, greeting Bella this morning was hard without tears, after experiencing Warhorse. Horses give us everything they have. They allow us to - and give us a safe place to - open our hearts. I think that realization was brought home in the theatre last night.

Gratitude, even momentary gratitude, is a state of wholeness. - Michael Meade

(Here is the Living Myth podcast The Necessity of Gratitude.)

So, I'm thinking that those gratitude journals that everyone poo-poos might be worth it. Just a few minutes every morning, to keep us on track, to keep us aligned, before the world sweeps us up in its dramas.

Be safe everyone. I love you, LA.

(Translated, from the Polish, by Clare Cavanagh.)

I was born in LA. At least spiritually. Los Angeles is the place where I became the person I was meant to be. It was my Golden Triangle, the conversion of two cultures, not rivers, that created the person I was to become and in that birth, due to the perfect set of circumstances; a husband who believed in my infinite possibilities, and the scent of mimosa and orange and the blowing of the Santa Anas in the right direction. Therefore I find my heart heavy as lead and my eyes frequently full of tears as I witness the devastation to my beloved city as a result of the Palisades, Eaton, Sunset, Hurst and Kenneth fires (and more, I know.) My immediate family is safe, away from the current disaster zones, but our extended family and friend group has suffered so much loss; so many houses raised to the ground, so many people who have lost everything they own, so many people I have worked with over the years, and family too. The destruction is vivid and real and super close to all we hold dear. No-one we know hasn't been affected at all. Neighborhoods have been flattened as if by a hurricane, landmarks gone (I shall miss the silly fishy puns of the Reel Inn on PCH, the picnics at Will Rogers, the beautiful old storefronts of the Palisades.) And just by a small miracle the Laurel Canyon house we lived in and raised our family in was saved (thanks to the brilliant work of the Runyon Canyon firefighters and the perfect intersection of wind speed and direction). I cried and cried and cried yesterday and the English part of me felt ashamed. You're not there. Your family is safe. What do you have to cry about? It was something akin to grief. Massive grief for a world I love and miss and which will never be the same again. I cried buckets. Charlie sat by me and handed me hankies and brought me cups of tea and both dogs.

I found something I wrote ten years ago:

"I recited the litany of reasons that I loved LA: no weather issues, no need to carry a coat/an umbrella/gumboots, access to the ocean, mountains, trees, a world full of possibility, a vibrant art scene, sunshine, did I mention sunshine? It is a city I love. LA IS my lady."

And this:

"The entire canyon is scented with wild yellow mimosa. You notice it in the cool/warm mornings, now that the sun is up at six. It brings with it the promise of summer, of sweet long evenings, hinting at the myth of the canyon -- a place full of possibility."

There is no place like LA and all the films and books and tv shows and things that you read in the Daily Mail about the Kardashians and the film stars and the wacky people and the woo-woo views will EVER do it justice. It's the place where people go to be in their heart space and to manifest their dreams. It's full of abundance, of endless time, a multiplicity of possibility, of love and support and people who care about what happens to you, and are there for you and have your back. In the midst of the silly industry that we work in exists a huge beating heart, warm, embracing, uncynical, non-judgemental, guileless. Like my father in law used to say to me, "come on in, give me a hug, you're my daughter."

My heart goes out to everyone who is going through unimaginable distress of finding themselves unhoused, and I will keep you, Los Angeles, my spiritual mother, in my prayers.

I'm reliably informed that this year is going to be great and that it is a year when more and more people are going to realize that we are all souls having a human existence. There is a shift happening and we're going to discover if we haven't already that we have six not five senses, that we need to learn to trust ourselves. (If you haven't listened to The Telepathy Tapes, do so immediately.) Imagine how the earth will change when this news catches fire!

The best advice I have for you in 2025 is listed here. Take what you need:

• Sardines on grilled on rye bread are the best high choline, omega 3, protein-rich snack. Also, delicious. Parmentier is best.

• Be patient. When you ask for something it will come to you but not always immediately. A bit like a 6 month old puppy working on recall (see pic above).

• Everything that you're presented with is meant for you and instead of asking why, ask what. Everything is a lesson of some kind, you know part of life's rich fabric. It's a puzzle for us to unlock.

• Start the day and end the day with a prayer or an intention — even if it's whispered under the covers when you're dog-tired, or stuck in the middle of a dog sandwich — say what it is you would like and what is it that you are grateful for. Gratitude begets abundance. It's just the way it is. I say this little one adapted from Sonia Choquette: "Divine Spirit within me, move me in the direction of my highest good this day and the highest good I can bring to anyone I encounter. Move my mind, words, emotions, thoughts and body in the direction of my greatest success and the greatest good. Thank you for the abundance that surrounds me." For a long time I had brain salad, all kinds of ideas swirling in my head in a mushy ADHD lentil soup. Once I started articulating things OUT LOUD, things happened. And it got better.

• Water of any kind, drunk, swam in, bathed in, showered in, walked in, splashed on you, will help you. Take more than you think you need. Water is magic.

• Eat an orange. Preferably one with babies. Simple and perfect.

• Consider the things you spend your time on. Just don't do anything that you don't vibe with. Why bother? Life is short. We choose to be here to live out our years, so why not fill them with things that bring joy and meaning.

• Sound is everything. Now they've discovered it heals too. Find music and vibration that makes you feel happy. Find a sound bath if you haven't already.

• Let them. See Mel Robbins' brilliant new book, or her podcast interview with Oprah. Just that: Let them. You are the only thing you have any control over. You cannot change anyone else. You're not there to feel their emotions for them nor to control how they feel. The only thing you have any influence over is yourself. (It really doesn't matter what anyone else thinks.)

• Everything is conscious. It may not have a beating heart and it may not look like you, but it will vibe with you, so greet everything with love. Say hello to the birds, the trees, and see what they bring you. (It's only good manners, really, innit?)

• Radical acceptance. Accept the world as it is not as you would like it to be (which is a variation on Mel Robbins.)

• This one is hard, I know, but what you think becomes your reality.

• LOVE.

Good luck and please know how powerful you are. (Embrace your inner woo-woo with joy.)