One of the reasons I love meditation is that it feels like the equivalent of a long, cold glass of water on a parched throat. Sadly, the rigours of business-starting and the daily round of feeding, cleaning, moving and collapsing have left me lacking the crucial time and peace to just sit. Small cats and their wicked ways are not helpful either; I am yet to find a satisfactory time of day and place to access the peace I am craving.
Good to be craving peace I suppose; I have once more given up smoking, having started again in a cliched fashion while getting the business going. My life can now be conveniently portioned by periods of smoking, non smoking; drinking, non drinking... oh yes, there is a pattern emerging!
To that I should also add - meditating, not meditating; scone-eating, not scone-eating....
Hand in hand with my need to find space is my desire to wallow in nature. Sometimes I think on whether my urge to curl up in hedges and lie in fields is evidence of a past life as... something in a time when we were closer to the actual world, less cosseted and removed.
Actually I think this is a desire we all share to a greater or lesser degree; the draw to escape from the constructed and confining into a more simple and accessible form of life. I would spend many more days outside in a tent if the conditions prevailed (living in a wilder place with some land... tent on slabs in suburbia just not the same); waking to the birdsong and damp of the grass in the doorway. I am still thinking about the lovely couple of days I had two years ago in Somerset when I went to hang a show down there; two days alone in a tent (beautiful weather, mackerel skies and long-tailed tits) eating dinner on a log on the beach. Bliss.
Muddy hands, sandy feet, rain falling gently in a forest, lying on a cushion of leaves and needles, listening to nothing but my own breath and the muffled rustling sounds of the little lives around me.
