Getting on my mat at 4.30am is a statement of intention to stand up and face the day rather than collapse under its force. Intention is important; it’s the root that keeps me bedded in the soil. But a rigid form gets blown over; there also has to be plastiticy. There has to be the ability not to resist the wind but to to bow and weave with it.

I often don’t keep standing up. I often feel that I don’t have the sinews. There’s something about hypermobility here: the sense of being too pliable and then hardening to compensate, which manifests in all sorts of stops and jolts and stutters. Physically it creates knots in the muscles, emotionally a sort of sporadic armouring that really only works against the integrity of the whole structure.


There’s such poignancy in bringing up a child. Every day a little more of the adult enters, and every day a child creeps slowly off the stage. Celebration and arrival are all tied up with grieving and loss, and at the back of it all stands the ultimate reality of death and impermanence: we are all always crossing the stage like this. No matter how I resist being a mother, how I want to leap ahead and inhabit that fictitious promised land in which I am responsible for no one, I have a feeling that when I look back I will realise that the promised land was actually always in the process of love and struggle, that life has never again been as fraught with tenderness. And partly memory will be sweetened by the sugar of perspective, but also I will be tasting something real, which is more elusive to consciousness when I am in the here and now with it.

If writing is a practice, it means that I just put myself in the present and flow with whatever arises. The temptation is to try to record experiences, but this never works. It moves me out of the now. Writing shouldn’t be a preservative. It should be its own moment.

For me, the ngondro is a kind of cummulative destabilising force. It creates a particular set of internal conditions that gather and gather until you’re juddering down the hillside on a river of scree and your backside. In other words, it’s a landslide in here. I want to pin down each rock and tussock with words, but they go by too fast. The only thing is to let go and slide.