Tomorrow is June. My favourite time of the year, when everything is rising to a crescendo. My body feels good in summer ... I feel good in summer. I crave heat, sun.

I read some other people’s practice blogs. Either I am self-dramatising or extremely intense – or both. I feel a bit embarrassed really. As a result, I scratched what was going to be my previous entry, and which felt rawer and more self-exposing than what went before. I write first of all for myself, not for anyone else who might possibly be listening, and yet, clearly, I am editing just in case.

If I am self-dramatising, it isn’t that I don’t realise the ultimate emptiness of all my stories. It isn’t that I don’t see how they go round and round like a ball of string. It’s just that somehow they can’t be let go of until they have been hauled up from the bottom of the sea and rinsed in clean water. Maybe this is the meaningful function of art.

I am getting out of bed and onto my mat every morning, and it has been delightful. I stopped trying to dismantle the old patterns, and turned my energy to creating new ones. It’s tremendously powerful when the practice becomes the basis for each day: the round-bottomed bowl on which the day rocks and rolls but never quite slops its liquid. I see it like this anyway.

Why am I finding it so difficult to get on my mat these days?

Because in order to find my way onto the mat, I have to get out of bed, and in order to get out of bed I have to grope my way through a cloud of free-floating anxiety, and I would rather stay in bed and kid myself for a couple more hours that I don’t have to face the day.

When the alarm clock goes off, there’s a critical mass that has to be reached if I’m actually going to get up. On the one side of the balance is the said desire to hide under the duvet and hope that the day doesn’t find me. Then there’s the need (genuine) to get enough sleep, which I rarely do when I’m on the mat regularly at 5am. On the other side is the knowledge that practising forms the foundation for my day, that if I don’t do it, the whole structure will be rickety and in constant danger of collapse. Which begs the question, I suppose, how much I create the day and how much it’s already out there pre-formed and waiting for me.


In the garden suntrap. Carol Shields describes driving to Toronto in the snow: everything ‘the colour of cement’. Massachussetts was like that, when I was there that winter. The monotony of it. So un-nutritious when colour feeds you. Down by the Thames, with the tide swirling in: a bollard kind of thing, bright-blue paint eaten away, and lichen growing over. Salt water does this, brings up the intensity of colours, and the texture – even of ordinary synthetic things: bottle tops, old bits of plastic.

Here’s a resolution. I’ve made it before, but as of now it sticks. Promise. Tomorrow is the day I get back on my mat, first thing in the morning, and from then on every day (except Wednesdays: day off). Without any agenda except to be with my body for two hours in whatever way feels appropriate. I will muster the courage to get up and embrace the day, because, let’s face it, if I don’t it will break the door down. I will acknowledge the the fear and the resistance and I will get on the damn mat anyway, knowing that, from the larger perspective, it’s the sanest way.

And that too passed ... By which I mean that on some level all of it continues to be so, and yet it doesn’t seem to matter too much any more.

The right side of my body is in serial collapse: joints going down like dominoes. As much as I can, I avoid asking myself what this means. I have a certain internal cartography. I know – or think I do – where certain experiences, certain traits of personality, certain clusters of emotion are located in my body, and this is valid on a certain level. But knowing it all too surely blocks out space for the unknown. And then there’s the awareness that all of this geography exists only on the relative plane. In moments of intense presence, in movement, it’s all dissolved. It just doesn’t exist. So it seems better not to feed it too much energy.

I feel dark inside. Through the dance, a certain process is unwinding itself in me. It is plotless and unmapped, and it isn’t finished. In the meantime this is where it leaves me, in this place – this dark place. It’s not so much that it’s hard to put this into words (although it is), but more that it’s hard to know whether putting it into words is any use – or whether words just fossilise it into some sort of spurious permanence with all the meaning leached out. When I was a child, one of my aunts had a place-mat made out of dead butterflies. They were laminated into a gruesome kind of sandwich, their fat furry bodies bulging the transparent plastic. Even at the age of eight, maybe, I saw how the essential point had been missed. I saw how when you take something bright and vibrant and on the wing and seal it into plastic limbo, you are not understanding that the wonder and beauty of life is in its evanescence, that you have destroyed whatever there was of vitality there and left yourself with some sort of grim sarcophagus.

Sometimes when I write I feel that I am committing the evanescent into the limbo of ink. When I was a child, a process occurred by which I was dislocated from my body into words. My instinctive impulse to move was displaced into the acquired discipline of writing. I was like a gypsy baby switched at birth, and once I had grown up and found my way back, I couldn’t quite trust the gadjes any more. So when I engage in the process of writing, my heart and my throat constrict a bit; my stomach speeds up. I want to struggle. I want to batter my wings against the camphor jar. That’s what it did to me in the end, dislocating myself into writing: it suffocated me and sealed me in plastic: silent, immobile. Yes, I had words – I published them – but they were half-dead: zombie words. Their lifeforce had flown away.

If I’m writing this now, it’s because occasionally, if I can keep shedding garments and digging down deeper, the passage of words across paper ceases to be the record of something experienced in some other time, on some other occasion, and the words become the unique moment of themselves. They take wing. And even thinking this makes me smell camphor, and I want to select all and press the delete key.