I feel scratched up like chicken dirt. It’s the disparity between the way I’m living and the way I want to live. I’m living halfway the way I want to live; the other half is predicated on choices I’ve made and the responsibilities they entail. Well, there’s only one choice really: to have a child – which means to take hold of one end of a ball of string and keep holding on as it unravels and unravels, as one thing after another ensues. I’ve never regretted that choice. Nevertheless, it’s becoming harder and harder to remain present and invested in mothering in the face of the desire to practise, just practise. And I don’t feel I’m doing well by Rowan, not well at all. He’s so much a person who thrives on company and fun, whereas I live best in silence and reflection. Sometimes I feel as if I’m wearing him down, just by dint of who I am, and who he is. I don’t know what I can do about this. Neither of us is going to change our nature.

I understand why the ngondro is traditionally done in three-year retreat. These practices want to absorb you. It’s how they work. They get into your veins. I’m doing them in a very different situation, and I feel torn up and flying in the wind, like little pieces of scrap paper.

In transition again. I would like to be the Esk, just up-river of the naga house, always twirling and jumping and running, formless except where solid objects give it form. Actually, we’re always in transition, from one moment to the next; I can either offer myself to the flow or try to dam myself up against it. But the dam is in its own slow flow, year by year offering its body to the water. It's not really separate and discrete; it only looks that way to the observer who doesn't stay long.

For me, the heart of Samye Ling is not the temple, but the Esk, and the naga house on its grey stone island. This is where I find myself most deeply, in the body of living water.

Travelling. I’m a difficult plant to uproot. The clod clings. Getting out of the house and onto the road (train, actually) is hard. I resist. I vow never to go anywhere again that requires a suitcase. Then, finally, I’m up and away, a cup of coffee, a litter of crumbs of soil shed, and flying like a bird. I want never to touch down.

Time gives me vertigo. I try to attach myself to the moment as it spins away, but it’s gone before I can touch it. I experience my life-in-time like cloud formations massing and dissolving. I mean, I’m always wanting to anchor myself in this pattern or that – this past week to life at home without Rowan – but you cannot fix the form; I just create resistance, always behind myself, hanging on to the last thing, and then the last. Yesterday, alone once more, I got to wishing Rowan was with me, but he had already gone again, before I’d even managed to find myself in being with him.

Travelling fast I feel as if I could soar up above all these phases in time banking and dispersing. But I know that soaring is really just another phase.

August in England: sixty-something degrees, grey and constantly threatening rain. It’s like simmering (barely) in an old tin saucepan with the lid on. But I’m in the garden anyway.

The second set of ngondro teachings begins at Samye Ling on Friday. I’ve booked the thing and then cancelled it and then booked it again. Now I’m glad to be continuing with the damn practices, even if Scotland is driech, five degrees colder than tepid London, and beautiful only in a dower, monotonous way, with endless pine forests, pheasants, and wild raspberries along the road.

I watched a caterpillar manoeuvring its way across the aubretia, tasting into the air and dropping down from leaf to leaf. This is the way to journey, knowing the destination only in a blind interior way. The mind doesn’t understand this slow, spirallic progression.

For two-and-some weeks, Rowan was away. I loved those weeks. Everything slowed down. Space bloomed around me. Silence dropped like dusk. I lived a life of practices, contemplation and few but redolent connections with people. Then, this week, Rowan came home, and I am struggling with the transition from single, childless person to the parent of a nine-year-old boy. Yes, I am an unlikely mother, full of resistance and longing for the quiet, contemplative life that I feel is really mine. But the caterpillar in me is making this loop, so I have to trust that I need to veer off the road ... or not even that: I have to recognise simply that I am veering off the road ... or that I don’t even know what a road looks like if it can be an emerging trail across the aubretia.

When Rowan was a baby, I wrote that I felt like a biscuit being mashed into the carpet. I hated being that biscuit. I still do. But something had to be – has to be – eroded. And just practices won’t do it. There aren’t enough pebbles, or hard enough, for me in that bag. So I was given this child, like me but so unlike: so social, so talkative ... as if for Rowan speaking itself is proof of existence. Whereas for me, even at nine, reality was silent and internal. And of course I feel guilty: that in the deepest sense I will always be (so it seems to me) unreachable to Rowan. I will be always moving off into the distance, absorbed in my own story. But I don’t know what he will make of all this. That’s his story. And it’s undercut by that fierce, inalienable umbilical love, which changes the shape of things perhaps, and keeps me here, no matter that part of me would like to be like Machig Labdron, who left her children for the dharma.

I scratched two entries to this blog, because, I think, the process of writing them didn’t tell me anything. This is important: that the process of writing should be the experience itself, not just the record of some other experience, however significant that experience was in its moment. If the writing is not its own moment, it dies.

The ngondro is a noisy practice – so many words, so many repetitions. I wake up in the middle of the night with Vajrasattva still rattling around my head like wooden wheels on a stony road. In Long Quiet Highway, Natalie Goldberg tells this story:


My head, too, is often going to India, while all the rest is staying in Taos Pueblo. The songline that I’m really dreaming is half submerged and mysterious. What I’m saying is not what I’m actually doing, and I’ve learnt that what I’m doing is a more reliable guide than my loquacity. While I complain about the ngondro, while I tell myself that I long to excede to the gravitational pull of moving practices, I’m still doing the ngondro. And my head can't work out whether this is one great loop of a pointless diversion, whether it’s another way in which, for all sorts of reasons, I can’t quite give myself permission to just move; or whether the ngondro is really something I need to complete in order to deliver myself totally into my body moving. But I am doing the ngondro, and even if it goes against all sense and prior experience, I trust this underlying process of emergence.