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 ngöndro 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.