It’s a spider’s world out here. I could easily be lunch for one of these fat, ambitious old men on their sticky wires. September wends on, but the nasturtiums are still here, and lavender, butterflies, bees, some yellow and purple weeds ... The sun crosses the garden at an oblique angle: arrives later, leaves sooner. Ten-thirty finds me and two cats squeezed into two square feet of sunshine under the apple tree. It’s the still point between seasons, the last moment when denial is still possible, before you have to admit that the year is really on its way out.

I think this blog is mainly about practising, rather than what I experience when I practise. I suppose that’s the seed in the dark, the ineffable, the real esoteric side – real because it cannot – not may not – be articulated.

A sense of being at a watershed, of waters joining, like the two limbs of the Esk at the naga-house. It’s a landmark rather than an arrival, because a river is always a process, a passage – until it debouches into the sea. The Esk is an enthusiastic river; it rushes and jumps and circles. It’s like a puppy; it can’t contain itself. I could also become a bit like this, in the face of so much joining and opening and possibility. As well as having an eye to where I’m going, I need to keep returning to where I am now. If I get carried away too fast on the water, everything will dissipate before I reach the sea.

When I look at how I have been teaching, or rather setting up the structure to teach – devising, scheduling, selling – I see that I have been like someone trying to build Stonehenge. Single-handedly. And I wonder if it’s really necessary to drag enormous slabs of stone for miles and erect them with only brute strength and ropes made of grass. Latterly, I’m more inclined to wriggle down into a form that already exists and needs only to be excavated a little bit, something much simpler and more organic. It may be less visible on the horizon, but it’s more authentic, a better fit all round, and therefore more effective, in a ‘less is more’ kind of way.