NOW is the Place ....

My welcome home niece's Chocolate Polenta Cake that we had for lunch yesterday with raspberries and honeyed Greek yogurt......

and the Ultimate Indulgent Chocolate cake we had for tea in Plymouth - made by the mother of my  great-niece ( divinely moist and rich - from BBC Good Food) and the niece's gift of booties from Nepal....so cute..

East Hill outside Honiton this afternoon....the beginning of our  Good Friday walk

following the path down the hill...

and back up again through silver birches.

The allotment this morning after our new gardener got to work with his strimmer between the beds....

Taking a tea-and-flapjack break from weeding...

It's all quiet on our walk this afternoon through the woods, except for the birdsong high above us in a clean blue sky. And the smell of fertiliser coming off the fields is rank. We don't talk much. Then I feel a shift in my husband's mood and he looks at his watch.

What's making it hard to be here now? I ask.

I'm not sure.

What are you thinking about?

Death and the people we know who are going to die.

I take his hand and make him stop walking.

Look at me. What can you hear?

A bird....somewhere.

What can you see?

He looks up into the sky. 

The trees ....they're so high.

Look at this bark.  Look at the moss on it.

We both reach out and touch it. It's rough and dry not soft and moist as I expected.

OK, he says, I'm here now.

And we carry on walking. I feel the sharp stones in the path under the soles of my boots.

 Thank you, I say, you just helped me to be here now, too.

But I don't know how to stay in this place of NOW for more than seconds....I feel him slipping away again but don't try to bring him back..... I just look at the new beech leaves uncurling on the ends of their branches and concentrate on including the smell of pooh in the air..... 

Later I read Robert Holden's quote for the day,

NOW is the place in your mind where you are already happy - no matter what.

I love that thought.....if I'm already happy then there is nothing to do.....except find the way to feel it.....and people have written books and books about that....which I haven't read.