At Breaking Point...and not giving up The Owls

My day long - long day -  house planning meeting - nailing down on  paper all tiny and huge and insurmountable details leaves me in a stunned stupor. In spite of breaks for  leek and mushroom risotto lunch and tea and shortbread, and the resolute  patience and experience, knowledge and advice of dear friend, I am stretched to breaking point. Out of my depth. Drowning.

There are endless loose ends, doubts, question marks, unknown factors and one very serious drainage issue which may not be possible to resolve without re-drawing the design.

There's so much follow on work, research, choosing stuff for me to do in a short space of time that I want to give up and say I can't do this anymore. 

But I don't want to let go of the garden.

It will seem different in the light of day ....it's tiredness and despair speaking now.

I can hear the owls calling in the darkness...I can't give them up either.

This is the last blog for a while.

I am escaping to the warmth and beauty of our familiar retreat with my dear sisters in Portugal.

Back soon.

Mini Blog due to tiredness

Too late to blog now....so a mini blog...due to tiredness.

These photos were taken this week last year - the trees were much more golden than they are at the same time this year.

I got carried away with writing a specification of all the  things that need to be built/ knocked down/replaced/added to/changed/fitted in the house and the garden. Like the light sockets and the skirting boards and the windows. It's a preliminary schedule of works for builders so that when my lovely project manager friend comes tomorrow with his wife he can get it to all make sense in a proper order and time scale. I'm so grateful to him - it's all overwhelming otherwise - doing it on my own.

The kitchen still smells of Christmas - I've been cooking a pot of spiced red cabbage, carrot apple and cranberry and a batch of mincemeat shortbread - the filling bulked up with grated apple and a small pot of my sister's sweet and sour cherry jam.

I have a Skype session with my lovely homeopath this afternoon.The tears keep flowing just talking to her...she prescribes Carcinosin ....a grief remedy. She says that I'm trying to fix everything outside of myself and I need to face/feel what's going on inside me..the degree of the loss.....and be kinder to myself and also stand up for myself....be more confident in my choices.

   

Going to bed now would be the kindest thing I can think of.....with a hot water bottle for comfort.

SOFT and Comfort Food

I wake to this sky...

and unexpected sunshine...

brightening up the kitchen.

I'm so happy to see the blue tits are back,

but this poor little one has that 

horrible parasitic disease....affecting his eye.

Birthday brunch with a dear friend at The Old Library cafe in Ashburton. Lovely friendly place, fresh, appetising, varied menu - a find.

On the way out we bump into another friend  - coming to celebrate her birthday with her husband. We three all go back 46 years when we lived and worked in Dartington and Totnes, when we  - and the world - were very different.

Later I  have an appointment with a chiropracter who works on my shoulder and back and knee - realigning my out of kilter bones, easing the pain a little.

But I still feel what I've been feeling for a weeks now - SOFT -  a mnemonic Robin and I devised  - 

Stiff

Old

Fat and

Tired.

I suspect adrenal fatigue/winter blues. And too much comfort food.

It's getting dark by the time I arrive  home so I drive further up the hill to see if I can catch a view of the sun going down.

Later I'm pleased to see that Masterchef The Professionals has returned. Like Gardeners' World it's my TV equivalent of comfort food.

How to stare death in the face

Listening to Matt Khan's video  -  Consciousness  is Everything, he answers my question about where did Robin go.

He talks about being at his father's funeral, seeing his dead body, realising that his father is more alive in his own heart than in the shell of the body he used to inhabit.

That he didn't go somewhere else but moved to a different level... his light/consciousness has moved back to the Source, the consciousness within him, Matt, within all of us.

If I don't try and understand it too much with my head I can feel the truth of it, that I already know it,   that the essence of Robin, his Light, not his personality, is what I feel sometimes, what I can call on when I'm alone and bereft.

And it's just my mourning  lost-child-self which clings on to the memory of him in his body when he was here with me.Which is only how I knew him - in his body -  so conjuring him  up without it is such a new thing to learn, to live with. An impossible thing really... I think in pictures so  I can't make up any images of him...disembodied. 

Today I bring this cool wet autumn

into the house - I cut leaves and branches and berries and fill a jug of them for the hearth. 

I was going to light a fire in the grate for my two dear visitors who are floundering in the cauldron of a terminal illness diagnosis, but the sun pours into the sitting room and warms us all instead.

I bake vegan muffin/buns for them - banana, lime, walnut, blueberry and almond - more like a soft biscuit than a cake and make fennel tea.

  I sit with them  for a long while, sharing what we know and what we don't know - 

how to stare death in the face and imagine one of us not being here. 

This lovely nut hatch has been visiting the bird feeder all day. He has been absent so long...I thought I'd never see him again. And now he's here, a beautiful rare gift - out of the blue.

Lost but finally free

"Meet me there where the sea meets the sky,

Lost but finally free."

Inscription on memorial bench Men-y-grib Point.

I read these words in The Salt Path tonight  - a heading of the final chapter.

Is Robin finally free?

over and over I ask myself 

Where are you?

Where did you go?

Where are you now?

I know I'm lost 

but not free.

So much empty space around me,

but not free.

Just aching for him tonight.