The Secret Garden

Barking up the right tree at last

To say I was upset by my relationship breaking up is to put it mildly. I was crushed. Devastated. The news came out of the blue, and then it took a further 8 months of agonising separation to finally lay the beast to rest. My ex is a bastard and a coward. And I never thought I would say that aloud, let alone publish it for the world to see.

The hardest part to accept for me has been the death of our dreams. We had big plans for our future together, and they really were the stuff of my dreams. I have always felt that there was something more to life than this, that life should be more, more involved, more satisfying, more self-sufficient. The 9-to-5 slog of office life just didn't seem right. Separating work from pleasure, needing to make time to exercise outside the working day because work is so sedentary. I felt (and still feel) like a hamster in a wheel. Like I'm running and ultimately getting nowhere. What sense of progress do I feel when I lay my head to rest on Sunday evening, knowing that on Monday morning I will get up to start the whole routine again? Maybe I need kids. Maybe I need to see something growing and changing and developing to mark the time and give it meaning. I know I need to feel that I am somehow making meaning out of my life, moving forwards, not simply shuffling around this mortal coil unto death.

And that is what our dreams were. To put meaning into life. To live an embedded life. To have witchlets, an allotment, a smallholding. To raise veg, and livestock and a couple of humans, and to be happy.

After much soulsearching I now realise I can have those dreams again. But like Sysiphus, the rock at the bottom of the hill feels so large and heavy. The sense of loss I have is of having nearly reached the summit only to watch the rock roll inexorably back down the hill. I trudge after it, spit on my palms and put my shoulder to it once more. Heave! I heave with all my might. I can feel it budge, and I know in my heart it is an easier task for two.

That is my great sadness. Not that I had these dreams and lost them; that I found someone else who shared these dreams, and whom I loved, and who wanted to realise these dreams together and I lost him. He took away that special connection. I now know I can have these dreams again. What I do not know is who I will find to share them with me. Who will I find to connect with and love and make these dreams real?

My first step has been discovering WWOOF and seeing this.

Food: Self-catering in shared field kitchen (buy your own food-but can help yourself from a well stocked veg and fruit and salad gardens and eggs and lamb. Accommodation: Yurt, 12ft canvas bell tent, gypsy bowtop wagon, barn. Earth loo and rustic shower. 3 acres, sheep, chickens, veg, 2 polytunnels, salad business, horticultural therapy medicinal herb garden. A chance to learn about medicinal herbs in a working herb garden and dispensary, where herbal medicines are made. Frances is a qualified herbal medicine practitioner who makes her own medicines from the fields, green lanes and herb garden. 2 days work required if bringing own tent. 3 days work required if in my accommodation. In exchange for the work you will get a unique chance to see a working medicinal herb garden.

It's exciting, beautiful, meaningful to me. And I want to share it.

The Test

I'm back, but I'm starting to wish that I wasn't. It seems that everything has changed while I have been away.

Travel is always a liminal sort of time. There is the true liminality of being in transit - neither in one place nor the next - and also the liminality of your life on hiatus. While you are away you live the bubble of your life at one remove from its normal sphere.

Normally, this is why I love travel. I enjoy the feeling of being between. My favourite way to see the world is from a truck - constantly moving from one place to the next. An extended liminality that can go on for days, weeks or months, with no need to allow the instrusion of my other life to burst my bubble. Indeed, on this trip I found myself not wanting the journey to end, and I needlessly replenished my supplies on autopilot, steering myself only at the last minute away from the ticket desk, the way a sailor only reluctantly tears himself away from the lure of deep water and drowning.

I had the sense (as I often do) that if I were to give in and go that I might never come back.

It is a siren song, the call of the open road, but that is not the Test I have to face. The Test is coming back.

A month is a long time to be away at some times in one's life. As a student a month was nothing, and I have regularly gone for several months at a time without seeing friends from those days, still slipping comfortably back into conversations almost as if I never left. I took it for granted, even found it stifling at times, but now I wonder at what it was.

Because this time I have come back and everything has changed. In the space of a working day I have discovered that my working and homelife are both about to change (we'll discuss the changes to my spiritual life by proxy another time). My closest colleague is leaving at the end of the year, and my housemate has given her notice on the house (unbeknownst to me) and so in four weeks' time she will be gone, and I have to start the process of finding somewhere or someone new.

So what does the Universe make of all of this? It's pithy comment: The 8 of swords. The Test. It seems I have walked into the shitstorm promised to me by my Tarot teacher in the summer. And I forgot my umbrella. So as the shit hits the proverbial fan, I find myself once more in need of the life laundry. Delicates cycle this time, with softener please.

Dreams are made of this

I have felt a bit of a fraud lately. While those around me have been making gris-gris and big mojo, I've been pottering in the kitchen making biscuits and cutting shapes from occult play-doh. Don't get me wrong, I've had a fantastic time doing it, but I have started to question my magical credentials.

Even as I spin my spindle on the train each morning I have been trying to make the pieces of my new Practical Magic lifestyle fit together. All I really knew when I started was that spinning was an essential outlet in a time of change. It was meditative, absorbing, and productive. When I spin I only have half an eye on the real world, and sometimes that really is all you want to see of it.

For example, yesterday I caught the Orient Express to work. Oh, only as far as Wimbledon, but it was far enough. When the train drew into my station it was different than normal, and my carriage was fitted with half-moon seats, arranged in an open almost 1960s style. As I started my spinning I could overhear a swarthy man barking Russian into his mobile phone. It rang again - a lilting Baltic accordion tune - and he barked more Russian, "Da...Da...". I glanced up and behind him saw only passing trees and a greying sky, and suddenly I was a Babushka, drafting wool against my heavy denim skirt and spinning quietly. When he got off at the next station, as if to complete the illusion a young couple took his seat and sat, hand in hand, speaking Russian softly to each other too.... but when I put my spindle away the spell was broken. As I looked up, alert again, I read an English headline, heard an English voice, recognised my station though the window.

When I spin my spindle, as my mind relaxes and focuses on the rhythmic pull and drop, pull and drop, I sense a shift and my version of reality softens. In this state I can spin the chanting of a voodoo priest into my yarn and know that while the whorl spins the energy is channelled away and stored, only to be released when the spindle drops. No wonder then that spinners say they spin their dreams.

Day trip to India

I knew that I was travelling a long way from home today, but I didn’t think that I would slip into another country. Today I travelled from Richmond to India and back in the space of an afternoon. Bex and I went to visit the Hindu temple in Neasden.

One road looks very much like another around the North Circular and it is uniformly grey and uninviting until from behind a drab concrete terrace looms the other-worldly Shri Swaminarayan Mandir. Even the sun seems to shine more fiercely over its marble domes.

The temple is set within a large enclosure and guarded by high fences, and we had to pass through a metal-detector to enter. I was told extremely firmly that I had to cover my shoulders NOW, before I was allowed to even approach the temple outbuildings. I was taken aback, as I had dressed as conservatively as I could this morning to avoid offence. In a floor-length skirt, twin-set and bead necklace I was the WI personified, I thought.

We stumbled into the entrance hall, removed our shoes and looked for somewhere to wash off the street. Washed and covered and feeling properly prepared at last, we walked in the direction of the Mandir, feeling every male eye turn our way. I felt suddenly naked, and ashamed of my nakedness, and it made me understand what ‘skyclad’ really means. It struck me as ironic that I have never felt naked in my birthday suit, yet here I was naked as a child despite my clothes.

As we walked through the “Understanding Hinduism” exhibition I had the sense of a people fiercely proud of their religion, of carving out their place of worship that would stand for a thousand years on British soil. I felt slightly oppressed by the un-Englishness of it all, and the endless catalogues of their achievement, of setting the historical record straight. 

We gladly left this feeling behind as we entered the Mandir. Within this inner sanctum I felt a comfortable sense of awe and reverence. Hindus believe that the spirit of God is brought into their idols, and so the place where they rest is truly the house of their god. Each day the statues are fed and their clothes are changed, and I felt privileged to witness their daily rite. Even their holy men are revered in this way, and as I walked past the statues of the spiritual forefathers of the Mandir I could sense something more than cold hard marble. They seemed to breathe.

Outside the temple, we visited the SAYA café. This was another assault on the senses, and we browsed aisles of exotic herbs and oils, spotting occasional familiar names. This was as much of a highlight for me as the temple had been. I have backpacked in Africa and Asia, and I love to feel a place through all of my senses, including taste and smell. I have no idea what we ate, since the names were in Urdu and regardless of what we pointed to I think the chef served us what he wanted to serve. But as we ate, and felt fire burn in our bellies (clearly we and the chef have differing opinions of what constitutes “mild”), I had the feeling that I had stepped outside of my home-country, and was a visitor in another.