Remember the trees and stars...

we are all winged birds.

Hello dear ones, before I write another word, I just want to say how much I love every one of you that takes time to read and comment on my jumbles of journal ramblings, it means the world to know you are here. Simply thanking you feels hopelessly inadequate so I am singing it with all my heart from this table, in my kitchen, from my home perched on a hill.

🎶🎵🎶 T H A N K Y O U 🎶🎵🎶

Not knowing what else to do with them because they refused to form coherent sentences during busy days, I carried hundreds of words about home and belonging in little bags labelled ‘for when you have a free moment’ every day of the last week but the days refused to stop being so insanely busy, then, they disappeared to that place called ‘forgotten’ where all ideas and thoughts go when not written down. When I finally sit in the quiet of obligations fulfilled, they were nothing but indecipherable, dusty remnants of dreams half remembered.

Hence a very late post, I had to wait for them to return, shake off the dust, organise themselves.

I think many may still be out there spinning with star-dust in the stratosphere!

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“Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.” — Herman Hesse

HOME;

It is Monday evening, A violent storm is circling the hills, the wind is hurling huge raindrops at the walls, the panes of glass in the windows are no longer transparent but blurred by torrents of running water, trees are bent sideways and back again, the water barrels are overflowing and a river is running down the courtyard. All of this I listen to—watch with reverence—from inside my dry and comfortable home.

I drive to the Lycée to pick up Seth, his beautiful friend in tow. There is a bus, of course, but it will reduce the time they have to work on a project—the time they have together, alone—a project they want to spread liberally across my kitchen table, apparently the only place big enough and calm enough to allow ideas to flow. I smile, our home… for whatever reason, its where he wants to be.

I weave my way through other parents collecting their own young adults, wonder if they have the same feeling of home.

He gives me one of those big smily hugs that translates as ‘mum, I know you’re busy but…’ I understand; they need snacks and something to drink.

My desire to traipse around a supermarket buying chemically infused crap is zero. Likewise neither do I particularly want to spend one-second of a—recently rare— sunny afternoon indoors making something healthy. Sigh…

I drive them home, make cheese and olive scones, place them amidst their young love and lap-tops and papers and leads and pens and mobile phones just forty-five minutes later with a bowl of walnuts and prunes from the last of last years harvest and glasses of freshly squeezed juice from ten oranges.

I do this because I love him, his pretty friend too. I want these days in this home, the only one he has ever known, to be memorable, filled with moments that he may, in years distant, recall when his own children are in need of something that wasn’t part of his plan. I want to make those memories both with him and for him, I want him to glow when he recalls every moment within these old stone walls, his always home.

I tell him it is a wonderful thing how our memories and thoughts and ideas and dreams and loves all twist and turn, roll from one tiny, single note to a rhapsody of others!

I tell him how profoundly fortunate we are to have a home filled with memories conducting music that can be sung for the rest of our lives, handed to our children to sing throughout their lives.

I also tell him he watches far too many Reels on Instagram!

I hope he understood.

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BELONGING;

Too many people think of themselves as separate, singular, exclusive from our origins, from the trees and the stars. Especially the stars.

Are we not all derived from the one explosive source, therefore belonging in this one beautiful place it created?

All human beings, all flora and fauna, the earth, the mountains, all sea life and the sea itself live together on this exquisite, tiny blue dot floating in all its intricacies in the vastness of an indigo universe. None of us more. None of us less. Each with our worries. Each capable of love.

We are winged birds…

The vagabond, his threadbare clothes, the vast magnolia he sleeps under because it is preferable to cardboard in a dark alley. The gentleman he once was.

Every single leaf that falls upon him, the mole burrowing blindly in the rich earth below, the one hundred crows flying into the wind above.

The maize on the hill just piercing the earth, the light of morning unstoppably becoming then fading when requisite time has passed. Time.

The sweet song of a blackbird.

The stars of Orion’s belt; Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka, thousands of times brighter, larger than the sun, yet, also, the momentary glint of sunlight on the château window.

And, the sunbeam on polished oak floorboards in my kitchen, the trees their timber planks grew from.

The fine hairs on my sons face growing darker with age, the light in my daughters hair, the lines on my own face.

The lanolin in the wool on the four loves in my field.

All the souls who have understood the empathy and compassion in every line of beauty Mary Oliver wrote.

The seeds blown far from a dandelion growing in a cracked tarmac, the lush meadows they land upon.

The cry from a newborn child, the tears of its mother.

The outcrop of volcanic rock I sit upon and the melody of song notes in the wind.

The hill, my home that nestles on its slopes.

The tremble of leaf as first raindrops fall.

The raindrops.

The trees and the stars…

We are winged birds, how have we forgotten to use our wings?

Hope then to belong to your place by your own knowledge of what it is that no other place is, and by your caring for it as you care for no other place, this place that you belong to though it is not yours, place that you belong to though it is not yours. Speak to your fellow humans as your place has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you. — Wendell Berry

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With love from my now quiet home

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Something I loved;

If you read nothing else this week I cannot recommend enough that you go immediately to read

Kendall Lamb

- every essay she writes is filled to tear jerking overflow with compassion and love for this planet we inhabit, every mountain, every winged bird…. A letter from Denali is inspired by

Holly Starley

’s equally heartfelt beautiful essay Dear Vivian — both will halt you entirely.

This is how you remember that you are a part of every ecosystem you’ve forgotten you belong to. You return to your knowing when you stop perceiving your skin as a barrier, and you remember that it was only ever a doorway.

—Kendall Lamb

A Letter From Denali

Dear Vivian