‘My mind is back now,’ said one of my boys last night, bounding up the stairs after a lengthy tantrum because I’d switched the TV off. Interesting, I thought. How the hell did you know that you’d lost your mind when you went to that electric, crimson place of no reason? Then I just said, […]
Category: Meditation
City story
I’ve been in London for the last few days. I went to learn more about meditation. I had forgotten about the vast, exciting dusty crazy beauty of the city and all the people who live there. I learned some cool things, like if you flatten yourself really hard against the teeniest corner of the Tube […]
Three boobs
I sometimes look down at my belly and a character comes to mind from one of those old Seventies American cop shows. He’s an amalgam of them all: a good guy, he likes doughnuts with his coffee and he says things into his walkie talkie like ‘Mac, we gotta prawblem heeyah.’ Because postnatally (oh alright, […]
Only connect
As a child, I found Catholicism appealing. It was dramatic and scary. There was the crucifixion. The resurrection. Taking holy communion on a Sunday and being told you were actually eating the body of Christ. The spectre of sin hanging over you, coupled with the thrilling fact that you were probably sinning quite a bit, […]
The Walden of suburbia
‘To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.’ So said the great Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Each day, during his two-year sojourn in a long cabin in the woods near Walden Pond, he would get up to bathe in the pond at dawn, calling it his ‘spiritual discipline… a […]
The (four) barbers of Seville
When my eldest son and I came out of the cool, hipster new barbers’ near where I live yesterday, he hung his head and quietly said ‘I look like Violet Beauregarde. But that’s ok.’ Well, it was not ok with me. He wasn’t going for his first school photo today with a retro 20s bob […]
Treeclimbing
Do you notice trees? Often I do, and I’ve been doing it a lot more in the last few years. There is something about meditating that gently prods you into noticing nature more. Why is this? It’s probably because it helps you see that you are part of nature. I know that sounds a little […]
Put a sock in it
The sock situation when you have three small children is out of control. In our house, a pair of socks is worn once and then rarely reunited. The baby wears my socks sometimes. I wear the boys’ socks sometimes. I’m pretty sure my husband has gone to work with one of my socks uncomfortably stretched […]
And Death Shall Have No Dominion
In her poem, The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac, Mary Oliver talks about the urgency of living. She asks: Do you need a prod?/Do you need a little darkness to get you going? And then brutally reminds us that such a vibrant soul as Keats died at just 25. None of us have much time. […]
Halos and hailstones
We can be saved in tiny ways every day by people we meet, even just once. Five years ago, a month after the birth of my first son, I was saved like this by a midwife at the Coombe hospital. I’d had four weeks of steadily worsening mental health. I knew a lot about depression […]