Thank you Lynne for this!


A poem for Papatūānuku – Mother Earth by Ngāti Hine/Ngāpuhi writer Nadine Anne Hura, and
recently shared by Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand….


🍃Rest now, e Papatūānuku
Breathe easy and settle
Right here where you are
We’ll not move upon you
For awhile🍃
We’ll stop, we’ll cease
We’ll slow down and stay home
Draw each other close and be kind
Kinder than we’ve ever been.
I wish we could say we were doing it for you
as much as ourselves
But hei aha
We’re doing it anyway
It’s right. It’s time.
Time to return
Time to remember
Time to listen and forgive
Time to withhold judgment
Time to cry
Time to think
About others
Remove our shoes
Press hands to soil
Sift grains between fingers
🍃 Gentle palms
Time to plant
Time to wait
Time to notice
To whom we belong
For now it’s just you
And the wind
And the forests and the oceans and the sky full of rain
Finally, it’s raining!
Ka turuturu te wai kamo o Rangi ki runga i a koe
🍃Embrace it
This sacrifice of solitude we have carved out for you
He iti noaiho – a small offering
People always said it wasn’t possible
To ground flights and stay home and stop our habits of consumption
But it was
It always was.
We were just afraid of how much it was going to hurt
– and it IS hurting and it will hurt and continue to hurt
But not as much as you have been hurt.
So be still now
Wrap your hills around our absence
Loosen the concrete belt cinched tight at your waist
Rest.
Breathe.
Recover.
Heal –
And we will do the same.
🍃

Does preparing to do a health retreat mean eating up all the coffee and walnut cake before I start on Saturday so that aI am not tempted during the juice fast?

I think I know the answer to that  :-(

Here is the recipe.

225g butter
225g sugar
3 large eggs beaten
225g SR flour
30ml coffee essence (I didn't have any so made a pot of espresso)
75g walnuts chopped  Save some halves for decoration
coffee buttercream

20cm cake tin
oven 180C 350F Gas mark4 for  about 45mins

Cream butter and sugar, add eggs, beating well. Fold in flour, coffee essence and walnuts.
When baked (springs back when lightly pressed) leave in tin to cool for five minutes.
When cold, cover with buttercream. Cut into slices and freeze open, then wrap individual slices in foil to freeze.

I will definitely make this one again for the wonderful coffee mornings I am going to have when I am allowed to see my friends again!

Have you tried to do your best all your life? Have you worked hard? Have you always done your utmost for your family? Have you considered other people and tried to be helpful? Have you been through some very difficult times and survived? Have you tried to fulfill your potential? Are you politically aware? Do you try to be a good citizen? Do you support good causes? Do you take your responsibilities seriously? Do you strive to make ethical choices? Do you push yourself to be productive? Or creative?

Are you pretty stressed right now?

I wonder, could you just quietly and maybe without telling anyone, cut yourself a bit of slack/give yourself a gap week or month or year/let the world spin without you for a while/step back a bit/switch off - literally and/or metaphorically/go awol and simply watch the world turning and the seasons changing....just until coronavirus runs its course?

Would the sky fall in do you think?

Would anyone even notice?

Just a thought..

:-)


PS. Recipe for coffee and walnut cake tomorrow.

Today I saw the first swallows and yesterday I heard the first cuckoo. These things always lift my spirits and nourish my soul.

Watching the beautiful colours develop in the tulips also lifts my spirits.

They change every day.

Even from morning to evening.

The colours of the stems change too.

So subtle - this tulip started out yellow...

I just woke up this morning feeling better. So I made a late birthday cake. Please help yourself...

What lifts you up when you are down?

They simply can;t lockdown everything....

Graffiti in Venice

..is so helpful!

I hesitated to write about my difficult feelings in the last few posts.  Like most people perhaps, I am trying to put a brave face on things,  acknowledge that I am one of the lucky ones, accept that these are unprecedented times and so on and so forth, but.....denying one's true feelings can lead to depression I think, and I know others must be feeling similarly about the loss of freedom and real contact with those they love.

My friend Anna's beautiful funeral service was videod by her family (several of whom are in lockdown in other countries) and sent out to her many friends. I watched it today with tears streaming down my face, grateful for the technology which made it possible and for the skill with which it was done.

I washed my hair (third home haircut now) and changed out of my gardening clothes for my birthday video call with the family.  I put on a bright shirt and a necklace, and felt better for it.

I cooked myself Risotto di asparagi e scampi - not as good as Heather's but good all the same.

Am spending the evening answering all your kind and interesting comments. My heart is full.

The death of a friend while I was travelling home from Venice, being unable to attend her funeral, and spending a birthday alone have added a touch of loneliness to the mix of difficult emotions.

I wonder if many of us are actually in shock? The classic British treatment for shock is a cup of hot sweet tea.

My birthday breakfast was some chocolates with tea in a favourite mug.

Thanks to all of you who have shared your thoughts and feelings here. As you might imagine your comments are more welcome than ever!

Join me in a mug of tea while  considering how to manage the difficult feelings and where to go from here.....

Close on the heels of the sadness I feel at the current situation is a vague feeling of guilt.

Especially if I find myself enjoying something! Lying in the hammock, reading philosophy at breakfast, sowing sweet pea seeds. A friend was enjoying the sight of the bluebells near her home until she remembered all those stuck indoors without access to such sights.

It's not logical. (Guilt implies culpability.) Did I start this pandemic? No. Am I doing what my government tells me to do? Yes. Basically they are telling me to keep out of the way, and therein lies the problem. I am left feeling useless and redundant, and guilty at doing nothing.

Lotta wisely decided to swap 'g's guilt for gratitude and I do indeed feel grateful for my very privileged position, and I want not just to feel gratitude but to show it in some way that might help those bearing the brunt of this horrible pandemic.

Ideas please!  Talking with friends who are alone, donating to charities whose work is needed more than ever but  who have lost sources of income like charity shops are two things I can do, but there must be more....

The beech leaves I picked nearly a week ago have gradually opened their fresh green leaves....

Today I realised that what I am feeling is deeply sad.

It actually took a bit of thinking to realise that sadness is my dominant emotion right now. Just naming it has somehow been helpful.  I am very much a 'glass half full' kind of person and if I feel a bit down can usually talk myself out of it, but this sadness can't be talked away and no amount of distracting activity seems to assuage it.

Like grief perhaps, I just have to learn to live alongside it.

I am sad for all the people who are suffering, and who will suffer, and whomI feel I should be helping.

It's an emotional time - do you know what your feelings are? Have you named them? Would it help?

I always breakfast outside when the weather allows.

I was enjoying a pot of fresh coffee and eating some awful little scones I found while rummaging in the depths of the freezer. I was also looking to see if A C Grayling had written anything illuminating about guilt - specifically survivors' guilt. I didn't find anything, but as always found lots to engage me.....and the sun was just beginning to warm me nicely when from the forest I heard the unmistakeable hoot of an owl!
 
Did he know I was seeking wisdom?

Just for a moment I was out of my own head and in the trees with an owl who was heading home.

What kind of a night had he had?

I was delighted to hear that Katrina of The Body Toolkit is doing an online 7 day retreat starting at the beginning of May and I signed up straight away!  After all I am not spending much right now or going anywhere any time soon, and to spend some lockdown time on improving our health (and probably losing a few pounds) seems like a very good idea to me. See details here.

Some of you may remember that I went on a health retreat with Katrina in Januray 2017, never having been on amy kind of retreat before. By the end of it, I had noticed a distinct improvement in my eye condition (I have macular degeneration) and am thrilled to be able to say that three years on my condition is stable with even a slight improvement in one eye. I wrote about that experience here and here.

I will be forever grateful to Katrina.

She is lovely - a totally genuine person, passionate and knowledgeable, patient and kind, and I can't wait to experience more of her positivity.

Maybe some of you will do it too?

That would be brilliant.

The warm summery weather here seems at odds with what is happening in the wider world, and it's hard to know what to write about....a disturbing disconnect.

There are butterflies around, I have strung up the bunting and had an afternoon nap in the hammock, but an air of unreality hangs around, and wonderful though social media is in these circumstances I long for the real contact with friends and family.

This article which starts with the news that half a million people have recovered from coronavirus has a lot of interesting facts and figures...

..to order more of these for next year.  Called Pipit, it's  the last to flower here.

What are you up to?

Are you doing things you dnn't usually do?

I have unpacked (so glad to wear some fdifferent clothes!), lifted a big rug and moved furniture, rehung a  painting which had fallen off the wall, covered the sitting room floor with white paper to see if I would like a white floor in here (I would), set up the heated propagator in the studio, sown five lots of seed, soaked sweet pea seeds, potted on some dahlia tubers which survived the winter, scrubbed out the garden water dishes, started clearing the middle bed, watered many pots - the weather is warm and quite sunny, started cleaning the greenhouse, brought out different vases and paintings, and cushions, cut some tall birch branches and put them in my biggest jug. Paid some bills. spoke with neighbours, sent lots of emails, had toasted cheese and a glass of wine, brought in logs, still have to juice lots of vegetables and cook some food before it goes off....

Then hot bath and early to bed.

Can't wait.


My phone is still talking to me in Italian, which is a bit disconcerting.,.

..to have a garden, and that the deer have not eaten the tulips.

..home again jiggitty jig..

Our neighbour's pure white sheet took on the tints of the setting sun and of the wall behind it, and fluttered dreamily in the warm air like the skirts of a ballerina. I watched mesmerised for several minutes.

In Venice even the laundry can be poetic!

Marigolds and ginger tea.

I wrote this on 7th April to publish on 8th - not knowing at that point that I would be starting my journey home! I am not sure my perceptions of a change are accurate of course, but I had found an English speaking chemist who spoke of 'light at the end of the tunnel' and I will post it anyway in the hope that it is of some interest...


 
Day 27 of the lockdown and there is a change in the atmosphere here in Venice.

As the death toll rose, the restrictions tightened and the seriousness of the situation sank in, the silence deepened.  People stopped chatting. They stopped looking each other in the eye and walked along with heads down. Screens went up in the shops to separate the customers from the shopworkers and more people began to wear masks. No-one was friendly any more. They were not unfriendly exactly as they swerved to avoid you in the street, but  It began to feel zombie-like. Perhaps you will see the same thing happening where you are.

Then one morning it seemed to me I could hear more voices than usual on the fondamenta below our windows, but the queue at the supermarket was just as silent and I thought I was probably mistaken. Two days later however I sensed a definite change. It coincided with further confirmation that although deaths were still increasing, the infection rate was going down. (I get my news by the way, by photographing the headlines on the billboards at the newspaer shop then translating them with Google Translate. As you might imagine I am developing a rather strange vocabulary...)

That same day a beautifully dressed elderly woman adnired my shoes and we stopped and chatted for a minute or two, the requisite distance apart of course. It was delightful!  My Italian still doesn't extend very far beyond  I'm sorry I don't speak Italain, do you speak English?  I was very glad to discover that she did.

A little later I went into a tiny pasticceria and asked for un croissant crema and was charmed by the smiling, helpful woman behind the counter. My eye problem means I can't see very well especially when I come in out of the sunshine and I have learned to say so in Italian  Non posso vedere bene. She was the first person I have seen smiling for weeks and it cheered me up no end!

The only other smile was on this election poster which went up just about the time of the lockdown and seemed really inappropriate..in fact I thought it might actually lose Zuin votes.

My neighbour threw a little packet of biscuits from his balcony to ours and gave me a.thumbs up.

Just get through this next bit.

Things will get better.

Hang on in there!

Man cannot live by healthy food alone.

Sometimes only chocolate will do!

What is your go-to in times of crisis?

As is everyone's life!

I won't go into the uncertaincies, cancellations, sudden changes, quick decisions etc that those of you travelling will know only too well, but the current situation is - Heather who flew home on 31st March is self-isolating in my house in Scotland. I am self-isolating in a friend's beautiful holiday flat in York for the next two weeks. We're both well with no symptoms at all but family members with compromised immune systems meant it wasn't straightforward! Lots of you will be juggling similar dilemmas...

My journey took 30 hours and then I slept for 9. Standing ovations for all the people who made it possible and to my daughters who organised it all.

Was it all a dream? That sail on a beautiful morning across the empty lagoon from Venice to Marco Polo Airport, the only passenger on a beautiful new boat, and without a ticket. The walk along totally silent and empty corridors to the terminal which looked deserted. I felt like Leonard Mead in Ray Bradbury's The Pedestrian (thanks Steven). And then back on British soil, the driver who wanted to share all his conspiracy theories about the virus. I had had about 3 hours sleep in 48 hours by this point and this was just too much. I had to pretend to be asleep!

I didn't see any of the famous statues in Rome in my 19 hours there.

These were just huge photgraphs in the airport. Another case of being tantalisingly close but not able to look!

But here I am looking out at one of my favourite sights in all the world - the daffodils around the city walls in York, and a view of the Minster...

Counting blessings.

..to Alitalia, who flew an aircraft which can take up to 240 passengers from Rome to UK with only four of us!!
Am safely back in UK.
Back here soon when I have caught up with my sleep.
Be safe.
Be well.
Be strong.
X

But change is in the air...

Yes, still here!

{ decided to make the lockdown into a proper work and health retreat as all is well on the sunny balcony bubble here in Venice, so forgive me if I just post the occasional photo and don't reply to comments for a bit as I concentrate on my writing project.

Thinking of you all in so many different countries and different situations and hoping that all goes well with you.

x