Rain and thinking and unexpectedness and changes

Sitting by the fire thinking, this rainy day.

The storms have been relentless, and the expected snows of winter turned out to be rain, because the temperatures never fell.  Snow is inconvenient surely, but it slows down the soaking of the water into the land; this ceaseless rain has brought so much damage and misery – here in Hastings, there have been falling chunks of cliff and cracking crumbling houses, down in the West Country the damage has been devastating, and everywhere rivers are overflowing, flooding homes.

We live on top of a hill flanked with trees, and even here the garden is one big mud puddle.  

After yesterday’s storms (my beautiful mama phoned and cancelled my visit to her, alarmed by the wild weather) the trains have been cancelled for today.  “February Fill-dyke” – I’ll say!  Wet, wet, wet!

Plunged into the world of juicing fruit and vegetable and distilling water, not to mention Gerson upside-down coffee (!) to get my health back on track (with brilliant results so far), and surrounded by mud, I have hardly even been in Komorebi these last ten days, and I’m worried about mildew in the mould-prone things – fabric, books etc.  If I were to actually live in a tiny house, the consistent heating and airing would keep everything dry and toasty, but being there only part of the time is different.

I’m glad to feel so much better than I have for a long, long time, and grateful to have found a properly workable regime that builds a firm health foundation, but I feel a bit bewildered – that I only just started something and suddenly everything changed.  A bit upsetting.  I thought my days and mind were to be occupied with off-grid tiny-house-ness, instead of which I’ve been mastering the routines and machinery of Gerson health principles.

I have found one or two profound changes in how my body works, with all the de-toxing.

One that I find hard to put into words.  I only noticed it when Hebe played a wonderful song today and I felt like dancing.  I always used to love dancing – it was a joy to me; but gradually over the last few years I couldn’t dance anymore; like my body just didn’t want to dance, couldn’t dance.   But today, unexpectedly, the music danced in me, in my body, again.  I remember one time a nutritionist saying to me about de-toxing the liver, that some people’s livers are just held together by accumulated grot, and they can be a bit fragile after de-toxing, because the liver gets a bit flimsy – needs milk thistle to re-build it.  What it felt like, today, was that the cells of all my tissues had been insulated in grot, and now they are getting cleansed out, they are clear enough for the music to get in and dance in them again.  As though my cells could hear again.  That may sound dodgy, but it’s what it felt like.

The other change is that since forever I have relied on the glorious combo of tea, sugar, white flour and fat to make me stronger than I really am, leaned on its energy spikes to help me do everything that needed doing.

With all that sluiced thoroughly out of my system, my energy is zingy and bright, but also somewhat fine – not heavy duty.  I can’t keep slogging on with things like I used to.  The other day I tackled the typing up of the church council minutes – it takes ages – and by the time I’d done I was so tired I just crawled into bed.  And, I find where I was travelling further and further into a withdrawal from everyone, just basically wanting to be left alone, I’m feeling a need to be near the people I love – just in their aura, in their company.  Where we each had our own living pod in this household, I’ve crept back into the Badger’s pod, his high-in-the-clouds garret, to be near him – even when he isn’t there.  

I spent ages wondering whether to post all this.  Somehow this blog, which always had my thoughts but judiciously filtered, seems to have strayed into very private territory.

This is an odd journey.

It seems, Komorebi is going to be a praying, peace-soaking, talking, chilling, healing space more than a leave-everything-behind living space.   It lives up to its name.  Each time I have been there in these soggy days, I have marveled at the light-through-trees dappling the wooden walls, the sense of lightness and calm, its quietness and serenity.  It is full of presence, ready for what is emerging.  Its joy transfixes me whenever I stand inside.

As always – in this situation, in life generally, in everything – I think the secret is in owning less.  The less one owns, the more one slips easily between one context and another, like a cat found curled up now on this sofa, now on that chair.   The less one owns, the more realities emerge.  It’s as though possessions peg a person down into definitions and attachments, adhering personas to the living soul.

That’s enough thinking for one day.

And you?  What do you think?