Rebirth!

A new book

The purpose of life the French know well is the pursuit of pleasure. My life so far Including two years of solitary homelessness and years of unshakeable poverty has been one of pleasure I was a gardener What could be more pleasurable?

I mowed meadows with a scythe, walked behind a lawnmower cutting grass, kneeled by flowerbeds pulling out weeds with a small fork, planted seeds, nurtured a million flowers, sat with bees and foxes and hedgehogs and crows, grew trees that blossomed and fruited, I created the most beautiful things our planet has to offer. I got muddy and tanned, very fit and deeply tired.

I worked hard, long days in the sun, frost and rain, carrying, digging pushing and pulling, bending and stretching. I was exhausted when I stopped working in that garden when I was sixty three, when I closed the gate and locked it and posted the key through the owners letter box with a little note saying that I could not do it any more. I felt that I needed a good long rest, so I started to rest and I never stopped. I sat at a desk and wrote books. I got fat and lazy. I am approaching 70. I’m overweight. I drink too much alcohol and coffee. I struggle to breathe sometimes because my sinuses swell up due to allergies while I’m asleep and I wake in the night gasping to breathe through my mouth. I have a heart arrhythmia. In the morning I have high blood pressure. Every day I take pills to keep my heart beat regular, pills to stop my blood clotting and pills to lower my blood pressure.

I’ve rested enough now and started a new regime. You know those really old guys you see on the beach sometimes with the white beards and hair, the skinny old buggers who are always smiling, look like a prune, can sit in a full lotus for hours and do handstands. I am going to become one of those!

I have always done yoga on and off but I’ve come back do it every morning. Instead of rushing it for a quick fix or to get it over with I’m doing it slowly, as it was otraditionally done, as a form of meditation. A long meditation. I’m walking long distances again as I used to in the mountains when I was a young man. I’ve changed my diet, I’ve gone completely vegan, eating simple unprocessed food that I cook myself. Soups, vegetables, rice, pulses. I’ve stopped drinking alcohol every day. In just a week I have reduced my blood pressure, lost a little weight and I’m starting to feel more energised. Also as you may know I am also leaving the country. Learning a new language. Crossing borders into a new culture.

Every writer needs an adventure. We need to change things every now and then, throw the cards into the air and see what comes up. I’ve done this a few times before and each time ‘The Fool’ falls face up on top of the pack. (Tarot reference there.) Writing a new book is also an adventure. You never know how it is going to end up.

I’ve been reflecting for a while, waiting for a fair wind to invite me onward. I’d written three books quickly in a row and needed a rest, I was in ebb rather than flow. After a few promising but vague and unproductive blusters, that fair wind arrived a few days ago and the tide has turned.

‘I am going to write another book’ I said to Peggy last night. ‘I’m going to call it **********.’ (I’m not telling you that yet, there are concept thieves about.)

‘Will it be about facing death.’ Peggy asked because I am old.

Without thinking I said, ‘Every book ever written is about facing death. Every book is about mortality. That’s why murder stories and love stories and escapist stories are so popular.’ Then for a while I wondered if that were true or just some nonsense that came out of my mouth. That happens a lot.

I write meditations related to the natural world. Look at any of my books and that is what you will find if you scrape below the story. I am a lifelong meditator. I’ve done it for over fifty years. Meditation is connecting intimately with nature and the truth of the coming and going of things. (Every time you write a definition of meditation it will be different. This is todays definition.)

I am here on this planet to do one thing. To pay attention. (Meditation is paying attention. Another definition.) To use this wonderful awareness I have been blessed with. The world is weird and beautiful and the more you become aware, the more beautiful it becomes until you just fall in love with it. Awareness really is what we humans are, walking, eating, fucking, singing, dancing, worrying, fearing tiny bundles of awareness that get squirted into the world from the unknowable and we wander around for a while doing all those things, constantly changing in response to what is around and how we feel about it until the body is worn out and it goes back to the soil like everything else that ever existed. The beautiful ebb and flow of things.

But it will not be a book about facing death. It will be a book about facing life. Because life is harder, and there is little about it that is inevitable, it is more exciting, more complicated it is deeply beautiful and we choose whether to dance or complain, sing or worry, fear or laugh. So, a book about meditating on nature, on living and laughing, pleasure, making choices and the power of letting go.

A quick chat to my agent on the phone and it is all systems go! So what appears here on my substack will probably include bits of what I have been working on for the new book and some of what I’ve already posted will definitely be in the new book. Everything relates to everything else! and substack subscribers will get to read the book first, well lumps of it.

So my apologies once again for my sporadic posts but in between sorting visas, packing stuff, moving house and selling a house I will be at my desk because I am back at work!

Here is a picture of my second book Seed to Dust that just came out in Korea! Isn’t that a beautiful cover. Peggy wants to make a poster of it.