Yesterday I was a piece of grass. The sun lit me up and everything around me was glowing.
I moved so effortlessly through the trees and over the rocks and only started to feel tired when I announced to Mum, how happy I was that I wasn’t tired yet! Funny how it was at that moment that the familiar aches in my back and right hip started simmering.
Do you ever get so tired that you think you’ll never have energy again? So sad you think you should just sink into the ground, what’s the point? To be honest that happens to me a lot, and every time I get a little bit better at listening to it and at waiting. Last week I felt so wiped out I could barely recognise the person who was out walking in the mornings and the evenings every day, getting joyfully lost in dead tree wreckages, lying in wet grass to get a closer photo of a mushroom and laughing about how little I cared.
On Saturday I just slept and filled myself back up again. It’s much easier to do without guilt on a “three day weekend”. I would wake up and stretch and barely have finished questioning myself about getting up, before I had turned over and fallen back asleep. The dreaming rearranged my head and the resting soothed my body.
So yesterday we invited Mum and Dean to walk to Blake Dean (lol) and we were all delighted by the sunlight and shadows, the white flowers dotting the ground like stars, the smell of pine, the unfurling ferns, the chocolate biscuits. And the lizards and newts that Domenique spotted! When we got there we put suncream on our little necks and sat with our feet in the silky riverwater waiting for the cold burn to turn into pleasant aliveness. “I love how easily amused you are!”, Mum said, when I was chortling to myself about the different splash sounds of pebbles as I threw them in. I love it too!
Being outside together for hours was made even better by the fact that we are now “allowed” to be INSIDE together too! We made a plan to pool our vegetables together and eat at Mum’s in the evening. At one point in between kitchen dances and sharing all the songs we’ve had to keep to ourselves all this time I went into the bathroom and started crying. It just hit me. I didn’t realise how much I had missed being there with them.
