Day 481: Bees and Birds and Butterflies

Yesterday's dancing in the woods was mildly disappointing - lots of earnest flannel in a circle and not enough getting on with it or pumping beats for my liking - but there were some absolute gifts: sunlight streaming through beech leaves far above my head, doing its own dance; standing surrounded by flowering mint and bees and butterflies so close I could count the patches on their coloured wings; crows cawing harsh and loud and real, blotting out the recorded birdsong tinning through the headphones. I love a shouty bird, I do. Not like that.

I scared myself. That's always good. It was in an old chalk quarry filled with beech trees, steep at the sides and filled with slightly reeky badger holes. I climbed a tree and sat in it. From that angle, it seemed a very long way down. I did the ungainliest getting down from a tree that has ever been done without actually falling - all limbs and awkwardness - but I did get down and I didn't squeal or cry. The trip up to the minty butterfly land was  very steep and getting down from it was scary too. Scary, but not dangerous (unlike the people who walked along the top of a chalk cliff - fuck, that's REALLY unsafe). 

Slightly irritable as I was, I was surprised and delighted to discover the juiciness of the two people I travelled back with. I was glad the train didn't come for 45 minutes, because we really got to chat. If I'd followed my starting instinct, I'd have travelled home alone and spoken sparsely at most, only to strangers. This way was better. The man was very interesting and the woman was an Esalen-trained massage therapist. Yes. Please. I wonder if she'll do swapsies.

Thank you for warming soup, Dilly DeVille. Thank you for a smooth start to my Freedom from Chains experiment. Thank you for work cancelled at short notice and pay remaining unaffected. Very much appreciated. Can't tell you how much. Thank you for opportunities disguised as problems (I translated the wrong document and have to do it again for no pay - well, it suits me better to say that the previous one was a retrospectively voluntary practice run and this one, the real thing, is paid). Better get on with that, then.


The light right now is gorgeous. It's yellowy warm and bright, picking out the white backs of leaves and lighting up fields against the setting of a water-filled sky, ready to burst. We're whizzing through it.