A Year in the life: 20 September 2022

20 September 2022

Yorkshire Dales

Diary: Tuesday 20th September 2022.

I wake up to a new dawn and a new age: the third Carolean.

It’s been a difficult few weeks. The loss of a friend has entangled my thoughts. It was his funeral recently, but I’ve found it difficult to let go. Yesterday, on a walk over Malham Moor, Yorkshire, I carried his memory with me along Mastiles Lane, Roman Camp and on to Malham Tarn.

This morning I wake with a searching in my soul. I look out of the van window at the start of a new day. As the sun rises over Wharfedale and tints a bank of cloud with a pinky luminescence, I finally find the courage to let go.

The timing feels right. It’s a singular day with a singular sunrise that’s reflected and repeated innumerably in a host of dew drops in the field before me. Every dew drop is a perfect rendition of this new day. I squint and see millions of particles of light refracted in the grass. I think how remarkable it is that an infinite number of possibilities can arise from such a single isolated event.

The sparkling pulsing light reminds me of some words by Rosie Garland. She describes the brain as being dizzy with electrons like fireflies in a jar and:

'dying is the slow unscrewing of the lid

to release your dashing flutter of energies

as you unravel

shoot across the universe in lovely disorganisation

going

never gone.'

It’s time to move on.