Lighter in Spirit…

I am writing in Teide restaurant, having a working dinner…

Teide has served as both my office and my second home while I have been here, especially with no and slow internet and stormy weather…

I enjoy being in the warmth, with chatter in the background, and I feel part of a place that I am passing through… I can feel the experiences, the things they care about, through the interest of those who are my neighbours for now…

And in this space, a community so small – the busy restaurant central to the village – I feel private yet supported and embraced…

And the night is young in Espana, 20.50… Lots of time to write, to upload a vlog and to eat my cenar

Maggie and Jack and I enjoyed an impromptu ‘board meeting’ over a glass of wine/ carrot and apple juice in my case, in the bar before I moved here to my office in the corner of the dining room…

I have ordered a tropical salad – which although delicious – feels slightly incongruous with the wintery feel to the evening.

The days are hot hot hot, but night fall brings about the true character of the month, and tonight I know it is October living out its transition, craggy, brown, under a golden orange sunset….

I rose with the sun again this morning, and headed to the mountain path as soon as there was sufficient light… The golden sharp rays bathing the still sleeping village, reflecting its shafts of translucent power onto street lights, which twinkled their response… A shadowy dawn was easing itself over the mountains and I made my way in my socks to the path which challenges my feet still under the running step.

But I jogged along easily and allowed my body its resistance… ‘This is hard’ it cried to me… ‘It just feels hard’ and so I allowed the body to go slowly, so that we might all take in the joyous rising of the new day. So that the feeling of pushing back against  the sense of unrelenting toughness could ease and we could all find our way through…

For this is how we might find our way through hard times… Firstly ease away any resistance to what is occurring… Instead feel it , this will melt it. Take the foot off the push pedal, ease back the throttle but keep moving, keep treading on the path that is opening up before us…

Keep taking that small next step and trust that ‘this too will pass’…. And then by allowing whatever is going on, to be going on, by trusting that in the living of it, it will pass… The understanding will come, the sloughing off of the old will occur, and we will emerge stepping into the new, clearer cleaner, freer….

My time here has been so rich with experience, connection , love and friendship… With Maggie and Jack, Maricarmen, Angela, Wends Tony and Alfie, as well as all my friends in Bubion and Almunecar…

And it has also been hard, my body more fragile… But in allowing the days their flow, allowing my body its frailer state… By experiencing what has arisen I feel different…

Lighter in spirit.

On one occasion i was coughing so hard that I couldn’t breathe and I watched the distress in my body, but I was unafraid and the clearing was able to happen… And then on another occasion, stuck half way up and half way down a steep flight of uneven narrow mountain steps I felt extreme fear and  found another place of clearing, of a need to let go, to go deeper…

Any fractures within us, will always reveal themselves if we are prepared to open to them. I created these three weeks, and the gifts within them have been more immense than I could have imagined.

And I am sitting in a bar where the news is pre-occupied with a fracture in the country, people are concerned and distressed not aware that their distress is a projection onto the ‘drama’ of their own inner unrest, their own fractures.

If we seek always to notice where we are in pain, disjointed, hurt, fractured within, and seek not to resist what is arising then we will find the road leads eventually to ease and freedom within and without…