That’s what it’s all about

Well I was up around 5.30, wakened by the sound of a little voice and by six thirty I must have sung “The Hokey Cokey” at least fifty three times along with a variety of arm movements, meanwhile bouncing up and down on a sofa with a seventeen-month old on my lap. There are moments when you discover energy (and parts of yourself) that come as a bit of a surprise, even to yourself...

Having waved Hanne Lene off to work, and little Esmeralda goodbye for now as she returns home to her Mum, I was suddenly aware of the silence, for the first time in three days.The dawn light was breaking and it was looking good. Being in a moderately altered state (I’m not usually wide awake quite this early) I grabbed by camera and set off out of the door. It looked fine when I went out but within about ten minutes I was huddling under a tree in a porous fleece jacket, trying to keep my camera dry. Things can turn around quite quickly in life. Luckily there was sufficient leaf cover for me to get only moderately damp and a little chilly.
When the sun reappeared, I did manage a shot of an oak tree in the morning sun with the valley in the background.

Home life meanwhile has descended into a degree of chaos or system breakdown. There seems an inevitability about it which is to do with ageing and impermanence. We have been here 25 years and parts of the the infrastructure we either inherited or put in place...central heating system, outbuildings etc....are breaking down. No sooner have I arranged for a wood burner to be serviced than a pump in the underfloor heating system fails. Our garage, home built by the previous inhabitants of our home in the late 1980’s or early 90’s, who proclaimed himself “a bit of a builder”, has suddenly started to heel over to one side. It feels like it’s hard to keep everything under some degree of control.

About twenty five years ago, we joined an ongoing Five Rhythms dance and movement group. This involved doing a whole series of intensive residentials and dancing the 5 rhythms pretty well every day for up to an hour. I always struggled with the third rhythm which is called “chaos” but little by little I seemed to manage it better or at least to suffer it less. The theory is that life throws many different situations and rhythms at you, and you need to learn how to move through all of them - those you enjoy and those you find more testing.
Anyway so now I seem to be spending some of my time learning to dance chaos again, metaphorically speaking. A struggle.

“You do the Hokey Cokey and you turn around, that’s what it’s all about.” Apparently.