Right now the purple-pink thistle flowers by the river are setting seed. Each flower transforming into a shell of white fluff and preparing to scatter. In the death of one phase the possibility of the next.

Like the seeds in a dandelion clock. These images have shadowed me this year. The sense of a thousand possibilities. The feeling of chance encounters and their ripples. The unseen consequences of our words and actions.

I’ve spent the past fourteen years sand-bagging my life. In the event of sudden and unwelcome change shore up your defences. Baton hatches. Pull up drawbridge. Prepare. Plan. Train. Review, begin again.

Its been a journey, I suppose. But I am coming to wonder at this version of myself. She’s good at what she does. Determined. Focused. She perseveres. But in her attempts to safeguard herself she is missing life.

Driving out to see a client today I reminded myself that this is my real life. I am not play-acting. It’s not an imagined scenario; a training day role play, a childhood imaginary game. The buzzard thermaling there above the wheat, almost brown it’s so dry, is real. The newly resurfaced road, minus its dividing  lines, is real, the woman with her carrier bag and flip flops walking in the heat haze is real, the trickle of sweat through my hairline is real.

In unusual weather everything becomes surreal. The heat and lack of rain is revealing hidden secrets in the landscape, lost monuments, archaeological remains. It’s the same in my life. The bones of life are coming to the surface, harder to bury in the flinty soil…Here are the bleached remains. Here the signs of something deeper, more primitive, a primal, present, instinctive life.

I am learning, slowly, that the mind doesn’t have the answers, I have to feel into them. The me I used to live in is unimpressed. It isn’t very tidy or coherent. I often do things on a whim. I am like a child exploring her environment, because it is here and it wants me to. My plans and programs, my lists and goals are abandoned, a boot fair of clutter and unneeded processes.

I want my life to be like thistledown. I want to grow, flower, and release. I want to let it all go. Not radio track the outcomes, simply set them to dance, fairy free without the need to know or monitor. They have their own life, they will live beyond what I can see or imagine. This is the magic. That each day I am sending thistledown out into the world, in my words and deeds, and that I only have to do this, as light as air, as easy as breathing, the rest is up to grace.