On Stillness, Mornings by the Vines, and Just Staying — a writer’s diary entry, 10th of July

Up before six because it’s the only hour worth having now. By nine the heat is already a wall you have to lean into, and by noon the day is essentially over as far as being outside goes, so the morning has become the whole of it, everything I want to do pushed into a few pale hours before the sun gets properly cruel.

Found a new place to sit at the bottom of the garden, by the vines. I don’t know why it took me this long. I’ve walked past it a thousand times. There’s a spot just where the row ends and the ground dips slightly, and the leaves are high enough now that the low sun comes through them green and moving, and the earth down there is still holding the night’s cool the way the downstairs of the house does. I took a cushion down and sat for maybe forty minutes and didn’t do anything with the time. Not thinking, not solving. Just letting the morning arrive around me. There were the swifts going mad overhead the way they do at that hour, and a tractor somewhere far off, and after a while a kind of quiet that isn’t the absence of sound but something more like permission.

I keep trying to explain to people that meditation isn’t emptying your head. It’s just staying. Sitting there while your head does what it does, and not getting up. The vines don’t care what I’m thinking. That helps somehow.

Came back up and drank coffee on the cool side of the house with the shutters still shut and felt something I don’t have a good word for. Not happiness exactly. More like being on good terms with the day before it’s had a chance to ask anything of me.

Writers’ group on Monday. I’m looking forward to it more than I want to admit, which probably means I’ve been alone with this book for too long. There’s a particular kind of loneliness in working on something for months that nobody has read. You start to lose your sense of whether any of it is any good, whether the thing you think is on the page is actually on the page. I’m bringing the chapter I’ve rewritten four times now. I already know what they’ll say about it, or I think I do, which is either a sign I’m finally learning something or a sign I should stop pre-empting them and just listen.

Either way. Monday. Something to walk toward.

Rest of the day: shutters, water, the manuscript, waiting for the evening to give something back.