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 at the moment. By nine the heat is a wall you have to lean into. By noon the day is 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 turns properly cruel.

I’ve found a new place to sit at the bottom of the garden, by the vines. I don’t know why it’s taken me this long, I’ve walked past it a thousand times. There’s a spot right where the row ends and the ground dips a little, 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 about forty minutes and did nothing with the time. Not thinking. Not solving anything. Just letting the morning arrive around me. The swifts were going mad overhead the way they do at that hour, and there was a tractor somewhere a long way off, and after a while a quiet came that wasn’t the absence of sound. It was 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. That’s the whole of it. The vines don’t care what I’m thinking, and that helps somehow.

Came back up and drank my coffee on the cool side of the house with the shutters still closed, and felt something I haven’t got 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 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 taking the chapter I’ve now rewritten four times. 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.

The rest of today: shutters, water, the manuscript, waiting for the evening to give something back.