Crystal Vision

I’ve been out on a wind-blown walk on the forest. That word will, for many, conjure up an image of trees but the forest here is made up of open heathland as well as woodland. I am lucky to live here, on the edge of England’s seemingly well-kept secret; on any day of the week, I could find beautiful places to walk and ramble (if I had the strength for it) for miles without coming across more than a handful of people. As they are almost on my doorstep, the forest and the heath, each spring finds me ready to make resolutions to walk every day. I can’t of course, but still I find it necessary to keep making resolutions – to state my intentions and wishes, as it were, to make a space for the possibility of some of them coming true. I have always believed in magic. A defence against unacceptable realities, perhaps, a survival strategy. Keeping a dream journal does after a while give me the sense of being on the edge of extraordinary possibilities – not that my dreams in themselves are particularly extraordinary (in fact it irritates me just a little that so much of them have - quelle surprise - endless sequences to do with food and the preparing of it. Last night it was cakes, I think). But the recording of them, the bringing of night-vision into day, has a way of changing the way you look at and remember things. The day’s events, mundane as they might be, become lit and pregnant with meaning. I think it was the Jungian analyst, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who said that dreams are like coded messages. You don't read them in the ordinary way. I think too that the messages are like Matryoshka dolls - you open them and find another, and then another.

Of course it may be that I really am losing the last of my marbles. But anyone who says so is a mashed potato. Talking of which, I am not eating them right now; nor bread, rice and pasta or sugar and coffee. It does (I say this in a whisper) seem to have the effect of giving me just a little more strength. I know in any case, from experience, that separating starch and proteins is always better for me, less tiring. But still – in case it seems that I’m off into the blue with the sail set fair, well I’m not – just yet. But a friend with a definite tendency toward sign-reading said she looked at the ball of crystal (that one up there she photographed) and it told her things concerning me: much writing, on white paper, and laughter, and a lightness... and in believing this will all come true, I have nothing to lose but a few marbles that were never much use to me anyway. So I do.