5-1-2022: Day 209
It was twelfth night, the night it all comes down, the night of the great unravelling of fairy lights festooned round the street. It was also the night of the great fairy light power blackout. Blackout on the Walk, blackout on the Drive, and blackout on the millionaire mansions of Mill Hill.
It is the time when everyone gets to stand in their own power, feel the subtle vibration of their own energy, away from the boozing, the feeding and excess – and reach for the nearest fad diet book on the shelf.
This year, it’s a big fat NO to resolutions, ground in the dust underfoot. This year, it’s a big fat YES to revelations, to lighting a candle on twelfth night, and seeing how it all unravels. It’s time to hop onboard, to see where the ferryman glides to – keep an open mind, open the heart like a lotus flower, and keep soaking up the fresh daylight air from sunrise to sunset.
8-1-2022: Day 212
It’s been a mossy kind of day, with buckets of rain running in channels down the Walk. Sitting in the battered brown leather throne, I could feel the damp green moss growing underfoot. Up the legs, across the chest, up the nostrils. I was the Green Man, watching a scrappy and hard knuckled South London tele-box derby waged at the Den, shivering to the very bone marrow, lungs dry heaving in the damp winter blues.
My lungs, ravaged by the Virus, feel clammy to the breath. A sharp inhale still inducing a searing level of pain, a fortnight into the contagion. I imagine fungi sporing in their droves, drawing valuable oxygen from my in-house air bag system. So, there’s not mushroom for manoeuvre for this Green Man with his mossy weathervane set to a downpour.
10-1-2022: Day 214
Plugged into Arcade Fire, the music was firing on all cylinders, as I watched the night train cruise past the bottom of the Southwick Rec. Waiting in the car, as the boy played under the floodlights, the rain was teeming down, as I scrolled through my digital life illuminated on the phone, under the buried coal blanket of midwinter night. Somewhere, beyond the darkness visible, I was making a silent prayer to the distant angels of the night.
I feel the tremors in moments like this one, when I pause to hold a shaking finger over the screen. I feel a hostage to Big Pharma and their experimental and experiential drugs, held captive for the crime of blowing up when I first heard the Voices fifteen years ago. So, I was taking a little time out to reflect on the effects of a dosage drop. Down to a mere 7.5mg, waiting with bated breath, as the brain rewires, the physical self is retuned, and the system is recalibrated. The prayer was out there, winding its silent passage to the beating wings of the night.