I’m still a gardener and this blog is still about my forest garden and my allotment, but I do need to say some more about my weekend of Play, Presence and Parts with Holly Stoppit. I wrote what follows soon after returning from Bristol.

I feel different after the weekend. I’ve discovered the parts part of the course was actually the nub of the whole thing, the central element, what it was all about. It seems like we have these parts of ourselves, characters who live inside us and look after us. Unfortunately, to give one example, they sometimes don’t seem to notice us growing up. So a strategy that was useful to a terrified eight year-old can be counterproductive to a fully formed adult.

That’s all a bit wordy. There’s this gang. They run me. I’m the bus. They’re all driving. They don’t always agree which way they want me to go. So it’s difficult to actually get anywhere. And if I decide on an actual destination that I want to get to they have a committee meeting and decide whether that destination is safe or appropriate to aim for.  They almost always modify the desire in some way. And as some of them are very powerful and have been around a long time, it is hard to get where I, the bus, want go. Drivers tend not to listen to buses.

‘Oh, how wonderful!’ you said as if you really meant ‘Oh, how wonderful!’ You said it after I had told you I was a gardener making a garden and growing food on an allotment. I like gardening but I don’t think I had ever thought Oh, how wonderful! like that. Today I’m at the allotment, weeding and lifting the garlic and watching all the tiny life I’m disturbing. I saw a bright red spider and lots of fascinating beetles. I saw a very very small spider crawling over a huge striated dome and realised it was a giant slug.

So thank you Holly for helping me look at my common place with new eyes and be inhabited by the wonder of it.