I'm going home, I'm going home!

Now, actually I haven't minded this stint away. It wasn't like the terrifyingly challenging Commonwealth Games or the haul to Qatar. Paris in 2019 or whenever it was was pretty tough. This has been fine. A pleasant walk to and from work with places to do yoga; two jaunts (to Kew Gardens and Richmond Park); a very welcoming office (with peanut butter); and great catering from Feast.

Still, I'll be glad to get home.

The crows in the city are no braver than the crows in the park. I have been pleased to see parents with fledglings a few times. Whenever I make eye contact with one, I feel that buzz of connection: that we have seen each other; that we acknowledge the other as a minded being.

And when I devoted some time to a journey, inspired by Asia Suler, it was a crow I spoke to. I asked the crow what he would say to me, if he could tell me one thing. The crow said, basically, "Grow a pair!" He told me to be brave enough to buy into the messages I receive through these journeys or tree conversations. He told me that at some point I have to stop grasping after proof and guides and gurus and evidence and instead to fall into the wisdom, let it seep into me and come to my own understanding of it. He told me to think of the old image of a person stuck into the ground headfirst, with legs waving in the air, and how that is a way to think of the tree. "What does thins imply to you?" asked the crow. And I thought. I thought of ideas being grounded. I thought of the opposite of flights of fancy - minings of mystery, maybe. I thought about our minds being all connected while the bodies might move around in space.

Then, I asked the crow what he would say to all humans? And He said, "Stop. Just stop." He said we are like a bulldozer going at full throttle through a museum, smashing and crushing, and then the environmentalists or whatever come along to make nice, but they, he said, are like "visually impaired drunks wearing boxing gloves as they try to repair a Ming vase."

That's pretty clear.

On my final morning, I saw a dead fledgling magpie. That saddened me deeply and felt like a curse. Of course, I thought of Bobbit.

I had, again, sought to meet the robin in active imagination. So, in a journey, a fawn led me to a woodland clearing. Bobbit flew out of the trees and came to me, bright eyed and red breasted, and I cried. I cried not just in the journey, but in the world, weeping and tortured by the sense of loss and the conviction that I had let him down, that his life was hard and brutal, red in tooth and claw.

“But,” said Bobbit, “life was good! I sang! I created worlds! I sang space into place and turned life into love! I played, I teased, I preened, I fed, I watched, I flew, I mated, I loved. I knew you. I saw you and you saw me and we loved and that was good! Life was good!”

I told him his life had been too short and he said, “But I lived each moment as it was and I did not, in living, miss what I hadn’t yet had; and now there is nothing to miss for death erases loss. I lived and it was good. That is all. I lived. There was joy and love and ongoing creation.

"What more can you ask for?”