Peacocks for Breakfast

At the local playbarn, there is a white peacock. I love this thing - it seems miraculous everytime you see it, serenely gazing over the grounds at all the kids running round the place bouncing on trampolines and pelting each other with playballs. When I was growing up, a friend whose mother was a cigar smoking calliper wearing genius of a GP had peacocks. They used to feed them on the windowsill at breakfast, and I've wanted some ever since. How could you not be aware of how miraculous life is every single day sharing your breakfast with peacocks? Now I've met this extraordinary white bird, I've set my heart on one day having white peacocks. One day.

Continuing the 80s theme from yesterday (this is less skeletons in the closet more casettes in the basement/MTV's Vault), I was surprised how much Higher Love reminded me of a gospel hymn. It was/is one of my favourite all time songs - and I had no idea the bodacious Chaka Khan was in the mix with Steven Winwood until checking the video on Youtube last night. Rather like seeing the white peacock, hearing this song just makes me smile - it's inspired and inspiring, a celebration of the miracle of love and life. Wherever you stand on faith or religion, I think most writers would say there is something miraculous about art, music and writing - when you are in the Zone, or experiencing flow, it does feel like you are experiencing a sense of higher love, (call it God, call it connection with a universal power as suits your beliefs). From talking to friends who compose music, I think this feeling crosses all art forms (in fact perhaps all thought processes and acts of creation?). Personally, I know my best lines appeared fully formed as if they had always existed and I was just the medium or channel - I know this happens with melodies and lyrics too. I think a lot of us feel disconnected at some level most of the time - when your work is going well, or when you are laughing with your children, when a conversation with a friend is buzzing or you are close with someone you love, it's like you are plugged into some national grid, a higher consciousness. It feels good, a natural high.

Perhaps everyone feels a sense of this disconnection, this longing to feel the buzz and turned on - I don't know? Maybe this is the hole we try and fill with drugs (I'm including anything upwards of coffee here - at school they lectured us about the perilous path that starts with a double espresso and leads to crack. We laughed then - now having seen friends get lost it seems possible). I've said before I don't buy into the whole myth of artists and writers needing drugs/alcohol to create. Someone very close lost their way - it started very nobly with Carlos Castaneda, and ended up limiting rather than expanding their consciousness. I do agree within limits it can loosen you up - after a couple of glasses of wine I regularly feel I could write a Nobel prize winner. Great fun, but come the morning those bedtime 'notes' to remind me of the dazzling insights are normally pretty lacklustre, unoriginal and hard to decipher. Artists, writers, have always wanted to push the limits - going back as far as shamans, they were literally on the edge of villages - feared but necessary. Maybe you need that space (physical or mental?) in order to create? With writing I always feel a conflict - I need the stimulation of culture, people, life but the solitude and peace to work. (The dream would be a studio in the city and a ramshackle family home on the coast ...) Was it Annie Dillard who described herself as a gregarious recluse?

Maybe you've found your home? Your safe place where you have a balance of both? I'm still looking. I don't know about you, but I've always had a strong gut reaction to places as much as people. In the eighteenth century, they spoke of the 'Genius' of a place - the spirit of it, and appreciated the sublime (something beautiful but awe-inspiring or fearful). I grew up in a very remote and beautiful place (6ft snow drifts in the winter, arcing cornfields in summer - when we moved in the little girl on the school run informed me 'You know you have bears in your woods?'). Add to this a High Church school and it probably explains a lot. Spain was similar - very remote and beautiful landscape dotted with incense filled churches guarding miraculous relics and Virgins. Wild, sublime, spirit filled. I think this sense of spirit spilled over into how I feel about the material - landscape, architecture, great design. There's an inherent 'rightness' to certain things and forms - like a Lucie Rie bowl, a Shaker chair, or pretty much anything from Japan.

I love the oriental concepts of wabi sabi (finding beauty in the imperfect and impermanent), and mono-no-aware (the pathos of things, the awareness of transience). My own taste seems to be in tune with a more eastern ideal - I love simple, natural elegance, the beauty and serenity that comes to something with age. One of the most beautiful things I have ever seen was an ancient Buddah in a moss garden behind the golden pavillion in Kyoto - the weather had worn its features smooth, and the coins that had been scattered at its feet in offering had been there so long they too had worn down to perfectly smooth pewter coloured disks. The garden was shrouded in mist, and a gentle sheltering rain was falling. It was ravishing - the perfect embodiment of wabi sabi. I can't remember for the life of me who wrote 'accept loss, all can be treasured', but this sentiment chimes well with me at the moment - nothing lasts, nothing is finished, nothing is perfect. It's what makes life so precious, and so wonderful.

TODAY'S PROMPT: What are the landscapes and beliefs that shaped you? What combination of the spiritual and physical made you the unique person you are? Did you rebel against this? Do you find you are 'coming home' with age? Part of 'wabi sabi' is a sense of bittersweet nostalgia. Virgil spoke of 'tears for things' - a sense of the fragility and impermanence of our lives. Are certain authors and books speaking to you at the moment? Why not take some time to just look, and listen to yourself today - see what this triggers, enjoy the everyday miracles, treasure the day.