We have reached the half way point of my course in Boathouse 4. The year is going so fast. I wonder if there is time enough left to complete the process of putting my final years of Practice life behind me. I realise now that this is part of the reason for doing the course, even if it was not the original intent. Legal and financial strings, though flimsy, still bind me to the Willow Group – something highlighted only this week!

We have travelled today to ‘God’s own country’ – Yorkshire – and are staying in a stone cottage, just north of York, for a welcome week’s break.

It is just after 5, and I am sitting in the pocket hankerchief of a garden, that adjoins the cottage, taking in our suuroundings. A soft breeze barely tempers the heat of the sun, and the air is filled with birdsong and the buzz of bees. House Martins and the occasional swallow swoop overhead, and several different butterflies dance around me. A cock pheasant runs across the nearby field, as a pigeon swoops up, clapping its wings before gliding on.

As the shadows lengthen, the birds in the holly hedge sing even louder and sweeter, and I wish that I could identify them from the trills and tweets they are making.

The sound of the bees buzzing around the lavender, reminds me of Yeats’ poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43281/the-lake-isle-of-innisfree): ‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, …

In medieval times, rest was a healthy ‘activity’, whereas frantic work or listless idleness were taken as a sign of not being at peace with oneself. I can certainly identify with the former!

Brook cottage is certainly a lovely peaceful place to spend a week away, together. As the Welsh would say ‘Ile i’r enaid ddod o hyd i heddwch:’ a place for the soul to find peace.