The week of the headache.

This week a headache has eaten my time…..

My daughter decided that I needed to change the way I eat ( as in, not having breakfast, sometimes getting to the end of the day having eaten nothing because there is no time, AND not drinking enough water.

So, she wrote me a plan.

Lovely. I bought a nutri-bullet. Brilliant. Have eaten so much fruit. Hannah was worried that my hands are quite arthritic and were quite ‘puffy’. After two weeks I can now get all my rings back on my twisted fingers. But, for two weeks I had the headache from hell. Hurt so much I couldn’t keep still and no painkiller touched it. So, I took it for a walk, to the place where the flowers grow.

And we went to a place where the wind had sculpted a tree to look like the inside of my head.

And in between headaches I painted an otter and curlews, called Otter hunting, curlews rising, full moon falling, for Suffolk Wildlife Trust for their Christmas card ( so late with delivery I can only apologize.)

And all the while I was nursing my headache I dipped in and out of The Wild Places by Robert MacFarlane. It became such a harbour in which to rest my mind. A hymn to all things wild and the best excuse I have for sitting in hedges again, as I did when I was a kid, for hunting for wild places. Such beautiful language.

And somewhere in the book he talks about hare, identifies with the hare as he wanders the land, sleeping in scrapes. Somewhere in the book he states that the Egyptian for ‘To be’ as in ‘To exist’ is a hare over running water. And so I painted;

To be….

or not to be.

And now my headache has gone, I hope for a while. Thanks Hannah and Tom and Robin for looking after me. Next week I hope to do more work.

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