This week I fell off my perch. I have been hanging on for a while now, gripping tightly to hold onto that place of stillness within. But then, the final straw was removed and I slipped and fell into some kind of void. Slightly discombobulated and disorientated, I recognise my surroundings but suddenly I can’t feel them in the same way. Numb to both sounds and sensations I look on but feel as though I am on a distant island where all sound is muted and the colours, dull. The northern breeze blows through my untidy hair but I don’t feel the cold, I’m just grateful to feel something against my skin. Tired and disconnected, it all feels too much and the stillness is nowhere to be found. The reliable techniques of breathing and grounding just aren’t getting through to that place to which I yearn to return.

I know life goes like that, the ups and downs, the eddies and waves, but I don’t like it. I will myself to trust and let go, to enter the resulting free fall that follows on from having the rug pulled out from under one’s feet. I have been here before and the descent, whilst unnerving, is tinged with the colour of numerous possibilities and filled with anticipation. There feels a difference though, in jumping by choice into the unknown and being violently shaken free from the perch, startled, into an unrecognisable space. Perhaps this is simply one’s perception and to make a transition from what we know into what we don’t, has to involve entering into the territory of some sort of void, whether we like it or not.

I need to go outside. To bury my feet into the earth and let her take me to where I need to be. To immerse myself into the trust that I feel in her so that she can guide me back to the stillness. To breathe the musty scent of the autumnal earth, full, as it is, of the much needed grounding, fungal spores. To fix my gaze upon my favourite oak, the one who always welcomes me and scoops me up into her steady and restorative embrace. She will help me to let go, to trust and to find myself in the place I am meant to be. If I return to the place of stillness then I can be more help to others again. I am much more at ease being in that recognisable place, than I am in this numb, disconnected and lonely one I find myself in today.

I look forward to the lessons that will come from this fall which, as yet, I am unable to perceive. But I know they will be there when I am ready to receive them. I think I need to find myself first and then find myself another perch, or if I am lucky, I might be able to crawl back onto the one I came from. I felt safe there. Maybe that’s why I needed to be shaken from it: I had got too comfortable and we stop learning if we are too comfortable. Perhaps that is it. Only time will tell.