The purpose of this post is not a delineation of what I did on my holidays: it is rather a consideration of the underlying significance, 'energies' if you like, of what happened & didn't happen.
What I did was - absolutely nothing of great significance. For a start I was disappointed to have circumstances scupper a planned meeting with a friend who was only in the country for a fortnight. Obviously I'm disappointed, but we've come through it with our friendship reinforced.
Then there was something I *didn't* do: I have withdrawn from something because I am no longer willing to be used to buttress a social gathering that someone else looks on as his property & possession, when I'm not getting out of it what I was seeking when I started going. I was looking to meet like-minded people & that hasn't happened: if I'm told I'll have to pull someone's cold dead fingers off a thing, I leave the fingers there & withdraw, since they're already dead.
Nor have I particularly felt the need to rush around in 'outings'. Instead I have spent a lot of time on the canal bank - no *not* for that purpose, the canals were cleaned up a decade ago & respectable people can walk them now without fear of heaving bodies. Actually I've walked several stretches of the canal that I've never walked before. The universe's message to me was found in the fact that I completely failed to find my ideal canal guide reasonably priced anywhere, until I found that *exactly* what I wanted was available free online. Stop straining, Hound, is the message.
There's a funny thing about canal banks - they attract all sorts of odd people, who then end up talking to each other, when I doubt they would in normal circumstances. I'm sure some of it - such as the drunks who were obviously from the Salvation Army hostel - is that people on the edge recognise the witch & get respect since they know trouble could be staring them in the face.
That may also have gone for the black man who literally *grabbed* me on the canal bank & wanted to look over my ink. He said 'God bless' & I gave him the blessing of the witch.
So all in all a free-form week, in which things have just happened. Sometimes you just have to return to yourself & stop trying to make things happen.
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Do you see the cobbles on the streets? Everywhere you look, stone & rock. Can you imagine what it feels like to reach down with your bones & feel the living stones? The city is built on itself, all the cities that came before. Can you imagine how it feels to lie down on an ancient flagstone & feel the power of the rock buoying you up against the tug of the world? And that's where witchcraft begins. The stones have life, & I'm part of it. - adapted from Terry Pratchett
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