Settle. Calm. Soothe.

Instructions from my higher self when distraction brought me low.

I’m standing in the bathroom with a hot washcloth pressed against my face. It’s morning and I should be all fired up to ‘seize the day’. But I’m not.

The warmth, the dark, the comfort… It calls to me like a siren. I want to curl into it, shut out the world, and just stop. Stop seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling. Stop trying. Stop knowing. I don’t want the light on my eyes. Even a breeze on my face is too much.

I appreciate this sounds desperate - depressed, maybe - but I’m in neither of those states. I’m just abso-bloody-lutely overwhelmed by All The Things.

What even is 2025? I know that as we get older, time can seem to speed up. I read somewhere, written by someone whose name I have rudely forgotten, a metaphor that said (I’ll paraphrase) life’s passage is like being on the end of a long piece of string attached to a post in the ground. We circle it, with each completed turn symbolising a year. Every year the circle gets smaller, and the string shorter, as it winds around the post until, towards the end, our trips around the post take just seconds.

I feel like someone cut a big section of my string while I was daydreaming about something else. “Making other plans.” How is it nearly June?

In our recent good weather, I’ve finally learned to deal with whatever the heck plantar fasciitis thinks it’s doing to my foot, and a migraine flare up from hell has passed, so I’m tentatively (thanks to a chest infection that knocked me out OH MY GOD SHOOT ME NOW IF THIS IS MY SIXTIES) walking again most days. My absence from this track has seen so much happen. The tree blossom this year has been out of this world. Since I was last out here on the daily, the oaks have leafed up and the wild plants that flourish on the field margins have broken out of their dark, winter refuges to reach for the sun again.

I? Have not.

In my head it’s barely even snowdrop season. I am bemused by the return of my plant kin and confused by their presence. Isn’t it terribly early? Is this climate crisis? Did I slip into a coma and no one bothered to tell me noticed?

Back in the bathroom, I’m still in the dark and I like it. Now…I’m all for total sensory depravation when I sleep, but my normal behaviour on a sunny May morning would be to repeat, for the millionth time, the so-not-funny line about how I’m “solar-powered”. To bore my family and friends with the annual “why don’t we live somewhere hot so I can feel alive?” monologue. It’s not happening. In fact - just between you and me - the sunshine and heat we’re getting feels almost offensive.

Who am I and what have I done with my body?

I find myself drifting off into daydreams of Brönte-esque, dark, wild moors. Storm-battered coastlines and dark, rolling skies. Layers of clothing wrapped close, while rain runs down my face. What the actual..?

Perhaps it’s just that we didn’t get our usual winter because Life got challenged, then saved, then came recovery for him and us. I have no doubt that’s a factor. And that while he continues to adjust and evolve into a new version of himself, I am doing the same. (Aside: how exciting is it that this could define our sixties, not ill health?)

I remember that it was me who wrote this about my own evolution into my cailleach era.

This 2025 world continues to be a test outside the comfort of my home and family and I have not dealt with it well. I have over-engaged and spent too much time feeling angry and powerless. I have lost sight of the fact that humanity is a tiny blip in The Everything and no one person is here to save or destroy it.

I was listening yesterday to Accidental Gods, Manda Scott’s podcast. Her guest, Katie Patrick was talking about systems change and how that can seem like an impossible mountain to climb. “But,” she said, “The body is a system.” We can start there. This fit perfectly with my own inner knowing that I have to go back to scratch and my own “system” rather than immerse myself in doomscrolling about the world. When I turn my intuition to that concept - the “my body as a system” one - I hear loud and clear, “Settle. Calm. Soothe.” It’s comfort, kindness and released demands. It’s a hot washcloth held to my face.

Then, if the Universe sends signs via YouTube (and I’m a long time subscriber to their channel so it’s possible), I got another. Long ago I followed a very excellent man called Sid Garza-Hillman. I found him back in the very early days of Rich Roll’s podcast and loved his approach to a more natural way of living. My subscription to his YouTube channel has always resisted deletion. Yesterday he posted a short video talking about his decision to disconnect from the news. Like, properly. It’s been good for him.

My days - the ones that I’ve somehow forgotten to count as actual time - have been, to far too great a degree, spent scrolling the news about whatever the f*** that person who calls himself a President is doing. About war and suffering. About polarisation of everyone and everything. About the media’s relentless portrayal of The Absolute Shitshow that our systems have created. Has my engagement with it - either silent or active - made one iota of difference? Not to the world. To my life, yes, and not in a good way. I am addicted to the scroll, and the buzz I get from being outraged. This is why my body is exhausted, overwhelmed and out of synch with the rest of the natural world. It can’t continue.

In just two days of our (previously) regular walk route, I’m back in touch with Earth’s movement. With the length of the days. Having lost my ability to guess the time by the amount of light, I’m adjusting, and no longer caught off guard by 9pm and open curtains. I can be in the sun a while and not feel beaten up. Did I mention that I’m solar-powered?

As Rebecca Solnit once said, “Walking is how the body measures itself against the earth.”

Keep walking. Stroll not scroll.