What happens when we die

 

The stark beauty of a new saltmarsh on the Otter estuary in East Devon, part of a National Nature Reserve, where Ellie and I walked at the beginning of the month

I read on Instagram this morning that scientists have now discovered that energy leaves the body (of both humans and animals) when we die. Tibetan monks comment, ‘You need science to tell you what silence already knows?’ 
 
I agree with the monks. It's our own experience that matters. Science is a clumsy tool. As my little book of Chinese wisdom says, 'Why light a candle to see the sun?'
 
I saw the energy of our first dog, Brindle, fly from her body like a puff of smoke and zoom northwards over our shed. It was a discrete entity and it was in a hurry. I presumed it was her soul. Brindle had nearly died a year before and I’d prayed for her to stay alive because I wasn’t in a position to deal with her death at the time. She’d waited for me, even though she’d wanted to go. I write about this, and more, in a previous post.
 
I feel annoyed when I read about things like the above because I don’t talk about most of what I experience because people mock. They need science to ‘prove’ things. Then the world catches up with me and I wish I’d had the courage to speak sooner. 
 
This blog is one of the few places where I do speak out and my time here now without either parents or Frog is for me to learn to be my whole self without shame or doubt (not that Frog ever caused me to feel either of those, but my upbringing had). That’s something else I ‘know’, and I knew it as soon as Frog died.
 
I didn’t see Frog's soul go. It vanished in a second, as we stood together halfway up a hill admiring the view and he dropped to the ground with a cry of surprise.
 
Then the emergency services arrived - by helicopter, two ambulances and a car - and spent about an hour trying to revive him at the side of the road. Then they took him to hospital and tried some more with bigger machines.

When they stopped trying and pronounced him dead, I was almost relieved as the resuscitation attempts were gruesome. I was also unsurprised. And that’s something else I’ve never admitted before. He wanted to go. It was his time to go. He was removing himself for the moment so that I could learn without pressure. (The grief had yet to kick in.)

And none of that is what I intended to write in this post. I intended to tell you about another moving film from the Right to Roam campaigners. In September I directed you to a film about their mass trespass swim at Kinder Reservoir. This new film is about looking after a neglected river in East London and about what they call ‘wild service’. And I hope to tell you more about that when I know more myself.

Sunset last week as I walked home with Ellie

PS I realised after I uploaded this post that today is the winter solstice - the shortest day. How appropriate then to be talking about death - and resurrection perhaps. But that's another story.

Sharpham House - retreats, reedbeds and rewilding

Even on a wet winter’s day, nature’s beauty can still astonish me. Here’s a pond I’ve walked past countless times, but it was only yesterday that I suddenly realised how picturesque it was and was inspired to take a photograph of it. Perhaps it was the season revealing the bones of  the corner.

 

Pond. (I wanted Ellie in the view but she raced off to bark at something at the critical time.)

I love tree skeletons, and here is a row of them that caught my eye as I sat in a soggy field a few days ago having my quiet moment.

 

Tree skeletons

I’ve now been on my retreat (mentioned in the previous post - I lied about the timing) and it was a wonderful experience. Beautiful warm house, fabulous setting, excellent teaching and lovely people. Here are some pictures.

 

The view from my room. That's the River Dart you can see below.

The house was built in the eighteenth century and here is its marble staircase - lethal if you're not wearing proper shoes

As a result of the retreat, I’m trying to meditate regularly - currently short sessions three times a day. The explanations make it sound so simple but the practice is anything but, and the more I try to meditate the more questions I have about it. Maybe I need to go on another retreat, such as Mindfulness for Beginners – another Sharpham event that’s caught my eye.

I do feel different though, so I perhaps I did have the ‘reset’ I wanted.

Here are some more of the pictures I took at Sharpham.

A sunrise from my room

A strange henge in some reedbeds down by the Dart

Pristine mudflats and reedbeds stretching back upriver towards Totnes. I spotted herons, geese, seagulls and a little egret, but I know such habitats are of international importance and I'm sure there was a lot more that I didn't spot. (It's drizzle, not my technique, that's misting the picture.)

Sharpham is rewilding a chunk of land leading down to the reedbeds, but I didn't have time to get much further than this information board

Meditation and Mindfulness

In a couple of months I’m going on retreat to Sharpham House in South Devon where I’m hoping to learn meditation and mindfulness, geared towards those who feel burnt out. Well, I’m certainly that. It’s now nearly four years since Frog died and discovering how to function without him has been non-stop on every level. As my sister said, I need a reset (not to mention a rest).

As you might have picked up if you’ve been reading this blog, it’s the ‘spiritual’ side of life that’s got me through so far. I don’t like the word spiritual as it sounds pretentious, but I don’t know how else to describe that part of me in a simple way. I also have trouble describing the quiet times I take while out walking the dog since I don’t actually meditate in an official way during them as I’ve never been taught how to do it properly. Hopefully the retreat will help with that.

The entire dog-walking period is a sort of meditation, I feel, as even if my brain is whirring throughout I always feel better afterwards, and often the whirring is interrupted and I’m stopped short by the beauty around me. Which is astonishing, given that I’ve lived in my current house for 45 years and been walking the surroundings for most of that time. Every day, it seems, there’s something new to see. 

And here are some recent photographs of some of those moments.

On a misty murky early morning at the beginning of the month, as I wondered what point there was in me still being alive, I almost missed these two jewels under my feet. I’m so grateful I didn’t step on them.

Feather

Toadstool

Here is a corner I found recently for one of my quiet times. I’d never sat here before and I couldn’t understand why not. I’m under an oak tree (as you can see from the fallen leaves), there are no houses staring at me, I'm hidden by trees and bushes, I can see to the horizon, and there’s some wildness around in overgrown hedges. All the criteria I unconsciously look for. 

The perfect spot for a quiet sit-down. Ellie obviously likes it too.

I encountered this lovely and perfectly framed view for the first time as I walked home along a lane I use almost every day. My house is the furthest white blob in the middle of the picture.

 

A new view of my house (the furthest white blob in the middle)

Here is another route I’ve walked countless times. On the day of the photograph, in spite of mud and puddles, the approach of winter, indifferent weather and stupid worries that were wearing me out, I looked ahead and my heart was lifted.

Mud, puddles and Ellie

Book restoration

In my post 'Along the Grand Western Canal', I mentioned the wildflower book my parents gave me for my eleventh birthday in 1964 and which I’ve loved and used ever since, to the extent that it was falling apart. I couldn’t replace it, not only because it’s out of print but also because it contains six decades’ worth of my plant-spotting notes.

I am pleased to report, therefore, that it has now been meticulously restored by Celandine Books of Wiveliscombe and I’m thrilled with the result. The book has kept all its character and turned into something beautiful and usable again.

 

Before

After

I'm not sure the same can be said of me, but I'm working on it.

A Devon beach (Budleigh Salterton) a few weeks ago

Kinder Rising

In April this year, the Right to Roam campaign organised a mass trespass and trespass-swim at Kinder Reservoir in the Peak District, Derbyshire, in memory of a 1932 trespass on Kinder Scout, the Peak District’s highest point.

The 1932 trespass was in protest at losing access to the wild hills and moorland of the area. These were a lifeline for inhabitants of nearby cities like Sheffield and Manchester, pretty grim places at the time, but landowners had begun to fence them and keep people out. 

The trespass led eventually – a long time later - to the establishing of National Parks (1949) and long-distance footpaths (1965). However, as the Right to Roam says, the business is unfinished. See my earlier post for the shocking facts about how little of our countryside (about 8 per cent in England, for example) is, even now, open to us.

The Right to Roam made a moving film of the day. Do watch it.

In the film two people, Alex and Jo, talk about what nature means to them and Alex in particular expresses what I feel, but he says it so much better.

Like Alex, I love to sit quietly in nature – to think and dream and breathe and connect, to just be - and I try to do it every day. I like to find new places, and I like to find somewhere I can’t be seen. Here are some recent hideaways. (I've lived here long enough (45 years) for the farmers to tolerate me, so I'm not trespassing, but they do all think I'm a bit of a loony.)

 

An early morning, inside an oak hedge

On top of a hill camouflaged by long grass. (Spot the dog.)

 

Underneath a giant oak tree, with its canopy reaching to the ground all around me like a tent.

Dog Dementia

Ellie arrived to live with us a few months before I started this blog, which makes her 15, a good age for a dog.

Ellie at one year old

Physically - apart from deafness, cloudy eyes and wonky back legs - she’s doing pretty well. We still walk a couple of hours a day. She still chases rabbits. She still beats the bounds every evening, marching round the garden barking. She still enjoys her food.

Ellie and me contemplating the bluebells, spring 2024

Mentally, however, it’s a different story.

About a month ago she started barking through the night. I tried everything I could think of that might help – ignoring her/going down to see her, letting her out for a run round the garden, putting an unwashed t-shirt in her bed so that the scent comforted her (something we did when she was a puppy), light on/lights off, in her crate/out of her crate, crate covered/crate uncovered.

Then one morning before breakfast, she vomited her supper undigested and later on in the car had a funny turn, retching, howling and shaking. I took her straight to the vet and they tested her blood, x-rayed her and scanned her. They couldn’t find anything wrong. 'Has anything traumatic happened to her recently? they asked, but I couldn't think of anything. 'Probably a touch of dementia then,' they said, prescribing both painkillers and a sedative to be on the safe side. Nothing changed. Then they prescribed sleeping pills. Still no change. 

And now, weeks later, we’re both exhausted and still she barks. I wish I could talk to her. I wish I could find out what’s wrong. But sometimes I think there is no rhyme or reason to it all. It’s just her brain breaking down. It’s heart-rending.

She follows me around during the day and barks when I go upstairs and leave her behind. (She’s too weak to climb the stairs now and too heavy for me to carry.)  I could sleep downstairs so that she can be near me during the night but it would be a huge disruption for me and, selfishly, I’m resisting. I'm experimenting with the ramp she uses to climb into the car.

I wish Frog was here to help.

Frog, with Ellie as a puppy

It's not time for Ellie to go yet, but when she does go, it’ll be another huge chunk out of my life. Who knows where I’ll go or what I’ll do then.

A quiet moment in March last year

A Right to Roam?

First, a story. Perhaps an over-simplification, and there may be inaccuracies (history and facts are not my strong points), but this is how I see things.

Since the invasion of the Normans (in the eleventh century), we in this country have become separated from nature. Firstly, the Normans parcelled up huge chunks of land (like Cornwall) and divided them among themselves, concentrating land ownership in the hands of the few. Then in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, these few decided to take for their own the common land which ordinary people used for food and fuel. They fenced it off and instituted a more intensive form of agriculture which meant that many lost their homes and livelihoods. With the advent of the industrial revolution, these destitute country people moved to cities to look for work (where they lived in poverty and squalor and probably never saw even a blade of grass).

We are still suffering the effects of these events, to the extent that 1 per cent of the population of England owns half the country (Who Owns England? and The Lie of the Land by Guy Shrubsole, 2019 and 2024) and about 85 per cent of us are urban. We are excluded from 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of its waterways (The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes, 2020).

This is not healthy, either physically or spiritually. We need fresh air and exercise. We need nature for the world to make sense. We need the sense of freedom that wild nature brings. We need to know about nature so that we care for it and protect the planet.

The Lockdown emphasised this, as nature was all we had left. Many more people than before went out for walks in the country and, unfortunately, some farmers and landowners reacted badly to this, enclosing footpaths with wire fences and padlocking gates. Making the situation even worse.

I call this sort of footpath a gulag. The bridge is for animals.

Locked into the footpath and out of the countryside

Enter the Right to Roam , an organisation started in 2021 by Hayes and Shrubsole which campaigns for England and Wales to have the right that Scotland already does.

The Ramblers organisation is also campaigning for more access to the countryside. An Act of 2000 gave us the right to walk freely over mountain, moor, heath and downland. They want that expanded to cover woodland, watersides and more grassland. Woodland alone would more than double our freedom.

A right to roam wouldn’t mean that people can walk wherever they like without consideration, but it would mean that we might be able to enjoy more of our beautiful country – swimming in rivers, camping out under the night sky, exploring wild places, going off-piste.

A Duchy of Cornwall wood, with access barred by the sign above. So enticing.

An overgrown watermeadow, currently out of bounds. Is there anything more beautiful?

There would of course be responsibilities on both sides. We would need to respect crops and farm animals, and avoid damaging the countryside with, for example, litter and fires. There would be exclusion zones around places such as houses. Landowners on the other hand couldn’t needlessly obstruct access.

But, in the end, it could be of benefit to us all. The public would be better educated about what to do and not do when out and about. We could share guardianship of the countryside with farmers and landowners, which might help safeguard nature. Farmers could make friends with their communities and feel less isolated and misunderstood. We’d all be happier and healthier.

That is my dream.

And here are a couple of pictures of things going right, of farmers engaging with visitors – a taste, I hope, of things to come.

Devon, 2020

Kent, 2025

*I read elsewhere that in the UK as a whole 1 percent of the population owns 70 percent of the land, but I'm checking this figure.

The Cosmic Tarot

Because I’m embarrassed to be talking about myself so much in this blog, I thought that this time I’d share with you a tarot reading I did two weeks ago. Then you might at least find some interest in that esoteric art, even if not my internal ramblings.

I first learnt about tarot reading 27 years ago from a compelling woman who might or might not have been psychic. But you certainly believed everything she said, and she took me under her wing. She made the cards come alive for me in a way that all the learned books (by men) that I’d read hadn’t.

I do believe that magic sometimes happens in tarot-reading – when a certain card brings me out in goosepimples or strange coincidences appear in the fall of the cards – but on the whole I look at it as simply a case of noting the effect that the archetypal images have on me and weaving a story from them. We all know more about each other and ourselves than we realise. We just have to tap into that knowledge.

Sometimes I read for other people but I feel grossly under-qualified to do so and find it a huge responsibility. It is however a good way of opening up subjects for discussion. When reading for myself the results are variable. Sometimes the cards are meaningless, sometimes they’re only wish-fulfilment, and just occasionally they’re extraordinary.

This was one of those times.

The reading

My intention and the random card

I held the cards in my hand and pondered my intention for the reading. I wanted hope, I decided and clarity about something that had been plaguing me for several months. Then as I shuffled the pack this card fell out, and Cheryl, my teacher, always said that you should pay attention to these random cards.

 

It’s a lovely one, isn’t it. At XIX (19) it’s near the end of the cycle of the Major Arcana, the 22 cards that deal with our soul’s journey. I took it to be a good omen because it means happiness, being reborn, seeing the world with the freshness and joy of a child. It doesn’t mean that you’ve finally got the answers to life, the universe and everything. It just means that you’re on the right track at the moment.

Thank god for that, I thought.

The spread

Then I laid the cards out in my favourite ‘spread’ (arrangement) – five cards, with the first two representing the past, the third and centre card the here and now and the final two the future near or far (timing is not a forte of tarot reading, any more than it is of weather forecasting). You can use any spread you like so long as you’re clear in your mind as to what the positions mean.

 

Cards 1 and 2

These were the first two cards.

Oh dear, oh dear. I didn’t have any secrets, did I, from the powers that be (the powers that control the fall of the cards).

‘Anonymous’ commented on my previous post that it must be difficult for me to imagine a new life when I was happy with the old one. Well, sort of. Frog and I knew we wanted to be together but we both had ‘issues’ and they clashed, and for years we had terrible fights. By the time he died we’d reached stalemate and I knew his death was my chance to finally sort myself out – in my own time, in my own way, however messy the process.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last three and a half years – without much reward I was beginning to think. Why didn’t I look for a close male companion, or CMC as I put it in my journal? (Not husband. One was enough. You can only be married once.) Having a CMC might alleviate my grief for Frog and enable me to deal further with my issues. How nice it would be to fall in love again, I thought. I deserved it. Surely it was time.

But it wasn’t happening and I was getting more and more stressed about the whole thing.

And wasn’t this just what the cards were saying? Neither of the couples is actually together. Neither is kissing. There’s a gap between them. There’s indecision, lack of confidence. Well, that’s how they appeared to me anyway.

I was going down a blind alley, the cards said, and I knew they were right.

Card 3

I laid out card number three, the one concerned with the here and now.

How interesting that the card showed a female person. She had to be me, looking rather severe.

The 56 Minor Arcana, like ordinary playing cards, come in four suits with four court cards in each suit – princess, queen, prince, king. The suit of Swords, as here, represents the mind – the intellectual side of life, thoughts.

I was brought up to rely on the mind but it wasn’t working for me any more, if it ever had. It was my soul that had got me through the years since Frog’s death but my mind kept scoffing. It was horrible. It was my mind that had come up with this crazy idea about a CMC and worn me out with it.

My mind needed to know its place, said the card. We also had body, emotions and spirit (as in the other three tarot suits – and according to Jung). I needed to remember that I was only a princess and not yet a queen. I didn’t know everything. How comforting that was. 

Card 4

This was card number four, from the suit of Pentacles, representing the body and the physical world – money, houses and security – and this card showed lots of activity in that area.

How apt, I thought. That was also me over the last few years: clearing Frog’s mountains of stuff, having work done to the house in case I wanted to downsize, taking on the myriad practical jobs that Frog did, getting used to the scariness of managing alone, trying to stay healthy while staggering between sleepless nights.

That activity wasn’t finished yet, said the card. There was still more to do. That’s what I needed to focus on – not romantic dreams.

OK, I could cope with that. It was quite a relief, actually.

Card 5

This was the final card.

Put simply, this beautiful card means hope, which was extraordinary given that hope was exactly what I’d asked for before doing the reading. It means following your star. It means that you are a star. At number 17 in the Major Arcana it’s near the end of the spiritual cycle, like The Sun, and another celestial body.

The card told me to write, as that is where I feel most me, where I touch my star.

It gave me permission to believe in a higher (celestial) world.

It answered everything, as did the whole spread.

So there was a pattern. We are connected. All is well.

Note
Tarot probably dates back to medieval times but the best-known traditional pack is the Rider-Waite one of 1909. Modern tarot packs, and there are many of them, are easier to read because they rely less on symbols and more on pictures. I use the Cosmic Tarot (of 1988) because that was the one Cheryl used. Thanks to the artist Norbert Lősche and the publisher (of my edition) F X Schmid. There are other later publishers.

Willie Nelson, Miriam Margolyes, Dawn French and me

One of my pleasures is listening to music (CDs) while driving. My choice at the moment is ‘Across The Borderline’, an album by the great Willie Nelson, on which is a gorgeous version of ‘Graceland’ by Paul Simon. Three of the lines always make me cry: 

            Losing love is like a window in your heart.

            Everybody sees you’re blown apart.

            Everybody sees the window.

They move me because when I first lost Frog everyone was so kind to me, even complete strangers like supermarket checkout people. It was as if they sensed what was going on, and Paul Simon has obviously had the same experience.

At least, that’s what I thought the words were. But when I came to check them for this post I discovered that I’d misheard the last one. It's not ‘sees the window’ but ‘feels the wind blow’, and that doesn’t work for me at all. Never mind. It’s still a beautiful version of the song and I can sing my own words loudly over the top of the official ones.

 

In Miriam Margolyes’s scurrilous autobiography ‘This Much is True’, which I’m currently laughing my way through, she mentions a Dutch word ‘drempelvrees’ which means ‘threshold fear’. She says that the Indonesians (who were once colonised by the Dutch, as you probably know) use the word more specifically to mean the moment we gather ourselves up to appear in public. They do consciously, she says, what most of us do unconsciously before going out - putting on a persona, an exaggerated version of ourselves, ourselves as we’d like to be.

I’m doing a lot of that at the moment. Or maybe what I’m doing is pretending to be what I hope I’m becoming. Dawn French, in her memoir ‘Dear Fatty’, first alerted me to this phenomenon. Before becoming a new person, she writes, we have to imagine that new person and play the part for a while. I found that very helpful. It’s such a good way of getting out of a rut and taking the step forward that we need to take.

 
However, both techniques have their drawbacks. They can mean that we’re not being true to our whole self, perhaps hiding or protecting something, and in my case it means that I’m glossing over the vulnerable grief-stricken part of myself, which is still there and may always be there.
 
When Frog first died, I didn’t have a persona. I couldn’t present an idealised version of myself. I couldn’t protect myself. I didn’t have the energy. It was as much as I could do to get up in the morning. And I think that honesty was one of the things people responded to. That was why they were kind to me.
 
Unfortunately that unexpected kindness doesn't happen any more in quite the same way, even though I’m probably just as fragile inside. Yesterday was a case in point, when I tried to engage the woman at the Sainsbury’s till in conversation and she looked at me as if I was mad. It threw me for the whole day.
 
I’ve a lot to learn still about this ‘being myself’ business, about how to face the world as me - new or otherwise, how to combine strength and vulnerability. Frog was much better than me at it. He never pretended. All his failings and weaknesses were on show. He knew he was an idiot (as we all are really). And I loved him for that.

 

A walk in the North Downs

Last week I stayed with family in Kent.

I was brought up in that county on a farm on the edge of a village with my two brothers and two sisters. My sisters have returned to live in the village, and the rest of us visit as often as we can.
 
Kent is known as the Garden of England because of its fruit orchards and I have vivid memories of my mother buying us lucky children a crate of cherries from a local grower and us working our way through them, having spitting competitions with the stones.
 
On Friday however when I went for a walk it looked more like the Mediterranean. I believe it has the hottest (in summer), driest climate in the country. My sister’s lawn was too parched and prickly to walk on with bare feet

My sister's lawn

and the view from the hill was more brown than green.
 

The view from the hill

 
The village lies in the North Downs, a chalk ridge designated a National Landscape  - what used to be called an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. I think I prefer that name. In the 1970s (after I'd left home) they wanted to drive the M25 through the village and a friend, whose mother was a leading protestor, wore a campaign t-shirt with Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty emblazoned across her chest.

Eventually, not because of the landscape but because of the artist Samuel Palmer who lived in the village and is known for his paintings of the area, they drove the M25 through the hills instead. You can hear the roar of motorway traffic everywhere.  Nevertheless, there are still multiple footpaths, swathes of trees, and loveliness round every corner.

Looking towards the hills and their beechwoods. The M25 is the other side of the first rise, in a dip.

Our farm – which I remember as being mostly grazed by cows whom we dodged in order to climb the trees that dotted the fields and who ate the underneath of the giant horse chestnut visible from the house and kept it neat - is now a vineyard.
 

Rows and rows of vines

 
The vineyard is open to the public and has a shop and restaurant – a vast glass edifice built over the concrete yard where I used to play hopscotch with a friend. The whole place, I'm told, is an extremely popular day out for people from nearby London. Fields have been turned into carparks, and neighbouring landowners put up boards explaining the farming business. (So much better than fences and 'keep out' signs.)
 

An overflow carpark

An information board

A stream flows through the village and I remember spending hours with my siblings and friends trying (and failing) to catch fish with twigs and string, paddling in it, falling in it and crawling through it under the road.
 
Chalk streams (I read) are globally rare, and important because they support so many species. They are fed by underground water which percolates up through the chalk. This is full of minerals, very pure and clear, and of a consistent temperature (cold!).
 
In a wood I pass some tributaries of the main river, a welcome feature on a broiling day and somewhere my sister’s spaniel spends as much time as she is allowed.
 

Welcome streams and shade

I skirt the cricket pitch where a brother and I used to take charge of the scoreboard, and I helped the ladies making the teas in the hope that I would be able to eat some of the delicious food. They were so deft with their knives, whipping up squishy butter from a large plastic tub and sweeping it over sliced white bread. I still think of them every time I make a sandwich.
 
From the cricket pitch there is a view of a cross cut into the chalk. This commemorates those killed in the First World War.
 

The cricket pitch and the cross

 
Finally, I make my way through the graveyard next to the church, where I pause at the newly filled grave of a sister-in-law’s brother, whose funeral was the reason for my visit to Kent. He was the same age as me and had lived in the village all his life.
 

This morning on my second day back at home, I realise that I need to commit to my life in Devon. I feel divided between Kent and Devon but I don’t want to go and live in Kent. I love it in Kent and I love it here, but I have a very big family and at times they overwhelm me. Here, on my own without Frog, is where I am at last finding myself.