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This photie was taken this afternoon at ten to four up in my hut. It is only two days till the winter solstice. Hurrah! I don't care about Christmas or the New Year. I want the light back. Even in January when the weather is horrible, there is hope since the days are slowly but surely getting longer.
I used to dread the winter. After the Edinburgh Festival finished in September, I used to think here come the dark, the wet, and bugger all going on. Also, for most of my life I have not welcomed the holidays at Christmas and the New Year. I never needed holidays. I didn't work that hard. What the winter holidays meant to me was that I had to press the pause button on all the things I enjoyed doing, such as writing and training and meditating, so that I could laze about doing bugger all with folk who did that anyway with their spare time; bugger all.
This attitude has changed over the past few years. I resolved not go on about effing Christmas, and such like, and to try to just accept it. Then came the lockdowns. I loved the lockdowns, particularly the ones at Christmas. I think last Christmas I had a cold and had to tell folk that I couldn't celebrate Christmas with them. The folk I see these days are different from the folk I saw a decade ago, and although they do as little as possible at Christmas, they still do something. The Christmases I've really liked and remembered well are the ones I spent on my own. That was last year, 2012, and the two or three times I went to the Samye Ling to avoid the night after night of parties and piss-ups. Thank God that doesn't happen, the parties and piss-ups I mean, these days. A benefit of getting old.
This year I started writing another book about dharma, and I've got about 35,000 words of the first draft done. This is the first bit of writing I've felt really enthusiastic about for ages. I really want to write it, so that's a definite positive. I might even try to get it published, but I'll have to write it and re-write it and so on. This could take a couple of years since I haven't got a definite writing schedule these days. I used to be bang on with two hours or so every day when I was working. Somehow, it's harder to find the time now. I am meditating for four hours a day and the training and bathing take up about two hours, so ...
The writing and the meditating are kind of integrated when you are writing about dharma, and that somehow makes things better. You life fits together somehow.
Practically every week there seems something improving in the meditations. That's a normal feeling though sometimes I think it can't be truth since it can't have been improving every week for the last decades, but that's the way it seems. This is a convenient perception if you want to keep meditating: that they're always improving. But they do seem to be. This is especially true over the last couple of weeks. I can't explain to you what is going on here because I don't know myself.
Have a lovely holiday.
