A regenerative practice: recognise which way you are facing, learn where the light is coming from and how you are oriented in relation to it. Not for monetary gain, not as a game, but as an act of planetary alignment. Solidarity with the cosmos, if you like. Which way are you facing now? At the shop checkout later, where is north? Don’t check a device. Search out the sun at noon, or Ursa Major, or the Southern Cross, at night. Your two favourite places to sit and read, do they have aspect in common? Are you a secret west-facer, when 200 pages deep into a new romantasy? Which way do you face when you pray?

All week since meeting this old ‘dead’ tree, it has been with me, orienting me, making me think about which way I have been growing and towards what I have been reaching, for years. It’s made me wonder how that shows up, how it’s visible. People, like trees, don’t just go straight up, (unless forced to by unnaturally close monocultural conditions…)

If after my death, my life were laid out plainly, like this tree has been, and you could see the side where warmth and light had hit me, could observe the thinner lines of the parts of my life that had remained in the shade, what would an interested onlooker make of it? Would they say, ‘Ah, I see you were turned towards the sun but got overshadowed by a faster-growing tree for a while.’

And what is the sun? Friendship? Love? The Great Mystery?

It’s another way to think of the heart-mind which gives a little more spaciousness, admits the influences of conditions and environment, and doesn’t cling to the popular though ridiculous idea of being self-made. I’m not implying some mystical goal, a psyche formed like perfectly even rings of a tree that receives sun all day as it stands majestically alone in a sunlit field.

Caroline Ross

My Garden (Book)

surroundings that speak of enchantment