Day 2

After very little sleep in the camper on the car park where no one would hear the screams on a wet, darkly deep dark night in the middle of the vast emptiness of the Scottish borders with a madness of midges for company, I felt like a collapsed prayer flag first thing. Re-engaging with the course sorted that out.

There is no doubt about it, it's a weird spot. I can find myself swinging between being completely comfortable and utterly uncomfortable. It is always a paradox when I visit ... no bad thing ...

I was last here at a conference a year ago and then for a course before that ... I posted the following poem then and it is just as relevant this time.

FROM: LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET 

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms 
and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. 
Do not now seek the answers, 
which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. 
And the point is, to live everything. 
Live the questions now. 
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, 
live along some distant day 
into the answer 

Rainer Maria Rilke