I was given this body and I take it for granted that it will carry me wherever my mind needs to go.  However, some infinitesimal bug and a few million of its relatives have decided to take over and I have all but ground to a halt.

I was fine yesterday, doing what I wanted and needed to do, when I wanted and where I wanted.  I came home and we had dinner – a lovely turkey mince with grated vegetable fry-up.  Then I felt unusually tired and slunk off to bed.  No, I wasn’t tired, I was exhausted, wrung out, totally pooped.  I tried to read for a while until even that was too much effort.

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Circulation; a word I don’t think about much, most of the time.  It’s on account of my cold nose and toes and fingers that it comes to mind.  Because of the lack of it, the impairment of it.

I have just come back into the warmth of the kitchen.  The dog and I have been exploring the local ‘community forest’, a leash-free area.  Leash-free allows me to wander at will, without the dog restricting me.  I can go where I want to go.  I can stop and take macro close-ups of tiny mushrooms and mosses and sniff the dampness they grow in.

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The dog suddenly gets up from his spot next to the heater and races to the window.  With his paws on the sill, he starts barking at something outside.  I listen carefully.  Between barks I can just hear what sounds like the warbling of a bird.  I’ve never heard that before.  I get up and join the dog.

On the path through the reserve which skirts our property, two teenagers are using their cupped hands to create a whistle, blowing across their thumbs.  They seem to be competing with each other.  With me next to him, the dog has fallen silent, his ears alert and his head cocked at an angle (his ‘what’s going on?’ look).  The whistling is sonorous and surprisingly loud.  The girl seems better at it than the boy, but both are obviously enjoying themselves.

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It’s winter, according to the Australian calendar.  In many parts of the world, however, winter starts on the 21st – the time of the equinox, a reminder of the way people used to mark the turning of important cycles.

We have lost much of our connection with the cosmic and global ebbs and flows which marked the lives of our ancestors.  We now respond to more mundane markers: commercial cycles, the ‘founding’ of a nation (though most people do not know what we are actually celebrating), the birthday of a monarch (though not on her birthday), the birth and death of a prophet upon whose life a religion has been based (though, again, not on the true days).

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