Grounded in Manchester, it’s fantastic living with my sister and brother-in-law and their four foster children. There’s a sweetness to every day of living with a family and a secure couple who like each other and have supported each other's dreams over the years. My sister is a force of nature, and my bro-in-law looks after the house. There’s a comfort and excess of good things here that are easy to appreciate. It feels like I’m in a prepper house; everyone round here for the apocalypse. As someone who’s tried to move away from being a consumer to a contributor, and for financial reasons had to choose a simpler life, I’m enjoying a fridge with five kinds of mustard.

Let’s talk about offering. I try not to. If you want my help, let me know what you want, then I won’t assume you want what I already know. That might be a waste of what I do know, though it gives me boundaries to consider. Being asked to do something different is interesting.

As my dad went into the hospice, he agitated about paying the paper bill and milk bill. After that, he didn’t speak for a few days before he stopped breathing too. I’m sure he chose his moment. They were precious days, sometimes silent, or me talking to him at last, thanking him for all the things I hadn’t while I was running around the world. Seeing his childhood friends I knew as aunties and uncles in my childhood, and nuns and priests dropping in offering last rites and various Catholic blessings. This precious time of his death came after a Tantra weekend where I’d observed someone falling back and taking an inward Shamanic journey. I was prepared to bear silent witness. Recently being poorly, I may not be able to walk to the cafe 20 minutes away, but my electricity bill is paid in Greece.

I’m doing research into objectification. I’m beginning to realise how much men want it. Being seen, even when being used, allows a visibility and attention that the pillow princesses may rarely give, or have the skill, interest or confidence to mete out. I’ve learned that you have to put your people pleaser in the corner, and not care that much if someone likes it or not, as long as they’re willing to do what you want to try. Then have the imagination to issue, or follow, a few commands. Are you willing to do what you’re asked, so someone else can feel what they’ve never dared try? Are you willing to push beyond being caring, serving, nice or good so your object feels the blush of humiliation, or the vulnerability of being observed in their nakedness? It is relaxing being objectified. Within boundaries, you don’t have to think. Objectification is edgy, which is what makes it worthwhile. I’ll carry on with the research.

Gosh, sexting is time-consuming. Following an old fantasy I’ve long held but never enacted, about being picked up in a hotel bar, an old friend followed me in the dance of power and pleasure. For him, the initial approach was nerve-racking. He was polite and elegant. The moment of leaving the bar to go to his imaginary room was braver than I imagined. Being in there together was still, gentle and then surprising. Not falling back on PIV sex or pleasure revolving around a hard-on, orgasm or ejaculation.  I got to know an old friend from a different lifetime, in a newer innocence than I might have found in real life. Sexting slowed it all down, with time consumed in relaxed arousal in a make-believe hotel room. That met my troublesome turn on with aplomb.

I’m staying in the UK for the next six months as I can’t drive. I like the clarity.

The first day I was ever invited to stay in silence all day was at a Buddhist yoga retreat near the edge of a loch in Scotland. After yoga class, I went for a walk and was struck by the green of the grass, the reeds at the edge of the loch, and the cow’s eyelashes. Then at the scent and taste of a long-awaited coffee at the local hotel instead of barley cup at the retreat centre. And two little freshly baked scones. Heaven. Walking alone and in silence was a new experience. Mostly, I’d spent previous walks complaining about my boyfriend of the time to anyone who’d listen. It wasn’t till a friend told me I was like a stuck record that I shut up. It was years later I learned it was good to leave relationships. I didn’t have to stay just because of my unconscious conditioning, just because my father waited till my mother’s affair might be over. Leaving a lovelorn relationship is freedom.

Living next door to a barely verbal, beyond-screeching-painkiller addict in a specialist pneumonia ward is a unique experience. Being admitted to hospital again, a few weeks later, but this time being out of it in intensive care, then thinking I was having a spiritual journey in a high dependency ward, is slightly ludicrous. The cosmic joke is alive and kicking.. The last time I was in hospital was with an ectopic pregnancy thirty years ago. Even though I’m not interested in being ill, I wonder if I’m being forced to be. Or maybe I underestimate how the dharma classes have taught me to be a witness and know I’m separate from my experiences. Indifference helps steadiness, and so does not emotionally collapsing. I’m a natural worrier about the future, but the things I can’t do much about, I’m oddly untouched by, and surrender and pragmatism prevail.

I’m not responsible for the loneliness epidemic. I doubt it’s gendered. There was a time I was paid well enough for erotic massages, and I enjoyed the experiences. I was kinder and curiouser. Now I haven’t got the temple or energy. Let me encourage you to find someone who has.

Being poorly this week with the chills, I haven’t had the capacity for conversations or meetings. It’s good practice not to feel guilty for not responding or saying no. Have mercy.

When we ‘give’ what we know, or what we feel matters, it’s very puzzling when someone else doesn’t understand, need or value it. It can feel like rejection of your value/s. When you offer something you can do, yet the other person hadn't even imagined they needed or desired, it’s confusing about how to respond. If your intention was good – for you – there's nothing wrong with that, but say so.

A friend tied me up last week. We talked about why and what we might do, what emotional mood we were creating, and who it was for. The tying was caring and slow, my hands bound to my chest, then my calves and thighs tightly wrapped. Roping me towards myself in a feeling of secure attachment, laying me down on my side, he covered me in a blanket and stroked my hair slowly, sitting behind me so I could drift. In all of it, I was nurtured. It’s not simply about the tying but the trust. It was also rewriting my beliefs around men. To feel the care when I’m vulnerable, when I’m not being capable or seductive. There’s a chance for new stories of those roles I perceive as expected. It’s going to come in useful sooner than I imagine.

Being in the unknown takes willingness, a certain spaciousness and acceptance. The desire for knowing and certainty is natural, yet can create its own suffering. There can be a calmness in waiting, an invitation to compartmentalise without going into catastrophising, even though the potential hovers at the edges. It can look like not feeling much. Maybe it’s just being present with the day to day rather than what can’t be known yet.

Soul journeys begin in unlikely places. Sometimes we do the wrong thing for the right reasons and sometimes we try to do the right thing with the wrong person. It sounds like spiritual bypassing, but there are times in my life where it’s been the kinder way of seeing a painful journey; imagining my soul wanted the lesson of what love is, and isn’t. Spiritual meeting practical. Some of the ways spirit experiences living and love is through the body and mind it picked for this incarnation. A soulful erotic psyche in search of wholeness and completion. We just don’t know how that might happen.

Gone with the Wind was the first book that had kept me up all night as a teenager. Tess of the D’Urbervilles the second. Early examples of Attraction + Obstacles = Excitement. Rhett Butler frankly seemed a lot more accommodating and seductive than prissy Angel Clare. Oh dear, that explains a lot of my less wise partner choices.

Optimism is a virtue of my recklessness. I don’t know how to feel the bad stuff. Yet I’m not disassociated but distracted. So I must be due a good cry. Often it needs someone else to ask questions or model what I can’t completely access; less a mirror than a catalyst.

We assign meaning to our lives. It’s not a given. You choose. So to frame it as a miracle or adventure or doom and gloom pessimism are options. Which wolf do you want to feed? 

I’m such a closet romantic, another thing I don’t think I’m allowed to admit.

There are so many ways to not ask for what you want. The long list may begin with telepathy, hinting, offering, assuming, arguing, sulking, blaming, guilt tripping. There’s so many more, add your own deception or shyness. Why, and what do you do instead? Be virtuous, cheat, withdraw, refuse, be sneaky, steal touch, expect entitlement? Seriously, it’s easier, more fun & liberating to go on a Wheel of Consent course than continue all the failing strategies for the next decade.