A gratitude list.

Although it sounds very hello clouds, hello sky, I do try to count my blessings. Apparently, it is a thing. If one consciously lists the good things in life, before bed, or first thing in the morning, one’s mental state is enhanced. It’s one of those simple acts which is often quite hard to do. The monkey mind is monkeying about, time is racing, one must get on. There’s no room for all that hippy shit.

The Younger Brother is really a proper hippy. He lives in Bali and sits in circles of love and beats drums and chants and everything. Sometimes it works for him. Sometimes he rings me up and says, despairingly: ‘I’m still staring into the void.’ The void is our shorthand for all the difficult things that hit one in middle age: the reality of mortality, the madness of the world, the bashed heart. It is easy to fall into a terrible confirmation bias, where one only takes in the sadness and the madness, the haters and the shouters, the people who rape the land and tear down the rainforests. Everyone is going to die and we are all for the dark.

So, doggedly, furiously sometimes, I damn well count those blessings.

Opposable thumbs are always pretty near the top of the list. I love typing and I don’t take it for granted that I can do up buttons. I also give thanks for a brain that mostly works, water that comes out of the tap, and a warm house. If I believed in prayer, I would pray to the gods of nature, the spirits that live in these blue hills and my beloved trees and the smallest piece of moss. I give gratitude to beauty, in all its forms, and the luck I have that I can appreciate it. I’m very, very pleased to have the English language at my disposal. That is a great gift. I am blessed with a happy horse and a happy dog and a fast internet connection, so I can look at baby pandas when things get very bad.

I think quite a lot about happiness: what it is, whether it is a goal to be pursued. I think about ratios. I have the ordinary amount of sorrow, fret, fear and angst. But as long as there are joys as well, the balance holds. I can’t be Pollyanna every day, skipping about, blind to the dark side. (Jung spoke a lot about balancing the light and the dark.) On the other hand, wallowing in the bad parts does not achieve much and can slip easily into self-indulgence. The good old shrinks always say: you can’t change the thing, but you can change the way you think about the thing. It’s not easy, but it can be done. Perspective, in all its forms, is a talent that may be learnt.

The gales have passed and the sun has come out again. Scotland looks clear and calm and ravishing. I got back on to the back of my dear red mare. We have not been riding on account of the weather, and I was so excited that I had to take several deep breaths so as not to communicate wildness to her. She walked sweetly on a loose rein, at home with herself and the world. Even in a slow, low walk, I can feel her power, all those centuries of breeding for speed and strength streaming off her. She is as light as air and as mighty as an empress. The spreading sense of physical joy runs between us, in the bright air. Half a ton of flight animal rests easily beneath me, responsive to my every thought. It is a sort of miracle. It is a blessing of the very highest.

Opposable thumbs, a majestic thoroughbred and a Scottish field: that is a list to be going on with.

Oh, and this morning I saw the first tiny daffodil shoots; singing green harbingers of spring.

 

Today’s pictures:

 

Love, marriage, nature and dogs, with a side order of Leviticus

Today I: walked the dog, did the horses, collected cash from the bank, did some Christmas shopping, wrote some book, bought two delicious steak pies from the butcher, and had a spirited discussion about gay marriage.

I was talking about the problems of being a small L liberal. I gave my little riff about the reason liberals look so tired and peaked is that they are always having to see both sides of every argument. So much less exhausting to be straightforward Left or Right. The perennial cry of the liberal, I said, is ‘I see your point.’

My interlocutor said, gently, drily: ‘But I would say you are a woman of...’

Slight pause. Quizzical look.

‘Strong opinions.’

I shouted with laughter, which I always do when some of my more absurd pronouncements are nailed to the wall.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I do admit there are some things where I find it very very hard to see the other side. Gay marriage, for instance.’

And we were off to the races.

The interlocutor is not, I should say, against gay marriage, but he likes a debate, and there was a little devil’s advocate in him. He listened quietly as I cantered away with my devout belief that we should celebrate love, not chastise it; that I could never understand why it exercised people so about who loves whom; that the staunch defenders of marriage as an institution should be delighted that more people want to join it.

I galloped off over the religious course, which involves Leviticus. This is where most of the anti-gay stuff is found, biblically speaking.

‘But if we all followed that,’ I said, ‘we should be stoning people for swearing and happily buying slaves and dutifully putting adulterers to death.’ I stopped for effect. ‘And we really don’t do that, do we?’

‘There are people,’ said my patient listener, ‘who say it is unnatural.’

‘Ha,’ I cried. ‘But penicillin is unnatural; agriculture in unnatural; forestry is against nature.’

Stanley the dog wandered in, to see why I was shouting. I looked at him.

‘Keeping domestic pets is unnatural,’ I concluded, triumphantly.

The argument from nature is one of the most commonly and madly used, by the fearful. Nature, they say, and often God too, meant marriage to be for a man and a woman, and the procreation of children. But virtually everything a modern human does is against nature, from heart surgery to government to living in houses.

Besides, as I think of it now, I realise nature is an absolute bastard, and I have no idea why it is held up as the gold standard. It is red in tooth and claw. It will kill you with tidal waves and droughts and freezes. Animals in the wild, so often held up as a beautiful free template of honest living, unlike horrid conniving humans, are driven by brute survival instincts, and will as often kill you as look at you.

Even something as charming as the horse has a ruthless streak. If a member of the herd is old or wounded, the other animals will shun it, and often move on, leaving it to die. In their world, it is quite right that they do this; their survival of the fittest means they cannot afford to be held up by the lame or the halt. If humans obeyed that law of nature, they would be considered treacherous and cowardly.

It is for this reason that I try hard, against all my instincts, not to anthropomorphise. Human and animal morality are so different that even using the same words for them may confound and confuse.

And yet, before I ran off on this gay marriage tangent, I was going to write about an animal thing that should carry a sentimentality warning.

I had a good and cheerful day yesterday, but suddenly, in the dark of the night, I whacked into the howling despair of missing my darling old dog. Because I am up against a hard deadline, and have about twenty things to do each day, because it is the Christmas season, because I have the sweetness of the new dog and the loveliness of my little herd of horses, I have not been dwelling on her loss. I think I had fooled myself into believing that everything was quite fine and normal. Watch me, getting on with it, not making a fuss. I am always conscious, in the cold weather, of how lucky I am, to have heat and good warm clothes and a sturdy roof over my head. All this conspired to fool me into a bogus normality.

Mourning may not be so easily denied, and must be done. Last night was a big whack, and floored me. As I was sitting with it, Stanley the Lurcher came into the room and sat like a sentinel at my side, gazing earnestly at me. I wondered for a moment if he were fretful at the noise, but the look on his face was not one of anxiety. He was just there.

The thing about this dog is that he is not, as The Duchess and The Pigeon were, a vamp for affection. He likes a bit of a scratch and a stroke, but he does not come to ask for them, as they did. He is not a kisser, and they both were (small, delicate licks on the end of the nose). He does not like to be without me, but he is happy to keep a little distance. Even as I write this, he is calmly curled up next door, taking his ease. This may be because everything is new for him, or it may be his character. Either way, the coming and sitting and gazing were out of the ordinary.

There are many reasons for dogs to do the things they do. I must be careful not to fall into foolishness or mawkishness. But it did feel like something very touching indeed, and I wanted to write it down. There was something peculiarly comforting about that dog, sitting as straight as a statue, waiting for me to finish my childish tears. So, as I make my daily list of lucky things, of the fortunes for which I am grateful, and which I feel most keenly at this time of year, Stanley the Dog goes at the top of the list.

 

Today’s pictures:

I got rather obsessed by the lichen on the trees, as you shall see. Also: moss.

Oh, these two little faces:

My tiny principessa:

The new hay mangers are a great success:

It amazes me that Red the Mare and Autumn the Filly look more and more as if they are sisters, despite being completely different breeds.

My favourite Minnie the Moocher shuffle:

When people talk of thoroughbreds being difficult and unmanageable, I wish they could see this old girl coming for love. After this, she stood for ten minutes with her head on my shoulder, just communing in the middle of the field. It’s one of the best parts of my day.

There was a very fine game of ball this morning, and I took rather a lot of Stanley action shots:

This is the one who still makes my heart ache. My beautiful Pigeon:

The hill: