There are moments, just moments, when I feel like I may have gotten it all together…

And I had one this morning.

I left at seven to drive Joli to the bus. Rich stayed home to get Benji up and ready for school, and milked all our plethora of goats - a kindly gesture, since I can’t come close to milking the newcomer Marmite, and would have spent all morning trying!

I came back, Rich went off to work and I ferried Benji to his beautiful new school, where he had a birthday party to attend. I drove back along sunny roads, the fields glittering with that deep polish that only fields in Wales have - all the rain washes the dust away, so when it is sunny, everything glistens. I was thinking about what to do, and settled in my mind that I could do some digging in the garden and plant the wildflower seeds - indeed, that I had to plant the wildflower seeds, or it would be too late in the season…

And this made me feel unreasonably happy. 

What I should be doing, of course, is working on the book that is due in November. There are a number of people waiting, more or less impatiently, for me to make some progress on the bloody thing. 

But it is so easy for me to get caught onto the seductive slow wheel of the farm - the chicks need to be fed, and the goat kid given her bottle, then there are the plants to be watered, and the willow stakes to be pushed in to form a screen for the compost - and before I know it the morning is gone, the afternoon is past, it’s time for supper…

There is a timeless quality to all these things that feeds me at the very deepest level. That wheel turns almost imperceptibly, and alters with the seasons - it’s like stepping into a warm river with a strong current that simply sweeps you into it and away. To drag myself into the computer room takes a terrible effort of will. 

I’m playing with the idea that all this physical labor - and it is hard work, make no mistake - shoveling out the sheds, barrowing the wood chips, wrestling with the goats and cleaning out the pens - that all these things are conducive to well-being. 

We have worked so hard in this society not to work. It’s as if our goal in life is to reach the point where none of us have to do anything at all…but the resultant coma of television and eating junk isn’t conducive to well-being. 

 I think well-being is a better phrase than happiness. Happiness sounds fizzy and addictive - like a series of high points. Party after party…

But well-being is easier to grapple with, easier to define. I can see that hard physical  work is conducive to my well-being, although I’m not sure that I would define it as part of happiness. 

But the warm, almost floating feeling that descends after I’ve worked myself to exhaustion on the farm, and the satisfaction of seeing what I’ve accomplished - no television program in the world can provide it. 

And this morning, when I came back, I picked a bouquet of flowers from our yard and set it on the long wooden table that Rich made. I made a cup of tea and put our own goat’s milk in it. I boiled one of our farm eggs, cut a slice of home-made bread, put Bach’s Brandenburg concertos on the cd player. The light streamed in through the window, the newly hatched chick cheeped from the brooder.

And I had a moment of reasonless happiness, of grace and order, of being part of something that finally, and with granite certainty, made sense…