All About Floating ~  I’m not generally one for naming inanimate objects. But as soon as Lily Pod arrived on my lawn I knew I had to call her Lily.

I want to make special mention of Vortex Spas – who incredibly generously collected her from the docks, transported, and helped her over the fence into her new home – so much gratitude.

Technically she’s a Float Star float pod as I’ve mentioned before, but then I’m technically a human being and I still have a name ;-).  So here she is – Lily… from the inside out.

There is something extra special about coming out of the float cabin to a clear, still and starry night.It really is magical. Mostly it’s me who gets to do this since I generally float quite late at night. Of course with Caroline’s stunning interior design everyone gets a touch of it when they open Lily’s hatch after floating. I just get a double whammy …. unless it’s wet, cold and windy outside, in which case it’s not so magical!

My float experiences are different every time – though there are general categories they often fall into. There’s the active float – (my last one was like this) – where your body moves itself around untying, unwinding, freeing and releasing.  And you come out at the other end feeling like a physically brand new human being…. then there’s the emotional float – where it seems that everything that has ever bugged you floats away, and you realise that all is well with the world and all those little things you have been worrying at have simply gone…. even if the problem remains you know you have the ability to cope and work through it all…. there’s the mental float – you feel sharp and awake and clever and in tune with everything, where all the jobs you have been trying to shake down into order suddenly find themselves sorted out and the first thing you need to do when you get out is write it all down.  The creative / spiritual float – is a little piece of magic and one of the reasons artists like to float – words, music, pictures and ideas just flow and translate well into the waking world (unlike when on drugs or so I am told).   Occasionally I get the sleepy float – falling asleep almost instantly and waking with the music (or more likely about 2 minutes before the music), and this is the best sleep you have ever had, physically, physiologically, mentally and emotionally.

In truth most floats are a combination of all of these – with an over-ridingly common denominator of a deep sense of peace and well-being. Life outside is just as it was before – but your ability to see it clearly, and feel it calmly have grown ten-fold. Magic.

The Main Project ~ I always seem to have something on the go at Utopia. At the moment I am redesigning the front entrance… it took a while to start this one as I had much soul searching to do over whether or not to remove the old tree at the front.  In the end I agreed with myself that it had to come out (not my favourite thing – trees are good!) – but only because I had decided to replace it with another one. It was a kind of cherry, adorned each year with literally thousands of very small inedible cherries that even the birds wouldn’t eat. At the end of the season they would all drop onto the pavement and the grass verge and be a major daily clean up task.  It was very pretty for about a week during blossoming, and spent 3/4 of the year shading the house from the sun. What will replace it is still in debate.

The whole area was covered in ivy – the removal of which was a task that took hours and hours of blood, sweat and tears (only because of the blood). Much digging out of deep roots, …. and a little joyous assistance from the girls who discovered an entire long established ecosystem of spiders bugs and creepy crawlies…. which on one hand I have the grace to feel guilty about – and on the other I was very happy for Tilly, Poppy, Ethyl, Daisy and Rosie, who spent a very very happy couple of days leaping about heads down tail feathers up.

And then I started the clean up including splitting some pretty decent wood:

So that’s this week! –

More to come mid week – the new addition to the blog will be called One Day At A Time, where Helena’s story will properly begin, watch out for it!

Thanks for being with me again.

Angela ~

My Happy Place