It began with the sunset, yesterday. Breathtaking colours, but a sense of strange events unfolding.

Nothing threatening… just events I would not have expected, let alone predicted; and all of them ‘inserted’ into reality as the day unfolded. An inner feeling of ‘wheels turning’.

One of our regular dog- walks is through the forest and up to Sizergh Barn for a take-out coffee. All very Covid-compliant and distanced. There’s a man named Gareth who has a license to use wood from the forest to make charcoal. I’ve written about our chance meeting with him in a previous blog. He was not present, but his charcoal furnace was burning away, its three chimneys somehow strangely symbolic.

This stark image of three followed that of three white roses many of us had seen, festooned by a light-show of ‘orbs’ on the Facebook site of the Glastonbury Unity Candle, in parallel with a private ceremony three of us were having in the Silent Eye, to be in contact in a way that Covid has taken away…

Leaving Sizergh Farm – where the organic shop and cafe are located – we decided to return via the ‘Fairly Glen’; a walk created for families with children that follows the course of a powerful stream before it plunges into the forest, proper.

There, on a mossy stone, was a beautifully painted pebble, photographed above. ‘When. Life gets blurry,’ read the words, ‘adjust your focus…’ Beautiful but strange, as though a scene from the 1960s series ‘The Prisoner’, whose setting at Portmeirion, in Wales, we had used as the basis for a Silent Eye consciousness weekend.

Then, leaving the forest on the homeward leg, with a well-walked collie happily trotting alongside, we came across this solitary stone, painted with a heart, left in a gap in one of the dry-stone walls.

Beautiful, isolated and, seemingly, not part of anything… except itself and what it said. A strange day, very beautiful in parts, and stark in others. A bit like life…

©Stephen Tanham, 2021.

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a modern yet mystical journey through the forest of personality to the sunrise of Being.