I’m here in the garden listening to the piano music I recorded while I was away on the business trip (at the airport, and you can hear the airport mini trucks beeping here and there, as well as airport hubbub and occasional announcements).

It’s the last day I will be able to sit like this in the garden this year. At the weekend the picnic tables and chairs and benches will be stored for the winter.

As so often happens, the moment itself is not as difficult as the anticipation of the moment.

The sun is shining, the wind is mild and the flowers and plants wave around me.

All that I have lived in this miraculous garden this summer is welling up within me. The sheer surprise of it, the gift of its unimaginable beauty, the joy of the comings and goings of other gardeners, the sweet events of afternoon teas, meditation with someone who might become special to me, birthday celebration with old friends and new neighbours, semi-adopting the sweet cats, picking, delighting in and sharing flowers, running here first after trips away, to check on my plants, to be home.

Sometimes life is difficult but sometimes grace effuses itself from who knows where and overwhelms the pains with its unexpected, astonishing beauty.

Such has been this garden to me in a quite wild summer, inside me, around me, and beyond me in the world which sometimes feels like it is collapsing under the weight of its own pains, its own lostness.

At the start of the summer I pondered whether the rhythm of this garden would help me restore ‘the studio inside’. It has. It has been the most exquisite open-air studio anyone could wish for. Now it is going to be allowed to rest while already I have been provided with a ‘real’ indoor studio. What grace again.

The music is ending, but, in a way I love so much, it ends on a note of incompleteness, an interrupted cadence, a kind of resolution with expansion in prospect, a generosity to what will come next…