Ok, I will not mention panic, countdowns, or the shocked expletive that wanders constantly through my mind, kicking me into realisation… eleven days.

Nine days and I’m at the hospital sorting the imminent surgery. the timing of that is wonderful, don’t you think? Ten days and I am collecting my dear friend at Heathrow… all the way from the US for the workshop and a few days with me.. eleven days and we head for Derbyshire, the tiny village of Great Hucklow and the momentous event that grabbed my co-director and I by the heart and towards which we have been planning and working for months. The birth of the Silent Eye School.

Is it months though? Is it years, since our paths first crossed all unknowing in Tintagel? Perhaps it is a lifetime as we have learned and trained, studied and grown towards what is and will be required of us. Perhaps we have always been on this particular journey. Myself, I think that this is so.

No experience is wasted, no lesson without purpose, neither the light nor dark that has touched and bathed our lives is without meaning. Who we are, what we are, all has its place within what we do. The very foundations of the School are deep within us, back to that first conversation and beyond. Who can tell where these threads begin?

When Steve first brought me in to work with the School, it was simply as a friend and to work on a specific project, long before the first ideas had blossomed beyond the nebulous. Those ideas have grown and changed, evolved and lit up from the inside as we have felt our way forward, like children in the dark sometimes, stumbling but led by a beloved voice.

As the ideas have grown and changed, so have we. And it has not always been an easy journey. Yet the birth of the School will also be a new beginning for us as individuals as we commit our lives to what we believe and seek to share.

I was reading, last night, a passage I love from one of the Narnia books by C.S.Lewis, ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.’ It struck a chord in a way it has never done before, for I can relate to the process it describes, the stripping back of the layers, the exposing of the inner self hidden beneath. It is something we have each been experiencing for a while.

If you know the book you will remember how Eustace… an unpleasant child who has lessons to learn, had become a dragon. To return to his true form he has to be ‘undressed’ from his outer skin by Aslan, the Lion, before he can become himself once more and begin to grow. He has himself peeled away three layers of dragon skin, yet beneath he remains the same.

“Then the lion said — but I don’t know if it spoke — ‘You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.

“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know — if you’ve ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like billy — oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.”

Tonight, as I tap away at the keyboard in this silent room, after an utterly exhausting day that has run the gamut of emotion, has held tears and realisations, understood pain and fragility and which has brought me to my knees before a beauty so delicate and yet magnificent I have no words for it, I am intimately aware of one thing that has not changed, that has remained the very core of what we seek to do and to build. It is the heart of the School and was the first thing we ever discussed.

We build a School founded on Love.

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Awareness matters

This month is Parkinson’s Awareness Month globally, andAwareness Week UK. Please show your support for those who  live with Parkinson’s, those who care, and those who seek to find new treatments for this progressive condition that can strike any one of us at any age. Thank you.