Wednesday 4th April

Temperatures have dropped by about 20 degrees in a day and in Scotland gales and snow have struck with unseasonable force.
Yesterday we spent the best part of the morning cleaning our sculptures: lugging the dead weights through the house and feeling like weight lifters. It was a chance to sweep up dead leaves and make the garden look as best it can before the buds and blooms burst. 
We're anxious about our lupin though: for all intents and purposes it looks completely dead. Three years ago we'd had a magnificent display for nearly six weeks...

Its a reminder that nothing stays still in a garden and that nothing stays the same.
We've had to lose our two Pieris bushes: some sort of manky mould had covered them with a mean looking blackish soot.
And the small patch of frog spawn that we'd discovered in the pond two weeks ago has now dissolved to nothing: I suspect its been eaten by the goldfish.
Poor frog! The same thing happened last year and the year before.


Today we will visit the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. We'll likely have to queue for hours,  but the show closes on Friday and it has to be seen.

Nicholas

This is me hiking in the Lake District of England, it was nearly 12 years ago now. I looked like this when I was cast in my first Broadway show, when I got married to Nicholas, when I first moved to Dorking. 


This is also how I looked when I was new to my career in the healing professions.


Yesterday, I gave away the massage table I have worked on since I enrolled in, and graduated from, the Swedish Institute of Massage Therapy in NYC. That deep green leather table, with its matching headrest has provided a soft and gentle surface for the over 10,000 hours of hands-on time I have spent with the beautiful women and men who have sought my touch to relieve their pain; physical, mental and spiritual. It has flown across the ocean, part of my luggage in an American Airlines flight, it was on and off New York's subways, in and out of NYC cabs ,and up and down the upper westside of Manhattan on a skateboard designed to transport it. And now, it is with another gifted therapist here in England.


 I will purchase a new one so that I can work when I arrive, while all of our belongings are in storage. It will look different. I will look different. I hope all of those who have privileged me with their trust and their courage have been healed in a manner they couldn't have imagined. I know they have given me the gift of healing in profound and unexpected ways. My beautiful table held all of our stories and all of our transformations for 16 years. I am deeply thankful.


Judy