Dear Friends,

On turning 26 last week I was prompted to evaluate my life a small amount yet again! I still don’t feel to be the sophisticated, elegant woman I imagined myself to be as I daydreamed my childhood away in search of sweeter, greener grass where I thought my adulthood might prosper.

To my child self the image of Annie Driver at age 26 was hero-like and every thing was to be square-like and obvious, even the blurred background of this projected image had an air of success and deliverance about it.

Now, entering my 27th year I find that the child self who once daydreamed that sophisticated woman was to be mistaken all along. I don’t feel ‘older’: in many ways I am still that child self, only bigger. It was a shock to find out that ‘adults’ don’t have a clue what they are doing, it’s certainly not square and obvious as one had thought it might be as a child.

The day of my Birthday was one of those days where the sunshine, in all it’s warmth has the ability to communicate with every creature it shines upon. It welcomes one to everything in one’s path – promoting a change in one’s attitude and energy.

All one had to do was face the ebbing sun and allow it to penetrate the lids of one’s eyes and at once, the very vitality of life itself comes into focus.

A luminous screen of pumping orange, red blood, the stuff of one’s own body is before one’s eyes as if an operatic stage setting for the underworld scene in Orpheus and Euridice.  I find this experience an intimate moment with the sun and I often like to familiarize myself with it after a long winter.

I was back with the Zoo – my family – my pack (a pack of 10 including my partner Jonathan). The Sun did a great job of herding us, and we gathered in the garden in roughly formed circles for coffee and cake, conversation and play. Every moment together stabilised us. As siblings the invisibility of bonding took place through the joy of messing around, much like wolf cubs.

A large circular trampoline sits under the shade of a tree in my parents’ garden in Yorkshire. In blissful weather one can’t help but take the opportunity to heave one’s self up onto the sprung surface and begin to jump.

To feel weightless and defy silly old gravity for split seconds at a time as one jumps is to allow one’s body to fill a space that one otherwise cannot enter at all. Jumping on a trampoline ‘en plein air’ is to transport one’s self to what I call the ‘lower sky’.

Let me explain the lower sky, it is a precious and elusive space, where upon the troubling cares of the day are left floundering below – they don’t matter. One only takes one’s bones, skin and blood along; allowing one to fully immerse one’s self in the moment. Unlike the painter, who makes marks on the canvas on ground, we trampolinists make shapes with our bodies in the air, making extremely good use of that lower sky – an innocent art in motion.

As we jumped higher and higher into lower sky I drank in the sparkling gleam in my brother and sisters’ eyes. Every facial expression is ingrained in my memory, more valuable than gold.

It was a simple sort of way to celebrate a birthday and nothing short of joyful. It wasn’t about me, it was about continuing to be part of something bigger.

“For the strength of the pack is in the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is in the pack.” Rudyard Kipling

Thank you for reading and supporting my blog! Please enjoy the pictures below of the art I have making in the past couple of days.