Thursday 9 August. Day 70.

A lovely night. It rained solidly and properly until 7am. My fault - I'd carefully tied my towels over the windows yesterday to keep out the blazing sun. Slept well, dreamed vividly about something to do with Jordan Peterson who I'd been listening to last night. I wrote a long(ish) letter to Susanne, of no real consequence, just filling in the blanks of the last few weeks since I left for Oscar's christening. Didn't say much about the incident, other than it happened, the snake entering the Garden. I thought yesterday how we all sinned, and all were victims, and Bonnevaux made us do it, for a lesson. Each had our role to play - perp and victim as the actors, Andrew, Rebecca, Thomas, me, Jacques, Bill, and Delyth off stage, mostly. Audience, spear carriers, director, director's assistant. And what's the story? What's the lesson? That we are not isolated, a garden, a little paradise. That we have responsibilities, to this place, to the community, to care for each other, and ourselves. Not to judge or blame, but to set and observe boundaries, and watch out for each other. And beyond, Laurence, Pascale, Sandrine.

time for morning meeting. and work.

Rebecca in a puss (and late, but somehow that's our fault and where's Patty and why haven't we woken her and it's important to face the truth immediately and share it with everyone and if she i.e. we had then none of this would have happened and we need a plan and Andrew and I and she must meet to discuss what we are doing for the next two months - which Andrew and I were already doing, but somehow R needed to tell us to do it - I think she's just in a twitch because she's leaving tomorrow and doesn't know if she'll ever come back)

Jacques wanted to do his emails so I've taken a break from the accounts and reconciling the bank statement. They're off to lunch with Thomas at the bio bistro in Gençay. I've cried off, Andrew wants us to have the accounts ready for Philippe tomorrow so we can fill in the blanks in the cashflow / spreadsheet (and work out how much Bonnevaux owes him and me).

I dug out my tweed breeks yesterday (looking for a bungy to tie my towels onto the window) - the meecies have found them and decided wool is almost as nice as plastic. I never wear them nor am I likely too again (I might if I ever go to Scotland or skiing) but it still feels like a loss. One of Pol's many presents.

Rebel Wisdom was interviewing an icon painter, an orthodox Christian, about Jordan Peterson's attitude to Christianity and belief, and a writer about JP and the left. Both interesting and useful discussions. Pageau - Sam Harris / the materialists / scientistic viewpoint is it's all just particles and us and the interesting stuff like consciousness is merely an emergent property of the quantum particle soup. Pageau says this is just silly - love is not particles, you can reduce it to particles if you choose, but you have not accounted for love as we experience it. Everything is meaning, stacked on top of meaning, in a hierarchy all the way up. He quarrels with Jung (and to some extent with JP) because he thinks they think the stacks just stop, with us, that we are the highest meaning, whereas he believes that the hierarchy goes all the way up to God - i.e. the highest level of meaning, the void, nothing that can be described or encompassed or explained but which is nevertheless the origin of everything, right down to the particle soup. The Rebel Wisdom guy was still at the Jungian level. I'm not sure Pagineau is right about JP - JP just doesn't know, and therefore won't give a straight answer to the 'Is there a God?' question, but I suspect JP suspects there is. I sent the link to Susanne (her explanation of her rejection of religion and Catholicism being that it just doesn't mean anything, which at the childish level at which most Christians apparently believe it, is true). Pagineau very good on the problem of the people in the Church - some are children, some are naive adults - he called them dumb peasants which seems a little patronising but I know what he means - and some are still looking, searching, learning, understanding, even if through a glass darkly. The importance of the Resurrection - how it's so clear from the accounts given in the new testament that this was not just resuscitation, a trick with bones, but something much more mysterious and significant, and if we truly understood it, we would be amazed (and of course enlightened and free). That resurrection is everywhere, and at all times, in every moment, as of course is crucifixion and death. In the eternal present, everything is dying and being reborn, re-created, by the creator.

The discussion about the problem the 'left' has with JP was interesting too. The left is almost, in fact actually pathological in its response to JP (and thus driving him into the arms of the right, who get him much more easily because they know what their sin is - the racial purity nonsense of the Nazis et al - but other than that they are open to new ideas. And they also care, about fairness and justice, just not at the expense of order and hierarchy. That hierarchy is part and parcel of the created order, built in to us over 300 million years of evolution - hence the lobster story which so upsets the left, just like Darwin upset the traditionalists when he said we share our descent with monkeys. The left (or the SJW / extreme left) looks for equality, of outcome for all, fairness, no higher or lower, no imposed order/tyranny/hierarchy, no relative value, and reacts violently to any suggestion that this is not the only or final truth. That politics is symptomatic, superficial, that we take up our positions on left or right, liberal or authoritarian, because of our personality types, that both left and right are necessary to control and critique each other, but one without the other would lead to insanity, totalitarianism of the left or the right. That there already is a totalitarian mindset on the left - you may not even think this or that, and if you do, I must reject you and have nothing any more to do with you, as if you are unclean. A similar response to that of the extreme right to challenging ideas (e.g. equal treatment for LGBT).

Back to the accounts . . . . ironic really. I've spent the day tidying up the expenses for Bonnevaux for the last few months and trying to reconcile them with the bank account - what I more or less ran away from at Top Trucks 5 years ago (it was the worst job, using Sage to reconcile the bank account). And then thinking where and what I was a year ago. Quietly drinking my way through the job at the CoOp, looking forward (sort of) to my holiday on Naxos in September, vaguely contemplating retiring on my birthday. Look at me now. Mostly thanks to going sober, finally. To Belle. To God. The universe. Even the CoOp. And Bonnevaux.

Be nice to get shot of The Second Coming, and Metanoia. I think I'll feel really free then, and a genuinely new man. Get the Astra fixed (Brigitte said she'd ring the Russian today, when he gets back from his holiday). They had a nice lunch apparently. Rebecca being a bit funny / odd about Thomas' market garden venture - which the lunch was celebrating - as if she felt she should have been given the option, or one of her friends, like there's a queue of people behind Thomas desperate to start squatting at Bonnevaux. Which there probably is; after all what am I doing? Isn't this just a nicer / easier option for me than sitting on a hill on Naxos?

The bell's just rung for 6:15 meditation. Back's agony - all day on a very uncomfortable chair working on the computer.