Diane de Simone's Blog

I've just had a book published and am nearly done with the initial hoopla, and I'm wanting to be quiet. Very quiet. I'm sitting here now with birds trilling in the background, communing with each other and the trees, flowers, bugs, shrubs. I'm able to read now, and so I was given Janie Chang's Dragon Springs Road, and finished it in three days and loved her poetry, her language. I've just begun The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, and though I've only read ten pages or so, my life is already feeling enhanced, enriched.
I'm filling myself up again. And I have no clue where the words that will someday flow again through me will land -- and what they'll be contained within -- what story needs tellin'.
I'll just stay here deeply listening, being patience, being nature's natural pace.

People look surprised when I respond to any of their questions about inspiration. But just today I have been inspired to write about where inspiration for me comes from by reading about the New Mexico artist, Agnes Martin, long passed on, but about to have a showing in London. She -- like me -- became used to having a vacant mind -- and images would simply arrive to her hand..and then she would paint. Similarly, with this new book of fiction I am working on, I wait for next paragraphs and next scenes to arrive, to come into me, and then I write them down. But it may be a few days before the way forward comes...and then it may be only a sentence or two, or a whole chapter. In-between, yes, I stay open and vacant. Agnes worked in this same way for years and I am chuffed to find a compatriot...I am sure there are other artists who work this way too. We are open and receiving gifts from the whole, from the quantum-field when we work in this way. It requires listening, stillness, patience, A Ho. Amen. There is only grace.

I've been living in Thailand nearly three years this time back -- consistently. I haven't left. And something is happening in the village in which I live and also in the way I am with most Thais -- there's an ever-deepening trust and intimacy. Along with that, I'm learning more and more about traditional customs, also more Thai words that I can translate. Als0, I'm being given more indigenous Thai herbs and grasses and vegetables to eat.
The Thais cook almost anything --from "maroom" berries, to tamarind seeds, to young tendrils from growing vines. They season them up, or eat them raw...and I'm told that everything is naturally good for me.
So, along with the mangoes that can be picked off trees, coconuts which fall to the ground, papayas, and mangosteens, and pineapples etc. -- my diet is richer than it has ever been, as is my relationship with a people and the land. The Thais are teaching me to open myself up to deeply receive from others and also from mother earth... Dear Thailand: A Love Story...more so than ever before.