So now I'm on soya milk - not even a drop of cow's milk,my physician said, in chocolate, cheese, butter or anything - and black tea with jaggery, mashed green leafy vegetables and brown rice.

I feel better...the week at Manjinakare was full. Healing, even if only I did not have things to see to. Productive:I sat alone in the grass and many days, on a ledge with rain pouring past me and wrote,thought, sorted out thoughts and set free some old goblins.

And sexy. Not only because he was there - manly in a way that he is not in the city -but also because my body woke up after months and months of hibernation. It was impossible to look at all that fleshy green, listen to all those many birds, feel the cold cold wind or to taste the mist rolling in from the valleys without my body shivering awake into an Ah! So, I'm feeling sexy again, feeling the world.

Up there in the hills, I remembered many things: the old man- now gone- who first taught me to trade in words; the Nijinsky diaries where first I saw the fierce madness that artistic journeys can suddenly turn into; the idea of myself as a teacher...the idea of me with him; those walks.

Something from that week changed something inside, perhaps it's the new diet, perhaps it's the body's waking...after returning to the madness of college, where manipulation and disregard are commonplace - I am floating through what I don't want...without trying.

A week leaning on trees and sitting just outside the reach of rain, composing words onto a page and doing things with him now leaves me listening for rain and sniffing the air for birdsong.

The garden here is lush and bursting with green life, the butterflies have gone with the cold, but there are hundreds of baby ants on the stems of the peas and hanging in stalactites from the upstairs window ledge.