Heaven. That is my writing spot today.

I have been writing my blog for almost seven years now. Seven years! In that time I have written in many different locations, from the cool, cosy sanctuary of my home office, to the pleasant hubbub of a local cafe, fuelled by a café latte. But come the summer, I write here… in the garden of my home in France.

The garden has become my haven, my sanctuary.

I come to our home in France each summer, when the weather warms up. It’s a mas, a traditional French farmhouse, which we renovated into a comfortable home. Over the years, I have worked extensively on the garden, in the cool of the mornings mostly, until we have a wealth of colourful flowers and home-grown fruits and vegetables. Last year for the first time we harvested olives, and today for lunch we will have garden vegetables roasted in our very own olive oil. The taste is divine – so much better than anything I could buy at a shop, for the fact that I nurtured those olives myself.

As I sit in my gazebo, listening to the drone of the bees and the song of the cicadas, I look around at my garden, at its kaleidoscope of colours, and I remember how barren and unloved it was when we first found this property. It feels so wonderful to see how, slowly, step by step, the little efforts built into something beautiful.

Rather like writing this blog, in fact – and six novels over the past seven years. That, too, has been a journey of so many very small steps, and it has taken me to a place I am so delighted to be. Someplace that makes my soul sing.

A butterfly lands on the patio table. I stop writing. Stop breathing. Watch it. For a long, perfect moment, we are still. And then a breath of breeze sends it trembling away. I watch it until it has disappeared into the horizon, where blue sea meets blue heavens.

Heaven. In Walden, the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau describes a moment of dawning understanding that he experiences on his morning walk:

First I take an axe and pail and go in search of water, if that be not a dream. After a cold and snowy night it needed a divining-rod to find it. Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

‘Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.’ That is how I feel, sitting here in my garden, writing to you today. Heaven is under my feet. This is my little corner of heaven.

I hope that wherever you are today, you are able to find heaven beneath your feet too.