The SNJ columnist Karen Eberhardt-Shelton was born in California but grew up in England.

She now lives in Stroud and is currently working on an education project called Learn, Think, Act and is hoping to develop an eco-community land trust.

Her thought-provoking columns will focus on how we all have to take responsibility for our actions and for our planet.

HAVING to move once again – this time unexpectedly – is worse than missing the bus fifty times in a row, living with the sound of my neighbour’s impressive big tree being slowly cut down, or learning my best friend has suddenly moved to Bhutan.

I now feel as though I’m a honeybee without a hive, a badger cut off from its sett, a fox lacking a den.

If I had the security of my own home, I would just get on with everything.

But being merely a tenant who pays rent every month, signs contracts and hands over lots of deposit money does not buy security. It’s like knowing I’ll never find honey in the desert or my own kale nodding to sleep in the sunset.

It’s a trauma that hangs like a lowering cloud over everything I do.

Being conscious of what I’m lumbered with besieges my mental excursions more or less throughout the day and puts forays of curiosity on hold.

Finding myself in this situation is so unexpected – and has come so much out of the blue – that occasionally I pinch myself and say, ‘stop imagining things, you’re fine.’ The place I’ve been living in for over a year now was put on the market very recently and, sadly for me but happily for its owner, has already been sold. I should say subject to contract, but that might give me hope and I don’t feel like it.

My kind landlady is allowing me an extra month to vacate.

She’s not the problem, what’s troubling is the dearth of acceptable places available for me to move to.

I’ve never experienced such a scarcity of supply.

I have limits of course, must-haves or won’t put up withs – no busy road, no housing estate, my pets must be allowed, no dark side of the mountain, nature must be nearby to keep me mentally and emotionally intact. Oh, and I’d much prefer being somewhere near Stroud instead of caught up in the flux and flow of the busy town itself.

(No big teeming Gloucester or Cheltenham for me, thanks.) And of course it would be a huge bonus to be part of a neighbourhood composed mainly of people who oppose incinerators, attend Transition Town meetings, vote green (that can include Labour candidates of course), buy what they need from charity shops and get their new dog from a rescue centre.

Anyway, I went out to witness the solar eclipse around 9.30am on Friday morning, and aside from chatting with an artist walking his dog, it seemed as though the moon couldn’t be bothered to glide in front of the sun.

The only difference from a normal spring morning was a slight dimming of everything, the landscape looked as though it was fading from lack of air and grew chillier.

Other than that, traffic carried on as usual, litter stayed where it had been dropped, and late sleepers stayed in bed.

Gazing across to Uplands and Whiteshill, listening to the chatter of birds, noting the beauty of faithful daffodils and wondering if passengers in a jet plane passing high in the sky witnessed an eclipse I’d missed, allowed me to be reminded I’m just one tiny dot in the big picture.

I’ve got this far, I’ll just carry on til the next eclipse, solar or otherwise