Month: January 2021

Tears and Fears

Sometimes, early at dawn when it’s too dark to photograph it like the other birds shown here, a little wren flits to my window. It surveys the scene, sees a few crumbs on the breadboard, flutters down, feeds and looks around, then flutters back up and out. What a gift. It doesn’t know that it has become a healer of the highest order – or that news of this would stretch across the world. So wren and I are doing a good business in crumbs – and this morning, guess what, it had crumbs from the last of Lynne’s Christmas Cake! Bonus.

Slightly soppy Jupiter in Pisces that I am, I’ve been leaking tears recently, and it’s fascinating to discover what it’s all about. Several things seem to connect up to get it going – some are very positive, such as the little wren. One is about me, one is about people I know and have a connection with, and one is about the wider world.

I’m starting chemo on Monday 1st February and this will last 5-6 months, probably followed by a few months of fatigue and other side-effects. If I don’t do chemo, then the blood cancer I have will gradually hollow out my bones, I will get more collapses of vertebrae in my back and bones going brittle, I’ll become seriously disabled and eventually I’ll die, quicker than otherwise. I don’t have great expectations, but the chemo might give me a few more years with which to complete things, inshallah.

To holistic crusaders who think there’s a better path to follow: I’m on the same side as you, and if something had come up that was sufficiently convincing, based on real experience with my particular cancer and who and where I am, and if there had been a sufficient support system that I could afford, I would have done it. So thanks, and I know you mean well, and I have chosen this path, and here we go…

But it scares the hell out of me too. Mercifully, I’m not unused to that: before working in conflict zones or entering risky situations I’d grind through my stuff in the days and weeks preceding, though increasingly I found that, on the day, I was fine, balanced and fully present. It worked, mostly, in those things I could affect. In those things I could not affect, which are many in chaotic situations, I just had to take my chances. And here I still am.

So at times I’ve been feeling vulnerable and shaky, digging around in my fears. One big thing to overcome is lingering resentments over the way things have been in my life, that have not changed for the better, despite all that I and so many others have done over the years. This is coming up now with the doctors I’m working with. As a longterm vegetarian, meditator and consciousness-explorer, also very underweight, I believe I should be dosed with medications about 30% below the norm. In the last few days I haven’t taken a single pill or shot of chemo yet, yet my body and psyche are already going there, as if autonomically inducing it. My medical results have been pretty good: last year my chemo treatment, standardly eight cycles, was cut to six, then five. These results the medical profession just calls ‘good luck’. In this they are incorrect. I’m lucky, yes, but these outcomes arise from choices I have made and positive inputs that are way outside their zone.

Back to the fear. It is activating pain from the past, about being, or feeling, misunderstood and treated inappropriately, being judged and penalised for being who I am – and I’ve had a good load of that! But it’s still going on now to some extent, and I’m unhappy about that. On the other side, I do trust my doctors, and while they do want the best for me and to get things right, they can also make my life more difficult than it needs to be. Owing to institutionalised taboos against alternatives in medicine, and because doctors lack experience of holistic solutions and odd people like me, they don’t take seriously those things that are serious for me – particularly concerning pharmacological side-effects.

To be honest, this is also the case with some holistic practitioners too, who might be qualified, and who might think they know, and they mean well, but some of them also try teaching their grandmother to suck eggs, or they err a little too far on ideology, or they lack specific experience, incorrectly applying knowledge about tumorous cancers to my much rarer leukaemia-like blood cancer. With a rare disease and an unusual person, this can be problematic, being misjudged from both directions! Though I don’t want to seem entirely critical either, since doctors and healers are genuinely helping me too. However I am yet to find someone who is competent, experienced and unbiased in complementary and conventional medical fields together – integrated medicine.

One other thing I’ve had anticipation about is the task of training friends and people how to behave with me, as a cancer patient. Most people don’t know how, so they leave me alone, and this isn’t a solution – especially with people I’d like to see. Others get awkward, or try too much to help, or they’re so sorry or anxious for me – and I just need people to slow down, make us both a cup of tea, be a friend and act naturally!

Here’s a tip for dealing with someone with brain-fog: instead of asking me what I want, tell me what you’re proposing and let me say yes or no. Or just do it anyway – keep it simple. This gets around chemo-brain and the frontal-lobe issues it brings – making decisions, finding words, remembering details and following long explanations.

Here’s another one: please don’t ask me ‘How are you?’! I am asked this multiple times per day, and you’re requiring me to do a systems check and report this to you verbally and then to deal with your responses and concerns – and, believe me, it’s tiring and repetitive. I write these blogs to report what’s happening. If we do meet or talk, please just treat me like a ninetysomething, have a good conversation or communion with me and you’ll then find out how I am. My state can change on an hourly basis anyway.

Anyway, I was feeling vulnerable over all sorts of things. It’s good to bring it up, stir it round and get some of it out of the way – because many of the experiences we have in life are there to teach us. If we learn quickly and willingly, on or ahead of time, we unmanifest certain kinds of difficult learning experiences. Or they become testing experiences instead, where the Universe checks whether you really mean it, emotionally and in your cells and bones. Again, progress in tests depends on our capacity and willingness to go make something good out of a bad situation – and working through fear, guilt and shame in advance really helps us deal with such situations when we’re actually in them. And what we fear and what actually happens are two very different things.

So I am working on welcoming and befriending the process I’m about to go through and doing the best I can with it, on all levels of my being. Really, it’s the only option.

I get emotional over other people too. There’s a woman I know in Ghana whose child died on Friday night – Kwame was perhaps three or four years old and he died of pneumonia. I paid for some medicines but it was too little, too late. God bless Kwame, little soul – he had only a short life. His mum doesn’t even have enough money to bury him, so she’s stuck and rather overwrought. This is the case for many people in countries where health and social support systems are weak, or where paying for healthcare makes the difference between life and death. I cried not so much for Kwame, who returns to his Maker, but for his mother Grace, and for people like her (Lynne is one), who are left with a gap and a shadow of loss or regret when such things happen.

Then I get emotional about the overall world situation. Problem is, I’ve been dedicated to world transformation for fifty years and the new age hasn’t started. I could perhaps have done more, though I’ve done my best, but I’m now deeply sad for the world. The price it has paid for not getting the message fifty years ago is enormous – and there’s more to go. If necessary change leading toward ecological rebalancing, social and economic justice, peace and appropriate development had started back then, the situation we face today would be very different.

I’m a philosophical guy with a longterm sense of history, and I deeply believe things will work out better than many people fear – eventually. But I feel such grief over the way things have gone, and the pain and damage involved. Yes, there have been advances, but the fundamentals have not yet been addressed. This grief is what Germans call *weltschmerz* – the pain of the world. In my meditations I work to reduce the heat and increase the light in world situations and I’m very much a believer in the maxim ‘Don’t complain about the darkness – light a candle’.

When I go to my Maker, then to see things from that perspective, I have a feeling this innerwork, of all the things I’ve done, might be what I’m most satisfied with – even though, here on Earth, it is difficult to see what benefit it has brought, and even though, especially in the now-defunct Hundredth Monkey Project and Flying Squad, we did have definite instances where miracles happened.

Sometimes my tears come up from nowhere. I think of someone, or I hear something on the radio and, whatever I’m doing, I start wobbling, so I stop and give space to that precious and revelatory emotion that’s surfacing. Personally, this is important: I learned to cry only when I was about 30 – and it was an enormous loss that did it. Back then, it wasn’t just my own self-pity, but I felt so much regret for the others who also had lost in that situation. It cracked me up and cracked me open, affecting them a lot too. This experience was important for me as an Aspie: it taught me to look people in the eyes. Aspies are often regarded as feelingless and emotionally neutral, but actually we’re flooded with feeling, often confused where to put it and how to deal with it – so we go blank and get short-circuited.

This loss set me on a path of commitment to pursuing my purpose. It’s the case for many altruists and server-souls: intense pain and dilemma can unleash one’s superpowers, if one so chooses. One supporter of Alexei Navalny in Russia recently said, when asked why she was risking so much by demonstrating in the streets, “I could not bear the thought of not being there” – and this is what changes history. There comes a point where you lose your fear – or, at least, a crucial chunk of it.

Fear is natural. In the animal part of ourselves it warns us of danger, alerting us. But the deadening, sleep-inducing, inculcated and inherited fear we all have challenges us to use it to move forward, to do what we fear, to do it anyway. Though intelligently.

So I start on Monday, getting shot up with Dara, Velcade and Dex, and a load of other stuff to compensate. It involves three visits to Treliske hospital and multiple home visits from a nurse. I reduce my holistic treatments during this period, to minimise complication and avoid conflicts between holistics and pharma. Certain things, like CBD, Vit C, colloidal silver, basic nutrients and other things, I continue because they help the process (Lynne’s flapjacks too). There are other helpers, including an eLybra machine (radionics-like) and homoeopathy. There’s a mighty inner influence from Upstairs, from healers, meditators and well-wishers round the world, from Lynne and close-by supporters, from my adopted homeland of West Penwith and the landscape of the farm where I live. And my tears are part of my arsenal as a warrior-soul. And, fuckit, the past is past and this is today, the next stage on the path. All is forgiven that I’ve uncovered so far, and I’ll try to deal with the rest when I get to it.

I hope to report the whole process, as and when I can. If possible to the end. This said, I must be self-focused in the next few months, and I won’t be very interested in or respond to many people’s questions, concerns, worries and neuroses. Or endless Youtube videos. But personal, briefly-put, interesting thoughts are welcome – I’ll probably see it but you might or might not get a reply. My day will gradually go down to about six hours, probably.

I’ve said this before and it’s worth repeating…

Everything is okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

This is one of those that’s worth writing on your toilet wall for further contemplation.

Now for the next bit.

Love, and thanks for being alive,

Palden

The pics are of birds who have visited my home in earlier years – including one wren who seemed to like hanging by a Tibetan thangka on my wall.

In Praise of Goddesses

Think about it: your partner is on a death sentence and, in anything from six months to ten years, he could be gone. It takes a heroine to stick around for that.

Palden at Faugan Round, West Penwith, Cornwall, in the buildup to a squally rainstorm

While they’re down here for the G7 conference nearby in St Ives, I was thinking of inviting Mutti Merkel, Justin Trudeau (I once met his dad) and a few of the others for kombucha and Lynne’s gluten-free flapjacks round the campfire – they’ll get an airborne dance by our swallows too. That new chap Joe can come if he wants. My son Tulki will fix a security stake-out with his army friends, and my son-in-law Perra will pick up my guests and drop them in the field in his helicopter. If that Trump guy tries to disrupt things, we’ll stuff him down an iron age fogou with one of the wrathful goddesses – good at emptying testicles in the most agonising of ways – until the summer solstice sun shines in and lets him crawl out through the creep. That’ll keep him quiet for a while. Except there’s a problem.

I’m being kept alive by a group of amazing protector-goddesses. That’s a great asset, and not the problem. Chief goddess Lynne, who minds everything from my soul to my toes, has stretched my understanding of what grace and blessing truly mean. Goddess Panacaea is embodied by Penny, who in another life probably was a first lieutenant of the highest order, and the Great Shopping Goddess is Karen, an angel who genuinely demonstrates the truth that by their works shall you know them. Sheila, Miriam, Jennifer, Faith, two Helens and my three remarkable daughters also play a part – a benign conspiracy if ever there was one.

Then comes Goddess Hygeia, my doctor Liz, whom Lynne and I had a video call with on Monday. She keeps my blood and bones going – key issues in the blood cancer I have. My readings are up: paraproteins were 3 in September, 9 in November and 13 now, and light chains have gone from 368 to 785 to 1,000. So, to intercept the returning Myeloma before it starts eating up my bones again, Liz has decided I should go back on chemo. So I can’t have contact with anyone, even if they’ve had one of the much-vaunted Covid jabs, because any infection could knock me for six. So the G7 will just have to stay in St Ives.

A year ago I decided not to have a stem cell transplant, opting for a maintenance strategy, and chemo was part of the deal. (See here.) Time’s up now, though the timing is right: I’ll go through the worst during the back end of winter and, inshallah, as I start improving, spring and summer will come. It will take five months, plus a few months’ fatigue and brain-fog, so it’s rather a long haul. I’ll tell you what it’s like when we get there. If I don’t answer messages or e-mails, please be patient and don’t take it personally. I’m starting in a few weeks from now.

Sheltering from the rain behind a standing stone at Faugan Round

I’m so fortunate. I live in a lovely place and this feeds my spirits. A saturnine workaholic till I drop, my work keeps me alight too – currently, the two main challenges are getting my book Shining Land published on paper and raising funds for the Tuareg out in the desert in Mali, to pay the three teachers at their village school (both of these tasks not as simple as you’d think). My innerwork gives me a focus too, especially during long hours stuck in bed. And yes, I’ll be hovering around the backrooms of the G7 conference twiddling etheric puppet-strings.

So I have reasons to stick around until incarnate life is no longer the best arena. It’s up to the Management, really, and though Liz (visibly worn out from overwork) is doing her best, there’s a greater medicine than this, the power of spirit and the resilience of my soul, that makes the final decision.

My tutor and companion is Lynne. While no stranger to slicing vegetables and servicing old crocks like me, and one of the most loving, caring women you ever could meet, she’s really interesting too, and she holds hands with my soul. I mean, think about it: your partner is on a death sentence and, in anything from six months to ten years, he could be gone. It takes a heroine to stick around for that. Living with an Aspie also has its challenges – when confronted with personal, emotional situations I look blank and befuddled like Commander Data, and human guile passes me by like water on fish scales. Lynne doesn’t have much of that and seems largely to handle me, but the next bit is even more trying for her…

Many people might have an image of me as a thoughtful, well-behaved, decent kinda guy, but when I’m on the steroid Dexamethasone – part of my chemo treatment – my character changes. I become argumentative, defensive, impersonal and confrontative, and my eyes take on a rather fierce, empty, heartless look. Would you like to see your old man turn on you like that? Last winter, Lynne was shocked to the core by it – and the worst bit was that I wasn’t aware I was doing it. The good bit is that, since I’m not too much of a bitter old man with a chip on his shoulder, I didn’t go as far with this as I might otherwise have done. When the treatment ended, gradually I came back, but if our relationship were less deep-rooted it would have cracked there and then. (You’ve now seen what it did to Donald Trump too – I warned you! (Here.)

There’s another thing. Cancer has prematurely aged me. Falling into the cancer abyss in November 2019, I was zooted forward to the age of 95. Recently I’ve come back to about 83 – my physical age is 70 – but in the next few months I’ll probably go back into my 90s. This is physical, affecting my movement and strength, and mental, affecting my frontal-lobe capacity to make decisions, find words and handle life’s details, and it has enormously changed my perspective. Before cancer I was ten years older than Lynne, but now, behaviourally, I’m 20-30 years older, and that must be weird for her.

Before cancer struck, I was a veteran – I’d been through deep shit and it had honed the content of my character. Well, kind of. In the 1990s and after, many long-haul veterans in the movement for change started thinking about elderhood, and I have sat in a few elders’ circles myself. But I always felt uncomfortable: I was a veteran but not an elder.

The difference clarified for me only after cancer changed everything. An elder is genuinely withdrawn, standing back – not just matured or retired but half-dead and pretty incapable. This loss of energy and engagement has a deep effect, and you start seeing things differently – a bigger agenda and perspective takes over.

Elderhood is not a status issue. One qualifies by dint of the burnishing of one’s soul, and this involves sitting with death, no longer active or competent in a worldly sense – just peeing or getting dressed becomes a big task. Your duty is to sit there, watch and see, occasionally speaking truths that lift people out of the fray, the treadmill and the madness of crowds. You have to step beyond the nowadays rather self-indulgent conservatism of old age. If you’re neither heard nor believed, you must watch quietly as the consequences unfold, in acceptance and without judgement. The only thing you can do is offer an optic to help people see more clearly. You can’t even participate in decisions – others now carry that load.

Lynne is a wise woman before her time, and unassuming with it, but she’s more involved in the fray than me, bravely juggling a lot of balls in the air, as I once did. If I last ten years, she’ll be 70 when I perform my pilgrimage to that enormous refugee camp in the sky. What then, for her? She has no shortage of assets – a brilliant astrologer, awakener and anchor to many, and a natural grandmother – but in her love and commitment to me she faces a yawning gap, and in that emptiness at such an age starting a new life isn’t easy. I’m going to leave her. This is big for her, both difficult and life-enriching.

I’m going to do my best to have a good death, and not just for my sake. No one’s going to inherit any money from me, but in this life this was not my wealth, and it gets boring being rich and powerful anyway, so this time I’m trying to engineer a different bequest. There’s something important we all must get to grips with: when we die, our body stops operating but we don’t. So whenever I pop my clogs, keep your antennae up because I’ll be sending out deviceless messages straight into your psychic inbox, but only if you keep your connection open and whitelist me on your internal spam filters.

In this sense, Lynne won’t lose me – our story doesn’t end there and our saga didn’t start here. Neither will anyone, unless you choose otherwise – we shall meet again. We still have a big task to do. We have a problem on Planet Earth, and this is not just about us and our planet. We’re holding back progress in the universe. This must end. This was fully explained in the book I wrote for the Council of Nine in the early 1990s, called The Only Planet of Choice – essential briefings from deep space.

Earth is a training ground for supertroopers – yes, you – and a hot-housing soul-hybridisation experiment for seeding the universe with possibilities that even its Creator couldn’t think up. We’ve got to get this right. It’s on us: we’re the only ones who know how to work with Planet Earth. The good news is that, if we break through on this mess we’ve created, it will be a breakthrough of cosmological proportions, never done before. If we fuck up, there will be eight billion sad, angry and lost souls for the universe to deal with, and a wasted mega-project, and the problem is that our fuckups, pain and trauma are so great and unique that others don’t really know how to sort us out – it’s beyond their experience.

I’ve worked in refugee camps and disastrous situations, but I cannot fully comprehend what it’s like being the journalist I know of in Rafah, Gaza, who returned home after writing an article to find her compound bombed and all 35 members of her family dead. Moreover, she’s chosen not to hate the Israelis for it. It’s like that. I can empathise and do what I can, but the scale of her loss and her choice is beyond my experience.

So we have to stop this war on Earth: not just the shooting, but the environmental, human and psychospiritual destruction we have built into a seemingly unstoppable institution. That’s why we must meet again, one sunny day.

There are men involved in my life too – Tulki, Anim and the Chief of Tinzibitane – even two souls in India that I’ve never met, Navin and Vishnu, who have greeted me every single day for ages, plus others like the two rather laddish fortysomethings I live next door to – but I’m now very much in womankind’s hands.

In 1968 I went to a talk by Germaine Greer and was shocked to learn of women’s oppression by men and the patriarchy – I’d never even thought of it before – and something in me clicked. It has been tricky spending fifty years as a man on the side of feminism – sometimes seemingly being blamed for all of the sins of my fellow males – but I am so happy to say that, while there’s further to go, they’re on their way, and I honour my bravely desperate sisters for that, surrounded as I am now by brilliant examples of how far things have progressed.

Lynne would not call herself a feminist but in some respects she’s well ahead of the game. She serves her family and fellow humans yet she’s no slave. Her qualifications to teach are in her bones and her smile, not on a sheet of paper. When she lights up people’s lives she’s not just glimmering. When she breaks down she’s no victim, when she’s strong she’s perceptive and empathic, and when she’s troubled she doesn’t throw a fit. She probably feels uncomfortable with my extolling her virtues in public but this isn’t starry-eyed romance – it’s really real – and if she hadn’t walked into my life I don’t think I’d be here now.

So I’ve learned a few big lessons in this last year. Healing is not just about doing medication or therapies – and I have one foot on a pharmaceutical and one on an holistic pathway. It’s about cultivation of spirit. Get real: one third of you, my readers, will get cancer – and yes, I too thought it wouldn’t happen to me. You’ll get it because you’re ready to go through that mangle and because it’s the greatest gift of your life. If you don’t get cancer you’ll have no shortage of other hurdles to jump. So do it well, live as if this day is your last, and die well too.

Apart from making a contribution to the world on the way, you came for this. So make your choice. And if you’ve already made it, what’s the next step? Because even if you’re near the end, there’s more to go. You won’t get this kind of opportunity back home on the Pleiades, or wherever you came from. They don’t have chocolate there either.

The most amazing thing about Lynne is that she knows deeply that healing and loving me doesn’t involve holding onto me: she’s chosen to walk this journey with me, whatever happens and however it needs to be. I’m so grateful for that. This matters so much to someone in the last chapter of their life. She could have taken an easier path.

So I’m in good hands.

Bless you all, and thanks for reading. Palden.

With photos by Lynne, sweater by Sheila and hat by Maya.