This is something of a turning point for me. I hope it is so for you, and in a benign way. After a disastrous winter I feel I am now moving on, step by step. One small symptom of this is that I’ve just completed the Meyn Mamvro Archive.
After two years’ work, I’m rather relieved to complete it. Who knows how many mouse-clicks were involved, but it would be thousands. What’s significant here, for me, is that it’s the last such project I shall do. I’ve done a good few over the years.
It’s an archive of 100 copies of the magazine Meyn Mamvro, about archaeology and earth mysteries in West Penwith and wider Cornwall, edited and published by a friend and soul sister, Cheryl Straffon. I’m glad to have done it.
There have been a number of lasts in my life since getting cancer, and a few more are to come.
In West Penwith, where I live, I’ve done a number of projects in the prehistory area, apart from this. This subject really interests me, and I so much love West Penwith.
One is a series of maps of the ancient sites and geomantic alignments in West Penwith and wider Cornwall (six years’ work) – they’re here: http://www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/maps.html
Another is the Ancient Penwith website, a very comprehensive site providing alternative ideas about West Penwith’s prehistory. It goes through the different kinds of sites in Penwith, and it highlights the role of ancient site alignments in the creation of the whole system of ancient sites in Penwith.
Another is my forthcoming book Shining Land – the ancient sites of West Penwith, and what they say about megalithic civilisation. It’s not out yet though. But there’s some interesting material on the book’s website to be getting on with. It’s here: www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/
I’ve been overwhelmed with things since my partner departed some months ago, so I’ve been unable to focus on the book to get it published. But that will happen in due course, inshallah. Being a cancer patient, I can’t push myself as most people do, or multitask and remember all the details involved in living a modern life. I go at half the rate of most people.
My support system isn’t working well – if I had my way I’d like a digital PA, a minder or two for adventures (such as in a month’s time) and a close companion. But that’s life – you get what you get, especially on Saturn transits!
The uphill grind of the last 6-9 months has taught me a lot, squeezed and raked me out, pushed me through an accelerated change process and moved me a long way. I can feel it moving without yet knowing where it is going. The process isn’t complete, though things are brightening up.
In August and September I shall be doing the first three events of my ‘Far Beyond’ magic tour, in Glastonbury, Avebury and Totnes area, plus a couple of talks. Full details to be announced soon, when everything is hammered out. I’m really looking forward to that and, if you’re pulled to join me, I’d love seeing you. I have a feeling this is going to be rather special.
It’s great working with each of the local organisers, and many thanks to them. This is limited-edition, one-off stuff, since my capacity to do such things will decline in time. I hope to go to Wales and the North too (organisers sought), perhaps during autumn-winter, inshallah.
The good news I’ve had recently is that my cancer is not deteriorating, according to the latest tests. In February my cancer indicators (such as paraproteins) started climbing – I was very ill and in a dark tunnel – but as I improved they have pegged at a new level. It means I don’t have to change cancer drugs. This is a relief, since the new drug is a kind of thalidomide, which my mother took when gestating me, and intuitively I just don’t feel safe with the prospect of taking it.
There’s another benefit too. The nurses from a private healthcare company (Pharmaxo) who visit me monthly to administer my drugs are really nice, and they answer questions and take on issues in ways that NHS nurses and doctors don’t. If my drugs are changed, I shall lose them (because I’ll be taking pills, not injections). This has been important, since I feel quite neglected by the NHS, and I’ve lost my medical confidante too (my ex-partner), so the advice and support of the nurses has been really valuable.
It’s the peak of the year – it comes so fast – the time when fruition begins, when the drift of our lives since winter solstice reaches a climax and it turns a corner. Something has taken shape, and now we need to do something with it – harvest it and then put it to use. If you’d like to read something about solstices and equinoxes, then here’s a book I wrote 35 years ago, Living in Time, that explains all – now archived free online. Living in Time: The Ancient Festivals.
Love from me to all of you, from down’ere in Cornwall.
Now and then, in my blogs and podcasts, I’m sharing some of the ET and metaphysical experiences I’ve had over time. This one concerns crop formations, and a specific one, The Sparsholt Face, which, for me and for others who visited it, was unforgettable. I wrote this in 2002.
In all my years of croppying, this has been one of the most fundamental and deeply stirring of experiences, a privilege for which I feel deeply grateful. This is about my subjective experience of the formation – or more correctly, of the ‘space’ within it.
The picture the formation makes is impossible to distinguish on the ground. Unlike most formations it is not swirled and flowing, but definitely right-angular in the lay of the wheat. The face part is made up of parallel lines of varying thickness, using a ‘rasterising’ effect to create a subtly shaded image, as seen from above. Steve Alexander (a photographer) told me that, while hovering over it in a helicopter, it was very difficult to perceive exactly what the picture was, so he photographed it from as many angles as possible, and only saw the full picture when the film was developed.
The formation was very energy-dense. When we approached it I was in quite a balanced and calm state. Stepping into the first bit of the formation (its ‘frame’) I suddenly felt shocked, as if falling suddenly into a deep end, out of my depth. The magnitude of the experience was quick to be felt – a heart-fluttering thing. I felt almost forcibly ‘pulled within’ and found that, although there were several old friends there, my social skills were zeroed out immediately. It wasn’t unpleasant, and I think everyone there was experiencing roughly similar things. As with some other formations, I felt as if I could be seen inside by X-ray eyes above me, read off and monitored. It’s as if our normal relativistic universe dissolves, leaving us in empty, wide-open space – though, in another sense, as if we’ve come home – a bit like landing in a foreign country and feeling instantly familiar with it, even if you don’t speak the language.
The ‘energy-signature’ of the formation was different from others I’ve been in. In the ‘main series’ formations over the years, I get quite an intimate feeling of a presence or of energy-fields, but these presences distinctly don’t want to tell who they are or what they are saying or doing. It’s a bit like being a child watching an adult, without understanding why adults do what they do though nevertheless knowing that there must be some reason and sense to it which is beyond us. It seems that the main point of these is to present us with unanswerable questions which have a deeply transformative effect on consciousness and our sense of reality. An opportunity for communion, a chance to step into ‘their’ world while remaining on or in ‘ours’.
It seems clear to many croppies that these beings are not ETs as such, but interdimensional beings of a non-physical yet non-earthly nature. We don’t know who they are, but somehow we know them well, and the experience is recognisable, tweaking deep memory, even if unique and entirely new. Then, of course, there are those who are desperate to assert that crop formations are man-made, but, sad to say, that’s their problem, and their cosmic constipation will no doubt one day be relieved!
This formation felt like a personal message from a specific being, with a distinct identity ‘he’ was revealing to us. Sheila said she felt it was a rather shy being, tentatively offering itself to us, to see how we would respond. Clearly, the face in the aerial photos is an ET face – unlike the Face at Chilbolton (six miles from this one) last year, which was humanoid. The picture, when first seen, brings up mixed reactions, but the atmosphere in the formation is undoubtedly friendly and benign.
The Face of 2001 looked straight at us. To me it said ‘We are watching and eyeballing you – and we are you watching yourselves’. The 2002 face looks over our left shoulder – and the feeling I got was that it was looking and communicating with our soul, which stands, as it were, just behind us (perhaps because we omit fully to incorporate our core and heart into our worldly lives).
I looked and felt my way around the face part of the formation for a while, but was drawn into the disk – and everyone else was there too, mostly lying on their backs and ‘far away’. (It was a bit like a who’s who of currently active croppies, actually!). The disk reminds me of psychic experiences I’ve had, of being given a ‘rote ball’, a hologram-bundle of multidimensional information which, once given, unfolds itself gradually over time (rather like being given a CD of information to look through, as you find ways of opening the files in it).
Settling down close to the centre of the disk, I went inside and felt as if an energy-information download had started to take place. At one point Tulki (my son, then six years old), spoke to me, and I surfaced and replied, only to feel that the download was half-way through, so I went inside again to complete the download, and a point came where I felt it was complete. A few others verified this experience too. God knows what happens next, with that experience, and today (Sunday), the day following, I’m left wondering what to do with it or, more specifically, what this ET wants of me. It feels totally okay, and a great blessing – and I guess I’ll find out!
I opened my eyes at one stage and saw Tulki alone in another part of the formation, just standing there for some minutes, silent and utterly still, staring into space. There was a crackling, crisp aura around him, and he was just being. Later, he came charging toward us waving a few stalks of wheat, as if carrying a sparking antenna or a magic wand, and waving them around. Something in him probably knows more about all this than we so-called adults do.
The ‘disk’ is made up of a fine spiral, with ‘blips’ on it which are spaced and sized in such a way as clearly to represent a coded and decodable message – my croppy friend Michael Glickman, earlier in the day, had said “Well, that’s given me a winter’s-worth of work to do!“. Someone will hopefully decode it in due course by linearising the ‘track’ of the spiral and analysing the patterns and spacing of the ‘blips’. Virtually all previous formations (except the Chilbolton ‘Face’ and ‘Code’ of 2001) distinctly represent clear patterning, mathematical principles and geometry, while the specific ‘message’ cannot be interpreted, at least in the language and concepts we currently possess. Yet this seems to be something we can decode, a specific message from a specific source.
Some people threaded the spiral of the disk but, frankly, my capacity for physical movement was strongly reduced (until I left the formation, when it returned), so I didn’t do that. My body felt like stiffened rubber, stable and grounded, but in another way my motion-connectors weren’t wired up and motion was thus reluctant. Subjectively, I felt that each blip on the disk’s spiral was not just a piece of information, but a kind of ‘file name’ to a whole bundle of information in its own right – it felt as if a whole library, not just a statement, was being given. I presume that a series or sequence of insights or life-experiences might follow from here.
This felt to me like a distinct ‘close encounter’ – a very intimate one, perhaps closer than we can get to our own selves. Interestingly, the face itself, though quite clearly ET, does not seem to be specifically one of the ET faces I’ve seen in people’s drawings of the beings they’ve met in close encounters. In my own psychic adventures I have not met this kind of being before (though I’ve met a few). It was not a ‘Grey’ or a ‘Nordic’ or anything of that nature – nor humanoid.
Everyone stayed there for a few hours – it was difficult to leave, as if we were already ‘home’. While in the formation and reflecting on the experience, I was aware of being a part of history. Perhaps the men who were with John Cabot when he ‘discovered’ Newfoundland in the 1400s would not have been aware of all that would unfold thereafter, and of the subsequent significance of their landfall (the whole history of USA/Canada). I felt this was similar, as if more will unfold in the centuries to come which will render this event significant in a new light.
Of course, this event should be front-page news, but its true significance will hardly be noted or seen publicly. The materialists amongst us might well ask what has this to do with Iraq, guns, cars and stock markets? and, although the logical connections are perhaps flimsy, I’d say this event is totally relevant, by dint of its timing and also the larger light it throws on our vexatious human affairs.
We have contact, and those of us who are open to it, whether or not you can visit the crop formation, need perhaps to send back the signal “Message received with thanks! And we await further developments“. I do find myself wondering what I am to do with this gift, though I trust that answers will be revealed in due course. But one immediate conclusion is that I find myself reaffirming my commitment to the life-path I have chosen. Even though it’s a ridiculously small number of people involved in croppie research, I feel blessed to be one, to suspend my intellectual neuroses, metaphysical control agendas and fear of madness and the Unknown, or of loss of reputation or friends, and to simply follow this trail.
The crop season is now ending – the combine harvesters are out as we speak – and the formation will probably be gone within days. These things are not built to be permanent. The wheat was crisp and ripe – most people were nibbling at it!
We shall see.
If ETs interest you, try this podcast by Palden, A Close Encounter With Other Worlds. For another article by me, Afterthoughts about The Face, go here. For an interesting analysis of The Sparsholt Face and its message by Michael Barber, go here.
Aisha and I went into Bethlehem. The town was crowded, mostly with Palestinians, Christian and Muslim, who come from around the West Bank, Gaza and in Israel, but also with a much larger number of foreigners than usual. Eventually 100,000 visitors hit Bethlehem by Christmas Eve, the largest turnout for at least a decade.
We went to the Nativity Church but it was packed with visitors. There are two halves to the church, Orthodox and Catholic, and the place was crowded mainly with Italians, flashing their cameras and forming long queues to visit the shrines. We didn’t stay long. I don’t think Jesus would have done so either – though I can’t really speak for him. I reflected on the strange fact that, whenever I come to this church, I seem to be brought here by Muslims.
Aisha, a British Muslim, had to go home to Ramallah where she lived, so we had hummus and falafel at a friend’s cafe and then trogged up through the Old Town to Bab-al-Sqaq where she caught the 21 bus to Jerusalem. She was trying out this route because, though it requires passing through two major checkpoints near Bethlehem and Ramallah, it’s shorter and cheaper than going along the circuitous Palestinian main route around Jerusalem, staying within the West Bank.
I walked back as darkness fell toward Manger Square, taking photos and chatting with people. The square was heaving by now, with people streaming in from all directions. I spent much of the time with an enterprising young coffee seller, Mahmoud, who places his big charcoal-fired coffee pot on a concrete pedestal and does a roaring trade, selling coffee for a shekel (20p). We have an ongoing dialogue, and he likes his pet Englishman – except that I don’t support Real Madrid, but no one is perfect. I somehow doubt that Jesus supports Real Madrid either, or Barcelona for that matter, and told him so. “Ah, but Mohammed the Prophet supports Madrid!”, he joked.
Indonesian evangelism, no less
Soon a weird and very loud concert cranked up, by an Indonesian Christian rock band. The concert was sponsored by an Indonesian evangelical foundation. I heard the best rendering of the Lord’s Prayer that I have ever heard, quite tastefully done. One of them gave a lovely rap about harmony between Christians and Muslims, and everyone cheered, even though there was an embarrassing moment when he asked Christians, then Muslims, to stick up their hands, and the Muslims outnumbered the Christians by three to one – oops!
Before long I had had enough of harking to herald angels, soon degenerating into Santa and sleighbell songs, even though the music was rocking and rolling with vigour and aplomb, Indonesian style. Do Indonesians, or Palestinians for that matter, actually know what sleighbells are? I took refuge at my friend Alaa ad-Din’s shop, sitting people-watching as the endless crowds streamed down the narrow street. An old taxi-driver I knew drove past and I asked him to return in twenty minutes to pick me up.
I’ve never been one for Christmas – usually I go quiet and into retreat. This year I have felt more sociable about it but, suddenly, I realised that Bethlehem was becoming a nightmare. Why, in this source-point of the Christmas tradition, do they have to import all the Santa razzmatazz, all the commercial crap that has so ruined the spirit of Christmas, burying peace and goodwill under a mountain of consumptive blindness and artifice? After all, this is Bethlehem, the home of Christmas – it doesn’t need to import anything, and in fact it should by rights set the tone. When I had mentioned this to Aisha, she had said I was welcome to come to Ramallah to escape. Suddenly I knew I was going to Ramallah tomorrow, on Christmas Eve.
The taximan never came. After an hour of waiting – allowing for Palestine Inshallah Time – I waved goodbye to my friends at the shop, who were duly worried that I wasn’t enjoying myself, but I was just fine. In truth, if they stopped deluding themselves, most people in these crowds didn’t seem too happy to me either. But then, as someone aptly wrote recently, if you live inside a myth it looks like reality – though the gentleman in question was referring to the growth-economics of recent decades. Yet this rendering of Christmas, in my judgement, has more to do with growth-economics than Jesus, peace and goodwill. Or perhaps I’m just being Scrooge-like and grumpy, or becoming jaded?
It took a while to find a taxi, and then we had to weave around backstreets dodging the traffic-jams. Looking out at the crowds, it’s rather tragic that the majority of people here were Muslims. This isn’t a problem – it’s a blessing, saving the Christmas celebrations from moribund decline. What’s sad is that the Christian presence is so thin. Most of Palestine’s Christians have emigrated.
I had an image of Jesus coming down the street ranting at the desecration of his memory, vaulting onto the stage in Manger Square to unplug the amps and tell the privileged visitors in their allocated seats in front of the stage to yield them up to the poor and needy. Or perhaps just to go home and get on with the job of building Heaven on Earth and acting on His teachings. I’m sure there are spiritual moments for many people here, when they contemplate the tender meaning of the Christ Mass, of the shepherds who came up from Beit Sahour to see the newborn babe and of the Holy Mother and Child, but this… this is something else. I was glad to get out.
So, to all my dear readers, my apologies for omitting to give you a warm and toasty image of Christmas in Bethlehem! I’m sure it has its finer side, and it certainly puts this walled-in city on the world map, at least for a few days each year. It’s good to make a bit of a fuss about peace and goodwill, but why don’t we do this all year?
Ismael
Next day I pottered around the apartment tidying up and exercising my fingers on my computer keyboard, then I rang Ismael and left with him for the service-taxi station, to go to Ramallah. Ismael was a happy man today – his son Tareq had just been released early from jail, thanks to Hamas’ clever politics in exchanging a thousand Palestinian prisoners for one woe-begotten Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. This says something about Hamas’ strategy: they doggedly hold out for their principles without budging an inch, and this time it worked. Israel, which desperately believes Hamas is a bunch of terrorists, did the deal and paid the price. Ismael’s son was free.
Ismael had driven with his wife to the prison near Ramallah to meet him, but the Israelis kept everyone waiting until late into the night, to prevent an outburst of celebration and protest – though it hadn’t worked. There had been a near-riot outside the jail, and Ismael and his wife had beaten a retreat until things calmed down. Ismael is a respectable gentleman, by profession a surveyor but now redundant and a taxi-driver, and quite poor. But they found Tareq and brought him home at last. Their house had since then been busy for some days as people came by to congratulate the son and family, bringing gifts and partying. Released prisoners are heroes in Palestine. Tareq had been jailed for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers who were raiding Deheisheh refugee camp, themselves breaking the rules of the Oslo Accords.
Ismael is trying to get Tareq into Abu Dis university. But he’s worried because the jail term has delayed his son’s entry into university, meaning that one of his daughters has reached the age for university too. He can’t afford to pay for both of them. This is deeply vexing to him, because Palestinians value education very highly. A while ago I had given Ismael 400 shekels toward the 8,000 shekel (£1,600 or $2,000) fine he would have to pay for his son on release in about nine months’ time, except the Hamas deal had cut this short and saved the fine, so I told him to put it in Tareq’s self-help fund. He was so grateful, it was touching, and we both cried a few tears together.
Bethlehem was choked with traffic. The place was crawling with armed security men because Abu Mazen, the president, and Salam Fayyad, the prime minister, were on their way here to deliver annual Christmas speeches – a tradition started by Yasser Arafat. There were loads of big SUVs everywhere, the cars of privileged members of the PA hierarchy – people who have done well from Western and Gulf subsidies that support this nation. Unfortunately these subsidies support the hierarchy more than the nation. There’s no major crime in Palestine except for this.
Eventually we reached the service-taxi station. I bundled into a van and we were soon off, down through Beit Sahour and onto the main trunk road northwards. Most of the traffic was coming the other way – not least the armed motorcade of the president and prime minister, with flashing blue lights and a swarm of big motorbikes out in front and in the rear.
This is a trunk road not because of its quality – in British terms it’s a bumpy old ‘B’ road – but because it’s the only road from the southern to the northern West Bank, from Bethlehem to Ramallah, avoiding Israeli controls. Most Palestinians are not permitted to enter Israel proper or Jerusalem, which would be the shortest route – 25km instead of 70km – so they have to go round Jerusalem along this convoluted mountain route.
Palestine Route One
This road is dramatic, a tremendous ride. At first it weaves along the top of the limestone plateaux east and north of Bethlehem, where there’s a view down into a deep valley and then, on the other side, high up, the walled-off outskirts of East Jerusalem. This is vivid enough in itself, but then it suddenly plunges dramatically 1,000ft (300m) down a steep switchback into Wadi Nar, the Valley of Fire, where it changes from a winding old road into a new USAid-modernised dual carriageway heading north to Abu Dis and Al Azariyah, through more wild semi-desert mountain landscape, and winding tortuously through Wadi Nar until it eventually joins the Israeli east-west Route 1 from Jerusalem to the King Hussein Bridge and Jordan. This is a full-scale modern dual carriageway, financed in the 1990s by the Japanese government as a peace road linking Jerusalem and Amman – except peace never came. As far as I know the Japanese never asked for their money back.
We cannonaded down this road, past the Ma’ale Adumim Israeli settlement, perched on a hilltop to the right, then we turned left toward Ramallah. More dramatic landscape, and a few impoverished Bedouin shack-villages. This certainly is a memorable trip, this road. It weaves around hither and thither, and the service-taxi drivers do it at breakneck speed – mercifully they seem to be good drivers. Eventually we reached Ramallah – and it suddenly started raining! This was the first rain for over a month. It was tipping down. I waited to meet Aisha at Manara Circle, the centre of town – a funny bi-directional roundabout with a monument in the middle, dating back to British Mandate times. The British used to come here to get out of Jerusalem and enjoy themselves – rather like a hill-station in the Indian Raj.
Aisha took me to a Latin (Catholic) church for the Christ Mass. It’s the first time I’ve been to a church service for, er, well, must be over a decade, heathen that I am. The service was in Arabic and the church was packed. I floated off into another world, standing up and sitting down when required, looking as if I knew what I was doing. I had been in rather an altered, spaced-out state during the day, so it was rather nice to let myself drift along with the choral singing.
Again, I was taken to a church by a Muslim. I didn’t understand a word of the sermon, but the priest, dressed in white robes with lovely embroidery on it, spoke quite clearly and slowly – useful to listen to, picking up Arabic words I’m beginning to recognise. I hadn’t realised until now that Christians also use the term ‘Allah’ in Arabic. But then, he’s the One God, so why shouldn’t they? For your interest, Allah means ‘The God’ – it has a slightly different nuance to the Western personalisation of ‘God’ as a name, while the Arabic term is a noun.
Ramallah – where the foreign money is
We emerged from the church into the pouring rain, dodging torrents of water, and found a taxi to take us to the village outside town where Aisha and her husband Ahmed live. He’s a web-designer and film-maker, and we had lots to chatter about. They’re moving to England in a few months’ time to work and study (inshallah, if the British do the right thing with his visa, at a cost of £800). Ahmed likes the relatively high educational and intellectual standards of the English. The idea of living in London gives me a sinking feeling, but they’re excited about it. Perhaps I’m just a provincial country bumpkin with moss in my brains.
Next morning, Christmas Day, I sat writing my blog – I was falling behind – while Aisha went out and Ahmed updated websites. It was raining hard – not a day for sightseeing or footling around outside. It was a slow, do-nothing-much day. The calling to prayers at the local mosque was particularly tuneful – though Aisha later told me that, unlike in Bethlehem where it is sung by live singers and therefore quite variable in quality, this was pre-recorded by star muezzin from Mecca or Medina, and pumped out through sound systems paid for by Saudi sheikhs. Then we had a chat and a late lunch, and I bade them farewell to return to Bethlehem. I was still feeling rather wobbly, and wanted to get home to be in my own space.
At the service-taxi station I had to wait some time for the taxi to fill up – it has space for eight passengers. The driver thought I was German, but when I told him in German that I wasn’t, and came from Britaniyya, he didn’t understand, so I stuttered it in Arabic. He was fascinated when I stood outside smoking my pipe – around here, the only pipe-smokers are wizened old Bedouin out in the hills. Eventually people came and we started out.
It was still swilling down with rain and progress was slow. Palestinian roads aren’t built for handling rain, so there were massive pools and floods, and we had some great moments of aquaplaning. Heavy rain in a desert landscape is quite paradoxical. When eventually we reached the steep, winding switchback at the far end of Wadi Nar there was a big traffic jam. People had ground to a halt on the 1-in-3 hill and, the road being covered with a film of rubber and oil from the customarily hot weather, they couldn’t get up. Neither could they back down because of the traffic jam behind them. But Palestinians are good at crises, and it sorted itself out in due course.
When we reached Bethlehem the taxi-station was closed. Since it was still bucketing down the passengers nagged the driver to take them up toward Manger Square, which he duly did, and we tipped out into the monsoon, running everywhichway. By now I was not just wobbly and vulnerable but cold and wet and, being a thin pile of bones, I decided to run for the nearest shelter to ring Ismael, to ask him to come and rescue me. The nearest shelter was a coffee bar called – wait for it – Stars and Bucks, a Palestinian chain that has taken this name to dig Starbucks in the ribs for avoiding setting up in Palestine. Some global corporations (such as Coca Cola, Wall’s ice cream or Nestle) come to Palestine and others, such as Starbucks, don’t. So it looks like Starbucks has lost its chance for business in Palestine – though they probably don’t care.
Whatever, Stars and Bucks had a heater on and served a good cup of tea, and I waited for Ismael. The guys there interviewed me about what I am doing in Palestine: Palestinians are so interested in foreigners, especially the ones who stay a long time and return repeatedly. The usual questions came about my family, my wife (haha), with the customary expression of surprise when I said I had grandchildren (to them I look young), and the questions about my work, where I was staying, and then the riveted attention watching me lighting my pipe.
Bethlehem Old Town
Ismael arrived at last and off we went, weaving around the Old Town, slowing for the virulent speed-bumps, stopping at a shop to get a few provisions and then water-skiing back to Al Khader. I promised to come to visit his son soon. We waved goodbye. Ismael and I are getting like brothers of the soul – he looks my age but he’s ten years younger. I’ll miss him when I go back to Britain, since it’s so good having someone who thinks of me and rings me regularly to make sure I’m alright. He also knows that, as an old revolutionary and dissident who has had his own problems with police and authorities, I understand his son and I have a few survival secrets to share with him.
The apartment was quiet and cold but, once I’d had a bite to eat and a cuppa, I put my hot water bottle on my lap and wrapped a big blanket around myself, finished and uploaded my blog about Hebron, processed my latest photos, did a few e-mails, did my meditation and then staggered off to bed.
So much for Christmas 2011. I went back to Britain in late March 2012.
Carn Gloose and, behind, Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall
I’m lucky to be a writer. With my cancer-derived disabilities I can still more or less carry on with my work. If I were a farmer, work would be mostly impossible and my life would fall apart. There’s another side to this though: I get fed up with sitting at the computer – being nerdy and scholastic, I’ve done a lot of that over the last fifty years! My major hurdle at present is fatigue, though even that has its compensations because the rest and the floating-off that fatigue induces gives me space to cogitate things more than I’ve ever done before.
So my current book is taking time, but I’m now on the finishing touches – checking footnotes, indexing and sorting out pictures and maps – ready to send to a printer and publisher I do not yet have. That’s the next hurdle. Fatigue means I have to take things one thing at a time – handling complexity, arrangements and details is distinctly difficult. But I’m really pleased with the book.
The ‘council circle’ at Bosigran cliff sanctuary
In some respects it’s rather obscure – about the ancient sites of West Penwith, here in Cornwall, and what they show us about ‘megalithic geoengineering’ – but in other respects I’ve never been able to give a book so much thought and consideration. It might be one of my best (it’s my eleventh). There has always been a rush to meet a deadline or before other things start happening. But I don’t have a lot happening, and I’m no longer striving to be a successful author – I’m seeking simply to pass on my knowledge to whomever will benefit from it, before I go.
A dear soul-sister, Sophia, suddenly went recently. She was about to stage a big exhibition of her remarkable art and ceramics when she died quietly in her sleep, in her early seventies. It’s one of those deaths that was a surprise – she was in good enough health and spirits, with good prospects. Yet there’s a feeling it was not actually wrong that she passed away there and then. Sophia is a deep and sensitive lady who has done consistent spiritual practice (Subud Latihan) for a long time. We worked together on local and world healing in the 1980s, with an occultist called Gareth Knight and others. Her angels clearly, cleanly and calmly took her out at what they consider exactly the right time.
It’s stirring, when someone suddenly blips out like that. But we’ll probably meet in heaven when I blip out too. It doesn’t bother me the way it seems to bother a lot of people who, in their confusion over death, seem to experience such loss and regret when a person dies. Some people judge that I don’t care when I say this, but they misunderstand me. Yes, there’s an enormous gap, a silence, and it raises big questions about life, bringing up mysterious feelings, and the person is no longer physically present, but why do people stop talking to a person when they die, as if they no longer exist? I’ve sat at funerals where the departed soul says to me, “But can’t anyone see I’m here?“, so I talk to them. Then they, and the attendant angels and beings, seem to wonder why I am not running the funeral myself.
At times in the past I have done so, encouraging the living, standing around the grave, to address the person directly in their thoughts and words. We’d do a talking-stick circle where everyone could say their bit and recount their chunk of the life-story of the walked-out person and their abiding impressions. I’d encourage everyone, silently to themselves, to say all they needed to say to the person, to round out their relationship, and to hear the departed person’s truth, and thank them for their presence and for whatever, knowingly or not, they taught us while they were alive.
Anyway, Sophia is now very much at peace and in good hands, and she is going home, and the quiet manner of her departing was true to form, for her. A death like hers leaves the rest of us in an altered state because part of us goes with her, drawing attention to the wider and deeper meaning of life and what we are doing about it. This leads me to my latest podcast about Soul Education – recorded in early September. It’s not about death but about life. My starting premise is that we as souls did not begin our evolutionary journeys here on Earth, and that we come here for two primary reasons: to learn and to make a contribution.
Carn Euny iron age village, 2,000 years old
Cancer has been something of a gift because it gave me an indefinite though possibly imminent death sentence, which has brought forward this question of the contribution I have made and still make. It sharpens me up, in my constrained and slightly helpless state. Soon after getting diagnosed, in mid-November two years ago, on my back fighting for my life and amidst my pain, I was moved to write down all I knew about prehistoric culture – something I had not properly done before. This knowledge would be lost and wasted if I didn’t get it down. It gave me a focus through the next two years, and now it is virtually complete and ready to ‘put to bed’.
I now face a new question. My life might (or might not) be longer than the few years I expected. But I do not know what will happen, especially since, just two weeks ago, I was again not far from death’s door. I need to face the world and to supplement my income, since my pension and allowances no longer cover all my needs and costs and I have nothing to fall back on. But I cannot make arrangements, keep timetables, remember details and deal with the intricacies and obligations of conducting business – I don’t even know what state I’ll be in next Thursday, next month or next year, so making promises and agreements is just not realistic.
Working for a living (such as editing books or doing astrological sessions) is not easy now, even though I’m a solid workaholic. You see, when I fall ill, I cannot sit at the computer renegotiating arrangements with multiple people and giving them a reliable answer when they ask when I’ll be better and back to normal! If I died suddenly, lots of threads could be left untied. My recent health encounter took three weeks and I’m worn out, running on three cylinders. I’m destined to fail in dealing with the details of working for a living, and I know it, and I’ve had instances already where I have let people down or forgotten something, because I’m in an altered state with chemo-brain and fatigue. Or they’re in more of a hurry than I can keep up with.
I’m just not ‘up to speed’ or ‘in the loop’, and neither should I be. I’m still shielding. But I’m a Virgo with an inbuilt need to do my bit. I need to focus on what actually I can do, such as writing this cancer blog until I no longer can, or churning out podcasts and my forthcoming book, or doing psychic work and playing a part in the lives of people close by and far away. I do these not just for self-entertainment, though they do keep me occupied, but because I believe they bring some value.
Neolithic Chun Quoit as seen from bronze age Boswens menhir
Last week Lynne picked me up and I went to stay in Devon with her. That worked well, and the change and being with her after a too-long pause was good. But while I was there I encountered another issue: electrosensitivity. It has increased since I got cancer. It’s a blood cancer, and iron-rich blood is electronic and magnetic. Lynne is herself electrosensitive, so this is not what otherwise could be a difficult issue between us. But it affects my and our social life a lot.
Most people don’t understand radiation, and many think they are exempt from its effects when this is incorrect. Problem is, it takes me just three seconds of close exposure to mobile phone or wi-fi radiation to set me off for 36 hours. I go through a sequence of cumulative symptoms, depending on the amount of exposure. It starts with an agitated, embattled, uncentred, inarticulate, locked-in kind of feeling, progressing to a high-pitched whine in the centre of my skull, then some sharp, pulsing, show-stopping headaches, then a thumping, irregular heartbeat, then distinct feelings of flu-like illness lasting about 24 hours after exposure has stopped. This is upsetting, especially when it’s friends, loved ones and interesting people killing you. No one understands what they’re doing because it is not recognised as a problem.
From my own perspective, I think that EM and nuclear radiation probably account for at least 20% of the environmental damage, climate change, social stresses and health problems happening right now, globally. The world doesn’t want to know. Many people groan when I come up with things like this, and I have been criticised many times for awkward utterances, only to watch them come true in the longterm. I’m not right every time, but I’m correct enough times for it to matter. It’s the price of being a seer and choosing to live ahead of our time – I’m sure a lot of you know that one.
I turned vegetarian-vegan in 1971, but now is it no longer regarded as a deficiency or weakness, but that took 40-50 years. Twenty years ago I was involved with ‘talking to terrorists’ (Hamas) at a time when it was risky and taboo. But now, British soldiers tell us we should have talked more to the Taliban in Afghanistan – ahem, yes, precisely. It’s painful, living with this wilful blindness and watching the wider costs and hardships rise so high. This is the case now with the question of EM radiation – it is nicely invisible and deniable, and mobiles and wi-fi are so useful, but it’s harming us and our world. Even Extinction Rebellion and the Green Party have a blockage over this issue, and I do wonder why.
Caer Bran, the possible bronze age parliament site for Penwith, as seen from Grumbla in the valley below
It’s past lunchtime and time to go to bed. Fatigue is funny: when it comes, it’s like pushing through treacle. The law of gravity gets switched up, my mind dulls out and it’s like being muffled in wool. It can arrive quite suddenly, often in the afternoon or following a lot of activity. The secret is to accept it and not grind myself up feeling guilty or inadequate. I’ve pushed energy writing this blog, and now I need to put my body-mind system into freewheel for a recharge. Besides, it’s a grotty, rainy, grey, blustery day, and bed is the best place to be. With a cuppa, a few munchies, music by Brian Eno, and a good case of metaversal megaflop.
Thanks for being with. This time you get a podcast too, introduced by a nightingale.
This is a note I posted on Facebook in response to feedback about this blog.
Neolithic placed stones on Zennor Hill, here in Cornwall
Thanks everyone, for your comments. While the compliments are heartening, what I find most interesting is the variety of ways my blogs go ding and clang with different readers in differing ways. That’s just fascinating.
With these blogs I don’t really have a clear intention. I’m just trying to record things that come up along the strange path of being a cancer patient with twiggling antennae and a lot of time on my hands to reflect, look at things from one step back, and to use my wordsmithing skills to try to squeeze them into written lines of verbiage.
Believe me, when I was young I struggled hard to write down my artesian aspie thoughts, and it took a long while – decades.
This is one of those things about living on Earth – stuff doesn’t come easily and we have to work at it. We have to serve time, slogging through loadsa shite to get really good at things. This is a key part of our soul-honing process and one of the big reasons why each of us chose to come here.
That’s what I’m trying to do. So I have cancer. So my challenge is to get good at cancer, to exploit its openings. Writing this blog is part of my medicine.
I don’t pre-think it. I’ll just sit on it until, one morning, I wake up with a nugget, a starting place – it kinda fizzles – and it comes out of the present. Which is how sometimes you’ll hear about my toilet challenges and other times it’s about meta-cozmickle panoramas.
Thanks for being with, and I’m really glad that the stuff that gets dredged up here brings insights, connects a few things together and reminds you of what you already know – though perhaps put differently so that it can be seen with another optic.
As someone said here, who knows if I am right? That doesn’t matter. What matters is to bounce things around because it helps our seeing, helps us see things from other angles, and it loosens us up.
Actually, I’d be quite glad and relieved to find out I’m wrong in many of the things I say and write, but I’m not sure whether I’ll be allowed that privilege. We shall see.
Padjelanta national park, Sapmi – Swedish Lappland
I’ve had good news. I talked on the phone to the haematologist at Treliske hospital in Truro (about 40 miles away) and she seems pleased with my results. Although the readings from blood tests are slowly rising – this is to be expected, but I could be worse than I am – the PET scan I had a couple of weeks ago, to see whether any further damage was being done, turned out well. So I do not need to go back on chemo right now. I’m glad, because I’m tired of getting poleaxed by medication and fatigue. I need to revive before the next round.
But that’s not what I want to write about.
As promised, here are my thoughts on the next ten years or so. There’s a combination of a historian, futurologist, astrologer and seasoned observer coming through here, and long hours in bed have meant a lot of time to ruminate on these things.
I think the 2020s are going to be both difficult and more encouraging than the 2010s. Covid is the beginning of a process, and there are more storms to come – that’s the difficult bit. It’s going to be an uphill grind. Or a different kind of grind than the one we had before.
Looking more longterm, this process started around 2008-12, when the overall balance of global trends tipped critically, and it has been ramping up over the last ten years: the world crisis is no longer a thing of the future but it’s now present and here, in all departments of life and coming at us in waves. We have entered the inevitable period of price-paying for the profligate lives we’ve led in the rich countries and the destructive aspects of the world system we’ve created. Some of us saw this coming way back in the 1960s, but the majority didn’t agree or want to look.
During the 2010s we needed to be given gritty, distressing challenges to get us engaged, to grind us down and prepare us for what happens next. It was in many ways a dispiriting decade, but a lot of good things bubbled underneath. Many revolutions failed, but many people were changed by them. Covid is in a way a climax of that phase and the beginning of the next one. It’s a punctuation point.
The issue is this: since the world has delayed action on necessary human and planetary issues, there’s a lot of catch-up to do, and a lot of damage has been done. We’ve lost fifty years, and things can’t wait. Events are taking over. This is no lnger a matter of opinion.
There’s a long way to go before we find the full range of solutions – it will take the whole 21st Century. To progress, we need to be accelerated into a process of change that will take us out of our comfort zones and confront us with hard facts. Humanity needs to get itself mobilised. Now it’s a time of consequences, imperatives and seeking solutions.
Though a few might think it’s the only option, an all-out catastrophe would not help. Catastrophes hurt, disable, stun and set people back, and they are not the best recipe for change. We need to make big choices and get behind them – even if we’re arm-twisted by events to do so. What’s needed is a deepening series of crises that tip us incrementally into change-processes, forcing us over a succession of thresholds and pushing us to get really real about our situation and its many details, nuances and implications.
It’s especially about human society. Without substantial changes in our group psychology and behaviour, we will not get through the century intact. This concerns cooperation and sharing, and it brings up collective emotional issues about identity, power, who decides, and how much we really care about nature and human nature. It concerns Us and Them.
So people across the world are variously cleaving into progressives and resisters, new tribes and old tribes, and this is the new politics. Ultimately, humanity has to realise it is one tribe, but this will come clear only when Ronald Reagan’s late-1980s Reykjavik Proposition comes true: humanity will unite when it realises it is not alone. But without humanity cooperating as one planetary race, there will be insufficient resolution of environmental issues, tech hazards and the wide range of potentially fatal issues that face us now.
So we’re being accelerated, and it is reasonable to expect further crises ahead, and particularly multiple crises happening at once, or cascading crises with proliferating implications – as Covid is with the social and economic issues it has precipitated. The urge to restore normality is an unconscious reaction to this acceleration, part of the process of letting go of the past. Normality will not be restored, no matter how many dollars and scientists you throw at it. But there are still options. It’s just that the new normal is going to keep changing.
The 2020s are likely to be very different from the 2010s. The shit will increasingly hit the fan. But something else has been bubbling up underneath to meet this and change the equation: a growing surge of new ideas, perspectives, attitudinal changes, technological advances and challenging situations that nevertheless prompt progress and positive developments – as in ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.
Astrologically, an interesting and rare configuration is approaching in the later 2020s for which my best description is ‘cultural florescence under duress’. This will not be easy because we’ll be battling with more crises. But the difference is that the tide will be flowing more strongly then, and this loosens things up. It allows creativity, innovation, new ways of seeing things and new reality-configurations. There is likely to be a battle of ideas, perspectives and loosening positions, and a generational change in which Millennials will be coming to power (and my own generation will be dying off).
One of the big questions will be, do the people exist for the system or does the system exist for the people? Questions of systemic control, the rights of the individual, the needs of the collective and the balance of the three.
This will not be the old workers-and-capitalists battles of the 20th Century: it will be between progressive people and ideas at all levels of society, and resisters, some of them indisposed to change, some victims of change, some of them vested interests, and many who are older, marginalised and disoriented. These too need to be considered, because this isn’t any more about my side or your side of the argument, it’s about the complete outcome of all arguments, for all people and in all areas of life.
So we have come to a need to rehumanise society. Another issue concerns social willingness to cooperate. If change is imposed, and if governments and those at the top of society fail to act in people’s overall benefit and society fails to come together to cooperate, then resistance, exceptionalism and non-cooperation will ensue, complicating things terribly – this issue has been tested in the Covid crisis.
So we’re likely to get an escalation of both problems and solutions, and we’ll be challenged to see when solutions are actually solutions. If we judge events on the basis of past norms, there will be a plethora of problems, but if we judge them on the basis of the possibilities they offer, they become a solution. Much hangs on this. In the Covid crisis, from which everyone is so anxious to escape, we have been given multiple solutions but we fail to see them – we choose to focus on the problem side, on what’s being lost. And yes, things are hard.
This year we have wobbled over a tipping point, toward rehumanising society and making the world more fit to live in. Millions of people are thinking deeply about their lives and about life itself. The rich world is at last starting to become aware of its consumption patterns, which need to reduce radically. And the developing world needs to find new ways of developing from those that have existed before.
Then there’s ‘mental health’, a term based on the presumption that conventional normality is good health. Chaos has broken out in people’s lives, and for many people it’s really hard work. Many, including me, have also had to face being very alone. But calling it a ‘mental health crisis’ avoids the main point.
We’re in a rather necessary spiritual crisis, affecting everyone in varying degrees and ways. For some, this has been really tough – the bottom has dropped out of their universe and many people are flailing. It’s all about facing our demons and fears and, as individuals, communities and societies, we all need to face them. Old values, expectations, judgements and preferences are becoming obsolete, and there’s a lot of grasping at straws, blame and escapology going on. This is a transitional inner growth crisis for many, a time of what disaster professionals call ‘epistemic insecurity’ – confusion over what and who to believe.
In the later 2020s, specifically around 2024-2028, we’re coming into an avalanche period, a torrent of events and issues – but I don’t think it will be as blocked and struggly as the 2010s were. There will be pain and also increasing relief – relief arising from a cumulative adjustment to and acceptance of what’s happening. But the pain often comes first and the relief tends to follow. We’re in the pain bit for now.
Conservative forces from the top to the bottom of society are beginning to realise that things are changing anyway – and this applies also to that part of ourselves that prefers our comfortable routines, habits and security. The part that wants to be the exception. The part that says, ‘I’m up for change as long as it doesn’t affect me’.
There’s a rule in geology: the erosive power of a river increases as the square of its volume. That is, when volume of flow increases three times, erosive power increases nine times. That’s what we’ll see in the 2020s: the erosive power of events. The flow and volume of change is increasing, and it’s eroding anything that gets in the way. Whether we like it or not, it’s coming at us.
But the good news is that a flood also clears out the channels and generates energy. The challenge for us all, for individuals, communities and nations, is to get used to living and operating in a far more tumultuous and challenging world.
What is the gift in that? It will make it easier to face the 2030s and 2040s. Because things are not going to slow down.
But there’s an extra issue here. Whenever the world fully accepts change, things will progress faster but it will still take time. Forests take half a century to grow. People need time to adjust and sort things out. Innovations need trialling. Cities take years to redesign. Soil takes time to reconstitute. This means that, even when the big decisions have been made, it will take decades to find out whether it will actually work. By the 2040s this could raise world neurosis levels to a peak – or it could bring a new kind of sanity. This is new territory – we’ve never done this before and we don’t know what will happen. So the decades following 2030ish could be a nail-biting period.
To put a time-perspective on all this, the two big dates of the 21st century are these: 2048 and 2065. The changes we’re in now are operating in a time-frame from 2012 to 2048ish. I won’t go into that now (my book Power Points in Time tells all), but it’s worth flagging up here.
The 2020s are part of the run-up to 2048 – astrologically a Uranus opposition Pluto. The conjunction, the beginning of the cycle, was in 1965-66, and the square, the growth-crisis, was in 2012ish. So 2048 is the climax of all that started in the 1960s. The 1960s were a time of dawning awareness that all was not well on our planet, and that we faced daunting times. Times that we now are in.
2065 I would call the beginning of the start of the future. The time of nail-biting might well be over, and we’ll know the facts of our situation – the crunch-time is likely to have been around 2048, followed by a rather shell-shocked post-crisis period following it, dealing with pressing realities and taking stock. By 2065 I would imagine that, whatever the state of the world, we’ll have a clearer sense of what comes next. It’s a Neptune square Pluto, the crunchpoint of a cycle starting in 1892.
So Covid has upset the apple-cart. The starting gun has been fired. And, to be honest, even though things are hard, do you really want normality restored? Do you really want to go back to the way things were before? It’s strange to say this, but in some respects, since cancer took over my life a year ago, it’s been coming clear that it’s the best thing that could happen to me. But I do also choose to see it that way – not just in my head but in my bones.
Well, that’s what I think anyway. Whether my prognoses resemble the reality to be, we shall see. None of us can presume to know the big answer. That’s quite amazing, really.
St Michael’s Mount – 5,500 years ago a Neolithic Tor Enclosure. Picture from my book.
The deed is done. I finished writing my book Shining Land. Been writing it since December. So now it will go out to a few readers for checking – I present quite a few radical ideas, and I want to make sure they make sense. It’s all about the ancient sites of West Penwith and ‘megalithic geoengineering’. Phew, so that’s done. Now I can pay more attention to family, friends and people.
After my cancer treatment in November to March I landed up with a lot of fatigue and brain-fog, so in the last six months I haven’t been very functional. I’ve been alive and active for only 6-8 hours each day, with a need to do my daily tasks, cook food and run my house as well as write the book and live a life. All in a slow and doddery way.
I’ve had a lot of trouble with making decisions, complexity and problem-solving, and yet, when I’ve been clear enough to write, my brains have done well. Obviously it concerns different parts of the brain. But one advantage of the fatigue has been that, when I go to bed in the afternoon, lying there in a strange heavy stupour with my leaden body totally flumped, my psyche floats around the subtle worlds in a hypnopompic, dreamlike state, and in that time I’ve mulled sluggishly over things and given each proposition and paragraph far more thought than I’ve done in the ten previous books I’ve written.
It’s strange, writing books. You can’t show anyone until long after it’s finished. It’s hidden away in a computer file, and I can’t hold it, prod it or wave it around. As far as you lot are concerned, I’ve been quiet, seemingly doing nothing. But I’ve been doing lots. It’s now ready – apart from a final review after a few readers have vetted it.
Lockdown hasn’t been a problem. Every time I write a book I go into lockdown, so I’m well practiced. When I did The Only Planet of Choice in 1992 I was locked down for 18 months. The main difference has been that, usually, people think I’m being antisocial. But during Covid I’ve suddenly not been antisocial. Nothing changed for me – it was others’ attitudes that changed! But if ‘normality’ returns, I’ll be antisocial again, haha.
Meanwhile, healthwise I have been improving 5-10% each month. As Victoria, a nurse heroine, warned me back in March, I won’t return to the same place where I was before I was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer. Back at winter solstice I felt like a 95 year old. Now I feel like an 80 year old – getting younger! But I don’t think I’ll get a lot younger. My body is getting older – I’ve just reached what my old friend Sig Lonegren, the dowser, called the Big-Seven-Oh. He reached it ten years before me.
You ought to see all the supplements and remedies I’m taking. Most of them are capsuled in those funny plasticky capsules, and I don’t want to swallow 15 of those every day. So religiously I break open these dratted things, mix them together, add a dash of top-grade local runny honey, let it soak in, and then I take this superpowered spludge on a teaspoon. I’m no longer on pharmaceuticals, thanks be.
One of the weird things has been that, during my treatment since November, only one doctor has actually touched me – that was a poor registrar who had to stick his finger up my bum to see whether I had prostate cancer (I don’t). It has been ‘bloods’, x-rays, PET scans, CT scans and MRI scans and, sure, they’re amazing. But not a soul has actually listened to my heart, looked at my tongue or touched me. This is modern medicine.
So when I went to John Tillyard, a brilliant chiropractor in Hayle, he actually touched me, and it was amazing! His hands were so firm, and he was so good at what he was doing – he hit me on the spot first time and every time. Three treatments and I was standing and moving so much better. Bless you, John – you’re a good man. Soul-sister Miriam has been giving me remote healings on Zoom too – I am much blessed.
My back will never return to its former strength and straightness – I’ll probably be using sticks for the rest of my life. It’s useful having four legs though. I can stagger around the house without sticks for up to three minutes, and that’s it. Three vertebrae in my lower back collapsed a year ago – that was the first sign of the cancer. My bones have lost substance: I click my back in at least five places when I lie down. You can hear it – it’s quite shocking first time. Bone marrow cancer erodes your bones, and though this has been stopped by the chemo treatment, my bones aren’t what they were.
For astrologers out there, guess what, I’m on a Neptune opposition Saturn right now, and it’s all about bones. Bones that have lost their firmness. I’ve had teeth falling out too. But I’m still here and, despite this, when my energy is up I can walk a mile or two – slowly and dodderily – especially in inspiring places, of which there is no shortage around here.
Thanks be to three amazing ladies. First is Lynne, who cares for my heart, spirits and soul, second is Penny, a fine soul who cleans my house and does tasks, and third is Karen, a Brummie angel who does my shopping each Thursday. I am held in the hands of the Goddess. Also Helen, my homoeopath, who gave me a radioactive lanthanide Curium 1M remedy recently, and that really pulled me together. Oops, was it legal to say that?
The doctors are happy with my cancer – the readings are good – but they think I might have lung cancer. I don’t. When I said this to the specialist I could see her thinking, “Uh-oh, he’s one of those”. She politely called my response ‘conservative’. Then, just this morning, a lung cancer nurse rang me, following a recent CT scan – a really nice chap – to tell me that the suspected lung cancer has not got worse and might even have got a bit better. They’ll test me again in a year. I told him that, all my life, I’ve been something of a healer, especially in my humanitarian work, and this is a case of Healer, heal thyself. “Interesting attitude”, he said. “You might be right”.
I’ve been rather shocked though at the extent to which the NHS hasn’t been caring much for me – and I’m glad I have holistic treatments and practitioners to resort to. But there’s a problem with both doctors and holistic practitioners: they are all specialists, all stuck in silos. It’s a completely non-integrated system, both in the NHS and the holistic sector. No one except Lynne is watching my overall condition. I’ve even had difficulty getting advice and appointments from my GP. When I ring them they take copious notes and… nothing happens.
That’s weird. I understand their situation with Covid, but I’m feeling ignored. But then, that simply means it’s for me to self-manage and do whatever I feel best, and that suits me fine. Kind of. I’d appreciate more knowledge and advice, especially (here comes a pipedream) from someone who understands both pharma and holistic medicine.
So now I’m a seventysomething. I never thought I’d get this far. In my life I’ve had at least ten opportunities to die, and I’m still here! Hello world. I’ll live until my angels decide it’s no longer worth keeping me here, and I get the feeling they have a few more tasks lined up. The book I’ve just written was the first. Since having cancer I’ve moved into a new archetype within – which many might see, for better or worse, as a ‘wise old man’ archetype. I’m becoming a voice calling from the far beyond (well, down’ere near Land’s End, it does feel like that). That’s what ‘Penwith’ means – the end of the beyond.
The ancient name for this Land’s End area is Belerion – the shining land. And it does.
Some time ago, when fire-walking was all the rage, people nagged me to join in and I just wasn’t taken with it. Perhaps they thought I was weak-willed – me, with Mars in Scorpio? No, if you want a test of the will, try cancer. It’ll get you where expensive new age trainings just don’t reach. It’ll confront you with all your fears. It’ll give you the biggest choice you ever made. It’s gloriously unromantic. It’ll truly test your will to live. It will hone your spirit – if, that is, you choose that route. It’ll prepare you for joining the Ancestors. It’s a bizarre kind of Gift of God. I don’t recommend it, but if it comes to you, do your best with it.
I’ve done acid, been with Tibetan Lamas, swamis, shamans, sheikhs and so many wondrous people, I’ve communed with ETs and transdimensional beings, hobnobbed with magnates, hippies, monarchs and Gazans, and cancer is another stage on that enlightenment path. Before any of us came here, we were, after all, warned that it was not going to be easy on Earth. We thought, “That’s okay, I’ll manage it, and besides, I want the chocolate”. And here we are, on this Earth – and you ought to find out about the crimes, injustices and near-slavery that are involved in providing you with that chocolate too.
This is the time and the future is here, now. This is it. Forget returning to normality: too much in this world needs to change and we can’t afford normality – it’s a killer. Normality is eating out the heart of the Mother.
Now that I’ve finished the book, I might muster up some further utterances on the state of the world, as I see it. Might even do some podcasts from stone circles and clifftops, far beyond, with not a surveillance camera in sight. We shall see. One day at a time.
And bless you all for being you. Thanks for reading this.
I keep on falling into eureka-traps. This has been a lifelong blessing and a bane. They usually come late in the evening and, from that moment on, I’m compelled to pursue them. It starts with a brainwave, a prompt to look a things through a certain optic, often to overcome my own resistances too, and then it relentlessly unfolds from there. Currently fuelled by rose congou tea, interspersed with sips of a homoeopathic remedy made of potentised lava from the Hekla volcano in Iceland.
Or perhaps it came when Lynne and I recently visited Bosiliack Barrow, a late-neolithic chambered cairn. That’s a great place for fetching insights. Sometimes it’s as if the spirits of the place almost want to blurt them out, excited that at last they have a receptive ear. Many of my archaeological revelations have originated there, and Lynne seems to ‘get’ stuff too, and she’s always glowing afterwards. I struggled along on my sticks, with Lynne patiently following, to ensure I wouldn’t fall – but having four legs is pretty stable, to be honest, even when the world is wobbling.
Anyway, I’d been resisting this because I somehow knew it would open up a line of work that would proliferate endlessly, and part of me is tired of these eureka moments. I love them too, and it’s my life, but I’m on a major Neptune opposition Saturn transit at present and I’m feeling the weight of it. Feeling the weight of my patterns. Feeling the weight of my back – it hurts continually – and I’m gravitationally compromised.
This new project started actually because I realised there was a gap in my book concerning sacred geometry. I’m not good at it, you see. I’m good at visual pattern recognition but not at numbers – azimuths, angles, proportions, pi and phi ratios. So I was holding back, putting up a prayer that a geometry expert might appear – and they didn’t. Spontaneously, last night, fullmoon as it happened, I sat down, shrugged shoulders and started playing around on the map.
Within two hours I had a load of significant geometric triangles. It was quite a shock, how easily it came. Now I have to measure angles and distances and try to figure out the meaning and significance of all this. The 1% inspiration bit is over and 99% perspiration bit is yet to come. I’ve just started this map and it’s unfinished, an experimental draft map at this stage.
This’ll probably provoke a torrent of e-mails, messages, YouTube videos, most of which I can’t reply to, and requests to make maps of Northumberland or Essex, to which the answer is No, please do it yourself and show me what you come up with!
You see, I might sound vigorous and in good shape, but I’m not. Recently I’ve been labouring, achingly holding myself up, experiencing difficulty looking after my house and cooking, and I get terrible fatigue. My former neighbour Penny has just started helping me though, which is an immense relief. I’m a domesticated Virgo who usually runs a good house, but I can’t keep up now. My bathroom is spotless and she’s attacking the kitchen next.
Never in my life have I expected to be cut down like this. I never knew what fatigue or cancer could be like until I started experiencing them personally. Early on in my cancer treatment I felt I suddenly aged to about 95, and I assumed I’d grow back down again to my current bodily age (70 in September), but it’s hardly happening. Well, perhaps I’m 88 now. I’ve got chemo side-effects to deal with, such as arthritis (aching hips) and neuropathy (feet filled with chilli-pepper, it feels like). I can no longer tell how much I’m young at heart and how much I’m a grumbly old codger.
At least in body. I’m such an incorrigibly positive fucking optimist, and my heart, mind and soul are doing just fine, in a way – if anything, cancer-riddled self-examination has been a gift, an uplift amidst the grinding pain and the threat of early death. But I have my down moments, and recently I’ve been wading around in the underworld, dredging my fears, grinding my stuff and talking to myself too much.
I let it out through the keyboard. Only some of this is visible to you folks – much of it is accumulating in the book I’m writing, hidden away on my computer. It’s not available except for a sample chapter and contents list for publishers. Or it’s longterm projects that emerge gradually, like the Meyn Mamvro archive. I spend endless hours on these things.
I get dual feelings. I love my work yet I’m tired of keyboards. Been a keyboard-slave since about 1964, when I started annoying my mother by using her clackety old mechanical typewriter. By 1971 I started out on the world’s then fourth largest computer: it had a memory of 64k! It was all Fortran IV, punchcards and dot-matrix printouts.
This said, with the last of the money that you people on Facebook kindly donated to help me in my cancer process, I’ve bought a new computer – a laptop called a Toughbook (military grade, no less). I got £350 off the price! My old computer died, after 11 years’ stalwart service in deserts, airports and on Cornish farms. I’ve also bought a studio quality sound recorder (£150 off). At some point podcasts will emerge through it. I used to do radio in the Seventies and Naughties, so I’m no stranger to it.
This is the kind of thing I’m doing with my new life. I can’t travel, hobnob, teach, agitate or organise things, so I’m keyboarding a lot, doing that blessing and bane business. At great length. There’s nothing much else to do – I’ve been locked down since November, when I was diagnosed with cancer. But then, half of me is a hermit, and I live in a lovely place, so I’m okay about that.
And the fool on the hill sees the sun go down, and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round…
One of the banes of astrologers is that we’re always asked, “What does a Mars square Jupiter mean?“. Well, at least that’s better than being required to guess some stranger’s sun sign, as if that’s a test of how good an astrologer we might be, or as if getting it wrong constititutes proof that astrology is a load of bunkum.
Here in these words you’ve had an exposition of what a Neptune opposition Saturn ‘means’ – the kind of issues that can come up. In one sense it’s a time of uplift and in another sense it’s about carrying that weight.
The doctor has suddenly remembered I’m here, and tells me that she thinks something more might be wrong with me. They want to fill me with radioactivity and do a PET scan, in the back of a truck in the car park at Trelliske hospital in Truro. I have strong reservations. About the scan, not the truck.
Staying alive takes on strange twists and turns. But at last it’s raining, and nature is drinking it up. Yesterday we had multiple rainbows – perhaps somewhere in the world a great being was being born.
Amazingly, life continues another day.
Please forgive me for (mostly) not answering e-mails and messages. You see, I’m not as active and capable as most people, and if I spent time chatting I wouldn’t be getting on with what I’m called to do. Like the above crazy map-making.
Staloluokta in Sapmi in 2011, 90km from the road and 200km from the shops. Sapmi, the land of the Sami people, is known to many of us as Lappland, northern Sweden
Today I reached a point where it was down to thinking up the final humdinger of a paragraph for my forthcoming book ‘Shining Land’. It’s nearly there.
The great thing about this book, my eleventh, is that I’ve given a lot of time and consideration to every thought and proposition while lodged in the cosmological cocoon of my bed, looking out over the fields and woods at the jackdaws, swallows and buzzards.
With plenty of timespace to think. The book is all about time, space and consciousness. It’s going to annoy the hell out of some sceptics and rationalists, not least during this triumphal period of all-embracing Science.
Now I must review the whole 100,000 word manuscript again, submit it to two ‘expert readers’ to check through the ideas, compile the online appendices, enter the illustrations and maps into the manuscript, and it’s done. Phew. The book will come out, regardless, in digital format: the main issue is whether it comes out in print (the costliest and most complex option).
Then it’s two months of sitting around, kinda fallow, thumb twiddling, wondering what to do with myself. The creative vacuum creeps up afterwards. It does give time and space for things I ignored before, and for dwelling on nothing in particular.
Writing books is a self-imposed lockdown – most of the time an anti-social activity but now transcovidated into responsible self-isolation and social distancing. I’m doing the same thing as before but not, this time, anti-socially. Apparently. These twists of judgement are always strange for Aspies to get our heads around.
I’ve been on lockdown since mid-November, when diagnosed with myeloma. Approaching six months. So there was little change when Covid slunk in like a voracious Neptunian mist, taking over everyone’s lives and tenuous sense of reality. I just carried on – out of my head on chemotherapy and steroids.
It gets a bit boring, this lockdown, even though I have stuff I can get on with, in my slowly ponderous six-hours-per-day, wiped out, struggling way, stumbling around like a 96 year old. I’ve been on my own quite a lot throughout life and get a bit fed up of myself, my own cooking, my repetitive, stuck Virgo patterns and ossified daily methodologies. Why people want to prolong their lives and achieve immortality beats me. But then, ‘You were a strange little child’, my mother once said, and ‘You’re not like the child I brought up’.
Tomorrow, I am appearing on an Indian social psychologists’ online conference on the overall social effects of Covid, giving them a prescribed ten minutes on the psychodynamics of accelerated social-cultural change. Me, a global health expert, hobnobbing with people bearing doctorates…
This is one of the unexpected outcomes of having cancer. Lots of things have changed. Here’s one. People who want to hear me are now predominantly in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, not Europe and America. Growing for years, suddenly it shifted critically, recently. My last book Possibilities 2050 I wrote with them in mind. I made it available for free, so that expense and availability would not be barriers. They can read it on their mobiles, and it uses little bandwidth. Now I’m hearing from really interesting folk in Gambia, Malawi, Uganda, and Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Bangladesh, Tuvalu and Cuba. Magic.
What I like most about this is that, if I’m delivering something people really find useful, it draws something out of me. I’m quite accustomed to being part of something that ought to be much bigger than it is, but it’s good having people gladly soaking up this stuff – and making it their own, doing it their way. Fuck the royalties and getting famous – I just want to get on with what I’m here for before I no longer am here.
These people are not emulating the West; they’re overtaking us. They’re the world’s future and the majority are under 30. Many ideas coming from the back-alleys and the underground in the West have become useful to them. They’ve seen the impositional side of us but there are fertile outpourings from the unofficial culture in the West that are invaluable too. Permaculture being one. Talking stick. Herbalism. Astrology. Holism. Homoeopathy. Anything interesting, stimulating and new.
We Westerners need to listen up. Our majority culture has become sclerotic, stuck in a groove, constrained by its vested interests and comfortaable habits. Yet it has much of value. Especially a lot of the things we haven’t given enough attention to. We were too busy making money, or trying to.
We still want to be the leaders, the teachers. The mission to civilise is still alive and well, as is the hypocrisy. No, we’re the minority and being outclassed. Declining without appropriate grace. But most of us are goodguys and mean well – that’s our asset.
It’s time for us to rejoin the human race. Exceptionalism no longer works. Wanting to be the leaders blocks the flow. Lecturing obstructs hearing.
Yet, as a cancer experiencer, I’m so fortunate to be undergoing treatment here in UK. I have access to the best of conventional and holistic medicine, healers and advisers, people praying and reiki-ing me too, and I’m grateful for that.
I’ve offered myself for research and observation, having had some of the best results seen for years. But no, no interest. Oh well, it saves me being poked, prodded and sent to London!
The Management has recently been doing a little fixing. Normal service is unlikely to be resumed. Apologies for the disruption. Please recycle all used containers and clear up your litter after you.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
You must be logged in to post a comment.