Cancer blogs – Notes from the Far Beyond

Ancestors

and taxiing toward the runway

Pics in this blog are of my father, Julian Jenkins – no longer on this Earth. Here he is, noble at his wife’s, my mother Ruth’s, funeral

I’m getting a feeling that, unless something changes or I’m getting things wrong, it might not be too long before I join the ancestors. That’s not a heavy feeling – there’s a dawning sense of relief to it. Of course, you never get to know when and how death will come, until it actually happens. So I’m faced with rather a strange choice: is it best to talk about this while I can, in case I keel over quite soon, or am I overdramatising something that is not actually imminent?

There is indeed a feeling of migration going on, a gradual shifting from here to there which, at some point, will mean that my heart stops pumping. The time will have come to go over to the otherworld – whatever that lands up truly meaning.

But the otherworld doesn’t start there. I want to return to a thought I shared a couple of years ago, about dying. Dying is a gradual psycho-spiritual process, and every one of us is dead to some extent, at this very moment. You might be only 10% dead, but part of you is over there. I’d estimate myself to be 80ish percent dead at present, up from the 70ish percent of a few months ago – though it’s a non-measurable perception.

Whether or not you’re aware of it, your psyche is much more bendy, pulsating, edgeless, multilevel, imaginal, transdimensional and empathic than you think. We’re addicted to the idea and the feeling of individuality, as if there is a clear boundary between what is me and what is not me, when actually there isn’t.

Julian at Castle Rigg stone circle, Cumbria, in his final years

Part of our deeper psyche oozes over to the other side, and on a more regular basis than we might think. This happens especially when a loved one, or a person who is important to us, dies. Part of us goes over with them, and it’s important to give time and space to experience that. It’s a blessed, spacious feeling, and a great gift. That feeling of inner connection with a deceased soul can be quite strong in the first few weeks. Over the course of a year, that emigrant soul will come back clearly at times. You get a flash of them – if only a glimpse – and you feel them and their vibe quite distinctly. So listen and talk back – this is important.

That’s how it works with ancestors. Early in human history, when we lived in genetically-defined tribes, souls would tend to recycle within the tribe’s psycho-spiritual field. We modern people have now burst out of our tribes, seeking experiential variety and following a multiplicity of possibilities. Both genetically and as souls we have become remarkably mixed and mongrelised. We’ve been at it for millennia.

But there are also specific threads that pertain to our own personal life-stories and interpersonal histories. People in our past have acted as beacons of light, rescuers, enemies, teachers, harmers, questioners and friends to us, and they live within us now, and it’s a personal thing. Or it might be a tribal or group-soul thing – a concatenation of souls with a shared identity and purpose.

Ancestors continue to live through us. They watch and witness from another place, sometimes lending a hand or dropping thoughts into our heads, or acting as an element of memory, as a model of how to do things, or how not to do things, that helps us shape the lives we live now.

One of my key guiding ancestors was a man who was alive in the mid-19th Century in South Wales, where he was well-known as a healer of last resort. Doctors would refer patients to him if they felt they could do no more. Apparently he was a curmudgeonly, difficult old git, with a big, white, Karl Marx beard, though he had a glint in his eye too. At times he would disappear up into the mountains on his horse, leaving the world behind, to collect herbs and spend time on his own. Yet he was gifted with a wondrous ability. He would reappear, back from the mountains, and people would come to him.

I first met him, inside myself, when I was young, during an inner journey on my third acid trip, in 1967. Over time he has returned, as if watching me, especially at critical points in life. It took some years of questioning relatives to find out who he was. He had been an embarrassment to the family, so he was not well remembered. But he was well-known and he did apparently save a lot of lives. He still turns up on the movie-screen of my psyche every now and then, and he’s both a genetic and a spirit-ancestor to me. And I am a bit like him too.

In this life I’ve been involved with large numbers of people, organising events, running groups, standing on stages, muttering down microphones, writing books and building websites, connecting deeply with many amazing souls. I’m aware that, having played a catalytic, key-turning role in many people’s lives, that makes me a kind of spirit-ancestor to at least some of them – once I’ve popped my clogs, that is.

So, after I’ve gone from this life, please do remember to check me out every now and then. Or if you find me checking you out, please do say hello. See whether there’s a message in it for you. I’ll pop up in your thoughts for a micro-second, and you’ll get a distinct feeling of me that comes with it.

But it’s not just that. This is a two-way thing. Being up in ‘heaven’, lacking an earthly body, it means that, if we ancestors want to get stuff done on Earth, we need to get people to do it on our behalf. This gets tricky. Modern humans suffer doubt, thinking that such thoughts are ‘just imagination’, and setting them aside. This can be frustrating for a soul on the other side: try talking to someone on Earth and they just ignore you and walk away! However, we can meet you in your dreams, and sometimes such interactions percolate through into waking-life – into what we call consciousness.

One of the things I am glad about is that, throughout life, I have often followed these promptings. I wake up with a feeling, an inspiration or a compulsion to do something, big or small (this blog about ancestors being one example), and I feel driven to do it. There’s a certain magic that comes with such downloads, a feeling that the prompting points towards something that is genuinely supposed to be. The outcomes from prompts like this can be much bigger than anticipated too.

Acting as an ancestor is rather a choice and a commitment. It’s a resolution to be available and of service to souls who remain in the land of the living, and service to the universe’s wider agendas. You don’t automatically become an ancestor just by dying: it’s a choice to be present, accessible and involved.

It also depends on how others see you, as a sort of role model or example. On some level, and whether or not people are conscious of it, you become a star in their inner firmament. You become a watcher. You cannot interfere, though you can lay seeds of possibility and simply be there for people.

Here’s the main reason I’m dwelling on this. From an earthly viewpoint, my health and condition have been deteriorating in recent months. I find I’m becoming less focused on, and interested in, the world around me. More often, I find myself floating off and disengaging, interiorised and seeing the world more like an outsider, once-removed.

I remember this when my Sagittarian father was in his nineties. I’d take him on adventures – he liked that. He would fall asleep during the journey but, when the engine stopped and he awoke, there before us would be a panorama over the mountains or the sea. We’d sit there sharing a flask of tea, sometimes going for a slow walk. Or I would go for a walk and he’d fall asleep. I was giving him a last look at the world, and we’d visit some of his favourite places. He died over a decade ago, but we still nod and wink to each other across the dimensions. Those were valuable moments.

We certainly are multidimensional intelligences, and this becomes more and more apparent as we approach death. Except, as intelligences, we don’t always use our full intelligence. Jean Piaget, a sociologist, once said, ‘Intelligence is not about what you know, it’s about what you do when you don’t know’.

Indeed. This is the story of life on Earth. It’s a life filled with paradox and improvisation, and we each have a different instruction manual and a unique experiential path to follow, just to complicate things.

I’ve just begun revising my cancer book, Blessings that Bones Bring – it needs to be shortened and sharpened. The book is a distillation of relevant material from my cancer-and-life blog, Notes from the Far Beyond. It’s in both digital and audiobook formats.

Next there is a question of how to end the book, since a cancer story, in my case at least, ends when I die. However, I’m not dead yet and, after death, I won’t be able to write the final chapter. That’s one of those paradoxes. I haven’t figured out what to do about ending the book, but something will work out.

So that’s my project for the next few weeks – apart from getting through each day. At this late-life stage, it’s a matter of completing what I can of the flapping threads of my life, while I still can, even though existence is twice as difficult as it used to be before cancer along.

I hope this rather rambling blog makes some sense. Perhaps I’ll return to this ancestor theme another time. I might be losing the plot, going off at tangents, but something else is dawning inside. In the land of the living it looks as if things are going wrong and I am deteriorating, but in the land of the soul something new is starting up. Or perhaps I’m getting a re-training in how to function in the rather rarefied consciousness-realm where ancestors spend much of their timeless time. I wonder if they serve good tea there?

This doesn’t really feel like a journey into the Great Unknown: instead, it feels like going home. It was this life that was all about the Great Unknown – a life in a world where we drive bulldozers through the laws of the universe. We flail around in the choppy seas of earthly experience, bumping up against things and people, struggling to make sense of a pervasive fiction that we call ‘reality’. However, at the end of it we are permitted to go home, and our bruises and wounds are attended to – if, that is, we allow it. If we don’t allow it, we start our next life carrying the baggage, hurt and aberrations of the life or the lives we had before.

Meanwhile, if you’re in the mood for some seriously moving rock’n’roll, here’s a remarkable musical rendering of the dying process, in a Christian cultural context: Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPI3E0Sxs0E

Love from me, Palden

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Interesting click-clacks:
+ Cancer book, Blessings that Bones Bring (original 2024 version): https://www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html
+ Blog, Notes from the Far Beyond: https://penwithbeyond.blog
+ From the AHA Class, a talk: Getting Dead, and What Happens Afterwards: https://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-dying.html

The Slow Demise

of a new age pontificator

I’m moving towards the end of six decades of public speaking and teaching. I feel it in my aching bones and sluggish brains – what’s left of them. My synapses have run almost enough marathons for this lifetime. But I think I’ll last until the end of this year, inshallah. So I’m going to do a few talks and classes during the rest of 2026. That is, if people invite me, and if it’s doable.

I was thinking recently about my capacity earlier in life to hold and convey vastnesses of information and big, wide perspectives. In my audio archive there are talks from thirtyish years ago, and some of that stuff surprises me now. Gosh, was that me? Was it in this life or another? The audio archive is here: https://www.palden.co.uk/audio-archive.html

I’ve always been rather a polymath, covering a range of subjects. A typical hyper-focused Aspergers type, I became a veritable expert in each subject I took on, and subject to occasional bursts of genius. But that’s what I did in mid-life, and now I’m rather a worn out, ponderous old hippy veteran who’s seeing things in more of a reflective way. More transdimensional. But I still have a few more things to share.

I’m doing a talk in Penzance as part of the Golowan Festival around summer solstice, courtesy of an old friend and neighbour, Na Nook. (Info: The Cornish Sacred Landscape.) I’ll be holding forth on the prehistoric society of West Penwith in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

This is about the ancients’ worldview, their optic, their magic and their society, as demonstrated in the ancient sites they left behind. That’s fascinating, though what’s most important is that we need to learn from the ancients – it’s growing in relevance today. I’m really happy with the discoveries I’ve made about Penwith’s ancient sites in the last fifteen years. This is a kind of final statement of where I’ve come to on that matter.

As usual for me, it’ll take 20-30 years for people to really get what I’m talking about – being ahead of the times has been both a blessing and a bane in life. Hence, I’m leaving an extensive online archive which, I hope, will stay intact and available for at least thirty years! Perhaps its time will come. In the archive there’s some interesting stuff from the 1990s – some of you might enjoy Paldywan Kenobi’s Millennial Master Class from 1995.

At the JustLiveCamp at Morvah, in Penwith, Cornwall, 23–29 May, a community camp in sacred Cornwall, I’ll be giving a talk about quoits, stone circles and cliff sanctuaries. Chun Quoit is just up the hill from the camp, and I’ll happily transport those who are present on a journey into the Neolithic, 5,000 years ago, to connect with those times – the much-forested times when Chun Quoit and Chun Castle were first built.

If I can, I hope to make a trip around parts of Britain during this year, to see old friends and haunts. As you might gather, my health and mental acuity are approaching a stage where making coherent talks is becoming less possible, but if there are invitations to speak, and if it’s doable (I have to be brought by a driver-minder) then I’ll do my best!

I hope to be able to keep on with podcasts – they’re still doable. Blogs are more difficult because my fingers no longer work well. A lot of people think voice recognition programmes are a solution but, no, they take so much re-editing and correction work that I find they don’t necessarily help. Besides, written English is a little different from spoken English.

Perhaps I need a digital assistant – someone living nearby with networking and literacy skills who would like to manage my online process as I pass away. To the right person this could be really interesting, since I have a large archive of material which can easily be recycled. We shall see. Magic happens – and sometimes it doesn’t, and something else happens instead!

Anyway, here’s a new podcast about ancient sites. I pose the simple question, why do people like visiting ancient sites? We need to look at this question. We need to be honest about a few things. I believe we need to get a bit more serious about ancient sites and what they mean for us now. It’s here:

All things being well, my penultimate book, Shining Land – the ancient sites of West Penwith and what they say about megalithic civilisation, might come out in printed form before long. It already exists in digital and audiobook format, and it’s here: https://www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/

My final book, Blessings that Bones Bring, is going through a review and hopefully will emerge as a second edition by the end of the year. Or sometime – in Cornwall we say ‘dreckly‘. Clare, one of my helper-angels, is assisting with that. It’s made up of re-edited cancer-related extracts from my cancer blog.

It gives the inside story about being a spiritually-oriented cancer patient, and about cancer as a spiritual path and process – a path of awakening, acceptance and completion. As I say somewhere in the book, doctors saved my life and healers gave me a new life – and this is how it has been.

Everything that begins and is born eventually comes to an end. This is the nature of life. This is our learning. We come here to master this. It’s all in the grand scheme of things and, guess what, it’s a training for a greater life. Yes, folks, there’s further to go.

Just remember: you are on a journey, and this life in a physical body, on a dense, spinning and rather troubled planet, is but a stage along that path.

Oh, and while we’re here, I invite you to join me and a widely-spread group of shining souls in the Sunday Meditation, any and every Sunday. Come and waste half an hour with us, for a homoeopathic dose of infinity.

Whether or not you do so, please put in a prayer for all those people round the world whose lives are being devastated by the military actions of fucking assholes who believe they can bend people to their will and their geopolitical delusions by bombing hell out of them. Both the bombers and the bombed are to be pitied, each for their own reasons, and may the 21st Century be the final century in which this kind of insanity is permitted to happen.

Yes, permitted. You can go on as much as you like about Illuminati, Reptilians, Bilderbergers, Oligarchs or any Them you can name, but, in the end, it is we, humanity, who permit all this madness to happen. It is in our hands. We can do it. It has to be done.

With love, Palden

BTW: I was given the nickname Paldywan Kenobi in 1986 by a boy, then aged about eight, in a rather deep, hot and heavy talking-stick sharing circle at the time of Chernobyl, and the name kinda stuck. He stood there with the stick before him like knight holding a medieval standard, uttering words of power that I can’t remember but I’ll never forget. He’s William Cartwright, nowadays a rock musician in Glastonbury. This is where children become our teachers. And our parents.

Helpers

If you ever get a serious late life illness such as cancer (and there’s a good chance you will, even if you’ve looked after yourself, as I had), or simply if you’re growing older and more decrepit, you come to a stage where you need help. You just can’t do all the things you used to be able to do.

When I was younger I could open every jar, reach things down from high places, safely drive everyone home after a party when they were tired and stoned, and overcome many challenges that now are well beyond my scope. Nowadays I don’t have the strength to open stuck jars, some logs I can’t chop, and if I took the lead of my neighbour’s sweet dog it would pull me over. Sometimes I’m really useless. I can’t drive any more either – what, me, a traveller-soul with Gemini Moon and Sagittarius rising?

Yesterday was like that. I’m on a new drug which is supposed to help with peripheral neuropathy – it’s called Amitriptyline and I’m not getting on well with it. It’s draining my energy, my head is befogged, I’m losing my balance and I’m just sitting here in an armchair like a sackful of manglewurzels.

On days like that I really appreciate some help, often just with small things – things to make life a bit easier because, in my situation, life is twice as difficult as it once was, and more painful too. Just standing upright is strenuous, and going for a walk for half a mile takes a lot of focus and willpower.

People often ask, “Anything I can get you?” This doesn’t work – my brain blanks out. Writing a shopping list isn’t easy: that’s left-brained stuff that I’m no longer good at. So, often, I’ll say No, when actually I should say Yes, but I can’t in that moment think of anything I need. Five minutes later, my intuitive right-brain will start working, and I’ll remember. But it’s already too late. That’s tricky.

Managing this process can at first be quite confronting, because it requires opening up to the generosity of others. You can’t complain if they get the wrong thing or turn up late when you’re stuck in a rainstorm – after all, they’re doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. The secret is to hold your silence and appreciate the gifts you’ve been given, even if it’s raining – then you mention it diplomatically at a later moment. Don’t complain.

There are different kinds of help, and it’s necessary to clarify this. Some people try too hard to help and fuss too much, or they might not have the right skills, or they might not be emotionally sensitive, or they might be a dodgy driver – so it’s important to find the right kinds of people, and sometimes one must be frank with people about this.

You get quite close to your helpers. I have a new helper who has been with me for a few weeks, and it’s working well, but it is still taking her time to figure out where everything is in my little house, and how I like things to be. She’s attentive to that, and that’s good, and we have interesting discussions too, because part of the benefit she brings me is some company (since I spend most of my time alone).

But it’s not just that. I have a wider group of friends, FoP – Friends of Palden. They help me in all sorts of big and little ways. But most of them don’t see me very often. So the first thing they do, and sincerely, is to ask me “How are you?”. That’s not the right thing to do. I need you to look at me, watch and witness me and tell me what you observe. If you ask me “How are you?” at different times of day, I will give quite different answers too.

Besides, it’s not easy being asked how I am five or six times a day. I have to assess myself and give some sort of answer, and there are times when that works fine and other times when it’s actually rather difficult. Instead, you could tell me how you are. So, sometimes, when someone asks me “How are you?”, I just say, “I’m like this!”, opening out my arms. I invite you to make your own assessment, because your observations of me are more useful than my own observations of me.

Special qualities… well, one key quality is reliability. You see, if someone rings me up just before they’re due to come, saying “Oh, sorry, I’m too busy, can we make it next Tuesday instead?”, that can be tricky too. Well, yes, we can, and that’s kinda okay, but actually it makes quite a big difference, even if I can’t at this very moment say why, or give a list of things that needed doing. So it is good to have people coming along reasonably regularly. Not least because the number of e-mails and messages that can otherwise be generated can be staggering, when things lapse into ball-juggling flexi-territory.

Also, there’s the matter of the computer and phone. If I don’t respond, what does this mean? Am I in bed, gone out, sitting on the toilet or dead? Should someone check me out? Or perhaps they decide not to bother me. A helper who knows me well, with a little intuition on top, can usually figure this out. But if I am dead, then it helps to discover this before I start smelling too much.

Regularity also helps because of memory issues. It can be quite challenging and complicated managing a group of four, five or six people who are all in changeable states. So recently I’ve managed to sort things out rather differently. I’ve now got two ‘reliable regulars’ and then a number of occasionals and reservists, and that works well.

The two regulars cover me three days a week – they come for an hour or two on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays – and then the occasionals come when they can, or drive me to Treliske hospital (thirtyish miles), or take me out somewhere… or things like that, on a more flexible basis.

The funny thing is that one of my reliable regulars is called Claire, and the other is called Clare – just to confuse things! Perhaps my Anima is telling me something, though I’m not sure what.

But actually, for it to really work, it’s necessary for a person to get to know me more closely than they normally would. This includes seeing me in my weak states, at times when I’m quite helpless, and I might need tenderness of a kind that wouldn’t usually happen with friends who come to socialise. Other times, I’m quite bright, cheerful and able, and there isn’t much for my helper to do, so we sit, drink tea and chat, and that’s really good too.

There’s something nice about this because I’m no longer seeking one-to-one relationship (been there, done that), which in this era of toxic maleness, makes me a reasonably safe bet. I’m not going to try it on. There’s also a difference between depending on help and emotional dependency – something that can get confused and tangly in close relationships.

Claire, who has worked with me for eighteen months now, has really got me sussed. When we go shopping she knows what I’m looking for, so she wanders off, comes back and puts things in the basket, with a knowing smile, and that’s really useful. She points things out to me and helps with the most difficult part at the end when we’re checking out.

She packs the bags and keeps the cashier entertained while I fumble around with cards, lists and last-minute memory-eruptions. I find that last bit really exhausting. Then she drives me home, puts stuff in the fridge, unpacks the bags, makes some tea and leaves me to rest and defragment. I’m happy with that. But that arises from the fact that she’s got to know me. She can read me off.

This matters a lot because my brains have been affected by chemotherapy – they call it chemo-brain. My executive functions – the left-brain stuff – are a lot weaker now. So although I’m quite brainy, I have difficulty figuring out certain things. It helps to have someone around who’s like a second brain, who will remind me to take my pills, or to be ready to go, or to remember to take something with me, or perhaps to tell me that my complexion is not very good today, or making useful observations and suggestions.

So if you’re in a situation rather like mine, as a net recipient of help, it’s worth giving some thought to the different kinds of help you might need, and the different kinds of people who will be good at giving it – and enjoying doing so. One male friend of mine, Kai, loves going shopping for me and he’s really good at it, and I can say to him, “Oh, just use your commonsense…” when he asks whether I’d prefer this or that, because I know he’ll get the right thing and, if he doesn’t, that’ll be interesting and useful too. On the other hand, he’s not so good at making tea, so I don’t expect it of him – I enjoy making tea for him instead. After all, this is about energy-exchange. I only get to see him occasionally (he’s a Gemini, travelling a lot), but this works well because both of us have identified how we slot into each other, given the circumstances we each have.

There’s a big sociological problem going on here. It’s this. Everyone is busy rushing around, racing timetables and to-do lists. They are time-poor. It’s a deep cultural and psychological thing in our society. This time-poverty sometimes makes things difficult. Occasionally I need a person to slow down to my speed, and at times it’s really good for them to do that, and they are grateful for it – it’s something I can give.

But people who are just fitting me into their busy timetable… well, that can be difficult. I remember, I did this once to a soul-sister with breast cancer – I’m sorry, Lily, but I was up to my neck in stuff and felt unable to stretch into your space. I realised this only when I got cancer and experienced others doing it to me. Us men, it can take us a while to realise these things, but we do get there in the end. Well, a lot of us do: toxic males make a lot of noise, but new men are more numerous than we appear to be.

This is to do with the way our society is today. We have become alienated and atomised as a society, and many of our family and community energy-saving mechanisms have deteriorated or disappeared. My own family is a case in point. I have four grown up children and seven grandchildren, and they’re all lovely people, and they do care, and they’ve got busy lives to pursue, and we live quite a long distance from each other and in two different countries. In truth, that’s mainly my fault, not theirs, since it was I who chose to live at the far end of Cornwall, a long way from everyone else!

Living and working in Palestine taught me a lot. I’d been brought up in a NW European Protestant environment, where you’re supposed to pay for all that you receive and deserve all that you get. If you go to any Muslim country (including Iran), you quickly find out that it is offensive to try to pay for other people’s generosity or to return the favour. You are depriving them of the right to give. To them, everything comes from God and returns to God, so they’re just channelling the infinite beneficence of Allah. Hindus do this too. So you have to develop other ways of circulating the energy, and this has nothing to do with returning the favour or paying your way.

These are guilt-driven, obsolete Christian beliefs – all about indebtedness and original sin. The result is that we live in a mean-hearted, capitalist society made up of a few winners and lots of losers, which doesn’t really care for the weak and needy, because everyone is busy pursuing our own paths through life and, in the end, we don’t have enough time for each other!

Arabs taught me how to receive. This opens up channels of sharing and mutuality. It creates an inherently supportive society, a generosity economy where there is little need for professional carers or babysitters because the extended family or the community can handle it. I learned something about the Christian virtue of giving without counting the cost – a practice that works well in a society where everyone does it. But it’s more difficult in a society where only some do.

I might need help, but even in my needy condition, it’s also a matter of what I can offer. Support is a two-way thing. I can’t do a lot now, but the funny thing is that some of my helpers simply enjoy coming to sit in my nice, warm, radiation-free cabin, drinking tea, chatting and doing nothing much at all. They can slow down for a while before they have to return to the madding crowd or to shepherd their elusive teenagers around.

On a good day they might also have a lightbulb moment, arising from a conversation that we have over tea and biscuits. Yes, one thing that useless old codgers like me can still deliver is the occasional gem of insight and perspective, helping people remember that this is not the end of the world and that everything turns full circle in the course of time. It’s all alright, really, even when you don’t quite know why or how.

There’s some sort of energy-circulation going on with FoP and with friends and acquaintances further afield. I have soul-sister, Jo, in Oz, and we haven’t seen each other for thirty years, yet we’re still close. In some respects I feel a bit like a cosmic-energy server, operating in a psychic network of souls near and far that functions of its own accord, on a mysterious level where we get only faint intimations of what’s really going on between us.

Perhaps that’s why I spend a lot of time alone nowadays, to give space to tune in to all those people, dead or alive, who resonate on a similar soul-network to the one I’m on. Twenty years ago I lived at the bottom of Glastonbury Tor – a distinctly noisier kind of energy-place in comparison with West Penwith, where I live now, sitting on a granitic pile of crystals in the wild Atlantic.

I’ve said enough. I might return to this theme another time. There’s more to say, but I can’t think what it might be. Except for this…

At age fifty I realised that I had no capital or savings. So I chose to trust in building up my social and spiritual capital, and to work at it. I decided to make it as easy, pleasant and rewarding as I could for people to help me, when the time came that I would need help, and to stay useful right to the very end. Us Virgos, we need to feel useful. I’ve screwed up a good few times with this but, since cancer came to me in 2019, I’ve been much blessed with fine helpers and minders, and I’m really grateful for that. Including Lynne. I mean, really, really grateful, and thank you all for that. And the funny thing is that it all ends with a funeral!

Love, Palden

Uninspiration

I can’t remember who gave me this pic, but thanks anyway! It is taken on the coast path from Land’s End to Pordenack Point – one of my favourite haunts.

Recently I’ve been feeling rather uninspired. Saturn and Neptune are in opposition to my natal Mercury, and I’m feeling it. Mercury is a key planet in my chart and, since the age of fourteen, for better and for worse, I’ve been a big communicator, and the struggle to clarify my ideas and make myself understood has been a key part of my growth. When I was a boy I was quiet and shy – would you believe? – and it took until my teenage years to find my voice and until age 36 to become good enough as a writer.

It’s kind of like drying up, this uninspiration. It’s a feeling that I’ve said all that I can say – and I’m not one for repeating myself. I’ve also been wondering how much people are interested – though this is often solved by spending time with someone to find out what’s going on for them.

And so I took another tack – after all I’m rather a workaholic, continually looking for new things to do to keep myself occupied. Nowadays, although I’m reasonably noisy online, I spend most of my life alone and quiet. In another world.

This is the farm where I live, in the far west of Cornwall

Over the last few years I’ve been turning my website into an archive. After all, it’s thirty years old now (started in 1994), and I’ve been adding bits to it every few years which, with a bit of tweaking has been gradually turned into an archive over the last two years. I don’t have money or property to leave to my descendants but, for what it’s worth, they are getting a digital estate, and I’ve often had the feeling that a few of my seven grandchildren might find some treasure there.

A while ago, I was tooling through some old radio programmes which I made twenty years ago, when I lived in Glastonbury, and they were surprisingly good. Especially since, in comparison to many of the talking-heads podcasts which are pouring out now online, the content was really rich, good, original and quite unique. This is partially because Glastonbury is a place which is a source of new ideas and initiatives, and some of the people living there are true originators in their fields.

It was not difficult to bring in old friends to provide interesting material for this programme. I called it This is the Light Programme. That’s a bit of an older generation joke: it refers to a time before about 1970 when BBC Radio had just three channels – the Home Service, the World Service and the Light Programme.

So I have been reviving many of the interviews in those programmes and creating a new section of my archive called Recycling Light – this was the Light Programme. The first few programmes will be coming out soon on the new moon, and I shall continue reworking more of them, making them ready to add to the list of Recycled Light programmes.

And yes, on the whole, when I post a blog or a podcast, I do it at astrologically auspicious moments – this matter of timing is more important than most people think. So this blog was uploaded with Jupiter rising, Mercury on the Midheaven and lots of planets in the tenth house. That’ll do.

I’m recycling these programmes because of the quality of the ideas coming through them. The first is the story of two Glastonbury characters who had been involved in the Middle East – one, Colette Barnard, was in Tehran at the time of the ayatollahs’ revolution in the late 1970s, and the other, Tom Clark, has been involved with funding and supporting progressive projects in the Middle East, particularly women’s and backchannel diplomacy projects. So the first programme is a really interesting interview with these two characters.

The second programme is an interview with Peter Taylor, a critical scientist, ecologist and shaman. He and I have been dialoguing for decades, cousins of the soul, sharing a political-spiritual activist approach to our respective areas of work. He used to be a scientific adviser to Greenpeace in the 1980s and also to government and United Nations bodies on ecological matters, and he is a detractor in the climate question and also one of the inventors and early advocates of the concept of rewilding, a concept which is now accepted but, thirty years ago, it was an entirely new idea and quite radical. What? Wolves? Beavers? Weeds and scrub? Well, yes.

The third programme involves two old friends who, like me, have been involved in researching alternative archaeology and prehistory. One, Sig Lonegren, is a dowser, who can find information about ancient sites which the majority of us have no access to at all. Now in his eighties, he has been a major contributor to the field of earth mysteries. The second, Bruce Garrard, has been doing a lot of thinking about the early origins of human society – particularly of the question of gender and the historic formation of gender roles. So they have interesting things to say.

That’s where I rest and sleep. When resting I can watch the swallows, buzzards and jackdaws outside.

It was a great privilege to make that programme. It was weekly, and we did it for a year. Each programme was three hours long. Unfortunately I have had to take the music out, for rights reasons, and to rework it into a new format, but it turned out that this was a good thing to do. My son Tulki, who was then eleven years old, was the studio manager – he used to run the controls. He and I work well together. Now he’s turning thirty. Time moves on.

So in a few days time, I’m coming out with something new on my website. It’s become a really big site over the years, as I have added bits and chunks to it every couple of years. Partially it’s a manifestation of the story of my life, of being one who has advocated ideas which, in general, are right for the world, but which the world is not ready for or interested in accepting.

This has been the story of my life and that of many other people of my generation – particularly the drop-outs. We’ve had to live and work as ‘alternative types’, playing our part in society from the periphery, not from the centre.

When I was lying in a hospital bed with cancer six years ago, being eyeballed by Death and reviewing my life, I realised that I needed to leave as much as I could online, just in case it becomes relevant and useful in the future. Because the need can arise to refer back to the original people who first thought up the ideas which have become commonplace as time has gone on.

Many of the things that I’ve believed in and advocated have been roughly twenty to thirty years ahead of their mainstream adoption – or at least the beginning of it. So I’m leaving this archive in the hope that it becomes useful to someone in the future.

So when the new moon comes along I’ll be launching this new segment of my website called Recycling Light, and I hope you find it useful and interesting.

That’s the view from my bed. On that hill is an ancient site called Caer Bran – around 3,500 years ago it was the parliament site for the clans of Belerion, or West Penwith.

Now it’s time to have breakfast – before it’s lunchtime. And I have to work out what pills to take this morning. As a cancer patient I am given lots of pills, but if you adopt a holistic approach to cancer treatment, then it’s double trouble because there are loads of supplements and other therapies to take pills for too! Groan.

(Though if you follow this route, I recommend keeping the pharma drugs and the holistics separate – taking them at different times of day, with food between them – since they operate according to different principles and in some cases can conflict.)

There’s a gift in everything. A state of uninspiration has led to a state of audio-recycling.

With love, Palden
www.palden.co.uk

This is why my wee hoose is called The Lookout. On the right is my desk, where I do much of my work – such as this blog.

Clog-Popping

Once I encountered a paper bag, and on the side was printed, ‘Recycled materials – do come again’. Yes indeed, if that is your path. There’s also the option of going beyond.

But that depends a lot on what we do with the life we have, and the way we played our hand of cards.

This is one of the best blogs I’ve written and it’s time to give it another spin. It’s all about dying, and prepping for it while we’re alive.

ET, go home

With love, Palden

The Rigours and Gifts of Cancer

Ancient guardian at Pordenack Point, Cornwall. Busy watching.

Quite a few people have followed my outpourings because I’m a cancer patient with some deep and wide perspectives on it. I’m one of those who was told I had perhaps a year to live (and it felt like it), and here I still am, six years later.

I haven’t said much about cancer recently. Partially because I’ve said a lot already and tend not to repeat myself. However, there are recent friends and followers out there who haven’t had the full story.

I’m mulling it all over… and that’s part of the reason for relative silence on it. My cancer book ‘Blessings that Bones Bring’, available on my site, is undergoing a revision, and a new version will come out sometime – here in Cornwall we say ‘dreckly’. It needs to be shorter and more focused on what matters most to cancer patients and their helpers. Some new reflections are brewing, but my psyche moves slowly nowadays…

If you need something now, then go to my podcast page and look for the ‘Cancer and Dying’ section. To get a sense of the progression from earlier to later days, start from the bottom and work upwards. It’s here:

https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

There’s a lot about cancer here on my blog, but it’s all jumbled up. Here is one blog giving an overview of what happened for me and how I handled it: https://penwithbeyond.blog/2024/05/11/blessings-that-bones-bring/

I have an incurable blood cancer called Multiple Myeloma – it can only be managed and held at bay, medically. It affects the bones: the first sign, in my case, was that the four bottom vertebrae in my back collapsed and, from that day on, my life changed. Rather painfully at first.

I became a partially-disabled old crock. It was a soul-shift. I’m not sure whether I went down with cancer or went up with it. But it confirmed and tested a life-lesson I had already learned, that everything in life is a gift.

Repeat: everything in life is a gift. Especially at those times when it doesn’t feel like it.

Time spent in Palestine taught me that, though cancer took it to a new level. As a peacemaker, I distinctly disbelieve in the notion of ‘fighting cancer’ – and as it happens, I’m still alive, so there might be something in it.

Cancer is not a failure or an aberration – it is a gift. It is an awakener. It presents hard facts and profound choices. This is about free will at its deepest level. Surrender. Acceptance like you’ve never accepted before.

Living with cancer is very difficult, and that’s the point. It confronts us on why we’re here and what it’s all about.

I’m in a different life now, drawing on the mixed outcomes of the life I’ve had, but it feels like a different life. Funny, that.

Anyway, I woke up with this morning with the thought to reconnect with fellow cancer-experiencers, and something is brewing, and I just wanted to say that.

If you’re struggling through the darkness, just keep going. On a soul level, during times like that we make a lot of progress.

Love, Palden

Hell’s Bells

They came. And they went. They went scorching along the south coast of Britain toward the Netherlands. The storm gods, that is. It was a right old holy hoolie, a demonstration of the Power and the Glory for everyone in Cornwall to hide away from. And we did.

It’s one of those situations where you just have to huddle down, say your prayers and wait. One of those situations where even proudly hubristic secular rationalists start saying a prayer, just in case. You have to wait until it’s over, because it’s no longer in your power to do anything much else.

The winds were resolute, firm and consistent, not blustery or tricksy – they were forceful, merciless and thoroughly unrestrained. This was what in capitalism they call a hostile take-over. No consultation, no regard for human rights, no compassion: just the energy and might of a full-on Atlantic storm, a gift of the gods to remind us how small we are and how easy it is to wipe us out and dispose of us, if Nature so chooses.

Too often, we arrogant, self-centred, comfort-addicted humans forget this. It’s not that difficult for Nature to blink or cough, sending us beetling off to Heaven in our thousands, for the angels to sort out. Well, I’m heading that way anyway, sometime soon, and if the weather gods wish to take me today, getting in there first before the cancer gods get me, then what a way to go. I won’t complain. You have to get to Heaven somehow, after all, and in this there is no choice except for timing and method.

But it was okay. The lights went off and I sat in bed, reading in candlelight a novel about the Dreyfus Affair of 1890s France – as it happens, topically, a prime example of institutional anti-Semitism if ever there was one. Then I dropped off to sleep, with 100mph winds screeching over my little cabin, The Lookout.

They were coming from the northwest, and a hill stands there behind the farm, sheltering us from the Atlantic vastness, 3,000 miles of it, and it was okay. Had the winds been coming from the south, as in some of the storms of 2014, there would have been trouble on the farm. We were okay, but across Cornwall a lot of people were not, and many trees lost their lives. I found myself wondering what small birds do in super-storms like this, like the tits, dunnets and the robin who patronise the feeder outside my door.

Anyhow, I’m a survivor, and programmed up for it. Well, much of the time. The main dangers I have faced in my life have been from humans – control-freaky Israeli soldiers, nervy Palestinian freedom fighters, gritty ISIS terrorists and crack-addled Nigerian criminals – and the force of Nature has a more comforting side to it.

It is mighty, threatening and decisive, administering justice in a remarkably even-handed way and singling out all those things you’d failed to notice or do anything about during calmer times, making them fly. But it speaks the words of The Ultimate, and no one can argue with that – even The Donald, living as he does in a hurricane corridor called Florida, the land of the flowers, who badly needs to realise that he is not God and never will be.

But human dangers are another matter, and with them you’re dealing with a different, more capricious and regrettable kind of randomness.

When I woke up there was no power or water. Jon, the farmer, was clearing up the mess in the farmyard – the roof of his woodshed had radically repositioned itself. There was no phone signal, so a neighbour had driven to where there was a signal, finding out that we might, with luck, expect power back Friday afternoon. It took until Saturday afternoon.

Well and good. Except there’s one problem. Why is it that the power always returns just at that moment when you’re beginning to enjoy the calm and the candlelight?

But I do have a woodstove, and it soon was alight. There was the light of a lovely golden dawn over the valley, exhibiting another kind of Power and Glory from that of the night before. The birds were very quiet, probably a bit groggy after a long, trying midwinter night. There was no sign of the flight of geese who pass over the farm in the morning, hooting and croaking to the Void as if sadly lamenting the insecurity and non-attachment that migrating animals have to accept. They’d probably come from Greenland, Iceland or Norway, now wondering whether they might have been better to stay there.

So I pottered around. The worst that can happen is that the food in my freezer defrosts. No bombs are falling, and no earthquake-aftershocks are to be expected. Before long a saucepan was on the woodstove, warming up for the first pot of tea. I stumbled down into the farmyard and along the track to check a neighbour – yes, she was okay and huddling in bed with her dog. I came back, making my walking-stick work hard, poured the tea and read more of my book. Then I rooted around in the cupboards and found a Tilda pack of lemon and herb rice – and that went on the stove too, with some grapes thrown in.

One of the best meals I’ve ever had was during an Israeli lockdown on the West Bank. People in the rich world, all neurotic about our loss of freedoms, complained loudly during the Covid lockdowns, but with an Israeli lockdown, well, if you go out, you risk getting shot – it’s quite simple. Israeli troops are trained to shoot first and think later. In circumstances such as this, a kind of culinary gallows humour takes over and, using what you have in the cupboards, some amazing feasts can be had.

This is partially a perceptual issue. At a Palestinian refugee quarter outside Damascus, since I was a European with some diplomatic skills, I went out to see if I could find some food for the family I was staying with. We outsiders sometimes could get to places and negotiate things that others could not – though it would depend, of course, on the mood and values of any gun-toting man you met along the way, and whether they spoke English, German, Swedish or French. My ageing, sixty-something brains were having difficulty absorbing Arabic.

I usually managed to convince them I was a decent chap. Arabs are good at reading your body-language. Anyway, it was my lucky day and I came back with a shoulder-bag of bread – including, strangely, a plastic-wrapped pack of German pumpernickel. We had a true feast – of bread, with a few old, chewy olives thrown in. And, believe me, it was a wondrous and happy feast. Palestinians are well used to this kind of thing, though they have one weak point: they go through big coffee-withdrawal problems during lockdowns and hard times.

People often ask me what I used to do in Palestine and Syria. Well, I’ve done three books and an audiobook on the matter (links below), but the short answer is, things like this. Such as finding bread for a family to eat because, in the circumstances, I had the capacity to do so. It’s a small matter, finding food, but a meal can have a big effect on people’s mood and welfare. And you get to eat something too.

So a Cornish winter hoolie, well, it takes me back to that alert, resigned, improvisational, ready-to-run state that you get into when stuck in an emergency. You’re out of control of your fate, yet strangely in control too – though it’s necessary to leave the fear until later. In a funny sort of way it brings out the best in me. Comfortably normal regularity is not my forte, as my former partners can easily testify.

My computer battery is running out and I’ve said enough. I’ve been churning out verbiage for a whole lifetime, so no more is necessary. And, as usual, I’ve forgotten my tea and it has gone cold. So I’ll put my mug on the woodstove and, lo behold, in a few minutes it’ll be warm again. What simple delight can be found in small mercies.

And, as Arabs often say, Allahu Akbar, God is Great. Life is a wondrous thing. It’s a gift that’s worth cherishing while we have it. As something of an expert in other worlds and their characteristics, I can safely inform you that the tea on Earth is the best in the whole Universe. If you don’t believe me, your turn will come to find out.

However, compensations are available in Heaven. It’s a cool place to be, so don’t worry about the tea or other such things. Other things matter there. But just make sure that, when your own time comes, you’ve had enough of the experiences of this world to have, in another sense, truly had enough of them.

With love, Palden.

Pictures of Palestine: www.palden.co.uk/pop/
Palestine audiobook: www.palden.co.uk/bethlehemblog.html

Looking Within

This time of year it’s easy to feel battered by life. Things just get to be too much. This is part of the syndrome of modern times – we get overloaded and stressed, landing up in a routine of juggling too many balls, and we lose our way. We end up wondering what it’s all about and why we’re living our lives the way we do. This is an important truth point.

When I got cancer six years ago I had to look at what I had done in my life to bring it about, or to make myself vulnerable to it. We can blame such things on this or that but, in the end, it’s us. I realised that I had been both harmed and helped by moments like this – times when I was strung out on a busy and engaged life, pushing myself, trying to keep up with everything that was required of me, trying to do my best.

I was harmed because at times like this we actually generate the seeds of future illness. These are times of vulnerability, overstretchedness, worry and, if we are honest, times when we swim around in our guilt and fear, in unconscious stuff that we never have time to look at or to process through.

So we lay it down as a pattern, a pattern of fear which becomes a bit harder to look at another time. This is where the root causes of later illnesses or disabilities arise – in those stuffed-away, shadowy segments of our psyche where we don’t want to look. This is where we have power change our futures.

I was also helped by times like this. They give moments of self-examination and soul searching, an opportunity to pay attention, at the very time when we need to do so – even in the middle of busily stressful, dissonant and portentous junctures.

One of the greatest mass self-destruction errors of today is the setting aside of essential soul matters in order to tread the mill, to pursue our important agendas, in which we carry the weight of the world, fight our loved ones and get worked up over small things (like supermarket queues).

We lose our way. We lose our sense of the real reason why we’re doing all this business of being alive on a planet. I mean, what on Earth am I doing with my life?

It is very important, amidst these times of So Many Important Things, to give ourselves proper quality time, being quiet, giving ourselves timetable-free space, relaxing, yielding, taking it easy, changing the subject inside ourselves, and letting new information, energy, healing or blessing come into us.

This is a matter of allowing. It’s not about making it happen. Unless you really want to, you don’t have to pay large amounts of money to go on retreats or to exciting places in the mountains of Turkiye: it’s a matter of giving time and space now, today, even if just for an hour.

When I was examining myself and the causes of the cancer that I was suddenly given in 2019, I came to see the roots of my cancer in moments like this. It’s to do with those times when we have stuff coming up from deeper down, changes going on, truth emerging – and, we tell ourselves, we’re too busy, and we can’t give it the attention it is due right now. Later.

We often set aside these moments, these openings of doors. Thus we lay down patterns which can lead to future regret. Or at least to future times when conscience and consciousness are squeezed and wrung out of us, by force of circumstance. Times when our souls decide to present us with hard, inescapable truths.

It’s not about being perfect. The soul is forgiving, understanding, and it sits in an eternal place. We are here to learn. As humans we are a mixture of light and darkness. We are not here to be angels. We are here to make good in a difficult and challenging situation, and to do our best with the riddle of life and the deal we are given, to struggle our way through an obstacle course and a learning journey. This is what we came for.

This is planet Earth’s special gift: you get an amazing physical life in which you meet remarkable people and situations, and in return you undertake to learn some profound lessons – lessons about balancing the physical with the spiritual, daily-life routine and inner calling, and our own and others’ needs and preferences.

We should not feel bad and guilty about our failings, our hidden bits, and the things we come to regret. These are fuel for the fire of learning. That’s what we came for.

But it certainly does us a lot of good if we pay attention to releasing whatever needs releasing as closely as possible to the time that it happens, while it is in focus. It’s good to build a habit of moving forward, seeking out truth, applying all of the different kinds of growth-tricks we come to learn as we pursue our path through life.

If we build this habit it means that when the shit really does hit the fan, we have tools and experience to resort to, because we have built a growth habit, a truth habit.

It’s not that truth is always available at the moment when we seek it. Sometimes it takes time. Someone once said, a decision is truly made only at the time when you can chuckle about it. On the other hand, in every moment there is sufficient truth available for us to do enough of the right thing in the situation we find ourselves in.

This involves intuition – listening to the signs and signals within us. It involves listening to that inner voice which at times just says, ‘Be aware, be aware in this moment’. This is what you could call conscience.

Only sometimes does it give an answer about what to do, but it certainly gives a prompt to say ‘Be aware, this is a moment of choice’. If we pay attention to these moments, these moments of proto-truth, it expands our free will, our freedom of expression, our freedom to negotiate situations in the best way we can.

Sometimes we get it all wrong. And this is life. Because there can be deeper threads, deeper meanings going on underneath, and it is not uncommon that we find ourselves out of our depth, being stretched. Life gives us these moments of choice. This is what free will is. And sometimes we get it wrong.

That’s not the end of the matter. Because revelation and times of correction do come. Be patient. Sometimes we can make it up with the people who were involved, or we can correct or improve the situation, or we can own up in some way, and sometimes we can’t. But within ourselves, it is possible to change the story.

In every scrangle, we were half of the problem, and we can change our half, even in retrospect. This shifts shadows. Balance starts returning. Forget good and bad, right and wrong: what matters is movement, forwardness and progress. Sometimes this can involve taking the difficult path – a path of confrontation, pain, tears or apology. But this lands up becoming the easiest path.

Sometimes we cannot shift the shadow or resolve the situation. It might be too late, or the other party might refuse to forgive, or resolution might not be possible. But we can still look at our own side of the equation and get that bit right.

There is a simple rule by which to judge situations: treat others as you would like them to treat you.

If there are instances in the past that you regret, where you didn’t do your best, you can own up and rework them. It’s a de-guilting, forgiving process. And perhaps the judgements of rightness and wrongness made at the time were themselves incorrect.

In whatever proportions, you were both at fault and you were both right too. Remarkably, if you move on your side, sooner or later there will be movement on the other side. But don’t sit around waiting for it.

There can be resolution for the other person, or the other people who were involved, even if you don’t know whether it’s happening, or even after their death or yours. But in the fullness of time, if we release our side of the equation, then it loosens up the whole tangled cycle of co-bondage that lies behind and beneath the whole situation.

Some situations just cannot be understood or explained. But things happened that way. The world, as we have made it, is an incomprehensible place. So-called ‘mental illness’ is a simple consequence of living an a screwed-up, contradictory, insensitive world.

This is particularly important for those of us in late life. It’s about forgiving other people for what they did or they omitted to do, or that they did in ways which could have been different. It’s about forgiving world and societal situations because some, such as an earthquake, might have hurt a lot, but these are part of the formula, the equation, the deal we took on by being born, when we decided to have a life on Earth.

There’s also the matter of forgiving ourselves. Because in forgiving ourselves it loosens up the whole cobweb, the whole network of shared error, since we are not as separate as individuals as we frequently believe. We are all so intertwined. We breathe each other’s air.

There are various dimensions to this. There are things we definitely got wrong, and there are things other people judged were wrong which perhaps were not so, when seen from further away.

Then there are cultural issues where social judgments are implicitly made and accepted which, in the fullness of time, turn out to be to be very different. For me, for example, 900 years ago I believed in holy war, yet in this life I do not believe in war at all.

Then there are matters where we were wronged, yet we took on the guilt, the wrongness, because we were surrounded by unavoidable situations or people who misjudged us. Quite complex gestalts and constellations of human feeling can cause us to carry a psychological burden when in fact we might not have needed to carry it.

Some people spend their whole lives carrying far more guilt than indeed they should do, but in another way they mop up the free-flowing projections of other people and of society, absorbing it like sponges – sometimes with an ability to transform it, as nurses, carers, humanitarians or even inadvertent social healers, and sometimes they become victims of society and its ills and madnesses – the special needs cases.

In fact, the way things are going, the whole population of the world, currently around 8.2 billion, is becoming a special needs case. Help!

So if you’re feeling rather beat up at the moment, and if you’ve had enough, and if you’re feeling physically or emotionally vulnerable, it’s well worth staking out some time for yourself. Just tell everyone else to go away. Switch off your phone. It is to others’ advantage to support you in becoming a better person.

Whatever their dependencies and needs, these will be better fulfilled if you are in a good state. But if you are struggling inside with ghosts and demons, your generosity and good-natured side doesn’t shine genuinely and wholeheartedly.

If you’re lying in bed feeling unwell or wobbly right now, you might try listening to one of my podcasts about the inner doctors. Working on things like this can be really helpful, but often it’s only at these moments of vulnerability where we really perceive the need to pay attention to this kind of thing.

Also, it’s winter solstice – at least, here in the northern hemisphere – and a time for contemplation and reflection. Many people make this into a time of stress, spending vast amounts of money and overconsuming even if they don’t want to – all out of a sense of obligation to fulfil needs which were relevant in former, poorer times, when a feast was good and necessary, but which have lost so much relevance today. If gifts and treats are expected and taken for granted, they are not a gift, and the money might have been better spent supporting a family in Gaza.

There’s a big case of cognitive dissonance around all this. It is symbolised on Christmas Day when the day starts in a very human and open hearted kind of way, but then most people in countries like Britain start assaulting themselves with alcohol and overeating, also going through social situations which perhaps they might not want to go through, though they might feel obliged to do so. Don’t upset your grandmother, darling.

This sense of obligation to be happy, and to do all the right things, is, deep down, guilt-driven. Yet in order to have peace and goodwill on Earth, and every day of the year, and for evermore, which is surely what we all genuinely want, we need to free up all this guilt.

As you might by now tell, I don’t do Christmas, so unfortunately you will not be receiving a Christmas card from me. It’s not Scrooge mentality – it’s just a divergent Aspie’s preference. Before Christmas I am Scrooge, and after Christmas quite a few people, burping, tell me I’m lucky to have bypassed all that.

Here is a greeting to those who concur with me, and who will be spending Christmas mostly on their own – for perhaps you are the ones who can do some forgiving, pumping up the peace and the goodwill to all people, with an extra dollop of collective release and public mercy, without burying it in fats, and carbs and alcohols.

Here is a greeting to those who love Christmas too. It can be such a wonderful time of family and neighbourly gathering, and do it well. It’s special. Unplug the TV and get everyone to pile their phones in a box for the time you’re together. And get the kids doing the washing up – or, alternatively, making a valuable contribution of their choice. After all, we live in anti-authoritarian days, so options must be available, though I have not heard of a human right that entitles us to avoid earning our ticket.

Savour the Christmas plenty. I mean that. Because we’re coming into times when there might not be so much plenty, and it will be necessary to enjoy that too, and the gifts of grace that come with it. For when the economy goes up, society goes down, yet when the economy goes down, society goes up.

I think that was an economics and life lesson that the Prophet Jesus, peace be upon him, was trying to teach. It is likely that peace and goodwill in our world will rise as the global economy adjusts to the facts of its situation, and as humanity goes through an inner change that causes it to stop gulping up our world and shitting on it.

Not only that, but we will enjoy the new situation. There will be elements of relief to it. And defence expenditure, malware and security cameras will be things of the past, like holy war.

The world is in a process of acceleration and thawing, and it’s complex, and the bits are all bumping up against one another, and it looks as if things are getting worse with each passing year. No, they are getting better, though it is a painful and intricate process. Things are just starting up.

And the way they look now is not how it is going to be in the fullness of time. All things shall pass. All will be well, and in ways we cannot currently imagine. Hold that thought. All will be well.

Love, Palden

#followers #everyone #forgiveness #worldcrisis #mentalhealth #socialhealing #healingtheworld

The Tuareg of the Sahara

I’ve been working with a village of Tuareg for ten years, in a small people-sized support operation. They live in the Sahara desert, a day away from the historic city of Timbuktu in Mali.

We restocked their goats and camels after a terrible drought, helped them dig a new well and build a small village school.

But now I need to pull out – I can’t continue with things I used to be able to do. But I don’t want to abandon them.

So this pod tells the story, and about the dilemma of a humanitarian with a need to pass this on.

With love, Palden

Thanks to Constanze Küppers in Germany for prompting me to make this pod

Or find it on my podcast page at https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Fingers

I find that, as I’m growing down, I’m going into transitional phases where things change and I have to review and revise what I can do and can’t do, and all sorts of other things in between. This get tricky when the abilities I’m losing are a deep part of my identity.

So, as a writer and communicator I’ve spent bazillions of hours, days and weeks banging away on typewriter and computer keyboards. But my fingers are losing their accuracy, and I can’t do it like I used to be able to.

It’s called peripheral neuropathy in medical speak – loss of feeling and coordination in the fingers and feet. It’s a funny sensation of non-feeling where feeling ought to be, a bit like music that’s turned down too low.

I’m getting an impression my blogs are too long for some readers – they’re a 15-minute read – and they tend to stretch synapses quite a bit.

So I think I’m going to do more podcasts. Or, in some cases, both.

Here’s my last blog, about pain, as a podcast, and you can find it on Spotify, Google and Apple Podcasts, such as here:

or on my podcast page here:

https://palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

And you’re welcome to lend it your ears!

Love, Palden