I thought this article was interesting, and am inclined this way myself. Current values in society tend to believe we should avoid and be free of pain and difficulty as much as possible, but this keeps us in the same place. It’s a growth-less position to take.
I was summarily dumped last year and, while it was really painful and I’m still left hanging and unresolved, it has been a remarkable gift and learning experience too, forcing me to master those things I felt I needed from my partner. It gets a bit complex when you have something like cancer and you rely on them, but even there, it’s possible to do your best with the situation as it is. So I became stronger as a result. It was a struggle, but also, seen from another viewpoint, it was a gift of love. It’s okay to let it bleed.
Some people have called me brave, for things I’ve done. But it’s not really like that. As this article mentions, you get to master life and its challenges by taking it on and going into it – the author uses the analogy of weight training and increasing the weights you lift. Former challenges become easier because you get used to bigger ones. And this is what hones the soul.
Once you’ve had a gun pointing at you, it gets easier when someone else points a gun at you again, and you realise you can get through the situation, even with a smile. That’s not really bravery – it’s just getting used to life and wading a bit deeper in. A bit like Brits’ attitudes toward British weather, or Yemenis’ or Ukrainians’ approach to life in their countries – and some people choose to go into the fray rather than to run. Or a bit like the work (‘labour’) a woman goes through to give birth – if you run from it, though that’s understandable, you might miss something, something about life itself.
In a sense, life is a preparation for the moment of our death. Death is not usually painful, but it does involve facing stuff – not least facing our incapacity to do anything much about the situation or to change anything, which is a choiceless choice to face. But even so, we have a choice to take what comes, or we can try fighting it.
Therein lies the choice. In the end, that’s where freedom resides. Because if you’ve grappled with something, you don’t have to carry the pain and fear of the prospect of having that something come at you and stop you in your tracks. That’s a kind of pain that comes even when you’re not experiencing it. It’s rooted in fear. A comfortable, safe life is not necessarily the best kind of life to have.
The author of the article provides a good strategy for dealing with the difficulties we face – about the incremental drawing of lines, and about facing the reason we’re in such a situation, rather than either letting it oppress us or running from it.
Summer solstice sunset, as seen from Trencrom Hill, Cornwall
One thing I like about doing a regular, weekly, ‘booked’ meditation is that I do it regardless of whatever is happening or how I am feeling. I just do it – no question, no struggle. Over time this has created a parallel space in my life with a life of its own, and it has a tremendously steadying effect. It pulls me back on track, helping me step outside the ‘wheel of life’ a bit, to remind me of the main issue or the heart of the matter.
So, whatever’s happening, and however I’m doing, I just do it anyway. That’s a bit different from doing meditation by choice, or doing it daily. Doing it daily is a distinct choice and, certainly at some stages of life, it can be really good, if life allows it. And sometimes it can be made to fit in with life: I often used to go into meditation while sitting with my kids as they went to sleep – and we’d all mutually benefit from the vibe-change. It was a moment of special closeness.
The weekly meditation is very doable. It’s not a relentless habit and it doesn’t require a disciplined or diligent attitude. At minimum it’s a half-hour deeper-relaxation space, once a week, and at best it can sometimes be a game-changing shift, or a blast of insight, or a healing, or an inner journey.
At times I get into some really remarkable inner experiences – for example, when visiting a disaster zone or a world situation, or when communing with people dealing with life. Other times, I just have a quiet meditation. Or I have two or three parts to it, one of which might involve letting my inner doctors scan and work on me, or inwardly being with a friend who needs standing alongside, or simply working over the events of the time, to release them or lift the clamps they’ve put on me.
It varies a lot. It’s a kind of extra dimension in life that goes on anyway, whatever else is happening.
It has certainly been valuable to me as a cancer patient – especially getting involved with ‘inner doctors’. When I had a lot of fatigue a few years ago I found I progressed a long way in meditation. I didn’t have a lot of available focus, but I had time, allowing myself to float and glide, to let be. If you have Longcovid or disability or something similar, I suggest taking a positive approach inwardly and looking for the gift that is available in fatigue or immobilisation.
It’s currently at 8-8.30pm UK time (other times elsewhere – see link below), and quite a few of us are doing it, including people who aren’t aware of these postings – they started doing this ages ago, or because they read the Nine book, or through other connections.
It’s especially good for folks who are doing it on their own, perhaps because of geographical or social isolation, or just because they can and do do it that way. It’s not complex, you don’t have to go anywhere or do anything for it, it’s free and it’s a gift of the present and The Presence.
When I was diagnosed with cancer in late 2019 it was at first like receiving a death sentence. I was indeed close. This has a way of changing and reorienting everything inside – or it did so for me.
When it looks like your life really could be ending, it makes you reassess everything, where everything stands, what can be dropped, what means a lot to you, and what is unresolved, regretted and incomplete. It’s a rapid, factual acceptance process, prompted by a loss of ability to act on life, owing to serious illness and malfunction.
So I looked at my life. Some things I could let go of easily, some needed attention, some presented hurdles to cross and some looked impossible. This process went on over a period of weeks while I was flat on my back, struggling to stay alive. As it happened, I made it through, with the loving help of my then partner and the ministrations of the staff at Torbay hospital.
After three months, I was gradually reviving. After six months I was more or less on my feet and functioning – enough to be able to go home to Cornwall and look after myself, with a little help from my friends – and the staff at Royal Cornwall hospital at Treliske. Lucky me. I survived.
Being a writer and communicator, there were still things I could do, and it became part of my cancer therapy. If I were younger, with a job and family, or if I were in engineering or farming, I’d have been in a catastrophic situation. But as a freelance writer and broadcaster, I could carry on. My brains and the creative process changed, and my fingers weren’t as keyboard-accurate as they once were, but it worked.
Even so, part of me was left hanging – the humanitarian part. So were the people in other countries who were affected by my loss of functionality. I could no longer travel long distances and my capacity to get through such a rigorous life had collapsed. If I went to Palestine or Mali now, it might well be a one-way journey. That remains an option, though I’d also be happy for my ashes to be buried under a tree on Botrea Hill.
I made a prayer for clues suggesting how to resolve this question. Three issues came up.
One was the growing needs of the people I’d been working with. This included Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, all sorts of individuals in Palestine and Syria and in the Tuareg village of Tinzibitane, Mali. In the 2020s, need and crisis levels were rising, and this was vexing.
The second issue was me, since doing such work had meant so much. These people, whom I had grown so close to, were some of the most valuable people in my life – I had learned so much and become so much more of a real human as a result of working with them and finding my place amongst them.
The third was finding people to take over from me. That was the biggest question.
As my old friend Sheikh Bukhari once put it, “God has a staff shortage, with plenty of eligible employees who for some reason prefer to stay unemployed“. A kind of Sufi bishop with a deep Muslim heritage, he had emigrated from Jerusalem to America, landing up flipping burgers in a California burger joint. He returned home after a decade, back into the frying pan that is Jerusalem, to become a leader in a community of spiritual peacemakers in Israel-Palestine – then called Jerusalem Peacemakers, and now called the Abrahamic Reunion.
“I finally accepted Allah’s job offer“, he said. A good man, he was. He’s now in heaven, carrying on up there, and his widow Hala carries on down here. His son Izzedin Naqshband runs a Palestinian vegan restaurant in East Jerusalem, if you’re ever over that way.
Finding people to take over helping Tinzibitane has been a challenge. The Tuareg don’t have as much PR power and experience as Palestinians do. However, they make amazing hand-made, trademark-free, talismanic jewellery and other crafts, and that’s their tradeable USP or ‘unique selling point’. Many Palestinians are educated, literate, competent, urbanised people, while the Tuareg live a simple life out in the desert, without being highly engaged in the modern world.
They are not tempted by modernity, tending to hold it at bay. From a humanitarian networking viewpoint, this is a good marketing tag to use – the Tuareg have a genuine mystique that charms and fascinates people. If it were lost, it would be a loss to the world. They don’t beg and bleat either.
The modern world comes at them anyway. In 2016 I managed to save the life of a baby, Zeinabou, whose mother died in childbirth. I helped with other survival issues by making Facebook appeals and raising a few hundred quid to help.
Mercifully, I was joined by two others, Eve and Jane, and we were able to fund social-reconstruction projects going into the thousands. Over a few years we restocked their camels and goats, sank a well and funded the building of a small village school, helping them regain confidence as a village after a devastating war and drought around 2011-12.
They hadn’t actively participated in the war, but it had affected them and they had been attacked by both sides – the Malian army and Al Qa’eda-related Jihadi militias spilling over into the Sahel from Libya and Syria. The Jihadis tried to establish an Islamic caliphate to lord it over the independent-minded Tuareg, and they’re still at it. I think they will blow out, get tired and go home eventually, but not anytime soon.
Testosterone does wear out after a while – and this is how many wars come to an end. Eventually, people just want to go home and sleep in a proper bed.
The Chief
The desert village, some way west of Timbuktu, started coming together again. People returned from refugee camps in neighbouring Mauretania and new people joined from other villages, seeing how they were getting organised and taking life back into their own hands. The chief, a thoughtful man in his early seventies, with good intentions for his people, strengthened the social fabric of the village and gave it new hope, with our help.
The Tuareg are a consensual people with deep traditions going way back before the arrival of Islam in medieval times. They are independent people, with significant gender equality and a strong sense of collective solidarity. I liked working with them, and they did the right things to help us help them.
They are a desert people. For centuries they have been the camel-truckers of the Sahara, carrying goods between south and north, inhabiting the southern edge of the desert, the Sahel. Gold, salt and high-value goods were their main cargoes, plus, in medieval times, slaves to Algeria and Egypt, which they stopped doing later. These goods and people were sold in the souks of the Arab world and forwarded to Europe, Ottoman Turkey and the Middle East.
One thing I like about them is their integrity, honesty and lack of corruption, and this makes it easier to work with them. They don’t like asking for help, and they budget and spend well, and money sent for a particular purpose is usually spent on that purpose, as arranged.
Home-made mud bricks for the school
In many crisis zones, money just gets spent on whatever urgent need comes up next – it’s understandable, a ‘firefighting’ approach, and that’s life there, but from a fundraising viewpoint in the rich world it’s difficult, because of our issues around accountability. Accountability is a polite word for post-Protestant tight-fisted control-freakery, a key quality that has made us whiteskins rich.
We communicated through Anim al Husseini, who first contacted me in 2015. It was his wife who had died in childbirth, and Zeinabou is now growing up in the village. Anim speaks Tamashek (the Tuareg language), Arabic, French and English, and he’s good at staying in touch and supplying information and photos – without these, support work gets difficult.
The chief has nominated Anim to be the next chief – though, whenever that happens, he will need the consensus of the villagers to step into that role. That’s the way it works amongst the Tuareg: their traditional systems of governance are consultative and confederal. As desert individualists with a self-help survival ethic, any family or tribe may take their leave and join other villages if they feel the need. Nominally the men make the decisions but, if the women disapprove, it simply doesn’t happen, and that’s that. So the women set the norms and the men do the business.
The school in construction
The village has hit new political difficulties. It’s a long story, going back to the 1880s-90s when the French took over the Sahara, dividing it into what are now Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Morocco, Algeria and Libya. They took the Tuaregs’ camels, goats and best lands, oppressing, conscripting and enslaving them and discouraging their nomadic lifestyle. Over time there were a few Tuareg revolts against this.
When independence came in the 1960s, power went to the Mandinka and Bambara majorities in the southern, greener part of Mali, who continued discriminating against the Tuareg, regarding them as a threat. Yes, there is black racism too, and the Tuareg are only partly black – they derive from ancient Saharan, Berber, Arabic, Nubian and West African stock.
The school in completion
By the 1990s some Tuareg wanted their own independent country of Azawad in the northern half of Mali – the desert region. The government wouldn’t have it and fought back. There were also frictions with other peoples in the area – the Dogon, Fulani, Songhai, Bambara, Soninka – as populations grew and the region became more desertified.
Recently, Anim Touareg wrote to me, and this is the first time he has ever expressed true fear over the future. This is what he wrote:
Salam Aleykoum dear Palden How are you ? All the people of the village greet you We are very scared about the situation and yes we hope everyone will be safe A lot of people already flee to Mauritania But in the village we discussed about it and we decided to stay in the village Because travelling will cost a lot of money and the last time we went to [refugee camps in] Mauritania, everybody get sick Here now the biggest problem we have is the provision [food] Things are getting very very expensive because of the war However if we get food for the people, we will stay in the village and continue education for the children The chief of the village is sending his worry and ask you to tell to your friends Because this is very emergency and we hope everything is gonna be alright Thank you so much for everything dear Palden Please receive greetings and prayers from all the village Ma’Assalam
And later he added this:
We don’t have access to a good and reliable internet connection these days I am happy to tell you we sent some families to the refugee camps In Mauritania We evacuated elder people first because they have a lot of health issues and can’t support big pressure For me I am still in the village with my family and some other families We will work hard to continue running the school so our children get educated It’s very important for us We are trying our best I know about your health issue dear friend and I don’t want you to work a lot also So take your time and share some Infos when you can Thank you so much for everything dear Palden Please take good care of you and keep in touch Maasalam Anim ❤🙏🙏🙏
Anim is a Capricorn in his early thirties – a Tuareg Millennial and single father, with camel.
The well in construction
I’m telling you this story partially for your interest and information, but also I’m sniffing around. We need about three people with a good mix of skills who would be happy and willing to work with this and – this is the important bit – stick with it. The good news is that this project is not a big one – it’s human-sized. The turnover of the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem was over a million dollars a year, with which I could only tinker around the edges and do specific bits of hassle-busting but, with this village, our input has made a total, marked difference.
The well, completed
It’s a smaller-scale project, involving real people. We have no offices or international development degrees, though we’ve lived round campfires in tents and tipis. The involvement of an enlightened NGO might be welcome, yet there’s something special here about people-to-people, ground-to-ground connections – and not just handing it over to the charitable sector.
It feels best for there to be something like a small group of (say) three proactive energy-holders with 2-3 helpers. But it will take the shape it takes, around the people who turn up.
This isn’t about aid and development in the standard model. This is about helping the Tuareg stay Tuareg, and helping them interact constructively with the encroaching 21st Century world – and its guns, troublemakers, competing interests and geopolitics. A friend in Cornwall, Kellie Odgers-Brown, has come forward to market their jewellery here in Britain, and that’s a first step – the Tuareg want to generate their own income.
Now we need:
a good networker experienced in social media, crowdfunding and handling payments,
someone who understands cultural sensitivities and the politics of the region (who has also travelled outside the rich world without staying in hotels),
someone who is good at hustling, writing and organising,
plus a couple of people who are happy to pitch in when needed and handle special issues (such as cultivating a funder, running a website, starting a branch in another country or even going to Mali).
There’s a crisis going on in the Sahel and it is unlikely to end quickly. So this is not an easy mission, but it is doable by keeping an eye to the future. These people are a potential shining light in the post-conflict revival of the area. They stay politically neutral, focusing on their village and raising its game. By setting an example they give a model for other villages and tribes to emulate – this is a multiplier factor that is worth considering, and it’s already ‘case proven’.
But it needs resolute perseverance. It’s not full-time – it’s a spare-time thing that will go in waves and bursts. It might be good if there is one person in their 50s-60s, one in their 30s-40s and one in their teens-twenties, since each generation has its virtues. But those who turn up and make a difference are those who will run it and decide.
My dilemma is that I am no longer able to head this up and I have only a few years to live. The best I can do is advise, support and stand behind you. I no longer have what it takes to shoulder this operation. Think in terms of a minimum three-year commitment, with an added duty of finding someone to replace you if you wish to go.
If there is a gap in your life, if you seek engagement with something meaningful and out of the ordinary, and if it fits your ethical values to the extent that you can focus on it and become a trusty friend to these people, then this might be of interest to you.
If so, think about it for a few days, do some research, take a look at Anim’s Facebook page, contact him if you wish, and write to me with your thoughts (just a few paragraphs at first, please!). We’ll go on from there. Consider your realistically available time-space and your capacity to carry things through, and be clear about where your limits lie.
This is teamwork and others will rely on you to do whatever you take on. It’s unpaid, voluntary work, and it might or might not benefit your CV or resume, but it could benefit your mana – your standing as a soul. At the end of my life, I am so thankful for having been involved in this kind of work – it has been enriching in heart and soul.
That’s what this is about. To fulfil our missions on Earth, we need to get engaged with specific issues, activities and projects. We need to test ourselves with some gritty stuff, bringing light into the darkness. While this world has no shortage of crises and issues to worry about, getting involved with one thing like this is doable, and it can have wider implications longterm. It’s something where you as an individual can make an impact.
You form relationships with these people, and it’s about giving them some hope and backup, to make their lives better. They live in a very different world to us and, in our time, we need to learn to avoid imposing our ways on them and getting them to suck up to us. Instead we need to help them be themselves, stay themselves and develop themselves in their own way.
This is the way of the 21st Century. Leaders in this are the Palestinians – they are advising the Ukrainians in non-violent social survival and resistance skills. This is the stuff of the future – human, spirited aid.
It’s about building resilience, ecological, cultural and societal, about helping people face modern times, and bridgebuilding between cultures while honouring diversity. It isn’t only about helping them: it’s about an energy-exchange where they give what they are strong in, and we give what we are strong in, and it connects up, and everybody benefits.
For we, in the rich world, we need aid too. It’s just that we don’t fully know it yet. These people know a lot about survival and self-sufficiency. They understand the magic of life. They have a deep-rooted culture. They need friends, and so do we.
If this says something to you, or if you know someone who might be interested, or if you’d simply like to donate a tenner to the kitty (details from me), or rustle together tenners from your friends, or even take over the kitty, or make a prayer for protection of the village and the departed villagers, then please do. It would be great to give them some encouragement right now.
I’ve given you another long read, haven’t I? Well, congratulations in getting to the end. Happy newmoon. And Happy Birthday to Lynne too!
This being Britain, as soon as the tourists went home, the sun came out. It seems to be a law of British meteorology. My wooden cabin, with its big windows, gets quite hot when it’s sunny. I sat outside today, soaking it up. One of the very best cancer medicines is sunshine – and it’s free. I need to rest, because I’m shagged out – my legs in particular. Yesterday – pat me on the back, please – I did it. And it well and truly did me.
View from near Pordenack Point
A friend, Kellie, came round and we did the hike from Land’s End to Carn Lês Boel [map here]. For me this was rather special – a personal pilgrimage to a special place. It’s the place where, if I could, I would dance my last dance. I go there whenever I need to say prayers and come home to my soul.
But it’s a long haul, for me in my condition – my walking sticks, serving as legs three and four, get tired too. It’s two miles each way, with a lot of up and down, but it feels like four. I was not at all sure I would make it, but part of me realised that this was my last chance – now or never. There’s a shorter route from Porthgwarra, but this route is special, and I wanted to do it while I could.
Pordenack Point (see the people on top?)
Heading south from the car park at Land’s End, first you come to Pordenack Point, a high cliff bastion which, from the first time I went there fourteen years ago, I knew to be a major clifftop sacred site. But back then there was little evidence of that – to local archaeologists it was just one more of Palden’s crazy, rather left-field ideas. That evidence has appeared since then. It’s a friendly, strangely homely place where you can sense happy gatherings, unions and reunions, even choral singing. The panorama over the sea is spectacular.
One of the simulacra at Pordenack Point
Pordenack has a prominently-placed chambered cairn, which would have been used 4,000 years ago as an initiatory chamber for deep retreats in this definitely cosmickle place. Also it would probably have been used for dying – it’s a great place for disincarnation, an esoteric spaceport for soul-takeoff toward the Western Heaven. Or it would have been a repository for relics and revered personages put there, at least for a while, to bless the landscape – rather like charismatic saints’ relics in medieval times.
The new discovery was that of a circular enclosure at Pordenack Point, perched on the edge of a near-vertical cliff. That changed things. It was found using LIDAR, a brilliant new form of aerial radar mapping that can pick up hidden remains under the earth’s surface.
Here comes the interesting bit: the enclosure is lined up exactly with two other circular enclosures inland – Castle an Dinas and Caer Brân (pronounced ‘Care Brain’). Both of these enclosures are large enough to host gatherings of a few hundred people, though at Pordenack the enclosure might hold twentyish people. These were all concerned with the coming together of people.
By my reckoning, Caer Brân – it’s just over the valley from the farm where I live – was the parliament and moot site for the tribes of Penwith in the bronze and iron ages. Archaeologists are far more cagey. It is right at the centre of the peninsula, at the intersection of two major trackways. One goes west-east from Sennen (for the Scillies) to Madron and upcountry, and the other, NE-SW, links all of Penwith’s stone circles, from the Nine Maidens and Tregeseal to Boscawen-ûn and the Merry Maidens. This trackway goes past four bronze age platform barrows at the top of Botrea Hill on our farm and over the valley to Caer Brân – I made a podcast about this trackway two years ago.
Castle an Dinas was a further gathering site further east, probably for the meetings of tin traders and for fairs and celebrations at Beltane and Lammas. This is deduced from two astronomical alignments emanating from the enclosure, aligned to the rising and setting points of the sun at those times – the sun rises over Trencrom Hill and sets over Conquer Cairn.
Caer Bran
My feeling is that Caer Brân was rather more for formal and jurisdictional assemblies, while Castle an Dinas was more of a marketplace and social gathering site. Just up the hill from Caer Brân is Bartinney Castle, a hilltop circular enclosure with cairns inside it, which has a distinctly spiritual-religious character and a remarkable panorama. Legend has it that the Devil can never get at you inside the enclosure on Bartinney.
But, get this, three of these circular enclosures – Pordenack, Caer Brân and Castle an Dinas – are exactly aligned along a summer solstice sunrise orientation. Gatherings and festivals were really important to ancient peoples, and the people of the tribes of Penwith would come together at these enclosures at special times of the year.
In those days, folks weren’t as peopled-out and time-pressed as we are – there weren’t so many people around and, if you went anywhere, you walked. Much of the land was wooded, which gives a different space-perception to the open farmed landscapes we’re used to nowadays. Jumping in the car to visit friends wasn’t an option, so you met with them periodically, when you could, at gatherings like these, particularly at the solstices and cross-quarters.
You’d meet your relatives, distant friends, old acquaintances and new people too – at Castle an Dinas there would be interesting people from abroad, even in ancient times. There would be discussions, decisions, the making of deals and the settling of disputes. There would be trading, flirting, celebration, partying and morning-after hanging out, with moments of invocation, spectacle and holiness. They’d troop there from their living places around the peninsula, stay for 2-3 nights and troop back home again.
Pordenack Point is special not just for the above reasons. It hosts what must be one of the world’s largest collections of rock simulacra – natural rock shapes resembling ancient beings. There are whole gaggles and convocations of them – guardian rock-beings who face the vastness of the Atlantic at the far end of the Isles of Britain, holding the winds and waves at bay and protecting these isles from the storms, currents and weather gods. Some of the simulacra stand there chatting, and some are watchers, peering toward the far horizon. Some are Keepers of the Law, some are the Chanters of Intonations, and some are grumbly earth beings who resent the dwarvish bane they carry.
Carn Boel
Then you head onwards to Carn Boel, the next headland along the coast. Carn Boel (‘headland of the axe’) and Carn Lês Boel (‘headland of the court of the axe’) form the bounding headlands of Porth Nanjizal (Nanjizal Bay, pronounced ‘Nanjizzle’). Carn Boel has a big outcrop with a hooked nose, on top of which is a rather magical stone and sitting place, looking out to sea. Perhaps a place for consulting ancient seers and soothsayers.
Then you follow a cliffside path – a bit challenging if you have vertigo – alongside Porth Nanjizal, past a fascinating granite outcrop called Carn Cravah. We had a good sit and a round of tea there – I was already having to pace myself because, since I got cancer four years ago, I have few energy reserves to draw on. So it’s an exercise in prana-management, energy-management, pushing myself but not pushing too much. Often there are seals hanging out in the water below, but they weren’t around yesterday, possibly because of all the humans frolicking happily in the water.
Nanjizal Bay
Then you get to Nanjizal, a lovely sandy cove. It lost all its sand in the storms of 2014, but the sand has returned now. It was quite busy. It was lovely to see children getting lost in the magic of the place and playing in the waves, without a care. At least half of the people present seemed to have foreign accents – central Europeans, accustomed to being landlocked, love Cornwall and its wide-open, oceanic coastline. Since Covid we’ve had a new wave of non-white, second-generation Brits coming to Cornwall, laying claim to the extremities of their homeland, to plant their hearts in the landscape and tune in to its roots, and I really like that – they’re welcome.
Then it’s a steep climb up endless steps to the top of Carn Lês Boel, a few hundred feet above the sea. This was a killer and I had to take it slowly, step by step, with two pauses and one sit. An old dog came puffing up the steps like a steam engine, gave me some friendly slobber and continuing on its way, followed by a puffing human, smiling as he passed at this old hippy sat there in his Arabic jalabiya.
The path onto the carn is on the right of the propped menhir
But I got up there. It was painful, but the Carn makes the price worth paying. Its energy-field is strong and uplifting. It’s a place of transformation and healing, with a lightening (levitational) and enlightening (uplifting) effect. You can feel it as you approach. There’s an ancient ditch crossing the neck of the Carn, marking the boundary of its sacred space – I stop there to ask permission to enter but the answer is always ‘Yes, welcome back‘.
The propped menhir
Then there’s a gateway marked by two menhirs, one now fallen. At times, before cancer, I had a sneaky urge to come here one night with a few friends to re-erect it, but it never happened. The other gateway stone is a rare propped, crystalline granite menhir – raised up on small stones so that there’s a gap underneath, so that the menhir doesn’t itself touch the ground. The purpose of this is difficult to tell, but there’s quite a concentrated energy-field in the gap underneath. A similar thing happens at two other such stones: one at Trevean, half a mile away and probably built by the same builders at the same time, and the other a few miles up the coast at Carn Creis, amongst the Boscregan Cairns.
At the top of the carn is a rock platform with an energy-vortex that makes my body sway involuntarily when I stand on it. A nearby tipped-over stone probably stood on this vortex in former days. There’s another energy-centre further along the carn – a natural rock pile with a vortex emerging from the top – and, yesterday, over this and the first energy centre there were swarms of flying ants, swirling around psychedelically in the heat, following the flow of the energy-vortices.
When I’m there I settle and eventually lie down, finding myself drawn deep inside the carn. Esoterically it feels hollow. It does have seal caves in it, but this is a different kind of hollowness, as if there is an enormous atrium of vastness and voidness underneath, Tardis-like and bigger than the already enormous carn itself. There’s a feeling of very ancient beings here – geological beings who were here long before humans were ever thought of. There’s also a wide-open, upwards-and-outwards, infinite-space feeling to the carn, with its oceanic vista. The next stop across the ocean, thousands of miles away, is the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, the Mayalands.
Carn Lês Boel marks the western end of the Michael Line, a line stretching across southern Britain along its widest axis, crossing Glastonbury Tor, Avebury and other major sites along the way. That’s one reason why this site seems to me to be working at a higher level than many other sites around Penwith – the carn is on a global great circle energy-line.
I needed to come here because I feel I’m at a junction point. I’m drawing a blank on where the roads lead from here. Unusually for me, at present I see no future – no sense of where I’m going or what happens next, or even what I want or need. I’m not sure how to interpret this, but I see three possibilities. One is that I’m just plain blank and need to feel alright about that. One is that I am on the edge of something, a new chapter, the form of which I should not even try to pin down at this stage, in order to allow it the space and freedom to develop. Or the third possibility is that my life might end quite soon, and that I see no future in life because there isn’t one – the path leads through a threshold to another, less physical world.
I can accept any of these, for although I turn 73 on my birthday (Tuesday 5th September), and I’m not that old, I feel like a hundred years. Life has been an uphill grind in recent years and I feel rather worn out. Tired of pushing hard to get through life, tired of all the palaver and complexity. But I’m not set on that either. I’ll be wherever it is most useful for me to be.
I’m rather a mission-driven kind of chap, and if there is something meaningful and manageable for me to do here on Earth, then I’m up for it. But my life has developed a kind of emptiness. I miss my family, my partner and her family. In the wider world I am well liked but not greatly included. Regarding will-to-live, it does make a difference when there’s someone to live for, and perhaps I haven’t appreciated this sufficiently, earlier in life. I’m not good at doing nothing, staying alive just to stay alive, and I’m uninterested in watching TV, entertaining myself, feeding my face and living in glorious isolation. There’s more to life than this, and if there isn’t, then perhaps I’ll be better off going back home.
That’s why I went to Carn Lês Boel, to place myself before the Vastness, to make a ‘here I stand‘ life-statement, to ask a question and make a prayer. I chose the hard path to get there since it might be the last time I can do that route. It’s special to me because, this time in particular, I have to work at it, wear myself out, and that’s a quality that pilgrimages need to have. I needed to open myself up to whatever is to come. To ask for clues.
I didn’t get anything definite for an answer except for one thing: when leaving the carn I paused and asked, “Is this my last visit?” and the answer was definitely ‘No’. That perked me up. But instead of giving answers, this pilgrimage brought a change in me, a change of state. The questions started mattering less, and I came to a feeling that everything is alright, okay and perfectly in order.
Even so, I had to build myself up for getting back. Part of me didn’t want to leave. Another part of me knew that I had to start now, while I still had energy and before my body stiffened too much. Being on the carn had recharged and reconditioned me, and I knew I just had to apply mountaineer’s grittiness, persevering through the next bit to get myself home – well, back to Kellie’s car.
So I psyched myself up and went for it. My legs and back were hurting and my strength wasn’t great, but I just had to do it. At times like this, when I’m out in the wilds, I have a secret wish my dear son would winch me up into one of his helicopters and teleport me back to the farm. But this is Planet Earth, and he’s busy with other things.
This said, the whole trip was really worth it. Kellie was great company too – a right-on lady who’d been a road campaigner in the 1990s and who, I sense, stands on the edge of taking on a new mission of her own sometime soon. She’s one of those women whose kids are hitting twenty, who finds herself standing in front of a rather big, wide-open space. She was attentive to my needs, pace and timings, which was great, but she didn’t fuss over me, letting me stagger along at my own pace – and this old cripple likes that! She also seemed to like the Queen Mary’s Rose Garden tea that I brought in a flask. And I liked the lunch she had brought, which we had at Nanjizal Bay, just before climbing up to the carn. Thanks, Kellie – and I hope the trip was auspicious for you too.
Another person who came along, in spirit, was the Okomfo Akue Ayensuwaa – a new soul-sister I’ve never met, and queen priestess of the Ayensu River in the Gold Coast of West Africa. We have worked together on a shared mission for the last nine months and, while Kellie and I were doing this pilgrimage, Maa Ayensuwaa was at her shrine, accompanying us in spirit. This lady is deep, and if she so chooses she really is with you. There’s a Nepali seer who has also entered the equation, and we form a sparky triangle. I’ll tell you more about this and our story another time, when it’s safe and proper to do so.
Today, on the day following our walk, my legs ache, and I’m happy. Sometimes I have a question but it turns out that I don’t really need an answer. Sometimes it’s just a matter of changing my state. Something is reintegrating. What I love about visiting a power point like Carn Lês Boel is that it can transport me out of the confines and coordinates of my life and raise me to another level. I get more of a panoramic sense of life – a sense of context and meaning that seems to slot everything into place. It’s a shift of viewpoint that casts another light on things so that they look different – and this in turn leads to different outcomes.
On this walk something else came clear. There are advantages to being aged, especially if I accept it fully and completely. There’s no longer a need to hurry. It isn’t a time of goal-orientation but a time of allowing. The urge to get there, to achieve objectives, and to get on with the next thing, fades into the past – almost as if it was another life. As my physical powers have declined, my psyche has become more spacious since I’ve been obliged to drop many of the concerns, activities and preoccupations that used to fill it. It means that, with an undertaking such as walking to the Carn, I can take each stage, each footstep, as it comes. I just keep on going, step by step, neither pushing nor giving up, and I keep on going until, suddenly, I surprise myself by finding I’ve actually got there.
Life is nowadays more of a here-and-now thing – not least because the past is fading in memory, and there isn’t a lot of future ahead, and when I spend a lot of time alone, other people aren’t around me, keeping me attuned to the issues, struggles and woes they face. So I lose track of most people’s sense of reality, floating off in my own bubble. That makes the present time expand into more of a timeless zone. It has a beatific effect, adding an enlivening sparkle to life, giving a rather childlike sense of spontaneous discovery of every moment. The urge to get there, to reach the destination, to tick off everything on the list, is a compulsion that touches me much less than ever before.
Yet again, Carn Lês Boel gave a gift of time, out of time. At life’s junction-points it’s a good place to go, as if to clock in to the universe to renew my contract with the Great Wide and Wonderful, to go through a reassessment turnstile, to get worked over by the spirits of the ocean and vibrational field of this holy cliff sanctuary.
So that’s what I did on Saturday.
Lots of love from me, Palden
The photos here were taken on earlier trips – I wasn’t in a photographic mood yesterday.
It’s raining. Unwittingly, we were teleported into October. Well, that’s the case down’ere in Cornwall. I’ve even lit up my woodstove to cheer things up.
Then I started working on a half-finished website – a shortened version of my 2003 book ‘Healing the Hurts of Nations’. I wrote that in Glastonbury as the Iraq War was building up. It’ll be ready dreckly – a Cornish word meaning ‘whenever’.
One of the funny things that has happened in my life has been that I’ve given focus to quite a wide variety of different subjects and areas of activity. I give each of them total attention, lots of time and energy, sometimes to the annoyance of people close to me.
Something comes out of it that lands up as a book or a project of some sort. And then, once it’s complete and wrapped up, I have a tendency to move on to something different. Sag rising and Gemini Moon. Four planets in the Ninth. Or manic Aspie obsession, perhaps.
Which means that, over my lifetime, I’ve accumulated a range of bits of work. This one here, ‘Silk Roads’, represents the para-political and geopolitical side of me, fed by the historian and feeding the stuff I’ve done in humanitarian activities and world healing.
The other side of this is that I’ve made contributions to many fields – astrology, geomancy and cereology are other ones – though I haven’t stuck around long enough to really milk any of them fully. Other people got better known than I. By the time the ideas I’ve put forward start gaining traction, I’m off somewhere else.
This traction process seems to take around 30 years – a Saturn cycle. It’s frustratingly slow when you’re younger, but it starts making more sense when your bones start creaking. It’s necessary to let go of the urge for fame and success, let others get the accolades and royalties, and instead enjoy feeding the collective psyche with ideas and impulses that take on a life of their own. After all, ideas don’t come from us – they come through us. It’s all to do with feeding future history with ideational fertiliser. Planting seeds.
At the end of life, that process seems to be turning around, for me. I’m leaving an online archive of much of my stuff on my now rather labyrinthine 600-page website, and it’s all there for anyone who wishes to trawl through it. Or for anyone who find the parts that are waiting for them. It has become a kind of wholeness – at least to me. But for most of you, bits of it will be valuable.
Cape Kenidjack, a cliff sanctuary
I’m now approaching what might be a crisis. I’m running out of stuff that needs revising and entering into the archive, and also my capacity to cook up new stuff is diminishing. Blogs and podcastswork quite well, because I can get them done in a matter of hours, but books, no, I can’t do books any more.
I can do single intense workshops like the Magic Circles I did last year, but these are in-the-moment one-offs, never to be repeated. I can’t do longer courses or series any more. For both better and for worse, chemo-brain and ageing have put me more into my right, intuitive-imaginal brain. It kinda trundles along like an old steam engine, but the livery is a tad smart.
I’m able to do a few more five-hour Magic Circles, if you’re an organiser who’d like to host one. I can’t organise them myself, but on the night you’ll get something really memorable, special for that moment and for the needs of those present. I’m contemplating doing some online… er… I’m looking for a term like ‘master class’ but better… one a month for 4-5 months. But really, I prefer now to work amongst people, not online. People power me up.
In my last life-chapter, I find myself looking for something new – there’s something that needs to come right. I need to find a situation where, as a partially-disabled but rather interesting old crock with cancer, I can play my part and make the contribution that I can make, and not be difficult to have around – and have someone cover my back or even consider hosting a good decline and death.
Investigating an iron age settlement in Penwith
I want to fix this sometime before long, in the coming year. Before it’s too late for me to make a change. I’m not sure whether it involves moving – I do love it where I live, but I’m too alone here now. It’s circumstances rather than location that matter most. Perhaps my world is gradually shrinking.
Anyway, here’s a re-posting of an interesting chunk from Healing the Hurts of Nations, in case your eyeballs needed something to get down on, to feed your synapses with some interesting stuff. It’s all about humanity’s largely unconscious attempts at becoming a planetary race.
That’s rather important, a key ingredient in the next stage of human evolution. All of the issues before us, including local and personal ones, are now planetary in context and thoroughly affected by global-scale influences. Like it or not, we’re becoming one humanity. It’s an at times painful process, and at times it’s amazing.
It’s a kind of destiny. It was not foreordained how we would get here, and the process has been in many ways cruel, but it’s what humanity is heading toward. It’s a bit like an acorn that is programmed to become a mighty oak – it’ll get there somehow.
The uniting of humanity is necessary because we can then join the wider, greater universal order, but only as a unified race of beings. At present we can’t handle that idea, but it’s coming. Also, the only way we can fix our own problems on Earth is by becoming a unified race of beings. It all boils down to simple questions: who decides and who gains? Well, now, by necessity, we’re a team, currently with 8 billion players.
We’re in the critical part of that process now. I’d suggest the process properly started in the 1960s and will, at least in principle, be worked out by the 2060s-70s. That is, by then, I think we will know the state of play on Earth, what we have to work with, and we will have started doing it. Whatever that entails at the time. (For more on this, click ‘The 2020s’ above.)
Not all of the time, but at times it rained quite a bit. Nevertheless, Oak Dragon has been doing camps for 35 years, and British weather doesn’t stop it, even in force nine gales. Under the shelters, into our tents and vans, or into the domes we went, and sat it out, chattering. When I came home my joints and muscles ached, and it took three days for that to go.
But the compensating factors, the payoffs, far outweighed all that living in a planetary-body decrepitude I now live with. It was great. There’s a deep, magical spiritual uplift that dawns on everyone, and a family feeling, and there’s something special about disconnecting from the world for a week, as if going to another planet (which it is) – something captivating and engaging, moving and clarifying to the spirit. It’s like a multilevel recharge, and people’s souls start shining through.
In a way it’s a taste of future society. Conditions while camping are quite simple (we’ve got all the kit for it though), yet there’s somethinghere about a potential society where people have reunited and re-entrusted themselves to each other, and where the energy-saving effect of living in a community lifts off, opening out the possibilities for everyone.
One of the biggest things is the profound everyday sharings between people. Exchanges and connections, with an openness that allows us to experience more of the soul more and less of the adopted, conditioned behaviours in each of us. But group events – simple yet moving ceremonies, mystery-journeys, shared meals and the amateurishly uproarious show on the last night – create a kind of experiential sharing that is memorable to have been a part of.
One day, a wicker coffin was built in the middle of the camp. We all thought about ancestors of ours with whom we sought to reconnect, and wrote messages to them, during the day. Meanwhile an enormous pyre was built, with a flower-bedecked coffin containing our messages. With due aplomb, up in flames it went, and our thoughts and prayers went with them, and we could feel the ancestors close, and all of us were entranced by the enormous blaze.
Special moments. The theme of this year’s camp was ‘the Triple Goddess’ – the maiden, the mother and crone (though I think ‘the biddy’ is better). The camp was divided in three parts and we explored each aspect of the Goddess sequentially through the week. That was great. On the first night we were taken in small groups on a journey in the dusk to meet the goddesses, one by one (enacted by members of the camp), and we were given teachings and face-paintings and oracular moments.
Photo by Chrissie Ferngrove
As the founder of Oak Dragon (our first season was 1987), I was deeply moved by all this – I was shedding tears daily! In sharing circles I’ve even learned how to talk lucidly while crying buckets! They’re still here and at it, the Dragons, and many of them thought this was the best camp for many years. It’s particularly touching on a deep level to realise how, had I and we not started this, hardly any of these people, this family, would even have met. Many children would not have been born. Many lives would not have been reset and restarted. Many other miracles would not have happened. There’s something deeply moving about this and I felt privileged to witness it and play a part in it, as the Dragons’ kinda grandfather.
Also, I was so happy and relieved to see twenty- and thirty-somethings taking the reins, leading the circles, making the rules and teaching us wisdoms afresh. Many Millennials give me a feeling of confidence that the world will be alright in future times – they’ve got hearts and brains, good hands and broad shoulders. There was a good spread of ages at the camp, and there are signs that Oak Dragon might still be around in 35 years’ time.
You missed it. But there are coming years (it happens in late July and early August at Lughnasa). If I can, I’m going back. You can do that: you can come and go each year, and return years later, and the family, the tribe, rolls on, and you become part of it – your presence is your membership. You can come for the first weekend of the camp if you wish – though everyone who does so tends to regret leaving just as the camp is gaining momentum, so I don’t recommend it!
Now it’s true, I’m good at writing PR blurbs for things I like supporting, but actually, though clearly I am thoroughly biased, what I’ve written here isn’t too biased, actually. So it might sound like a sales pitch, but actually it’s pretty close to the mark. I had a great time, and it has changed my perspective, and I’m looking at life in a different way from just three weeks ago. Personally, I was honoured to be there, and I seem to be under strict instructions to come back next year. I’ll try. For me, it’s a bit like taking medication for the soul. I’ll leave it at that.
I even had the sneaky thought that it might be really good dying at a camp! What a way to go.
Meanwhile, I’m back in West Cornwall, and there’s more to come. And I have a pile of campfire smoke-infested clothing awaiting a sunny day for washing and drying them. Blimey, living on Earth ain’t half complex sometimes.
I have a couple of half-written blogs that didn’t get the whole way. One was my current thoughts and tips for other cancer patients – I’ll complete that another time. I’m a bit distracted and unfocused at present. I’m going away tomorrow (Thursday) to join friends old and new at the Oak Dragon Camp in a field in Somerset, upcountry from Cornwall – that’ll do me a world of good, inshallah.
It’s funny because, although it’s perfectly safe and I’ll be with lots of friends, I feel quite wobbly about it! I think that’s cancer-vulnerability. Since getting cancer I’ve not had the same insensitivities and protections as I had previously. I can’t handle stuff as well, and get impacted more by things that other people just pass on by. If a lot of life happens, it gets a bit much. It’s a bit like being a little boy again, needing someone to hold my hand. But it’ll be okay – it’s change-apprehension. I’ve been on my own a lot – perhaps too much – and in my own world, and stepping out of that feels like quite a step.
There are things in life I’d like to change before long, though I’m not sure how or where, because it’s a set of circumstances I seek, really. To have someone covering my back and keeping their eye on me, and to be amongst people who can help me with the small things I need help with – often it’s just the fetching of a prescription, or a lift or adventure, or people popping round, and stimulus, or even a cup of tea.
Sitting with old friend Barry Hoon, sorting out the world, at last year’s camp
Anyway, that’s for another day. I’m off camping. I love it, and have camped through every decade of my life, ever since being in Cubs and Scouts. I was amazed at last years’s camp – I went through quite a healing. Beforehand, I could stand for two minutes without support (such as two sticks), and afterwards I could stand for up to ten minutes. It has stayed more or less like that, except perhaps when I’m tired and gravity gets heavy.
Last year was a time of relative rebirth, after the main cancer shock of 3-4 years ago, and I’m not expecting quite the same this year, though I feel I’ll either strengthen myself up or it will be time to accept that my limits are closing in – one of the two. It’s all part of the journey. Perhaps I have some emotional stuff to work out this time – after all, the theme of the camp is ‘the Triple Goddess’.
So, I’m almost packed – boxes and bags are all over the floor – and I’m quite amazed I have managed. Some issues that I’ve been trying to bring to completion have not come to completion, which means I can’t put them away entirely, but perhaps they might resolve while I’m away, or perhaps not.
At these camps, we leave the world for a week and have no contact with it. On the other hand, we’re close to the earth, and in a really nice location. So I’m off to another world for a while – it feels a bit like jumping into Cerridwen’s Cauldron or going through a wormhole! I’ll be back around 10th August.
I shall be doing the Sunday meditation as always, on the next two Sundays.
Love from me, from a rainy Cornwall.
Palden
At the ancient yew tree at Compton Dundon church, on a trip from the camp with historian Ronald Hutton
The Longships Rocks, with the Isles of Scilly Behind
There are two routes to the farm where I live, and they are shown on online maps. The problem is, one route is easy and good, and if you follow the other – as recommended on satnavs – then you’re likely to lose your exhaust pipe and damage your car, unless it’s a Land Rover.
Claudia Caolin took this
We’ve tried to get the satnav people to change the instructions, but they won’t do it. They look at a satellite photo and see a road there, without knowing what its surface is like. So they even disbelieve evidence that we, who live here, send them – because the satellite says there’s a road there. Well, at your peril.
So when people come to visit, I send a map and instructions but some rather slavishly follow their satnav. They trust it more than they should, because it tells them what to do. As a result, they arrive late, flustered, after having made a few extra phone calls to me to find out the way. That cuts down our time together.
This highlights a big problem in our time. Many people – even quite aware ones, and even those who otherwise distrust a lot of things handed down to them from the corporate and governmental world – believe and obey what we are told. We set aside our own thoughts, experience, finer judgement and intuition, because the instructions say that we ought to follow this route, not that.
Precarity at Porthmoina Cove, Penwith, Cornwall
But if the satellite system breaks down (almost inevitable sometime), and if we lose our map-reading skills and intuitions, then we’ll get lost. Not only with finding the way, but also because we’re addicted to obeying orders. We all do it, in varying degrees! Even if you are a dissenter, an ‘alternative type’, or a sensitive soul, there will be areas of life where you snap to and do what you’re told, even at a price.
Even with conspiracy thinking, there’s an element in it where people disagreeing with the ‘official line’ transfer all their need for certainties to other things they’re told by other people, who sound as if they know what they’re talking about, and uncritically they follow a new set of rules.
Move along please… Bosigran, Penwith
One of my bugbears is typical: we are told that mobile phones and wi-fi are safe and okay, and we are addicted to all that phones have brought us (it’s an amazing technology). Yet, just consult your feelings, consult your body and your psyche, and something is not right. This radiation is changing you. It changed my life – I have a cancer caused by radiation, and when I mention this to others, or when I walk out of a room because I can’t handle being in the company of six phones with humans attached to them, there’s often an awkward silence. Ooops, I’ve said something wrong. If I mention the effects this has on nature, the world’s climate and on earth energy and subtle energies, most people just don’t want to know – even if they’re nature-lovers. Yet this is suicidal. And you don’t need a PhD to understand that.
We all do this. It arises from the fear that “I do not have the knowledge, authority and whatever else it takes to cut my own line through life“. This is the way that the Megamachine retains control – through imposing a fear of what might happen if you don’t obey, through telling us what’s right and what’s wrong, infantilising us and making us conform.
Listen guys, I’m in charge, okay?
In the end, this is not about Them – it’s about Us. It’s about our deepest psychology – profoundly stilted and stunted by fear, guilt and shame, the big blockers of inner progress and of correction of the world’s ills.
We all do it – I do too.
I did this last year. I was accused of being a narcissist. Bewildered and feeling at a loss, I took it upon myself and carried that for about nine months, feeling bad. It was a burden of guilt – my own guilt from the past. Not about being a narcissist, but simply about feeling inadequate and flawed.
But I was bewildered and confused about it too. Perhaps I am a narcissist? Perhaps the person who put that on me was right.
But then, a good friend came along and grilled me – she could see I was unhappy and weighed down with it. She had experience of this, having been a ‘victim’ of a narcissist herself. Though she pointed out how a victim is part of the equation too. She questioned me about what had happened, saying in the end, “Hang on, it wasn’t you – it was the other person. The actual behaviour of a narcissist was displayed not by you but by the other person, and this was projected on you”.
The Universal Solution to Everything
Now this was a big revelation. Suddenly a weight started falling off my shoulders. It was like a forgiveness. It didn’t just dissolve the issue – it gave me a new perspective. It allowed me to look at the narcissistic tendencies within me – after all, I do like standing on stages, and I’m what Facebook would label a ‘public figure’. Part of me is shy and a hermit, and part of me loves attention. So there’s stuff to take ownership of here, and it has helped me understand much about my life.
I’ve always been something of a reluctant leader. There’s pain in my psyche over matters of power. But this has made me focus on ‘right leadership’. The world does need leaders, but of a certain kind. In my 2003 book Healing the Hurts of Nations, in a chapter about power and legitimacy, I give three quotes.
Rioters and vandals at the Oak Dragon Camp
“A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service.” – Georges Pompidou, French prime minister, in 1973.
“You can erect a throne of bayonets, but you cannot sit on it for long.” – Boris Yeltsin, Russian president, in 1991 (Mr Putin, take note!).
“Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.” – Winston Churchill, Hansard, November 11, 1947.
These photos of me are by Claudia Caolin
This concerns right leadership. In my life I’ve learned a lot about this, and the question still continues. I’ve often felt like a monarch without a kingdom, a bishop without a church and a professor without a university – and this has been my karma in this life. It concerns service. It’s a big question for Virgos like me: the difference between service and slavery.
Service is willing, intentional and conscious. Slavery is reluctant, grudging and involuntary. Slavery is about resorting to type, conforming to what we feel is expected of us by those who seem to know better, and doing our best to avoid punishment.
If you’re going to be a shining star in the public firmament, then rightly or wrongly you need to fulfil what you feel are people’s needs and expectations. In this context, staying in power starts becoming more important.
The matter of staying in power is a difficult one. It’s not just a form of corruption and powermongery. It might be the case that, in a position of power, you actually are the best person for the job – it’s arguable that Mr Putin was the best for the job 10-20 years ago, and many a strongman is like that. But then your star starts falling and times start changing – Xi Jin Ping will experience this in coming years. The tide goes out on you, as it does.
But if you’re good at what you do, then you’re faced with the possibility that the person or the oligarchy that replaces you could actually be worse. I’ve faced this myself. Many people who rail at leaders are, frankly, covertly envious. Watching things that I’ve started deteriorate in others’ hands has been a big and painful lesson to me, bringing me back to a difficult truth: while holding onto power is not advisable, letting go of it can also be problematic.
It comes down to our motivation, and to being honest, often while standing in the spotlight in the ‘court of public opinion’, ruthless as it sometimes can be. Remember the British politician Paddy Ashdown? When he was caught with his pants down he owned up immediately – and everyone thought, “Good on you, Paddy – at least you’re honest”. Meanwhile, others were caught with pants down but they went into denial – they were clearly ‘in office but not in power’.
Tony Blair then came along – he looked like a clean pair of hands. But Tony, after a few years of doing some pretty good things, himself made a classic error – he sucked up to the big guys and took Britain into the Iraq war, when most people in Britain knew this wasn’t right. He sucked up to the Americans and PNAC, a cabal of believers in ‘The New American Century’, which now, chaps like Putin and Xi are showing to be empty and hubristic – America was being what Chairman Mao once called a ‘paper tiger’. Hm, fatal error, Tony – and he’s paid a price for it.
It’s all in the motivation. When I was a young acid head revolutionary in a former millennium, I realised then that it wasn’t just a question of replacing one evil system with another, whether through revolution or reform. It concerned the hearts and minds of the people actually sitting in seats of power. No one system has The Answer. No system is perfect.
Democracy has big problems, and we cannot say that our democratic governments truly represent what the people of our countries need. But autocracies like China and ‘managed democracies’ like Turkiye, though at times they can deliver the goods, have their problems too. It’s all to do with the matter of succession.
Some people moan about our king, here in Britain, but would an elected president and House of Lords really be a better solution? Hmmm, that’s questionable. King Charles III, well, you might or might not like him, but he’s okay, actually, as a person. Though his limited and mainly moral power is inherited, he happens to be an interesting person, and his son isn’t bad either – compared with what we could have.
I remember standing on stage at the Glastonbury Festival in the early 1980s, saying, as an astrologer, that Prince William, born during the festival during an eclipse, would be an interesting character as a future monarch. And he is likely to be so. Do we want to get rid of this guy and his missus?
Why do we expect perfection of our leaders? Why do Americans place so much belief in their elected presidents when they have lots of evidence that such belief is futile? Why do we continue electing the same old political parties, even when we’re disappointed in them?
I remember in 2005, many Palestinians asked me, “Why, after you had the biggest demonstrations in British history against the Iraq War, did you re-elect Tony Blair a third time?”. Well the answer was, “Because he’s still better than the other lot”. Twenty years on, that’s why quite a few people might vote for Biden or a clone of him – because of the other lot.
That’s the dilemma of democracy – it gives us second-best solutions. It is based not on consensus and agreement but on argument and dissension, meaning that 49% of the population land up dissatisfied, unhappy to support their government. Actually, through the quirks of our supposed constitution here in Britain, Margaret Thatcher only ever really achieved about 25% support of the whole electorate, even at the peak of her power. Is that democracy?
Sometimes you just have to stand on your own – a baby swallow on our farm
Well, it’s a common quirk of majoritarian democracy. In some countries, we vote for a plethora of parties, and then the biggest, or not even the biggest, cobbles together a coalition that might not at all resemble what voters wanted – as Israelis have discovered. It relies on conformity and grudging acceptance of bad political outcomes – AND we, the public, customarily disunited, then fail to support our governments wholeheartedly, even when we vote them into power.
The result is that it’s a recipe for failure, because someone somewhere is always opposing it. So this concerns the responsiveness of political systems to public need. And, besides, it isn’t democratic governments that really decide things: such governments exist to ease the cruel grating between the priorities of the Megamachine (the apparently ‘free’ market), and the needs of The People (whoever we truly are).
It’s all down to right leadership and right use of power. But that’s difficult, because sitting in the power seat is not comfortable, and it’s a 20 hour a day job, under a lot of pressure, and subject to cruel judgements from the public – witness those promising leaders, many of them women, who choose not to sit in that seat because it’s painful to get exposed to the sheer negativity of the commentariat and people on the street who land up even hating you.
You get there in the end
So, if we want good leadership, we need to treat our leaders with greater empathy and support, remembering that they actually are human beings, with sensitivities. And we need leaders with human sensitivities. But we need also to hold them to account. We need them to change when they get things wrong.
It doesn’t always work to jettison old leaders and put new leaders in place – it can lead to a cycle of deterioration where we get leaders who are either bombastic and imposing, or leaders who say one thing and do another, or they make it sound as if they’re doing things when actually nothing is changing at all.
In fact, it might be valuable sometimes to welcome back old leaders – to give Theresa May or Tony Blair a second chance. Why? Because they’ve had a period in the wilderness, a time to think things over, and they might well have a deep need, in later life, to get things right. Well, perhaps. Second-term presidents can be a bit like that. They don’t want to go down in history for the wrong thing.
Anyway, so I might well be a narcissist. It’s a convenient accusation to make, for which one is guilty unless proven innocent – but even then one might not be believed. Just to be suspected is enough to ruin a person’s life. What’s needed here is owning up, in public, and self-correction.
It gets a bit rough sometimes
Mistakes are allowed. Learn first time round and you’re doing alright. Learn second time round and you have a problem but it might be excusable. Leave it to third time round and you have a deeper issue going on, and it’s best to go – whatever his merits, Boris Johnson got to that point.
Human error. There’s accountability and there is forgiveness. Just because someone fucked up, it doesn’t necessarily mean they should be blacklisted – it means they need to self-correct, and genuinely so. And everyone, everyone, is a mixed bag – yes, even Bill Gates, who does both some questionable things and some laudable things (and, as an Aspie, he also has an exaggerated capacity to be misunderstood).
So, it might be that I’m a narcissist. To be honest, I really do not know, and it’s up to people’s own judgement. It has caused the person who accused me to completely cut off all contact and unfriend me, perhaps obeying the strictures of a famous psychologist in Canada who says that the only way to deal with narcissists is to cut off all contact.
Standing there for 2,500 years and not going anywhere
Well, I experience that to be rather cruel, actually, throwing out both the baby and the bathwater. I sincerely hope the accuser was right, because otherwise this fierce separation was a very destructive strategy. I’ve learned a lot from it and, for my sins, I now live in glorous isolation, and that’s my karma and life-lesson, and on some level there’s something good about it. Because, for better or worse, it enables me to write yardages of verbiage to you lot, and I sincerely hope it’s useful!
Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans. In the end, there is no right or wrong – there are simply outcomes. And life is for the learning. So, whatever my fuckups, I’d like to be remembered at least for trying to redeem those fuckups and make things good. But there are some who would even question whether I’m getting anywhere with that.
In the end, it’s necessary to listen and to take in the feedback that people, life and its learning experiences give us. But not too much, because otherwise we become guilty of another crime – the crime of holding back our gifts, believing that someone else can do it better. However, if it’s a gift, it’s highly unlikely. The secret lies somewhere between taking a stand and keeping your antennae up.
You’re welcome to join the weekly Sunday meditation this week.
It’s at 8pm UK time, 7pm GMT, 8pm in Western Europe, and for other places, plus more details, check out times lower down this page: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
This week I’m going to pay attention to Israel-Palestine and also to Sudan – in both places the virus of violence is running rampage. It’s as if, as Syria and Yemen die down as conflicts, the virus has shifted. The earthquake in Syria tapped and released the conflicted feelings of people in the Syrian civil wars, taking the fire out of the conflict. Yemen, meanwhile, has demonstrated one of the most regular causes of peace – sheer exhaustion.
It’s important not just to try to impose peace – this doesn’t necessarily heal the causes of conflict. What’s important is to seek to transform the sheer expression of violence and resentment into something that does something – something to address the fundamental causes of the problem. This requires some imagination and exploration.
Palestinians in Manger Square, Bethlehem
It means that people might suffer or die, which is tragic. But if hardship and death lead us toward a realisation that resolution must happen, this is more valuable suffering – a soul-sacrifice, in a way, which might save lives and hardship further on in the future. What is most important is the collective learning experiences that build a basis for resolution.
The Elders, Mary Robinson and Ban Ki Moon, have made a strong statement about this which is worth a read (link below). What they say about the demise of the two-state solution between Palestine and Israel isn’t new – it was visible 15 years ago at least. But at least they are acknowledging that the two-state framework is now obsolete, and a more fundamental rethink is necessary – this is back now as an international issue (itself an important development).
In Sudan, the eruption of wild violence is such a sorry thing. Sudan has so many unhealed wounds, from recent decades but also it goes way back. It is by nature a mature nation which could have a steadying effect on the Middle East, where an experiment in people power had been thriving until this dual coup d’etat fomented by two fighting generals and their men, overriding the people’s movement – and this, globally, is a worrying sign of our times.
So, if you’d like to join in, please consider the thoughts above. Praying for peace can work before a conflict erupts but, once it has started, it’s necessary to make use of what is happening, seeking to turn it to a more positive direction, to create situations and openings where positive developments may emerge. Sometimes a showdown or even a tragedy is necessary in order to turn around the local and the global consensus. Sometimes a ray of light needs to come into the situation in an unexpected way.
It rained. It’s strange for this to be important in a customarily wet country like Britain. But it rained down’ere in Cornwall.
We’ve had the best sunny weather in Britain in recent weeks, and we got the first rain – it came north from Brittany. I had been away for a few days in East Cornwall and, as the train home neared Penwith, the landscape changed colour and smell. It had rained.
The last two miles of the trip, pulling into Penzance station, is the best bit – cruising alongside the waves of Mount’s Bay, with St Michael’s Mount standing there majestically like a mythic castle transplanted from Gondor… When you return on the train from London (takes 5-6 hours), it’s like the real world opens up before you, bathed in the light of Penwith.
It was good to get away from home, to see things from another viewpoint. I seem to have been facing a variety of adversities for a really long time, and feeling rather locked into a loop where seemingly I had to accept a lot and couldn’t do a lot to change it. So going away was good, to spend time with an old friend I’ve known for forty years. It really helps to be in the company of someone who’s seen me through various chapters of life – there’s a mutual understanding there that I appreciate. Being a rather incomprehensible and inscrutable one-off oddball, it can mean a lot.
Regarding adversities, one thing I give thanks for is that it has really pushed me. With reduced capacities to handle things in the way I used to, instead I can draw on a tankfull of experience. That’s a blessing of old age – you’ve done it all before. Well, kind of.
Each day, spending a lot of time alone, I have rather a lot of available time, so I can go gradually though things to get them right. Takes ages. On the whole I think I’ve dealt with it all quite well – with a few errors and misjudgements thrown in. Could have done a lot worse.
The tide might even be turning, you never know, and the various nightmares I’ve been through might turn around. Perhaps I was being tested. After all, it is always the case that there is more to life than this, even in late life. Or perhaps life just gets like that sometimes, and it needs no reasons for doing so. Now that’s a thought.
Going down with cancer in late 2019 (or up, depending on your viewpoint), I decided to try to resolve as many as possible of the patterns of my life before I died. Actually, some of them have moved much further from resolution since then, becoming more complex and irresolvable. This has been disconcerting. Part of the reason for this is my own reduced capacity to remember, manage and handle things. They call it ‘chemo-brain’ but I find it’s ‘chemo-psyche’, since my capacity to process emotional and profounder things has changed too – it’s not just about brains.
But I’m being taught something here as well. Life’s been throwing googlies. I had a strange one recently. The cancer drugs I’ve been on produce funny neurological symptoms – funny feelings around my body. Well, some weeks ago I thought I had nits. But a few examinations and treatments have shown nothing at all there. It’s another of those funny neurological things. But the interesting thing is what this phenomenon put me through, in terms of self-esteem, feelings of failure and no-goodness, and all the stuff I’ve been carrying all my life that, only in late life, is coming clearer and visible. And I didn’t have nits!
I’ve written earlier (somewhere in this blog) that, as we come close to dying, we go through a progressive loss of control. When we are actually at the point of dying, there is absolutely nothing more we can do. It’s over. It’s all about what we truly have become – not what we aim, try, aspire or pretend to be, or avoid being, but what we have actually become. Not where your eyes are looking, but where your ass truly is at. I’ve wondered whether this escalating disarray is a kind of overload-lesson, to teach me to disengage further from at least some of life’s complexities.
For I am slowly deteriorating. My back is weakening, and I have a physical stomach issue and osteo-necrosis, and these are consequences of my cancer but having a worse effect on me than the cancer itself (I’m doing well with that). As I get worse I shall need real support (not just advice, which I get lots of), and I’m not currently managing to manifest it. So this might cause me to cut out earlier than otherwise I might. For me, the point of death is not exactly a medical thing – it’s more to do with willpower and how much I’m motivated to carry on.
You see, if you see your death as a home-going, it’s rather different. Most people see death as a loss or a departure, with little sense of what they’re heading towards. I’m rather looking forward to it, to be honest. So I’m not gnashing my teeth over dying – it’s living that’s more troubling. It isn’t about being on planet Earth – I quite like it here – but it’s more about living in the particular kind of civilisation we find ourselves living in at this moment in time. I’ve always felt a misfit. This might be the case for you too.
But there’s a job to do first. I’m not quite finished. After all, it’s a bit of a waste of time leaving before you’ve done what you came for. Earth is important for the progress of the rest of the universe, and many of us came because of that. Most people don’t realise Earth’s importance. This problem arises from the strange belief that we’re the only intelligent beings in this universe, and that Earth is a godawful provincial planet that we somehow got stuck on… and look at the mess we made of it. Well, there’s a larger story than that. I can’t relate it here, but I’ve done so in a few of my podcasts and podtalks (see notes below).
So these adversities have faced me with some quite big questions. One that I was facing during the winter was this (regarding the Africa mission I’ve been on): do I prioritise my own financial position and security, or do I let a person that I know and like die? That’s been quite a sharp question, often with only minutes to answer it. I had to face it several times, and it was difficult. But I’ve made my choices and stand by them, for better or worse.
Sometimes I find it really demanding to turn a problem into an asset and advantage, but that’s what I try to do. At this point in time it feels as if a coin is spinning in the air, in slow-mo, regarding all the various show-stopper questions coming up in life right now.
In a way, we all came here to get ground down, between rocks and hard places. We’re here to get burnished by struggling through impossible conditions. We enter life naked and helpless, and that’s how we leave it, and everything that happened in between is quickly blown away in the winds of time, well and truly forgotten and gone. We all have multi-generations of ancestors, hardly any of whom we know or remember – and, like them, you’ll be forgotten too. Even those who go down in history are often remembered for things they themselves might not want remembering for.
I became aware of this once on the Isle of Iona in Scotland. I ‘met’ Saint Columba, and he was troubled. In his view, everyone remembered him for the wrong reasons. He’s fondly regarded as a saint, but in his view he was a murderer, doing penance for his sins. This is what can happen for people who make a mark on history: what they’re seen as and remembered for doesn’t necessarily correspond with their own experiences and their own assessments of life.
I write this for the person who not long ago accused me of being a complete fake. Well, there’s truth in everything, dear sister, and you’re right. And also, as it happens, you’re incorrect. Fakes tend not to stake their lives on the kinds of things I’ve been foolish enough to stake mine on. Though you’re entitled to your opinion. It’s all in how we see things, really.
Talking of how we see things, it’s meditation time again on Sunday (and every Sunday). 8pm UK time, 7pm GMT. All the details are here. You are welcome to use up a precious half hour ‘doing nothing’ with us, if you so wish!
The photos from a lovely place in East Cornwall that I forget the name of, in the Lynher valley on the side of Bodmin Moor, near Rilla Mill.
Oh, and I’ve made a new soul-friend. The funny thing is, I’ve never seen a picture of her, and we might never meet in person, but we have done a lot of psychic and rescue work together since December, and it has been remarkable for us both. Maa Ayensuwaa, queen priestess of the Ayensu River in Ghana, wishes to send her greetings to you. She is a healer and priestess of the Akan or Ashanti people, who have deep roots stretching back to the same roots as ancient Egypt, and their cosmology resembles the Jewish Tree of Life.
Greetings to all of you from me too, across the void. Paldywan loves you. Don’t go away… because, inshallah, there’s more to come.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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