Here’s a timely excerpt from my bookPower Points in Time, all about winter solstice.
With love from me, and Happy Everythings. Paldywan.
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An experimental design for the back cover that wasn’t used
To deal with winter we must consolidate, come together and work at it. This shift happens fully at winter solstice, when the darkness is maximal and everything stands still. It’s a time for celebration around the fire, eating and making merry – or perhaps sorting out some of the family stresses that no one had time to work through before!
We have made it through the changes and challenges of life and we find ourselves still here, together once again as a kinship group of blood, soul or commonality – and it’s a time for grandparents, for harking back and reflecting on a sense of posterity.
This is our family. Ultimately our family is humanity, but our emotional security needs require something more local and personal, made up of people whose names we know, with whom we have common history and/or genetics. We are capable of feeling a personal connection with and looking into the eyes of perhaps 50-80 people at any time – beyond this things get impersonal, no matter how friendly we might be. This is the basis of extended families, whether genetic or of the soul.
A front cover design that was used
The fruits of the past year are shared and eaten, even to excess, after a solsticial pause for awareness or prayer, or for moments of wonder and goodwill. The seeds of the coming year are laid here in the relative quietness of this time of contemplation and rest. In former days when resources were meagre, the Yule feast represented a necessary stocking up of fat and nutrition to help everyone survive the winter. Modern affluence has turned this into an orgy of consumerist excess, sozzled stupor and TV overdoses, but it wasn’t always so.
To get through winter we must engage in regularised routines, fulfil our social obligations, act sensibly, pace ourselves and stay within the bounds of socially-acceptable behaviour. It’s time to be low-key, sleeping and recharging our batteries at the opposite end of the year to frenetic summertime, with its work and activity. Summer gives meaning to winter and vice versa. While autumn was a time of becoming, winter is a time for living with what we have and what we are. That’s what you get, and that’s that. If last year’s harvest was insufficient, you go hungry and hide in bed, lying low until a better time.
An illustration I did for the 1986 predecessor to this book, Living in Time
Forty-five days after winter solstice the ascending light is clearly evident. It’s still cold, perhaps even colder, but a change is apparent. This is the winter cross-quarter, Candlemas or Imbolc, when the Sun is around 15° Aquarius. By this time winter has been with us long enough to become tiresome, and something in us starts looking forward to a change. We relish the growing light. The first signs of growth will come in the weeks that follow – in Britain, that’s snowdrops followed by daffodils. In colder climes this is a snow-covered period of light and crispness, good for getting out the skis or skates, bringing in the felled logs on sledges from the forest, or breaking holes in the ice to drop a line through for fishing.
Acceptance of winter realities gives way to an urge for something different, a hankering for springtime. Yet the winter quarter is not done – not yet. The coming change is so great that we must be held awhile in arrested progress to help us put things on the right footing. Gardeners must dig the earth, spread compost and prepare seed-beds. Tools need fixing, houses need cleaning, things need sorting out – it’s a necessary time of preparation.
The back end of winter, leading up to spring equinox, is spent fulfilling our obligations to the situation we’re in, accepting that everything has its time. Something is stirring deep down – the hope, the aspiration, the necessary understanding that will act as a foundation for what is to come. By now we’re tired enough of winter to generate the will to wrench ourselves free of winter habits and move forward. A time of reality-adjustment is here, starting after Candlemas and peaking just before spring equinox.
It’s that silver lining. And can you see what I see?
Well, it’s a bit like that. For those of you who are interested, here’s the latest lowdown.
Sunday morning, wet and windy here in Cornwall. Early on, and Dr Isaac and I were dealing with an emergency, yet again, on Skype. We’ve become quite a team, he and I.
Felicia is hanging in there, just about. We had to take her back to hospital last night for intensive care, and a doctor there has allowed it on promise of payment later, bless him. Dr Isaac has sold his TV and sound system this morning to pay for oxygen and a drip. He’s such a dedicated doctor. I am sniffing around amongst contacts in the NGO sector, to see if there’s a good job waiting for him somewhere – he’s a true asset and he deserves better. He and his family risk having an Unhappy Christmas, though if I can change that, I shall. They are looking after Phyllis, who is doing well, and she’s a good kid too, and everyone loves her. We need to get her Mum Felicia back.
This is sharp-edged stuff. It’s really testing our mettle and our capacity to keep finding remarkable solutions. But we’re also both weary, fed up and in debt. Something needs to change now.
As you might imagine, this has been an enormous learning experience. It started with my doing a return favour for one of the company’s agents, to get him out of a tight scrape. Then it mushroomed from there. Quite a few people have been questioning whether I’m getting things right – to be honest, I don’t know, and we shall see. But I feel it’s right to keep these people alive.
The Moon emerges from an eclipse over Bethlehem, 2011.
So now it is a waiting game. Mercifully, my beating heart works well under pressure, and I’m not unused to being under fire. Though one thing we cancer patients have is greater sensitivity to and higher impacts from life’s buffetings, as if a layer of emotional armouring has been stripped away and we’re less protected. I’ve realised this in the last year since I became a single man again – fewer fallbacks, everything is up to me.
My response to this vulnerability has been a greater readiness to get down to the bottom line faster than before. Perhaps there’s a certain aged recklessness too, that comes when you know you’re in last-chance saloon and your time is limited. So, in a way, within the scope of the capacities I have left, I guess I’m playing for high stakes.
I’ve dealt with one-to-three crises every day for two rather long months, with no days off, unpaid, and I’m still in the running. Phew. I do want a rest and a break – even, dare I say it, some fun! But while Felicia, Phyllis and Isaac are in trouble, whatever anyone says, I’m staying with them. It means a lot to me, and I’m willing to lose friends over it – probably already have. This crunch period of the last week has really made me get down to first principles. What is my life about, really?
Burning. Sweatlodge fire at the Oak Dragon camp, 2022.
A friend in Nova Scotia, Susan, who has recently been my chief confidante, sent me a really pertinent lesson, written by someone called Paul Weinfield. Here are key lines from it.
“Leonard Cohen said his teacher once told him that, the older you get, the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love you need. This is because, as we go through life, we tend to over-identify with being the hero of our stories. This hero isn’t exactly having fun: he’s getting kicked around, humiliated and disgraced. But if we can let go of identifying with him, we can find our rightful place in the universe, and a love more satisfying than any we’ve ever known. Everyone from CEOs to wellness-influencers thinks the Hero’s Journey means facing your fears, slaying a dragon, and gaining 25k followers on Instagram. But that’s not the real Hero’s Journey.
“In the real Hero’s Journey, the dragon slays YOU. Much to your surprise, you couldn’t make that marriage work. Much to your surprise, you turned forty with no kids, no house and no prospects. Much to your surprise, the world didn’t want the gifts you proudly offered it.
“But if you are wise, you will let yourself be shattered and return to the village, humbled, but with a newfound sense that you don’t have to identify with the part of you that needs to win, needs to be recognised, needs to know. This is where your transcendent life begins.“
Gosh, well, yes. That hit me right on the nose! Yes, and that’s life. Planet Earth is a school – for some of us a real crash-course – and our purpose here is to graduate with honour.
But we do need to keep the school going, to enable our descendants to get born into a planetary body, to have a decent chance to do something with this strange privilege of life on Earth. And, you never know, we might one day have Heaven on Earth.
But today, we’re still on the case. If you are so inclined, please stay with those healing and helping thoughts, because we aren’t out of the water yet. I want these guys to have a Happy Christmas too – unlike me, they are Christians, and good Christians who do seem to live by the teachings of their master. That is, they’ll bust a gut for their fellow humans.
Meditation acts as a complement but not a replacement to action. In the Majority (‘developing’) World there is a higher proportion of spirited people who do bust guts for people and for justice.
Not that such people are lacking in the rich world, but here we play safe and stay within our comfort zones – we behave ‘properly’. It’s not very good karma, in the end.
This is one reason all those poor faceless people are coming over to Britain in flimsy boats – we are attracting them unconsciously in order to help us learn how to be more human, how to share. We are in a ‘cost of living crisis’ to teach us how to pull together and look after each other. We have problems with our politicians and bosses because we as a society have not taken life in our own hands. We have problems with race and gender because we labour under the belief that other people are deeply different from us.
Ridin’ that wave. Cape St Vincent, Portugal.
The good news is that, once the Great Correction really starts, life is going to get easier. Why? Because inequality and injustice are inefficient, energy-wasting, murderous ways of running a world. It doesn’t work. We need to make life easier. At last, increasing numbers of people are realising this. But the test lies in what we actually do. Leaving your job (or whatever) and changing your life is just the first step.
To get a country like Britain to a sustainable level, we need to reduce our consumption to 1960 conditions. Those of you who remember that time will know that, though there were problems, as there are today, life was alright. We had more time for each other. It’s doable, and we can be happy with that. It’s all to do with how everything is shared.
Bless us all. Life is tough at present, for many people. History takes a long time, and it’s grinding hard. But the Great Correction has actually already started – Covid was a tipping point and we’re now sliding inexorably into accelerated change. Now we just gotta get it over the hump, so that we achieve the necessary momentum to really crack our world problems.
Thank you so much to all those who have helped and contributed. There have been times when this has brought tears to my eyes. You’ve made a real difference – Felicia and Phyllis are still with us. However, this has become more of a marathon than a sprint, and there’s more to go.
It’s good practice. That’s how it’s going to be in coming decades. There’s no going back now. If I could hug you all, I would, but I’m down’ere in glorious isolation in Cornwall, so please feel it imaginally.
This is not a christmas card. This is Kvikkjokk in the north of Sweden, north of the polar circle, last year. It’s where my daughter Maya lives. It was -30C there last night.
There’s one robin that comes from the thicket above my cabin, and another who lives in the brambles down below the barn.
Problem is, being male robins, and with breeding season coming, they’re doing their territoriality trip – much to the consternation of the tits and the blackie, who also want to get to the feeder just outside my door.
When you spend much of your time alone, issues like this do matter! But it’s a welcome diversion too because, as you might imagine, my thumbs haven’t exactly been twiddling very much recently, and I’ll welcome an off-duty break one day.
It hasn’t snowed here in Penwith, though it went sub-zero and icy in the last few nights. Stuck out in the Atlantic and bathed in water that not too long ago passed Miami Beach, we’ve been about 5 degrees warmer than most of Britain. But then, though Brits love to complain, whatever the weather, up where my daughter Maya lives, north of the polar circle in northern Sweden, it was -30C last night – and the sun won’t rise until mid-January. Welcome to Planet Earth, dear friends – this is what you get on this world, and this is what you chose when you decided to come here.
I get cold feet. I’ve got this weird thing called Peripheral Neuropathy – a side-effect of chemo drugs where your nerve-endings die off. So I can feel the inner feelings in my feet but not the outer ones – and I never knew there was a difference until the Good Lord (or whoever) gave me cancer. This also means I don’t feel the cold in my feet very much – which goes to show how, in life, you win some and you lose some, and that’s the deal. I still have warm double socks on though.
An Indonesian Christian rock band in Bethlehem
One of the narratives of my life has been about dealing with paradox. My mother did love and care for me but she didn’t have the time and presence to mother me in the way I needed – that kind of thing. But that’s alright: it gave me some mother patterns to work with. Or this: my Tibetan name means ‘radiant merit’, my Arabic name ‘servant of the light’ and my Brahmin name is god of the sun, but there’s a shady side to me too, who gets involved in gritty, underworldy, heavy stuff. I’ve been exposing this side of me in the last month, with the strange thriller I’ve found myself in.
It goes to show, I’m not a holyholy meditation teacher at all, but a lawbreaking aged hippy charlatan who does nasty things, corrupts dishy young ladies, leads people astray and ought to be locked up forthwith – a danger to civilised society. Be warned.
I’ve been breaking the law recently, paying bribes. In West Africa, if you don’t pay enablement payments, nothing gets done. However, as my late senior barrister friend Keith used to say, in his endearingly bombastic Leo kind of way, “I, dear boy, am a purveyor of the Law of Man, but you, sir, are a purveyor of the Law of God”. Well, that’s a bit over the top, but there’s truth in it too, and sometimes divine will does need to prevail, whatever anyone thinks. So I’ve paid some bribes because, actually, it’s usually just to pay the guy’s phone bill or taxi fare so that he can do what you’re asking for and perhaps take a few bob home to his missus.
Well, if they want to arrest me for that, I’m over here. It’s a professional expense, and not the least of the sins I’ve committed. I’ve been a traitor, consorted with terrorists, smuggled tofu though Israeli checkpoints (they think it’s Semtex), taken on false guises and a few other things I’d better not mention.
But on the other hand, bad as I am, my life-saving stats measure well against any doctor or paramedic, and I’ve had the pleasure of uplifting thousands of people, and many of the bad things I once did, or decidedly didn’t do, are now, a few decades later, strangely approved of. It took a while. Some people think I’m brave, though my rather naive Aspie response is simply, ‘But why is that unusual?’.
Manger Square, Bethlehem, full of people
I have another weird Aspie thing too. I have an aversion to Christmas. I don’t do it. I’ve always felt unhappy feeling obligated to be happy and congenial when, at the time, I’m feeling contemplative and quiet. So I have a no-compromise approach that, before Xmas, is frowned on and, after Xmas, is envied.
On Xmas Day, if the weather allows, I’ll be out on the moors or the cliffs with a flask and a pie, attending to the top of my head and a few related matters, and if the weather is bad I’ll be huddled round the woodstove, propped in my chair or inner journeying in bed, busy not drinking sherry. Unless I find another person who would delight in an utter non-Xmas with me, I’ll be on my own, and that’ll be alright. You might wonder why.
Well, it’s a time for wrapping up the past and looking toward the future, and I have rather a lot of both at present. That’s solstice, the turning of a tide.
But it’s also a time when, rarely, the Christian and Westernised elements in the world suddenly get excited about peace and goodwill for a day or two. This is really good. My only reservation is that it suddenly ends around lunchtime on Xmas Day, when everyone starts blotting themselves out with food and booze, only to regret it afterwards.
Manger Square, Bethlehem, Palestine, at Christmas
Nevertheless, as a guerrilla planet-fixer with an esoteric style, I find it’s worth scooping up some of this goodwill for good use. After all, there are at least a billion people on Earth who really need some peace and goodwill to be shoved their way right now. If not, truth be told, the whole eight billion of us.
So I spend my solstice-to-Xmas doing consciousness work. It’s secret – don’t tell anyone. It’s a good time for doing some gentle infiltration of the collective psyche, to strengthen that thought: goodwill. If you’re on your own this Christmas, then, wherever you are, stick up your antennae and see whether you can find me in that ‘reality-field’ and come join me. Try 11am and 2pm GMT, Xmas Day.
I’m always there on Sunday evenings at 7pm GMT too, for half an hour.
Ten years ago I was in Bethlehem at Christmas. The slightly sad thing is that Christian numbers for the Christmas Pilgrimage are much diminished nowadays, so Muslims make up the numbers – Palestinians do appreciate Bethlehem’s global name-recognition in such a forgotten land, and Jesus is also one of the prophets of Islam.
The Catholic Xmas is a bit like ours in NW Europe, with a lot of the jingle-jangle, and big concerts in Manger Square with Christian singers and bands from Germany, Indonesia and Nigeria, and a few Papal delegates thrown in. And why on earth do they import Father Christmas to Bethlehem, already replete with Christ Mass primacy, when most Palestinians have no idea where Estonia is or what slieghbells are?
Then comes the Orthodox Xmas, which is a bit more sedate, very ornate and quite delightful to a jaded old heathen like me. The chanting is done with deep faith and mystique, and the archangels and cherubim really do seem to hover around.
Then in mid-January comes the Armenian Xmas, which actually, if I were Christian, is the kind of Christmas I’d prefer – ruminative and richly calm. Either way, they’re all resplendent with candles, incense, chant and reverence – that’s very different to the mosques, where there’s nearly no ceremony or pizazz, just quiet prayer. They both have their virtues, but give me an ocean clifftop or a desert outcrop anyday, and I’ll be happy.
It looks like I’ll still be on duty over Christmas, monitoring the West Africa situation daily. Here’s the latest news from there.
Phyllis, now three, some time ago
Phyllis, the child, is happy and in good shape. She underwent an amazing turnaround last week, going from fever and coughing blood to wanting an ice cream in two days flat. I think you lot, with your prayers, played a key part in that. She is now staying with Dr Isaac and his family. Phyllis seems to be a great kid, easy to have around, and everyone loves her. I’m so happy about that. She’s special, that one.
Felicia… well, she’s improving, but we hit a setback two days ago. She has been reviving, and three days ago we moved her out of hospital into accommodation near the doctor and his wife. She was awake and becoming able to function, but she fell over, and it was bad. She needed two blood transfusions, a drip and medication. I’ve managed to finance that. So, it’s tenuous with her at present.
Those of you who have been giving your prayers, healing and positive thoughts to Felicia… may I ask for another round? Please hold her and raise her up. She has brain injuries from the ‘accident’ two weeks ago (they were rammed, actually). We think she’ll be alright, and she’s in good care, though she isn’t out of danger yet.
I want to put in a word for Dr Isaac and his partner Millicent and their children. They have taken in Felicia and Phyllis. They live simply and have their own family concerns, but they care a lot, and they’re definitely not in it for the money.
One of the greatest benefits I’ve had from my humanitarian work has been meeting simple, good-hearted folk like these who are the real saviours of our planet. They just get on with it and hold the world up. They do so much of the mopping up of the world’s mess.
Here’s Dr Isaac
The people I’m involved with in West Africa, and also my handler with the fraud investigation company, are all good and remarkable people. In this business, you develop ways of finding out who you can and cannot trust, and everyone depends on each other, and there’s a certain implicit code of behaviour, and you bond closely with people you encounter when sharing intense situations with them.
The Syrian Orthodox church, Bethlehem, Palestine
In something like this, to use an old sexist term, it sorts out the men from the boys. The people who hang with you through thick and thin are often amazing people. Dr Isaac is like that. He lost his job for us (though I think he’ll get it back). He risked his and his family’s lives. He’s gone several extra miles. He’s a man of faith and a good doctor who deserves more than a one-room home for his family.
I’ve met many remarkable people, and he ranks high, a true server, a doctor of whom Hippocrates would be proud. We’ve known each other for three rather long weeks. God bless you, Isaac. People like you convince me that this world will survive. My daughters, son and grandchildren do that too.
I guess I’m a sucker for crisis situations because it brings out the best in many people, and I like working with them, and it brings out the best in me. I’m not good at normality, you see. I’ve always felt I’m there to help the helpers, the social healers and the frontline people, and it’s an area of deep late-life satisfaction now.
Here’s the Mosque of Omar on the other side of the square. Sensibly, when they invaded, the Muslims under Caliph Omar didn’t take over and convert the church. Bethlehem has had very good Christian-Muslim relations throughout history. I wonder why?
As an independent ‘freelance humanitarian’, for want of a better term, I’ve held to certain principles I feel are important such as: ‘don’t give a person a fish, but teach them how to fish’, and ‘teach a man and you teach a man, but teach a woman and you teach a generation’. There’s even William Blake’s statement: ‘the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ – and war is excess to human need, in my judgement.
I feel also that, as an educated, white, male, privileged Brit whose ancestors built the empire and kept it going, and living through its downfall and seeing its very mixed outcomes, I have a bit of an urge to complete the job. I’m not a great believer in reparations, guilt or sorrow – I just like to get in there and do something to help people have a better life and rise to their full potential. To the extent I can.
People have asked who or what I work with. To my surprise, at present it’s for a big bank – though that’s not my style. One of my PodTalks, The Only Planet of Choosing, gives clues. I’ve worked with all sorts of people, but the bottom line for me is their humanity, and progressing humanity’s evolution. My focus has been community-building, conflicts and crises, and helping social leaders stay on the rails.
You have to have your wits about you. This is strange because, as an Aspie, I can be at times apparently naively open but it’s not exactly that – it’s because I sense people’s hidden motives and agendas, and I often get delayed-action clarity on what’s really happening. So I look blank for a while. Then it all comes. So I’m best working with others, inputting what I’m good at. Such as total attention, hyper-focus. When I’m on form, I’m brilliant, and when I’m not, I’m best back here in Cornwall, out of everyone’s way.
Which is where I am now, on the farm, and it’s a dark and rainy pre-solstice night, and the owls and crows are all tucked under their wings down in the woods and hiding from the feather-ruffly wind. Wherever you are, may all be well with you.
Don’t worry too much about your circumstances, even if they’re tough at present – look at your attitude, and be innovative. Find simple ways to be happy. We all get inner friction and pain, but these are things we can reduce, even if we can’t reduce the adversity. That’s what’ll get us all through.
The Church of the Nativity began as a goddess temple (hence the Virgin Mary came here), then a Greek Apollo temple, and only then did it become a Christian Church. The front entrance is really low and you have to duck to go through – this is to force Crusaders to dismount and it stopped their hunky stallions from entering the church. But the Israelis just roll bombs in. Interestingly, in Bethlehem, I don’t get a feeling of Jesus – it’s Mother Mary’s or Mariam’s town, and the matriarchs there definitely let you know it
St Michael’s Mount from Cudden Point, with Penzance behind
I had my three-monthly phone chat with Liz the haematologist today. I have a blood cancer, Myeloma or bone marrow cancer, so the specialist who’s running me is a haematologist, a blood expert.
I seem to be doing well. The critical measure of myeloma is paraproteins, and they are found with a blood test done by the nurse who comes round monthly to administer my cancer drugs. My paraproteins have been on 5 since March, and Liz is happy with that. In early 2021 I got down to 2, but my illness of late 2021 and early 2022 took it up to 5 and it has stayed there. I can’t remember what it was when I was diagnosed three years ago, but it was in the hundreds or the thousands. I wasn’t far from popping my clogs.
But I got a reprieve. Well, you never get rid of myeloma – you just keep it within safe bounds. But the chemo worked – they had planned up to eight cycles of treatment and I was complete in five. As a blood cancer with the effect of hollowing your bones and making them eventually break and collapse, there are no tumours to be removed – though I have had Zolodronic Acid to strengthen my bones and stop their deterioration. I seem to be doing well, staying within safe bounds.
She also asked me about my covid and flu jabs. I told her I had had none and wasn’t interested – I hadn’t had covid and I tend not to get flu, and I have my ways of keeping my immunity high. “I won’t ask you about those, Mr Jenkins. I’m sure you know what you’re doing, and you seem to get good results, so just carry on”. She has got to know me by now.
I’m not ideological about medicine and healing. When I started on this journey three years ago I plumped for following my intuitions in all medical decisions, finding some sort of balance between allopathic and holistic methods, and trusting in the capacity of my bodymind to modulate things so that side-effects and harm are minimised. So I don’t have the jabs because intuitively I feel they aren’t a net gain or needed, in my case, and that is my choice. Not because of politics or conspiratorial suspicions. Just following my intuition.
In front, Cudden Point, behind, St Michael’s Mount, with the hills of Penwith in the distance
There’s a hidden Factor X too: inner doctors. I’m mentioning this because, if you have a serious illness, you might try this. Go into yourself and ask for help, for the attention of a set of inner doctors/healers. Your soul and your inner teacher will help with this. Train yourself to let them in – to open yourself up, give permission to be examined, follow the process, point out areas and issues that concern you, and allow them to do things. Let them look inside you, including at your psychology, your fears, concerns and guilty bits. You might or might not experience being showered with light, or infused with rays or instruments of light, or ‘etheric wires and rods’ are inserted, or you might feel warmth or colour in parts of you – be open to whatever happens, even if it is simply a feeling of relaxation.
There was one time when I had a worrying appointment the next day – I was anxious about what would happen. I asked my inner doctors for attention. It seemed they ummed and aahhed, but I didn’t get the feeling anything was happening. Oh well. Next day I went to hospital and the staff I met were fantastic, the doctor found an unexpected solution, the treatment was simple and easy and the prognosis was a relief. Ding. My inner doctors had clearly delegated the matter to the outer doctors (one Irish and one from Belarus, with a Nigerian radiologist) and guided their thoughts and hands. It is through this combination of metaphysical and physical medicine and healing that, at least for me, the staying-alive process works best.
I take well-chosen supplements and helpers too. Forget cure-all wonder drugs and regimes, but a selection of helpers, each making a 5% difference, can add up to 40% and make a critical difference. Number one is vitamin C (I take 1.5g per day, quite a lot). Then I take selenium, zinc and a really good multivitamin, colloidal silver in my water, Turkey Tail tincture, blueberry powder, a green algae mix, homegrown beansprouts, tahini and ground up nuts (for oils), probiotics, flower remedies… it goes on. I’m not fanatical about it. But it does make a positive difference to my underlying condition, immunity and cancer.
As do the various treatments I’ve had over time. It’s important to do just one at a time and leave them space to sink in – don’t get neurotic about it. I’ve had homoeopathy, radionics from Canada, chiropractic, naturopathy, e-Lybra machines, herbs, CBD oil, a variant of Alexander Technique, an energy treatment from Czechia that I can’t remember the name of (by a Swedish friend in USA), and crystal healings, laying-on of hands, remote healing, prayers – the only thing missing has been massages. I’ve been fortunate to have good friends and contacts, and I’m grateful for all the healing and support I’ve been given. It does work.
To be honest, although I wouldn’t rate cannabis specifically as a cancer drug, it’s a definite helper – it helps deal with a surfeit of time, a degree of pain, and it encourages a certain creativity, self-enquiry and understanding that itself can be a healer. It can help you change your attitude. (I do meditation and other things too.)
I don’t do all of these tharapies and supplements all of the time. It has rolled incrementally over the last few years. I follow what feels right at the time. When I was on my initial chemo treatment in the four months after diagnosis in late 2019, I had to take between 12 and 35 pills each day – and that drove me off getting neurotic about taking too many pills, supplements and treatments. Why? Because there is one medicine that tops all others.
Looking across Mounts Bay from Halzephron Cliff on the Lizard to Treryn Dinas on the south coast of West Penwith
Happiness. Yes. Happiness. I have really found this definitely to be true. Stay happy and, whatever happens, you’ll be alright, even when life isn’t alright. Go down, and you descend into a loop that’s hard to rise out of again. So, above all things, stay happy. Make that a top-priority rule, not just a hope.
This means a few things. Happiness is about attitude: it doesn’t just happen at you when the circumstances are right – it is created, a decision of the heart. You can either give yourself a hard time over life, or you can make it easier by seeking the silver lining – what’s right about life and what’s being given. It’s also about being happy with whatever life throws at us. Stop moaning – or at least, feel it and then let it go. Just going for a walk in nature can work wonders.
This is not necessarily easy, but the price of not doing so is higher, so it’s worth it. Thank your adversaries, enjoy your illness, appreciate the virtues of being short of money, and enjoy the wind and rain. There’s good to be had from that kind of approach, and when you’re facing the handicap and the uphill grind of longterm illness it becomes a central issue. Above all else, do whatever it takes to get happy and be happy, whatever is going on in life.
If it lifts you up, do it, and if it weighs you down, don’t. This statement is much more of a practical proposition than you would think.
In the last year I’ve had quite a bit of adversity, pain, sorrow and challenges. I’m certainly not happy all the time, and at times I’ve been grinding my stuff, suffering over things and falling into states I’d prefer not to be in. This isn’t about pretending to be happy, like Christmas, or escapism, or taking a hyper-positive attitude that seeks to override real life.
Carn Du at Lamorna, with the Lizard behind
It’s about returning. Returning to centre. To a place inside us where things are alright. Remembering to pull ourselves out of our morasses and scrapes, to see things from a wider perspective. The world isn’t ending. Change is constant. There’s joy and relief in truth. And pain and joy are contrasting poles of the same spectrum.
It’s a matter of coming back and habituating ourselves to doing so. Coming back to ourselves, to something bigger, wider, deeper and more enduring than our own little lives. The more we make a habit of this, the more it works, and after a time we start doing it more automatically. Sometimes, if I’m in a mood or a state, I give myself an hour to be angry, grouchy, down, fucked off and had enough, and then I drop it and come back to look at it from the other side.
In the last year, I’ve gone through a lot of pain over the loss of my partner. At times I got really lost in it – though it truth, in the end it was good, actually, as a way of grinding through the feelings to come out the other side. I started coming through and realising what a gift she had given me – a gift of pain that opened me up and kept me bleeding (metaphorically), which in itself has been a great gift. I cried and wobbled for months. It helped me dig out deep truths about my mother and my experiences as a young, estranged Aspie, in the early 1950s when I was 3-5 years old, and wondering why I was here, what this place was and who these people were.
So, bizarrely, that gift of pain was a gift of love. She reached parts others haven’t reached. And the present and future have now taken over from rueing the past. I’m not quite finished yet but I’ve come a long way. I feel it was the last really close relationship of my life, and from now on I’ll do things differently. For a modern woman, it’s not fair taking on an awkward customer and partially-disabled cancer patient like me – it’s too much to ask. So I must spread it around so that it’s more fun and less of a burden for anyone. I’m not talking about sex here, but about the various virtues of relationship that, in my current state, I miss. I’m managing, but I’m not doing that well as a single man with cancer.
Such as someone to talk to, who knows me well and accepts me as I am, and acts as a ‘second brain’. And I need three occasional minders, for adventures and trips, so that it doesn’t weigh too heavily on any one of them. I need different things with different people, since my intention for the rest of my days is to be more public, more open to larger numbers of, well… you lot. I’m a hermit too, but that part of me gets well serviced down’ere on the farm in Cornwall. Even though I’m quite a loving soul, it’s tricky for a woman to be close to a hermit who spends long hours and days writing books rather than paying attention to servicing loving relationships or stopping work when dinner is ready.
St Michael’s Mount from Penzance harbour
So I’m making a change. With only a few years left, everything has come into a different focus. I can’t wait around or let things drift in the way that I once did, when death seemed much further away. This is last chance saloon, and if I don’t do it now or soon, I’m not going to do it. Quite a few things have to be accepted as non-doable or non-repairable. Some are a relief, and some are painful. But the issue here is that it’s better to process things through in life, because when I get to death, there’s quite a lot else to pay attention too – such as moving forward – and a load of encumbrances from the past is not very helpful.
I’ve been finding that life has been accelerating that last-chance clearance process. In the recent six months, my health has been stable and I feel better now than I have felt since contracting cancer. So my primary focus on handling cancer and its effects has reduced, and now I have the rest of life to deal with. What has come up instead has been a lot of social and human issues. My brains and psyche have changed as a result of cancer, chemo, ageing and a few big Neptune transits, and I’m experiencing things very differently now.
Many physical capabilities, including car driving and easy mobility, are gone. I get through life at half the speed I used to, and my capacity to multi-task, remember details, remember names and figure out problems is reduced. Getting through each day is much more difficult than before, though I’m more adapted to it now and I accept it. I’ve simplified things to a degree where I can function more easily. I do a lot of writing, podcasting and online stuff, which I’m good at – if I had been a farmer or engineer needing physical mobility, with my kind of cancer, I’d have been in much deeper doodoo than I am.
It’s almost as if this particular kind of cancer was tailor-made for me. The specific trials and tribulations it has brought – a recent one is that my left arm is slowly going numb and tingly – have offered me a focus and challenge that seems karmically right for me. I’m glad I contracted cancer at this stage of life though, in my seventies, and not earlier. I’ve done enough in life to be kinda satisfied enough with it – though I do have some reservations and regrets. But in another way it has opened up a new phase of life. By cutting down my life-possibilities, other possibilities have emerged. I’ve been given a gift of time and space – time to ruminate and pay attention to things I didn’t have time for earlier in life. Or a new aspect of them is emerging because I have time and space. This is a privilege.
If someone reacts with ‘sorry’, when I tell them I have cancer, I can’t agree. I don’t advocate getting cancer or other serious ailments but, if they come your way, do your best with them. It’s not just about staying alive, and ‘getting better’ isn’t necessarily what you always need to do. The main thing is to ‘get good’ – whatever that means. Happiness is a key ingredient. Too many old, ill and disabled people are unnecessarily unhappy.
Carn Du, Lamorna, with the Lizard behind
It’s about optimising the soul-opportuinities we have been offered. It’s an opportunity to confront our fear and get to grips with things we have long feared – I had to get over an aversion to having needles stuck in me, or having x-rays. I do have, or have had, a fear of being disabled – and, bingo, I’ve been given half-disablement, specially customised for me. For me, this blood cancer is about my will to live. That’s always been a major life-issue for me too.
It’s also about my will to die. I’ve decided to take charge of my death – whatever that means. Deep in my soul, I’ve clarified and decided that I shall carry on until I don’t want to continue any more. There comes a point where there’s no more point fighting or pushing, and that’s just fine. Up to that point, it is my spirits that keep me alive, and if I keep my spirits up, I’ll be in the right state to handle whatever else comes. The main point here isn’t about staying alive as long as I can. It’s about optimising the experience of my soul, and doing the best things for its progression and for the all-round benefit of everything and everyone. I shall be where it’s most useful to be, and sometimes the opportunities can be greater on the other side.
That’s when I’ll go, and until then, there are a few things to do. Earth is a funny old place, but one thing is true. You don’t get these kinds of experiences anywhere else, so savour them while you can. The toast on Arcturus is just not as good as here, and on Alpha Centauri they’ve never even heard of ice cream or baked beans, let alone maxed-out credit cards or flat tyres. On some worlds you don’t even get the experience of being born – you just create yourself.
Lots of love from me, Palden.
PS: For those of you who have been following my recent adventures, please pray for Phyllis, three, who is struggling. We’ve identified that she has yellow fever, not cholera, and she has something more too. She is being transferred to a herbal hospital where the hope is to build up her immunity. After her experiences of the last month, she is weak. Thank you. Meanwhile her Mum, Felicia, in her thirties, is ticking over but not out of the woods yet.
Hello everyone. Where have I been? Well, Paldywan’s back on the holy warpath.
Sounds a bit strange, that, but it has indeed been strange. Mars, customarily the god of war, is to me a god of encounter resolution. Sometimes, life leads us into a fight – but the destruction involved depends a lot on how well we deal with the conflicts within ourselves. A great general in history once said, “Every drop of blood spilt charges its price” – it’s true. So the aim is to achieve the best all-round outcomes with the minimum of damage, but it’s a rollercoaster, the stakes are high and often the full results are slow in coming.
It wasn’t my choosing – I fell into it. I have this strange karmic pattern where I’m standing there, suddenly finding myself in the thick of it and sometimes able to pull off a remarkable solution – or at least, avoid the worst. In this instance I served as a honeypot, unwittingly attracting and exposing a crime ring involved in fraud, kidnapping, drugs and probably anything. By dint of doing the right things in the opening moments, I landed up being the only one who could follow it through – online from my desk, here on the farm.
But then, I wasn’t exactly unwilling. I’ve been feeling frustrated recently, physically unable to complete my humanitarian work, and this kind of stuff is the kind of thing I’m good at. Being rather hyper-focused, I’m calm in crises. “Ah, we have a situation” – some Palestinians used to quote me, trying to imitate my English accent, with a cheeky smile. As an Aspie, while I’m seemingly not very good at close relationships, in other contexts I can get inside the head of a person with a gun and talk them down, if necessary. Well, thus far it has succeeded, though there have indeed been ‘situations’.
I thought I’d left all that behind when cancer came my way three years ago, but the universe had other ideas – a few weeks ago I was requisitioned to play the role of a knight or a bishop in someone else’s chessgame. Again.
It’s an anti-fraud operation, now in a few countries. It’s delicate, changing hourly and daily, and I’m handling part of it. The short story is that, when I was blackmailed a few weeks ago, the first three blackmailers were small-time amateurs trying their luck to make a few bucks (two apologised afterwards), but the fourth was different – it emerged later that he was part of a crime gang, though we didn’t know it at the time. An anti-fraud agent – a really good chap, from Britain – handled the case and eventually had it wrapped up, deleting the fraudsters’ computers. Peace descended. Or so we thought.
Then suddenly, I received cries for help – the gang were coming after him, armed, and he needed to get away, pronto. They captured him, together with a woman, Felicia, who had bravely sheltered him, and her three-year old child, Phyllis. Suddenly, I was their only lifeline… and it went on from there. I managed to connect with his anti-fraud company (they work for banks), and since then I’ve been helping them.
The story went on through all sorts of complexities for twelve rather long days – it was demanding and I had to pace myself. That’s why I haven’t been blogging. After a week I managed to free Felicia and Phyllis, then further complications happened, and following that Felicia and another anti-fraud agent working for the company were attacked while driving in a car. Both have been in hospital at death’s door for some days, though on Wednesday (newmoon) I heard from the doctor that she had regained consciousness – what a relief. Meanwhile, he’s still on life-support. The unfolding situation is still rather hair-raising.
Poor little Phyllis is for now in the caring hands of strangers (I’m fixing arrangements for her), and the original British agent is still in captivity somewhere. Here am I, hidden in the far beyond, coordinating online with doctors, agents, taxi-drivers, handlers and sundry oddbods, fixing money, fixing heads, and with three or four lives at stake. Just a normal day on Earth, haha.
You meet some amazing people. A taxi-driver witnessed the attack, took the two people to hospital, then took them to another hospital and stayed with them for two nights and a day. I have just heard that he has lost his job as a result. What a good man – we’ll help him restore things. The doctor I’ve been dealing with has also been remarkable, though his wife probably doesn’t see him much.
Many people urge me to stay out of this kind of thing. Well, yes, but you’re also asking me to let these people die. That’s an option I don’t spend much time thinking about. In the middle of a crisis like this, you bond quite quickly and deeply with people. The first agent, in our last exchange on Skype before they got him, said he’d like to visit me on the farm one day, and I said, “You’re on, that’s a deal”. We haven’t spoken since, but I’m holding that thought, and I think he, wherever he is, is holding it too.
This hyperfocus business is strange. Another task I needed to do at the time was to reduce the length of my book Shining Land and remove some of the pictures – the removed stuff will go on the website. Bruce in Glastonbury, who is typesetting the book, recommended cuts because book production costs are rising and I want to keep it manageably priced. I’d been putting off this job but, when the above operation started up, happening in bursts throughout each day, I used the betweentimes for re-editing the book. It was a way of staying focused during a testy, turbulent, unsettling fortnight. So the book is now done and sent back to Bruce.
When I was diagnosed with cancer in November 2019 my life changed. Then last winter a crisis took me down deep and, by summer, it bounced me back up again, raked out but sensing there was something in life left to do. I seem now to be in a new chapter. My relative disability, aloneness and isolation, more a problem six months ago than now, mean I have time and space to do things – at least, those things I can nowadays do. Near-death and ‘chemo-brain’ have taken me through a level shift in the way I see and understand things, and while in some respects I’m saying similar stuff to 30-40 years ago, something is coming out between the lines that’s deeper, wider and stronger. Which goes to show, even fearsome things like cancer can have their blessings, if we let things be that way.
Having emerged from my shell during 2022, I’ve been cogitating what to do in 2023. What’s taking shape is this…
First, a number of Magic Circles – covering 21st Century esoterics and living as a stellar soul with an earthly contribution to make. Some will be like the Magic Circles of 2022 and at least one will involve a talking stick circle and energy-work.
Second, an online series of monthly Magic Moments (in the far beyond). These are for friends in other countries, those unable to attend Magic Circles and any Magic Circle attendees who wish to join in. Each month I’ll highlight a bundle of useful knowledge and insights, about the universe, time, the nature of our times, ancient wisdom, parapolitics, psychic geoengineering, inner aid work, healing, rescuing souls and whatever else comes up at the time – that kind of thing.
Each of these events will stand for itself, so you can join whatever you like, whenever you can. They will roll along, each rather different, unfolding as they will. They’ll all be reasonably priced and as accessible as possible. I might do one or two events for fellow cancer and terminal patients, if that is sought. Details will follow in the New Year. If you’re good at organising and have outreach in your area or network, please contact me if you’d like to host an event.
Then, third, while doing the above, I’ll be watching to see if some participants are up for starting a world-healing project with longterm aims, to continue and grow after I’ve gone. This is Version Three of earlier world-healing projects of the 1990s and since (the Hundredth Monkey Project and the Flying Squad born out of it). If and when a workable quorum of people forms, such a project can start.
There are people and bits to fit into place, and it’s an organic group process resting on who turns up and how it develops. I have a packet of seeds to hand over, with a little experience in growing them, but the garden will be evolved by the group itself – my shelf life is limited. In the 2023 Magic Circles, amongst other things we’ll have some tasters of this kind of inner work that will be useful to you whether or not you’re interested in the project. Without wanting to sound grandiose about it, there’s something ‘heaven blest’ about this, and some people might like to work within a reality-field of this kind.
Ultimately it’s all about gradually cranking up group synergy to a level where a group’s healing power is greatly increased – and the world needs it. This takes time, since a group is as strong as its weakest links, and it needs approaching in a somewhat matter-of-fact, steady and diligent way, starting at the beginning and giving it time. The Flying Squad managed 20 years, doing amazing work, though where we didn’t succeed was crossing generations and replacing ourselves with new members – so we ran out of numbers and steam. Third time lucky?
I might have only three or four years left for midwifing this idea: its success rests on the circle of people who step in and work together. The project will be pitched so that it is not too demanding in terms of commitment, because beavering away at this work longterm is more important than creating dramatic firework displays that then fizzle out. The basic commitment involves a meditation, wherever you are, once a week on Sundays, plus two or three weekend meetings per year, and there will be scope for greater and lesser involvement, to reflect everyone’s circumstances and availability, which can also change over time.
If there are people who feel right doing this, and if the right critical bits fall into place, then we can start, perhaps in late 2023 or in 2024. It will start in Britain, but folks in other countries will be able to participate remotely and, you never know, it might spread. If this sets a bell dinging, think about it over wintertime, and I’ll come out with more in a while. This is just a tender germinating seed at present, but it might one day become a tree. We shall see. Also, if option three doesn’t lift off, then options one and two will still be good.
If there’s one message I’m moved to convey, it’s this: whatever your path, and whatever your calling, do pursue it.
Now is not the time for holding back and awaiting another day. In whatever way works for you and lifts you up, whatever is your ability and contribution, it is time to come out with it and do it. If I can be of assistance in that, by doing what I do, then welcome. As I keep quoting, ‘For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing’.
I have some personal bits to put in place. Any offers? I need a part-time, nimble-fingered, literate PA with digital and communication skills and the sort of character and availability that would work well with a person like me. You don’t have to be in Cornwall, though that might be helpful, but the main thing is that we need to be able to sync well with each other. I also need an experienced techy Zoom moderator for the online classes, located anywhere, for a few hours each month. I’m looking for a further minder and companion too, living in Cornwall or Devon, to work alongside Penny – it’s occasional, not hard, you need to be a driver, there might be trips away, and I’m looking for someone for whom it would be uplifting and right. I can pay only expenses but, when it works well, there will be ample magic payoffs.
I’ve been quiet yet it hasn’t been quiet. Been going through some big emotional let-gos too, which have been both a wrench and the lightening of a weight. When I’ve wrapped up this operation sufficiently I’ll enjoy a getaway trip away sometime, somewhere. West Penwith, stuck out in the Atlantic, is a windy place in winter, and it sure has been whistling and whooshing around, with sunshine and monsoons in quick succession.
The cattle are down in the lower fields and the birds hide in the bushes and trees when they find the Atlantic coming at them with full-on gusto. The crows and jackdaws down in the woods, hundreds of them, work up a racket when dawn is coming – they’re my alarm clock – and in the evening they do flighty, crarking displays before settling in the evening, reminding me that it’s time to start thinking about dinner. I forget these things, you see – it’s an unhelpful aspect of hyper-focus.
Please put in a prayer for Felicia, child Phyllis and the two agents, both of them good men. I want them all alive and okay. It means a lot to me. Thank you for that. This is not the greatest of the world’s troubles, but if we all deal with our own little chunk of reality, together we’ll make inroads into turning this world of ours into the kind of place it really needs to be. Gaia needs a laying on of hands.
I’ve just done another upload to my audio archive of talks from former decades. It’s taking shape, gradually – my wintertime project.
This one is about ancient British time systems and the way they are built into ancient remains from the neolithic and bronze ages. It discusses key issues such as solstices, equinoxes, eclipses, lunar maxima and minima, the rising and setting of stars, zodiacs and subjective inner time.
I’ve just listened to a rather inspired one, which I did in Byron Bay, Australia, in 1992, shortly after writing the book ‘The Only Planet of Choice’. If you’re a TOPOC freak, you might be interested in this one. It’s called ‘An ET View of Terrestrials and What’s Happening on Planet Earth‘. Trivial, mad, timewasting stuff, of course…
I’m learning a lot from these talks – it’s funny, that. But when you’re in life’s last chapter, it’s really fascinating trawling through old stuff, just to get a balanced view of things you’ve been involved with through life. It’s a bit like putting yourself on the scales to see how it all balances up. You gotta look at the plusses and the minuses.
When I was 24 I had a near-death experience that changed my brains and removed a lot of my memory and capacity to remember the events of my life. This is why, if I haven’t seen you for over a decade, I might look vaguely at you while a memory is slowly emerging (sorry about that).
So it can be quite a surprise, actually, to hear myself rabbiting on from around thirtyish years ago – and I’ve come across some gems – but the thing is, was it the same life?
And that’s just some of them
We have hundreds of crows living down in the woods below our farm. They assemble after autumn equinox and spend the winter together, dispersing around Penwith around spring equinox. In the evenings they get worked up, crarking a lot until, around dusk, they go into swoopy formations and an impressive tribal synergy process.
It’s like the corvid tribe has an identity and mind of its own, which the individual crows plug into as they do these dusk rituals, before they all settle in the trees to spend the night together, as one tribe – all of them probably related.
This is one of the blessings of my life at present. Another is the little birds, robin and tits that feed at the feeder hanging in the dogrose bush outside my door.
Gurnard’s Head, on the north coast of West Penwith, Cornwall. Its Cornish name means ‘the desolate one’.
Here in Britain and across the rich world, the problem we have now with our economies arises from our not having had a full and proper cultural revolution in the 1960s-70s. What has happened is that the exaggerated materialism we adopted in the 1980s is seizing up, and we don’t want to recognise that it’s all going awry, tripping over its own shoe laces. Let me explain.
As Buddhists say, the only constant is transitoriness or change. The more we get involved in materialism, the more we attach ourselves to things that begin and end. And they do come to an end. A country, a people or a culture experiences an ascendancy if it answers a need, if it steps into a greater potential that somehow does something that people seek or history accepts or the future demands. But when it loses the plot and rests on its laurels, history starts passing it by.
Britain grew great in the industrial revolution on the basis of technology, sheer inventiveness and the capture of lands and resources worldwide that it could exploit. This was its mission 200 years ago. But in the 20th Century that leading edge, based on coal and steam power, was eventually lost, and the empire was lost at around the same time. The critical point came around the 1960s, and what arose at that time was a potential cultural revolution in our own country. One centre of it was Liverpool, where I grew up – once the world’s greatest port and then declining terribly.
Gurnard’s Head from Carn Naun, with Pendeen Watch behind
This possible cultural revolution arose within the centre of society, mainly amongst educated and socially advantaged young people like me. We were society’s beneficiaries, not necessarily the underprivileged and downtrodden – though many of our parents and grandparents had started there. Holistic and adventurous in perspective, this movement covered most of the world issues that then were visible and important, from civil rights and social change to peace, to health, to farming, to the arts, to matters of spirit – the global village had arrived and, with it, the possibility of something completely new.
It was a means by which the West tried to renew itself, to begin reorientating its goals in order to redeem, correct and further develop what it truly was aiming for. It was aiming to make life better for everyone, globally, to free people from the drudge of hard labour, to free them up for more meaningful creative and spiritual possibilities. Instead, another, more materialistic, acquisitive, frenetic, consumptive future was chosen in the Reagan-Thatcher period – what I then called amphetamine economics. Many people bought into it or went along with it, hoping they might get rich. It is now seizing up. The whole model of material development is coming apart, eroded by its own inherent weaknesses.
Today in Britain we have a new prime minister originating from one of the former colonies – the biggest and richest, the Indian Raj. During its latter years, the Roman empire was similar – its emperors were Syrians, Spaniards, Brits and Croatians – and Rome’s vanquished and colonised peoples propped up the empire because they quite liked its benefits. Or perhaps they had already lost enough of their old ways to prevent them going back.
Having long been preached the virtues of democracy, the world’s majority, the relatively unrich, are now asserting majority rights. The world is going through the beginnings of a social-cultural globalisation process, no longer determined and steered by the rich world. What’s interesting here is that while, materially and our ways and values, we humans are becoming globally standardised (we all use roughly the same gizmos, supermarkets, burgers and plastic bags), socially and culturally we’re going through a re-diversification, a multiplication of differences, subgroups and identities – new tribes and nations are forming, based on internal connections rather than tradition or external imposition.
In the face of the standardising globalisation process, issues of personal and group identity and diversity are growing just as fast. We’re becoming a predominantly urban race – we topped 50% of large-city dwellers around 2008 and it could well be 70% by mid-century. This is a very fundamental change, affecting the psychology, experience and spirit of humanity. When people move to a city they move to a different world.
But we still have a big question. If you were an ET approaching Earth and wishing to talk to the people of planet Earth, where would you find our leader? Who can speak on behalf of all of us and legitimately make decisions on behalf of Earth’s people?
These are times of much more fundamental change than we currently see or understand. We’re immersed in it, entering the future facing backwards, and in too much of a hurry keeping the show on the road to stand back and smell the coffee. The full change has not broken out yet – we’re dealing right now in late 2022 with powerful undercurrents and rumblings. This rapidly rising wave is likely to peak in the late 2020s, when we tip into an utterly new process. A new age cannot come until the old age stops sabotaging it. When the critical, decisive, overwhelming change-wave comes, we enter a new phase lasting decades, probably fifty years. We stand right now on the edge of an avalanche of events and shifts, likely to start cascading in this decade. (The astrological details are here).
This will introduce a new, insecure, yet fast-moving period where, on the whole, the world transits toward big adaptational changes, toward solving the problem, but it will take decades before we know that the problem is sufficiently resolved. So much needs sorting out that we need to find a new, pragmatic way of doing it.
We’re entering a whitewater rapids phase in the 2020s-30s before we go over the waterfall, probably in the 2040s. We’re likely to be crossing the Great Divide in the 2040s-60s, around which time we cross into a new landscape – and the coin is spinning in the air to determine what it will look like.
The necessary shifts of global-scale values, ideas and priorities will, I think, take at least 25 years from now to slot properly into place, but the process has already started – it was sub-surface up to 2020 and the outbreak of Covid, and it’s accelerating. It’s like a rising tide – boats get lifted out of the sand and mud, and they float, and if the waves overtop the harbour walls the boats can break free of their moorings and a safe haven becomes a chaotic nightmare, even though the only thing that happened was a rising of the tide.
In geology, the erosive power of a river increases as the square of its volume – that is, if the volume increases three times, its erosive power increases nine times. Psycho-socially, and worldwide, this is what is happening. The flow is now turning into a more of a flood, the erosion is increasing, and there’s a long way to go before our imperilled civilisation is safe and okay to move into the future.
At some point, the incoming tide will breach the harbour walls and we enter a different movie – the power and the glory of the open ocean. Paradoxically, this critical change could happen quite surreptitiously – it could be that, one morning, we wake up and everything suddenly looks and feels totally different. Though on some level of our being, we knew this was happening.
It’s time now for us to transition onwards, ride the waves and get more used to doing so, because we’ll have more of this in future.
Try to identify those stuck parts of your life that aren’t moving – things that no longer lift or light you up, or not as much as before. Entertain the idea of changing things more than you previously thought. Be ruthlessly honest and fiercely real – getting real is an important process, since it’s about recognising and taking ownership of the truth of things in your life, including the beliefs and justifications you’ve lived by thus far.
It’s okay to get stripped naked (metaphorically): vulnerability and insecurity bring with them amazing gifts. Safety and security are ebbing away, and the more we get used to changing, shifting times and circumstances, the better we shall be.
Pain is made up of two things: the issue that creates the pain and the way we choose to experience it. Do we make it bigger, with all the fuss, drama and inner friction we create for ourselves? Or do we realise that, no matter how difficult life seems to be, there’s a way forward, things’ll work out, and there’s cause to be grateful for what we have?
Get down to bottom lines and worst fears. If you bring your fears to the surface, looking at what you fear, often it becomes clear that you can actually move forward, you will make it, and you don’t need to let fear stop you from doing what you know you need to do. Use fear as a way of moving forward: if you fear it, consider actually doing it. Because, whether or not your fears come true, you’ll be far better prepared for the worst than if you hadn’t ever faced this stuff. If you’re prepared for the worst, the chances are that you’ll either survive it or, more likely, it won’t actually come – because many of the adverse events of our lives come to us precisely because we fear and avoid the issues that lie beneath and behind them.
I’m not saying this because I myself have mastered it. Issues like this are what I myself have been facing recently – Saturn-Pluto stuff – and this is what I’m trying to remind myself. (Partially, you see, I teach myself though communicating with you.) When you’re faced with bigger-than-nornal adversity – in my case, cancer and all that goes with it – the feeling tones and experiential intensity of life get amplified and you can get rubbed up deeply and movingly, sometimes by quite small things.
One of the issues for me has been a combination of loss of mobility, infection risk, increasing electrosensitivity, dependency on others and relationship breakdown which has meant my social life has dwindled catastrophically. I can’t hang out with people (unless they switch off their phones – sometimes a big ask). One advantage, however, is that, to plug the gap, I’m writing blogs, making podcasts and doing forays up to England to do events instead. So you win some and lose some.
I’ve been using this time for ruminating over the next step in my life. Time is not on my side, but it’s worth spending it well. It’s now nearly three years since I was diagnosed with cancer, and I’ve got used to my new reality. I seem still to be alive, to my surprise, and I seem to have a few years left. The last year has been something of a nightmare, though in the process something new has dropped into me. So I want to change things.
I have evolved a plan, and I’ve visualised a small and a big version and worked through many details, and something is clarifying here in my eyrie down in Cornwall. For me, it’s phase three of a forty year evolution – not new stuff at all, but I have realised it has not been taken as far as it can go. The big question I’m ruminating over is whether I have what it takes to do it – and the bucket is there to be kicked anytime. Actually, inshallah, I think I might have what it takes, but I’m a strangely realistic visionary and in a weak position in life, and I want to get to a 100% feeling inside. That’s why I’m sitting on it.
If you can get to that 100% feeling in your bones, you then move into a position where it might be possible to move a mountain. We come here to Earth to find out. While a potential might be there, its actualisation is no twenty-minute procedure. It’s that wee matter of 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
As for the cabin where I live, on an organic farm at the centre of West Penwith, it’s called The Lookout, because that’s what you do through its big windows. Except it’s as much a look-in as a look-out. Especially on rainy days. In winter I stay warm with and cook on a lovely warm woodstove.
So now I’m sitting on it, gestating, cogitating, writing notes, checking my feelings. Being time-rich, I can do this. I’ve given myself until winter solstice to clarify things and until Imbolc (early February) before committing and coming out with it. All I have, really, are insights, experience, a vision and a wee bit of social cred.
But it’s not time to talk about it yet. The basic intent is clarifying, but there’s more to go on the method and the manifestation. If any of my readers feel a jiggling of something when you read this, please cogitate it and whether you might be up for it. I shall need to find out during 2023 whether there are sufficient people prepared to give this years, and to stick with it – including after my death. Because, for me, there’s no point starting it otherwise. I’ll find out by doing more events and putting out feelers and seeing who turns up.
It concerns world healing. But just keep it under wraps for now and cogitate it, please. If I get to that 100% feeling, I’ll tell you fully what it is, with my usual lucidity. And if I don’t, I shall leave a body of ideas behind, which will help someone else pick this up and run with it. And I might be able to help from the other side.
Toward this end, this week I started a new project, building an audio archive of twentyish of my best talks and workshops from the 1980s-2000s – because these will form part of that body of work.
Weighty stuff, on a rainy, drippy Scorpio day. Time for a round of tea. Jon the farmer rumbles past, down in the yard, on his tractor. Someone in the workshop is banging something metallic. Our cattle herd is being moved down from the hill to the lower fields by the woods. The bronze age barrows up the hill are shrouded in wet mist. And life goes on at our farm.
Recently I’ve been working on straightening up my back. When I went down (or even up) with bone marrow cancer, the four bottom vertebrae of my back collapsed, altering the architecture of my pelvis, legs and back. I lost bone mass and my back grew weaker to the extent that I’ve had to use sticks ever since to hold myself up. Since then I’ve had an unconscious tendency to stoop, which gets exaggerated in the later part of the day or when I’m tired or my energy is down. This gets interesting though – there’s more to this.
For me, taking on cancer involved taking on a burden and making it mine. Living became more difficult and dragging myself around is more of an effort than it used to be. I feel heavy even though I’ve always been slim, and now I’m bony. In a way, I’m quite a big presence, yet my body has been lean, and nowadays rather frail. I deal with that fragility with willpower, by resorting to ‘second strength’ – the strength that, as a runner or mountaineer, you get through to when you’ve broken through your initial tiredness. Mars in Scorpio – that’s me, and Uranus is doing an opposition to it.
This Saturnine burden-bearing thing has been a life-issue for me – somewhere between karma-yoga and self-punishment – so it’s fascinating that I get a cancer that concerns the blood (life-force and will-to-live) and bones (gravitation and carrying that weight). I’ve sometimes wondered whether I was an elephant in a past life.
Nowadays, when my spirits are flagging and I’m tired or feeling burdened, I tend to droop. So I’m retraining myself to stand straighter, reminding myself over and over to lift myself up. I’m being helped in this by a lovely man in St Just, Alan, who does his own version of Alexander Technique, and whose firm hands and ways of manipulating me give a satisfying feeling of being opened up, stretched, uplifted and balanced.
It has become really clear to me how much my current posture relates to my state of mind and spirits. When I’m up, I’m up, and when I’m down, I go down in posture. So I’m working on the centre of willpower in my solar plexus and also on the character of my thoughts – astrologically, Uranus is opposing my Mars in Scorpio, bringing up these kinds of issues.
Pendeen Watch from Bosigran Castle
When I was a mountaineer when young, I learned that cultivating uplifting thoughts has a levitational effect, getting you up that mountain much more easily and happily. But if you’re grinding your stuff, worrying about how far you still must go and indulging in tiredness, then it gets terribly difficult, longer, more painful, and your rucksack gets heavier.
The same applies to living with cancer. It’s a mountain to climb with only a few let-ups, a mountain with no summit till you finally give up and die – whereas, as a mountaineer, you can descend and have a hot bath afterwards. There can be longterm wear-and-tear and challenges to the spirit – it’s all about will-to-live. These challenges can be weighty – they have been so for me. But facing this stuff has sorted me out inside quite a lot.
As a mountaineer and cross-country runner I trained my will to stay focused and to hang in there by working with my mind. But when I got involved with ETs in my forties I started imbibing ideas they put forward and started connecting things together. The Nine had talked about a difficulty connected with the downward-pulling effect on consciousness of gravity and dense physicality, as we have them on Earth. This has a twofold effect: the direct effect of gravity itself, and the effect of accumulated human habits, beliefs and institutions, which tend to embed a deep, guilt- and fear-ridden, downward-pulling effect on society and human culture as a whole.
Our conditioned beliefs, fears, guilt and shame are means by which we allow ourselves to be controlled, giving power to those who would control us. We constrain the scope and depth of our awareness, fitting inside boxes, clipping wings, subscribing to channels of belief, conforming to perceived expectations, setting aside our deeper feelings and perceptions and generally losing the plot, losing perspective and losing ourselves. It’s a comfort-zone which, if everyone does it, makes everyone feel safe. Except we aren’t safe, since the basic premises of such a life-structure are unsustainable longterm, hollow. We’ve become addicted to quite sophisticated avoidance strategies.
I learned about this key gravitational issue from two sources: the Nine, who mentioned this as a key factor in bringing us to our current rather imperilled condition, and the Austrian scientist Viktor Schauberger, who proposed that the law of gravity and the law of levity are equal and opposite, and that their balancing and utilisation are a matter, in the end, of consciousness. In other words, uplifting thoughts are levitational, and depressive thoughts are gravitational. Think about it – but not too much!
It’s all to do with vibrational frequencies. Dense physical matter isn’t just stuff – it’s energy vibrating at wavelengths that make it appear physical. Gravity-levity occupy a range of frequencies, as do light, thought, emotion, subtle energy, different forms of consciousness and their moods and states. These interact with each other. When I’m walking on the cliffs and feeling inspired, my power increases and walking gets easier. In connection with the relative rebirth I’ve gone through this summer, I can stand upright without sticks for longer now than I could a year ago (five minutes instead of two) – so the levitational force is increasing in me. Though it still depends on my energy-state at the time. I can overcome tiredness by working with my state of mind and heart, if I’m on a long hike, or if it has been a long day, though I usually pay a price the next day. That’s a matter of pacing myself and energy-management – dipping out, resting my mind and degravitationalising my body.
When I experienced a lot of fatigue in 2020-21, by late afternoon I would lose energy and start drooping. My mind would start slowing and switching off, I’d lose my mind and my words, and my life-energy would dwindle rapidly. Sometimes this would happen in minutes, as if I was being taken over. Those are moments when I really value having someone around for a bit of support and TLC – it doesn’t happen much nowadays. But it’s okay if I can retreat to bed, take the weight off my back and drift off into a fatiguey kind of trance. If I can’t, I’m in trouble, unable to marshal myself and do what’s necessary, and needing to focus a lot of energy just on staying upright, taking one step at a time.
Porthmoina Cove
I feel more in sync with myself now, in October, and my life-energy has improved since spring. But one year ago I was going down, ill and struggling in a nightmarish in ner reality, sinking into the dark, and eventually to lose my partner – a disaster for me, and probably for her. It was a major Neptune transit to my Saturn. I lost my way and came close to losing my life. But I’m a survivor: my starting thought, when I’m lost in the dark, is to ask myself where the gift lies.
It was hard, that time, but it put me through the grinder and I emerged from the other side in springtime, blinking and rather surprised, surfacing with a new sense of mission – something to keep me alive. That’s important because, when you’re old and disabled, society shoves you to the side and forgets you unless you do something to bring yourself back in. And, regarding grinders, in order to be gifted with miracle solutions such as a rebirth after a crisis, it’s often necessary to make the downpayment first. The universe tests us, wanting to know whether we’re 100% behind it, because it’s only hundred-percentness that enables us to override the normal default rules of life and nature, bringing a higher level of rules, norms and magic into operation.
When I was ill, wondering whether I was leaving life, the threads in my life that remained incomplete came into sharp contrast. Something was coming clear that I could not lay them to rest. Paradoxically, the most immediately painful one, the loss of my ladylove, left me with a big, simmering, unresolved issue, and it had a strange way of keeping me alive! It was so bad that it activated the fightback in me. But the realisation that there was something more to do with life before I go – that was the clincher. I realised that, if I were up in heaven, I would regret not having done all I could to set in motion some serious work in the area of world-healing. This has been a major thread in my life since I was about sixteen. It’s an incomplete thread. Mission not accomplished.
Working on my posture has a direct relationship with – when it boils down to it – fulfilment and happiness. Not just because of the structural, bony corrections that might happen, raising my life-energy, but also because it’s all about developing the levitational power within – the power to rise up. In my observation, in my cancer process, the medical treatment has saved me and kept me alive (and I wouldn’t have lived had it not worked), but the healing I’ve received, from people, from HP Source and from my own inner processing, has created something of a rule-breaking miracle. I’m now more alive than otherwise I would be.
Gravity has a relationship with time too. Our capacity to deal with time is a key issue in consciousness. Time spreads out events along a perceptual, developmental continuum such that, on our densely physical, time-bound, spinning planet, life is a process of working with physicality and with life-experience in a very gradual and drawn-out way – at times frustrating, and often technically complex. My Tibetan teacher, the Karmapa, once taught that patience is applied timelessness. That is, all of our wishes are fulfilled in the fullness of time, and we really need to worry much less about how things happen and how to steer and control them. They will all come.
One of the Boscregan clifftop cairns. Sennen behind.
Getting old and being partially disabled, I’m losing my powers, and there’s quite a sense of loss to that. But then, from a time-released perspective, throughout life I’ve had my powers and all sorts of experiences with them, and that was good, and now life is about something else. Other powers have become available that I didn’t once have. I’m doing better on the wisdom, acceptance, insight, inner journeying and gratefulness-for-being-alive fronts, and my writing and podcasting have improved. My vibe and inner archetype have changed.
I’ve lost many ‘executive’ functions in my brains and cannot multi-task or do rapid-fire attention switches or complex situations any more, but something on the other, imaginal, intuitive, creative side has actually improved. So there’s a gift in everything, and we can focus on what we’ve lost or don’t have, or we can give attention to what we’re gaining and what’s available. That’s our choice.
When you come close to the end, you’ve had your time. It was given, you had it and you did it, and what you did and didn’t do with it were, in the end, your choice. It goes through stages and it eventually comes to an end. That’s life. Hopefully, in the course of life, you can go through most or all of those stages – and pity those who get cut short, culled before their time, mown down by a karmic wave that is larger than their own personal one.
To live in this kind of physical existence, we needed to live on a time-bound planet defined by its rotational and orbital patterns, because a planet like this produces multiple evolutionary circumstances in which enormous experiential diversity can grow. It has local environments, seasons and climatic patterns that stimulate beings like us, prompting us to explore and extend ourselves. We weren’t meant to destroy this world in the process, however.
But physicality means that we enter into close relationship with things and circumstances that get born, live and die, and it happens to us too. The big mistake is the belief that this kind of physical, perpetually-changing existence is the only one that is real. Even though, in our sleep and altered states, we go into completely different worlds and existences on a regular basis.
So it’s our constrained awareness that binds us to ticktock time. But there’s another kind of time too – evolutionary time – and it has little relation to ticktock time. In evolutionary time, you can make ten years’ progress in twenty minutes, in an intense growth situation. If you block your growth through fear, then you lock yourself into ticktock time and you ‘serve time’ – some people do it for the whole of their lives. The more we invest in working on ourselves, allowing the magic of life to work through us, trusting in our spirit and serving humanity, the more that our relationship with time changes – since time doesn’t constrain energies that come from beyond time and beyond self. You’re capable of being old when young and young when old. You don’t worry so much. You realise there’s more to life than paying bills and doing your perceived duty. The laws of life start changing, and things start happening which, in that time-bound world and the groupthink that goes with it, were deemed improbable or impossible.
Light, energy, thought, gravity, consciousness – they are connected, all of them operating in a range of frequencies. What I’ve been finding is that, as my body and my life-possibilities become more limited, I’m learning more about the intimate relationship of all of them. It’s directly connected with my backache, mood, happiness and choices at any moment. Giving them all attention is helping my healing process. This, for me, doesn’t mean ‘getting better’, since I won’t, but it does mean being in a better state than otherwise. Being happier about the life I have. The funny thing is that, with this kind of acceptance, I’ve been getting marginally better!
A scene from the Buckfastleigh Magic Circle. Galen and Jahnavi, behind, had just finished playing music and we were ready for lift-off
With some pics from the Buckfastleigh Magic Circle, Sept 2022
We’re going through a really scrangly time at present, and I’m hearing of a number of people going through it, and I am too. There’s an astrological transit, Saturn square Uranus, which is turning out to be sharp-edged, hard and grating – a conflict between ideas-perceptions-expectations and evolving hard, factual reality. It’s all crunching hard in the public sphere and in our personal worlds. This seems to be a gritty threshold point on an evolving process.
A Saturn square Uranus would normally have quite a strong effect on events and atmospheres, but it wouldn’t be earth-shattering. However, at present the world is tense, insecure, ill at ease and loaded with hazard. It’s the kind of thing where the death of one woman can cause an uprising in a place like Iran – the Arab revolutions ten years ago started like that too. Social wildfires break out. It’s all to do with bottled-up, high-pressure underlying feelings in humanity that are so loaded and volatile that a ripple of energy can set things off. This Saturn square Uranus is a bit like that. Its influence is pumped up by eight billion people going through an intense time.
But there’s more to this too, and it’s longer term. We are in times of historic, planetary change, and the stakes are high. I’d break down the various intensities into three.
Jackie Juno does the introduction. She and Jeanne Hampshire organised it.
One is the bottled-up energy left over from around 2009-2012: this was an opportunity for change but little really happened, and the genie was more or less stuffed back into the bottle. In 2012 the future turned into the present, and everyone was forced to realise things were getting really serious. This bottled-up feeling means that there’s a big glob of unprocessed frustration, regret, loss, injustice and need for change that is sitting there in the collective unconscious, simmering and waiting to explode. The heat needs to rise only a little to start the fizzing – and there’s an uprising every few months somewhere in the world now. So it doesn’t necessarily need a major astrological configuration to spark off major events, in conditions like this. There’s a lot of pent-up energy left over from previous big configurations where fundamental issues failed to be processed – the current war in Ukraine, for example, arises from issues not sorted out around the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993.
The second is a tidal shift that’s going on now and by 2024, when Pluto moves into Aquarius for twenty years until 2044. Twenty years of Aquarian issues. We’ve been through a period since the 1980s where Capricorn has been strong – money, law, technology, governments, corporates, tradition, hierarchies, resources – and now it’s going to change. Briefly put, this is about the wisdom and the madness of crowds – the world public. Do the people serve the system or does the system serve the people, and how much of which? It also concerns social control, mass beliefs and behaviours, the rights of individuals and of collectivities, inclusion and exclusion, the competing interests of nations and the world, the battle of new against old ideas, the forces of polarisation and solidarity, and human issues in the social context. This shift of themes is beginning to gain momentum, but it will take two years more.
I’m leading an inner journey to find the source of our souls. I was in there with everyone else, far gone.
When the economy rises, society falls, and when the economy sinks, society rises. The seesaw is tipping over to a new direction right now, especially for the rich world. Here’s another issue too: we cannot really resolve the ecological and climatic issues before us unless society itself goes through a fundamental shift – because it is society, humanity, which has to do the resolving. To do this we need to agree sufficiently on what we are trying to do and work together to pull off a miracle.
The third is a case where the future can exert a causative influence on the present. In the late 2020s, around 2025-28, it’s all going to be going like the clappers. So right now it’s a bit like the low-tide, eerie silence of an impending tsunami – the future is sucking us toward it. The bad news is that it’s going to prove to be all too much for everyone and, the way the world is, some people will get scrunched. The good news is that this avalanche of events and changes will loosen up many stuck, interrelated issues, and it will also bring a rush of solutions. It’s an acceleration.
The key issues of the time will be social priorities (Pluto in Aquarius), new and changing ideas and perspectives (Uranus in Gemini) and leadership and power issues (Neptune in Aries). These three will form a triangle, or an energy-thrum, which actually will be very positive, a florescence under duress. But, since we have so many unresolved issues in the world, unatrtended to in recent decades, things could get difficult. If we had started the necessary changes fifty years ago, this would likely have been a very productive time.
Look, I’m standing without sticks – lifting up others lifts me up too
But it will perhaps not be as nasty and depressing as we saw in the 2010s. There we had bad stuff with few solutions, while in the late 2020s we’ll get bad stuff with lots of solutions – if, that is, we treat them that way. Things are likely to start rushing so fast that fundamental changes will need to start happening, urgently and pragmatically, simply to deal with the onrush of events and cascading outcomes arising from them. The gift in the situation is that, at last, things will be loosening up and accelerating. The Millennial generation will also be stepping into positions of influence.
So we’re in a time of tension where there are forces pulling in a variety of directions, and the future is currently like a coin spinning in the air. There’s a sense that something is coming, and there’s fear and anticipation around it in the collective psyche of humanity. There’s also a lot of frustration and disagreement about what to do about it. Questions we have been avoiding for decades are all suddenly crowding in, and this will continue. There’s a feeling of jaded disappointment and disaffection in the collective psyche, after a trail of horrendous scenes in recent decades – atrocities, wars, refugees, hunger, disasters – and this adds to the bottled-up, stuck feeling of our time, a feeling that, no matter what we do, nothing will change. Energies of growth are being held down by the weight of accumulated past decisions, habits and procedures, and by the manic busyness of a coffee-driven modern culture that is running so fast it has forgotten where it’s running to and why everyone is running so fast in the first place. There’s a lot of opposition, division, diversion, distraction and blocking going on.
So that’s why it’s rather intense at present. It’s going on for me too – it feels like I’m processing too many issues to be able to be clear any of them properly, and all of them depend on something else. I’ve been missing loved ones, particularly one of them, and fed up with my own patterns and with being single, and groaningly facing the fact that I might have to write another book, and dreading winter, and fed up with tribal politics, and feeling overloaded with things to pay attention to, and all sorts of stuff like that. The usual grinding stuff in which I sometimes get lost. Which I did today – I got quite down about it.
So I went to bed this afternoon to go inside myself, rumbling around in the netherworlds, then to surface and eventually reach above the clouds. One result was that it came upon me to get up and write this blog. It was Caroline in Glastonbury who had jogged me to do it this morning – she has a way of constructively jogging me – so thanks, Caroline. But I had resisted – the thought of sitting at my keyboard didn’t light me up. When she or others give me the elbow, I do sometimes resist at first, but that’s just an Aspie thing – I ruminate over such prompts once they’ve gone and eventually come to the rightness of what they tried to say. If, that is, it was right, and if it was not quite right, it helped me work things out and was a gift anyway. So this blog came out eventually, and I hope it gave some useful clues.
It’s raining and blustering, grey, with low cloud over Bartinney Castle outside my rain-bespattered window.
I’ve been fiddling away at home on the recordings of my Magic Circle in Buckfastleigh, Devon, and now they’re ready.
The first is about our origins as souls and about the people we come from, ending with an inner journey to uncover your own particular story – where you came from and what your people are like.
The second is about world healing, where we visit Pakistan to work with the psycho-emotional aspect of the devastation that people there are going through.
The third is about the gift of living on Earth and what we can do about the predicament we’re in, living as we do in a currently rather crunchy and crazy world.
That’ll keep you busy for a while, I hope! It kept me busy this week, and it was a great way of finding out what I actually came up with during the Magic Circle. Sometimes there are teachings in there for me too.
Since getting cancer I’ve gone through a big systems reset. It has changed my psyche and partially disabled me, so that I can’t carry on in life in the way I used to. Though I’ve stood on stages and led workshops and events for yonks and I’m drawing on lots of experience, cancer has made me start afresh and feel my way forward in a new context, with a rather different me who is doing it.
That’s partially what these Magic Circles were about – to feel my way forward in a new way, following a level-shift that cancer, and my way of dealing with it, seem to have given me – together with a few big Neptune transits that floored me and brought an unexpected rebirth. I’ve needed to start again, feeling out a new way of doing things that reflects where I’m now truly at. Each of the Magic Circles has therefore been part of a progression.
Hamish Miller
But another reason I’m doing this is also because my old friend Hamish Miller taught me a lesson. At the time when I was staying with Ba Miller and him, twelve years ago, I was fresh to Cornwall and didn’t know enough about it to dredge his memory for his own local knowledge, while he was still alive. Unthinkingly, I assumed he would be around for a while. Then suddenly he was gone and then, four years later, I embarked on a research project into the prehistory of this area, West Penwith. I’d really have liked to sit down with Hamish to raid his brains. Well, he did nudge me occasionally from upstairs, as did John Michell (another pair of shoulders on which I stand), but with dead souls you don’t get the detail and information you can with living souls – you might get energy and support, but not maps, diagrams and details. So that knowledge is gone.
When cancer came along and I thought of my own recyclability, something in me realised I needed to disgorge as much of my stuff as I could, in useful ways that people can make use of once I’ve gone. Three years later, they’ve taken the form of a book, a blog, podcasts and events. I haven’t given my life to fame or capital accumulation, but this is something I can leave behind. I’ve got Jupiter in Pisces after all – treasures in heaven, even though my bank account rarely did well.
We all have a contribution to make, and this was mine, acting out a planet-fixer’s karma in a world heading the other way, as best he could, with a few goals scored, and a lot missed. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, and that’s what life’s about. I regret the ways I’ve made life more difficult or painful for some people, and I’m glad for those whose lives I’ve helped or lifted up. It’s really a mixed bag, this Earth business, and I’ve been pretty mixed, and mixed-up, too. Though something gets distilled amongst all this and, in the end, this is what survives death. It survives as a bundle of experiential memory for the soul that passes on, and as a legacy for those left behind.
So editing and preparing material for uploading and leaving to posterity is what I’ve been doing this week, and now it’s done, uploaded and ready. Thank you to you who organised the Magic Circle and helped me through the weekend, and to those who came and those who couldn’t or didn’t.
Something else is brewing, and it has surfaced through these Magic Circles, and I’m making no decisions about it until at least winter solstice – it needs careful mulling over. Also, for future events, I’m taking my lead from requests that come from people who are happy to organise things.
I must go at the pace of a cancer patient who must manage his energy well. I have few energy-reserves, so every period of activity needs to be followed by a time of quietness and downtime. Energy-management has been a fascinating learning experience in the last three years – how to stay within my scope of possibilities, pace myself, and particularly how to recognise in advance the signs that I’m drooping and need to go into self-protect mode.
That’s a fascinating challenge. As is this: anything I start now will be intended to outlast me, and to grow forward from where we left it when I pass away. With all that I have done in group process, world healing, astrology, geomancy, geopolitics, history and other things, it’s all incomplete, a ‘work in progress’ that I hope will be taken forward by others from the place where I was able to leave it.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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