cancer – Notes from the Far Beyond

Blessings that Bones Bring

A spirited cancer patient tells his cancer story.

Yes, it’s my latest (fourteenth) book, now out. It recounts the story of my cancer process up to late 2023. Currently available as a PDF for on-screen reading (free or optional donation). Later it will come out as an audiobook.

It will be interesting to cancer patients, their helpers, families or friends who prefer to take a non-standard approach to cancer. Or to people with other serious conditions. Or to anyone who likes a good autobiographical read.

Blessings focuses particularly on the psycho-spiritual side of things. It outlines what I have chosen to do with my situation. It isn’t a how-to book, but there might be some secrets in there that are beneficial to you.

I have taken an integrated medicine approach, doing both chemotherapy and holistic treatments, following my intuitions. And, lo behold, my results are good and, to my surprise, I’m still alive, still at it.

You’ll find it here: www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html

For those of you who haven’t followed my cancer story since the beginning, here’s a summary of it, taken from the book…

The Wisdom of Insecurity

Fortuitously, five years ago I started a blog a few weeks before going down with cancer, with no idea that it would turn into a cancer blog. I just had a feeling to start blogging. That says something about intuition: it has ways of knowing things in advance that our conscious minds don’t.

Intuition knows or understands things in the back brain without needing to think about them in the front brain. But it’s a matter of giving it attention and credence, and learning to avoid overriding our feelings with obstructive and over-thought rationales, conditioned responses, fears or doubts – or science.

Cancer was a great surprise when diagnosed in November 2019. Signs were appearing nearly a year beforehand in January 2019, but they weren’t recognisable. Something wasn’t right. It was as if I was in a downward spiral, getting tired of life and losing my spark. Neither my partner nor I could figure out what it was.

In August 2019, while working in her garden, my back cracked – two of the lowest vertebrae in my back fractured and two collapsed. At the time it seemed I had an excruciating, immobilising back problem.

A cranial osteopath recommended I get scanned in hospital – he felt something more was going on here (thanks, Simon Perks). Getting to hospital was a long process. Eventually, in A&E, the junior doctor, in a quandary, called in a specialist, who entered, looked intently at me, then said, “Test him for Myeloma”, and walked out. Brilliant. This man nailed it at first try. Before long I was having treatment. I had Multiple Myeloma or bone marrow cancer.

When the news of cancer hits you it’s like a thunderbolt and soulquake. Yet it also brought me a strange element of relief, at last knowing what was actually happening after three months of spirit-wringing pain. For decades I had looked after my health quite well, with a view to avoiding such things as cancer. Had I got things wrong? Seriously ill, if I had arrived in hospital a month later I was unlikely to have survived. When cancer comes it can come fast and strong, even if its buildup is long and slow.

After a few days I asked one of the cancer specialists whether he had any clues about the causes of Myeloma. He looked at me straight, saying quite simply, “Radiation exposure”. The next day he brought a map in The Lancet, a medical journal, showing the clustering of Myeloma cases in UK around nuke stations. For 28 years I had lived 15 miles downwind of Hinckley Point nuke station, and I’d had two instances of nuclear radiation exposure in other contexts. His opinion just went ‘ping’. I had known since 1975 that I was electrosensitive. This was not a great problem until around year 2000 when mobile phones and wi-fi became commonplace. That’s what finished me off.

Certain chemical neurotoxins may also be a cause of Myeloma for some. Once, when in hospital, I met a man with Myeloma, asking him what his work had been. “A merchant seaman”, he said. “We have all sorts of strange chemicals on the ships”. I asked what his specific job had been. “Radar”. There you go: radiation exposure.

Another chap said he had been a freight train driver. “What kind of freight?”. “Oh, nuclear waste from Sellafield. It was good pay.”

Many doctors say the causes of Myeloma are unknown. This perhaps deliberate unclarity probably arises because of the court cases and compensation claims that would erupt if such electronic or chemical toxicity became public knowledge. There’s a lot of money in it, and everyone loves their mobile phone.

Back in 2000 I had a ‘dark night of the soul’ crisis and a long illness, going down into the deep dark, questioning all I had done over the previous three decades and wondering what value it had really brought. It was a profound honesty session, a struggle with Weltschmerz – the pain of the world. Then aged fifty, I think my susceptibility to cancer started brewing around that time.

As time went on the electrosensitivity got worse, especially after 4G smartphones emerged around 2008. By 2014 periodic overdoses of radiation (in a restaurant, meeting, supermarket or train) were giving me rapid-onset flu symptoms, and by 2017 I was getting heart palpitations. It took until 2019 for cancer to show itself.

That year I was working on my prehistory research and mapmaking in a rather urgent, driven way. I completed it in early August, just two weeks before my back suddenly went crack and my life changed. Well, the research was at least done – perhaps a hidden hand of fate had known what was going to happen next.

When diagnosed in November I was now very much in the hands of the doctors, my partner Grace, my son Tulki and a few others – and way out of my depth, flat on my back. It was an exercise in surrender and acceptance – there was no alternative.

Having been a health-conscious, vegetarian meditator for decades and rarely getting ill, I had always assumed I would be exempt from cancer. Well, life has a way of teaching us other things! In our culture, cancer is regarded as something going wrong, as if a failure, but it didn’t quite feel like that to me, once I accepted it was happening. There was something strangely fitting about it, even though life was being hard on me. I decided to suspend all my foregoing beliefs and to do my best to trust that, whatever was to happen, everything would be alright in the end. I held on to one belief though, and I have a suspicion you know what it is: whatever life presents, there is a gift in it.

Earlier in life, rigorous experiences as a mountaineer, camper and humanitarian taught me energy-management, attitude-maintenance and steadfastness. Having got through plenty of crises and survived, I felt it was possible to do so now, whether that meant living or dying. At one point I said to the haematologist that I felt I had gone past the allotted nine lives (of a cat) and was on my tenth. She laughed but, dealing every day with people with terminal aliments, she probably knew what I meant.

Trusting the doctors was my only option. Nearly all of them were really good people. My experience of NHS treatment has largely been positive, once I gained the right attention. As the Covid period went on, by 2022 Treliske hospital became much more efficient and better organised. That helped a lot.

I had done alternative medicine for decades, yet I did not have the knowhow, energy, facility, support, time or money to opt for a holistic approach while in the depths of cancer, and already it was too late, too urgent. Chemotherapy was the only doable alternative. Accepting it contravened beliefs I’d held until that moment, yet it felt right to do my best with it. If the angels wanted me alive, they’d keep me alive, and if they didn’t, they’d take me out.

I’m pretty good at handling crises and, here was I, going through a full-on crisis, a test of spirit. I had to grasp life’s reins. Healing means fully allowing healing to take place, handing ourselves over. This goes as far as dropping any expectation of what healing means – it doesn’t only mean ‘getting better’. Whether I am to live or die, may it be for the best, all round – this was my prayer.

Pharmaceuticals shocked my system, though clearly they could also save my life. I asked for inner help in handling whatever was to come. One profound message came through: use your feelings and intuitions. My brains were not working well – I couldn’t get my head around all the medical research and terminology – though my intuitive senses were easier to read off. Intuitions just say Yes or No – and then it’s up to us to figure out why, or to bear witness to the way it becomes true.

I went inside myself, connecting with the angels like never before. This might sound spurious to some readers but, believe me, when you’re in a situation like this, that’s what you tend to do, whatever your foregoing beliefs. I asked them to help me adapt to a changed life. But when you ask for help, you need also to offer something: I offered my life, however it was to be. May it happen well and may I make it easy – that was another key prayer. I think this approach really helped, not just psycho-spiritually but medically too.

I used holistic supplements, helpers and good nutrition judiciously, careful not to mix them or create conflicts with the pharmaceuticals. Over time, various healers and healing circles weighed in – thank you everyone. Some of these interventions made a big difference. And old Tomten, Grace’s cat, would lie on my pelvis, the most painful place, giving genuine pain-relief.

So, doctors saved my life and healers gave me a new life.

I feel immense gratitude to Grace, who gave balm to my heart and helped me through the process – she was a true healer and a great soul. Her love, care and protection made a critical difference in a bleak time. I was a heavy weight for her to carry. There was no financial help for a ‘family carer’ like her, she had a business to keep going and a life already filled with issues and concerns. And I’m a tricky and complex character at the best of times. My son Tulki was a constant companion and support, though he could be present only sometimes. These two good souls made a big difference in that dark time.

So I followed an intuitive route through the cancer tunnel. I worked at getting the doctors on my side, showing them that I was not a member of the awkward squad – ideologically rigid, argumentative health-freaks with antipathies to match – though I did have my own ways and preferences. Two things helped: the doctors and nurses found me interesting and, lo behold, as the months went by, my medical results were surprisingly good. This gave me leverage.

Still, I had to badger them about drug dosages. I didn’t need blasting with explosives. Eventually the doctors got the message. One or two drugs were withdrawn and one was reduced – Dexamethasone, which had had positive effects on my cancer and distressing behavioural side-effects. My dose was reduced and, lo behold, it worked better.

Initially I was supposed to have eight cycles of chemotherapy but they stopped treatment after five, saying I could go. Later on, one specialist said, “Mr Jenkins, I don’t know what you’re doing and I don’t want to know, but whatever you’re doing, keep doing it”.

Myeloma is a blood cancer that causes the bones to hollow out and weaken. It’s not as complex to treat as other cancers – there’s just chemo, with no radiation or surgery since no tumours are involved. I responded well and quickly. I think my use of holistic practices, supplements and remedies helped, together with, to me, an almost palpable influence from my inner doctors. They scanned and treated me on an energy-level, and it worked. I think they worked through the hospital doctors in mysterious ways too.

I’ll add a few more things: walks on the hills and clifftops; a lovely place to live on a wildlife-rich farm with low EM radiation; unchlorinated springwater from just up the hill; a positive attitude; and coming to peace with as many life-issues as possible.

And sunshine. And love. These aren’t available all the time, and they don’t just come when requested, but they work.

At the time I wrote this, I was on an immunotherapy maintenance treatment, Dara. I had a subcutaneous Dara injection every four weeks – a nurse came round, inserting a short needle into the flesh of my stomach. This made the Dara disperse slowly (in contrast to an injection in a vein or artery). She took my temperature, oxygen count and blood pressure.

Every twelve weeks she took a blood sample and sent it off, and it’s from this that my condition was judged. Later I was taken off Dara and currently I’m chugging along with no pharmaceutical cancer treatment – only holistics – but I’ll probably go on ‘third line’ medical treatment eventually.

With Myeloma, most people don’t get ‘remission’, just a delay in dying – some get a year of life and some get ten, even fifteen. In my fourth year, I’m still alive. Yes, just checked, I’m still here.

After decades of living a holistic life, your system evolves differently to that of ‘normal’ people. When you’re doing spiritual work and you have some pretty amazing healers as friends, normal medical rules get bent and broken. But still, there’s a deeper karmic story that goes on underneath cancer, with a trajectory of its own. I did well at first but after two years I was ailing, hit a crisis and got ready for the possibility of dying within the year.

Yet by summer 2022 I was reborn, even attending a week-long Oak Dragon camp. This itself was a healing boost, as much from the people and the ambience as from the campfires and outdoor life. As Oak Dragon’s founder (in the 1980s) I felt so welcomed, and this in itself was medicinal.

By now I was in a state of positive shock, realising I was still alive and that there was indeed a future. Perhaps I needed to get a new coat for winter.

I’m doing well with the cancer but the side-effects are problematic and these might fell me in the end. It’s all about bones. Four of the lowest vertebrae in my back subsided. Reducing my height by over an inch (4cm), this squeezed my stomach, leading to digestive and eliminative difficulties. It caused the outer gluteus muscles in my backside, which do the major pulling when walking, to lose their tension, making long walks strenuous and painful. Added to this I have osteonecrosis of the jaw – a dying jawbone – stopped by medication but still an area of susceptibility. If I break any bones, repair and revival could be difficult. These side-issues affect my life more than cancer does.

Then there is chemo-brain. Chemotherapy chemicals destroy brain-cells and nerve-endings. Chemo-brain has had mixed effects, reducing my left-brained ‘executive’ thinking and my memory for details, yet improving the right-brained intuitive-imaginative side. It has pushed me into the present moment. My sense of time, sequence and duration have dwindled. I’ll remember something that was said by someone, but not who it was or when. I screw up when things get complex.

Yet my creativity – through writing, podcasting and websites – has never been better. This can deceive other people because, if they read my writings or see a photo, they get the impression I’m in better shape than I am. “You’re looking well, Palden!” Gosh, do I? It doesn’t quite feel like that.

At one stage I asked myself what I would be doing if I didn’t have cancer. Just carrying on, was the answer. Instead I have been given a new relationship with life, an experience-rich chapter, however long or short it is to be – miraculously paid for by the government and the noble taxpayers of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Life is twice as difficult but, in compensation, it has changed in shape and content.

I’ve had some pretty amazing spiritual initiations in my life, and this has been one in a sequence, as if it was meant to be that way all along. Twice coming close to dying in the last four years, I’ve had some training for the inevitable journey that is yet to come.

So, did I go down with cancer, or did I go up?

In our time, we’re all faced with many unknowns. Most people can however safely assume they will be alive later in life. The removal of that assumption has a strangely spiritualising effect – and that’s another bizarre gift that cancer has given. It’s what the psychedelic guru Alan Watts used to call the wisdom of insecurity. Earlier in life I knew it was good to appreciate life and all that it gives us, but cancer has taught me what that means in far more real-life terms.

It’s funny how things go.

Relief

A cancer update.

Wind-strafed heather on Bartinney Castle, West Penwith, Cornwall

I’ve just had my three-monthly phone conversation with the haematologist – she’s at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro. One good thing about my particular cancer, Myeloma, is that it is easily tested and monitored with a blood sample (I had it two weeks ago). So we can do it over the phone. She’s always rather brisk – the poor woman probably gets fed up of the list of calls to make through the day, and with us cancer patients and our anxieties.

Anyway, I had been anticipating bad news. Well, not exactly bad, but not good either. I was hovering between optimism and pessimism.

This winter I’ve begun experiencing a kind of stress – partially due to circumstances but also because part of me feels vulnerable and undefended. No one has my back. It takes me back to experiences I had around the age of six-seven-eight. I remember the feeling of it. I was turning short-sighted, and as an unrecognised Aspie I felt like a stranger in a strange land and a fish out of water. My poor old Mum was always busy with other things, without paying much attention, and the world seemed so big and incomprehensible, and somehow I was expected to manage with all this.

Nowadays they might call that ‘learning difficulties’ but it isn’t really. It’s not a lack of intelligence but a bit too much of it. It’s a complex Aspie perception of the world that takes longer to compute – for me, it took until around age fourteen, when suddenly the other boys started calling me ‘Professor’ instead of ‘Speccy-Foureyes’.

Part of me feels like a seven year old – feeling a need to have someone holding my hand and shielding me from that big world out there. This is quite a change from earlier times in life when I had more confidence and a relative invincibility that was calm under duress and pretty competent – I’m a Virgo, after all, and us Virgos tend to be quite calm and serene, or we tend to be neurotic. Or perhaps both at different times.

So I was somewhere between nervous and calm over this phone call. It could decide many things. One thing in particular is that the next line of treatment – I’ve exhausted two out of five now – is Thalidomide. It’s a good cancer drug, the doctors say, but what makes me nervous is this: my mother took Thalidomide for morning sickness while pregnant with me, and I was very lucky to emerge into life with all my limbs and body-parts intact. Apparently, deformed bodies arise only if the drug is taken during a certain early week of pregnancy, and it wasn’t that week for me. However…

Prayer clooties at St Euny’s Well, near Carn Euny.
But if you ever wish to tie a cloutie at a well, make sure it is natural and biodegradable, since the problems you weave into it will disappear as the cloutie rots away. And it doesn’t throttle the tree.

I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and I have wondered whether it’s related to the Thalidomide I took, second-hand, during gestation. The chemotherapy I had four years ago made me wonder about this – particularly the steroid Dexamethasone. The drugs seemed to amplify my Aspie symptoms. The behavioural transition prompted by these drugs helped lose me a partner and some friends. It has become more difficult to manage some of life’s tricky social situations, or deal with bureaucracy, or insensitive people, or hackers, or modern-times complexities.

But, on the plus side, this Aspie-amplification has led to a wave of creativity, perspective and original thinking. As you might perhaps have noticed, I’ve been churning out loads of stuff – mainly in the form of blogs, podcasts and books. That’s the other side of Aspergers – the Aspie genius, with an ability to excel in certain specific interests and gifts (though not necessarily in the full range of abilities that modern humans are supposed to cover). Also, there’s a certain blindness to human guile and manipulation, making us emotionally rather susceptible to getting caught in other people’s webs without realising it.

Many ‘neurotypicals’ judge Aspies to be emotionally neutral or feelingless. Truth is, we get so flooded and drowned in feelingful impressions that we short-circuit or melt down, showing little or no responsive expression except perhaps the look of a rabbit frozen in the headlights. Or a bit like Commander Data. The picture comes clear within hours, days or longer, but by then people have formed their conclusions and stomped off, often making big, inappropriate decisions on our behalf.

Over two years after we separated, I have only recently lightbulbed a bundle of key insights into my relationship with my former partner that I had just not seen before. I had sensed it unconsciously but I still didn’t see it. While talking to a friend I suddenly saw it – the whole pattern and network of connections, events, clues, mistakes and junction-points. It’s funny when that happens – everything suddenly becomes very different. Nothing changes, but everything changes, and a healing can occur.

Yet the paradox is that empathically I understand the workings of the human psyche and human emotions more clearly than many people, though not necessarily in my own personal sphere of life. Many would interpret this as a growth blockage, a refusal to open up to my emotions, but that’s not the case. It’s just that I operate with a different operating system that computes things in a different way, and neurotypicals have some advantages and Aspies have others.

The main problem is that neurotypicals are in the majority and neurotypical culture is dominant, even though today we’re presented with a rather chaotic and multidimensional spectrum of psychodiversity. NTs tend to define the rules and, being more rule-bound than Aspies, they tend to insist that everyone should behave like them, according to their criteria.

Victorian architecture, at Porthmoina Cove, Penwith

Anyway, the haematologist quite likes me – I’m an easy customer. She was pleased (yet again) with my results. I’ve had no cancer medication now for four months and, lo behold, there is no significant change in my readings.

So suddenly I’m feeling relieved. My wobbles were just that – wobbles. It means I won’t have to go on Thalidomide for the next few months at least – and I won’t have to do the rather long journey to the hospital either, once a month.

That’s good, because it comes back to that vulnerable, undefended feeling. My fear is that my Aspie tendencies will get switched up by Thalidomide. The bit that concerns me most is that I have no one to speak for me or cover my back. There are times when I blank out and (this might surprise you) have nothing to say, at precisely the moment when I need to fend for myself. Or I simply forget about something important, remembering it afterwards, and too late. Again, it’s that eight-year old feeling where there are quite a few things you can handle, but some things are too much. You need Mummy or Daddy, or someone, to come to the rescue.

But there’s a lesson here too, in trust. Things always work out alright. My anticipations were based upon the fear that my readings would deteriorate and they’d put me on the new drugs quite quickly. I have a few public speaking engagements coming up, and some anticipation about how well I’ll do on stage if I’m on new drugs. Or whether Thalidomide would lead to regrettable behavioural changes, just as the steroid Dex did. But there was no need to worry, and everything is alright. My readings are fine.

So is Paldywan the oratorical bard. Lacking anyone to talk to, a few days ago I went up the hill to the 2,000 year old ruin of a courtyard house and recorded two podcasts on the trot. And one of them, Ascension, comes out with this blog.

There’s a funny twist I discovered recently. In 2021 I contracted Osteonecrosis of the Jaw (ONJ), as a side-effect of some pharma drugs I had been on earlier. It caused pus to drip from my chin – urgh, yuk! It made me feel horrible and disgusting and, naturally, no one wanted to come near me. I asked myself about the inner meaning of this, digging up an image or a memory of having had leprosy sometime back in history, and being rejected by society. Rejection and exile are two karmic patterns of mine. When I twigged this, it made some sort of sense – deep memory was involved in the ONJ.

As time went on the ONJ subsided, becoming manageable. Then, a few days ago I was looking up the various uses of Thalidomide and the two specific ailments mentioned were leprosy and multiple myeloma (my kind of cancer). Ah, there’s a connection. I’ve been given a clue. Clues like this can act as keys to healing. It’s fascinating how intuition can know things long before the brains catch up.

I’ve started on some new holistic remedies – the main one is Resveratrol, a specific treatment for Myeloma. I’m back on Shitake Mushrooms as well. I have started some new supplements and remedies too, including one by Detox Trading in Devon called Happy Mix – it really does lift the spirits and, with the late spring we’re having, it has helped me emerge from wintertime blues and cabin-fever.

The Watcher. A simulacrum at Porthmoina Cove

I didn’t need to be worried about the haematologist’s verdict. Perhaps I am a neurotic Virgo after all. Though there’s something else here too… cancer has stripped away many of my defences, sensitising me to vibes, energies, situations and scrangles. There’s more emotional lava erupting as well. This makes me both more open and more vulnerable. Small things demand more processing than before, yet I’m less dulled by the very defences, built with the cement of trauma, that are designed to protect us from a rather tough and violating world. Life has become more colourful, textured and meaningful.

So a key cancer benefit – or a possibility, at least – is that cancer is a big jolt to become more human, to live more fully – even if physically constrained like me. In some respects it might be worth looking on cancer as an upgrade – and other terminal, serious and painful ailments too. From a soul viewpoint, at least.

It’s not a matter of primary importance how long we live – dying ‘before one’s time’ isn’t necessarily a failure or a shame. What matters is how we filled the time and space we were given, how we chose to experience the life we had and what contribution we made. In terms of soul evolution, three years with cancer can sometimes be equivalent to fifty years of normality.

But then, you don’t have to contract cancer for that to happen. It’s the way cancer hits you that matters, and what doors it opens – and whether we choose to go through them. This is regardless of how well or badly the cancer goes from a medical viewpoint. It’s the psycho-spiritual impact and the jolt that matters. It induces a cards-on-the-table focus of energy and of will-to-live.

It obliges us to face our shit, stuff, fears, failings and foibles. And regrets. On a deep level, that’s one reason why cancer is increasing in incidence: it’s one way in which the soul of humanity is serving us notice that we need to wake up. Or, at least, wake up more. Or you die. It’s a simple formula. It’s a bit like being in a war or crisis zone – the situation is terrible, but a crazy enspiritedness can take over, making you put your life on the line and getting you through to where you truly need to go.

My cousin Faith calls it a state of super-concentrated uncertainty. Or I’m reminded of the title of Alan Watts’ book of fiftyish years ago, called ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity‘.

Even so, I’m rather relieved to know that I’m cruising along on a cancer plateau and my results are okay. I felt it was so, but the confirmation is much appreciated. After all, it does help to know at least a little about what’s going to happen next. Should I buy a new computer or put some money down for my funeral? Um, I don’t know, but it might be the computer. Sometimes you just have to choose. And that’s what life on Earth is about.

With love, Palden.

[Written using human intelligence. Such as it is.]

PS: my cancer book is progressing, and recently I decided to release it as an audiobook too – better for people with fatigue and chemo-brain. I still haven’t found a really good title for it though. That’s most strange. I guess it’ll come in its own time.

Site: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Palestine Audiobook: www.palden.co.uk/audiobook.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Meditations: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

Looking toward Ding Dong mine (in the far distance) from Carn Eanes, near Pendeen

The Greatly Unknowable

Zarathrustra spake thus, all over the Isles of Scilly

The world was on tenterhooks. After the assassination of Trump’s vice-president by a white South African, America could no longer play off different groups of nations against each other. Netanyahu’s threat to drop nukes on Turkey had put NATO in an acutely difficult position, exposing its double standards. Trump was raging at Israel’s intransigence and Putin, looking haggard in his hospital bed, uttered boisterous words in support of him when everyone knew that, in his tenuous position, and now being undermined by the Moscow oligarchy, he could promise nothing.

The Israeli civil disturbances were brutal, with neither side willing to step back – the media were under strict instructions not to call it a civil war. The mowing down by the Judaean Settler Army of Palestinians trying to escape over the Jordan valley had variously dismayed the world, exposing the inevitable consequences of their inaction. Even Israelis were not allowed out of Israel – at Ben Gurion airport and the two remaining land crossing points, only approved Israelis could leave. There had been a full-scale call-up of reservists but they were taking different sides, taking their weaponry with them. India had at last withdrawn its support for Israel. China had remained silent, concerned as usual about its markets, oil sources and leverage in the newly denominated West Asia.

After the establishment of the Sahelian Dirham, the currency of the new Sahelian Alliance, other small countries flooded to join it, abandoning the Dollar and distancing also from the newly-minted Renminbi-Rouble bloc – after all, the Russians and Chinese were resource-gulping imperialists too. The resignation of the UN Secretary General, saying he had done his best but it had led only to this, was rejected by a uniquely united Security Council. Then Netanyahu, looking taut-faced and cornered, put the cat amongst the pigeons. He boldly declared in Hebrew that, if threats against Israel continued, he would detonate his country’s nukes and incinerate the country – by implication, a second, self-imposed holocaust, as if to prove his version of history to be correct. Chaos broke out not only in Israel but also in the steets of Damascus, Beirut, Amman and Cairo as crowds panicked.

Trump’s speech from Mar a Lago (since Washington DC had become too dangerous) had been surprisingly firm and calming – the invasion would be paused for now. Secretary Blinken, drafted from his thinktank job by Trump to deal with a situation he had played a large role in creating, was to be given a last chance to pacify the Israelis. Gaza, left with only stragglers and people unable to escape, already looked as if it had been nuked, though it hadn’t. Saudi Arabia had reluctantly opened its borders to Palestinians to relieve refugee pressure on UAE and Egypt – well, it swelled the numbers moving into Neom, the new desert city not too far from Sinai and Gaza. Meanwhile, UNHCR, backed by the first Polish and Swedish battallions in the new European army, had taken over refugee operations in Greece. Refugees were coming in big numbers. Now there was a new crowd from the Tashkent earthquake and nuclear disaster.

In the English Channel, disaster came when a container freighter and an oil tanker collided. An oil and chemical slick was spreading and most shipping through the busy Channel was blocked. Both ships had been trying to avoid refugee boats. The UK authorities were now running ferries to Calais to pick up refugees who were endangering shipping in yet another of the world’s maritime choke-points. This caused further supply-line disruptions in crisis-ridden Europe as shipping was diverted north of Scotland, exposing it to both Russian and American naval attentions. Europe was on its own, suddenly sandwiched between two big powers.

A wee visitor at my home, aspiring to do the washing up

Possible realities… Improbable, yet all the same possible.

A big problem we face is that the world approaches the future facing backwards. We see the future on the past’s terms, afraid to make a leap, afraid to acknowledge that we’re lost at sea, afraid that everything could go wrong – and in so doing, we’re making things even worse. Consequence-delivering chickens are coming home to roost, in waves. This might go on for a number of decades, because the world seems so determined to drag its feet through every single learning experience that comes to face it. Such global brinkmanship arises from a collective failure to own up to the full consequences of what we have done. A multipolar deadlock has unfolded. The powers that be are all busily making sure nothing really changes – not fundamentally.

But there is another kind of brink we’re slipping over. It started around 2012 or, further back, perhaps 1989. Or perhaps 1967-68. It’s this: even if the world decided tomorrow to mobilise humanity, wholeheartedly embracing fundamental change, we would tip into a new, anxious period of at least a few decades. Whatever we do, we would not know for some time whether and how much the solutions we attempt will actually bear fruit.

It takes time for a forest to grow, for an invention to be trialled, for society to change its values and for the fruits of systems-redesign to show themselves. Not all solutions will work, some might backfire, and the world is hamstrung, riddled with complexity, interdependence and conflicting interests. We’ve sidled into a minefield. This creates an underlyingly edgy and anxious atmosphere, stoking up an already insecure and volatile situation.

I’m happy to report that my little visitor did not lay a plonker on my bed while hopping around on it

I was reflecting on all this a few nights ago while lying in bed, listening to the owls hooting and screeching outside. It reminded me of my own cancer story. We all face an underlying, nagging issue, and cancer patients get it in a big, pressing dose, thrust in our faces.

When and how am I going to die?

And here’s the rub: you get no answer.

It could be anytime, anyhow.

Making plans gets difficult when you know there’s a good chance that anything can come along to scupper them. Whether or not you’re going to die soon, this still comes up, variously for everyone, when we’re scared enough to look at it. With cancer, I’ve found I’ve become much more sensitive to anything charged with any feeling at all. It’s not fear, exactly – it’s an insecure, creeping anticipation that hovers in the background. Worse, no one wants to talk about it.

In my own case, I’m rather surprised to be alive. I’m unsure what plans to make, and with what time-perspective. So I tend to keep my perspective open, but with the headlights shining on only the next three months, and anything beyond that is unanswerable. This has a remarkable effect on everything. It’s tenterhooky, no matter how philosophical or optimistic I might be, and no matter how much others encourage me to ‘get better’, not to dwell on morbid things – as if dying were a failure and living a success.

Sorry, dear Kate, Princess of Wales, while I understand your wish to assure everyone by saying you’re getting better, this is unwise. You do not know. It’s unwise to yield to that implicit social pressure to make everything look alright, because it isn’t alright.

When I lie in bed, drifting with fatigue, this is the view. On top of the hill in the left-hand window is an ancient site called Caer Brân (mentioned a couple of blogs back)

This is our world situation. We’ve stumbled into a mire of uncertainty and complexity. We have squads of scientists, super-forecasters and expert-texperts, and mega-millions of people with armchairs and opinions, yet we’ve become unable to accept the obvious – that the future is not as clear and fixable as we would like it to be. It’s left mostly to the young to point this out, while they’re still at an age where they are uncompromised by fear of loss and chaos.

Cancer patients, in my observation, divide into roughly three camps. Some are in denial – they take the pills, do the chemo, get the op, and do their best to appear and return to normal – it was just a bad dream and it’s over now. Some are heroic, fighting, striving to overcome and conquer cancer, and some of these will succeed while they have the willpower to do so, but it’s experienced as a fight, not a gift. And some come through to a level of acceptance and forgiveness that allows them to live and die in greater peace, whatever is to happen. To some extent all cancer patients hover between these three in different ways and proportions because cancer does indeed have a convincing way of putting the fear of God up you.

I have my struggles with this. I get fed up with all the pills, disciplines, diets and doctors’ appointments a valiant cancer patient is supposed to appreciate, to save their life and relieve others of the pain of loss, and sometimes I just want to say ‘fuckit’, to be normal, get my life, or even my ex-partner, back (fat chance). Other times I work on rising up within myself, trying to be a good human, in case God notices and gives me a reprieve – which won’t really happen since it’s a pointless, guilt-ridden belief.

Anyway, I’m doing quite well with my cancer, and I think it has something to do with full-on acceptance, yielding to The Force. I’ve lost control – yet, like a slalom skier, or when you first learn to ride a bike, or even like sex, by losing control you find a new balance.

In times of despair, hope sometimes stretches far further than it realistically should – like the vain hope that many Gazans entertain, that the decent people across the world will step in to save them. But just because something should happen, it doesn’t mean that it will.

At times I’m given deep truth-moments and gifts of spirit. I go down into the depths and up to the heaven-worlds, handing myself over in a humbled acceptance of my powerlessness and the overwhelming force of my circumstances, dependency and weakness – and the paradox is that, every time I drag myself through such a crunch-period, something in me is healed and reborn.

Here I still find myself, alive in a body and wondering what exactly for. Am I just here because I’m here? Or is there more to life? Yet my inner growth process has been ramped up to three times the speed, with a lot more depth, breath and height, and with a vulnerability that has amplified the emotional impacts, the feelingful fullness of being alive. That’s what I’ve been given.

My little house. It’s called The Lookout. That’s what you do there.

So it is with the world. The world has cancer, depression, anxiety, diabetes, fentanyl addiction, ME and a strange mixture of obesity and hunger. Part of us wants everything to return to normal, if only we could just buy an electric car, and part teeters on the edge of an abyss, flummoxed and hovering between lightbulb moments and flounderous resignation.

A nightmare is unfolding. However, while plenty of horror, injustice and destruction are going on, World War Three is now mainly a hearts-and-minds matter, not one of nuclear bombs or evil terrorists.

This is what we have been given. Or, collectively and unconsciously, it’s what we gave ourselves, to teach us something. We’ve created a situation where, kicking and screaming, we’re being arm-twisted into change. This is the great value of the Trumps, Putins, massacres, disasters and tragedies we face: they’re putting options before us. The stakes are rising until, sometime, we get it – we get the fundamental lesson, the lesson that will save us and redeem the damage and pain. So it is with cancer.

What none of the pundits in the commentariat mention is the spiritual crisis the world is in. Mental illness is not limited to those who are diagnosed with it, as if a certification of our woes would contain the crisis: it’s a disease of a psychotic world society, taking different forms in different places. All of it points to one core issue.

We have lost our way, lost our humanity. We’re deeply worried about what’s going on. We don’t know how to make it go away. Even the wisdom teachers, psychologists and solution-bringers are lost. As an astrologer I can often see when a wave is coming, but what will actually happen is at best qualified guesswork.

We’re faced with the Great Yawning Gap, like a black hole sucking us into some sort of final battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. Well, that’s what it feels like, sometimes. This presents heightened choices. These choices have been around for quite a time – I was one of those harping on about it when a Sixties teenager – but the stakes are rising with each year and decade.

It’s highly symbolic of the state of humanity, particularly for the global minority, for the one billion of us privileged to live in the rich world, that cancer has become a big issue. Because cancer hits you like a battering ram, with immediate life-changing consequences and a threat of imminent termination. Loss of control. Loss of everything. When you die you take nothing with you except what you have become.

The biggest, deepest choice we are faced with is this. Just because life doesn’t go the way we want, does this mean it’s going wrong? If we get faced with cancer or similar terminal or disabling ailments, or earth-shaking experiences such as war, disaster, loss, hardship or death, is this something going wrong or something going right?

But when I’m alive and kicking, this is where I spend a lot of my time. It’s the bane of being a pathological wordsmith.

This is a very deep question. But in it lies a solution that lies at the foundation of our situation, from personal to global.

With cancer, in my experience, the secret is to embrace it and make friends with it. I manifested it and, whether or not I understand why, it came for a reason, not by chance or bad luck, and it gives me a deep learning for the soul. It’s a life-changer of a high order. Something is going right. Similarly, it might be difficult to see this at present, what with all that’s going on around us, but something is going right in the world.

To see this, it is necessary to step out of life somewhat, out of the mill and the grindstone, to see things from another viewpoint – the viewpoint of a soul visiting Earth. We came into life to do something with it – not only to learn but also to make a contribution. Society doesn’t think that way – it encourages us to snap out of it – but in the cultural, institutional and societal mass-avoidance of our time we miss something crucial about life.

Have we each made our contribution?

In Western culture we even believe that we get only one life, and that when we die we cease existing. This belief is unthought through, ideological and deeply problematic. It’s a key part of the world’s problem today – a way of blanking out the longterm and avoiding taking responsibility for anything much more than ourselves, those close to us, our properties, concerns and beliefs, and only for the next three years.

We’ve become hyper-privatised, socially atomised. The world is crowded but we don’t even know our neighbours. It’s crowded, yet loneliness is at its historic zenith.

The world we omit to save now is the same world that many of us will wish to return to in another life – after all, we have the best chocolate in the universe, and in most worlds getting rich, being a star or a tall poppy is distasteful and antisocial – that’s best done here, if you want it. Even if we don’t come back here, it still matters – after all, once we’ve ascended to the fifth dimension, Andromeda, heaven or wherever, it’ll still be necessary to account for ourselves, to explain the incomprehensible to the souls we meet there.

Why did you lot screw up your planetary home? After all, being a distinctly desirable residence, billions of souls want to live there. And, (you might have to take my word for this) most worlds in this universe don’t host souls in billions. If I remember rightly, the Nine once said that the optimum population of planet Earth is around two hundred million.

It is a planet of amplified choice – we are each and all given a capacity to create our lives as we feel best. This isn’t just a choice between Toyotas and Mitsubishis, or between Copenhagen and Buenos Aires. It’s deeper, and when we are confronted with earth-shaking crises, we’re given the gift of amplified choice. We’re dragged into fundamentals.

Disaster – which means ‘out of sync with the stars’ – is a gift. This is what we need to get straight about. We need to meet the future facing forwards.

Me too, with my cancer, which will inevitably kill me sometime. It’s alright. My bones could disintegrate, my stomach could block up, an infection could floor me. I could die alone with nobody noticing, nobody here to hold my hand. I could be floored by a blast of phone radiation given to me by someone who loves me and didn’t mean to be so generous. If such is the case, so be it – it’s all for the learning. Soul-learning, about the true and full nature of existence as a human.

I’ll be going home. Done. Cooked. But even then, it doesn’t stop there.

I’m tempted to quote the lyrics of a song, ‘I just wanna be there’, by a late, great soul-friend, John Cartwright, and it went:

“I just wanna be there / When we all start to re-pair / All the damage to our Mother / And our sisters and our brothers / All deserving to be fed / In the spirit and the body… / It is doing in my head / There is nothing to be said / Time is running out…
“Seeds bursting to grow / Dying of hunger, under the snow / My need, bursting my heart… / Where do we wander? Where do we start? /
“My soul… silently smiles / Laughs as the water falls from my eyes. / Each tear, spelling it out… / Rise or go under… Rise here and now!“

[Glastonbury friends will know John and Jaki’s band, Court of Miracles – ‘the best band you never heard of’, to quote the late Justin Credible. I couldn’t find an online version of this song, but here’s one of their uplifting albums from the 1980s, called International Times.]

Peace, brothers and sisters. Despite everything, it’s okay – just remember that.

With love, Paldywan Kenobi.

————————
Site: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Audiobook: www.palden.co.uk/audiobook.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

The Islands of the Dead. Sometimes the islands seem to hover *above* the ocean.

Carolingian Carcinogenix

A quick preen at Porthmoina Cove, Penwith, Cornwall

Greetings, King Charles, from that far-off Duchy down’ere at the other end of the A30, out past Windsor. Welcome to the Honourable Company of Cancer Patients. By appointment with Divinity.

Some people want to be astronauts, yet there’s another way of visiting other worlds, and it’s called ‘cancer’. From what I’ve heard thus far on the news, you’re taking the right approach to it. Good on you. Your life has just become a whole lot more difficult, yet moments like this open the curtains – something gets released and empowered too.

You’ve started a new life and, as a king and public figure, and with your background, you’ve had a training in public fortitude. So (pls don’t read this wrongly), when I heard you’d got cancer and cancer has got you, it felt that it fits. In some way it fits with the story of your life. There’s something good and right about it. As was the case with me – speaking as one with bone marrow cancer, and two years younger than you.

This is not a punishment but a challenge, and many of us are getting it. The reasons why we get cancer are many and intricate – it’s not just about ‘bad lifestyle’. The main reason is simple: we humans are living longer and this is the pricetag. But there’s something bigger and deeper too: it’s about facing the core reason why we are alive.

Cancer prompts a major review of the story of our lives, giving us an opportunity to realign, to do a course-correction. Even if not a lot can be done about our lives after cancer hits us, it is at minimum a time of understanding, re-computing, acceptance, reconciliation and choice. A choice between making something of it or being a victim of it. You can go down in glory or you can go down in sorrow.

Though, as I have discovered, you can also go up, not just down, with cancer, and it outclasses all of the workshops, trainings and pilgrimages you could possibly imagine.

Our civilisation has based itself on setting aside life-purpose in order to conform to the demands and requirements of keeping the show on the road, earning its rewards and avoiding its punishments. We get jobs, get debts and tread the mill, only some of us following something akin to our true vocation. This kind of life has its stresses and strains, causing many people to lose their way. They get stuck in it. Then they need an earthquake like cancer to change everything.

I have done a lot throughout my life to follow my vocation, though after I got cancer I realised I’d been missing something important. Cancer gave me a gift. It partially disabled me, making life, even just dressing and cooking, far more difficult. Yet it caused me to review my life, to do the best I could with it. It re-focused me. In a strange kind of way I stepped into a truer version of myself. Actually, I didn’t have a lot of option.

Yet this was a choice. It happened in the first few hours and days following diagnosis. There I was in hospital, immobilised, in pain, dependent on others, helpless to do much except fully accept the situation. The shock of it all actually gave me rocket-fuel: it was too big to handle, so I did the only thing I could do – handing myself over to ‘HP Source’. Surrender to ‘The Management’.

I had suddenly entered a test of all my beliefs and all that I stood for. The chop had come down and I was helpless, except to make that choice. It was a choice to trust that, whatever happened, everything would be alright.

Quickly I got to a point where I realised that, if there was a purpose in my staying alive, my angels, or the powers of regeneration inside me, would keep me alive. If it was time to go, that would be alright too. This is an important moment. This is where the big choice is made. It’s a choiceless choice, deep and multidimensional. It’s all to do with reconnecting with the true reason why we came to Earth.

Before entering this life we made an agreement.

To be given the gift of life we had to have a reason, a purpose, a task and a storyline, a particular bundle of joys and sorrows that we wished or needed to go through. Vacancies on Earth are in short supply, and no one is here by accident. Perhaps the choice had been made earlier, implicitly, as a result of things done or not done before this life, and it’s a matter of committing to a crash course in dealing with the karmic consequences. Some consequences can be testing and others can be a gift.

How we see things is critical here. Is cancer a gift or a burden, a life-giver or a killer? What matters more – longevity or meaning in life?

We made an agreement before coming and, the way that life is nowadays, the world has discouraged most of us from fulfilling it – for each of us in different ways, depending on our story as a soul. We went through growing-up and we lost our way. Some go through an awakening in youth (I did), some have a life-crisis in middle age or around age 60, and some awaken toward the end of their lives.

Gorse-perching demonstration, Carn Gloose

Life on Earth is challenging and thorough in the way it grinds and sieves us, to the extent that, even if we don’t lose our way, we still lose our way. For me, as an author, I was doing okay before cancer, yet cancer has propelled me into the most creative period of my life. I didn’t anticipate this, though now it has happened, I’m glad it happened. I had to lose some of my mind – to get ‘chemo-brain’ – to gain this benefit. Well, you win some and you lose some.

I was also given a gift of time, literally and psychospiritually. For the first time in my life I fitted safely inside a category – suddenly I was ‘a cancer patient’ with eligibilities – and this entitled me to benefits. This is a relief because, although I’ve brought benefit to the world worth millions, possibly billions, I haven’t done well financially, doing what I have done. So for the first time in my life I’ve had a regular income – a lean one, but if I’m broke now I don’t have to worry about next month. I’ve always been self-employed and public-service oriented, bumping along the bottom, so this is a big and welcome change.

This time business has led to a new issue. Most people around me lack time and, although I have great friends, our times together are short – or, worse, they’re mainly digital. That gives me even more time.

This time-wealth means that, as an author, I can ruminate on things more than ever before. Often this is semi-conscious, a fermentation going on underneath. Then suddenly, I wake up one morning, up it comes and, armed with a mug of tea, my fingers start up on the keyboard. This morning’s blog was prompted by the news of Charles and his cancer – and particularly of the approach he seems to be taking. You’re doing it right, Charles – carry on, and good luck. I’m with you on this.

And lay off him! Everyone’s suddenly worried about constitutional issues and how and when he’ll get better. The answer is: it’s a process, it takes time, and nothing definite can be said about anything because, with cancer, you can easily choke on your food and blip out in three minutes flat. So give it a break. Poor chap, let him be ill.

The one thing that does concern me about Charles is this. Cancer strips away our defences, making us more vulnerable and sensitive than before. This is a core part of the course-correction mentioned above, because insensitivity, fear and defence mechanisms are how we lost our way. So to get back on track we have to lose our defences. We have to feel vulnerable, stare death in the face, quake before The Abyss, and get real inside ourselves.

Cancer patients become more highly impacted by the prejudices and micro-aggressions that others unconsciously lay on us. We find ourselves crying tears and taking emotional impacts that, to normal people, would just mean ‘a bad day’ or ‘a tiff’, or ‘joshing’. This gets difficult at times because insensitive people can trample, act dishonestly, manipulate, harm and offend without being aware of it. When you have cancer and you’re in the public eye, subject to people’s hopes, fears and expectations, it gets complex and the best thing to do is to hobble away and leave them to it.

Charles will get fed up of being asked ‘How are you?’, and the worried looks, the repeated declarations of ‘Sorry‘, as if something wrong has happened, and of the people avoiding him, and of other people coming too close, and people being neurotic. He’ll be obliged by coffee-driven people to think clearly when he has brain-fog and he’s out of his head on fatigue and chemo side-effects.

Though the funny thing is, this is a gift. Charles has lived with an image problem all his life, and cancer is ending all that. In a strange kind of way, cancer brings him forgiveness in the eyes of many – though what he is to be forgiven for, over and above the normal foibles of being human, is an open question. Perhaps society needs to forgive itself for being so unforgiving and judgemental toward him for too long.

Charles now has an excuse to be himself. He can create his own image as a vulnerable, human, thoughtful and life-experienced people’s king. He can open up an important role for a constitutional monarch with limited powers: the possibility of teaching and tone-setting, exercising moral sway. If he wants to retreat to Highgrove or Balmoral to potter in the garden, he may – that’s a good way of being a king, in our day. If he wants only to do rare public appearances, that’s fine. If he needs to die, that’s okay too – but I suspect he has a few years left for redeeming something and giving the nation a gift. He’ll be more on purpose, with an enhanced moral right to speak his beliefs and suggest ideas to the wider public. We need a Carolingian Renaissance, mark two.

In a funny kind of way he’ll give new leadership to a country, Britain, that is rudderless, thrashing around bombing people instead of searching its conscience, or reviewing its history and revising its currently over-inflated, arrogant self-image. It’s called being human. We’ve failed to do it in Gaza and we Brits, as a nation, do need to do it, to prove that we are true, decent humans.

We need to do something about undoing the mess we’ve played a big part in creating – my own grandfather was in General Allenby’s invading force in Iraq and Palestine in WW1, and that’s where the trouble started. That’s one reason I’ve been involved with Palestine – my grandfather inserted it into my DNA.

We Brits have a certain standing in the world – it’s our covenant as a nation – and we’re failing to rise to our full stature, to fulfil that role. It isn’t about banking, manufacturing, property or wealth-generation. It concerns creativity, content of character, ideas, music, literature, principles, decency and moral integrity. Not religion, but spirituality.

Also, the future is too big for nations like Britain (or Germany, Israel, China, Russia or USA) to puff themselves up, acting as if they own the place, possessing some supposedly God-given right to impose on others and determine their sorry fates. Sorry folks, that was the Twentieth Century.

This gets interesting. What I have learned from cancer is this. When I was diagnosed and flat on my back in pain, I gave up. I realised that the game was up and I just had to accept reality. I realised that I’d had a pretty good life, all in all, and though I have regrets I also have joys, and it’s okay if it all comes to an end, if it must.

After about two years I went through a rebirth. I had got over the shock, learned some tricks, thought things through, screwed up several times and found some new benefits from a cancer patient’s life. Even though nowadays I have no professional aspirations, the fulfilment of my life-purpose has been going surprisingly well, without my really trying. All I’m doing is keeping my spirits up, filling time being creative, and people seem to appreciate what I churn out, getting something useful from it.

Deeper down, I guess I’ve stepped into a new archetype – the archetype of a rather beat-up old hierophant. Being an elder is not just about getting old and creaky. It’s about harvesting the value you’ve gained from life-experience, from what you’ve truly learned. It manifests in your behaviour, your manner and your vibe – what Maoris call Mana, your spiritual heft.

I’ve spent much of my life as an astrologer and speaker, volubly sharing my insights into the nature of life but, since having cancer, something has deepened. Life: it’s about what you become by living it. You take nothing with you when you die, except for what you have become. That’s what matters.

In 2022 I asked myself what I would be doing if I didn’t have cancer. The answer came straight: I’d be carrying on as before. Cancer wiped the slate pretty clean. Yet I’ve been gifted a new set of rules and parameters – I can’t drive a car, climb trees, make love, use a mobile phone, go to far-off places, earn money or do what I want. It’s almost like living on a different planet. Someone changed the rules of engagement.

And actually, I’m glad. It’s hard, and I’m unsure whether or not to recommend it, and I don’t think I’m just rationalising, but actually I’m glad.

From this viewpoint, I can safely say I’m glad for King Charles. Poor sod, he’s had to face a lot in life, including more than his fair share of antipathy from the public and a posse of judgemental hypocrites, though these experiences have prepared him for this, and it gives him a redemptive opportunity. This is the story of his life. This wasn’t part of the plan, and cancer is distinctly inconvenient for him as a king, but it authorises him to be himself and to take command of his position.

I’m not a royalist, by the way. However, I look at the different political systems we have around the world and I’m not excited by most presidents, dictators and other figureheads either – they do not convince me that another system would be better.

It comes back to something I realised after my time at the London School of Economics, where I had the opportunity to sample every kind of radical and academic political thinking that was available at the time. I realised that it’s not the type of system that matters, or laws or constitutions. It all hangs around the soul and content of character of the people who occupy the seats of power. In this, Charles is doing well. Meanwhile, most of our politicians are lightweights facing a heavyweight situation.

The problem with royalty is the matter of succession – it depends on who inherits the post. In Britain we’re doing quite well with our monarchs, at present. If you get a difficult monarch, you’re stuck with them unless you wish to engage in regicide or revolution. However, in our time, we can get stuck with apparent democrats too, and with oligarchies. So it returns to the question of the quality of people in power, not the system we live in.

If a dictator wishes to stay in power she or he still needs to keep their nose close to the wind, doing the right thing for the people and treating them well. If they fail in this then eventually they come to a sorry end. Revolutions and coups, and electoral landslides too, happen only when people feel things aren’t right.

But it’s not just about them. It’s about us. If we buy sensationalist newspapers or give clicks to online deceivers, if we pressurise leaders by expecting too much of them, or by criticising and blaming unfairly, or we fail to look at things in the round, then we’ll get leaders who ring-fence themselves for protection, distancing from and increasingly deluding the public with statements more than actions.

To quote President Georges Pompidou (in old sexist 1970s language), ‘A statesman is a politician who places himself at the nation’s service, and a politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service‘. Meanwhile, the good-hearted, well-motivated, listening, sensitive leaders – the ones who should be in the seats of power – wisely seek other jobs, or they land up in places like Cornwall.

We, the public, need to be more intelligent, aware, constructive and mature in our practice of democracy if we are to retain it. If politicians need security guards and spin-doctors they become inaccessible and democracy will not work. If the media and interest-groups engage in propaganda, manipulation and twisting the social discourse, democracy dies.

If electorates continue accepting this, we might as well also accept that we live in a ‘managed democracy’ – something we accuse Russia of having. That is, an opinion-manipulated democracy where there is no actual choice available and, even if the incumbent loses the election, nothing much really changes with the new lot, and the same oligarchy stands behind the scenes pulling strings.

To quote a 1970s bumper-sticker, ‘If democracy really changed things they’d make it illegal‘. And strangely, democracies are the most warlike nations of all. On behalf of whom?

So, Charles, hang in there. You aren’t involved in politics, and your job is to introduce some non-partisan wisdom, perspective and continuity to the equation. You’ve taken on a new mission.

Follow your intuitions, and when advice you’re given doesn’t ring true, follow your wisdom and preference. You’re in uncharted territory, but that’s not for the first time, and it’s likely that the public will think well of you if you handle this well.

Take time, don’t be pushed and don’t push yourself. Tell people that you’ll decide by tomorrow or next week. Enjoy the gardening. Be spontaneous.

When you feel up, be up, and when you’re down, be down, and teach people a new way of treating their king – more free of expectation and protocol and more happy with a happily human king. It’s okay if that crown is heavy – just take it off. We don’t mind. We don’t need the regalia and protocol – we need you.

That’s why your cancer is a gift, and I think you have the capacity to make it so.

With love, Palden.

This blog is guaranteed AI-free, crafted with Earthling-humanoid brainz and fingerz.

Site: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Audiobook: www.palden.co.uk/audiobook.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Arrive without Travelling

The long and winding road (near Falmouth, Cornwall)

I’ve been rather quiet recently. My energy has been under par. Nowadays I’m not good at doing winter. I’m often told that I look well, and part of me indeed is well, though this is more a matter of a grin-and-bear-it attitude than a medical reality. Since getting cancer I’ve found I give off an unintentionally deceptive appearance, looking better than I actually am, or feel. Sagittarius rising with Venus trine to it (the grin bit) and Saturn square it (the bear it bit). I’m not sure what to do about this.

Oh yes, I forgot… a health warning: beware of smatterings of astrology.

Though I’ve been relatively quiet, I’ve been at it, extracting parts of my blog from the last four years that tell my cancer story, turning them into a book for patients with cancer and other serious conditions, and their helpers – at least, for those interested in my approach. It will come out dreckly (sometime) as a free online PDF book, and possibly as an audiobook later on. I’m pleased with the way it’s developing.

In my birth chart I have Jupiter in Pisces – a dreamer perhaps, but for me the challenge has been to make dreams manifest. There’s fantasy and there’s vision, and there are doable and impossible dreams. The difference is a matter of discernment and not always clear, even if, like me, you have a forensic Saturn in Virgo, a dreadfully factual place for it. I’ve had successes and failures in this manifestation business, though a lot of things wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t tried. Jupiter, in my case, is the handle to a bucket formation of planets – so it’s an energy-focus in my being. A bucket is a pattern where all but one of the planets in a chart are located in half of the zodiac, with a singleton on the other side acting as a handle.

In my chart the bucket tips so that it pours or perhaps spills out – all of my planets except one, Jupiter, are above the horizon (the horizontal line across the chart), in the social and public domain. But the key to that array is Jupiter, down below, in the personal, local-neighbourhood sphere. In my case it allows a certain privileged access to inner wealth – though I had to make a progression of big, sometimes difficult choices to unlock it. The Tibetans gave me the name ‘radiant merit’ and the Bedouin called me ‘always giving’, and these have been a challenge to live up to and live with. Had I oriented my life another way, I might have been a senior civil servant or an ambassador serving Tony Blair’s government. But I didn’t.

Life as it stands today is rather peculiar: I’m out there with my writings and podcasts, with a public presence, while in real life I’m very much on my own. That’s Jupiter in Pisces and Saturn in Virgo again. I live in an uplifting, ancient landscape, peppered with geomantic technology from millennia ago, surrounded by high granite cliffs and the wide ocean. Here lies the taproot of my being – the sense of space here nourishes my soul. Jupiter in Pisces needs a spiritual anchorage. Before this, I’ve lived under Glastonbury Tor, in Bethlehem, in the Swedish forests and the mountains of Eryri, Snowdonia.

Yet ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main‘, wrote John Donne in 1624. For me, solitude is a way of sourcing original experiences and perceptions which then I can bring to the wider world. I’m not one of those authors who can write a book for three hours a day while doing other things – instead I go into a hyperfocused voluntary lockdown for months, totally immersing myself in it.

I’ve even manifested electrosensitivity in my life, which is very isolating. I live in furthest Cornwall to be as far away as possible from the dense cloud of radiation that England emits. I’m close to other emitters instead – humpback and minke whales, dolphins, basking sharks and seals. And buzzards, geese and owls. The construction of our realities, both intentional and unconscious, has so much to do with what we tune into.

The funny thing is that, although West Penwith is relatively isolated, in my psychic work I find it’s easy here to reach around the whole globe. It’s geographically peripheral and psychically quite central, relatively free of etheric noise. I have Neptune in the ninth house (an eclectic spiritualist) and Chiron in Sag in the twelfth (a penchant for behind-the-scenes stuff). As George Harrison, lifting words from Lao Tzu, once sang: “Without going out of my door I can know all things on earth; without looking out of my window I can see the ways of heaven; the farther one travels, the less one knows… Arrive without travelling, see all without looking, do all without doing…” [1] This is certainly true for me now, though I’ve travelled and done plenty of things before, and this makes it easier to accept my current confinement. If cancer had come in my thirties or forties it would have been a very different story.

Currently, transiting Saturn has been sitting on my Jupiter. Normally I’d interpret this as a crisis of faith. Well, my faith is more or less intact but circumstances are having a good go at eroding it, with many disappointments, big and small. Singlehanded, I’m not keeping up with everything that’s involved in staying alive – at times the ‘to do’ list overwhelms me, and I need help with critical things like transport, shopping, laundry, lifting, specific tasks and particularly companionship. And a PA for online assistance and organising things, and a minder for travels. Ideally.

But reality is something else. No one covers my back or keeps their eye on me, and that’s the lesson of my life. Or perhaps I deserve it, or perhaps it’s a gift in disguise. One of the gifts you get when you die is that you see all these facts and nuances from an entirely objective viewpoint, and the end-chapter in life is, if we so choose, a time of revelation and release as insights like this trickle up. Life is, after all, not only about what we tell ourselves is happening.

On the other hand, I’m kinda managing, keeping many things together, as long as it doesn’t get too complex and demanding. My task pile is increasing though, not shrinking. Even so, a strange kind of peace and acceptance has settled on me. Last year I was lonely while this year I’m alone – circumstances haven’t changed though my feelings about them have.

Ironically, one issue that’s stretching me a lot is that, although I need help, quite a few people nowadays seek help from me. I even need help explaining to many of them why I can’t help them – this requires careful diplomacy. The world’s needs are rising and people from the past naturally come back hoping I can wave a magic wand once again. Mostly not, in concrete terms, though occasionally I can given them a magic key. But the human contact between us is important – it helps them plug into some sanity, perspective and encouragement, with a feeling that someone is bearing witness and feeling their pain.

It’s heart-wrenching too. I’m talking to Bashar, a young doctor in Gaza, when he can get messages through to me. I haven’t heard from him for over a week now – might have lost him. Some years ago I helped him write articles about life in Gaza, under the auspices of We Are Not Numbers.[2] It’s an NGO that trains young Gazans in writing, photography, video and social media outreach, to help them speak for themselves. One of its founders, Prof Refaat al Areer, has recently been killed in bombing.[3]

Bashar graduated as a doctor in August this year after six years study at the Islamic University in Gaza City and was plunged straight into working at Al Shifa hospital – the big one recently in the news. I asked if he could write something about it but I haven’t heard from him. He wished he could come and work in Britain, where a doctor can have the resources, drugs and equipment they need for their work – well, much more than they have in Gaza. He doesn’t want money or to immigrate here permanently – he wants to get experience and raise his game so that he can return home, where people like him are much needed.

Another friend, Aminha, had a baby a few weeks ago. I’m relieved that she and her child are still alive – well, they were, last time I heard. What a life to be born into, stuck in a devastated concentration camp with little food or security and no escape.[4] Her brother had been a nurse in Gaza – he managed to escape in 2016, got to Europe, was talent-spotted by the Belgian health service and later died of Covid while working in a frontline intensive care unit. Poor chap. Some years ago I asked him what was the most difficult job he had had to do as a nurse in Gaza. He said, “Holding down patients during surgery without anaesthetics“.

One of the reasons I’ve had a strange peoccupation with conflict zones is this. Kahlil Gibran puts it well: “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars“. In conflict zones I’ve met some of the most impressive people I’ve ever met.

Sakyamuni Buddha put it another way: “The path to enlightenment begins with the experience of suffering“. That is, if shit happens, it might be a gift in disguise. It’s not fair to say that to a person in Gaza right now, but there’s truth in it – a truth better confronted in retrospect for the deepening of our understanding, at a time when we’re not actually being bombed.

I’ve been facing facts recently, regarding my health. I’m doing alright with cancer, though my current treatment, Daratumamab, is slowly losing its efficacy. So in the coming year I might have to change to Lenidalomide, which intuitively I feel nervous about. My anticipation is that I might not get on so well with it as I have with Dara. I’ll lose the visits by the nurses too, since it involves a daily pill rather than a four-weekly injection.

But my real concern is the peripheral side-effects of cancer. I have two critical issues – osteonecrosis of the jaw (my jaw is dying) and a compressed stomach (leading to difficulties digesting and eliminating food). The stomach is Virgo’s place in the body, while the jaw is critical for scrunching up the stuff of life. Experience is food too, so there’s symbolism in this. The stomach is where we assimilate the nutritional experiences that life gives us.

The osteonecrosis gives me anticipations. A specialist at the Royal Cornwall Hospital was concerned about it recently. We like each other, and he can see I’m very much alive, but the disintegration of my jaw, possibly in a year or two, could be a critical issue heralding my end – not a very happy ending either. Either this or the stomach issue are more likely to kill me than the cancer itself.

I’m not one who will struggle and fight to stay alive just for the sake of it. If I can, I’ll stick around until living becomes too difficult, but no longer. I’m okay about passing on, and I’ve had a full life. Over the last four years with cancer I’ve done my best to release regrets, accept facts, forgive and be forgiven, and to stay happy. However, without adequate support and with no one close to me in daily life, I’m concerned about what happens when I start deteriorating. I need someone who’s tuned in, an alternative type with some health knowledge and a good heart, with time available and willingness stand by me to the end – funnily, rather like my former partner, with qualities akin to hers.

She was into David Bowie and I was into John Lennon (having grown up in 1960s Liverpool). Lennon’s recent song, ‘Now and Then’, says it for me exactly.[5] Now and then I really do miss her. Nearly two years have passed and I’m moving on, gradually opening to other options. Not that options are here, but I’m opening up to them.

However, if I get close to someone or move house or join a new situation – a family or group, perhaps – this will be the last time, baby the last time, and I won’t be able to do another big change. If this can’t be the case, then it might be better to stay alone and handle things myself. This involves a promise to myself to pull out of life quickly and go home when the time comes to do so, and no later. I’ve spent my life pushing against the wind, and there’s no point doing it in death.

Life always has its compensations and our prayers are always answered – not necessarily when or how we might want them, but they’re certainly answered. When I was in the depths of cancer four years ago I was concerned about my humanitarian work. I could continue as an author and thinker, and my post-cancer blogs, podcasts and webwork are some of the best output I’ve done, but the humanitarian work died right then – I couldn’t travel and I’d be more of a liability than an asset at the frontline. Or so I thought.

But in the last two years I’ve worked with the Akan priestess Maa Ayensuwaa to disable a violent, Nigerian-led, drug-addled criminal gang, I’ve had involvement with the Tuareg in Mali, and recently I’ve been back with the Palestinians. It all happens from my desk here in Cornwall – online stuff – and in bed, or sometimes up on the bronze age barrows behind our farm – psychic stuff.

Something in me has been strangely calm about getting involved in human wrongs, death and devastation once again, even though at times it has been grief-filled and rather a strain. I’ve been given grace-time and opportunity to do it – a prayer answered. Which goes to show, there’s a gift in everything, even in disability, and even when it seems that all the wrong things possible are happening. But then, to quote a peacemaking Ulster vicar from some time back, ‘Better to fail in something that eventually succeeds than to succeed in something that ultimately fails’.

When it comes to popping clogs, I think I might be able to fold myself up and pop out voluntarily, if necessary – though I’ll find out only when I get there. It’s a matter of shifting away from the apparent difficulty of letting go of life, toward being reborn into a new world with a sense of relief and homecoming. We don’t stop being ourselves when we die, but the location changes, you wave goodbye to your old, damaged, tired, physical self and body, and you say hello to welcoming souls who await your arrival. You get processed through a decompression, a debriefing and a healing of wounds, a few truth sessions, some re-education and recuperation, and then other options come before you.

So, I’m getting used to the possibility that my time might be shorter than otherwise it might be. My current state isn’t going to last forever. However, the conundrum is that, when you’re kept alive by spirit, anything can happen.

But I do need friends to quit trying to oblige me to stay alive for their own convenience. I’m here now, alive in incarnation, in physical form. If you wish, you may invite me places, get me to do a holy gig or two, join us at the Oak Dragon Camp in summer [6] or visit me here in Cornwall. But please don’t leave it too late. When it’s time to go, I’ll need to go, whatever anyone thinks and whether or not I fit their timetable.

After that, I’m in the hands of two Geminis – Tulki, my son, looking after my remaining affairs, bless him, and a dear soul sister, Rebecca, looking after my funeral. I’m pretty Mercurial (Sun in Virgo and Moon in Gemini) and, as you may have discovered, rather effusive with words – miles and gallons of the effing things – so being sent off by two Geminis somehow fits, and thank you, you two.

My Mum, also with a Moon in Gemini, was a prizewinning shorthand typist in the 1940s-70s and she got arthritic fingers in the end. I’ve managed to bypass that, thankfully. Instead, my fingers are losing their keyboard-accuracy and I have to go over and over everything multiple times until it’s right! We each have served the bane of being a compulsive scribe.

I’m Saturnine – it’s central in the array of my planets – and my cancer, Myeloma, is about bones (Saturn). Without treatment my bones would hollow out, crumble and break. Bones hold us up, enabling us to live in a functional planetary body with a humanoid architecture. They give us a frame to hang our body on, counteracting gravitation and the heaviness of physicality. When my energy is up, I’m more or less upright, looking bright, and when it’s down I’m stooped, dragging myself around like a corpse on double gravity, and I need putting to bed with a cuppa, some music, a hot water bottle and a cuddle – therapy for a saturnine old crock with a limited shelf life.

So it feels a bit like I’m poised at the top of a slalom slope and it could be downhill from here. We shall see – I don’t have a sense of the future right now, the gods like keeping me on tenterhooks and it’s a scary-ish seat-of-the-pants matter. Goes to show, I do get fear, in case anyone wondered. But I’m usually alright on the night – fear is more about anticipation than factual realities. One of the great things about being a senior is that, having got through many scrapes over the previous seven decades, I know that, live or die, I’ll get through the next lot too, somehow. It all lies in attitude, really. Only in certain respects can we genuinely control the circumstances of our lives, but we have much more influence over the way we respond to the circumstances we face. That’s what free will is all about.

Love from me, Happy New Moon and Happy Everythings. Palden

The next blog is half-written, and it’s a ‘Paldywan’s top tips for cancer patients’ blog. It’ll also form the final chapter of the book ‘Bones’.

NOTES:
[1]. The Inner Light, by the Beatles: https://open.spotify.com/track/379hxtlY5LvbPQa5LL6dPo
[2]. We Are Not Numbers: http://www.wearenotnumbers.org
[3]. Refaat Al Areer: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/12/8/poet-professor-and-writer-refaat-alareer-killed-in-israeli-strike
[4]. An article about Aminha by an old friend, Mike Scialom: https://mike-scialom.medium.com/just-a-miracle-from-god-would-end-this-insane-war-gaza-city-resident-s-plea-under-attack-from-082af6b32586
[5]. Now and Then, the Beatles: https://youtu.be/AW55J2zE3N4
[6]. Oak Dragon Camps: http://www.oakdragon.org – if news of their 2024 camp is not online when you look, it’s coming soon.

Cancer Tales

and that hidden Factor X

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.

Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Eye-candy: www.palden.co.uk/photos/best-photos.html

Gravity

and blood and bones

Mighty cloud above Penwith, as seen from Bosigran

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.

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.

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!

Life is, after all, filled with paradox.

Love from me, Paldywan

Blogs: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Chapel Carn Brea, the last hill in Britain

Transitioning

Turmoil does bear fruit

Bluebells in West Cornwall — Bluebells at Treviscoe, West Penwith, the home of a dear friend, Ba Miller

I felt a bit like a nine-year old boy, swallowing hard, facing the Great Wide and Wonderful and wondering whether he’ll make it.

I made my first trip away from home for a long time, travelling to East Cornwall to stay with an old friend – we’ve known each other for four decades. I caught the train back – it’s necessary to take a punt on its not getting too crowded. The last two miles as the train comes into Penzance must be one of the better stretches of train journey in this country, as the mythic St Michael’s Mount appears and the train cruises above the Long Rock shoreline. A very fresh air and seagull welcome greets you when you get out at the last town in Britain.

Penny, my trusty helper, picked me up, taking me home to the farm. She had spring-cleaned my cabin while I was away, bless her. I spent the evening detoxing from the mobile-phone radiation I had picked up in transit, letting the brain-screeching, embattled agitation and sharply-piercing headaches of electrosensitivity die down slowly – it takes about 36 hours. Still alive, still here.

Going away changes my perspective, and I had a lot to mull over. In a way I’m starting again. The traveller in me, locked down for the last few years, managed to get an airing – and in making the trip I was testing out my capacity to handle it. Because, all things being well, and when I can afford the ruinous post-Brexit health insurance for a cancer patient and the expense of taking a minder with me, I might one day even find myself once again sitting in an aircraft seat and heading off somewhere.

The four likely destinations, in order of doability, are Sweden (where I once lived and have family and friends), the ancient Minoan island of Kalymnos in Greece and the even more ancient town of Bethlehem in Palestine, where bits of my heart still reside, and, least likely, Tinzibitane in Mali, the village of the Tuareg tribe I’ve been helping for some years. It would be great to meet the village chief, who is my age and a brother of the soul, before either of us passes on. Though perhaps we might meet over on the other side instead – you never know. I wonder if the Tuareg version of heaven is similar to that of a European like me? I might find out before long.

Making plans – a very Western preoccupation. I’m making some provisional plans. They must be provisional because I could have a choking fit or a sudden downturn and keel over tomorrow – I had a downturn and lucky scrape only in February. But I could also live for five years more. For a person like me, held up by strength of spirit more than by medical probability, there’s a mysterious factor too, because I have an uncanny tendency to bounce back from the deepest of crises, and this makes things a bit less predictable.

This stone circle was built in the 1990s by the late dowser Hamish Miller, and it does indeed thrum.

So I’ve decided to do something I’m good at: put myself on the parapet, push the river in a direction cancer patients like me usually shouldn’t take, and create a few miracles before I go. My two strong points lie in pulling together groups to do some magic pressure-cooking and close encounters, and humanitarian work in embattled places. These are more connected than it appears, actually.

I’m going to try to pull off a few things, using my weakness and despair as strengths and the insight that wizzened mortality and beat-up experience have brought. I’d like to create some magic moments for people I’ll soon be leaving behind. Or perhaps I want to reaffirm a heartlink with sisters and brothers far and wide, to strengthen our network of light so that it comes back to life in other realms and other times. Because the work is not yet done.

When I was twenty, standing atop a mountain in Snowdonia, north Wales, I had a life-changing vision of the coming battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. I saw the beauty of nature and the dark clouds on the horizon. I discovered what Weltschmerz felt like – German for the pain of the world. Fresh from a failed student revolution at the LSE in London, burned out and trying to process it, I had a soul-shaking revelation of the kind you sometimes get at the tops of mountains. I made a deep commitment to doing what I could to transform the world into a safe and friendly place.

Well, in the ensuing decades I did what I could, and now, as curtains time approaches, I feel the job is distinctly incomplete. This is deep because I feel I came into this life not to help bring about that change, but to attend to what needs to happen after it when, having crossed the hump, humanity is faced with the big question of what to do next. This mission is as yet unfulfilled – it must be commuted to my next life. Inshallah, if that is what it is to be. So if sometime in the future you see some kid in a baby buggy staring right at you and twiggling your sonars, it might be me.

Many ancient stone circles are sanitised and also robbed of their setting by farms and more recent developments, but this stone circle sits in a fine and beautiful setting. It draws the spirits to it.

But there’s still stuff to do. In my latest book about prehistoric sites in West Penwith, Shining Land, I suggest that the esoteric technology of the people of the neolithic and bronze ages in Britain is pertinent to us now because, once we’ve sorted out basic sustainability, social and ecological issues, by the end of the century we will come to the matter of working with the subtler energy-fields of nature and the planet, to bring about the next level of planetary restoration and repair. This is what I mean by ‘after the change’. It concerns not only ecological-climatic repair but social, psycho-spiritual and civilisational repair, deep and on a global scale. The book will come out sometime but, currently, there’s a technical problem: its typesetter, Jonathan, who has done two of my previous books, happens also to be the Green mayor of Penzance, and he’s a tad busy!

This is what being on Planet Earth is all about: there’s an excruciating gap between vision and actuality, and it often takes longer than we’d like. This is a key part of the learning and soul-honing that coming to this planet involves – it’s what we chose when we volunteered for the mission. It’s so easy to forget that. I do. Some things take a lifetime, and changing the course of history takes longer. For those of us in the business of planetary repair, we need to remember this. True and full change takes seven generations. So look after your grandchildren.

I can’t visit my grandchildren, but each of them I regularly hold in light, giving each of them deep attention and being there as a kind of guardian angel. I have an ancestor, a well-known healer in Pontypridd, South Wales, in the mid-1800s, who seems to have been watching over me. Apparently he was a stroppy, difficult man, but a brilliant herbalist and healer to whom doctors would send patients when they had given up on them. Sometimes he’d disappear off into the mountains, forsaking people and collecting herbs, and people responded with a mixture of relief and hope that, being a community protector, he’d return. Perhaps we’re a bit similar.

I’ve been learning a big lesson for a man, yet again: the taproot of our strength as men lies in our weakness, vulnerability and apparent lack of agency. In weakness we can either become its victim or we can use it to pull out all the stops, to break rules and probabilities. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. During this winter I’ve been alone, going into deep, desolate places in my heart, and realising that, though I’m immuno-compromised on cancer drugs, I don’t want to sit around at home waiting for the chop. I’m a Mars in Scorpio sort of guy who dies in action and rarely surrenders. Well, metaphorically speaking.

This said, I’ve had quite a few chances to die and I’m still here, so God only knows how this saga will actually end. I guess my friends upstairs will hold me up and keep me here until they transfer me to another department. Fuckit, these are the facts of life for a pathological rainbow warrior leaning heavily on his sticks, trying desperately to pull off a few earthly thrills before he deposits his clogs into the recycling bin of forgotten time. Us Virgos, we do tend to want to make ourselves useful.

So, I propose doing a few events, with a little (actually quite a lot of) help from my friends. To some groups it will be armchair talks or afternoon workshops, and in some it will be special group phenomena and close encounters of a ninth kind – inspiring, empowering and memorable, I hope. With the latter, perhaps they’re not for people who prefer to paddle rather than swim. They’ll be one-offs only, because there will come a time when I can’t do it any more.

So if you’re good at organising and you feel drawn to the prospect of doing an event in your area with old Paldywan, please contact me and we can work something out. I can’t do many of these, a minder will be bringing me, it must be phones off and not in a city, and please treat me as if I were ninety. Energy-management: if it all works, it could be a memorable event and a blessing. Cornwall and Glastonbury area are likely locations, but if there’s a caucus of interested people in your area or your network, let’s discuss it.

If you can’t make it, then I’ll be blogging and podding till I no longer can, possibly longer, so all is not lost. Then there are the psychic airwaves: it’s not specifically me that you’re tuning into, but the network I’m a part of, and those of you who get a buzz of recognition with me are getting a buzz from the network, and you’re getting it because you’re already part of it and perhaps need reminding or help with reconnecting. You see, I’m a strange one from a faraway place, and some of you pick up the frequency because you know it. I’m interested in reconnecting with those souls while I still can, and sharing a shot in the arm with you from the folks back home, if you’d like that. It’s pretty much all I can do with my life now. So do come and have a cup of tea with friends old and new, wherever I turn up.

Two dear friends, Ba Miller, 90, left, and Miriam Naccache, 61, right, at Ba’s home.

Concerning psychic airwaves… there’s plenty of spam, phishing and malware out there in the ethers, and keep your commonsense filters up. If in doubt, give it time and form judgements slowly. It all depends on the frequencies you tune into and anchor to. If you are as clear as you can be in motivation and perspective, that is your protection – a whole person has fewer weak-points and we’re challenging as entities to level with. Be cautious with anyone who in some way, often well concealed, advocates division or prejudice, since it is the unified resonance of humanity that will ultimately carry us through – just as the solidarity of Ukrainians is carrying them through today. Remember to know and judge people by their works more than their words – and that includes enchanters like me. In the psychic world the actual content and value of information is far more important than the claimed status of the source. The most valuable sources are not so loud and they don’t make big claims – they tend not to come from our local area in our galaxy or from neighbouring dimensions either. With exceptions. As you do with humans, treat each one individually and follow your intuitions as to how to interact with them.

But now, it’s back to mundanities. It’s another hospital outpatient visit concerning the osteo-necrosis in my chin, followed by a visit from the nurse to shoot me up with my monthly hit of cancer drugs. And team-building after the destruction I went through a few months ago, completing building the Meyn Mamvro Archive (it has taken two years), getting my book out, staggering over clifftops and through woods, and carrying out that strange activity called staying alive. For someone in my situation, that takes more effort than for most.

Walking angels, these two (though they’d no doubt shrug shoulders and deny it)

The 18th Century philosopher Edmund Burke once said something that has always guided me: For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing. This is the story of our time: in this world we don’t have a problem of evil, but we do have a problem with playing safe and keeping our heads down so that evil can prevail. This is why psycho-spiritual transformation is a necessary and central part of repairing all else.

I met a young Berliner in the Sinai Desert one hot, shimmering day. We were specks on each other’s horizon until eventually we met, there in the resounding desert silence, hiding in the shade under a rock, and he taught me something I seem to have repeated quite a few times on this blog: It’s always okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end. The implications of this expand in every direction, the more you consider it.

Hm, while finishing this blog, I kept saying to myself ‘Eat your breakfast, Palden’ – it was ready. Or so I thought. I looked at it and discovered I’d already eaten it. Ah, that’s presumably why I forgot. I might sound lucid in a blog or do a video interview, but actually I’m pretty useless in many functional things nowadays. Chemo-brain. I don’t have brain-fog, I have brain-lag. Which is why I sometimes need a minder, and I can’t organise events any more (that was 30-40 years ago). Nowadays I must studiously avoid getting sucked into complexity because I get lost and screw up. And sometimes, once we get to the car, it’s great to be driven home again, to my little cabin in the far beyond.

Here’s a big hug to all of you who’ve read thus far! Bless you – and thanks for being with.

Love, Paldywan.

Site: www.palden.co.uk | Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Some music I’m enjoying right now, Eric Mouquet (Deep Forest) and friends in Brazil: https://youtu.be/-nAwQoM3eS8

Here’s my granddaughter Idun in Lappland, singing in two languages, demonstrating the magic of the coming generation and busy discovering her starborn side (get a tissue): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dv_6IiHWLw

The Jokkmokk Market in February, in northern Sweden, goes back generations – formerly the Sami and the Swedes met up to trade, though now it is mainly a kind of ethnic festival lasting a few days.

Costs and Benefits

A new Paldypodcast

Here’s a new podcast. My creative mojo seems to be returning and I’m churning it out at present… erk. This is what it’s about:

In our time we’re going through an intensification of events and pressures, globally, socially and individually. We’re heading into harder times, and it’s not going to go back to normal. But there are things we can do about this. It doesn’t have to be as bad as currently it looks.

The costs and difficulties we have in life can be made a bit easier by not grinding on about it quite so much, by making things less difficult inside ourselves. Sounds easy, but it takes some work.

There are also gifts in any situation that become visible if we shift our focus, take a deep breath, own what we’re responsible for and focus on what’s really most important.

I’ve faced some stuff in recent times and seem to be gaining something from it, deep down, underneath. It’s a lot to do with finding what’s available in any situation – anything that can cheer us, lift us up and open up pathways – and going on from there. Following a path.

If your spirits have some sparkle, you’ll be alright. Though often, ‘alright’ isn’t what we originally thought.

17 minutes, with love from Palden.

Listen on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5W7HTEsIrryRSqs0syUK0w?si=36bw0NqbS1CFS_NnDo1Yyg

If you don’t want to use Spotify (or Apple or Google Podcasts – it’s there too), then go here: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Having Cancer 2

My latest podcast

About having cancer. All about keeping spirits up and dealing with adversity, about working with both modern pharma and holistic treatments and some thoughts on how it all ends up – actually, you die (so it helps to start preparing).

It’s for anyone with cancer or a similarly soul-rocking ailment, and for interested carers or anyone who knows a cancer patient.

I’m no expert or doctor but I do have cancer, I go through the grinder, I get swamped in fears and tears, and I try to do my best with it all. So this is from me to you, if it’s useful to you.

It’s the second of two, but you don’t have to hear the first one first. When I finished editing this and put the podcast to bed, I just burst out crying. You might hear my heart and soul in this podcast. It means a lot to me and might be one of my best.

Not finished yet though! There’s more to come.

It’s 30 mins long, and you can hear it on Spotify, or on Apple or Google Podcasts

or if you don’t like visiting sites like those, it’s on my website at palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

With love, Palden.