In my audiobook and various of my postings you’ll have heard of Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, Palestine (here’s a brief intro). I used to work there.
Here’s a newsletter from Ibrahim Issa, the school’s director. It gives a taste of what it’s like running a school in occupied Palestine at present.
With love, Palden
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Dear Friends,
Thank you for all your support and solidarity with the Hope Flowers School (HFS). I am trying through this letter, to share with you what happened on 6 December 2023 at the HFS. It is a bit long; I believe that some of you have received a big number of pictures and videos on that day.
It is almost 21 years ago, when James Bennet wrote an article in the New York Times about HFS: “Arab Coexistence school falls victim to violence” you can read this article on: https://www.nytimes.com/…/arab-coexistence-school-falls…
Between December 2002 and December 2023, HFS battle for Peace continues.
The school-day at HFS starts early in the morning. Children and staff start arriving at 07:15 A.m. It is quite difficult to predict the day and whether clashes between Palestinians and Israeli army will erupt that day. Clashes could erupt at any moment of the day. HFS staffs have to be prepared to act in case any violence erupts at a sudden.
Elegant vehicles, huh?
On Wednesday, December 6th 2023, in my way to HFS at 7:15 AM. I have to pass Deheisha refugee camp and Al Khader village. In my way I found tens of Israeli military vehicles and armed personal carriers about to enter the refugee camp and the village. Despite military presence on the way, but I managed to reach HFS at 07:30 A.m. The neighborhood of HFS was quite. I did not see any Israeli soldiers in the neighborhood.
I started to receive calls at about 07:45 from HFS staff that they could not reach the school because of Israeli army presence and clashes between the army and Palestinians. So we decided to start the school day with the absence of two staff members who could not reach the school.
At 8:30 am, I was in my way from HFS to another meeting. On the corner of the school, I was stopped by tens of Israeli soldiers who were just arriving to the street and started to block the road with large concrete blocks using a bulldozer. The soldiers were very tense, especially I found myself with my car surrounded by big number of soldiers. The one soldier asked me to continue driving while another asked me to return backwards to HFS. I decided to stay unmoved because of unclearity in soldiers demands. Any wrong movement at this situation may be interpreted as an attack on soldiers and could kill me.
At this moment a military vehicle stopped next to me and there was apparently the commander of the unit. I talked to him in English and explained the situation that one soldier is asking to drive backwards and the other is asking me to drive forwards, I asked him if I could drive backwards (back to HFS), but he refused and asked me to continue driving forwards. He also instructed the soldiers to allow me moving forwards. I also told the army officer that I am a principle of a school located on the corner, and that I have 350 children aged 4-13 years old right now in the school with some children with special needs, and that I would appreciate if the army could give me 30 minutes to evacuate the school before they enter further in the neighborhood. The commander refused and he told me that in one hour they will finish their operation and that the army will reopen the road.
I cancelled my meeting and decided to stay nearby the HFS. I immediately called the staff at the HFS and asked them to take all measures (according to emergency plan) to protect the children and staff at the school and warned them that soldiers are in the neighborhood near the school.
At about 09:00 I received a call from vice-principle of HFS informing me that soldiers are near the school and that few armored vehicles have blocked the school parking and the main gate of the school and that leaving the school or entering the school is not possible.
A paramedic comforts an upset boy
At 09:10 I received another call informing me that children with autism spectrum disorder (32 out of 358) are terrified and that social workers and staff need help to calm them down. Then I continued to receive calls from HFS informing me that children are totally in panic after soldiers started to fire teargas and heard of sounds of explosions nearby HFS due to clashing with Palestinian youth outside the HFS.
At this point I asked teachers and all staff of HFS to pay attention for the physical safety of children and to avoid sitting beside windows or even trying to look outside from the windows. I also informed the education department in Bethlehem that we have an emergency at HFS and explained the situation inside the HFS.
Everyone was concerned that the situation will get worse especially that some schools in Bethlehem and in the West Bank have encountered similar problems in the past few weeks.
Some children have reacted strongly to fear like inability to breathe, others were crying, etc. Therefore, I asked the health department to help sending ambulances to help the staff to deal with stressed and fearful children at HFS. Indeed, 6 ambulances from Palestine Red Crescent Society arrived few minutes later, but the Israeli army prevented the ambulances to reach the HFS justifying that the area is “a military closed area”.
A teacher tries to calm the children
At this moment I started to realize the danger that children are in and started to call the Palestinian-Israeli military coordination office and asked them to speak to the Israeli military to allow the ambulances to reach the school. I decided to call other international organizations and asked them to urgently reach out for Israeli army to allow ambulances to reaching HFS.
The Israeli army has finally agreed to allow the ambulances to reach the school and finally allowed me to get back to the school in one of the ambulances. A detailed inspection of each ambulance was conducted by the army before it was allowed to move ahead. All ambulances were accompanied by an Israeli patrol.
At HFS, children were extremely fearful; in addition we were concerned that clashes between Palestinian and Israelis will erupt further.
Evacuation
Therefore, in consultation with the paramedics in the ambulances, we decided that it would be better to evacuate the whole school and take children to transport children to a safer place. The ambulances started to transport groups of children (maximum 10 in each ambulance accompanied by one teacher) to a nearby hospital.
Due to intensity of the situation, the general director of the education department arrived at HFS with one of the ambulances to support HFS’s staff and children. With the heroic work of paramedics of the Red Crescent society we managed to get all children and staff out safely.
A neighbour got shot. Well, he might have thrown stones at soldiers twenty years ago in the intifada, but he doesn’t have to die for that. He was just protecting his home.
During the evacuation, it was clear that a ‘demolition order’ was being carried out, and three neighbors’ houses right next to the school were razed to the ground by heavy demolition machines. Much violence was used by the army. Soldiers tried to prevent photos or videos from being taken, neighbors’ and teachers’ phones were roughly taken and broken. Three neighbors were injured, one seriously, he was shot in the head.
Some children have seen this happen. Hundreds of parents have heard about evacuation of the school. Parents started to reach the area of the school asking about their children. They were very scared. We asked parents to wait in hospital, you can imagine hundreds of parents were waiting every ambulance to arrive to see of their child/ren is/ are being safe. At the end of this difficult day, three families were left homeless, three people are injured, one of whom is in danger of life, and hundreds of children are further traumatized.
The impact of this violence on children, families is immense.
Teachers and counselors at HFS will have lots of extra work to do in trauma care in the weeks and months to come. It is therefore as urgent as ever that HFS work continue to provide trauma counseling for children and their families. We are very thankful for all of you who helped us on December 6th and many thanks for your solidarity and support to HFS.
The trauma counseling program at HFS aims to:
• To provide help for the children at the school and for families in Bethlehem to address the effects of the downward-spiralling cycle of violence and trauma that has arisen from violence and the occupation, and to remove the basis for future hostile behaviour.
• To create a model for wider use in Palestinian schools, to become a centre of excellence and dissemination for psychological support for people of the West Bank, and to share our accumulated knowledge and experience with the wider world.
Your support to HFS and trauma counseling program will be highly appreciated. Our battle for peace will continue!
Best regards, Ibrahim Issa, Director of HFS. hopeflowers@palnet.com www.hopeflowers.org Cell: +972(0)599294355
A bronze age chambered cairn at Treen, near Morvah, in Penwith. I think these were used for, amongst other things, conscious dying.
Dying consciously isn’t something to leave for the future. It starts now. Yes, even when we’re young. It’s about our lives now. Let me explain.
Dying is a process, a continuum. All of us are part-dead already, at least psychologically, even if we’re in good health. Most people are only 10-20% dead, and most are unconscious of it, except when we schmooze into the otherworld in our dreams or when we’re ill or facing overwhelming circumstances in which we are obliged to ‘die into the moment’, to let go of all of all that went before, as if this is our last moment or it is soon to be so.
It’s all to do with our relationship with the otherworld and how comfortably we function in it. This depends on the extent to which we trust our ‘subjective’ perceptions. When a close loved one pops their clogs, part of us goes with them as if by osmosis, and we can be in quite an altered state thereafter (for at least a month though also up to a year).
This is a form of privileged access to the otherworld, empathically piggybacking the loved one who has died. It’s a gift from them to you. If we indulge in loss, buying into the mindframe that causes people to say, for want of something better, “Sorry for your loss“, we’re missing the point. Is it a loss or a gain? Here lies a choice.
If it’s a loss, then you’re afraid of dying. Go on, be honest. You’re afraid, and you see it to be a negative thing. But wait, when it’s 150 Palestinians who pop their clogs in one night, in some respects I’m happier for the people who died than for those who survive. Bloody hellsbells, that’s a version of earthly life that it’s quite good to get out of, if that is the fate that befalls you.
If it’s a gain, something in you is open to dying. And, as it happens, you’ll tend to be more open to living too. Living fully, and switching up the risk factor to a healthier level. It means you are likely to die more easily, when your time comes, because this isn’t just a goodbye. It’s a hello. It’s an entry into a new world. You’re going home.
Some people will relax into it and float off when they come to the point of passing over – when they come to the medically critical point of taking a last breath. But even then, this is but a stage on an intensely transitional dying path. Death starts long before and continues afterwards. Even with a sudden or unexpected death there are often signs, which can be seen in retrospect, of foreknowledge of death – something was fixed in preparation, on some level.
Sometimes I’m told of someone’s death and I’m not surprised at all – I didn’t expect it, but once it came, it made sense in some way. Then there are some deaths where it doesn’t feel right. I’ve felt that about quite a few of the deaths that have occurred around me in the last year or more – not only were they avoidable, but also, in my judgement, it was not right that they happened. I felt that about a family, the Gaza branch of the Issa family in Bethlehem, who died en masse, over thirty of them, in October. My first response was, no, that shouldn’t have happened. There was something bad about that. But then, ‘the hand of God moves in strange ways’.
How you feel at the bucket-kicking critical point is greatly affected by your readiness for it. Some people experience it a bit like falling off a cliff – scary at first, but then you discover that you can fly. Some people can’t handle it at all, going off at a tangent, or to sleep, or they fight like hell. Some people relax into it, floating over the threshold with a gentle, sighing smile of recognition, release and relief. Then of course, there’s the question of what you choose to do next.
Well, the general rule is, if you’ve done reasonably well thus far, you’ll manage with the next bit. It depends a lot on how you’ve set this up, how ready you are. This might not take a vastness of preparation: it’s mainly about forgiveness and releasing, and how easily we do it. Letting things be.
Summer sunset over the Isles of Scilly, as seen from Tregeseal stone circle
Recently I’ve been finding out about things in my own life that I haven’t found easy to let go of. So it isn’t easy, even for one who is quite used to it.
One gift I’ve had from cancer has been the advance notice I’ve been given. I’ve been given time to pre-process dying. I’m willing to do so – and that makes a difference. Becoming disabled and debilitated started me on a change-process, and I’m grateful for having been given a time of debriefing and unwinding from life. At times it has been lonely and bleak, but that’s a necessary part of the process, part of the full spectrum of life-experience. Especially for someone who has had quite a public life.
One aspect of this is that, as an author and broadcaster, a communicator, I’ve been very productive since getting cancer. Being given notice of death gave me impetus to write and record things I haven’t said, to finalise and bring to completion many of the different threads I’ve followed in my work. It’s all going up on my growing online archive.
Completion is important because, to die consciously, we need to be reasonably at peace with things. Successful dying involves letting letting ourselves float off, and that requires that we feel okay doing so. We need to feel finished and done, with no major regrets that divert our energy and attention at death, making us struggle when it’s already too late. There will be regrets, but they need to have been dug over and sifted through, to uncover the abiding truth of them. Often these regrets come from judgements, tropes and memes of the time we’ve lived in and, ‘in the eyes of God’, they tend to look a bit different.
In recent years, as part of a self-forgiveness process, I’ve become aware of guilt and shame I have carried for things that quite often were other people’s projections – projections I had taken on – and they were not quite as big and real and bad as they had been made out to be. In some cases, though I was deemed to be wrong, I was right, or at least more right than I was judged to be – though sometimes it takes decades. I realised that my own responsibility for what happened was different from the responsibility people had laid on me – often to cover their own asses. Even so, I am responsible inasmuch as I manifested these experiences, and they’re my responsibility and creation. And it always, always, always takes two to tango.
When you die, you can’t do anything more about life – you’ve had it, and that was it. You can’t fix anything, correct anything, re-run the movie or click the ‘undo’ button. Not that you could do so earlier in life, but at least you could delude yourself you could. You can do so to some extent while you have some life left, since there are things you can correct, reconcile, heal or re-work. But as you approach death, especially if disablement and disability are involved, your capacity to do things reduces, your world grows smaller and it becomes too late to do anything. You just have to accept that that is that. Bombs that were thrown cannot be unthrown, even when the craters are covered over.
It’s still possible to come to peace about things inwardly, without reconciliation having to come from outside. We have to accept what we did and what we omitted to do – especially the latter – and own up, examine our regrets, say sorry at least within ourselves, accept that we could have done things differently, understand what it was like being affected by the things we did or omitted to do, look at the true, enduring outcomes, engage in self-forgiveness and forgiving others, and then let things be. It was as it was, and that’s that.
My old friend Charley Barley, roaming around Carn Kenidjack. We dropped out of university together, fifty years ago.
There are wider and greater significances to things, and it helps to start seeing them. A friend, Mike, died of despair, drugs and alcohol and, of course, everyone deemed that this was not good. Well, from the viewpoint of the living and the default judgements of society, this might be so. But I followed him over to the other side to check him out, and he was happy, radiant, relieved to have died and actually having a lot of fun – and I was happy for him when I found out. Those who prefer to stay with the default judgement of his seemingly regrettable death see his death as a sad thing, and I do not. I’m glad for him. It’s all in how we see and judge things.
I’m sure we’ll meet again, upstairs, Mike and I. As is the case with a good soul-brother, Terry, who unexpectedly blipped out during a hernia operation – he was the caterer at the Hundredth Monkey Camps in the mid-1990s. At the very first of the Glastonbury Camps in the mid-1980s, the camp cafe was called ‘Pie in the Sky’ and, guess what, we’ll revive it on the other side, and you’re welcome to come along when your time comes. It’s free. For the good souls who ran it back then – people like Diana and Bron – the good news is that no washing up will be needed and the food will be self-cooking!
I’ve come to the end of my ‘second line’ cancer treatment (of five). I’m receiving no more treatment of Dara, the immunotherapy drug that has kept me alive for three years. It has worked well and now it’s losing efficacy and my readings are rising. Right now, I’m on nothing – this is an eight-week ‘wait and watch’ phase, to see what happens, before I start a new treatment called Lenidalomide, or Len. This is probably what will happen, though it depends on further blood samples and observations. I’m in rather a limbo.
I can feel the cancer right now. My bones are beginning to twinge with stripes of pain. My spirits are sagging. I feel the dying process accelerate.
However, I’m better off than before because I’ve learned a lot in the last four years about living with a blood cancer. (It’s Myeloma, a form of radiation sickness). In the six-ish months before my first clear symptoms appeared (my lower back collapsed), technically I was in good health, but something was not right. A dark cloud was settling on me. I was feeling constrained, tied and weighed down. My hope and light were fading. Something in me felt desperate, despairing, as if something was wrong, though I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
Well, right now I’m getting those feelings again. Except the difference is that, this time, I can recognise the feeling and I know more about what to do, and not to do. I’m not pushing against it or trying to ‘get better’, or trying to prove that everything is alright and normal when it isn’t. I’m not anxiously looking for remedies and escape routes (though actually I’m on some new holistics), because I’ll die at the right time, in the right way, if I have anything to do with it, and that’s the way it’s going to be. The angels will take me out at the right time. It’s necessary to entrust myself to this process. It’s an act of will.
So yesterday I went to bed with my hot water bottle, a mug of tea and some munchies and I lay there, out of my head, unable to marshall myself, feeling wan and weepy, missing company and watching the jackdaws sitting on the wind.
I was stuck in a loop. Problem is, people say to me, “Just give me a ring if there’s a need”. But then, when I ring, I have to explain how I’m feeling, discussing the matter at some length, then to have to make more calls when I find out that they’re not available right now, though please feel free to ring me if ever there’s a need – which I just did.
I’ve instituted a new rule of dropping it when I’ve made three attempts. Sometimes I just have to look after myself. Problem is, nowadays, everyone is so busy, and since they’re volunteering to help out of the goodness of their hearts, I cannot complain about the quality of service! I tend to get lots of advice, and sometimes I have to say, “But I need actual help!“. “Oh, perhaps you ought to ring social services…”. The tricky bit here is that I’m often in a state of mind where due diplomacy and tact are not easy, and I cannot talk at length or discuss grand philosophisms, miracle cures or lists of things I should do.
“Would it work if I came next Thursday?“. Well, the way I’m going, I have no idea what next Thursday will be like, and life doesn’t go according to plan when your body-mind are shutting down and you’re heading for a big, yawning chasm of unwellness. The best remedy is a hot water bottle, a bit of ‘there there’ and someone to sit with you. Just the sound of those knitting needles clacking away can be very comforting when you’re in a highly altered state and hovering on the edge.
Anyway, the feeling I have right now is a bit like that point in an airplane flight where, 200 miles from landing, the pilot powers down the engines and you go into a long glide. It feels like that. There’s something rather relaxing about it. It’s a bit more effortless. Internally, it has caused me to lapse into greater levels of forgiveness and acceptance, to accelerate the flow of letting-go.
Yet something else in me wants to do a few things before I go. I want to share a few outstanding issues, to complete the story. One of these is local to me: I’ve proposed a series of three workshops on the ancient sites of West Penwith. We shall see whether the venue I’ve approached is interested. But something is different now: if someone says to me, ‘not this year, but perhaps next year’ they’re not getting it. I’m unsure I shall be on good form, or even alive, next year. People say, “Oh, don’t be pessimistic – of course you’ll be around, and besides, we need you!“. Well, perhaps, but if you need me, please get me while I’m here – and that could well mean this year.
Alternatively, please do not express regret and loss when I pop my clogs, because I was indeed here and then the angels took me out. I think I’ll manage one more Oak Dragon camp, this year, and one reason I’m inviting friends to come to the camp is not just because I want to bring the Oak Dragon tribe (a lovely bunch) a few new members. It’s because we can be together for a week in the same magic space, and it could well be the last time this is possible. This is why I invite you to consider coming.
If you can’t, then a second option is that I’ll be speaking at the Glastonbury Symposium (in Glastonbury Town Hall) on Sunday 28th July. With luck I’ll be doing a few, but not many, gigs in Glastonbury and elsewhere – this year, while I still can, and if there are organisers for it. Next year, 2025 – that’s in the lap of the gods and I don’t get the feeling my head, heart and soul will be good for it. We’ll have to wait and see. But it’s not so cool if I forget my lines half way through a talk, staring blankly at you, as if to ask, “Where am I? And why am I standing here?“.
The Pathless Path to the Gateless Gate. Near Zennor, Penwith.
This kind of stuff is important. When I ‘went up’ with cancer, I made a prayer. At the time it looked like I might have one year to live. I was a ragged pile of bones. I prayed that I might be able to bring as many things to completion as I could. In my last blog I told of how one issue – my unfinished humanitarian work – bugged me at the time, and I made a prayer for resolution. Well, BAM, it came to me in Sept-Oct 2022 and afterwards – the Ghana mission I wrote about last time, the Tuareg, about whom I’ve also written, and then in October 2023, the Palestine disaster. I can’t say I’ve resolved those issues, and none are looking good for the future. But something has been happening inside. A cleansing and releasing.
For it’s not the specific worldly issues that need completing – they can’t, and each of these three missions will resolve themselves after, not before, my death. But it’s the inner stuff. It’s not just about the worldly outcomes of the work I’ve done – much of which has on the surface been undone in recent months – but it’s the inner process of engagement with these issues, and the pain and the satisfaction, the dilemmas and truths and the intensity and pathos of it all, which is the important stuff. How to forgive myself and release it when someone in my care dies.
Just before she died, a year ago, Felicia Otoo thanked me deeply for all I had done for her and for her child Phyllis. We cried together, thousands of miles apart. She was dead the next day. Two months earlier I had adopted Phyllis, to give Felicia a sense that at least someone cared. Phyllis was renamed Phyllis Kenobi Otoo. I had saved their lives at least four times in the preceding months. I told her that I shall be joining them soon. And I shall.
There are two former students in Gaza from whom I have not heard for over two months. They’re now in the ‘missing, presumed dead’ category. I’ve been talking to them inwardly. There’s a great gift here that wasn’t there before. I can assure these dying people that I shall be joining them soon – and this gives them some comfort. Yes, a dead (psychic) humanitarian worker can still be useful, even after death!
Life always has its compensations. To be honest, though I can feel death creeping closer – I’d estimate myself to be 75% dead and rising – there’s some relief that comes with it. I’ve found the last few years difficult, facing much of it alone, and while this has had worthy rewards and I’m not complaining, I shall also be relieved when it ends, when I can drop it all, consign these matters to history and go home.
Cloud beings at Praa Sands
I’m finding life in the 2020s to be more complex than I can handle. I got scammed by an Indian guy online in December. He was part of a really neat scamming operation, pretending to be a BT engineer. Usually I’m really astute with things like this and rumble them quickly, but this time I was tired and not thinking clearly. I found my PayPal account quickly being raided for £300, sent to some address in China – but I got there just in time to stop another £1,200 following after it. Though I managed to save the day, it was costly and I can’t handle this kind of stuff any more. I was a tech pioneer thirty years ago, and look at me now.
Even so, this spacing-out process has its virtues. It causes me to pull back, excluding increasing swathes of things from my life – things that are too much to handle. Such as train journeys where I can’t trust whether the train will actually come. Or shopping trips in busy supermarkets where I have to stand in a queue with ten mobile phones around me, killing me slowly. Or long conversations where I can’t keep up with long-winded diversions, footnotes and appendices when I just need to get to the punchline while I still remember what the story was all about.
This pulling back is part of the conscious dying process. It starts now. It’s a winding-down process, and I feel I’m somewhere around the age of seven, growing down. I can still stand though!
It involves setting up circumstances, if I can, where I won’t be plagued with people asking favours of me when I just need to go to bed and be left in peace. It involves setting up head-spaces where I’m feeling reconciled even with people who don’t want to reconcile (or they don’t have time, or they’re afraid, or they’re leaving it till a ‘later’ that never comes).
It involves laying things to rest, applying the ‘Fuck-it‘ mantra, putting stuff down and letting things be. Dropping the burdens. Forgetting my fucking pills. Making a mandala of the life that I have had. Enjoying the semi-weightlessness of lying on my back in bed, listening to the Desert Dwellers and the raindrops on the skylight.
Usually, today I’d be buzzing on steroids and cancer drugs, and quite often I would write a blog or record a podcast on that day – it channels the buzzing into something productive. But I’m not buzzing on steroids any more. Instead, two friends over in Botallack took me to the Dog and Rabbit in St Just and I had coffee and pear cake, and that set me buzzing instead. That, and what we talked about there, is what produced this sudden, unpremeditated blog.
Penwith is bathed in sea fog. The woodstove is burning aromatic silver birch. Dinner is warming up on the stove. And the Atlantic winds are whooshing through the bare tree branches to the occasional hooting of owls.
Thanks for reading. With love, Palden.
PS. For those of you who listened to my audiobook, remember the allegations of corruption that were used to discredit the school where I worked, leading to the withdrawal of foreign funding at exactly the wrong moment? And remember what I wrote some blogs back about hasbarah – the telling of stories that are the opposite to what is actually happening? Well, in the recent accusations against UNRWA, which has 30,000 employees, exactly the same tactic is being used again, twelve years later. This is classic dirty hasbarah. The nations that have withdrawn funding should be ashamed of themselves – and my own nation, Britain, is one of them.
An eclipse over Penwith. The Earth and Moon are a co-orbiting double planet. The only other one in our solar system is Pluto-Charon.
Chapel Carn Brea, the last hill in Britain, topped by bronze age and neolithic cairns
I’ve just started a job that I’ve been putting off for six months. I wasn’t clear about what I needed to do, and it’s a lot of work. And I’m supposed to be retired. But it came clear a few days ago, amidst a down-time when I was sitting here alone, feeling rather rudderless and wondering what to do. I decided to do a complete revision of a rather big website I wrote and created 6-9 years ago, Ancient Penwith. It’s about the ancient sites of West Penwith, here in Cornwall.
In some respects it’s more difficult to revise a website than to create a new one, because you have to take the existing material and re-shape it along completely new lines. But there’s a tendency to simply recycle the old stuff and stay in the same mind-frame as before. So each page is taking time for me to revise – one a day, and forty to go. I’m going to make the site briefer, more to-the-point, with more maps, pics and straight statements about the geomantic issues my research of the last ten years has aroused.
The detailed stuff has gone into a book, written and not yet published, called Shining Land. I can’t self-publish it – brain issues, and I want it to stay available after I die. So I’ll try finding a publisher when I get brain-space to focus on it.
That’s what it’s like. My psyche doesn’t process stuff like it once did. I can’t multitask and hop from thing to thing any more. When faced with memory issues I have to give myself full permission to utilise and trust my intuitive brain – intuition works by faster, more direct neural pathways than logic does, and that matters in ageing brains.
In this sense, being an educated Westerner is one of the causes of many old peoples’ brain-processing issues: we have been trained to disable and constrain a significant part of our brains, in order to fit into the requirements of the system we live in. Though, frankly, many people with dementia and Alzheimer’s are simply brain-tired, worn out, and we ought to recognise this instead of deluding ourselves that we can extend our busy lives forever.
It’s not just about slow brainz. It’s about a slowing psyche – the whole lot. It’s part of the life-cycle and a wonderful way of rounding out a life. Instead of facts and figures, you get understanding and you see things in a different light.
Here’s the summit cairn on the top of Chapel Carn Brea, a chambered cairn about 4,000 years old, for retreat, conscious dying and the energy-treatment of seeds and other items (many archaeologists would probably disagree)
Right now I am celebrating the second anniversary of the sudden separation of my partner and me, after six years together. I’ve been surprised how slowly I’ve moved through the stages of coming back to myself. It has been a struggle. On the other hand, since in a late-life context I’m in the last-chance zone, there has been far more stuff to get through, for this concerns all my relationships. My very first girlfriend, Jane, is dying too, in Northumberland. It’s all about finalising a life in which I’ve been involved with some amazing women and we’ve shared remarkable experiences. But I’m happy to say that, though I regret what happened two years ago, I made it through and I live to see another day.
I’m rather surprised I got through that. But then, that’s another gift of a lapsing memory: life and its experiences become more of a surprise. Well, I’ve got through 90% of releasing my partner and seem to have crossed a critical threshold in the last month or so. When a person refuses to talk and to debrief openly after a major life-crunch together, it opens up a new level of soul-searching, understanding, guesswork and forgiveness. It’s necessary to understand and release, regardless of whether the other person responds, helps or cares – otherwise it’s a weight around your own neck and emotionally a killer. It has been painful getting through this stuff but, in the end, something has cleared and a weight of bereavement has lifted. I’m happy about that, and I hope it’s happening for her too.
When a single issue such as relationship breakdown comes up, it widens out into other areas of life – those areas that remain unreconciled and which perhaps cannot be reconciled. One recent example, for me, has been watching much of my work in Palestine come to pretty much nothing. There’s something of it still there, but really it’s a matter of writing off this chunk of life and its efforts – letting it be. It’s in the ‘life’s a bitch, then you die’ department of reality.
In a way, all our big ideas, our plans, ambitions and efforts, come to nothing. It’s a fart in the void. This is not entirely true, but it’s an aspect of life that we do need to face. We’re locked in a groove of exaggerated, self-generated meaningfulness, desperate to explain our lives and justify our existences, when often the true meaning of our lives is completely different from what we believe. Quite often our track record is better than we ourselves tend to judge. After all, we’re all useless, error-prone shits, really, and it has taken us thousands of years to get to this point – and look where we’ve got to! We humans are the kinds of people our parents warned us about – or they should have done.
Fifty years ago I might have become a professor, but I became an independent polymath instead, covering quite a wide range of seemingly disparate subjects. I mean, what’s the connection between humanitarian work in Palestine and the geomancy of stone circles? What’s the connection between astrology and geopolitics, between ETs and the history of the Crusades, or between group circle-working and leylines?
For me, it’s all about reaching across rather large gaps and seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. I guess that’s one thing that drew me toward Israelis and Palestinians – if your aim is to bring peace to these poor people, that’s noble, but it’s highly unlikely to happen in your lifetime, so get used to it and soldier on anyway. That’s what I needed to learn. It took a few years, and my work out there lifted off as soon as I learned it.
Even so, things haven’t been working out well for me in recent years. Life has been an uphill struggle and I’ve had some rather earth-shaking experiences. In the last year, quite a few people under my care have died and I’ve faced some ridiculous challenges. Some think I ought to avoid such things but, in a way, for better or worse, this is my chosen life-path. It all hangs around the question of how deep into the water you’re prepared to go, and whether you trust that you can swim. Once you go deeper, you find out that you survive, so you go a bit deeper next time, and on it goes. Having someone shoot at you for the third time is not the same as the first.
Since October 2022 I’ve been involved in another irreconcilable problem that has weighed heavily. Recent news about the Post Office scandal here in UK has been heartening because I’ve been caught in a smaller but similar scandal. It’s a bank in Australia which, through corporate negligence, has caused the deaths of at least twelve people under my care. It is in denial of its responsibilities and has broken its promises. Like the PO scandal, the story sounds improbable and incredible. Even the consultant the bank brought in to help them with this problem recommended in our favour.
The short story is that, in October 2022, I got involved in a rescue operation in Ghana to save one of the company’s men, a Scotsman whom I knew. At the time I agreed to do it, it should have lasted 2-3 weeks. The anti-fraud security arm of the bank he worked for promised to pay all expenses if I acted as handler for this part of a larger operation – for them it was a confrontation with a large multinational crime gang. I have the right skills and experience, so I did it, in good faith.
In a crisis, there’s no time for written agreements: you either trust or you don’t trust the person, make a handshake deal and get on with it, since minutes matter. Despite repeated assurances of payment over twelve months up to September 2023, the bank has not paid. Twelve people have died as a result – some of you will remember Felicia and her child Phyllis, who died a year ago. And I am financially down. They owe Maa Ayensuwaa, me and a number of others £40,000 to help compensate all the damage done – not a vast amount.
During this time I met up with Maa Ayensuwaa, a native healer in Ghana with whom I’ve been working for the last year. Since December 2022 she and I have been alone on this, working to rescue people and both of us paying a high price for it. But we’re topping out now – the company has not managed to kill us, and neither has the crime gang.
The bank might not have intended to kill anyone, but its lack of integrity and its corporate dishonesty have killed people, and they’re continuing to err in this way even now, when a simple settle-up would not be difficult. Had they paid up as agreed at an early stage, many bad things would not have needed to happen – including Felicia’s and Phyllis’ deaths and the circumstances leading up to them.
Maa Ayensuwaa is now in Kumasi, Ghana, slowly reviving from a series of hospital operations for fibroids. Papa Nkum, her former student, and I are at present trying to find funds to get her home to her shrine at Nzema, to recuperate (£150). I’ve grown tired of fundraising. We need to get her home. It has been a long grind, keeping her alive, but we’ve done it. Gods bless her, she’s a tough cookie who seems to be able to hover around in the near-death state quite well without dying, and she’s made it through. If you feel any kind of connection with her, please send her supportive, healing vibes.
We’ve got through a crisis that neither Papa Nkum nor I reckoned we’d get through. He’s a good man. He has stood by her when others didn’t care – West Africans can be hard toward one another. But we’re quite a team, she, him and I, grossly underfunded yet resourceful and enduring. It’s quite an interaction too, between two native healers and one aged hippy – an esoteric bridge across cultures. We’ve learned a lot from each other.
The Mên an Tol, the Stone with the Hole
The issue here is about crossing gaps, reaching across cultural chasms and bridgebuilding between disparate realities that talk different languages and see things in fundamentally different ways.
The connection between humanitarian work in Palestine and the geomancy of stone circles is this. It’s about bridging gulfs. When you’re in a stone circle, you are communicating with an intelligence, genius loci, the spirit of the place. It has a very different viewpoint from you, and it’s a whole lot bigger and older than you. It’s a stretch, but the interaction is really helpful in both directions. Meanwhile, in Palestine: when in quick succession you find yourself in the company of a right-wing Israeli settler and a Muslim radical, you’re straddling a gap where the two live in very different worlds, even if living only a mile apart. It’s the same thing. It’s the vulnerability of doing the splitz.
What’s the connection between astrology and geopolitics? Well, astrology provides a way of seeing things that sheds light on the course of events, and it’s a source of hidden intelligence on the trends, tracks and timings that such events are likely to follow. It helps us understand the threads that move through history and the way they move and evolve. If astrology were used in international relations and intel gathering, diplomacy would work far better.
What’s the connection between ETs and the history of the Crusades? Well, the Crusades, for Europe, were a pattern-setting colonial adventure that have defined the history of the last thousand years, and we’re watching the latest round in Gaza and the West Bank right now. At the time of the Crusades, there was a choice between cultural interchange or cultural rivalry between the Muslim and Christian worlds, and rivalry and misunderstanding were chosen. If one person were responsible for that, it was Richard the Lionheart.
It created a gap not only between Muslims and Christians but a separatist mindset in Europeans. That is, we choose to call Hamas terrorists rather than freedom fighters. We call ETs ‘aliens’, with the expectation that they are hostile. We again say the word ‘Russia’ with an intonation and undertone that portrays Russians as ‘them’ – it’s a return to the safe hostile territory of the Cold War. Having an enemy helps us feel better about ourselves.
There’s another connection too, observed by none other than Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik nearly 40 years ago: if ETs suddenly presented themselves to us, our differences here on Earth would quickly dissolve. We’d have to change our mindset overnight. If we put up a fight, we’d lose, instantaneously – they wouldn’t even allow us to get to that point. Because it’s not about a winning-and-losing, threat-based mindset or expectation. At that very moment we as Earthlings would be challenged to do what we’ve long needed to do – cooperate and stand together. Standing against things is not the way to go.
I’ll say that again. Standing against things is not the way to go.
What’s the connection between group circle-working and leylines? Well, leylines constitute a subtle energy-system spanning the world, concentrated in certain areas (Britain and Palestine being two) and they act as network channels that pump up energy-centres dotted around the world. Group circle-working involves people sitting in a circle, using a talking stick and other methods of entering into a synergistic group-mind state. It is ancient, archetypal and very modern, the basis of deep, para-political democracy. In such a situation, a group can generate an amplified energy-field which can at times have pattern-changing effects around the world, somehow aiding or influencing events to turn in certain directions.
This is a shamanic principle that is a key principle today in the resolution of the world’s multiplex ills. ‘When three or more people are gathered in my name, there shall I be‘ – that’s ‘God’ talking in the Bible, and it’s true, and every single reader of this blog will have experienced this in some way, however you perceive divinity. This is what people did at power-centres, and that’s why they were built – to enter into advanced mass-consciousness states, to go into deep thought and to engage with the core intelligence of nature and the universe.
Spirit operates beyond the framework of time, space and dimension. We all have sisters and brothers of the soul, dotted around the world and the universe, with whom we are in regular communication on an inner level. We’re part of networks, lineages and soul-families and, consciously or not, energy passes through these connections. That’s one reason I like to run the Sunday Meditations – it’s not necessary even to do anything in the meditation. It’s more a matter of making ourselves meditatively available for whatever need there is, and much of it operates on a very deep level, of which sometimes we only get glimmers.
On Earth, we’re at a critical time where we need to understand that we really are all one. Sounds easy, but it involves a painful, drawn-out transition. We’re one human family living on one small world. We face a big emotional transition in which we shall have to learn to trust and agree more than ever before. Or, at least, we need to find ways of disagreeing and cooperating at the same time, and feeling good about each other. This concerns identities, nations, cultures and also species.
The iron age fogou at Carn Euny – a women’s space inside the heart of the village
It’s the bridging of gaps. Not only seeing and understanding those gaps, but stepping over them. We people in the rich world hold back more than is wise for us. We stay in our comfort zone, where we won’t be confronted with big moral issues that actually we need to confront, for the good of our souls. That’s why people are sailing to our shores on flimsy boats, sacrificing their lives to bring us this question.
I’ve repeatedly been faced with a question like this: “Is it better to give my last money to save a person’s life, or should I play safe and side-step the issue (and let them suffer or die)?”. The fear that causes us to turn away from facing such a question turns out to be unjustified, in my experience. It’s a question of undertaken risk and commitment – and such heat-of-the-moment choices introduce a new magic that is otherwise unavailable. I’ve found that, having faced this edgy question quite a few times over the years, I’ve managed intuitively to make good decisions, with but a few mistakes, and while it has involved making personal sacrifices, I survived – and so did they. And that’s the main thing.
It’s not what we get for doing things. It’s what we become by doing them.
Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall, a neolithic cliff sanctuary
Wednesday was a bad-news day. I cried myself to sleep afterwards. I’m crossing a threshold. My cancer readings are beginning to rise. My medication is going to be changed. There are five options available, and this is the third. Part of me wants my Mummy to hold my hand while I go through the next stage. I shall lose my four-weekly nurses’ visits – the next phase involves pills, Lenidalomide (a form of Thalidomide). I lasted well for three years on the last form of medication, Dara, but it’s now losing efficacy.
I’ll have to go to hospital in Truro once a month. There will be medical side-effects, apparently. I’m feeling similar warning signs to those I had ten months before I was diagnosed with cancer – a feeling of being up against it, drizzled with feelings of hopelessness and garnished with a creeping tiredness – and a strange manic drivenness to work on creative projects. I’m doing Reishi, Astragalus, Vits C, D3, multivits, blueberries, cider vinegar, grapefruit seed extract, beansprouts and my friend Kellie’s multicoloured carrots, and took a break from blogging for some sun-medicine too.
This is the life of an eccentric cancer patient. Who knows how the next stage will develop? This year I would certainly love resolution of the bank issue and the ex-partner issue. It’s time, and life doesn’t have to be so difficult. I would love to help Maa Ayensuwaa to get back on her feet and do something for the Tuareg too (I need to find people to replace me). The Tuareg have had to send their young and their old people to a refugee camp over the border, since they are under threat from government troops, Wagner Group mercenaries and Jihadis. This isn’t the World War Three that some people seem to want, but things are escalating. Need is rising.
And here’s my quote of the day. It cropped up on a new friend’s FB page (shukran, Selina). It’s by Austrian psychologist Carl Jung. It applies to the whole of humanity as well as to individuals or nation peoples.
“Nobody can fall so low unless they have a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a person, it challenges their best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.”
Pedn Vounder and Porth Curno, Penwith, Cornwall, from Treryn Dinas
SUNDAY MEDITATION
7-7.30PM GMT every Sunday (different times in different time zones – see below). You’re welcome to join. Do the meditation however you normally do it – mindfulness, prayer, visualisation or your own way, or simply being present with us.
Our purpose is to uplift our world an inch, to relieve the shadows of the past and to encourage decency and sanity in humanity’s thoughts, words and deeds.
Carn Du, Lamorna, and The Lizard in the background
This weekend we’re all at a rather historic juncture, astrologically speaking: Pluto moves into Aquarius for 15 years and, obligingly, the Sun conjuncted it today (Saturday), to give it an extra kick. It’s a change of chapter in the longer world story.
Last time Pluto changed sign (into Capricorn) we had the financial crisis of 2008 and the near-collapse of world currencies. But largely these sign-changes (ingresses) signify a change of theme, viewpoint, context and setting. Such shifts become big events when there are unexploded bombs lying around – unresolved matters from the past and trigger issues everyone hoped would go away.
In recent decades things have been steered top-down, but now it’s shifting to bottom-up – to some extent whether we like it or not. It’s less about economics and megastructures and more about people, societies, crowds and values.
Sunset at St Levan, Penwith, Cornwall
It’s a time of truth and transition. There’s a surreptitious tilting of balances, a crossing of a threshold. Warmakers currently feel trigger-happy and exempt from liability, yet something else is creeping up behind. A change of values.
A key issue now is ‘the people’ expressing their consensual view. Also it’s a question of whether ‘the people’ will be captured by propaganda and populism, waylaid by ‘bread and circuses’, or whether we express a new kind of moral-setting collective wisdom.
So it’s good at this time to put in a prayer for the people of planet Earth. We need some sanity and sensible behaviour.
Current times, on Sundays: UK 7-7.30pm GMT W Europe 8-8.30pm E Europe and the Levant 9-9.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm PST North America 11-11.30am
The first two audio instalments of my 2011 book Blogging in Bethlehem are now available, and the remaining five will come out once a week over winter (inshallah). The written version is available too.
I hope you enjoy them. It’s free, no strings.
Well, that lot took 20 hours to make, but I got through it quite quickly. That’s one advantage of hyperfocus and living alone. Rain drumming on the roof has stopped play for now. Just as well, really – I had my cancer treatment yesterday/Weds and I’m all floppy and wobbly.
I’m enjoying doing it though. The story comes from better times in Palestine in 2011, but it gives a sense of real life and some of the positive things happening there, and the social and cultural strengths of Palestinians. I miss friends there and would love to go back, but this is beyond my physical scope and financial ability now. So this is a way to be with them in spirit.
We live in a strange world where its inhabitants, called humans, have a weird tendency to believe that other humans are fundamentally different to them and opposed to them. Don’t go to Planet Earth – the inhabitants there are dangerous, mainly to themselves. This is a bizarre aspect of this particular world.
That’s a paragraph from my book Blogging in Bethlehem. I woke up this morning with the idea to serialise it as an audio book.
But then I wondered whether enough people would be interested to justify the effort. It’s not a very long book (unusually for me). At a guess it would land up as three hours of listening, sectioned into 30ish minute segments.
So I’m wondering about that. Any views?
I can’t start today anyway, because the wind is rattling around too much for sound recording! But I have my cancer treatment tomorrow/Weds – a nurse comes round and it takes just 45 mins. I might well be buzzing on that sufficiently in the following two days to start recording – you never know. Depends on the winds.
My life goes in four-week cycles and treatment affects my psyche, stomach and daily life for around a week. That’s weird for an astrologer who has lived life attuned to natural cycles of a more elastic kind, rather than to a calendrically-regularised grinding cog of time, with a periodicity determined by medication.
Down’ere at the end of Cornwall, stuck out in the Atlantic, we’re getting a lot of high wind and storming. It’s a bit reminiscent of the stormy winter of 2014. The birds are lying low.
Dolphins playing the waves at Nanjizal Bay, Cornwall
And talking of calendars – specifically Gregorian ones – may the rest of your year remain happy. In the end, happiness is a decision of the heart, not an ideal set of circumstances that only occasionally crop up – then they go again. Happy times.
Rather like Greenwich Mean Time, the Gregorian calendar is a vestige of European imperialism. Nowadays it’s neatly called the ‘Common Era’, as if to conceal its origins, and GMT is re-named UT, or ‘universal time’ – except the universe doesn’t follow it.
It might be one of those post-colonial vestiges that stick around for some time. Perhaps the only situation to change this will come when we finally adjust our lives on Earth to the wider universe.
Watching intently. Portheras Cove, West Penwith, Cornwall
Until such a time, since we’re dangerous, we’re under a form of quarantine. Dangerous to the universe and dangerous to ourselves. Most strange.
It sounds simple, but the solution is happiness (as a decision of the heart). The way things are now, though, it looks really complex. Especially with vexatious warring and all manner of dissonances going on.
It needs modelling and shoving through supercomputers because we believe we can sort things out mentally, if only we have enough data. But mentality simply sorts data, even if intelligently. Decisions are made in the heart, the womb and the gut – the parts that AI can only imitate, though it cannot reach.
At this juncture of history, we have a lot of rather big decisions to make. We humans need to get more happy and become less dangerous. Less dissonance, more resonance.
It will affect climate change in a big way, with instantaneous results.
Think about it. But not too much. And I won’t either.
I’m at it again. Here’s my latest podcast, of interest to anyone thinking a bit further than their nose about the current conflicts in the world.
Wars happen because of failed relationships between nations and peoples (and oligarchs). This concerns parapolitics – the politics of planetary evolution.
It’s taken from my 2003 book Healing the Hurts of Nations, written on the buildup to the Iraq war. All about the psyche of the world, the collective unconscious and the psyches of nations – and their unconsciousness as well.
That’s what causes big problems – projection onto others to escape taking responsibility for what we ourselves are doing or have done, or secretly intend to do.
Nations fail to see ourselves as others see us, and to own up to our own shadowy, smelly, dishonest side in our relationships with other nations.
This material is 20 years old and recycled, yet it doesn’t need re-working for 2023-24 – it’s all thoroughly relevant now in our current situation.
Without solving the problem of war and international cooperation, we won’t get through the major crises ahead of us – climate, population, ecology, resources… This podcast suggests how the world can move forward – by a shift of attitude and approach.
It’s funny. I’ve always had a strange allergy to Christmas. In recent weeks I’ve been looking into this issue. What is bizarre is that I have lived in the Baltic region – the source of Father Christmas and sleighbells – and also in Bethlehem – the source of the Christ-is-born part of the package. So I’ve lived in the source-places of Christmas but I’m not particularly into it. Well, we all have our weird pathologies.
I have fond memories of both places – of genuine sleighbells (except on horses pulling sledges through the snow-bedecked forest), and of crowds of the devout in Manger Square, Bethlehem, during the three Christmases they have (Catholic, Orthodox and Armenian) at roughly two-week intervals. When I was in Bethlehem one Christmas I wrote a blog about it all. The town customarily welcomes 100,000 visitors for the Christmas Pilgrimage, and often it’s utter madness in town. It’s not happening this year: Palestinians are really downhearted, in no mood for celebrating the birth of a holy child, or celebrating anything.
I’ve asked myself why I have this Yuletide allergic reaction. In my case, part of the answer is Asperger’s Syndrome – ‘Wrong Planet Syndrome’. It’s an inherent feeling of outsideness, and it brings both benefits and problems. It’s a bit like the day you land in a foreign country: you understand nothing of the language and you experience the funky quirks of that country with the eye of an outsider – like the smelly toilets in Austria, the crooked telegraph poles in USA, or the way that Australian wildlife is busily noisy in the night and quiet during the day, or the sheer colourful intensity and olfactory richness of India, or the foot-washing places outside mosques in Jordan.
Another factor was the Christmases we had in our rather dysfunctional family. I couldn’t stand the pressure to ‘behave myself’ and to eat food I didn’t really like. Things got more interesting when I was around age eleven, when my parents started inviting three or four foreign students from the School of Tropical Medicine in Liverpool to our house for Christmas Day. Suddenly I was meeting people from Uganda, India, Hong Kong, Egypt and Barbados. But even then I was frustrated because we had to enact the Christmas rituals and suffer the stomachic consequences instead of getting into far more interesting things… and meanwhile my mother worked her socks off, not enjoying Christmas at all, and getting annoyed with my father, my brother or me for reasons I never fully understood.
I’d stand there thinking ‘Why can’t we make this easier and have a good time together without all this fuss and bother?‘. But relentlessly, each year, it had to be done. I never quite figured out why. So perhaps that’s a cause of my allergy.
In Bethlehem, as a lifelong vegetarian, it was always a bit difficult passing the meat market – another rich olfactory experience. I turned vegetarian long ago in 1971 and, for fortyish years, people would regard folks like me as strange and awkward, missing something important in life. In Palestine I got away with it by saying it was part of my religion – and that’s something they easily accept and oblige. However, to a vegetarian, being vegetarian is a perfectly logical and sound way of behaving and conducting one’s life. Being an Aspie is rather like that – you’re regarded as strange, abnormal and in need of correction, while from your own minority viewpoint the world around you is incomprehensible and crazy.
An Indonesian Christian rock band, Manger Square, Bethlehem
Yet Aspergers is not a programming error – it’s a different operating system. I believe it’s not really a ‘spectrum’ issue either – to me, that’s a neurotypical excuse for not really understanding what’s going on. The way I see it, you’re either an Aspie or you aren’t, since this concerns operating systems, and the spectrum bit relates to an Aspie’s capacity to adjust, or not, to the world around – what’s called the ‘Aspie mask’. How well we adjust depends a lot on how we were brought up – whether we were encouraged to grow into being ourselves or whether we had to conform to imposed behaviours that weren’t our own. That adjustment factor is what gives the appearance of a continuous ‘autistic spectrum’.
It seems that the proportion of Aspies, Autistics, ADHDs and others in society is increasing, and this is an evolutionary change for humanity. It’s the direction the world is heading in and it’s happening for a reason. It’s not a problem, and Aspies and Auties generally aren’t ill or malfunctioning. Actually, there is cause for us to feel sympathy for ordinary, neurotypical people and the templated, frameworked world they live in.
It has a fascinating side to it, inasmuch as, not seeing life in the same way as most other people, your perceptions are inherently out-of-the-box. So it means that you can come up with solutions that seem mad to some and brilliant to others – depending largely on whether their primary optic looks forwards or backwards. It also has a problematic side because it’s then a matter of whether it’s possible for that perspective to be expressed and accepted in society, for our strengths to be taken up and valued. This is slowly changing as society notes a growing variety of interesting public figures with this ‘condition’.
This was my problem. At Christmas, it was the implicit social requirement to behave in certain prescriptive ways, irrespective of how I felt inside myself, and the indulgence, waste and pretence of the relentlessly rolling bulldozer of Christmas behaviours. It grated for me and still does, and my own Xmas-avoidance can grate for other people.
In the 1980s, when I was in my thirties, I decided to clarify things, come out with it and just stop doing Christmas. If I was unclear I’d get drawn back into it, so I got clear and became ‘antisocial’ instead. In the later 1980s I started doing non-Christmas retreats for about ten people in the mountains of Snowdonia, which were fully booked. There would be no Xmas rigmarole, no presents, no special food or boozing, and we’d have silence and personal time up to 2pm each day and then hanging out together after that. The people who came to the retreats would rest, recharge and have some genuine human togetherness, without all the ritual. We had a great time!
Even though I’ve played a significant part in encouraging ceremony and ritual in Glastonbury, in the camps movement and elsewhere, and I’ve designed and led a good number of ceremonies myself, I’m not really into ceremony and ritual very much. I prefer to act spontaneously, picking up on and acting out the drama of the moment without making plans or imposing structures. I think this arises from a psychic sense of participating in a much broader and deeper reality-landscape and dialogue than many non-psychics perceive. If you’re in the right inner state, the spirits of the four directions will come and be there with you without needing much invitation. Like perceptive humans, they get a sense of where the action is and they go there.
I used to have problems when attending funerals. The vicar would be standing there leading the funeral service, while the hovering soul, looking for someone receptive, would find me sitting there in the pews. In some cases they would want me to lead the service, since I would be able more properly to speak on their behalf. But this was not to be, and I had to tell them so, secretly in my thoughts – the formalities had to be adhered to during such a solemn occasion.
The dead and the beings of the otherworlds run their own realities in parallel to ours, and the objective in ceremony is to bring those worlds closer. However, a direct psychic connection renders formalised ceremony less necessary – the action happens in ‘deep thought’. Formalised ceremony can indeed truly entrance people, enacting something that genuinely helps the interaction between worlds but, in my judgement, many ceremonies don’t do this as much as they could. The soul-quality of it can be obscured by the script. While many participants might wish to believe the gods are present, only sometimes do they seem to really feel it in their hearts and through their antennae. So there can be an element of pious game-playing to it. I hope I don’t offend by saying that. One of the things I’ve had to learn is how to say awkward things in an acceptable way – it took until my mid-thirties – and I’m not sure whether I’ve succeeded in that.
So, at funerals I have run, I asked people to address the departed soul directly, not as him or her but as you – since that soul was actually there (well, most times – there can be exceptions). It can be quite upsetting to someone who has just died to hear yourself being talked about and ignored by old friends and family, as if you no longer exist. I’d invite people to participate in a talking-stick process, each giving a short anecdote of their interaction with the deceasing person, addressing them personally as you – we were talking to that person about their life, and this is an important life-review process to help a departing soul understand nuances of their life that they’d perhaps never seen before. People were really moved by this. But I haven’t noticed such a method being widely adopted.
Bethlehem. But do they need to import north European pagan imagery such as sleighbells? Most Arabs don’t even understand what a sleigh is.
Winter Solstice and Christmas are important times for connecting with and reflecting on ancestry, origins, custom and tradition, but their importance lies not so much in ritual observance or cringeing Christmas habits as it lies in shared feeling and togetherness. It’s a time of social love and mutual support. The past is not important in itself, except inasmuch as it has some relevance to the present as a stabilising though not as a constraining factor.
There’s something wonderful about Christmas – the gathering of clans, the giving of gifts and the feasting. But for much of human history there has been a different context to these: today, in affluent societies, the feasting isn’t really necessary or good for us, and we already mostly have what we need so gifts have acquired hyper-consumption undertones, and while the gathering of families and friends can be wonderful, it can also be mixed in atmosphere, landing up with the TV, alcohol and niggly narrow-mindedness controlling the occasion.
Over the years I’ve found that, before Christmas, I get a slightly humbug, silent-to-disapproving response from many people when I tell them I’m not interested in it. Then after Christmas I’m told I’m lucky, or even envied. Most strange. We live in a very schizoid world. Some years, such as this year, with the devastation of Gaza, or back in 2004 with the Tsunami, the contradictions get quite stark, with people hungry in one place and over-filled in another, and both having a hard time over it. Sorry, but this doesn’t strike me as a good way to design the world of the future.
Anyway, that’s just me – though perhaps I’m articulating something for a few others too. Plenty of people are alone or lonely at Christmas. I am happy for those who are happy celebrating Christmas – it’s good for society to do things like this. And also I think about people who are unhappy about it, either because they’re left out or because they feel obliged to play along with something they don’t really feel right about. Perhaps Christmas needs a redesign to fit the reality of our current time. Less of the consumption, profiteering and excess, and more of the human aspect of things – the peace and the goodwill.
The Church of the Nativity (on the site of an Apollo temple and a Canaanite Goddess temple)
This is important. On the run-up to Christmas, one issue that has been bugging me is that I’m getting too many requests for help from people in many places and situations around the world, and it’s getting to be too much. Human need on Planet Earth is rising. My own sense of peace and goodwill has been under test. I’m currently working on three missions and I have the capacity for one. I’m having to remind people not to depend too much on me, because one day they won’t get an answer – I’ll be incapacitated or dead. I can’t find people to take on these people and their needs for help, all of which are genuine and legitimate. So that presents a problem. They need to get sorted out and back on their feet, and it’s good for us, for our souls, to take on karma-yogic responsibilities such as these. Well, that’s what I have found, at least.
So I’ve been experiencing compassion fatigue. Too many people asking for help. I have to remind them I am not a public-service help agency – I’m an old crock running on three cylinders. This fatigue has been accentuated by a need to re-focus on my own life – after all, living with cancer is a wee bit challenging – and on keeping my own head above water. If I don’t do this, I might well have a shorter life, meaning that I won’t be here any more for these people to contact. But then, to be ruthlessly honest, perhaps I need them as much as they need me.
But then, after I pop my clogs I’ll be Upstairs, accessible at least to those who attune their inner devices sufficiently and sign in to the dialogue. It’s certainly possible for me to tap on the top of people’s heads, or to walk into one of their dreams but, even then, it’s a toss-up whether they will notice or respond.
If you see things from the viewpoint of the ancestors, it’s difficult for them when the majority of people disregard them, or think of them as fantasy, as imaginary or even hauntingly disturbing. Or people shut off their receptivity by ‘just’ having another drink, or rushing off to spend money in shopping malls and bowling alleys, or arguing with each other over unresolved issues or trivialities. It can be frustrating being an ancestor in modern times, especially if there’s some wisdom to impart during moments of Christmastide reflection. Wisdoms such as…
Sometimes the young are wiser than the old. Sometimes adversity is really helpful. Or no matter how close you get to someone, there can still be light-years between you. Or that many hands make light work. Or that you can have the world’s greatest army but you still don’t win your wars. Or that the people who are regarded as winners are often very alone, even when they’re popular.
So I spent Christmas Day with a friend I met in 2022 who seems like an old friend already – Brian Abbot from Devon (he of the Invisible Opera Company of Tibet). Two aged hippies having a deep dialogue over all that has changed and all that has not changed, in our own lives, in the wider world and in the cosmos. One an author and the other a musician, both of us having started on our spirit-paths by consorting with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, in her blotter and microdot format, fiftysomething years ago in another millennium. He cooked a nut roast.
That was our Christmas. The wind blew, the rain came down, the woodstove burned bright with aromatic birchwood, and no animals died to feed us with Christmas dinner. All was well down’ere in West Penwith, at the end of the world – well, the end of the small British part of our world. And the Atlantic rollers crashed against the rocks on the coast with not a single care for human beliefs such as Christmas. As for Jesus, he was in Khan Younis, not Bethlehem, busy ministering to people in need. Good on him – we need a few more people like him around.
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.
Pendower Cove, Land’s End
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.
Dolphins playing in Nanjizal Bay
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.
Godrevy Head, East Penwith, Cornwall
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.
Gurnard’s Head, West Penwith
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’.
Treviscoe, West Penwith
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’.
I’ve always been an optimist, deep down inside – a Jupiter in Pisces type. I’ve felt this underlying optimism ever since I was young – not rigidly, but because I keep coming back to it after periodic times of despair over the state of the world, to which, for my growth, I’ve been karmically tied all my adult life. It’s over fifty years since John Lennon sang, outrageously at the time, that we should give peace a chance. I cannot say there has been a lot of visible progress.
However, underneath, something has changed. Many of the ideals of 50-60 years ago are in fits and starts becoming pragmatic policy strategies, and the balance of opinion at street and village level across the world has over the years quietly tilted against war. The strength and clarity of this consensus is yet to be tested, but hints of it are visible in world opinion over Gaza. We’re approaching that test.
Hair-raising world situations and crises have a way of arousing public feeling to a sufficient extent that a mountain of inertia, of helpless addiction to conflict, could actually start moving before long. Ukraine and Gaza have jogged us that way and there’s further to go. Trouble is, a consensus often takes shape in the background while vested interests act more quickly. This formula worked when Pluto was in Capricorn, from 2008 until now, but things are changing. With Pluto in Aquarius, we’re likely to have situations arising where vested interests find themselves encircled.
Polarisation, demonisation and dehumanisation are pre-requisites for conflict, and here the media and social media play an outsize role. If we truly believe in peace, then these three issues need tackling inside ourselves.
The information war is now as important as the military war. Since social media appeared, Palestinians have had more of a level playing-field. In the last conflict, young Gazans won the info-war on points, and this is one reason why Gazan phone networks are disabled now. Israel meanwhile fails to realise that, apart from military overkill, its determined, uncompromising certainty in pursuing its cause undermines it in the eyes of much of the world.
We’re getting too accustomed to witnessing blood sacrifices. We live in a thoroughly amoral world system and, collectively, by omission, we have failed to stop them happening. The system is rigged in such a way that, though we might choose peace, justice and ecological priorities, we undermine them simply by shopping at supermarkets, driving cars and using phones and computers.
I keep repeating Edmund Burke’s 250 year old quote: “For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing“. It’s true.
So we get the cruel destruction of people, cities and landscapes in ‘theatres’ such as Syria, Ukraine and Gaza – hellish nightmares that everyone hoped we’d left behind long ago. We’ll get more of this unless there’s a fundamental change. Such a change might start happening in the second half of this decade.[1] But, as with many of the world’s key issues, it won’t just happen. It has to be pushed, firmly and consistently.
It’s important that this pressure for change doesn’t become a new social conflict, a new cause for social and political polarisation. Battling over it will lead to delays and complications we can’t afford. The movement for peace needs to avoid adopting the methods of war and confrontation: success comes through building a rising tide of solidarity, consensus and cooperation. It needs longterm commitment and mass momentum, and if it is to succeed, the people of Earth need to get behind the project of saving our world. Global peacebuilding is a key part of that.
In relation to the current conflict in Is-Pal, taking sides is understandable, yet it is part of the problem. The problem arises from polarisation itself, not from the perceived goodness or badness of either side. What is under-reported here is an indistinct but nevertheless a majority global consensus tilting against war and devastation, by anyone, against anyone and for whatever reason.
The destruction we’ve seen in Gaza, Mariupol (Ukraine) and Kobani (Syria) in recent years have nudged this sleepy consensus along. Humane empathy is bubbling up in collective consciousness, especially amongst the young, the power-holders of future decades. But is it strong enough to overcome the resigned belief that conflicts are an unavoidable yet necessary evil?
Behind this lies a bigger problem. Governments of all kinds are out of step with their people. Defence and international relations, even in democracies, are managed by godfathers who decide the ‘national interest’ on our behalf. So, in future, matters of war and peace boil down to a bigger question: who decides?
Majorities in the Global South and also the Global North are proving to be pro-people in attitude. Current wars have taken on a people-against-the-Megamachine optic: we see high-tech war machines ranged against crowds and communities of people, mowing them down. With Pluto entering Aquarius for the next 15 years, this meme is strengthening – we’re watching it happen in Gaza.
Here’s an astrologer’s warning. From 2025-6 until 2038 Neptune is in Aries, an awkward period in which we’ll be faced with a key cause of war: big guys and strongmen who take it upon themselves to determine our future, often at the expense of majorities.
In Sudan we see a country being wrecked by two competing military leaders and their oligarchies. In Ukraine we see two very different kinds of strongman ranged against one another – Putin and Zelensky. In Israel we see a remarkably cynical prime minister taking on the whole world, convinced of his own rightness. In Gaza, Hamas is a resistance movement which, though it has its prominent leaders, is more horizontal than a hierarchy – more like a cooperative and rather like the Jewish terror organisations of the 1940s, Haganah, Lehi and Irgun.
Hamas will never remove the state of Israel, and they know it (they aren’t fools): Israel is here to stay. So are the Palestinians – here to stay. Israel will not eliminate Hamas because, even if it kills most of the current Hamas leadership, its actions generate new supporters and fighters willing to continue, whatever the cost, now and in twenty years’ time. That is, unless something big changes to make Palestinian lives better.
Big leaders and strongmen… Like that of war, this question has been allowed to drift because we were all too busy doing other things. This is one of the big challenges we must face globally if we are to avoid becoming a failed planet. However, here’s some good news: in the late 2020s and the 2030s we’re likely also to see a new crop of benign, altruistic leaders – of whom there have been too few in recent times. We could also see leaders who look as if they have solutions but they don’t, and visionary leaders with good solutions and a good way of asking people to face the music and grasp the nettle.
Palestinians are in a terrible mess. They have a strange mixture of social unity and political disunity, and they’re at a diplomatic disadvantage, poorly represented. ‘Palestine’s Mandela’, Marwan Barghouti, has sat in Israel jail for twenty years. The future of Gaza is now likely to be decided by outsiders. One sad fact here (many will disagree) is that the future governance of Gaza is best left in the hands of Hamas. The Palestine Authority, Israelis or international bodies are unlikely to get things right since they will simply perpetuate Palestinians’ position as dissatisfied victims.
Israelis have got themselves into a thorough mess too. They have landed themselves in a war on five fronts – against Gazans, West Bank Palestinians, Arab Jerusalemites, Arab Israelis and Hezbollah in Lebanon. They have an enormous domestic disagreement over the future direction of their country, which risks civil war or a separation of the country into an Israel and a Judea. Peace-oriented Israelis are having a hard time right now.[2]
By destroying Gaza Israel has raised a big question: who will pay the necessary mega-billions for its reconstruction? If there’s a risk of further destruction, governments, NGOs and investors will have little interest in an insecure investment that won’t pay off. Construction contracts will be valuable to Israeli companies, and plenty of cheap labour is available, but since Israel’s economy is tanking it will rely on foreign investment, during a time when the international community has plenty of bills to pay. It makes Israel accountable – it must promise to avoid destroying Gaza again.
And where and how will Gazans survive and get a decent life? A strong minority in Israel wants Palestinians simply to disappear – to Egypt, Jordan or anywhere – and this has been a hidden agenda for some interests in Israel since the late 1940s. But if this were possible, it would already have happened. Palestinians are good at standing their ground, whatever Israelis and the world throw at them.
Even if all Palestinians obligingly left, Israel would not be safe and secure – it would still be at war with itself, it would have unhappy neighbours and a further two million unhappy Palestinian refugees staring at it, and it would be internationally isolated (since USA is a fitful partner). Meanwhile the world is tired of holding its nose, paying Israel’s bills and accepting Palestinian refugees. Seen from outside, peace and security for Israelis have been destroyed by Israel’s own actions.
For Israel to feel safe and secure it must play its part in creating the right conditions. Palestinians need a decent life where they can be happy, make progress, do well, feel free and feel safe. The threat to Israel will then diminish – not without problems and crunch-points, but in the course of a generation of calming, it will happen.
This conflict exposes a key global issue we consistently fail to address. Who decides things at the global level? Gaza has now gone global. Perhaps this was Hamas’ hidden strategic aim: to put the cat amongst the pigeons internationally. It has exposed Israeli dependency on support and cover from abroad, and it has dragged neighbouring countries and the UN system into the debate over the future of Gaza. In effect it has made Israel lose its control of Gaza and even of itself. Confusing self-defence with revenge, Israel has alienated the world, lost its Middle Eastern neighbours’ trust and come under USA’s thumb. Even though Hamas’ strategy and actions are highly questionable, Israel has outclassed it in the badness stakes.
Who decides? This is a big, awkward international problem. Our haphazard, under-powered system of international decision-making is inadequate. The UN, the only international body we have for dealing with global affairs, is hamstrung by its incapacity to act independently. There is a growing need, though no capacity, for international bodies to overrule the decisions and actions of individual countries if they harm the wider world.
This is a minefield, but it’s a question we must sort out in coming decades. Gaza has become a nexus-point in a bigger argument between the Global South and North. However much Hamas intended it, this is what it has achieved.
The solution doesn’t lie in the past, in differing historic narratives and arguments about who did what, who suffers more and what God thinks about land-distribution. It lies in the future, and on the capacity of two peoples to live together sharing the same small space. Actually, we aren’t talking about two peoples, but more like seven or eight. Conflicts like this hold back the rest of the world and, if the world is to progress, disagreements must in future be resolved by means other than war.
The Middle East, the historic crossing-place of Eurasia, is filled with multiple ethnic groups, all with a history. For millennia it has been ruled by single systems – empires – where ethnic groups lived alongside each other in neighbouring villages and city quarters, each having quite distinct identities, laws and customs, without dividing the region into the separate territorial nations we have now. Today’s countries, introduced by the British and French around 1920, have had multiple nightmares ever since. As the hydrocarbon age ends, if it is sensible the Middle East will pull together, led probably by the Gulf States, and conflicts will tend to dwindle because its natural state is to be united in one multicultural system where everyone has rights and no one is excluded.
For that to happen, peace in Is-Pal must come first – it’s critical. It’s also difficult, after the damage that has been done. Peace is at root a consensual, emotional, people-scale thing, not just a diplomatic, business solution. It requires forgiveness, trust-building and a calming period of at least a generation. Hatchets must be buried. Lives reconstructed. Justice restored. Pain dealt with in another way. People need the space and calm to experience the advantages of peaceful coexistence.
It’s the same with the wider world: everyone needs to get a clear feeling that, whatever the costs and disruptions of change, change is better than non-change. In all departments of life. It won’t be easy, but it’s easier than the alternative.
Israel and Palestine act as a microcosm of the world. When peace comes to this small, benighted and strangely holy land, it will be because the world is itself coming to peace. The Is-Pal conflict is a key conflict, locally and worldwide, acting as a focus-point for a much-needed process of global peacebuilding. Without global peace we are unlikely to survive – Earth will become like Gaza.
Even so, I’m still an optimist. Optimism might be a sad pathology, but don’t bank on it. Just because things are bad and disillusionment is rife, this doesn’t mean this sad state of affairs will continue forever. Bizarrely – and this is a tragic point – the worse it gets, the more likely we might be to make fundamental changes. Perhaps this is the hidden psychology of the Israelis and Palestinians: unconsciously both sides feel out of control, driven by deep feelings and a kind of self-destructive despair, crying out for help and support.
Also, this is a gift they are giving the world, highlighting our helplessness in dealing with conflict and its causes. The extent of the current tragedy takes Israelis and Palestinians close to a brink, an epiphany point. People on both sides need somehow to realise that their existing strategies aren’t working.
So my prayer is that current momentous events in and around Gaza become a catalyst, a turning point, a tidal shift, both in Is-Pal and globally. A turnaround that seeds conditions in which a more lasting, true peace may come. Not just a ceasefire but a comprehensive solution. Actually it’s about justice, a correction of extreme imbalances, which will lay the foundations for peaceful coexistence. It is possible to do this by mid-century. It falls on a younger generation to do it since, sadly, my generation hasn’t succeeded. And they will succeed, since war is now obsolete as a way of settling our differences, and we need simply to accept that.
With love, Palden
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My next blog will be on more personal matters. Also, I’ve been quiet because I’ve been assembling a book for cancer patients and their helpers, drawn from my blog over the last four years. Thanks to those of you who have encouraged me to do this. Called Bones, it’ll be ready in due course (in Cornwall we say ‘dreckly’) as a free online PDF and possibly later as an audiobook. It’s in consultation stage at present with two special soul-sisters, Sian and Faith (thank you), and awaiting a final editorial trawl. Definitely dreckly.
I’ve written a trilogy of books about Palestine – the West Bank. I wrote them in 2009-2012 and not much has changed since then except people getting older. I feared the books would go out of date but they haven’t, really, apart from details. One is available in print and all are available free as online PDFs. www.palden.co.uk/pop/
These are Palestine Authority soldiers, not Israelis
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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