It’s Coming

Though it is a question of ‘What?’

This is not a christmas card. This is Kvikkjokk in the north of Sweden, north of the polar circle, last year. It’s where my daughter Maya lives. It was -30C there last night.

There’s one robin that comes from the thicket above my cabin, and another who lives in the brambles down below the barn.

Problem is, being male robins, and with breeding season coming, they’re doing their territoriality trip – much to the consternation of the tits and the blackie, who also want to get to the feeder just outside my door.

When you spend much of your time alone, issues like this do matter! But it’s a welcome diversion too because, as you might imagine, my thumbs haven’t exactly been twiddling very much recently, and I’ll welcome an off-duty break one day.

It hasn’t snowed here in Penwith, though it went sub-zero and icy in the last few nights. Stuck out in the Atlantic and bathed in water that not too long ago passed Miami Beach, we’ve been about 5 degrees warmer than most of Britain. But then, though Brits love to complain, whatever the weather, up where my daughter Maya lives, north of the polar circle in northern Sweden, it was -30C last night – and the sun won’t rise until mid-January. Welcome to Planet Earth, dear friends – this is what you get on this world, and this is what you chose when you decided to come here.

I get cold feet. I’ve got this weird thing called Peripheral Neuropathy – a side-effect of chemo drugs where your nerve-endings die off. So I can feel the inner feelings in my feet but not the outer ones – and I never knew there was a difference until the Good Lord (or whoever) gave me cancer. This also means I don’t feel the cold in my feet very much – which goes to show how, in life, you win some and you lose some, and that’s the deal. I still have warm double socks on though.

An Indonesian Christian rock band in Bethlehem

One of the narratives of my life has been about dealing with paradox. My mother did love and care for me but she didn’t have the time and presence to mother me in the way I needed – that kind of thing. But that’s alright: it gave me some mother patterns to work with. Or this: my Tibetan name means ‘radiant merit’, my Arabic name ‘servant of the light’ and my Brahmin name is god of the sun, but there’s a shady side to me too, who gets involved in gritty, underworldy, heavy stuff. I’ve been exposing this side of me in the last month, with the strange thriller I’ve found myself in.

It goes to show, I’m not a holyholy meditation teacher at all, but a lawbreaking aged hippy charlatan who does nasty things, corrupts dishy young ladies, leads people astray and ought to be locked up forthwith – a danger to civilised society. Be warned.

I’ve been breaking the law recently, paying bribes. In West Africa, if you don’t pay enablement payments, nothing gets done. However, as my late senior barrister friend Keith used to say, in his endearingly bombastic Leo kind of way, “I, dear boy, am a purveyor of the Law of Man, but you, sir, are a purveyor of the Law of God”. Well, that’s a bit over the top, but there’s truth in it too, and sometimes divine will does need to prevail, whatever anyone thinks. So I’ve paid some bribes because, actually, it’s usually just to pay the guy’s phone bill or taxi fare so that he can do what you’re asking for and perhaps take a few bob home to his missus.

Well, if they want to arrest me for that, I’m over here. It’s a professional expense, and not the least of the sins I’ve committed. I’ve been a traitor, consorted with terrorists, smuggled tofu though Israeli checkpoints (they think it’s Semtex), taken on false guises and a few other things I’d better not mention.

But on the other hand, bad as I am, my life-saving stats measure well against any doctor or paramedic, and I’ve had the pleasure of uplifting thousands of people, and many of the bad things I once did, or decidedly didn’t do, are now, a few decades later, strangely approved of. It took a while. Some people think I’m brave, though my rather naive Aspie response is simply, ‘But why is that unusual?’.

Manger Square, Bethlehem, full of people

I have another weird Aspie thing too. I have an aversion to Christmas. I don’t do it. I’ve always felt unhappy feeling obligated to be happy and congenial when, at the time, I’m feeling contemplative and quiet. So I have a no-compromise approach that, before Xmas, is frowned on and, after Xmas, is envied.

On Xmas Day, if the weather allows, I’ll be out on the moors or the cliffs with a flask and a pie, attending to the top of my head and a few related matters, and if the weather is bad I’ll be huddled round the woodstove, propped in my chair or inner journeying in bed, busy not drinking sherry. Unless I find another person who would delight in an utter non-Xmas with me, I’ll be on my own, and that’ll be alright. You might wonder why.

Well, it’s a time for wrapping up the past and looking toward the future, and I have rather a lot of both at present. That’s solstice, the turning of a tide.

But it’s also a time when, rarely, the Christian and Westernised elements in the world suddenly get excited about peace and goodwill for a day or two. This is really good. My only reservation is that it suddenly ends around lunchtime on Xmas Day, when everyone starts blotting themselves out with food and booze, only to regret it afterwards.

Manger Square, Bethlehem, Palestine, at Christmas

Nevertheless, as a guerrilla planet-fixer with an esoteric style, I find it’s worth scooping up some of this goodwill for good use. After all, there are at least a billion people on Earth who really need some peace and goodwill to be shoved their way right now. If not, truth be told, the whole eight billion of us.

So I spend my solstice-to-Xmas doing consciousness work. It’s secret – don’t tell anyone. It’s a good time for doing some gentle infiltration of the collective psyche, to strengthen that thought: goodwill. If you’re on your own this Christmas, then, wherever you are, stick up your antennae and see whether you can find me in that ‘reality-field’ and come join me. Try 11am and 2pm GMT, Xmas Day.

I’m always there on Sunday evenings at 7pm GMT too, for half an hour.

Ten years ago I was in Bethlehem at Christmas. The slightly sad thing is that Christian numbers for the Christmas Pilgrimage are much diminished nowadays, so Muslims make up the numbers – Palestinians do appreciate Bethlehem’s global name-recognition in such a forgotten land, and Jesus is also one of the prophets of Islam.

The Catholic Xmas is a bit like ours in NW Europe, with a lot of the jingle-jangle, and big concerts in Manger Square with Christian singers and bands from Germany, Indonesia and Nigeria, and a few Papal delegates thrown in. And why on earth do they import Father Christmas to Bethlehem, already replete with Christ Mass primacy, when most Palestinians have no idea where Estonia is or what slieghbells are?

Then comes the Orthodox Xmas, which is a bit more sedate, very ornate and quite delightful to a jaded old heathen like me. The chanting is done with deep faith and mystique, and the archangels and cherubim really do seem to hover around.

Then in mid-January comes the Armenian Xmas, which actually, if I were Christian, is the kind of Christmas I’d prefer – ruminative and richly calm. Either way, they’re all resplendent with candles, incense, chant and reverence – that’s very different to the mosques, where there’s nearly no ceremony or pizazz, just quiet prayer. They both have their virtues, but give me an ocean clifftop or a desert outcrop anyday, and I’ll be happy.

It looks like I’ll still be on duty over Christmas, monitoring the West Africa situation daily. Here’s the latest news from there.

Phyllis, now three, some time ago

Phyllis, the child, is happy and in good shape. She underwent an amazing turnaround last week, going from fever and coughing blood to wanting an ice cream in two days flat. I think you lot, with your prayers, played a key part in that. She is now staying with Dr Isaac and his family. Phyllis seems to be a great kid, easy to have around, and everyone loves her. I’m so happy about that. She’s special, that one.

Felicia… well, she’s improving, but we hit a setback two days ago. She has been reviving, and three days ago we moved her out of hospital into accommodation near the doctor and his wife. She was awake and becoming able to function, but she fell over, and it was bad. She needed two blood transfusions, a drip and medication. I’ve managed to finance that. So, it’s tenuous with her at present.

Those of you who have been giving your prayers, healing and positive thoughts to Felicia… may I ask for another round? Please hold her and raise her up. She has brain injuries from the ‘accident’ two weeks ago (they were rammed, actually). We think she’ll be alright, and she’s in good care, though she isn’t out of danger yet.

I want to put in a word for Dr Isaac and his partner Millicent and their children. They have taken in Felicia and Phyllis. They live simply and have their own family concerns, but they care a lot, and they’re definitely not in it for the money.

One of the greatest benefits I’ve had from my humanitarian work has been meeting simple, good-hearted folk like these who are the real saviours of our planet. They just get on with it and hold the world up. They do so much of the mopping up of the world’s mess.

Here’s Dr Isaac

The people I’m involved with in West Africa, and also my handler with the fraud investigation company, are all good and remarkable people. In this business, you develop ways of finding out who you can and cannot trust, and everyone depends on each other, and there’s a certain implicit code of behaviour, and you bond closely with people you encounter when sharing intense situations with them.

The Syrian Orthodox church, Bethlehem, Palestine

In something like this, to use an old sexist term, it sorts out the men from the boys. The people who hang with you through thick and thin are often amazing people. Dr Isaac is like that. He lost his job for us (though I think he’ll get it back). He risked his and his family’s lives. He’s gone several extra miles. He’s a man of faith and a good doctor who deserves more than a one-room home for his family.

I’ve met many remarkable people, and he ranks high, a true server, a doctor of whom Hippocrates would be proud. We’ve known each other for three rather long weeks. God bless you, Isaac. People like you convince me that this world will survive. My daughters, son and grandchildren do that too.

I guess I’m a sucker for crisis situations because it brings out the best in many people, and I like working with them, and it brings out the best in me. I’m not good at normality, you see. I’ve always felt I’m there to help the helpers, the social healers and the frontline people, and it’s an area of deep late-life satisfaction now.

Here’s the Mosque of Omar on the other side of the square. Sensibly, when they invaded, the Muslims under Caliph Omar didn’t take over and convert the church. Bethlehem has had very good Christian-Muslim relations throughout history. I wonder why?

As an independent ‘freelance humanitarian’, for want of a better term, I’ve held to certain principles I feel are important such as: ‘don’t give a person a fish, but teach them how to fish’, and ‘teach a man and you teach a man, but teach a woman and you teach a generation’. There’s even William Blake’s statement: ‘the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ – and war is excess to human need, in my judgement.

I feel also that, as an educated, white, male, privileged Brit whose ancestors built the empire and kept it going, and living through its downfall and seeing its very mixed outcomes, I have a bit of an urge to complete the job. I’m not a great believer in reparations, guilt or sorrow – I just like to get in there and do something to help people have a better life and rise to their full potential. To the extent I can.

People have asked who or what I work with. To my surprise, at present it’s for a big bank – though that’s not my style. One of my PodTalks, The Only Planet of Choosing, gives clues. I’ve worked with all sorts of people, but the bottom line for me is their humanity, and progressing humanity’s evolution. My focus has been community-building, conflicts and crises, and helping social leaders stay on the rails.

You have to have your wits about you. This is strange because, as an Aspie, I can be at times apparently naively open but it’s not exactly that – it’s because I sense people’s hidden motives and agendas, and I often get delayed-action clarity on what’s really happening. So I look blank for a while. Then it all comes. So I’m best working with others, inputting what I’m good at. Such as total attention, hyper-focus. When I’m on form, I’m brilliant, and when I’m not, I’m best back here in Cornwall, out of everyone’s way.

Which is where I am now, on the farm, and it’s a dark and rainy pre-solstice night, and the owls and crows are all tucked under their wings down in the woods and hiding from the feather-ruffly wind. Wherever you are, may all be well with you.

Don’t worry too much about your circumstances, even if they’re tough at present – look at your attitude, and be innovative. Find simple ways to be happy. We all get inner friction and pain, but these are things we can reduce, even if we can’t reduce the adversity. That’s what’ll get us all through.

Well, that’s what I try to learn, anyway.

With love from me, Palden.

Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
PodTalk | The Only Planet of Choosing (1h 13m):

The Church of the Nativity began as a goddess temple (hence the Virgin Mary came here), then a Greek Apollo temple, and only then did it become a Christian Church. The front entrance is really low and you have to duck to go through – this is to force Crusaders to dismount and it stopped their hunky stallions from entering the church. But the Israelis just roll bombs in. Interestingly, in Bethlehem, I don’t get a feeling of Jesus – it’s Mother Mary’s or Mariam’s town, and the matriarchs there definitely let you know it

Born Again

a pod from the far beyond

This is dedicated to my old friends Jaki Whitren and John Cartwight – they eloped upstairs together a few years ago. They’re the greatest rock band you never heard of, big in Glastonbury in the 1980s-90s.

And this podcast isn’t what you might at first think it’s about… this is about reincarnation.

Introduced and outroduced by the Massed Corvid Choir of Lower Grumbla, Cornwall – crows and jackdaws that live in the woods below  the farm. At dawn they get worked up and suddenly they all take flight, hundreds of them, and they settle on the roof of the farm. You can hear them arriving and landing just  before the music starts.

So this is about reincarnation, and the many lives we live in  this life. For me, towards the end of my current life (I’m currently 72, with cancer) this takes on a special significance, since I know in my bones, and always have, that it doesn’t just go blank and dark when you die. It doesn’t end there. You carry on  – but without a body or a slot in Planet Earth’s rather bumpy reality.

And when  you get born, you aren’t a blank sheet – you come with character, proclivities and tendencies already there, brought with you from before.

Oh, and, for your interest, this is Paldywan on steroids. Yes, literally. I had my cancer treatment today (Weds 7th Dec), and part of it is a steroid called Dex, or Dexamethasone. After my treatment, as you might imagine, I’m buzzing. This time I thought I’d do a podcast to harness the buzzing.

The steroids tend to loosen my vocal chords, so if you’re one of those who likes my voice, this is a good one! But I’m a little slurred too, in places, not entirely in my body.

With love from West Penwith in Cornwall – a rather magic place. Thanks for listening. There’s more to come.  35 mins.

With love from Cornwall, Paldywan

Listen | Born Again

or go to my website, here

Cancer Tales

and that hidden Factor X

St Michael’s Mount from Cudden Point, with Penzance behind

I had my three-monthly phone chat with Liz the haematologist today. I have a blood cancer, Myeloma or bone marrow cancer, so the specialist who’s running me is a haematologist, a blood expert.

I seem to be doing well. The critical measure of myeloma is paraproteins, and they are found with a blood test done by the nurse who comes round monthly to administer my cancer drugs. My paraproteins have been on 5 since March, and Liz is happy with that. In early 2021 I got down to 2, but my illness of late 2021 and early 2022 took it up to 5 and it has stayed there. I can’t remember what it was when I was diagnosed three years ago, but it was in the hundreds or the thousands. I wasn’t far from popping my clogs.

But I got a reprieve. Well, you never get rid of myeloma – you just keep it within safe bounds. But the chemo worked – they had planned up to eight cycles of treatment and I was complete in five. As a blood cancer with the effect of hollowing your bones and making them eventually break and collapse, there are no tumours to be removed – though I have had Zolodronic Acid to strengthen my bones and stop their deterioration. I seem to be doing well, staying within safe bounds.

She also asked me about my covid and flu jabs. I told her I had had none and wasn’t interested – I hadn’t had covid and I tend not to get flu, and I have my ways of keeping my immunity high. “I won’t ask you about those, Mr Jenkins. I’m sure you know what you’re doing, and you seem to get good results, so just carry on”. She has got to know me by now.

I’m not ideological about medicine and healing. When I started on this journey three years ago I plumped for following my intuitions in all medical decisions, finding some sort of balance between allopathic and holistic methods, and trusting in the capacity of my bodymind to modulate things so that side-effects and harm are minimised. So I don’t have the jabs because intuitively I feel they aren’t a net gain or needed, in my case, and that is my choice. Not because of politics or conspiratorial suspicions. Just following my intuition.

In front, Cudden Point, behind, St Michael’s Mount, with the hills of Penwith in the distance

There’s a hidden Factor X too: inner doctors. I’m mentioning this because, if you have a serious illness, you might try this. Go into yourself and ask for help, for the attention of a set of inner doctors/healers. Your soul and your inner teacher will help with this. Train yourself to let them in – to open yourself up, give permission to be examined, follow the process, point out areas and issues that concern you, and allow them to do things. Let them look inside you, including at your psychology, your fears, concerns and guilty bits. You might or might not experience being showered with light, or infused with rays or instruments of light, or ‘etheric wires and rods’ are inserted, or you might feel warmth or colour in parts of you – be open to whatever happens, even if it is simply a feeling of relaxation.

There was one time when I had a worrying appointment the next day – I was anxious about what would happen. I asked my inner doctors for attention. It seemed they ummed and aahhed, but I didn’t get the feeling anything was happening. Oh well. Next day I went to hospital and the staff I met were fantastic, the doctor found an unexpected solution, the treatment was simple and easy and the prognosis was a relief. Ding. My inner doctors had clearly delegated the matter to the outer doctors (one Irish and one from Belarus, with a Nigerian radiologist) and guided their thoughts and hands. It is through this combination of metaphysical and physical medicine and healing that, at least for me, the staying-alive process works best.

I take well-chosen supplements and helpers too. Forget cure-all wonder drugs and regimes, but a selection of helpers, each making a 5% difference, can add up to 40% and make a critical difference. Number one is vitamin C (I take 1.5g per day, quite a lot). Then I take selenium, zinc and a really good multivitamin, colloidal silver in my water, Turkey Tail tincture, blueberry powder, a green algae mix, homegrown beansprouts, tahini and ground up nuts (for oils), probiotics, flower remedies… it goes on. I’m not fanatical about it. But it does make a positive difference to my underlying condition, immunity and cancer.

As do the various treatments I’ve had over time. It’s important to do just one at a time and leave them space to sink in – don’t get neurotic about it. I’ve had homoeopathy, radionics from Canada, chiropractic, naturopathy, e-Lybra machines, herbs, CBD oil, a variant of Alexander Technique, an energy treatment from Czechia that I can’t remember the name of (by a Swedish friend in USA), and crystal healings, laying-on of hands, remote healing, prayers – the only thing missing has been massages. I’ve been fortunate to have good friends and contacts, and I’m grateful for all the healing and support I’ve been given. It does work.

To be honest, although I wouldn’t rate cannabis specifically as a cancer drug, it’s a definite helper – it helps deal with a surfeit of time, a degree of pain, and it encourages a certain creativity, self-enquiry and understanding that itself can be a healer. It can help you change your attitude. (I do meditation and other things too.)

I don’t do all of these tharapies and supplements all of the time. It has rolled incrementally over the last few years. I follow what feels right at the time. When I was on my initial chemo treatment in the four months after diagnosis in late 2019, I had to take between 12 and 35 pills each day – and that drove me off getting neurotic about taking too many pills, supplements and treatments. Why? Because there is one medicine that tops all others.

Looking across Mounts Bay from Halzephron Cliff on the Lizard to Treryn Dinas on the south coast of West Penwith

Happiness. Yes. Happiness. I have really found this definitely to be true. Stay happy and, whatever happens, you’ll be alright, even when life isn’t alright. Go down, and you descend into a loop that’s hard to rise out of again. So, above all things, stay happy. Make that a top-priority rule, not just a hope.

This means a few things. Happiness is about attitude: it doesn’t just happen at you when the circumstances are right – it is created, a decision of the heart. You can either give yourself a hard time over life, or you can make it easier by seeking the silver lining – what’s right about life and what’s being given. It’s also about being happy with whatever life throws at us. Stop moaning – or at least, feel it and then let it go. Just going for a walk in nature can work wonders.

This is not necessarily easy, but the price of not doing so is higher, so it’s worth it. Thank your adversaries, enjoy your illness, appreciate the virtues of being short of money, and enjoy the wind and rain. There’s good to be had from that kind of approach, and when you’re facing the handicap and the uphill grind of longterm illness it becomes a central issue. Above all else, do whatever it takes to get happy and be happy, whatever is going on in life.

If it lifts you up, do it, and if it weighs you down, don’t. This statement is much more of a practical proposition than you would think.

In the last year I’ve had quite a bit of adversity, pain, sorrow and challenges. I’m certainly not happy all the time, and at times I’ve been grinding my stuff, suffering over things and falling into states I’d prefer not to be in. This isn’t about pretending to be happy, like Christmas, or escapism, or taking a hyper-positive attitude that seeks to override real life.

Carn Du at Lamorna, with the Lizard behind

It’s about returning. Returning to centre. To a place inside us where things are alright. Remembering to pull ourselves out of our morasses and scrapes, to see things from a wider perspective. The world isn’t ending. Change is constant. There’s joy and relief in truth. And pain and joy are contrasting poles of the same spectrum.

It’s a matter of coming back and habituating ourselves to doing so. Coming back to ourselves, to something bigger, wider, deeper and more enduring than our own little lives. The more we make a habit of this, the more it works, and after a time we start doing it more automatically. Sometimes, if I’m in a mood or a state, I give myself an hour to be angry, grouchy, down, fucked off and had enough, and then I drop it and come back to look at it from the other side.

In the last year, I’ve gone through a lot of pain over the loss of my partner. At times I got really lost in it – though it truth, in the end it was good, actually, as a way of grinding through the feelings to come out the other side. I started coming through and realising what a gift she had given me – a gift of pain that opened me up and kept me bleeding (metaphorically), which in itself has been a great gift. I cried and wobbled for months. It helped me dig out deep truths about my mother and my experiences as a young, estranged Aspie, in the early 1950s when I was 3-5 years old, and wondering why I was here, what this place was and who these people were.

So, bizarrely, that gift of pain was a gift of love. She reached parts others haven’t reached. And the present and future have now taken over from rueing the past. I’m not quite finished yet but I’ve come a long way. I feel it was the last really close relationship of my life, and from now on I’ll do things differently. For a modern woman, it’s not fair taking on an awkward customer and partially-disabled cancer patient like me – it’s too much to ask. So I must spread it around so that it’s more fun and less of a burden for anyone. I’m not talking about sex here, but about the various virtues of relationship that, in my current state, I miss. I’m managing, but I’m not doing that well as a single man with cancer.

Such as someone to talk to, who knows me well and accepts me as I am, and acts as a ‘second brain’. And I need three occasional minders, for adventures and trips, so that it doesn’t weigh too heavily on any one of them. I need different things with different people, since my intention for the rest of my days is to be more public, more open to larger numbers of, well… you lot. I’m a hermit too, but that part of me gets well serviced down’ere on the farm in Cornwall. Even though I’m quite a loving soul, it’s tricky for a woman to be close to a hermit who spends long hours and days writing books rather than paying attention to servicing loving relationships or stopping work when dinner is ready.

St Michael’s Mount from Penzance harbour

So I’m making a change. With only a few years left, everything has come into a different focus. I can’t wait around or let things drift in the way that I once did, when death seemed much further away. This is last chance saloon, and if I don’t do it now or soon, I’m not going to do it. Quite a few things have to be accepted as non-doable or non-repairable. Some are a relief, and some are painful. But the issue here is that it’s better to process things through in life, because when I get to death, there’s quite a lot else to pay attention too – such as moving forward – and a load of encumbrances from the past is not very helpful.

I’ve been finding that life has been accelerating that last-chance clearance process. In the recent six months, my health has been stable and I feel better now than I have felt since contracting cancer. So my primary focus on handling cancer and its effects has reduced, and now I have the rest of life to deal with. What has come up instead has been a lot of social and human issues. My brains and psyche have changed as a result of cancer, chemo, ageing and a few big Neptune transits, and I’m experiencing things very differently now.

Many physical capabilities, including car driving and easy mobility, are gone. I get through life at half the speed I used to, and my capacity to multi-task, remember details, remember names and figure out problems is reduced. Getting through each day is much more difficult than before, though I’m more adapted to it now and I accept it. I’ve simplified things to a degree where I can function more easily. I do a lot of writing, podcasting and online stuff, which I’m good at – if I had been a farmer or engineer needing physical mobility, with my kind of cancer, I’d have been in much deeper doodoo than I am.

It’s almost as if this particular kind of cancer was tailor-made for me. The specific trials and tribulations it has brought – a recent one is that my left arm is slowly going numb and tingly – have offered me a focus and challenge that seems karmically right for me. I’m glad I contracted cancer at this stage of life though, in my seventies, and not earlier. I’ve done enough in life to be kinda satisfied enough with it – though I do have some reservations and regrets. But in another way it has opened up a new phase of life. By cutting down my life-possibilities, other possibilities have emerged. I’ve been given a gift of time and space – time to ruminate and pay attention to things I didn’t have time for earlier in life. Or a new aspect of them is emerging because I have time and space. This is a privilege.

If someone reacts with ‘sorry’, when I tell them I have cancer, I can’t agree. I don’t advocate getting cancer or other serious ailments but, if they come your way, do your best with them. It’s not just about staying alive, and ‘getting better’ isn’t necessarily what you always need to do. The main thing is to ‘get good’ – whatever that means. Happiness is a key ingredient. Too many old, ill and disabled people are unnecessarily unhappy.

Carn Du, Lamorna, with the Lizard behind

It’s about optimising the soul-opportuinities we have been offered. It’s an opportunity to confront our fear and get to grips with things we have long feared – I had to get over an aversion to having needles stuck in me, or having x-rays. I do have, or have had, a fear of being disabled – and, bingo, I’ve been given half-disablement, specially customised for me. For me, this blood cancer is about my will to live. That’s always been a major life-issue for me too.

It’s also about my will to die. I’ve decided to take charge of my death – whatever that means. Deep in my soul, I’ve clarified and decided that I shall carry on until I don’t want to continue any more. There comes a point where there’s no more point fighting or pushing, and that’s just fine. Up to that point, it is my spirits that keep me alive, and if I keep my spirits up, I’ll be in the right state to handle whatever else comes. The main point here isn’t about staying alive as long as I can. It’s about optimising the experience of my soul, and doing the best things for its progression and for the all-round benefit of everything and everyone. I shall be where it’s most useful to be, and sometimes the opportunities can be greater on the other side.

That’s when I’ll go, and until then, there are a few things to do. Earth is a funny old place, but one thing is true. You don’t get these kinds of experiences anywhere else, so savour them while you can. The toast on Arcturus is just not as good as here, and on Alpha Centauri they’ve never even heard of ice cream or baked beans, let alone maxed-out credit cards or flat tyres. On some worlds you don’t even get the experience of being born – you just create yourself.

Lots of love from me, Palden.

PS: For those of you who have been following my recent adventures, please pray for Phyllis, three, who is struggling. We’ve identified that she has yellow fever, not cholera, and she has something more too. She is being transferred to a herbal hospital where the hope is to build up her immunity. After her experiences of the last month, she is weak. Thank you. Meanwhile her Mum, Felicia, in her thirties, is ticking over but not out of the woods yet.


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

St Michael’s Mount from Caer Bran

World Healing

a new podcast
and an update

The Men an Tol, West Penwith, Cornwall

Here’s a new podcast and also an update on recent developments with the ‘operation’ I reported recently.

The podcast is about World Healing.

It’s a notion that can at times be rather lightly taken, but it’s really important, this. Especially if you feel a need to make a contribution to the world’s future, increasingly shaky as it is becoming.

There are different ways of doing world healing innerwork, and this is what Palden has learned along the way, especially from the Council of Nine, and through gaining experience by running the Hundredth Monkey Camps in the mid-1990s and being part of the Flying Squad thereafter.

There are many applications of this general method of working, in relation to world events as they arise, and particularly to the underlying issues and deep learning experiences that lie beneath and behind them.

This podcast looks into a few of the issues around healing the world. Recorded down in the woods on our farm on Monday 28th November 2022. 30 mins. It’s here:

www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

And then, an update, today, Monday 28th Nov…

The ‘operation’ is kinda progressing, a bit edgy, but getting there. The latest crisis is that child Phyllis, 3, has just contracted cholera. The children’s daycare centre in whose care we left her was not the best (it was urgent, though Phyllis thus avoided the car crash), and we need to bring her and Felicia back together – they need each other.

Phyllis

So we’re going to retrieve Phyllis tonight (it’s a five hour drive each way) so that she’s under the care of the doctor I’m working with, who is a 100% good Christian man, and we’re getting on well. The taxi-driver who saved the lives of Phyllis and the agent, bringing them to hospital, I gave the job of fetching Phyllis – he’s another really good man, and I’m going to try to give him work over time, to reward him for his efforts.

Felicia is conscious and steadying, and agent no 2 is in intensive care under the doctor. Agent no 1 is still in captivity somewhere, though I’m not focused on him much, except holding him psychically (as things calm down, I’ll be able to focus on him a bit more – see if I can get some clues).

New funds are coming thru today or tmrw – that’s a relief. Corporations and their accounts depts can be annoyingly slow when you’re in the middle of a metaphorical gun battle. How is it that Paldywan suddenly finds himself working for a transnational bank? I was supposed to be retired and frittering away practicing independent self-care and watching TV. Or moaning about the government…

Anyway, if you are able, please surround child Phyllis, 3, with love and healing, and we hope she will be back on Tuesday so she can be treated by the doctor. Without really knowing it, with her mum Phyllis has been a heroine. I get a feeling this is a formative experience for a potentially formidable lady, in coming times.

My prayer is that Felicia and Phyllis will emerge from this in a positive way. Under great pressure, Felicia has acted very sanely and effectively, hanging in there through a traumatic time, and I would have no difficulty recommending her to an NGO or similar for a good job.

All is well enough with me: this is challenging but I’m holding up, and there are some occasionally really rewarding moments. I’m not at it all the time – it comes in bursts through the day, but they can be full-on when it happens.

One thing my parents gave me, for which I am eternally grateful, is a gift of diplomacy. I’m not sure where I got patience and perseverance from, but thanks for that anyway! Erk.

Love, Palden

Tregeseal stone circle

Events

And the way they change things

Hello everyone. Where have I been? Well, Paldywan’s back on the holy warpath.

Sounds a bit strange, that, but it has indeed been strange. Mars, customarily the god of war, is to me a god of encounter resolution. Sometimes, life leads us into a fight – but the destruction involved depends a lot on how well we deal with the conflicts within ourselves. A great general in history once said, “Every drop of blood spilt charges its price” – it’s true. So the aim is to achieve the best all-round outcomes with the minimum of damage, but it’s a rollercoaster, the stakes are high and often the full results are slow in coming.

It wasn’t my choosing – I fell into it. I have this strange karmic pattern where I’m standing there, suddenly finding myself in the thick of it and sometimes able to pull off a remarkable solution – or at least, avoid the worst. In this instance I served as a honeypot, unwittingly attracting and exposing a crime ring involved in fraud, kidnapping, drugs and probably anything. By dint of doing the right things in the opening moments, I landed up being the only one who could follow it through – online from my desk, here on the farm.

But then, I wasn’t exactly unwilling. I’ve been feeling frustrated recently, physically unable to complete my humanitarian work, and this kind of stuff is the kind of thing I’m good at. Being rather hyper-focused, I’m calm in crises. “Ah, we have a situation” – some Palestinians used to quote me, trying to imitate my English accent, with a cheeky smile. As an Aspie, while I’m seemingly not very good at close relationships, in other contexts I can get inside the head of a person with a gun and talk them down, if necessary. Well, thus far it has succeeded, though there have indeed been ‘situations’.

I thought I’d left all that behind when cancer came my way three years ago, but the universe had other ideas – a few weeks ago I was requisitioned to play the role of a knight or a bishop in someone else’s chessgame. Again.

It’s an anti-fraud operation, now in a few countries. It’s delicate, changing hourly and daily, and I’m handling part of it. The short story is that, when I was blackmailed a few weeks ago, the first three blackmailers were small-time amateurs trying their luck to make a few bucks (two apologised afterwards), but the fourth was different – it emerged later that he was part of a crime gang, though we didn’t know it at the time. An anti-fraud agent – a really good chap, from Britain – handled the case and eventually had it wrapped up, deleting the fraudsters’ computers. Peace descended. Or so we thought.

Then suddenly, I received cries for help – the gang were coming after him, armed, and he needed to get away, pronto. They captured him, together with a woman, Felicia, who had bravely sheltered him, and her three-year old child, Phyllis. Suddenly, I was their only lifeline… and it went on from there. I managed to connect with his anti-fraud company (they work for banks), and since then I’ve been helping them.

The story went on through all sorts of complexities for twelve rather long days – it was demanding and I had to pace myself. That’s why I haven’t been blogging. After a week I managed to free Felicia and Phyllis, then further complications happened, and following that Felicia and another anti-fraud agent working for the company were attacked while driving in a car. Both have been in hospital at death’s door for some days, though on Wednesday (newmoon) I heard from the doctor that she had regained consciousness – what a relief. Meanwhile, he’s still on life-support. The unfolding situation is still rather hair-raising.

Poor little Phyllis is for now in the caring hands of strangers (I’m fixing arrangements for her), and the original British agent is still in captivity somewhere. Here am I, hidden in the far beyond, coordinating online with doctors, agents, taxi-drivers, handlers and sundry oddbods, fixing money, fixing heads, and with three or four lives at stake. Just a normal day on Earth, haha.

You meet some amazing people. A taxi-driver witnessed the attack, took the two people to hospital, then took them to another hospital and stayed with them for two nights and a day. I have just heard that he has lost his job as a result. What a good man – we’ll help him restore things. The doctor I’ve been dealing with has also been remarkable, though his wife probably doesn’t see him much.

Many people urge me to stay out of this kind of thing. Well, yes, but you’re also asking me to let these people die. That’s an option I don’t spend much time thinking about. In the middle of a crisis like this, you bond quite quickly and deeply with people. The first agent, in our last exchange on Skype before they got him, said he’d like to visit me on the farm one day, and I said, “You’re on, that’s a deal”. We haven’t spoken since, but I’m holding that thought, and I think he, wherever he is, is holding it too.

This hyperfocus business is strange. Another task I needed to do at the time was to reduce the length of my book Shining Land and remove some of the pictures – the removed stuff will go on the website. Bruce in Glastonbury, who is typesetting the book, recommended cuts because book production costs are rising and I want to keep it manageably priced. I’d been putting off this job but, when the above operation started up, happening in bursts throughout each day, I used the betweentimes for re-editing the book. It was a way of staying focused during a testy, turbulent, unsettling fortnight. So the book is now done and sent back to Bruce.

When I was diagnosed with cancer in November 2019 my life changed. Then last winter a crisis took me down deep and, by summer, it bounced me back up again, raked out but sensing there was something in life left to do. I seem now to be in a new chapter. My relative disability, aloneness and isolation, more a problem six months ago than now, mean I have time and space to do things – at least, those things I can nowadays do. Near-death and ‘chemo-brain’ have taken me through a level shift in the way I see and understand things, and while in some respects I’m saying similar stuff to 30-40 years ago, something is coming out between the lines that’s deeper, wider and stronger. Which goes to show, even fearsome things like cancer can have their blessings, if we let things be that way.

Having emerged from my shell during 2022, I’ve been cogitating what to do in 2023. What’s taking shape is this…

First, a number of Magic Circles – covering 21st Century esoterics and living as a stellar soul with an earthly contribution to make. Some will be like the Magic Circles of 2022 and at least one will involve a talking stick circle and energy-work.

Second, an online series of monthly Magic Moments (in the far beyond). These are for friends in other countries, those unable to attend Magic Circles and any Magic Circle attendees who wish to join in. Each month I’ll highlight a bundle of useful knowledge and insights, about the universe, time, the nature of our times, ancient wisdom, parapolitics, psychic geoengineering, inner aid work, healing, rescuing souls and whatever else comes up at the time – that kind of thing.

Each of these events will stand for itself, so you can join whatever you like, whenever you can. They will roll along, each rather different, unfolding as they will. They’ll all be reasonably priced and as accessible as possible. I might do one or two events for fellow cancer and terminal patients, if that is sought. Details will follow in the New Year. If you’re good at organising and have outreach in your area or network, please contact me if you’d like to host an event.

Then, third, while doing the above, I’ll be watching to see if some participants are up for starting a world-healing project with longterm aims, to continue and grow after I’ve gone. This is Version Three of earlier world-healing projects of the 1990s and since (the Hundredth Monkey Project and the Flying Squad born out of it). If and when a workable quorum of people forms, such a project can start.

There are people and bits to fit into place, and it’s an organic group process resting on who turns up and how it develops. I have a packet of seeds to hand over, with a little experience in growing them, but the garden will be evolved by the group itself – my shelf life is limited. In the 2023 Magic Circles, amongst other things we’ll have some tasters of this kind of inner work that will be useful to you whether or not you’re interested in the project. Without wanting to sound grandiose about it, there’s something ‘heaven blest’ about this, and some people might like to work within a reality-field of this kind.

Ultimately it’s all about gradually cranking up group synergy to a level where a group’s healing power is greatly increased – and the world needs it. This takes time, since a group is as strong as its weakest links, and it needs approaching in a somewhat matter-of-fact, steady and diligent way, starting at the beginning and giving it time. The Flying Squad managed 20 years, doing amazing work, though where we didn’t succeed was crossing generations and replacing ourselves with new members – so we ran out of numbers and steam. Third time lucky?

I might have only three or four years left for midwifing this idea: its success rests on the circle of people who step in and work together. The project will be pitched so that it is not too demanding in terms of commitment, because beavering away at this work longterm is more important than creating dramatic firework displays that then fizzle out. The basic commitment involves a meditation, wherever you are, once a week on Sundays, plus two or three weekend meetings per year, and there will be scope for greater and lesser involvement, to reflect everyone’s circumstances and availability, which can also change over time.

If there are people who feel right doing this, and if the right critical bits fall into place, then we can start, perhaps in late 2023 or in 2024. It will start in Britain, but folks in other countries will be able to participate remotely and, you never know, it might spread. If this sets a bell dinging, think about it over wintertime, and I’ll come out with more in a while. This is just a tender germinating seed at present, but it might one day become a tree. We shall see. Also, if option three doesn’t lift off, then options one and two will still be good.

If there’s one message I’m moved to convey, it’s this: whatever your path, and whatever your calling, do pursue it.

Now is not the time for holding back and awaiting another day. In whatever way works for you and lifts you up, whatever is your ability and contribution, it is time to come out with it and do it. If I can be of assistance in that, by doing what I do, then welcome. As I keep quoting, ‘For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing’.

I have some personal bits to put in place. Any offers? I need a part-time, nimble-fingered, literate PA with digital and communication skills and the sort of character and availability that would work well with a person like me. You don’t have to be in Cornwall, though that might be helpful, but the main thing is that we need to be able to sync well with each other. I also need an experienced techy Zoom moderator for the online classes, located anywhere, for a few hours each month. I’m looking for a further minder and companion too, living in Cornwall or Devon, to work alongside Penny – it’s occasional, not hard, you need to be a driver, there might be trips away, and I’m looking for someone for whom it would be uplifting and right. I can pay only expenses but, when it works well, there will be ample magic payoffs.

I’ve been quiet yet it hasn’t been quiet. Been going through some big emotional let-gos too, which have been both a wrench and the lightening of a weight. When I’ve wrapped up this operation sufficiently I’ll enjoy a getaway trip away sometime, somewhere. West Penwith, stuck out in the Atlantic, is a windy place in winter, and it sure has been whistling and whooshing around, with sunshine and monsoons in quick succession.

The cattle are down in the lower fields and the birds hide in the bushes and trees when they find the Atlantic coming at them with full-on gusto. The crows and jackdaws down in the woods, hundreds of them, work up a racket when dawn is coming – they’re my alarm clock – and in the evening they do flighty, crarking displays before settling in the evening, reminding me that it’s time to start thinking about dinner. I forget these things, you see – it’s an unhelpful aspect of hyper-focus.

Please put in a prayer for Felicia, child Phyllis and the two agents, both of them good men. I want them all alive and okay. It means a lot to me. Thank you for that. This is not the greatest of the world’s troubles, but if we all deal with our own little chunk of reality, together we’ll make inroads into turning this world of ours into the kind of place it really needs to be. Gaia needs a laying on of hands.

Thank you for reading. You mean a lot to me too.

With love, Palden

Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html (or on Spotify, Apple and Google)
Shining Land: www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/
All the photos here are from West Penwith in Cornwall, where I live – and a reminder of summertime.

Archiving

The past commutes toward the future

I’ve just done another upload to my audio archive of talks from former decades. It’s taking shape, gradually – my wintertime project.

This one is about ancient British time systems and the way they are built into ancient remains from the neolithic and bronze ages. It discusses key issues such as solstices, equinoxes, eclipses, lunar maxima and minima, the rising and setting of stars, zodiacs and subjective inner time.

I’ve just listened to a rather inspired one, which I did in Byron Bay, Australia, in 1992, shortly after writing the book ‘The Only Planet of Choice’. If you’re a TOPOC freak, you might be interested in this one. It’s called ‘An ET View of Terrestrials and What’s Happening on Planet Earth‘. Trivial, mad, timewasting stuff, of course…

I’m learning a lot from these talks – it’s funny, that. But when you’re in life’s last chapter, it’s really fascinating trawling through old stuff, just to get a balanced view of things you’ve been involved with through life. It’s a bit like putting yourself on the scales to see how it all balances up. You gotta look at the plusses and the minuses.

When I was 24 I had a near-death experience that changed my brains and removed a lot of my memory and capacity to remember the events of my life. This is why, if I haven’t seen you for over a decade, I might look vaguely at you while a memory is slowly emerging (sorry about that).

So it can be quite a surprise, actually, to hear myself rabbiting on from around thirtyish years ago – and I’ve come across some gems – but the thing is, was it the same life?

And that’s just some of them

We have hundreds of crows living down in the woods below our farm. They assemble after autumn equinox and spend the winter together, dispersing around Penwith around spring equinox. In the evenings they get worked up, crarking a lot until, around dusk, they go into swoopy formations and an impressive tribal synergy process.

It’s like the corvid tribe has an identity and mind of its own, which the individual crows plug into as they do these dusk rituals, before they all settle in the trees to spend the night together, as one tribe – all of them probably related.

This is one of the blessings of my life at present. Another is the little birds, robin and tits that feed at the feeder hanging in the dogrose bush outside my door.

With love, Palden

www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

The two top photos and this one are from St Loy, in West Penwith, Cornwall

Samhain

and the cross-quarter points of the year

This is a little late, but it might interest you. I posted it on Facebook on 29th October and then got diverted before posting it here…

One of the benefits life is bringing me nowadays is that I can read stuff I’ve written earlier in life and learn something new from it! That happened with some material on Samhain and the cross-quarters that I read this morning, having got up at 6am, suffering clock-change syndrome. So here’s something about Samhain. This comes from my book Power Points in Time.

If you’re short of time, the bit at the bottom is the best bit.

————————–

The Fire Festivals or Cross-Quarters

It takes time for solar energy to filter through into nature and actuality. The quarter points mark the inception of each of the seasons, but mainly in principle. As with everything, there’s a difference between setting out to do something and actually seeing it happen. In nature there is a 45ish-day time-lag between the quarter days and the cross-quarters, when the season in question is really in full swing, in visible, manifest terms.

Thus, the hottest part of summer is not necessarily at summer solstice but later, around the beginning of August at Lammas or Lughnasa, when the heat has gathered momentum. Likewise, the coldest, crispest part of winter can be in early-to-mid February, about six weeks after winter solstice at Candlemas or Imbolc.

Autumn really does its business in early November and spring really blossoms in early May – give or take the vagaries of weather and climate, which can vary annually and from place to place.

This is where the cross-quarters or fire festivals come in: as the midpoints between the quarter-points, they mark the times when nature and actuality respond concretely to the energy-changes initiated at the quarter points.

The zodiac is measured in terms of 360 degrees (°). The Sun moves more or less 1° per day. The quarter points are 90° from each other, and the cross-quarter points are 45° from the quarter-points (and also 90° from each other). The ancients, at least in Europe, where the seasonal changes of light and dark matter a lot, marked these cross-quarters as important festivals, celebrating and participating in the power of nature and her manifest expressions.

Historical quirks have shifted these festivals away from their original auspicious times (just as Yule has been shifted to Christmas, 3-4 days after winter solstice). The cross-quarters occur when the Sun reaches 15° (the middle) of one of the four so-called fixed signs – Aquarius, Taurus, Leo and Scorpio. The astrologically-true cross-quarter points thus take place around 2nd-7th May, August, November and February.

Tradition places these festivals a few days earlier – such as Beltane or Workers’ Day on 1st May, Candlemas or Imbolc on 2nd February, Lammas or Lughnasa at the beginning of August and All Souls or Hallowe’en at the very end of October (or Samhain on 1st November).

This said, the ancients were not as calendrically-fixated as we, and they often shifted the festivals around a little each year to coincide with a new or full moon, or any other energy-blip that was hovering around at the time, on that year. A remnant of this remains at Easter, which occurs on the fullmoon following spring equinox (nowadays on the Sunday following that fullmoon). Only later on, with the coming of the institutional church and calendrical dating systems, were such dates nailed down at regular, fixed dates.

Outwardly, there are visible seasonal changes at the four cross-quarters, and inwardly there is a quality of very real engagement in the life-process, a feeling of breakthrough in relation to the theme being explored underlyingly in each season.

The cross-quarters used to be known as Witches’ Sabbaths, when the inner intents (or spells) of witches would work through and become reality. A ‘witch’ is a person with natural, herbal, oracular and magical knowledge and training, often practising midwifery, healing, rites of passage and death rites, who acted as an adviser and spiritual friend to the people around them. By the 1500s across Europe they were often misunderstood, demonised and accused of heinous crimes, particularly by the church. The sabbaths are times of coming-to-pass, stages of manifestation and transition. The times for clarifying intent are the solstices, and those for adjusting or reaffirming intent are the equinoxes. At the cross-quarters, it is necessary to actualise those intents, or stages of them, and give thanks too. Things actually happen at the cross-quarters.

Conscious energy-working is a process of bringing things from the stage of visualisation into manifest reality, intertwining our attention, intelligence, will and activity with the natural flow of subtle energy. This is the true meaning of the Sanskrit word tantra, or interweaving (of self with universe), which is the essence of magical-spiritual work. In so doing, we engage with and enhance the natural energy-flows of the world and are supported by them.

We harmonise our lives with the energy-weather, with the deeper realms and with the karmic threads interlacing all events and developments. Nowadays, this isn’t witchcraft so much as a sense of ‘deep ecology’, the spiritual aspect of respect for nature, or perhaps even ‘magical politics’, a deeper aspect of working for social change and justice.

In ancient times, people would gather together at the quarters and cross-quarters to celebrate life and focus their collective spirit, keeping the human family moving in tune with the times – especially since, with sparse populations, people, families and clans didn’t actually cross paths with each other very much. They’d have meetings, markets, negotiations, flirting, marriages and rites of passage too. Today, people are doing this again – not for the romantic purpose of fantasising about the ancients (though this happens) but because they sense that it is auspicious and necessary in our time. It’s a form of para-politics, voting with our feet, spiritually, and communicating with the subtle worlds to say that at least some of us do care.

Tuning into these eight points of the year, the quarters and cross-quarters, we move into greater harmony with the energy-cycle of the solar year. It puts us into gear with natural cycles. Thereby are our lives enriched. Try it. It sheds new light on the seasons and the underlying learning process within them.

To repeat, there is a distinction between the quarters and the cross-quarters. The quarters represent change-points in energy-patterning, in terms of light. The cross-quarters represent change-points in manifest energy, in terms of visible seasonal changes. The peaks of the four seasons show themselves at the cross-quarters.

Autumntime

The Scorpio image here is by artist Jan Billings of Glastonbury

At autumn (fall) equinox, relationships, togetherness and belonging become important. Summer has ended and nature is beginning to close down for winter. Increasing darkness and cold encroach on nature and people – we are affected, whether we like it or not. People, animals and plants must adapt if they are to survive the winter. We’re given notice about this at autumn equinox and it gets serious at the cross-quarter day, 45ish days later.

The need to really engage with what envelops and surrounds us arises at the autumn cross-quarter. In Britain and Ireland this is called Hallowe’en or Samhain. Strictly speaking, this cross-quarter occurs when Sun is at 15° Scorpio, around 5th-7th November. In Britain 5th November is Guy Fawkes Night, celebrating a terrorist attack and attempted coup d’etat in 1605, but the tradition of bonfires, burning a ‘guy’ or straw-man and setting off fireworks is really a leftover of a much older fire festival. At this time the dark and cold is definitely coming down: leaves fall off the trees, migrating birds have gone, frosts and icy blasts impinge on us and animals go into hibernation – except climate change is nowadays changing that. In the agricultural cycle it’s time for the annual slaughter, and all the firewood must be ready and stocks laid in for winter.

Humans, animals and plants must accept that winter is intruding: together we stand, divided we fall. In the plant world a composting process ensues, to feed the ground and cover the seeds, spores and rhizomes for winter. The relative freedom and bounty of summer is gone. It’s fact-facing time, concerning me-as-part-of-something-larger. Our urges to belong to a family, to groups, society, tradition and social mores grow stronger – it’s more about a sense of heritage than a sense of future at this time of year.

The ancients held a fire ceremony at Samhain to recognise that, while the solar light is dying, the light within must be cherished, to be reborn later. This is a time of the death of the old, and within it is the eventual promise of rebirth of the new, but that’s some time ahead at Imbolc or Candlemas. Another aspect is ‘All Souls’ and ‘Hallowe’en’ – a recognition of souls and beings beyond this life and beyond visible reality, of ancestors and things that go bump in the night. It’s a time of forced adjustment – like death, it’s something we must accept when it comes, powerless as we are to do anything much about it except to work with it. Once these impinging realities are taken on board, new hitherto concealed possibilities are revealed – the power to survive and make something good of challenging circumstances. It’s a time to get out your knitting, do some woodwork or wade through thick astrology tomes!

From Samhain to the winter solstice, a dark time, we start with winter’s hard, sometimes harsh facts and end with a celebration of our social togetherness around a warming fire. At solstice comes Yule and the assembling of the clans. Yet in early winter there can be a stark beauty too: wintry gifts, with crisp air, frosts and the first snows, and warm fires to come home to. In northern Europe there were candle-lighting traditions: the christianised Santa Lucia in Scandinavia, honoured in December, is a blond maiden dressed in white and wearing a crown lit up with candles.

Samhain or Hallowe’en

What’s ending and completing here? What can you wrap up, and what is to be carried forward to another time?

What’s under the carpet or lurking in dark corners? What’s the final secret behind all that has happened throughout the year?

What has been your part in the great cosmic chessgame of life? Acknowledge the mystery, the unfathomable wonder of it all, the unknowns and the bits you sense but don’t see or understand.

Life has its tough aspects, things come and go, but something endures too. Talk to your ancestors and appreciate what has now gone. Clear the space and, even if you’re wet, lost and cold, take it with good grace. There’s something wonderful amidst all this, so light a candle to celebrate it. And tomorrow is another day.

————–

Power Points in Time – and how time passes
Ancient festivals, lunar phases, planetary line-ups and historic moments

Website: www.palden.co.uk/time/
Order the printed book from Penwith Press

Screws Turning Down

Gurnard’s Head, on the north coast of West Penwith, Cornwall. Its Cornish name means ‘the desolate one’.

Here in Britain and across the rich world, the problem we have now with our economies arises from our not having had a full and proper cultural revolution in the 1960s-70s. What has happened is that the exaggerated materialism we adopted in the 1980s is seizing up, and we don’t want to recognise that it’s all going awry, tripping over its own shoe laces. Let me explain.

As Buddhists say, the only constant is transitoriness or change. The more we get involved in materialism, the more we attach ourselves to things that begin and end. And they do come to an end. A country, a people or a culture experiences an ascendancy if it answers a need, if it steps into a greater potential that somehow does something that people seek or history accepts or the future demands. But when it loses the plot and rests on its laurels, history starts passing it by.

Britain grew great in the industrial revolution on the basis of technology, sheer inventiveness and the capture of lands and resources worldwide that it could exploit. This was its mission 200 years ago. But in the 20th Century that leading edge, based on coal and steam power, was eventually lost, and the empire was lost at around the same time. The critical point came around the 1960s, and what arose at that time was a potential cultural revolution in our own country. One centre of it was Liverpool, where I grew up – once the world’s greatest port and then declining terribly.

Gurnard’s Head from Carn Naun, with Pendeen Watch behind

This possible cultural revolution arose within the centre of society, mainly amongst educated and socially advantaged young people like me. We were society’s beneficiaries, not necessarily the underprivileged and downtrodden – though many of our parents and grandparents had started there. Holistic and adventurous in perspective, this movement covered most of the world issues that then were visible and important, from civil rights and social change to peace, to health, to farming, to the arts, to matters of spirit – the global village had arrived and, with it, the possibility of something completely new.

It was a means by which the West tried to renew itself, to begin reorientating its goals in order to redeem, correct and further develop what it truly was aiming for. It was aiming to make life better for everyone, globally, to free people from the drudge of hard labour, to free them up for more meaningful creative and spiritual possibilities. Instead, another, more materialistic, acquisitive, frenetic, consumptive future was chosen in the Reagan-Thatcher period – what I then called amphetamine economics. Many people bought into it or went along with it, hoping they might get rich. It is now seizing up. The whole model of material development is coming apart, eroded by its own inherent weaknesses.

Today in Britain we have a new prime minister originating from one of the former colonies – the biggest and richest, the Indian Raj. During its latter years, the Roman empire was similar – its emperors were Syrians, Spaniards, Brits and Croatians – and Rome’s vanquished and colonised peoples propped up the empire because they quite liked its benefits. Or perhaps they had already lost enough of their old ways to prevent them going back.

Having long been preached the virtues of democracy, the world’s majority, the relatively unrich, are now asserting majority rights. The world is going through the beginnings of a social-cultural globalisation process, no longer determined and steered by the rich world. What’s interesting here is that while, materially and our ways and values, we humans are becoming globally standardised (we all use roughly the same gizmos, supermarkets, burgers and plastic bags), socially and culturally we’re going through a re-diversification, a multiplication of differences, subgroups and identities – new tribes and nations are forming, based on internal connections rather than tradition or external imposition.

In the face of the standardising globalisation process, issues of personal and group identity and diversity are growing just as fast. We’re becoming a predominantly urban race – we topped 50% of large-city dwellers around 2008 and it could well be 70% by mid-century. This is a very fundamental change, affecting the psychology, experience and spirit of humanity. When people move to a city they move to a different world.

But we still have a big question. If you were an ET approaching Earth and wishing to talk to the people of planet Earth, where would you find our leader? Who can speak on behalf of all of us and legitimately make decisions on behalf of Earth’s people?

These are times of much more fundamental change than we currently see or understand. We’re immersed in it, entering the future facing backwards, and in too much of a hurry keeping the show on the road to stand back and smell the coffee. The full change has not broken out yet – we’re dealing right now in late 2022 with powerful undercurrents and rumblings. This rapidly rising wave is likely to peak in the late 2020s, when we tip into an utterly new process. A new age cannot come until the old age stops sabotaging it. When the critical, decisive, overwhelming change-wave comes, we enter a new phase lasting decades, probably fifty years. We stand right now on the edge of an avalanche of events and shifts, likely to start cascading in this decade. (The astrological details are here).

This will introduce a new, insecure, yet fast-moving period where, on the whole, the world transits toward big adaptational changes, toward solving the problem, but it will take decades before we know that the problem is sufficiently resolved. So much needs sorting out that we need to find a new, pragmatic way of doing it.

We’re entering a whitewater rapids phase in the 2020s-30s before we go over the waterfall, probably in the 2040s. We’re likely to be crossing the Great Divide in the 2040s-60s, around which time we cross into a new landscape – and the coin is spinning in the air to determine what it will look like.

The necessary shifts of global-scale values, ideas and priorities will, I think, take at least 25 years from now to slot properly into place, but the process has already started – it was sub-surface up to 2020 and the outbreak of Covid, and it’s accelerating. It’s like a rising tide – boats get lifted out of the sand and mud, and they float, and if the waves overtop the harbour walls the boats can break free of their moorings and a safe haven becomes a chaotic nightmare, even though the only thing that happened was a rising of the tide.

In geology, the erosive power of a river increases as the square of its volume – that is, if the volume increases three times, its erosive power increases nine times. Psycho-socially, and worldwide, this is what is happening. The flow is now turning into a more of a flood, the erosion is increasing, and there’s a long way to go before our imperilled civilisation is safe and okay to move into the future.

At some point, the incoming tide will breach the harbour walls and we enter a different movie – the power and the glory of the open ocean. Paradoxically, this critical change could happen quite surreptitiously – it could be that, one morning, we wake up and everything suddenly looks and feels totally different. Though on some level of our being, we knew this was happening.

It’s time now for us to transition onwards, ride the waves and get more used to doing so, because we’ll have more of this in future.

Try to identify those stuck parts of your life that aren’t moving – things that no longer lift or light you up, or not as much as before. Entertain the idea of changing things more than you previously thought. Be ruthlessly honest and fiercely real – getting real is an important process, since it’s about recognising and taking ownership of the truth of things in your life, including the beliefs and justifications you’ve lived by thus far.

It’s okay to get stripped naked (metaphorically): vulnerability and insecurity bring with them amazing gifts. Safety and security are ebbing away, and the more we get used to changing, shifting times and circumstances, the better we shall be.

Pain is made up of two things: the issue that creates the pain and the way we choose to experience it. Do we make it bigger, with all the fuss, drama and inner friction we create for ourselves? Or do we realise that, no matter how difficult life seems to be, there’s a way forward, things’ll work out, and there’s cause to be grateful for what we have?

Get down to bottom lines and worst fears. If you bring your fears to the surface, looking at what you fear, often it becomes clear that you can actually move forward, you will make it, and you don’t need to let fear stop you from doing what you know you need to do. Use fear as a way of moving forward: if you fear it, consider actually doing it. Because, whether or not your fears come true, you’ll be far better prepared for the worst than if you hadn’t ever faced this stuff. If you’re prepared for the worst, the chances are that you’ll either survive it or, more likely, it won’t actually come – because many of the adverse events of our lives come to us precisely because we fear and avoid the issues that lie beneath and behind them.

I’m not saying this because I myself have mastered it. Issues like this are what I myself have been facing recently – Saturn-Pluto stuff – and this is what I’m trying to remind myself. (Partially, you see, I teach myself though communicating with you.) When you’re faced with bigger-than-nornal adversity – in my case, cancer and all that goes with it – the feeling tones and experiential intensity of life get amplified and you can get rubbed up deeply and movingly, sometimes by quite small things.

One of the issues for me has been a combination of loss of mobility, infection risk, increasing electrosensitivity, dependency on others and relationship breakdown which has meant my social life has dwindled catastrophically. I can’t hang out with people (unless they switch off their phones – sometimes a big ask). One advantage, however, is that, to plug the gap, I’m writing blogs, making podcasts and doing forays up to England to do events instead. So you win some and lose some.

I’ve been using this time for ruminating over the next step in my life. Time is not on my side, but it’s worth spending it well. It’s now nearly three years since I was diagnosed with cancer, and I’ve got used to my new reality. I seem still to be alive, to my surprise, and I seem to have a few years left. The last year has been something of a nightmare, though in the process something new has dropped into me. So I want to change things.

I have evolved a plan, and I’ve visualised a small and a big version and worked through many details, and something is clarifying here in my eyrie down in Cornwall. For me, it’s phase three of a forty year evolution – not new stuff at all, but I have realised it has not been taken as far as it can go. The big question I’m ruminating over is whether I have what it takes to do it – and the bucket is there to be kicked anytime. Actually, inshallah, I think I might have what it takes, but I’m a strangely realistic visionary and in a weak position in life, and I want to get to a 100% feeling inside. That’s why I’m sitting on it.

If you can get to that 100% feeling in your bones, you then move into a position where it might be possible to move a mountain. We come here to Earth to find out. While a potential might be there, its actualisation is no twenty-minute procedure. It’s that wee matter of 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

As for the cabin where I live, on an organic farm at the centre of West Penwith, it’s called The Lookout, because that’s what you do through its big windows. Except it’s as much a look-in as a look-out. Especially on rainy days. In winter I stay warm with and cook on a lovely warm woodstove.

So now I’m sitting on it, gestating, cogitating, writing notes, checking my feelings. Being time-rich, I can do this. I’ve given myself until winter solstice to clarify things and until Imbolc (early February) before committing and coming out with it. All I have, really, are insights, experience, a vision and a wee bit of social cred.

But it’s not time to talk about it yet. The basic intent is clarifying, but there’s more to go on the method and the manifestation. If any of my readers feel a jiggling of something when you read this, please cogitate it and whether you might be up for it. I shall need to find out during 2023 whether there are sufficient people prepared to give this years, and to stick with it – including after my death. Because, for me, there’s no point starting it otherwise. I’ll find out by doing more events and putting out feelers and seeing who turns up.

It concerns world healing. But just keep it under wraps for now and cogitate it, please. If I get to that 100% feeling, I’ll tell you fully what it is, with my usual lucidity. And if I don’t, I shall leave a body of ideas behind, which will help someone else pick this up and run with it. And I might be able to help from the other side.

Toward this end, this week I started a new project, building an audio archive of twentyish of my best talks and workshops from the 1980s-2000s – because these will form part of that body of work.

Weighty stuff, on a rainy, drippy Scorpio day. Time for a round of tea. Jon the farmer rumbles past, down in the yard, on his tractor. Someone in the workshop is banging something metallic. Our cattle herd is being moved down from the hill to the lower fields by the woods. The bronze age barrows up the hill are shrouded in wet mist. And life goes on at our farm.

Love from me, Palden

Photos are of Gurnard’s Head, a cliff sanctuary on the north coast of Penwith, Cornwall. Here’s a map.

Collected blogs: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
PodTalks & Audio Archive: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Gravity

and blood and bones

Mighty cloud above Penwith, as seen from Bosigran

Recently I’ve been working on straightening up my back. When I went down (or even up) with bone marrow cancer, the four bottom vertebrae of my back collapsed, altering the architecture of my pelvis, legs and back. I lost bone mass and my back grew weaker to the extent that I’ve had to use sticks ever since to hold myself up. Since then I’ve had an unconscious tendency to stoop, which gets exaggerated in the later part of the day or when I’m tired or my energy is down. This gets interesting though – there’s more to this.

For me, taking on cancer involved taking on a burden and making it mine. Living became more difficult and dragging myself around is more of an effort than it used to be. I feel heavy even though I’ve always been slim, and now I’m bony. In a way, I’m quite a big presence, yet my body has been lean, and nowadays rather frail. I deal with that fragility with willpower, by resorting to ‘second strength’ – the strength that, as a runner or mountaineer, you get through to when you’ve broken through your initial tiredness. Mars in Scorpio – that’s me, and Uranus is doing an opposition to it.

This Saturnine burden-bearing thing has been a life-issue for me – somewhere between karma-yoga and self-punishment – so it’s fascinating that I get a cancer that concerns the blood (life-force and will-to-live) and bones (gravitation and carrying that weight). I’ve sometimes wondered whether I was an elephant in a past life.

Nowadays, when my spirits are flagging and I’m tired or feeling burdened, I tend to droop. So I’m retraining myself to stand straighter, reminding myself over and over to lift myself up. I’m being helped in this by a lovely man in St Just, Alan, who does his own version of Alexander Technique, and whose firm hands and ways of manipulating me give a satisfying feeling of being opened up, stretched, uplifted and balanced.

It has become really clear to me how much my current posture relates to my state of mind and spirits. When I’m up, I’m up, and when I’m down, I go down in posture. So I’m working on the centre of willpower in my solar plexus and also on the character of my thoughts – astrologically, Uranus is opposing my Mars in Scorpio, bringing up these kinds of issues.

Pendeen Watch from Bosigran Castle

When I was a mountaineer when young, I learned that cultivating uplifting thoughts has a levitational effect, getting you up that mountain much more easily and happily. But if you’re grinding your stuff, worrying about how far you still must go and indulging in tiredness, then it gets terribly difficult, longer, more painful, and your rucksack gets heavier.

The same applies to living with cancer. It’s a mountain to climb with only a few let-ups, a mountain with no summit till you finally give up and die – whereas, as a mountaineer, you can descend and have a hot bath afterwards. There can be longterm wear-and-tear and challenges to the spirit – it’s all about will-to-live. These challenges can be weighty – they have been so for me. But facing this stuff has sorted me out inside quite a lot.

As a mountaineer and cross-country runner I trained my will to stay focused and to hang in there by working with my mind. But when I got involved with ETs in my forties I started imbibing ideas they put forward and started connecting things together. The Nine had talked about a difficulty connected with the downward-pulling effect on consciousness of gravity and dense physicality, as we have them on Earth. This has a twofold effect: the direct effect of gravity itself, and the effect of accumulated human habits, beliefs and institutions, which tend to embed a deep, guilt- and fear-ridden, downward-pulling effect on society and human culture as a whole.

Our conditioned beliefs, fears, guilt and shame are means by which we allow ourselves to be controlled, giving power to those who would control us. We constrain the scope and depth of our awareness, fitting inside boxes, clipping wings, subscribing to channels of belief, conforming to perceived expectations, setting aside our deeper feelings and perceptions and generally losing the plot, losing perspective and losing ourselves. It’s a comfort-zone which, if everyone does it, makes everyone feel safe. Except we aren’t safe, since the basic premises of such a life-structure are unsustainable longterm, hollow. We’ve become addicted to quite sophisticated avoidance strategies.

I learned about this key gravitational issue from two sources: the Nine, who mentioned this as a key factor in bringing us to our current rather imperilled condition, and the Austrian scientist Viktor Schauberger, who proposed that the law of gravity and the law of levity are equal and opposite, and that their balancing and utilisation are a matter, in the end, of consciousness. In other words, uplifting thoughts are levitational, and depressive thoughts are gravitational. Think about it – but not too much!

It’s all to do with vibrational frequencies. Dense physical matter isn’t just stuff – it’s energy vibrating at wavelengths that make it appear physical. Gravity-levity occupy a range of frequencies, as do light, thought, emotion, subtle energy, different forms of consciousness and their moods and states. These interact with each other. When I’m walking on the cliffs and feeling inspired, my power increases and walking gets easier. In connection with the relative rebirth I’ve gone through this summer, I can stand upright without sticks for longer now than I could a year ago (five minutes instead of two) – so the levitational force is increasing in me. Though it still depends on my energy-state at the time. I can overcome tiredness by working with my state of mind and heart, if I’m on a long hike, or if it has been a long day, though I usually pay a price the next day. That’s a matter of pacing myself and energy-management – dipping out, resting my mind and degravitationalising my body.

When I experienced a lot of fatigue in 2020-21, by late afternoon I would lose energy and start drooping. My mind would start slowing and switching off, I’d lose my mind and my words, and my life-energy would dwindle rapidly. Sometimes this would happen in minutes, as if I was being taken over. Those are moments when I really value having someone around for a bit of support and TLC – it doesn’t happen much nowadays. But it’s okay if I can retreat to bed, take the weight off my back and drift off into a fatiguey kind of trance. If I can’t, I’m in trouble, unable to marshal myself and do what’s necessary, and needing to focus a lot of energy just on staying upright, taking one step at a time.

Porthmoina Cove

I feel more in sync with myself now, in October, and my life-energy has improved since spring. But one year ago I was going down, ill and struggling in a nightmarish in ner reality, sinking into the dark, and eventually to lose my partner – a disaster for me, and probably for her. It was a major Neptune transit to my Saturn. I lost my way and came close to losing my life. But I’m a survivor: my starting thought, when I’m lost in the dark, is to ask myself where the gift lies.

It was hard, that time, but it put me through the grinder and I emerged from the other side in springtime, blinking and rather surprised, surfacing with a new sense of mission – something to keep me alive. That’s important because, when you’re old and disabled, society shoves you to the side and forgets you unless you do something to bring yourself back in. And, regarding grinders, in order to be gifted with miracle solutions such as a rebirth after a crisis, it’s often necessary to make the downpayment first. The universe tests us, wanting to know whether we’re 100% behind it, because it’s only hundred-percentness that enables us to override the normal default rules of life and nature, bringing a higher level of rules, norms and magic into operation.

When I was ill, wondering whether I was leaving life, the threads in my life that remained incomplete came into sharp contrast. Something was coming clear that I could not lay them to rest. Paradoxically, the most immediately painful one, the loss of my ladylove, left me with a big, simmering, unresolved issue, and it had a strange way of keeping me alive! It was so bad that it activated the fightback in me. But the realisation that there was something more to do with life before I go – that was the clincher. I realised that, if I were up in heaven, I would regret not having done all I could to set in motion some serious work in the area of world-healing. This has been a major thread in my life since I was about sixteen. It’s an incomplete thread. Mission not accomplished.

Working on my posture has a direct relationship with – when it boils down to it – fulfilment and happiness. Not just because of the structural, bony corrections that might happen, raising my life-energy, but also because it’s all about developing the levitational power within – the power to rise up. In my observation, in my cancer process, the medical treatment has saved me and kept me alive (and I wouldn’t have lived had it not worked), but the healing I’ve received, from people, from HP Source and from my own inner processing, has created something of a rule-breaking miracle. I’m now more alive than otherwise I would be.

Gravity has a relationship with time too. Our capacity to deal with time is a key issue in consciousness. Time spreads out events along a perceptual, developmental continuum such that, on our densely physical, time-bound, spinning planet, life is a process of working with physicality and with life-experience in a very gradual and drawn-out way – at times frustrating, and often technically complex. My Tibetan teacher, the Karmapa, once taught that patience is applied timelessness. That is, all of our wishes are fulfilled in the fullness of time, and we really need to worry much less about how things happen and how to steer and control them. They will all come.

One of the Boscregan clifftop cairns. Sennen behind.

Getting old and being partially disabled, I’m losing my powers, and there’s quite a sense of loss to that. But then, from a time-released perspective, throughout life I’ve had my powers and all sorts of experiences with them, and that was good, and now life is about something else. Other powers have become available that I didn’t once have. I’m doing better on the wisdom, acceptance, insight, inner journeying and gratefulness-for-being-alive fronts, and my writing and podcasting have improved. My vibe and inner archetype have changed.

I’ve lost many ‘executive’ functions in my brains and cannot multi-task or do rapid-fire attention switches or complex situations any more, but something on the other, imaginal, intuitive, creative side has actually improved. So there’s a gift in everything, and we can focus on what we’ve lost or don’t have, or we can give attention to what we’re gaining and what’s available. That’s our choice.

When you come close to the end, you’ve had your time. It was given, you had it and you did it, and what you did and didn’t do with it were, in the end, your choice. It goes through stages and it eventually comes to an end. That’s life. Hopefully, in the course of life, you can go through most or all of those stages – and pity those who get cut short, culled before their time, mown down by a karmic wave that is larger than their own personal one.

To live in this kind of physical existence, we needed to live on a time-bound planet defined by its rotational and orbital patterns, because a planet like this produces multiple evolutionary circumstances in which enormous experiential diversity can grow. It has local environments, seasons and climatic patterns that stimulate beings like us, prompting us to explore and extend ourselves. We weren’t meant to destroy this world in the process, however.

But physicality means that we enter into close relationship with things and circumstances that get born, live and die, and it happens to us too. The big mistake is the belief that this kind of physical, perpetually-changing existence is the only one that is real. Even though, in our sleep and altered states, we go into completely different worlds and existences on a regular basis.

So it’s our constrained awareness that binds us to ticktock time. But there’s another kind of time too – evolutionary time – and it has little relation to ticktock time. In evolutionary time, you can make ten years’ progress in twenty minutes, in an intense growth situation. If you block your growth through fear, then you lock yourself into ticktock time and you ‘serve time’ – some people do it for the whole of their lives. The more we invest in working on ourselves, allowing the magic of life to work through us, trusting in our spirit and serving humanity, the more that our relationship with time changes – since time doesn’t constrain energies that come from beyond time and beyond self. You’re capable of being old when young and young when old. You don’t worry so much. You realise there’s more to life than paying bills and doing your perceived duty. The laws of life start changing, and things start happening which, in that time-bound world and the groupthink that goes with it, were deemed improbable or impossible.

Light, energy, thought, gravity, consciousness – they are connected, all of them operating in a range of frequencies. What I’ve been finding is that, as my body and my life-possibilities become more limited, I’m learning more about the intimate relationship of all of them. It’s directly connected with my backache, mood, happiness and choices at any moment. Giving them all attention is helping my healing process. This, for me, doesn’t mean ‘getting better’, since I won’t, but it does mean being in a better state than otherwise. Being happier about the life I have. The funny thing is that, with this kind of acceptance, I’ve been getting marginally better!

Life is, after all, filled with paradox.

Love from me, Paldywan

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

Chapel Carn Brea, the last hill in Britain

Earth

A podcast and a podtalk

An old pathway at our farm, certainly centuries old, could even be four millennia old

I’ve been at it again – beavering away on quite a few things, including coddling plans for my next round of events and activities in 2023. And for however long I stay standing.

It’s a product of spending a lot of time alone – as you might imagine, it makes me find things to do I wouldn’t otherwise do, if I could run around being busy like most people.

One outcome is a new podcast, and it’s called Earth – one of a series of ET-related podcasts I’m doing at present. It’s all about my understanding of the perspective that people who don’t live on Earth have about our planet and our acute situation.

It brings into focus a big reason why dealing with our world problem is important not only to us but across the universe. Sounds like a strange and rather human-centric viewpoint, but it isn’t. This podcast explains how and why.

Food for cogitation. 33 minutes of it. Enzymes for the soul.

Download or listen to it here www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html or on Apple, Google or Spotify (look for Pods from the Far Beyond).

Dans Meyn, or the Merry Maidens stone circle – 4,500 years old.

There’s more. If you’re really interested in this particular issue and want more, then I’ve unearthed an inspired talk I gave to the PAN conference in 1996, giving more details about the cosmic situation that Earth is in. It’s now a PodTalk, The Only Planet of Choosing.

I gave this talk not long after having written the book The Only Planet of Choice and during the time I was running the Hundredth Monkey camping retreats, working with world healing issues. It’s all about the wider reasons why world healing work is an important part of the mega-project of fixing Planet Earth.

I’ve uploaded it as a podtalk: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html – but this one is for those of you who are specifically interested in this (it’s 1hr 15mins long).

My aim with creating this audio output is to build up a body of material about those subjects and issues I’ve been involved in, for leaving after I’ve gone – they’ll come in useful in a future time.

With love from me, Palden

A cloud over Zennor, here in West Penwith, Cornwall