The first two audio instalments of my 2011 book Blogging in Bethlehem are now available, and the remaining five will come out once a week over winter (inshallah). The written version is available too.
I hope you enjoy them. It’s free, no strings.
Well, that lot took 20 hours to make, but I got through it quite quickly. That’s one advantage of hyperfocus and living alone. Rain drumming on the roof has stopped play for now. Just as well, really – I had my cancer treatment yesterday/Weds and I’m all floppy and wobbly.
I’m enjoying doing it though. The story comes from better times in Palestine in 2011, but it gives a sense of real life and some of the positive things happening there, and the social and cultural strengths of Palestinians. I miss friends there and would love to go back, but this is beyond my physical scope and financial ability now. So this is a way to be with them in spirit.
We live in a strange world where its inhabitants, called humans, have a weird tendency to believe that other humans are fundamentally different to them and opposed to them. Don’t go to Planet Earth – the inhabitants there are dangerous, mainly to themselves. This is a bizarre aspect of this particular world.
That’s a paragraph from my book Blogging in Bethlehem. I woke up this morning with the idea to serialise it as an audio book.
But then I wondered whether enough people would be interested to justify the effort. It’s not a very long book (unusually for me). At a guess it would land up as three hours of listening, sectioned into 30ish minute segments.
So I’m wondering about that. Any views?
I can’t start today anyway, because the wind is rattling around too much for sound recording! But I have my cancer treatment tomorrow/Weds – a nurse comes round and it takes just 45 mins. I might well be buzzing on that sufficiently in the following two days to start recording – you never know. Depends on the winds.
My life goes in four-week cycles and treatment affects my psyche, stomach and daily life for around a week. That’s weird for an astrologer who has lived life attuned to natural cycles of a more elastic kind, rather than to a calendrically-regularised grinding cog of time, with a periodicity determined by medication.
Down’ere at the end of Cornwall, stuck out in the Atlantic, we’re getting a lot of high wind and storming. It’s a bit reminiscent of the stormy winter of 2014. The birds are lying low.
Dolphins playing the waves at Nanjizal Bay, Cornwall
And talking of calendars – specifically Gregorian ones – may the rest of your year remain happy. In the end, happiness is a decision of the heart, not an ideal set of circumstances that only occasionally crop up – then they go again. Happy times.
Rather like Greenwich Mean Time, the Gregorian calendar is a vestige of European imperialism. Nowadays it’s neatly called the ‘Common Era’, as if to conceal its origins, and GMT is re-named UT, or ‘universal time’ – except the universe doesn’t follow it.
It might be one of those post-colonial vestiges that stick around for some time. Perhaps the only situation to change this will come when we finally adjust our lives on Earth to the wider universe.
Watching intently. Portheras Cove, West Penwith, Cornwall
Until such a time, since we’re dangerous, we’re under a form of quarantine. Dangerous to the universe and dangerous to ourselves. Most strange.
It sounds simple, but the solution is happiness (as a decision of the heart). The way things are now, though, it looks really complex. Especially with vexatious warring and all manner of dissonances going on.
It needs modelling and shoving through supercomputers because we believe we can sort things out mentally, if only we have enough data. But mentality simply sorts data, even if intelligently. Decisions are made in the heart, the womb and the gut – the parts that AI can only imitate, though it cannot reach.
At this juncture of history, we have a lot of rather big decisions to make. We humans need to get more happy and become less dangerous. Less dissonance, more resonance.
It will affect climate change in a big way, with instantaneous results.
Think about it. But not too much. And I won’t either.
One who Speaks does not Know. One who Knows does not Speak.
Discuss. This issue has been rather a preoccupation for me throughout life. Not least because I’m articulate and reasonably persuasive. It took until my mid-thirties though for that articulateness to really come out.
Over the decades I’ve created yardages of verbiage in writing and sound, onstage, radio and video and in groups, so does this make me someone who does not know? Well, it could be true. I could, after all, be twisting your brains in a very nifty way, so that you don’t notice. I might be manipulating you, deluding you.
And there would be truth in it. Not the whole truth, mercifully.
Besides, I find I can’t just rattle off stuff just to fill column inches, sell something or meet a deadline. So I didn’t become a journalist or copywriter, even though I could – I can’t just write stuff to fill space. I find I have to wait until something meaningful and creative comes up, something to really write about. It has to come up and out.
Gurnard’s Head, West Penwith
One gift cancer gave me is reduced concern about my career path – a release from the ties of what I believe other people believe about me. Or, as a blogger, a compulsion to write stuff just to retain eyeballs, for fear of losing readers if I don’t. There are times when I go silent. My feeling is that, without originality, my work is second rate – and I’m a Saturnine Virgo and relentlessly self-critical in these things.
But the funny thing is, the more I’ve got used to this, the fewer the quiet times have become – what some call ‘writer’s block’.
There’s an advantage to self-criticism, in the long term – as long as you relax about it as you mature. Since self-critical people set high standards for themselves, they do actually rise to some pretty high standards. Even if, when they get there, they’re still digging away at themselves and running themselves down.
With some of my writing, I go over and over it again and again. And again. Neurotic. What often shocks me, positively, is that I post stuff online that I think is, well, good enough, when readers enjoy and appreciate it in no uncertain terms and it seems to be far better than I’d have guessed! Phew.
I have a retrograde Mercury in Libra that mulls things over a lot, attempting to reach a balanced view. So I go though periods of quietness, mulling and cogitating. Sometimes I might be having an Aspie meltdown, where everything gets terrible tangled, to the point where I’m short-circuited and go into a space of aghast inner blankitude, like a rabbit caught in headlights, a sort of void space out of which, at some point, there suddenly springs a guiding light of an idea and… ping, I’m back – I got it.
Then I’m off again. One of the little gladnesses I’ve had is that I’m a good reserve speaker – someone who can be called in last minute because another speaker dropped out. Give me ten minutes, a mug of tea, and tell me how much time I have, and I’m off. Mercifully, as rather a polymath, I have a number of subjects up my sleeve that I can rattle on about in quite a fired-up way.
I had to learn how to do that, and it broke through when I was about 32. I discovered that, no matter how much I planned my talks, the best were those where, at the beginning, I found I had no idea at all about what to say, even if I’d prepared something. I just had to set aside my fear, take three deep breaths, take in the audience, and start with the first thing that came into my head. Nowadays, it just comes naturally.
St Michael’s Mount from Penzance harbour
I wouldn’t call that channelling. It draws on my own knowledge, experience and character. But there’s something where, if Friends Upstairs want to drop something in, it’s easy for them to do so. Sometimes I get nudged, occasionally jolted. Sometimes they pull the plug on what I thought I was about to talk about, and I launch in deep, straight away, into something that feels like it’s coming out specially for the particular people in the audience. I’m always amazed that, when people tell me the clincher for them, it’s a really wide variety of my utterances that they mention. It’s fascinating.
But at the end of a talk I can feel a bit bereft because I can’t remember what happened – I’m the one that missed it.
So I’m fine about being filmed or recorded, because it helps me know what I’m actually saying to people! Not only this but, sometimes, when I’ve heard a recording afterwards, it’s as if some of the stuff I said was precisely for me – me teaching myself out loud, in public. Other people seem to like it too, which is a relief. So it balances out – Mercury in Libra.
I’m not one who repeats myself too much, and working from notes doesn’t work for me. I often have three or four talking points in reserve, and I cycle around those, but that process is still spontaneous, a wandering, a looping and a returning back to base. These anchor points kinda keep me on track amidst a wide ocean – a Gemini Mooner like me can go off sideways and add too many footnotes, so that people can’t remember what on earth I was talking about.
Gurnard’s Head again
Part of the reason for this is that it wasn’t on earth. But I have had to learn how to anchor to a few key points, to give my poor audiences a few memorable nuggets to lodge in their brains. Judging by the ramblingness of this piece, I still need to learn it, even at my age.
As a Gemini Mooner, one of the issues I had to learn was this. People remember three things. Repeat: people remember three things. In any talk, book or radio programme, I always try to look for three core points that need bringing through. I might not know how I’ll do it, but I kinda flag them up in my back-brain for covering. If I don’t do this, I go into too much intricacy and people can lose track. It was an interesting talk but they can’t remember what it was about.
What’s changed, since I had cancer 3-4 years ago, is that, more and more, I find myself anchoring back spontaneously to a wellspring inside. I clear my psyche, the process starts up, something comes up and off we go.
This very blog is an example. I was sitting there drinking rose congou tea, contemplating Lao Tzu’s saying: One who Speaks does not Know, and One who Knows does not Speak.
Well, that’s true. But there’s a way round it. The resolution of this dilemma comes spontaneously. Part of the deal is that, when it comes, it’s necessary to get down on it and write it there and then. Because that creative streak doesn’t stay. It’s a momentary thing, and part of the creative process of the universe. It speaks for that moment. If you don’t catch it, like a sailor with the wind, it comes and it’s gone.
So Lao Tzu’s statement is true. I as a voluble person need to take note, repeatedly. Yet it has something to do with the message and the vibe that’s concealed between the lines. It’s that direct mind-to-mind and heart-to-heart communication that hides behind the clattering of expressed words. Something that AI will have difficulty falsifying since AI is imitative, not originative. It doesn’t come from that wellspring.
Up to the 18th-19th Century, it was part of an author’s remit even to use flexible spellings, even on the same page – and that was part of the poesy of prose.
True authors are here to authorise authoritative authenticity. I didn’t go on a creative writing class – I just did the however-many thousand hours and years needed to gain a certain mastery in the craft of wordsmithery. That where those aspects of life that we habitually consider to be problems can become assets in disguise. I’ve been complaining of aloneness in the last two years and, well, it has given me space to create. To do so, it’s necessary to be alone and ‘antisocial’. Life has its strange compensations.
That’s a realisation that particularly comes toward the end of life. Everything has its compensations, its reason for being as it is, or was. Often it’s not at all easy to see how this is, when we’re busy struggling through life’s relentlessly tangled web of attention-seeking demands that present themselves for free on a daily basis. Until, that is, you die.
Atlantic storm at Carn Les Boel
Then other stuff starts happening and, with luck, you begin to see the real, full, all-round reasons why life needed to be the way it was. Going through this process allows us then to pass through the gate and move on.
Not going through that process tends to make us take a left turn, a quick road back to incarnate familiarity – the hope for chocolate and the fact of blizzards and droughts. We have a strange addiction to being stuck between rocks and hard places. The Council of Nine called this ‘bottlenecking’. It’s the primary reason why Earth’s population has swelled so quickly to, now, over eight billion.
Many of us have repeatedly been forgetting why we came, recycling back into life again without fully working things out. We’ve forgotten that this is a training, an initiation into dense physicality, for the deepening and broadening of the scope of our souls.
But there is the option to go on to other realms and worlds – some familiar, a few of them ‘home territory’, and a lot more that we become ready to encounter by dint of what we have already become.
The Road goes ever on and on. Out from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone. Let others follow, if they can.
There was a cuckoo on the farmhouse roof just now, making quite a cuckoo racket. But the swallows have gone to bed – busy day tomorrow. The crows and jackdaws have mostly dispersed around Penwith for the summer. And a nightjar sometimes haunts my roof late in the night, after the bats have disappeared into the dark.
Paldywan sends love from The Lookout – especially to YOU. Yes, you.
Some of you will be having a quieter Christmas than many, and some creatives will be using this time as a way to get down to some work.
In this podcast I share some thoughts about writing. I’ve been an author, editor and online content creator, and I have no idea how many hours I’ve sat at typewriters and computers for sixtyish years, creating yardages of verbiage in print.
I guess my mother handed me that gene – she was a prizewinning shorthand secretary in the 1940s.
This isn’t about sentence structure or punctuation. It’s about getting on the flow. Getting it down – it involves a lot of fingerwork on keyboards.
That’s what copyright is actually about: ideas are free and flow freely, but it’s the fingerwork, the iteration of ideas in text, that gets copyrighted. The work done to encapsulate ideas on paper or onscreen.
It’s a load of slog. You spend hours and hours and come out with a coupla sheets of paper or a screenload of web-page. People loom at it and think, ‘Is that all?’.
If you’re writing a book it stays inside a computer for months, and no one sees it, and then suddely it comes out as a printed or audio book, and it’s almost like giving birth.
So this might be interesting and useful to a few listeners. Recorded in October 2022 during a storm.
This is something of a turning point for me. I hope it is so for you, and in a benign way. After a disastrous winter I feel I am now moving on, step by step. One small symptom of this is that I’ve just completed the Meyn Mamvro Archive.
After two years’ work, I’m rather relieved to complete it. Who knows how many mouse-clicks were involved, but it would be thousands. What’s significant here, for me, is that it’s the last such project I shall do. I’ve done a good few over the years.
It’s an archive of 100 copies of the magazine Meyn Mamvro, about archaeology and earth mysteries in West Penwith and wider Cornwall, edited and published by a friend and soul sister, Cheryl Straffon. I’m glad to have done it.
There have been a number of lasts in my life since getting cancer, and a few more are to come.
In West Penwith, where I live, I’ve done a number of projects in the prehistory area, apart from this. This subject really interests me, and I so much love West Penwith.
One is a series of maps of the ancient sites and geomantic alignments in West Penwith and wider Cornwall (six years’ work) – they’re here: http://www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/maps.html
Another is the Ancient Penwith website, a very comprehensive site providing alternative ideas about West Penwith’s prehistory. It goes through the different kinds of sites in Penwith, and it highlights the role of ancient site alignments in the creation of the whole system of ancient sites in Penwith.
Another is my forthcoming book Shining Land – the ancient sites of West Penwith, and what they say about megalithic civilisation. It’s not out yet though. But there’s some interesting material on the book’s website to be getting on with. It’s here: www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/
I’ve been overwhelmed with things since my partner departed some months ago, so I’ve been unable to focus on the book to get it published. But that will happen in due course, inshallah. Being a cancer patient, I can’t push myself as most people do, or multitask and remember all the details involved in living a modern life. I go at half the rate of most people.
My support system isn’t working well – if I had my way I’d like a digital PA, a minder or two for adventures (such as in a month’s time) and a close companion. But that’s life – you get what you get, especially on Saturn transits!
The uphill grind of the last 6-9 months has taught me a lot, squeezed and raked me out, pushed me through an accelerated change process and moved me a long way. I can feel it moving without yet knowing where it is going. The process isn’t complete, though things are brightening up.
In August and September I shall be doing the first three events of my ‘Far Beyond’ magic tour, in Glastonbury, Avebury and Totnes area, plus a couple of talks. Full details to be announced soon, when everything is hammered out. I’m really looking forward to that and, if you’re pulled to join me, I’d love seeing you. I have a feeling this is going to be rather special.
It’s great working with each of the local organisers, and many thanks to them. This is limited-edition, one-off stuff, since my capacity to do such things will decline in time. I hope to go to Wales and the North too (organisers sought), perhaps during autumn-winter, inshallah.
The good news I’ve had recently is that my cancer is not deteriorating, according to the latest tests. In February my cancer indicators (such as paraproteins) started climbing – I was very ill and in a dark tunnel – but as I improved they have pegged at a new level. It means I don’t have to change cancer drugs. This is a relief, since the new drug is a kind of thalidomide, which my mother took when gestating me, and intuitively I just don’t feel safe with the prospect of taking it.
There’s another benefit too. The nurses from a private healthcare company (Pharmaxo) who visit me monthly to administer my drugs are really nice, and they answer questions and take on issues in ways that NHS nurses and doctors don’t. If my drugs are changed, I shall lose them (because I’ll be taking pills, not injections). This has been important, since I feel quite neglected by the NHS, and I’ve lost my medical confidante too (my ex-partner), so the advice and support of the nurses has been really valuable.
It’s the peak of the year – it comes so fast – the time when fruition begins, when the drift of our lives since winter solstice reaches a climax and it turns a corner. Something has taken shape, and now we need to do something with it – harvest it and then put it to use. If you’d like to read something about solstices and equinoxes, then here’s a book I wrote 35 years ago, Living in Time, that explains all – now archived free online. Living in Time: The Ancient Festivals.
Love from me to all of you, from down’ere in Cornwall.
Carn Gloose and, behind, Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall
I’m lucky to be a writer. With my cancer-derived disabilities I can still more or less carry on with my work. If I were a farmer, work would be mostly impossible and my life would fall apart. There’s another side to this though: I get fed up with sitting at the computer – being nerdy and scholastic, I’ve done a lot of that over the last fifty years! My major hurdle at present is fatigue, though even that has its compensations because the rest and the floating-off that fatigue induces gives me space to cogitate things more than I’ve ever done before.
So my current book is taking time, but I’m now on the finishing touches – checking footnotes, indexing and sorting out pictures and maps – ready to send to a printer and publisher I do not yet have. That’s the next hurdle. Fatigue means I have to take things one thing at a time – handling complexity, arrangements and details is distinctly difficult. But I’m really pleased with the book.
The ‘council circle’ at Bosigran cliff sanctuary
In some respects it’s rather obscure – about the ancient sites of West Penwith, here in Cornwall, and what they show us about ‘megalithic geoengineering’ – but in other respects I’ve never been able to give a book so much thought and consideration. It might be one of my best (it’s my eleventh). There has always been a rush to meet a deadline or before other things start happening. But I don’t have a lot happening, and I’m no longer striving to be a successful author – I’m seeking simply to pass on my knowledge to whomever will benefit from it, before I go.
A dear soul-sister, Sophia, suddenly went recently. She was about to stage a big exhibition of her remarkable art and ceramics when she died quietly in her sleep, in her early seventies. It’s one of those deaths that was a surprise – she was in good enough health and spirits, with good prospects. Yet there’s a feeling it was not actually wrong that she passed away there and then. Sophia is a deep and sensitive lady who has done consistent spiritual practice (Subud Latihan) for a long time. We worked together on local and world healing in the 1980s, with an occultist called Gareth Knight and others. Her angels clearly, cleanly and calmly took her out at what they consider exactly the right time.
It’s stirring, when someone suddenly blips out like that. But we’ll probably meet in heaven when I blip out too. It doesn’t bother me the way it seems to bother a lot of people who, in their confusion over death, seem to experience such loss and regret when a person dies. Some people judge that I don’t care when I say this, but they misunderstand me. Yes, there’s an enormous gap, a silence, and it raises big questions about life, bringing up mysterious feelings, and the person is no longer physically present, but why do people stop talking to a person when they die, as if they no longer exist? I’ve sat at funerals where the departed soul says to me, “But can’t anyone see I’m here?“, so I talk to them. Then they, and the attendant angels and beings, seem to wonder why I am not running the funeral myself.
At times in the past I have done so, encouraging the living, standing around the grave, to address the person directly in their thoughts and words. We’d do a talking-stick circle where everyone could say their bit and recount their chunk of the life-story of the walked-out person and their abiding impressions. I’d encourage everyone, silently to themselves, to say all they needed to say to the person, to round out their relationship, and to hear the departed person’s truth, and thank them for their presence and for whatever, knowingly or not, they taught us while they were alive.
Anyway, Sophia is now very much at peace and in good hands, and she is going home, and the quiet manner of her departing was true to form, for her. A death like hers leaves the rest of us in an altered state because part of us goes with her, drawing attention to the wider and deeper meaning of life and what we are doing about it. This leads me to my latest podcast about Soul Education – recorded in early September. It’s not about death but about life. My starting premise is that we as souls did not begin our evolutionary journeys here on Earth, and that we come here for two primary reasons: to learn and to make a contribution.
Carn Euny iron age village, 2,000 years old
Cancer has been something of a gift because it gave me an indefinite though possibly imminent death sentence, which has brought forward this question of the contribution I have made and still make. It sharpens me up, in my constrained and slightly helpless state. Soon after getting diagnosed, in mid-November two years ago, on my back fighting for my life and amidst my pain, I was moved to write down all I knew about prehistoric culture – something I had not properly done before. This knowledge would be lost and wasted if I didn’t get it down. It gave me a focus through the next two years, and now it is virtually complete and ready to ‘put to bed’.
I now face a new question. My life might (or might not) be longer than the few years I expected. But I do not know what will happen, especially since, just two weeks ago, I was again not far from death’s door. I need to face the world and to supplement my income, since my pension and allowances no longer cover all my needs and costs and I have nothing to fall back on. But I cannot make arrangements, keep timetables, remember details and deal with the intricacies and obligations of conducting business – I don’t even know what state I’ll be in next Thursday, next month or next year, so making promises and agreements is just not realistic.
Working for a living (such as editing books or doing astrological sessions) is not easy now, even though I’m a solid workaholic. You see, when I fall ill, I cannot sit at the computer renegotiating arrangements with multiple people and giving them a reliable answer when they ask when I’ll be better and back to normal! If I died suddenly, lots of threads could be left untied. My recent health encounter took three weeks and I’m worn out, running on three cylinders. I’m destined to fail in dealing with the details of working for a living, and I know it, and I’ve had instances already where I have let people down or forgotten something, because I’m in an altered state with chemo-brain and fatigue. Or they’re in more of a hurry than I can keep up with.
I’m just not ‘up to speed’ or ‘in the loop’, and neither should I be. I’m still shielding. But I’m a Virgo with an inbuilt need to do my bit. I need to focus on what actually I can do, such as writing this cancer blog until I no longer can, or churning out podcasts and my forthcoming book, or doing psychic work and playing a part in the lives of people close by and far away. I do these not just for self-entertainment, though they do keep me occupied, but because I believe they bring some value.
Neolithic Chun Quoit as seen from bronze age Boswens menhir
Last week Lynne picked me up and I went to stay in Devon with her. That worked well, and the change and being with her after a too-long pause was good. But while I was there I encountered another issue: electrosensitivity. It has increased since I got cancer. It’s a blood cancer, and iron-rich blood is electronic and magnetic. Lynne is herself electrosensitive, so this is not what otherwise could be a difficult issue between us. But it affects my and our social life a lot.
Most people don’t understand radiation, and many think they are exempt from its effects when this is incorrect. Problem is, it takes me just three seconds of close exposure to mobile phone or wi-fi radiation to set me off for 36 hours. I go through a sequence of cumulative symptoms, depending on the amount of exposure. It starts with an agitated, embattled, uncentred, inarticulate, locked-in kind of feeling, progressing to a high-pitched whine in the centre of my skull, then some sharp, pulsing, show-stopping headaches, then a thumping, irregular heartbeat, then distinct feelings of flu-like illness lasting about 24 hours after exposure has stopped. This is upsetting, especially when it’s friends, loved ones and interesting people killing you. No one understands what they’re doing because it is not recognised as a problem.
From my own perspective, I think that EM and nuclear radiation probably account for at least 20% of the environmental damage, climate change, social stresses and health problems happening right now, globally. The world doesn’t want to know. Many people groan when I come up with things like this, and I have been criticised many times for awkward utterances, only to watch them come true in the longterm. I’m not right every time, but I’m correct enough times for it to matter. It’s the price of being a seer and choosing to live ahead of our time – I’m sure a lot of you know that one.
I turned vegetarian-vegan in 1971, but now is it no longer regarded as a deficiency or weakness, but that took 40-50 years. Twenty years ago I was involved with ‘talking to terrorists’ (Hamas) at a time when it was risky and taboo. But now, British soldiers tell us we should have talked more to the Taliban in Afghanistan – ahem, yes, precisely. It’s painful, living with this wilful blindness and watching the wider costs and hardships rise so high. This is the case now with the question of EM radiation – it is nicely invisible and deniable, and mobiles and wi-fi are so useful, but it’s harming us and our world. Even Extinction Rebellion and the Green Party have a blockage over this issue, and I do wonder why.
Caer Bran, the possible bronze age parliament site for Penwith, as seen from Grumbla in the valley below
It’s past lunchtime and time to go to bed. Fatigue is funny: when it comes, it’s like pushing through treacle. The law of gravity gets switched up, my mind dulls out and it’s like being muffled in wool. It can arrive quite suddenly, often in the afternoon or following a lot of activity. The secret is to accept it and not grind myself up feeling guilty or inadequate. I’ve pushed energy writing this blog, and now I need to put my body-mind system into freewheel for a recharge. Besides, it’s a grotty, rainy, grey, blustery day, and bed is the best place to be. With a cuppa, a few munchies, music by Brian Eno, and a good case of metaversal megaflop.
Thanks for being with. This time you get a podcast too, introduced by a nightingale.
Everything is okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
Looking out from a 4,000 year old chambered cairn at Treen, in West Penwith, toward the position of the summer solstice sunrise
This is my 41st blog entry since I gained cancer, would you believe – or it gained me. It is now almost two years since the first sign of cancer revealed itself: I was gardening at Lynne’s place and cracked my back. For the first two months it seemed I had a bad back issue, but by mid-November I was diagnosed with myeloma – bone marrow cancer. My life changed. I was given a new chapter of life. Now it has been nearly two years. I’m still here, still alive. Amazingly.
Myeloma is a blood cancer and, unlike tumorous cancers, it cannot be cut out or eliminated – it can only be managed. I’ve been on a course of chemo since February (DVD – Dara, Velcade and Dex) which is now cut down to one treatment per month of Dara (injection) and Dex (pills) – a nurse comes round to visit, do blood tests, give me the drugs and occasionally to pump me up with Zolodronic acid, by drip, which helps reconstruct my hollowing bones. This is because myeloma dissolves the bones – and that’s what, in the end, might well kill me. Collapsing bones that land me up in bed, or where I get breakages and complications from them.
Well, that’s the standard prognosis, but I’m rather different, and we shall see.
All this is because of a susceptibility and exposure to electromagnetic and nuclear radiation – yes, mobile phones and wi-fi. Which I no longer use, and anyone entering my house must switch off. Even so, some people forget, and some are even dishonest. What people don’t understand is that it takes three seconds to be irradiated and two days to get rid of it. That’s what it’s like being electrosensitive.
In what way am I different? Well, I’ve discovered a lot about this in the last two years, under test and in real terms. I’ve been an acid tripper since 1966, a health-conscious wholefood vegetarian since 1971 and a meditator since 1975. This has made a big difference, and it’s deeply embedded over half a century. When diagnosed with cancer I went through a few days of anger and feelings of letdown because I had honestly believed that my lifestyle would protect me from such ailments as cancer. But then a specialist came along to say, no, my cancer wasn’t a ‘lifestyle cancer’ arising from life-habits or other causes such as stress – it was from specific toxic poisoning from radiation exposure.
Though it is also true that there are deeper reasons, and psychiatrist Gabor Mate has something interesting to say about that: people who get cancer tend to be more tuned into others’ feelings, needs and thoughts than to their own. So cancer draws our attention back to ourselves. And staying attuned to your energy-state becomes very important.
Myeloma concerns blood, the life-blood that keeps me alive, and bones, the framework that holds me up and allows me to live. It’s core stuff – not just a stressed organ going wrong – and it concerns being alive and will to live. Being someone who has helped thousands of people change their lives and who has saved many lives, this is significant to me. I’m also one of those who has felt reluctant to be alive, though this has been a motivator too – giving me a desperate need to give meaning to my life, to justify being here.
A gull sitting on an ancient aligned stone, aligned toward the northermost of the Isles of Scilly, on Cape Kenidjack, West Penwith
There’s more. I’ve discovered that there are two levels of immunity. One is what people standardly regard as immunity, for which immune boosters such as Vit C, zinc or selenium and a wholesome diet with fresh foods and exercise help a lot. The other is an underlying resilience that arises from decades of care for oneself, in terms of diet, lifestyle, basic happiness and psychospiritual condition. This resilience has shone through during my struggle with cancer. It shows up in my medical results: the doctors sometimes say I’m lucky, but no, it is because of choices I made when I was young and have held to ever since.
There’s even more. I knew this theoretically beforehand, but I’ve now learned it in my cells and bones. My survival now depends not mainly on medication – which did indeed save me when I was at death’s door in late 2019 – but on the state of my spirits. Earlier this year I took life in my hands and deeply decided that I shall die when I have run out of energy and the will to hold myself up and maintain my spirits – no sooner, and no later. I’m a former mountaineer – I know this stuff. The state of my spirits keeps me alive. I do get deeply tired, and on some days I drag myself around like a lead weight, as if gravitation has been switched up and Sir Isaac Newton is working overtime. My batteries run down and my life-signs are measured in mega-flops.
But the key thing is this. As things have progressed I have gone for help to my ‘inner guides’ and ‘inner doctors’, and every week I do a deep meditation where I open myself up and yield to them, let them inspect me internally and do some fixing. And they do. And it works. It really works. But it requires deep surrender, trust and, dare I say it, belief. Were it not for this, I wouldn’t be alive now.
I’ve asked myself what life would be like if I didn’t have cancer. I realised that I had reached the end of my path. I’m a purpose-driven kinda guy, and I had run out of purpose without realising it. I was carrying on with my customary life-strategies but I wasn’t really fired up. Cancer has given me a new life by giving me new challenges: core challenges. I’ve been tasked with befriending death and completing my life. This wasn’t what I thought the plan was, but it is indeed a great gift.
The long and winding path – this one up Chapel Carn Brea, Britain’s last hill, to the 4,500ish year old cairns at the top
My old friend Bryony, a radiant lady and a devoted Buddhist, was my PA when we were organising the Hundredth Monkey Camps in the 1990s. She died of cancer at age 50 and she said, just before she went, that her life divided in two halves. One lasted 48 years, BC, before cancer, and the other lasted two years – and they were equal half-lives.
That’s what’s happened to me. Rob Hand, a well-known astrologer in Cape Cod, USA, once told me, when I was 40, that I would reach my peak in late life. Well, Rob, you were right. It made sense, because I have Saturn prominent in my birth chart. But I never anticipated cancer. It has prematurely aged me. Physically I am coming up 71, but I’ve been catapulted into my eighties, and on a ‘bad’ day in my nineties.
It reminds me of something the Tibetan lama Akong Rinpoche taught me in 1975: the real work happens when life is hard and you’re climbing uphill, and the times when you feel free, light and joyous are like holidays, to help you keep going. But then, he was a Capricorn.
In recent years some people of my generation have been thinking of themselves as elders. I’ve always balked at this. I’m a veteran, yes – a veteran of the revolution and a load of other things that would frighten many people. My life has been 120 years long, experientially. But I’ve now discovered what an elder really is.
To be an elder you need to lose your powers and abilities to a sufficient degree that you can no longer participate in life’s busy issues – you have to become incapable, dependent on others. This makes you see beyond normal ways of seeing things. A certain wisdom becomes available, yet it comes only when you can no longer act on life in the way you used to. We humans only really appreciate things when we lose them, and having Death staring at you, straight in the eyes, sure does change your perspective on life. You have to accept that you’re no longer in control. That brings forward the relative wisdom of elderhood – if, that is, you’re prepared to assume it, and if people around you actually want and need it.
I can’t do stuff any more. People want me to self-publish my book (which is still not out) but I don’t have what it takes to handle that. I am dependent on others for this. That’s just one example. And today, as I write, my valiant helper Penny, who deserves ten medals, comes round to clean up. I keep my house tidy on a day-to-day level (after all, I’m a Virgo) but I haven’t got what it takes to do deeper cleaning, recycling and sorting. I can no longer drive a car (a big thing for me), and she’s my daily-life fixer out there in the world. This week she’s going to get me a new dishwashing brush.
Treryn Dinas, a cliff sanctuary, and Pedn Vounder, a lovely and rather inaccessible beach
On Monday, Lynne left after one of our weekends, to go back home to Devon, and I depend enormously on her too: she’s my chief watcher, and she supports my heart and soul in thoroughly irreplaceable ways, and she helps me stay human. She loves me in ways I never thought anyone could. Circumstances meant that we hadn’t seen each other for two months. I’m a tough old boot and a survivor, but as soon as she walked in the door, everything was alright again for both of us. As she said last weekend, there’s something deeply magic between us – it’s almost as if we’d been fixed for each other. And remarkably, given my situation, I seem also to be supporting her heart and soul too, since she has a busy, engaged life of the kind I have now withdrawn from – and life hasn’t been at all easy for her recently. She’s had months of intensity and treading the edge.
I depend also on my truly dedicated and heroic shopper, Karen, who keeps me stocked with food each week. I depend on my landlords, the Tobins, for their hospitality, protection and goodwill. I rely on the wildlife outside my window – the swallows, tits, robins, buzzards, gulls and crows – who feed my spirits. And on you lot, who read my stuff and hear my podcasts, who give me a feeling there’s reason to stick around. And on my family, who still need me as a father and grandfather, however distant, hermity and weird I might be.
And on creativity: I’ve been limited to about 3-5 hours per day in my working capacities, but I’ve been very creative with it. That feeds me – and hopefully it feeds others too. But the biggest thing is my inner helpers. In the end, they’re keeping me alive, and this must be because they perceive a reason to do so.
Now here comes a plonker that will turn off some of you and twiggle the antennae of a few others: half of them are ETs. And, if I have it in me to write a further book, it might be about ETs. And MDIs – multidimensional intelligences. And what this means for the world. Most people think this is a peripheral, fanciful or deluded issue for cranks only, and of no relevance to them. Well, I have news for you.
If you think that climate change and resolving all of the world’s other endless problems is the most important question for the 21st century, think again. The biggest issue for humanity is meeting the neighbours. For which we are not ready.
However… resolving our world problems will make us ready. It will enable us to meet them as equals. Which is why they currently hold back. They’re waiting. To save us from our planetary plight they would currently have to stage a takeover, rendering us as subjects and victims, and this is not what is needed. They would need to suppress our strange human tendency to fight against them, defending our supposed freedom to do what we want – and a conflict would constitute a massive mission-failure for planet Earth. They would win, but they don’t want things that way. They are waiting for us to rise to our full stature as humans and take responsibility for our part in the universal story. Making progress in this is crucial not just for us but also for them.
Waves at Kilgooth Ust (Cape Cornwall)
What I am saying is not new. It was in a 1993 book I was commissioned to write for some beings called the Council of Nine, The Only Planet of Choice (now out of print and with collectors’ value). Gene Roddenbery was involved, and Startrek and the idea of the Prime Directive were based on his chats with the Nine. Thirty years after writing that book, my experience has led me to understand that the Nine were right. Planet Earth’s progress is important for the universe.
It is not really for me to choose whether to write this book, since I cannot control how long I live or whether my brains will handle writing another book (it’s hard work). I’ll do it if I can, and if the right flow starts up to allow me to write what is truly needed. But first, I must complete what I’m currently doing. On my ‘up’ days, I can see the possibility of doing such a book, though on my ‘down’ days, when I’m dragging myself around and making a cup of tea is a big deal, it seems a ridiculous proposition – and who would be interested anyway? And am I bothered?
We shall see. That’s what life is like now – it goes on a daily basis. I might live seven years, or I might fall over, break my bones and pop my clogs in a month. We shall see. That vulnerability, that rather big open question, now determines my life. Over time I’ve been describing to you how gaining cancer has been an amazingly strange gift – it has given me a new life, even if shortened in terms of ticktock time. Now let me deliver you another plonker. Some of you won’t like this or agree, but I’ve always been like this: I don’t always deliver notions people would prefer to hear.
The environmental problem and the world’s vast stock of problems are a great gift. They are the beginning of a new life for humanity. We are at last growing up. It’s happening now. The solutions lie within the problems we face, in all their details. And, despite the underlying fear, anxiety, loathing and resistance we humans are infected with nowadays, all eight billion of us, each in our ways, we’re going to make it.
The only question is how much pain and damage has to happen first – and that’s our choice. In making it we shall rise to a more full stature as a planetary race. We will become ready to meet the neighbours. Because we as souls come from them. No one started their journey here, and nobody is here by accident.
Brothers and sisters: be in peace in your hearts, and get on with whatever you know in your blood and bones to be good and true. Get on with it please. For that’s what we are here for. There was a nuclear scientist who asked the Nine whether there was one thing that would really change everything, that humanity could do. The Nine were good at one-liners. They said, simply, everything will change when everyone on Earth gets on with their life-purpose. It is already programmed inside us. If everyone does that, everything will get covered. We don’t need to find or get it: it’s with us now and we need to do it.
For you who are interested, here’s a transcript of a regression I did to re-live the life-changing near-death experience I had in 1974. www.palden.co.uk/nde.html
St Michael’s Mount – 5,500 years ago a Neolithic Tor Enclosure. Picture from my book.
The deed is done. I finished writing my book Shining Land. Been writing it since December. So now it will go out to a few readers for checking – I present quite a few radical ideas, and I want to make sure they make sense. It’s all about the ancient sites of West Penwith and ‘megalithic geoengineering’. Phew, so that’s done. Now I can pay more attention to family, friends and people.
After my cancer treatment in November to March I landed up with a lot of fatigue and brain-fog, so in the last six months I haven’t been very functional. I’ve been alive and active for only 6-8 hours each day, with a need to do my daily tasks, cook food and run my house as well as write the book and live a life. All in a slow and doddery way.
I’ve had a lot of trouble with making decisions, complexity and problem-solving, and yet, when I’ve been clear enough to write, my brains have done well. Obviously it concerns different parts of the brain. But one advantage of the fatigue has been that, when I go to bed in the afternoon, lying there in a strange heavy stupour with my leaden body totally flumped, my psyche floats around the subtle worlds in a hypnopompic, dreamlike state, and in that time I’ve mulled sluggishly over things and given each proposition and paragraph far more thought than I’ve done in the ten previous books I’ve written.
It’s strange, writing books. You can’t show anyone until long after it’s finished. It’s hidden away in a computer file, and I can’t hold it, prod it or wave it around. As far as you lot are concerned, I’ve been quiet, seemingly doing nothing. But I’ve been doing lots. It’s now ready – apart from a final review after a few readers have vetted it.
Lockdown hasn’t been a problem. Every time I write a book I go into lockdown, so I’m well practiced. When I did The Only Planet of Choice in 1992 I was locked down for 18 months. The main difference has been that, usually, people think I’m being antisocial. But during Covid I’ve suddenly not been antisocial. Nothing changed for me – it was others’ attitudes that changed! But if ‘normality’ returns, I’ll be antisocial again, haha.
Meanwhile, healthwise I have been improving 5-10% each month. As Victoria, a nurse heroine, warned me back in March, I won’t return to the same place where I was before I was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer. Back at winter solstice I felt like a 95 year old. Now I feel like an 80 year old – getting younger! But I don’t think I’ll get a lot younger. My body is getting older – I’ve just reached what my old friend Sig Lonegren, the dowser, called the Big-Seven-Oh. He reached it ten years before me.
You ought to see all the supplements and remedies I’m taking. Most of them are capsuled in those funny plasticky capsules, and I don’t want to swallow 15 of those every day. So religiously I break open these dratted things, mix them together, add a dash of top-grade local runny honey, let it soak in, and then I take this superpowered spludge on a teaspoon. I’m no longer on pharmaceuticals, thanks be.
One of the weird things has been that, during my treatment since November, only one doctor has actually touched me – that was a poor registrar who had to stick his finger up my bum to see whether I had prostate cancer (I don’t). It has been ‘bloods’, x-rays, PET scans, CT scans and MRI scans and, sure, they’re amazing. But not a soul has actually listened to my heart, looked at my tongue or touched me. This is modern medicine.
So when I went to John Tillyard, a brilliant chiropractor in Hayle, he actually touched me, and it was amazing! His hands were so firm, and he was so good at what he was doing – he hit me on the spot first time and every time. Three treatments and I was standing and moving so much better. Bless you, John – you’re a good man. Soul-sister Miriam has been giving me remote healings on Zoom too – I am much blessed.
My back will never return to its former strength and straightness – I’ll probably be using sticks for the rest of my life. It’s useful having four legs though. I can stagger around the house without sticks for up to three minutes, and that’s it. Three vertebrae in my lower back collapsed a year ago – that was the first sign of the cancer. My bones have lost substance: I click my back in at least five places when I lie down. You can hear it – it’s quite shocking first time. Bone marrow cancer erodes your bones, and though this has been stopped by the chemo treatment, my bones aren’t what they were.
For astrologers out there, guess what, I’m on a Neptune opposition Saturn right now, and it’s all about bones. Bones that have lost their firmness. I’ve had teeth falling out too. But I’m still here and, despite this, when my energy is up I can walk a mile or two – slowly and dodderily – especially in inspiring places, of which there is no shortage around here.
Thanks be to three amazing ladies. First is Lynne, who cares for my heart, spirits and soul, second is Penny, a fine soul who cleans my house and does tasks, and third is Karen, a Brummie angel who does my shopping each Thursday. I am held in the hands of the Goddess. Also Helen, my homoeopath, who gave me a radioactive lanthanide Curium 1M remedy recently, and that really pulled me together. Oops, was it legal to say that?
The doctors are happy with my cancer – the readings are good – but they think I might have lung cancer. I don’t. When I said this to the specialist I could see her thinking, “Uh-oh, he’s one of those”. She politely called my response ‘conservative’. Then, just this morning, a lung cancer nurse rang me, following a recent CT scan – a really nice chap – to tell me that the suspected lung cancer has not got worse and might even have got a bit better. They’ll test me again in a year. I told him that, all my life, I’ve been something of a healer, especially in my humanitarian work, and this is a case of Healer, heal thyself. “Interesting attitude”, he said. “You might be right”.
I’ve been rather shocked though at the extent to which the NHS hasn’t been caring much for me – and I’m glad I have holistic treatments and practitioners to resort to. But there’s a problem with both doctors and holistic practitioners: they are all specialists, all stuck in silos. It’s a completely non-integrated system, both in the NHS and the holistic sector. No one except Lynne is watching my overall condition. I’ve even had difficulty getting advice and appointments from my GP. When I ring them they take copious notes and… nothing happens.
That’s weird. I understand their situation with Covid, but I’m feeling ignored. But then, that simply means it’s for me to self-manage and do whatever I feel best, and that suits me fine. Kind of. I’d appreciate more knowledge and advice, especially (here comes a pipedream) from someone who understands both pharma and holistic medicine.
So now I’m a seventysomething. I never thought I’d get this far. In my life I’ve had at least ten opportunities to die, and I’m still here! Hello world. I’ll live until my angels decide it’s no longer worth keeping me here, and I get the feeling they have a few more tasks lined up. The book I’ve just written was the first. Since having cancer I’ve moved into a new archetype within – which many might see, for better or worse, as a ‘wise old man’ archetype. I’m becoming a voice calling from the far beyond (well, down’ere near Land’s End, it does feel like that). That’s what ‘Penwith’ means – the end of the beyond.
The ancient name for this Land’s End area is Belerion – the shining land. And it does.
Some time ago, when fire-walking was all the rage, people nagged me to join in and I just wasn’t taken with it. Perhaps they thought I was weak-willed – me, with Mars in Scorpio? No, if you want a test of the will, try cancer. It’ll get you where expensive new age trainings just don’t reach. It’ll confront you with all your fears. It’ll give you the biggest choice you ever made. It’s gloriously unromantic. It’ll truly test your will to live. It will hone your spirit – if, that is, you choose that route. It’ll prepare you for joining the Ancestors. It’s a bizarre kind of Gift of God. I don’t recommend it, but if it comes to you, do your best with it.
I’ve done acid, been with Tibetan Lamas, swamis, shamans, sheikhs and so many wondrous people, I’ve communed with ETs and transdimensional beings, hobnobbed with magnates, hippies, monarchs and Gazans, and cancer is another stage on that enlightenment path. Before any of us came here, we were, after all, warned that it was not going to be easy on Earth. We thought, “That’s okay, I’ll manage it, and besides, I want the chocolate”. And here we are, on this Earth – and you ought to find out about the crimes, injustices and near-slavery that are involved in providing you with that chocolate too.
This is the time and the future is here, now. This is it. Forget returning to normality: too much in this world needs to change and we can’t afford normality – it’s a killer. Normality is eating out the heart of the Mother.
Now that I’ve finished the book, I might muster up some further utterances on the state of the world, as I see it. Might even do some podcasts from stone circles and clifftops, far beyond, with not a surveillance camera in sight. We shall see. One day at a time.
And bless you all for being you. Thanks for reading this.
I keep on falling into eureka-traps. This has been a lifelong blessing and a bane. They usually come late in the evening and, from that moment on, I’m compelled to pursue them. It starts with a brainwave, a prompt to look a things through a certain optic, often to overcome my own resistances too, and then it relentlessly unfolds from there. Currently fuelled by rose congou tea, interspersed with sips of a homoeopathic remedy made of potentised lava from the Hekla volcano in Iceland.
Or perhaps it came when Lynne and I recently visited Bosiliack Barrow, a late-neolithic chambered cairn. That’s a great place for fetching insights. Sometimes it’s as if the spirits of the place almost want to blurt them out, excited that at last they have a receptive ear. Many of my archaeological revelations have originated there, and Lynne seems to ‘get’ stuff too, and she’s always glowing afterwards. I struggled along on my sticks, with Lynne patiently following, to ensure I wouldn’t fall – but having four legs is pretty stable, to be honest, even when the world is wobbling.
Anyway, I’d been resisting this because I somehow knew it would open up a line of work that would proliferate endlessly, and part of me is tired of these eureka moments. I love them too, and it’s my life, but I’m on a major Neptune opposition Saturn transit at present and I’m feeling the weight of it. Feeling the weight of my patterns. Feeling the weight of my back – it hurts continually – and I’m gravitationally compromised.
This new project started actually because I realised there was a gap in my book concerning sacred geometry. I’m not good at it, you see. I’m good at visual pattern recognition but not at numbers – azimuths, angles, proportions, pi and phi ratios. So I was holding back, putting up a prayer that a geometry expert might appear – and they didn’t. Spontaneously, last night, fullmoon as it happened, I sat down, shrugged shoulders and started playing around on the map.
Within two hours I had a load of significant geometric triangles. It was quite a shock, how easily it came. Now I have to measure angles and distances and try to figure out the meaning and significance of all this. The 1% inspiration bit is over and 99% perspiration bit is yet to come. I’ve just started this map and it’s unfinished, an experimental draft map at this stage.
This’ll probably provoke a torrent of e-mails, messages, YouTube videos, most of which I can’t reply to, and requests to make maps of Northumberland or Essex, to which the answer is No, please do it yourself and show me what you come up with!
You see, I might sound vigorous and in good shape, but I’m not. Recently I’ve been labouring, achingly holding myself up, experiencing difficulty looking after my house and cooking, and I get terrible fatigue. My former neighbour Penny has just started helping me though, which is an immense relief. I’m a domesticated Virgo who usually runs a good house, but I can’t keep up now. My bathroom is spotless and she’s attacking the kitchen next.
Never in my life have I expected to be cut down like this. I never knew what fatigue or cancer could be like until I started experiencing them personally. Early on in my cancer treatment I felt I suddenly aged to about 95, and I assumed I’d grow back down again to my current bodily age (70 in September), but it’s hardly happening. Well, perhaps I’m 88 now. I’ve got chemo side-effects to deal with, such as arthritis (aching hips) and neuropathy (feet filled with chilli-pepper, it feels like). I can no longer tell how much I’m young at heart and how much I’m a grumbly old codger.
At least in body. I’m such an incorrigibly positive fucking optimist, and my heart, mind and soul are doing just fine, in a way – if anything, cancer-riddled self-examination has been a gift, an uplift amidst the grinding pain and the threat of early death. But I have my down moments, and recently I’ve been wading around in the underworld, dredging my fears, grinding my stuff and talking to myself too much.
I let it out through the keyboard. Only some of this is visible to you folks – much of it is accumulating in the book I’m writing, hidden away on my computer. It’s not available except for a sample chapter and contents list for publishers. Or it’s longterm projects that emerge gradually, like the Meyn Mamvro archive. I spend endless hours on these things.
I get dual feelings. I love my work yet I’m tired of keyboards. Been a keyboard-slave since about 1964, when I started annoying my mother by using her clackety old mechanical typewriter. By 1971 I started out on the world’s then fourth largest computer: it had a memory of 64k! It was all Fortran IV, punchcards and dot-matrix printouts.
This said, with the last of the money that you people on Facebook kindly donated to help me in my cancer process, I’ve bought a new computer – a laptop called a Toughbook (military grade, no less). I got £350 off the price! My old computer died, after 11 years’ stalwart service in deserts, airports and on Cornish farms. I’ve also bought a studio quality sound recorder (£150 off). At some point podcasts will emerge through it. I used to do radio in the Seventies and Naughties, so I’m no stranger to it.
This is the kind of thing I’m doing with my new life. I can’t travel, hobnob, teach, agitate or organise things, so I’m keyboarding a lot, doing that blessing and bane business. At great length. There’s nothing much else to do – I’ve been locked down since November, when I was diagnosed with cancer. But then, half of me is a hermit, and I live in a lovely place, so I’m okay about that.
And the fool on the hill sees the sun go down, and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round…
One of the banes of astrologers is that we’re always asked, “What does a Mars square Jupiter mean?“. Well, at least that’s better than being required to guess some stranger’s sun sign, as if that’s a test of how good an astrologer we might be, or as if getting it wrong constititutes proof that astrology is a load of bunkum.
Here in these words you’ve had an exposition of what a Neptune opposition Saturn ‘means’ – the kind of issues that can come up. In one sense it’s a time of uplift and in another sense it’s about carrying that weight.
The doctor has suddenly remembered I’m here, and tells me that she thinks something more might be wrong with me. They want to fill me with radioactivity and do a PET scan, in the back of a truck in the car park at Trelliske hospital in Truro. I have strong reservations. About the scan, not the truck.
Staying alive takes on strange twists and turns. But at last it’s raining, and nature is drinking it up. Yesterday we had multiple rainbows – perhaps somewhere in the world a great being was being born.
Amazingly, life continues another day.
Please forgive me for (mostly) not answering e-mails and messages. You see, I’m not as active and capable as most people, and if I spent time chatting I wouldn’t be getting on with what I’m called to do. Like the above crazy map-making.
Staloluokta in Sapmi in 2011, 90km from the road and 200km from the shops. Sapmi, the land of the Sami people, is known to many of us as Lappland, northern Sweden
Today I reached a point where it was down to thinking up the final humdinger of a paragraph for my forthcoming book ‘Shining Land’. It’s nearly there.
The great thing about this book, my eleventh, is that I’ve given a lot of time and consideration to every thought and proposition while lodged in the cosmological cocoon of my bed, looking out over the fields and woods at the jackdaws, swallows and buzzards.
With plenty of timespace to think. The book is all about time, space and consciousness. It’s going to annoy the hell out of some sceptics and rationalists, not least during this triumphal period of all-embracing Science.
Now I must review the whole 100,000 word manuscript again, submit it to two ‘expert readers’ to check through the ideas, compile the online appendices, enter the illustrations and maps into the manuscript, and it’s done. Phew. The book will come out, regardless, in digital format: the main issue is whether it comes out in print (the costliest and most complex option).
Then it’s two months of sitting around, kinda fallow, thumb twiddling, wondering what to do with myself. The creative vacuum creeps up afterwards. It does give time and space for things I ignored before, and for dwelling on nothing in particular.
Writing books is a self-imposed lockdown – most of the time an anti-social activity but now transcovidated into responsible self-isolation and social distancing. I’m doing the same thing as before but not, this time, anti-socially. Apparently. These twists of judgement are always strange for Aspies to get our heads around.
I’ve been on lockdown since mid-November, when diagnosed with myeloma. Approaching six months. So there was little change when Covid slunk in like a voracious Neptunian mist, taking over everyone’s lives and tenuous sense of reality. I just carried on – out of my head on chemotherapy and steroids.
It gets a bit boring, this lockdown, even though I have stuff I can get on with, in my slowly ponderous six-hours-per-day, wiped out, struggling way, stumbling around like a 96 year old. I’ve been on my own quite a lot throughout life and get a bit fed up of myself, my own cooking, my repetitive, stuck Virgo patterns and ossified daily methodologies. Why people want to prolong their lives and achieve immortality beats me. But then, ‘You were a strange little child’, my mother once said, and ‘You’re not like the child I brought up’.
Tomorrow, I am appearing on an Indian social psychologists’ online conference on the overall social effects of Covid, giving them a prescribed ten minutes on the psychodynamics of accelerated social-cultural change. Me, a global health expert, hobnobbing with people bearing doctorates…
This is one of the unexpected outcomes of having cancer. Lots of things have changed. Here’s one. People who want to hear me are now predominantly in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, not Europe and America. Growing for years, suddenly it shifted critically, recently. My last book Possibilities 2050 I wrote with them in mind. I made it available for free, so that expense and availability would not be barriers. They can read it on their mobiles, and it uses little bandwidth. Now I’m hearing from really interesting folk in Gambia, Malawi, Uganda, and Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Bangladesh, Tuvalu and Cuba. Magic.
What I like most about this is that, if I’m delivering something people really find useful, it draws something out of me. I’m quite accustomed to being part of something that ought to be much bigger than it is, but it’s good having people gladly soaking up this stuff – and making it their own, doing it their way. Fuck the royalties and getting famous – I just want to get on with what I’m here for before I no longer am here.
These people are not emulating the West; they’re overtaking us. They’re the world’s future and the majority are under 30. Many ideas coming from the back-alleys and the underground in the West have become useful to them. They’ve seen the impositional side of us but there are fertile outpourings from the unofficial culture in the West that are invaluable too. Permaculture being one. Talking stick. Herbalism. Astrology. Holism. Homoeopathy. Anything interesting, stimulating and new.
We Westerners need to listen up. Our majority culture has become sclerotic, stuck in a groove, constrained by its vested interests and comfortaable habits. Yet it has much of value. Especially a lot of the things we haven’t given enough attention to. We were too busy making money, or trying to.
We still want to be the leaders, the teachers. The mission to civilise is still alive and well, as is the hypocrisy. No, we’re the minority and being outclassed. Declining without appropriate grace. But most of us are goodguys and mean well – that’s our asset.
It’s time for us to rejoin the human race. Exceptionalism no longer works. Wanting to be the leaders blocks the flow. Lecturing obstructs hearing.
Yet, as a cancer experiencer, I’m so fortunate to be undergoing treatment here in UK. I have access to the best of conventional and holistic medicine, healers and advisers, people praying and reiki-ing me too, and I’m grateful for that.
I’ve offered myself for research and observation, having had some of the best results seen for years. But no, no interest. Oh well, it saves me being poked, prodded and sent to London!
The Management has recently been doing a little fixing. Normal service is unlikely to be resumed. Apologies for the disruption. Please recycle all used containers and clear up your litter after you.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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