Since it’s crap weather (here in Cornwall, at least), and winter seems to be coming on early (here in Cornwall, at least), you might like some vitamins for the ears (wherever you are, and however things are).
I’ve assembled my four audiobooks in one place, here…
Good for when you’re stuck in a traffic jam, stuck in bed, stuck in the kitchen or stuck on a train, or if you’re fed up with the radio, or simply if you’d like something interesting to listen to!
So here am I, a lifelong author and communicator, and I’ve been sitting here in recent weeks with nothing much to say. That’s unusual. It isn’t ‘writer’s block’: it’s a funny feeling of little to say. In my birth chart, Neptune and Saturn are opposing Mercury right now, so I guess this blog is expressing the essence of what that double transit is bringing.
I’m one of those authors who, if I have little that is meaningful to say, I don’t just rattle off material just to fill space, stay regular, fulfil expectations or contractual requirements. I go quiet instead. The best of my writing has always come when there’s a need. I wake up with it, and out it comes.
In life this has given rather uncanny gift which has been both a blessing and a bane: a strange capacity to articulate ideas and perspectives that other people were about to get, but they hadn’t got there yet. As if speaking to people from the future, pointing to how it’s going to be. Or might be. Or could be.
I haven’t always got this right, though there have been times I’ve got things very right. Sometimes I’ve perceived a possible reality that just didn’t happen that way, or I underestimated the influence of obstructors, or got my facts wrong, or suffered wishful thinking or over-optimism, or simply mis-estimated things.
Yet at times I’ve hit the nail right on the head, and it has sparked outcomes or affected people and situations far more than anticipated – sometimes going into the magical-miracle zone. Cosmic catalysis.
It’s a question of whether the benefits from things I got right have outweighed the misfires and problematicals. It feels as if this question is on the weighing scales at present. And, perhaps to prove the point, recently I’ve had little to say. It’s a pause for rumination. Or perhaps a reality-flip is going on. Or a reassessment.
A winding lane in Grumbla, Cornwall
My ongoing cancer saga continues. A new symptom has appeared in recent months: I’m losing the use of my legs. That’s what it feels like, though diagnosis is yet to come, following an imminent MRI scan of my pelvis and a diagnosis in the coming week. My legs are exhausted after a hundred yards, as if I’d just hiked forty miles. Even when just standing still, they turn to rubber, as if they’re about to give way.
It varies on whether it’s an Up day or a Down day. Down days have increased, when I have little energy, drive or inspiration. So something is going on.
It reminds me of six years ago when no distinct symptoms of cancer had yet appeared, but something wasn’t right. It wasn’t possible to put a finger on anything until my back suddenly gave way in August 2019. This was the first concrete symptom of a rapidly developing blood cancer, Multiple Myeloma. It’s ‘multiple’ because it has a range of disparate effects that vary greatly from person to person. This makes it difficult to diagnose.
So it took twelve long weeks to progress from a back-breakage to a cancer diagnosis, though this process was helped by a series of three inspired acts of intuition by, in succession, a cranial osteopath, a GP and a hospital specialist. Bless them all.
I can’t put my finger on what’s happening now, but something is happening. Astrologically, it concerns Mercury, and I’m a Mercurial person (a Virgo with a Gemini Moon). This feels neurological. There’s that ‘nothing to say’ syndrome too. And there’s more.
Rock art, Morvah, Penwith
It concerns ‘growing down’ – losing our powers. This demands a lot of acceptance – getting used to the fact that something is ending. Really ending. In the past I’ve been a cross-country runner and mountaineer, and I find loss of leg-power to be confronting.
Also, as an author, many people are retreating from their phones and social media habits and, thus, many of my readers are simply disappearing. The default answer is to spread into new online media and engage in networking and marketisation strategies. I’m getting loads of e-mails from online promoters who want to marketise my podcasts.
I’d love to reach more of the kinds of people who might benefit from my blogs and podcasts, but I’m not interested in all that promo stuff. My abilities are waning and I can’t manage the work that’s involved. I’m not seeking to set up a business or build my career. This lifelong content creator is sharing his end-of-life process, that’s all.
By nature I am, or was, an integrity-marketer, studiously avoiding falsities, glamours, competitiveness and deceptions in my approach. I used to be a whizzo at this, but not now – my time was 20-40 years ago. Nowadays, online media are changing so much – I can’t keep up, and get my head around all the details. Meanwhile, digital costs and charges are rising, and this obliges monetisation. I can’t do this any more, I don’t have what it takes to crank up a business and I don’t want to leave too many complexities for my son to sort out when I pop my clogs.
So where this goes is anyone’s guess. Anything that increases my workload or demands feats of memory and micro-management will simply not work. Anything I do needs to serve my health and wellbeing without weighing me down, and I’m already going at the maximum pace I can handle. So there’s a dilemma here.
Fresh sets of eyes peer out on the great wide world. In a few weeks they will fly thousands of miles.
Anyway, there’s something to learn from all this. It’s a matter of looking at what’s underneath. It’s about acceptance of What Is. It’s a reduction of options. This happens to those of us who experience a gradual, stepwise end-of-life decline instead of a sudden, drastic one – things narrow and shut down, bit by bit. It’s simply a matter of doing our best with what is, and what we’re capable of doing – there’s little or no option. It can be difficult and rather final, though there’s a joy and fulfilment in it too, if we choose to see the gift in it.
Earlier in my cancer saga I used to measure my condition in terms of perceived age. My physical age is currently 74, and normally I hover around 80-85 in perceived age, but in the last few days I’ve felt like 95 – energyless, wan, off-balance, needing someone to hold my hand, and wondering whether the latest rewrite of my will makes sense.
Yet I’m also transported into the eternal present, propped up in bed, hearing the singing of birds in a crisp, microsecond, sonorous, meaning-rich way, as if they’re teaching me something. Which they are.
They’re teaching me a very special something. A something that words cannot truly encompass because words reduce it. It’s a silence between each frame of life’s movie. A moment of seeing, a shifting of optic, a moment of existential tranquillity. It’s very quiet. It’s momentary yet vast. A glimpse of the Void. A taste of the Silence. A Neptunian slippage of consciousness into a temporary eternity.
So perhaps having little to say has its virtues. After all, I’ve managed to say something about it, so something must be happening right! It just goes to show, there is indeed a gift in everything.
This is particularly for people affected by cancer or any other serious or terminal illness.
I’ve been a member of the Honourable Company of Cancer Patients for over five years now and, amazingly, I’m still alive, and against the odds. I have a blood cancer, Multiple Myeloma, and I didn’t expect to live this long.
I waded through the tough grind of chemotherapy and dealing with physical disablement. I went down, nearly fell through the cracks, and found myself emerging from a dark tunnel around three years ago.
I found myself starting a new life – well, kind of. I have no idea how long I am to live – it could be next month or five years. But I found a reason to be alive.
This podcast is not about the medical stuff: it’s about the experience of cancer and what it can do to us. Deep in our soul.
This is my fiftieth podcast from the far beyond. The birds in the intro and outro were recorded here on the farm early in the morning on 19th February 2025. To me, they’re medicine birds – especially the geese, who overwinter here.
Yes, that’s the drug I’m on today, together with Lenidalomide, Dexamethasone, Apixaban and Aciclovir – it’s enough to make pharma-paranoiacs run a mile. Many have been the messages I’ve had which recommend all sorts of alternative means of staying alive. No doubt well intentioned, I nevertheless find myself writing back to ask whether they have actual experience of what they recommend – which has mostly not been the case. Most seem to think I have a ‘normal’ cancer, without actually knowing I have Multiple Myeloma, an incurable blood cancer and definitely not normal.
I’ve listed all the holistic supplements, remedies and methods that I use in my cancer treatment in my book and audiobook ‘Blessings that Bones Bring‘. With a philosophy of counting my blessings, I’m doing both pharma and holistics, and it works, and the ideological contradiction between them that many people set up for themselves is something I gladly omit to subscribe to.
Just as well really – I’m alive against the odds. But the biggest medicine of all is this. If you are practicing your life-purpose, the reason why you came here to Earth, as a priority, then you’re likely to stay alive until it’s reasonably complete – whatever that means. However, here’s the rub: for some people, dying and the manner of their death can also be part of that life-purpose. Princess Di was an example.
It’s an initiation. You might be a smart-arse with a masters or a doctorate, but they will not qualify you for this. What’s needed is every single cubic inch of humanity you have in you. It comes at you, takes away your control and takes you off, out of your body to another place.
Or perhaps you believe it all goes dark and the you that is you somehow suddenly stops being you – you’ve become a useless pile of dust returning to the dust. Well, good luck with that, though you might be heading for a few surprises. In my experience, the journey doesn’t stop there. Just as well really.
I do have a strange tendency to believe that there’s more to existence than that. The last five years, since cancer gave itself to me, have reinforced that belief. If indeed it is a belief. After all, do I believe in breakfast? Do I believe in trees, rain and sunshine? I’ve been really close to dying, several times. Actually, I shouldn’t be alive – and that’s not a medical opinion but my own observation. I’ve made it through thanks to a series of miracles, a few acts of faith and a strange capacity to rebirth myself. Plus the prayers and goodwill of friends, the blessings of guardian angels, and… work. Yes, work. Working at the reason why I came, and whether I’ve done enough of it to feel satsified with a job well enough done.
Much to my surprise. I wasn’t expecting to be alive after five years, and it leaves me in rather an open space. I thought that at most I had three years, and now I’m on extra time. It’s a matter of figuring out how to make plans while knowing that I’m vulnerable enough, and my grip on life is tenuous enough, to pop my clogs tomorrow or the next day.
For me, it’s a matter of taking charge of my death. It’s my decision – not anyone else’s. Except perhaps for those angels. A year ago, my haematological specialist at the Royal Cornwall hospital said to me, “Well, Mr Jenkins, I don’t know what you do, and I don’t want to know but, whatever you’re doing, keep on doing it“. Indeed, I did, and I’m still here. I’m an easy customer for her – I get few complications, I’m uncomplaining though I’m also calm and clear about certain issues, and she leaves me to my own devices. No, not toxic digital devices, but devices such as intuition… and inner doctors.
Yes, I’ve got some inner doctors. I called them in at an early stage. My angels shunted a few in, too. Once a week, I have a session with them (and at no charge). I go into myself, breathing myself down into a deep state, and I open myself up to them, and there they are. They examine and scan me – using psychospiritual technologies that make Startrek look primitive. I feel them umming and aaahing over things, and consulting, and sometimes I’m flooded with light, or they insert a light-tube into me, or they focus on an organ, and often I’m not at all sure what they’re doing but I can feel them doing it.
At times they raise me up to their level and it feels so friendly, inclusive and welcoming there. I kinda hover there, on my back, held in the middle of their energy-field and jiggled, poked, massaged and blessed by invisible forces. After a while they drop me back down again.
It’s funny how it works. The doctors at Treliske have been worrying about the fact that I’ve been a lifelong smoker – it helps my brains and, as a psychic, also helps me stay on Earth – since I am not a foodie, which is the other way many psychics stay on Earth. So I was to go in for a lung scan. But during my last session with the inner doctors, I did two things. One was to ask for their help in cleaning out my lungs and removing anything that’s unhelpful, and the second was to offer myself up and release all hopes, fears and expectations, to get to a state of full acceptance that, whatever is to happen will happen, and it will be good.
So they flooded my lungs with light and I felt them doing something there. I continued with this in the days that followed but, the day before the scan, the thought came, “Hmmm, this needs more time…“. Claire, a trusty helper from over the hill, took me for the scan. I walked into chaos – the power had gone off – but eventually, on the second interview, the nurse said, “Ah, Mr Jenkins, I’m sorry to say that we can’t scan you because you had a PET scan last August and we cannot scan you more than once a year“. I quietly chuckled. Yes indeed, this needs more time, and I’d just been given it. The nurse didn’t notice me looking upwards and smiling. This is how it sometimes works.
I thanked her for her consideration, saying I am electrosensitive and it matters to me. “Ah, that’s interesting“, said she, proceeding to ask questions as if she knew about it. This was refreshing: in the last five years only one doctor has indicated interest. He showed me a paper in The Lancet which correlated incidences of Multiple Myeloma with proximity to nuke stations. Since then I’ve met other Myeloma patients who have worked operating radar systems, driving nuclear-waste trains from Sellafield, working as high-tension power cable or mobile phone engineers, or as programmers who’ve used a lot of wi-fi…
Once information about EM-radiation is finally made public, everyone will no doubt bleat, “But why weren’t we told?”. To which the answer is: “Why didn’t you feel it and use your commonsense? Did you think it would be alright to irradiate yourself all day and every day without consequence?”.
Well, we humans… we find quite intricate ways of limiting our possibilities and making life difficult. The same applies to me. However, while I have my own self-immolating patterns, I’ve also looked after myself and now find myself still alive as a result – if proof be needed. I’m definitely glad that, at an early age (21) I went vegetarian and changed my life – it has paid off. Yes, I got cancer, but my capacity to deal with it is far greater than most people’s, because on the whole I’ve had a good diet and lifestyle, having built up a good reserve stock of resilience.
But here’s what in the end is the key bit: I’ve been following a growth path, with fewer diversions and denials than most ‘average’ people. If you live on purpose and in purpose, it gives you distinct reasons for staying alive.
But even then, the stories of our lives are multiplex and not limited to being alive in a body. Many of us aren’t even fully installed in our bodies, even when emotionally attached and afraid of losing them. The Council of Nine put it quite well…
“Your Planet Earth is the most beautiful that exists in the universe. It has a physical variety that no other planet has. It has a varied climate that no other planet has. In all the universe there is no planet in existence that has the physical characteristics of Planet Earth. It is the rarest of beauties, and it does attract souls which, once they have come, would like to come back again. This has created a bottleneck of souls recycling on Earth.
“It is of a different nature from any other planet. It has aspects of all planets: it is like a composite of the Universe, with all the positive and all the negative aspects, and all in between, and this is what attracts souls.
“It has with it a gravitational pull that is different from other planets, and because of this a soul begins to feel a physicalness. Souls become adapted to their physical bodies, and they forget the freedom and pleasures they have without it.
“The Earth was created to be a paradise. When souls achieve harmony it will become a paradise again. Planet Earth is the only one of its kind, the only planet of free [individualised] choice in the entire universe, the planet created for the balancing of the spiritual with the physical – in other words, the creating of paradise.“
To some extent this ‘paradise’ business is an attitude of mind. In a funny sort of way, since getting cancer and becoming partially disabled I’ve been happier than before. It’s all to do with how we deal with the life we’ve been given. Nowadays, a lot of people do a lot of complaining about life, as if it’s all someone or something else’s fault. But my best recommendation is, just go to Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Belarus, Syria, Ukraine, Xinjiang or Myanmar – there are plenty of options – and do a full-spectrum re-assessment. You might find that you come to feel differently about things. That’s what happened to me.
Yeah, life’s a bitch, then you die. However, here’s another gem from the Nine: no one is here by accident.
So, you see, even on pharmaceutical cancer drugs, you can do something with it to make it good. That’s where that free, individualised choice truly lies. It’s on us, not anyone or anything else.
I didn’t expect to be alive today. Yet here I am and here we are, and this is it. We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st Century.
Born mid-century in 1950, it’s rather an age-marker for me. In my twenties in the 1970s, I didn’t really expect that the world would still exist in 2025 – it seemed an age away, and back then the world’s prospects seemed very much at risk. They still are.
It feels as if I’ve lived several lives since then. A new one started in 2019. As a cancer patient since then, I haven’t expected to be alive now either. Five years ago it felt like I’d reached the end, with just one year left. My body was on its last legs, wrung out with pain, I felt like a ninety-something and it seemed as if my angels were close, eyeing me and laying the tracks to receive me.
Or perhaps they were hovering there discussing what to do with me next. Two years later, reviving from a crisis, I woke up one morning with a voice in my head, saying, “Ah, there’s something more that we’d like you to do…”.
Here I am, wondering what’s next. Life is still very provisional. I have a form of blood cancer that can’t be holistically melted away, medically cut out or irradiated. It has permanently changed my body, giving me partial disablement and about 7-8 different side-issues. It’s called Multiple Myeloma because it shows itself in many diverse forms in different people, though it particularly affects the bones – it’s also called Bone Marrow Cancer.
Things indeed are provisional: recently I took on a booking to speak at a conference in May and I wondered what state I’d be in then. However, I’m accustomed to performing in whatever state I find myself in, and if I’m wobbly and unwell I’ve found that, onstage, I can nevertheless be right on form, with my thinking, planning mind already nudged to the side. So unless I’m actually dead, the conference talk should be alright.
But I still get anticipations and, over Christmas, I worked through a good few of them – one being a fear that my cancer might be spreading and becoming something else, something more. I’m having tests later in January.
To be honest, the fear comes from a creeping feeling that whatever happens next might be too big for me, that I can’t handle it. It’s precipice-fear, ‘little me’ stuff, and the kind of fear a little boy gets when looking up at the big, wide world, feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of getting to grips with it all. I spent a few days grinding through this stuff. Then I started emerging from the other side as the newmoon came.
In life, having been through quite a lot of grinding and scraping, I seem to have made it through. So there’s a good chance I’ll make it through the next lot, somehow. They call that resilience. Though, for me, it’s as if that resilience is rooted in a strange mixture of wobbly vulnerability and an accumulated knowing that I’ve done it before and I can do it again.
If I work through my fear in advance, I tend to unmanifest whatever I fear because I’ve already faced it – or at least I start facing it and showing willing. Or it becomes changed, turning out differently and easier than it looked. Or it becomes advantageous to feel the fear and do it anyway, since it then becomes a nexus of breakthrough. I learned this in conflict zones: I’d shit bricks before I went and often I’d be dead calm and on form when I was in the middle of crunchy situations. There were only some cases of bullets flying (I was quite good at not being in places where trouble happened), but there’s a lot of chaos, tension, mess, pathos, pain and complication in conflict situations, and the psycho-emotional aspect of war was very much there.
Right now, I’m not as close to dying as I have been at various times in the last five years. Cancer came during 2019 with no detectable warning, so I didn’t have to go through anticipatory tremors about cancer beforehand, like some people have to when they’re given a diagnosis. I hadn’t felt good in the preceding six months, though it had seemed like a classic down-time that I would hopefully pull out of. But then one day my back cracked while I was gardening. The four lowest back-vertebrae had softened, and in that moment they collapsed. From that moment my life was irreversibly changed. Even after that, for two months it seemed like I had a very bad back problem, though eventually a brilliant specialist in hospital identified Myeloma. Already half-dead, the news hit me really hard – also hitting my then-partner and son, who were involved too.
But when disasters strike, I tend to be quickish to adjust, crashing through the gears of my psyche and getting really real – I don’t waste time fighting it once I realise it’s a full-on crisis. There I was, in total pain, hardly able to move, feeling wretched, and the doctors were saying I had perhaps a year or, if I was lucky, I might survive – they couldn’t tell. I wasn’t expecting this.
There’s something rather special about coming close to death. Everything simplifies dramatically, and many of life’s normal details and concerns evaporate. You’re faced with the simple, straight question of surviving or dying – and the meaning of life. Is this it? Is this the end?
This simplification is a necessary part of the dying process. Many of life’s details that we believe to be important are not actually so. On the other hand, certain experiences and life-issues come to the fore – things we’re glad about, things we regret, things we missed, things we sidelined, things we got right and things we screwed up.
Many of the things that people and society judged to be wrong, bad or inadequate… well, these are the judgements, narrownesses and prejudices of the time and the social environment we’ve lived in. Things that conventional society considers good – money, success, status, property, fame – become diminished, or they flip, turning inside out so that the price we paid for them reveals itself. We might have had a million, but were we wealthy in spirit? We might have a doctorate, but did we really understand? We might have taught a thousand people, but where have they gone?
It depends on how we respond to the arrival of death, and a key part of this is forgiveness of others and of the world, for what they did and didn’t do. There’s also self-forgiveness for all, or at least most, of the ways we have let ourselves down, got our hands dirty or avoided the main issues and the bottom-line truths. Forgiveness lets new, non-judgemental perspectives come through – seeing how things actually were, from all sides, as seen in front of the backdrop of posterity. This deep simplification and clarification is a necessary part of the dying process, and the more we can accept it and make it our own, the better things tend to go.
The more we have faced the music during our lives and amidst our life-crises, the easier this gets at death. Dying is a gradual, cumulative process for many of us, unless we pass away suddenly – it’s not just about our last breath. There’s the matter of dying before we die – going through at least some of those squeezy, grindy processes that we’ll meet at death while we’re still alive. It shortens the queue of issues that can come up around the moment of death.
When I was younger I thought that my growth would slow down in old age – this is not so. It’s going like the clappers. My capacity to process emotions and profound issues has slowed, though it has also deepened to compensate. Nowadays, when faced with a crunchy issue, I need more time to process it through. But there’s a cathartic element to it that makes it easier – a bit like writing a resignation letter and having done with the whole thing. So the big let-go and the forgiveness process seem to accelerate inner growth in the final chapter of life.
Strangely, in late life, recent memory fades relatively and longterm memory comes forward. The recent and the more distant past rearrange themselves, taking on a different perspective. I’ve found myself working through issues deriving from decades ago, together with lifelong patterns that are exposed by things happening now, and sometimes by feelings or memories that blurt up from the hidden recesses of my psyche. In late life we’re strongly encased in our patterns, laid down, routinised and reinforced over the decades, like clothing we can’t quite peel off.
After all, if you are, say, 72 years old, you’ve eaten over 26,000 breakfasts. There’s not a lot we can change because it’s already done. The consequences are with us and there’s no Undo button. But that stuckness in our karmic patterns can be repaired too, if we let it.
We can change our feelings, our standpoint, by learning from the lessons that life has thrust at us – the deeper, more abiding, more all-round lessons. In the end, there is no right or wrong to what has happened in life, though there certainly are consequences – and that’s where our choice and options lay. But it was done, time has moved on and the page has turned.
It was as it was, and now there’s the future, and whether we actually change our behaviours, beliefs and befallings. We need to sort it out with ourselves and with others, if that’s necessary and possible, or accept it, or change the way we feel about it, or own it, or drop it – or do whatever brings some sort of forwardness. That’s a key aspect of life on Earth: living in a perpetually-changing dimension of time and creating forwardness out of the situations we encounter along the way.
If only it were that simple. It’s so easy to forget and lose our way. We get brought back to it when we get to the end of our lives. What was all that for – that life? Am I happy with what happened? Have I become something more than what I was when I started? Did I do what I came here to do?
I’ve been a good boy and a bad boy. I’ve done things I feel happy about and things I regret. I’ve helped a lot of people and hurt a good few. Some things I got right and some things I misjudged. My feelings around all sorts of things have changed as life has progressed. Mercifully, it seems to get lighter as I sift through the piles of detritus left over from a life that has been lived, committing it to posterity one spoon-load at a time.
Though I’ve had a few close runs with dying since getting cancer, a funny thing has happened. I’ve gone through an unexpected inner rebirth – not ‘getting better’ but, as Evangelicals would put it, being born again. The consequence is that, as my spirit-propped condition has improved, life has become more complicated. Part of me seeks that, because I’m not one who can easily sit around weighing down seats, acting like a passive old crock with his head plugged into a TV. Being a passive care-recipient doesn’t turn me on at all.
Partially the complexity comes at me from the world around, even though it’s me unconsciously manifesting it – recently I’ve been getting five friend requests a day on Facebook, presumably because an algorithm decided I’m a somebody. Oh, thanks. I do like friends, but keeping track of it all is beyond me now. To me, a friend is someone who mutually brightens up my life like I might theirs. (Please ‘follow’ me instead!).
I’ve even been setting a few things in motion. Whether they will work is another matter, since I cannot organise them myself as I used to. The three main ones concern the Tuareg, the Sunday Meditation and the ancient sites of West Penwith.[1] My likely short shelf-life, being unpredictable, and the dysfunctions of my brains, make me thoroughly unreliable in organising things.
Also, there’s not a lot of point starting something if it subsides when I pop my clogs. So I’m scattering some seeds of possibility for other people to take care of, if they will, to see whether or not they take root. Which they might, or they might not, and that’s okay. As a reserve option I’m leaving a biggish archive of work online in case someone picks it up, sometime in the vastness of the future. There’s a remarkable loss of control that accompanies dying, and this is one aspect of it.
So dealing with complexities has been quite a big one. I’m asked “How are you?” seven times a day. The answer is, “Well, I’m like THIS, really!” Do you yourself do a systems-check seven times a day to monitor your condition, and can you articulate it in words each time? Even so, I appreciate your concern and good wishes, and I write these periodic blogs to let you know how I am. When they stop, you’ll know I’ve gone, or I’m on my way.
I’ve written before about dying being a gradual process, and I’d call myself seventy-ish percent dead at present, and stable (as it goes) – I go up and down each day. Today (Wednesday 1st January) I’m working myself up for a hospital visit tomorrow for a three-monthly check-up, and a generally friendly but virologically-dangerous period of waiting for it in waiting rooms. Meanwhile, my stalwart friend Claire will sit outside in her car, reading books and twiddling thumbs in a shopping-mall car park – very exciting. I have to work myself up for events like this, and the day after I’m often rather wiped out.
It’s worth thinking about this continuum. Yes, part of you is already dead. That is, part of you is in the otherworld, where your soul, in the timeless zone, is closer to eternity than you currently feel yourself to be. This is of course an illusion – it’s more a matter of where we place our awareness and what we give attention to while we’re alive. That’s one reason I do the Sunday Meditations: to give busy people a manageable, uncomplicated, regular time-slot in which to give the soul a little attention. Do it for a year and you’ll have done it fifty times. It’s like a weekly shot of cozmickle multivitamins. Good for helping face life and its rigours.
Oh, and by the way… lots of people use funny ways of talking about dying, as if not wanting to mention or face it. Like, ‘passing’. Be honest: it’s called ‘dying’. It happens to all of us, inescapably, and you’ve done it before. Even Elon Musk won’t be able to buy himself out of it, on Earth or on Mars. It’s an integral part of our life-cycle, just like getting born. In the Tibetan way of seeing things, the whole of our waking lives are equal in experiential magnitude to the apparently much shorter processes of getting born or getting dead. It’s all about experiential intensity.
During life, moments of crisis that come up can be rather like dying. They’re moments when time stretches in duration while compressing in intensity, when everything comes to a head, crunching together – and these climactic experiences are our training for the expanded moment of death, when we transit, float or squeeze ourselves into another world, whether in peace or struggling with it. How we deal with our crises in life has a big effect on how we deal with our dying. We can make it easier or we can make it harder. The funny thing is that, though dying involves a complete loss of control, it involves possibly the biggest choice and free-will opportunity of our lives since we got born.
My Mum did that. At the end of her life, at age 92, she just could not handle more hospital stays, medications, discomforts and indignities. She made a big decision to stop taking her medication, and she was gone in a few days. Good on you, Mum: you made that choice. It was a big choice, and you did it. Believe me, my Mum wasn’t into meditation and cosmic stuff at all but, in the end, she exercised her choice, a soul-choice. I have a feeling she has flowered in the otherworld.
If you have cancer or any longterm, life-changing ‘condition’, this might interest you. Or if you’re a friend, family member or helper. It’s an audiobook about my cancer process and what I’ve experienced and learned through it. There’s also a text version if you prefer reading.
I have a blood cancer called Multiple Myeloma – typically for me, it’s not one of the common cancers. It has particularly affected my bones, leading to a clutch of other issues too, partially disabling me. Hence ‘multiple’.
This book is for you who might seek a different, deeper, wider approach toward cancer, not so much medically as attitudinally. Here I simply share my experiences, which have worked for me, and it might well give you a few lightbulb moments.
Medically, I have done both chemotherapy and holistic remedies and helpers – a middle path – and my results are good thus far. But the main focus of this account is psycho-spiritual. Yet very real too.
It starts in September 2019, before diagnosis, shortly after my back cracked and my life changed. It covers four years. I guess the story ends whenever I leave my body and life behind. If I am able, I’ll keep writing until I no longer can, and a later edition might take the story to its end. We shall see.
Distilled from a blog, this book more or less retains its blog format, with adaptations and improvements. In a blog of this kind you write whatever comes up on the day, and it doesn’t have to follow from what you wrote before or lead on to what you write next. So that’s how this book unfolds – a bit diary-like, with thoughts and observations that came up as life went on.
As an avid, lifelong communicator, I have always sought to stimulate people’s own thinking, not simply to persuade them to adopt what I say or write. Some readers might find some of the ideas expressed here difficult to accept. If that is so, I hope these writings help you clarify your own way of seeing things. These are my perceptions and experiences, submitted to you for your consideration.
In a way I went down with cancer. In another way I went up with it. It is very much a matter of how we see things. This profound issue affects our experience of being alive with cancer or any other serious terminal illness. It affects the way we create our future, even if we’re seriously ill. Yes, you and I might be dying, but there still is a future, and not just in this body. At least, that’s what I’ve found.
So this is the story of my cancer journey. It’s free, with an option to donate. Gratitude to all of you who have been part of it and helped it along.
“This is one of the virtues of meditating…“, said I to the three student doctors. We had just started reviewing my cancer readings. I was at the Royal Cornwall Hospital. The specialist had just told me that my ECG readings (heartbeat) were good and steady. “That’s rather a surprise“, I said, looking at the students, “Because I’m electrosensitive and I’ve just been sitting in the company of thirty mobile phones, with humans attached, for forty-five minutes. But once you get used to meditating and you build it into your life, it works wonders“. The specialist continued studying her papers.
“You’ve responded well to the new treatment. Your paraproteins have gone right down quite quickly, from 21 to 5. I’m beginning to expect that of you now…“
Again, as an aside to the students. “I’ve been a wholefood vegetarian since 1971 and done supplements and complementary therapies since the early eighties. For your consideration… there might be a connection.“
Then I turned to the specialist. “With your help, I’m alive now and I wasn’t expecting that. So bless you for that. Five years ago I thought I had up to three years. Yet here I am. I’m on extra time. I’ve been given a bonus. It has changed my perspective and since I’ve been given extra time, I won’t be complaining when I get to dying.” Aside to the students: “Attitude makes a big difference“.
And, to be honest, there’s a positive kind of disorientation that has come with that bonus, since I seem to have found a new mission in life, as a decrepit, vibrant old codger of a rainbow warrior and a slightly reluctant elder – with a little literary and audio output on the side.
I’ve been with this specialist for four years now, and she’s got used to me. She’s one of several remarkable goddesses looking after me nowadays. Though I’m an oddbod in their eyes, I’m congenial, good at elucidating symptoms and feelings, discerning but I don’t moan or make things difficult, and I’m not rigidly ideological, and my medical results are good – and the results are the clincher for the doctors. They think it’s good luck, of course – a very scientific conclusion, to be sure. I still regret that, five years ago, when I suggested that they set a student on me to monitor me, they didn’t do that. After all, in these straitened times of cost-cutting, ageing populations and expensive medical advances, they badly need to study people like me to find out how we do it.
To which, the main thing I’d say is this: if you’ve been looking after yourself for a few decades, both in a bodily and a psycho-spiritual sense, then that will build a basic resilience which, if or when you get plunged into the rigours of old age, will help you a lot. The moral of this wee story is this: if you haven’t started, start now.
Cloudscape from Carn Gloose, near St Just
Today’s the day when I pop my cancer pills – mainly Len, Ix and Dex.[1] I’m on a four-week cycle, with three weeks on drugs and one week off – during which time my bodily balances can restore themselves. Pharmaceutical drugs do charge their price, though I’m okay with that – I use holistics and innerwork to ease that out and improve the results.
However, when dying is on the agenda anyway, it’s good not to be precious about life. I feel I’m not quite finished here on Earth, though if the gods want to take me out beforehand, it’s okay. I’ve been and done enough. It doesn’t worry me. Paradoxically, such an attitude can be life-prolonging.
The other side of the deal is that, if I use this extra time to serve a purpose that the gods like, then the chances are they’ll help me stay alive to do it until it’s done. Though it’s also true that this might be a glib belief that doesn’t really hold up – it depends so much on one’s life-story – and that’s something that reveals itself as life goes on. Or perhaps having a mission becomes a healing device in its own right – which I’ve found to be true.
When I first contracted cancer five years ago, the immensity of it all, and what it meant, caused me to do a big let-go. I was lying in bed in hospital, helpless and in pain anyway, and that was the best response to an overwhelming situation. I let go of expectations and of those beliefs I’d adopted because I wanted them to be true. I decided to be patient and open, to allow myself to live or to die – whichever was most on the cards – and to see what happened.
Within two months this ‘good results’ thing started showing itself. It’s not that I’m in remission – this is not an option with Myeloma – but I’m doing alright, as it goes. It’s the consequent peripheral issues arising from cancer that bug me more than the cancer itself. I have stomach issues, back issues, peripheral neuropathy, osteonecrosis and a few other weird things. This means that I hover on the edge quite a bit – six weeks ago I was paralysed with pain, and movement was excruciating. I’ve had a few bouts of illness beforehand. It’s a matter of making use of these strange borderline states for the evolution of heart and the soul. For gifts come with them. Pain, for example, has a way of wringing out of us truths we don’t want to face but we need to.
The Longships Rocks and the Isles of Scilly, from Chapel Carn Brea, the last hill in Britain
Many people have to go on courses or retreats to learn things I’ve been given for free. Illness is a fascinating gift, if we choose to take it that way: it’s an opportunity for inner journeying, cogitation, letting be, and the resolution of deep life-issues. One of the key life-issues is the big Saturnine question that hits us particularly around ages 14, 29ish, 45ish, 58ish, 72ish and 86ish: what am I here for? Am I doing it? Where have I got to? What comes next? – all rolled up into one. And the answer lies deep, beyond a threshold of fear and self-doubt.
There’s one thing, our dream, and there’s another thing, our life as it presents itself. It is the grating of these two that characterise our lives and learning processes while in incarnation on Earth. It involves squeezing through the cog-wheels and roller-mills of Time, which stretches things out into threads, sequences, causes and effects. What you seek is also seeking you, but the process stretches out over time.
I had a big lesson in this: in 2000, during a life-crisis (Pluto square Sun and Chiron Return), I dreamed of the perfect place to live – and, as my life then was, it was distinctly out of reach, a fantasy. I forgot about it, got on with life, went through big changes, and then one day in 2012, I was lying flopped on my mattress, having just then got it into place, while in process of moving into the cabin where I now still live, and… gosh… I suddenly realised that this was exactly what I had prayed for, twelve years earlier.
Not only this, but it was the perfect place in which to go through a cancer process and a complete life-change, seven years later. Something in me knew this and fixed it. Yes, our souls know things that we do not. And sometimes there’s a guiding hand that pushes us that way.
Regarding missions, I’m really happy doing the monthly Aha Classes in Penzance – and for those of you who can’t attend, there are recordings on my site and on Spotify.[2] I’m seeking to share some esoteric general knowledge – stuff it’s good for people to think about and know a bit about, even if they’re not specifically interested. Things they already half-know, but hadn’t quite figured them out.
I’m rather an autodidact and, though educated in university (LSE), the knowledge I’m known for was not gained there. My self-education began as I was leaving university, and much of it didn’t exactly involve learning – it involved remembering. And observing. And watching. And gaining insights from within. This means that I don’t quote the usual old stuff, the derivative, fashionable or easy stuff you get in many of the books, videos and courses – you get original thinking.
The gift in this for me is that, no longer very interested in self-promotion (which self-employed people usually have to do), I can just express myself creatively – whether or not anyone publishes it or even reads it. It’s all going into my online archive on my site, and hopefully my rather techy son can keep it there in future times. In the front of my book Shining Land, about ancient sites in Cornwall,[3] is a quotation from Bhavabhuti, a mathematician in India in the middle ages, who said:
‘If learned critics publicly deride my work, then let them. Not for them I wrought. One day a soul shall live to share my thought, for time is endless and the world is wide.‘
Gods bless you, everyone. Look after yourselves. Eat your greens and do your inner growth, okay?!
I’ve been very ill since Friday – it’s cancer-related. Muscle spasms up my back and all round my torso. It feels like cramp but it’s also different and it doesn’t end, and movement is a killer, painwise. Paradoxically it came on when I went to Penzance hospital for an infusion of Zoledronate, to strengthen my weakening bones. By the time I got home I was dying on my feet – well, it felt like that.
I think my body is reacting to bone-weakness, and starting new cancer meds nine days ago, plus the infusion – and I’ve been pushing it a bit recently too. But there are always deeper dimensions: at one point I felt as if I’d been stabbed in the back. I think that was a prompt from deep memory. It’s amazing, the insights that can squeeze out of the psyche when in deep pain.
Recently I wrote about how illness and pain can concentrate and focus the psyche and soul. Staying alive and performing such normally trivial things as getting to the toilet can be major operations. It’s an exercise in mindfulness and staying steady within, even when your body is yelling at you, oppressing and constraining you. For pain is partially a perceptial thing. And I’m being tested on this now.
How far have I actually come on dealing with pain? After the excruciatingly similar experience I had in October-November 2019, around the time I was diagnosed with cancer, I’m dealing with pain quite differently. But it still really hurts, affects my breathing and stiffens me. I feel like I’m in my late nineties.
A nice Indian doctor came round this afternoon, to do a medical assessment on behalf of the haematology dept at Treliske in Truro (35ish miles away). He was good, new to West Penwith and day by day discovering the fascinating and rather isolated place he has landed up in. He took bloods etc, and I’m quite normal in temp and blood pressure – though a bit on the low side. It’s the crippling muscle-spasms, really – that’s the min problem. He thought to prescribe morphine, after he’d consulted Treliske. This is not the first time I’ve been saved by an Indian doctor. Bless them all.
So, if I’m on morphine for a while, it will knock me out. Today I’ve been working at alerting my local friendship network – that’s complex, and the system isn’t working right yet for situations like this. But I’m making progress and hope one or two (virus-free) people will be able-willing to come round in the coming days.
This is clearly a classic fullmoon crisis, and I reckon it will take at least a few days. Saturn is bearing down on me – time. Serving time. But then, I’m a saturnine person – perhaps even a textbook case. And one consequence of Saturn’s pressures is that this blog is (for me) remarkably short.
I cannot sit at the computer very long, so staying in touch is not easy. Just send positive thoughts – I can pick them up in bed! Thanks.
This is what can happen in a human life on Earth – it’s part of the deal. Not to punish us but to teach us – and it’s fast-track evolutionary learning at that. Especially if it hurts.
Silent Blessings on Dartmoor. Photo: Lynne Speight
I’ve just finished working on the audiobook version of my latest book, Blessings that Bones Bring. It’s done and uploaded to my site, in thirteen instalments of 40ish minutes each. Each audio instalment took around six hours to make. It’s culled from my blog over a four-year period. It’s not a how-to book but the story of a journey.
I cried at the end of it today, after doing a final listen to the last instalment – tears of relief, of discharge, of handing something over. It’s an emotional experience finishing a book, with some parallels to giving birth.
Every second of speech I listened to 4-5 times over, during the editing process – it’s strange listening to myself, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles nowadays, if you want to get something out into the public domain. The theme music is great – from a Ukrainian group called Orangery.
Whether or not ‘Blessings’ is widely read or heard, I’m happy to have done it. I’ve always had such an attitude. At the front of my book Shining Land I quote the 7th Century Indian philosopher-mathematician Bhavabhuti – the guy who conceived the number Zero – and it means a lot to me. It’s the story of my life as an author. “If learned critics publicly deride my work, then let them. Not for them I wrought. One day a soul shall live to share my thought, for time is endless and the world is wide.“
This isn’t a book for everyone, or for any or every cancer patient. But for those with whom it chimes, who are willing to dive into deeper water, it could be significant. It makes me happy to be able to say that. It’s about the psycho-spiritual side of cancer, and the stuff we can grind through not only in a cancer crisis but in life too, during any experience of earth-shaking intensity. It looks at adversity, illness and dying in a different way, and without shame or reservation. I’m not quoting current groupthink but speaking from my own observations.
With those books that have been significant to us, it’s not just the book itself but the timing of its arrival in our life that makes the big difference. This will be the case here. For some people it could be a life-changer if they’re at a critical point in their lives, seeking answers, cracks in the wall and glimmers of light. While this is a cancer patient’s recounting, it’s relevant to anyone experiencing crisis – and cancer is a crisis that is falling upon ever-increasing numbers of people.
That’s partly because we’re living longer and something has to fell us, and partly because of pollution, radiation and the crazy, screwed-up nature of the civilisation we live in, and partly because of things we’ve done to ourselves and choices we’ve made (or failed to make), and partly because the world is in the midst of a spiritual crisis where cancer has become a catalyst for a great awakening.
We don’t stop for rain at Oak Dragon! Pic by Chrissie Ferngrove.
There’s more to this. In my own case, the particular cancer I received, and the effect it has had on me, was tailor-made for me, karmically. It was somehow designed to hit me on all the right buttons, to force me to get to grips with issues that I, as a soul, need to grapple with. Stuff that stretches beyond the present, beyond lives. Including issues I didn’t know I had.
It has brought a wide swathe of things into new focus. But you have to choose to do the course – and it’s not a punishment but a strange kind of gift. You have to have some big honesty sessions with yourself, with your watching soul, and with ‘God’ (however you see her).
It’s not difficult when it comes down to it – when in the middle of a crater, it’s the easiest option available. What’s difficult is our resistances – our fears, guilt, shame, denial, avoidances, inhibitions and ghosts. The more willing we are to turn around and face these, when they present themselves, the easier it gets. Cancer is a crash course in this – if you choose to treat it that way.
Self-forgiveness is deep and difficult in one sense and dead easy and straightforward in another sense. It needs to be wholehearted, final and without reservation, and we need to be happy to live with the consequences.
For there is a consequence to everything. In the end this is neither good nor bad: it just is as it is. Everything creates consequences. Not doing things is no escape route because that creates consequences too. Many of the ills of our world boil down to things that were not done that needed to be done.
In my case, one of the gifts cancer has given has been an increased mindfulness of the effects of anything I do – because my energy-batteries are weak, my body is fucked, my defences are permeable and, theoretically, you could push me over quite easily.
Some talk, and others get the kettle on – that’s called ‘community’.
But there’s something funny about this too. Another strength has come up underneath, and it’s spirit-fired. I might be vulnerable but I’m not defenceless. Right now I am (still) involved with Maa Ayensuwaa in a serious altercation with a big Australian bank and, alive or dead, we’re not going to let them get away with it – and they know it. It’s about justice, and recognition by the bank that they have caused and been party to terrible consequences to which they need to own up.
Maa now has cancer too, so the bank is up against two cancer patients. Maa is a bit like Kali and I’m a bit like Obi-Wan Kenobi, and we’ve become rather a team.
The worst thing that can happen is that she or I could die. But we’re going to die before long anyway, so not a lot is lost. That gives a kind of relentless strength – something Palestinians are pretty good at.
The bottom line is that, in any show-down, winning or losing is not the primary issue. In the end things bounce back on victors and turn around for losers, and ever thus shall it be. So the objective is to make a battle yield a bigger outcome: truth, resolution and healing. That can involve taking a coolly fierce Zelensky approach, but the price might be higher if we don’t.
That is to say, it will not do the Russians good to take over Ukraine, and it will not help the Israelis to take over Palestine – there’s no victory available and chickens will sooner or later come home to roost. History doesn’t allow it, nowadays, and things have changed – though the world is yet to catch up with this small fact.
Maa Ayensuwaa and I seek justice and resolution. We want rightness to prevail. It’s two rather magical cancer patients up against an Austalian bank. Hehe, a bit like the Taliban and NATO, really.
But we do stuff too
When I started writing this blog I intended to go on about my new book. What I’ve written above is not included in the book, but it’s not a diversion either (even if I do have the Moon in Gemini). It’s part of my cancer process and the resolution of threads in my life. Other issues crop up in the book though – both blessings and challenges.
The great thing with cancer is that vulnerability makes me experience things far more fully. Life is more impactful – both the pains and the pleasures – and I feel the underlying feelings within and behind things much more than before. In a half-dead kinda way, I’m more alive.
There are quite a few cancer books around at present, and the majority of people and cancer organisations will prefer more mainstream accounts that don’t mention the virtues of inner travelling, stone circles, ETs, astrology, cannabis or colloidal silver – career-killers for most writers. However, since I don’t have a career to kill, and killing me off would probably raise my profile, it’s okay. It’s a learning experience for the soul – and not only for my soul. So all is well.
It’s the most personal book I’ve ever written. I’ve always had rather an allergy to writing an autobiography – not least because I can’t remember much about my life unless I recorded it at the time. This said, I have written a short autobiography on my site. Blogs have been useful ways of accumulating creative iterations of whatever has been going on, and this has yielded books and audiobooks on cancer and on Palestine (called Blogging in Bethlehem).
Re-editing a blog into a book does me good, since it helps me review my life. This might sound strange or perhaps narcissistic, but I have little memory of my life except what I have deliberately logged and imprinted as ‘personal history’ – and blogging has helped this. I went through big brain-changes when I had a near-death experience in 1974, when in my mid-twenties – one change involved loss of capacity to remember many but not all events in my life, and another was a rebalancing of my left and right brains to amplify the intuitive, emotional, imaginal right-brained side.
It’s nearly five years since my back cracked and my life changed – this was the first sign of cancer, though it took thee months to be diagnosed with it. It has been a very long and full five years. Not full of events – much of the time I’ve been completely alone, and I live on a farm at one of the far corners of Britain – but my life is full of life, even though I’d estimate myself to be around 70% dead.
Early morning at Oak Dragon. Pic by Chrissie Ferngrove.
So it has been cathartic to produce this book, and now I’m turning it over – for free, though donations are welcome.
It’s specifically of interest to people encountering cancer who choose an integrated medical route – conventional and complentary medicines together – and who have a spirited approach to life. Or people for whom cancer has taken away the blinkers, who want to try out new ideas. Or for people facing death and wondering what to do about it.
I’m not into giving answers, I’m no cancer expert, and I speak for myself alone, yet there’s a load of food for thought there, with a few golden nuggets hidden in and between the lines.
Phew. That’s over. Now I’ll have a few days pacing around, feeling redundant, wondering what to do next. Well, I’m off camping with a load of dragons before long, and perhaps I need to give my dear readers and listeners a break! Now that’s a thought…
Notes from the Far Beyond 
You must be logged in to post a comment.