Oak Dragon Camps – Notes from the Far Beyond

Here Be Dragons

It’s funny how, even though I, with a small group of people, started the Oak Dragon family back in 1986-7, I find it really moving now, approaching forty years later and in my current rather decrepit state, to be part of this family.

It had started with the Glastonbury Camps that friends and I ran between 1984 and 1986, which were the prototype for the then-new camps model, which was to launch itself more properly in 1987, the year of the Harmonic Convergence, as the Oak Dragon Camps (Ddraig Dderw in Welsh).

I’d started Glastonbury Camps quite spontaneously, and many Glastafarians joined in, but by 1986 the whole team was burning out – the camps had been so momentous, moving and transformative that they couldn’t continue as they were. Some of the team came to me saying ‘We can’t continue – we have lives to live‘ and this was true. This was the Thatcher period in Britain, when there were pressures to be economically viable and to get organised. Charitable, good-hearted voluntarism was seen to be a mug’s game and there was ‘no such thing as society’ – thus spake Margaret, the handbagging thunderbolt witch.

So, wondering what to do next, I went to my hideaway of the time in Snowdonia, North Wales, to contemplate things and pray for an answer. One wet day I went up alone into the mountains, stripped naked and prayed from the bottom of my soul for an answer. Was it all over? Or was there a next step to make? I stood there, sopping wet and shivering by a rushing mountain stream, with the rain washing my tears down. I waited. And it came.

“Oak Dragon“. That’s what came up. Oak Dragon what? Oak Dragon Camps… Within a long-seeming hour I had it, a complete vision. I went back down to dry out by the fire, digest all this and write down the details that had erupted. Thus began the Oak Dragon, with our first season of seven camps in 1987. It was somehow wanted and needed. The very first camp was a Beltane Camp in West Penwith, Cornwall. Ironically, it was just one mile from where I now live, and hosted by the same farmer landlord that I have now – and he and I didn’t twig that until a few months after I’d moved onto the farm in 2012! Well, magic happens. Out of these early camps many other camps organisations started, some of which are dead and gone and some of which are nowadays quite big, taking different formats and serving different interest-groups.

I left Oak Dragon around 1990, myself rather burned out, returning to camps only in 1993 and 1999. I was getting on with other things (such as writing the book The Only Planet of Choice and starting the Hundredth Monkey Project). The Oak Dragon carried on, going through its highs and lows and a deeper bonding and group identity-forming process. A family is something that is bonded on a deeper level than an ordinary group or community of interest – it’s something you don’t leave.

Rite of Passage – emergence after a long night

Three years ago they invited me back. I’ve attended camps as a grateful recipient, not as an organiser. It’s great leaving all that to others and leaving the plans and decisions to their wisdom! But there’s something new about the camps that wasn’t present in the 1980s: there’s a core to this family of people that knows how to do it and what needs to be done, and it doesn’t need an organisational team as before. Not only this, but the younger ones are taking it on, giving it new life and pushing it forward – and the oldies are not foot-dragging either because this is regeneration.

At the camp we (mainly the women) did an overnight a Rite of Passage for two sixteen-year old women who had been formerly toddlers and children in earlier camps. These are people who will take things on into future times, as the Millennials grow older. The women took them through initiations and teachings in the evening, the two slept out alone in a neighbouring field, and they were welcomed back as women next day – dressed replendently in red and blessed by the whole family, young and old. Would that more youngsters could have such initiatory treatment.

A camp isn’t just a camp – it’s a process and a journey. Short-term guests are allowed in on the first weekend and then the gates close. We are off-planet, out in space, switched off for the following six days, building the patterns for another world and being a family in its own space. You join the family by coming to a camp, and you may return whenever you wish. One couple, former regulars, hadn’t been to camp for eight years, and it was like coming home for them.

There was a forging workshop and a wood-bodging workshop throughout the camp, and other things too – workshops, ceremonies, group processes and campfire circles – evolved over the years and forming the particular character of the Oak Dragon. There’s no entertainment except what we create – even so, the cabaret at the end, put together by participants, is spontaneously comical.

Something really interesting happened. As the camp progressed, we were oblivious to what was going on around us in Britain – riots, dismay and dissension. I wrote the following observations to the Dragons after the camp…

I remember saying to a couple of people early on in the camp how harmonious and calm the camp was – and when would the trouble start? Often there’s something big that comes up – weather, a group issue, one or a few people going into a big process… but this camp just glided through, and we even had good weather in the take-down day!

I said to someone how the camp had started with the Sun in Leo and the Moon in Aries (both fire signs, not easygoing), and a few other potentially wobbly issues were hovering around (such as the buildup of a Mars-Jupiter conjunction in Gemini – good for arguments and polarisation). So I was half-expecting something erupting. Yet it didn’t hit us – in terms of friction, disruption or mega-wobbles.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country was catching fire. At the camp, I had no idea such a thing could be happening, and no one else seemed to either, to my knowledge.

There’s something interesting about this. Ages ago I picked up an interesting observation from somewhere. Speaking in terms of personal growth, it said that first you get problems to face within yourself. Then, when you’ve progressed with that you manifest people around you presenting problems for you to work through and resolve. Then, when you’ve harmonised your relationships to some degree, you manifest issues in the wider world (society, the environment, the state of the world).

I found myself wondering whether this is a commentary on Oak Dragon, as a beingness, a family and stream of consciousness in its own right, with a reality-bubble of its own that has some continuity and character to it. The growth levels at the camp were, in my observation, pretty good, and we weren’t particularly in denial about or blocking off the darker ways of the world around us.

Yet our nation had caught fire, while we seemed to be a pool of relative calm – and quite oblivious to what was happening around us. We had few quakey internal rumblings, few problems with the surrounding world, yet we manifested trouble around us in the wider world – and we were distinctly not part of it.

It says something about creating our reality. Also about reality-bubbles that all of us live in – we humans live on one planet yet in very different worlds. When those worlds fail to interact healthily, there’s trouble.

I also wondered whether, unwittingly, we were balancing out the collective psyche of Britain and the British. We were probably not the only ones who were unconsciously or semi-consciously doing this. Anger, oppo and polarisation were happening on the streets of the ‘United’ Kingdom while also calm, creative and harmonious realities were being experienced in the Oak Dragon world, on the same islands, at the same time. Perhaps the island reality-bubble of Britain as a whole fixed things so that such a balancing could occur.

Perhaps the collective psyche of the Brits was fixing a few things.

I was digging around in some old writings about the camps and found this description from thirty years ago. It described of one of the magical initiations we’ve done at Oak Dragon:

In 1994, at the Myth and Magic Camp, we planned a magical heist for the climax day of the camp. The idea was that the nine teachers at the camp would dress up and station themselves at different points along a pathway through a limestone gorge some miles away, presenting to unsuspecting campers on a magic journey a series of choices and situations representing stages along the spiritual path.

Luckily, we worked out a ‘plan B’, in case of inclement weather. Inclement weather indeed came, so we staged it at the camp site. Each teacher occupied a geodesic dome, dressed up. Campers were released in ones and twos at five-minute intervals, to follow a trail from dome to dome, meeting an archetypal encounter at each stage.

So there I was, acting as the last stage in the line. By the time they reached me, people had already met a fairy, a sky-god, a druid, a goddess, an oracle or two, and I was a wizard – Merlin to some, a Mongolian or a space-being to others. I was dressed in my Hungarian pointed hat and Chinese dragon robes, meditatively transmogrified into an archetype-rich, altered state of being.

On announcing themselves at the door and being invited in, they encountered me in my arcane state, addressing them. I said: ‘The road is long, and you have already travelled far. The journey through your many lives has seemed like an infinity. There have been many turns of the way, and there are many more turns yet to come. I am going to ask you a question, and the question is this: when you have completed your life, you are preparing to pass on and you are looking back over your life at all you have seen and all you have done, what is it that you most would like to have done before your days are over?‘. For youngsters, I asked them what they would like to do when they were adults.

The pauses were sometimes long. One boy wanted to be a sky-diver, and another a good father. A girl wished to be a famous film-star and another wished to plant lots of trees. One grown-up wanted to resolve things with his father, and another wished to travel the world. Some wished to prove that they could truly be a good person, and others sought peace of mind. Another wished for a child.

They then, to their surprise, received a florid and fullsome blessing through me, giving them full permission to entertain and achieve their wish. ‘And when you are there and you have attained what you seek, just remember that you asked for it. And you received.‘ Already bowled over by their previous encounters, this one finished them off!

This kind of special fairytale occasion, a journey into dreamtime, changes the patterning of people’s lives. Even if, back in Manchester, Massachusetts or Milton Keynes, they bury the occasion in busy amnesia, the experience stays there, lodged beneficently in deeper consciousness, acting as a seed of future growth and awakening. It makes a difference. It doesn’t go away.

Nowadays we are rarely genuinely blessed or initiated into new realities. We often make do with the lives we get. We struggle on without encouragement, seeking to rise to our true greatness. Through experiences such as these people are deeply healed of woe, fear and self-limitation. And a splendid time is had by all – kids and adults, women and men, under the sun and moon, watched by trees.

Lord and Lady of the Dance, having a go, hehe.

I’m so happy to have been part of all this. I’m so grateful to return to Oak Dragon in the closing chapter of my life.

Whether physically I have what it takes to do another camp next year, I really do not know – it was hard on my bony body this year, though the spiritual compensations lifted me up. At the back end of life a growing number of ‘last occasions’ comes your way and there’s something poignant and beautiful about that – including the more sad and regretful last occasions. But it comes to the best of us, sooner or later.

And that, my good friends, is life. And we shall see. Life also gets compressed into an evolving nowness in the closing chapter, and everything becomes contingent on all sorts of other things – such as dropping off your perch. With a smile. Or living to see another day – sometimes with a pleasant sense of surprise.

With love, Palden

Hub site: http://www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Cancer audiobook: http://www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html
Palestine Audiobook: http://www.palden.co.uk/bethlehemblog.html
Audio Archive: http://www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html
Oak Dragon Camps: https://oakdragon.org
The story of the camps (my rendering): http://www.palden.co.uk/camps.html

PS: on Facebook, instead of sending a friend request, please ‘follow’ me. I’m at my friends maximum, needing to reserve the rest for people I know or am likely to meet, or unless you write to me to introduce yourself, or you live locally to me. Thanks.

Oak Dragon

Guess what? It rained.

Not all of the time, but at times it rained quite a bit. Nevertheless, Oak Dragon has been doing camps for 35 years, and British weather doesn’t stop it, even in force nine gales. Under the shelters, into our tents and vans, or into the domes we went, and sat it out, chattering. When I came home my joints and muscles ached, and it took three days for that to go.

But the compensating factors, the payoffs, far outweighed all that living in a planetary-body decrepitude I now live with. It was great. There’s a deep, magical spiritual uplift that dawns on everyone, and a family feeling, and there’s something special about disconnecting from the world for a week, as if going to another planet (which it is) – something captivating and engaging, moving and clarifying to the spirit. It’s like a multilevel recharge, and people’s souls start shining through.

In a way it’s a taste of future society. Conditions while camping are quite simple (we’ve got all the kit for it though), yet there’s somethinghere about a potential society where people have reunited and re-entrusted themselves to each other, and where the energy-saving effect of living in a community lifts off, opening out the possibilities for everyone.

One of the biggest things is the profound everyday sharings between people. Exchanges and connections, with an openness that allows us to experience more of the soul more and less of the adopted, conditioned behaviours in each of us. But group events – simple yet moving ceremonies, mystery-journeys, shared meals and the amateurishly uproarious show on the last night – create a kind of experiential sharing that is memorable to have been a part of.

One day, a wicker coffin was built in the middle of the camp. We all thought about ancestors of ours with whom we sought to reconnect, and wrote messages to them, during the day. Meanwhile an enormous pyre was built, with a flower-bedecked coffin containing our messages. With due aplomb, up in flames it went, and our thoughts and prayers went with them, and we could feel the ancestors close, and all of us were entranced by the enormous blaze.

Special moments. The theme of this year’s camp was ‘the Triple Goddess’ – the maiden, the mother and crone (though I think ‘the biddy’ is better). The camp was divided in three parts and we explored each aspect of the Goddess sequentially through the week. That was great. On the first night we were taken in small groups on a journey in the dusk to meet the goddesses, one by one (enacted by members of the camp), and we were given teachings and face-paintings and oracular moments.

As the founder of Oak Dragon (our first season was 1987), I was deeply moved by all this – I was shedding tears daily! In sharing circles I’ve even learned how to talk lucidly while crying buckets! They’re still here and at it, the Dragons, and many of them thought this was the best camp for many years. It’s particularly touching on a deep level to realise how, had I and we not started this, hardly any of these people, this family, would even have met. Many children would not have been born. Many lives would not have been reset and restarted. Many other miracles would not have happened. There’s something deeply moving about this and I felt privileged to witness it and play a part in it, as the Dragons’ kinda grandfather.

Also, I was so happy and relieved to see twenty- and thirty-somethings taking the reins, leading the circles, making the rules and teaching us wisdoms afresh. Many Millennials give me a feeling of confidence that the world will be alright in future times – they’ve got hearts and brains, good hands and broad shoulders. There was a good spread of ages at the camp, and there are signs that Oak Dragon might still be around in 35 years’ time.

You missed it. But there are coming years (it happens in late July and early August at Lughnasa). If I can, I’m going back. You can do that: you can come and go each year, and return years later, and the family, the tribe, rolls on, and you become part of it – your presence is your membership. You can come for the first weekend of the camp if you wish – though everyone who does so tends to regret leaving just as the camp is gaining momentum, so I don’t recommend it!

Now it’s true, I’m good at writing PR blurbs for things I like supporting, but actually, though clearly I am thoroughly biased, what I’ve written here isn’t too biased, actually. So it might sound like a sales pitch, but actually it’s pretty close to the mark. I had a great time, and it has changed my perspective, and I’m looking at life in a different way from just three weeks ago. Personally, I was honoured to be there, and I seem to be under strict instructions to come back next year. I’ll try. For me, it’s a bit like taking medication for the soul. I’ll leave it at that.

I even had the sneaky thought that it might be really good dying at a camp! What a way to go.

Meanwhile, I’m back in West Cornwall, and there’s more to come. And I have a pile of campfire smoke-infested clothing awaiting a sunny day for washing and drying them. Blimey, living on Earth ain’t half complex sometimes.

With love, Palden

www.palden.co.uk – here’s my site
Here’s an audio talk I gave at the camp, about t he Decline of the Goddess Cultures of Ancient Britain (1hr 30mins)

Pictures mostly by me, with one taken of me by Chrissie Ferngrove (another of the founders of Oak Dragon), without whom lots wouldn’t have happened…

Off

The sweat lodge fire at last year’s camp

I have a couple of half-written blogs that didn’t get the whole way. One was my current thoughts and tips for other cancer patients – I’ll complete that another time. I’m a bit distracted and unfocused at present. I’m going away tomorrow (Thursday) to join friends old and new at the Oak Dragon Camp in a field in Somerset, upcountry from Cornwall – that’ll do me a world of good, inshallah.

It’s funny because, although it’s perfectly safe and I’ll be with lots of friends, I feel quite wobbly about it! I think that’s cancer-vulnerability. Since getting cancer I’ve not had the same insensitivities and protections as I had previously. I can’t handle stuff as well, and get impacted more by things that other people just pass on by. If a lot of life happens, it gets a bit much. It’s a bit like being a little boy again, needing someone to hold my hand. But it’ll be okay – it’s change-apprehension. I’ve been on my own a lot – perhaps too much – and in my own world, and stepping out of that feels like quite a step.

There are things in life I’d like to change before long, though I’m not sure how or where, because it’s a set of circumstances I seek, really. To have someone covering my back and keeping their eye on me, and to be amongst people who can help me with the small things I need help with – often it’s just the fetching of a prescription, or a lift or adventure, or people popping round, and stimulus, or even a cup of tea.

Sitting with old friend Barry Hoon, sorting out the world, at last year’s camp

Anyway, that’s for another day. I’m off camping. I love it, and have camped through every decade of my life, ever since being in Cubs and Scouts. I was amazed at last years’s camp – I went through quite a healing. Beforehand, I could stand for two minutes without support (such as two sticks), and afterwards I could stand for up to ten minutes. It has stayed more or less like that, except perhaps when I’m tired and gravity gets heavy.

Last year was a time of relative rebirth, after the main cancer shock of 3-4 years ago, and I’m not expecting quite the same this year, though I feel I’ll either strengthen myself up or it will be time to accept that my limits are closing in – one of the two. It’s all part of the journey. Perhaps I have some emotional stuff to work out this time – after all, the theme of the camp is ‘the Triple Goddess’.

So, I’m almost packed – boxes and bags are all over the floor – and I’m quite amazed I have managed. Some issues that I’ve been trying to bring to completion have not come to completion, which means I can’t put them away entirely, but perhaps they might resolve while I’m away, or perhaps not.

At these camps, we leave the world for a week and have no contact with it. On the other hand, we’re close to the earth, and in a really nice location. So I’m off to another world for a while – it feels a bit like jumping into Cerridwen’s Cauldron or going through a wormhole! I’ll be back around 10th August.

I shall be doing the Sunday meditation as always, on the next two Sundays.

Love from me, from a rainy Cornwall.

Palden

To consort with a dragon — At the ancient yew tree at Compton Dundon church, on a trip from the camp with historian Ronald Hutton

Home from Home

The turning of circles

Palden with old friend Barry Hoon. Together we created isleofavalon.co.uk in the 1990s

Oak Dragon called me. I returned. Something came full circle.

It all goes back to 1986-87 when I started the Oak Dragon Camps. For three years previously, with a lot of help from friends I had run the prototype Glastonbury Camps on a spontaneous, improvised basis, and this was the next step. Apart from a solar eclipse camp in 1999 in Cornwall, I hadn’t been back since 1993. I had been ousted by ‘we, the people’ (well, some of them), and went my way, soon to work for the Council of Nine and then to start a new generation of camps, the Hundredth Monkey Project, in 1995-97, inspired by the Nine and drawing on experiences gained earlier.

Ruby and Penny took me to the camp and, in the process, found a new family. Ruby, 12, grew a year in one week. Penny, one of those souls who holds the world up, found new context for it in a big-family setting. Everyone loved them. As for me, staggering around on sticks, periodically drifting off into dozy psychic reveries while flopped in my seat, I was so welcomed and cared for that I was moved to tears by the poignancy of it all and the love of a tribe I had set in motion, lost and suddenly regained. “If you hadn’t started this, all of us wouldn’t have met, and some wouldn’t even have been born“. Believe me, it was really moving to hear that.

Fiftyish of us were camping in a big circle divided into four smaller circles. Some were regulars who had met up for years, some hadn’t been for years and some were new, finding themselves melting into a new family they hadn’t anticipated joining.

Each day started with an optional meditation and the Dance of Life (a native American greeting of the day). Then came a daily camp meeting in a big, circular marquee, then group activities or a ‘council’, a talking-stick sharing session.

Ronald Hutton with a group at the yew tree

In the afternoon and evening, group activities ranged from talks, artwork, Breton dancing and making things, to visits to a nearby ancient hill camp, Dundon Beacon, or the ancient yew tree at Dundon church. One day we had a sweat lodge, a day-long process that Ruby and I joined. Some days we cooked the evening meal over campfires in our tent circles and sometimes we did it communally. Nowadays, Oak Dragon has all its developed ways and custom kit – marquee, domes, showers, tools and bits – but, in the earliest days it had been a matter of makeshift improvisation and doing our level best.

This is not just a nice bunch of people doing enjoyable things. In originating the camps I sought to create a space in which people could experience living in an accelerated growth zone, a different world without walls and with very different ways. Crucial here is life-education and what community living does to us as individuals, but the main issue is that an enspirited magic circle like this helps people go through breakthroughs, revelations, resolutions and great leaps forward. Then they spend the rest of the year integrating it, and they return for more whenever it’s right.

Throughout the camps, one of the most rewarding things has been watching young people grow in leaps and bounds, and seeing whole families release their power issues, conflicts and tensions. Everyone comes out glowing, whoever they are. There is pain, dilemma, choice and wobbliness too yet, when a camp is well set up, focalised and run, a supportive and safe atmosphere makes it all very different from the world out there.

I myself was a case in point. Back home, I rely on one helper, Penny, who comes once a week and is also reliably on call, plus a number of people who assist in disparate and occasional ways, and it is something of a burden on them. With my partner, our relationship had gone from one of equals to one of dependency, and this had weighed heavily on her. Meanwhile, at the camp, anyone would roll up with offers of tea or carrying my seat and I was both cared for – amply hugged, heard, supplied and assisted – and much appreciated for what I could, within my scope, contribute.

When Becky, the camp focaliser, invited me, I wondered how long I would last, physically. At the camp my body ached, camping was an effort and my psyche was rather overloaded after 2-3 years of relative isolation. But my spirits were lifted up, they kept me going and, on balance, I had a great time. It’s all a matter of attitude, really.

And… what goes around comes around. Once upon a time an organiser, this time I was on the receiving end. I was relieved of a pattern of mine: I couldn’t work my ass off. I used to be one who felt unconsciously that he had to pay off karmic debts to family, people, society and ‘God’ by contributing more than was due. I tried too hard. This is a common ‘server soul’ syndrome, though it does cause amazing things to come about.

I watched Penny acting out her own version of it, a few times dropping a hint to her that she could also sit down and hang out for a while, but she’s a compulsive helper and lifesaver, and this is her path. Frankly, if there were more people like her, the world would be so much better. Humorously I introduced her as my bodyguard – well, she is a former nightclub bouncer. She’d be great in a war zone. She calls me ‘boss’, with a cheekily ironic look that keeps me safely in my proper place.

In a week from now I’ll be back in Cornwall doing blood tests and scans. When I was tunnelling around in Hades in February-March, my readings got worse. In spring I stabilised. I suspect that, now, the readings might improve. At the camp I found I could keep going longer, sit cross-legged for a whole three minutes, my posture and digestion improved and the biggest medicine of all, spirit, shot up. I even started forgetting my sticks, which worked for about ten paces before rather painfully I remembered I couldn’t hold myself up any longer.

It feels like I stand at a new beginning, perhaps a new mission. A mission-driven person, this is my path, even in this last chapter of life. It gives me something to live for and I feel that, if I can bring about what is asked for, I’ll be kept alive to do it. If not, something else will happen.

I reckon I have between one and seven years to live – longer than I reckoned during last winter. But this brings up various questions. It makes life more complex, surrounded as I am with people living more normal lives and going at a pace I cannot keep up with. Then there’s the matter of making plans and how I shall live during whatever time I have left. I’ve been lonely and under-supported and I need that to change. Losing my partner six months ago impacted all areas of my life and, in a variety of situations, I still find myself wishing she were here, not only out of need but also from a wish to share and to give – we had grown into each other so much.

Today I planned to go clothes shopping but, frankly, I’m unsure I can do it alone – I need a second brain, an extra pair of hands and someone to scoop me up when I droop. But I’ll try anyway. Many of my life-needs are quite specific and it doesn’t work for just anyone, however well-meaning, to help me. That’s tricky – it has taken Penny time to figure out my nature and quirks, and really I need an extra person to complement her and cover those times her hands are already full. So there are issues I must contemplate when I return home. Something needs to change. Or I need to change. Or both.

Pete and Dot, my camp neighbours – they were so kind

Coming close to death made me acutely aware of what I haven’t done – you’ll find this happens when death approaches you. My book Shining Land, about ancient civilisation in Cornwall is now finished and coming out before long, I hope. I think it’s my last book.

This cancer blog, and my podcasts and events, all grew out of squaring with cancer. But I’m unfinished on a few fronts: family (I miss them), love (a big gap that is not healed by admonishments to love myself), world-work projects, and finding someone to step into my shoes with the Tuareg and the Palestinians. I’d like to close these circles before I’m done, if life permits. In the last chapter, some things we must accept as final and some can still be progressed.

While this cancer blog is not as medically oriented as many others are, it’s about the side-issues that have arisen for me as a cancer patient. Life has been hard overall, and one reason I appear to do cancer relatively easily is that it follows in a continuum, albeit in a new format. If you’ve done jail, exile, unpopularity, poverty, loss and bullets, cancer is just one step further. I’m a flawed human like anyone, with lots yet to learn, but I do hope that, by exposing my struggles and joys in this blog, you might gain a few glimmers of light.

Soon I turn 72 but cancer has thrust me into my eighties, with what seems like 120 years’ worth of experience trailing behind. This happens when you live intensely, wading around in a variety of high-risk zones and deep altered states where time shifts into another dimension. Cancer has pushed me into a new phase: I’ve stepped into a new archetype and even the patterns on the palms of my hands have changed. Even so, one thing I do need to learn is how to write shorter blogs, and I never seem to manage.

As for the ‘magic circles’, the first one in Glastonbury went really well. Thanks to Bruce Garrard for organising it and to the remarkable people who turned up, and to Avalon, my old home, for wrapping us in its energy-field. The next is in Avebury, this Saturday 13th August, and another follows in South Devon on Saturday 24th September (a link is below). It lights me up to do these – at last Tuesday’s circle I started out frail, coming alive and on-the-pulse as I warmed up. I think I’ll tighten up the next one – time went too quickly and I need to present everything more succinctly.

John and Chrissie Ferngrove. Chrissie was one of the founding Oak Dragon team, back in 1986.

This is an experiment and a new way of working, for me, an old hat entering a new chapter. I’m fishing for new avenues, people and a way forward, while finding out whether I have it in me to follow through. So far, so good.

Sometimes ‘guidance’ comes from within but, for me, it reveals itself when I act on possibilities and prod the future – this is how the alchemy works. Besides, when I get inner guidance, it’s often cryptic, pointing at principles and possibilities that then have to be applied in real life. It starts with preparing the ground, planting seeds and seeing whether and how they germinate.

After Avebury, I’m back to Cornwall for a recharge, cancer drugs and blood tests before the next wave of activity in September. One step at a time.

Right now I’m staying for a few days with Lily, a new soul-sister, having a quiet time in her studio, writing and recuperating under the calming gaze of Tibetan thankas, sorting myself out before the next bit at Avebury.

May you be blessed. You bless me by reading this. There’s more to come, inshallah.

With love, Paldywan Kenobi.

Magic Circles: www.palden.co.uk/magic-circles.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Forthcoming book: www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/

The sweat lodge fire, busy cooking hot rocks

Off to Pow Sows

The Land of the Sowsnek

Scenes from the OakDragon Camp in Wales in 1987

Pow Sows is the Cornish name for England, where the Sowsnek live.

When you have cancer, everything becomes a much bigger challenge. It could be easy to lapse into staying inside a comfort zone to keep difficulties down, but I don’t feel like that. It’s time for a change.

So on Friday I sally forth upcountry into the great wide and wonderful, feeling a bit like the little boy I was when I made my first trip to London, around age eight – my Mum put me on the train hauled by an impressive steam loco and I was met by my aunt at Paddington. But this time, this seventysomething little boy is under the Amazonic protection of Penny and Ruby and we’re off on an adventure to meet a dragon and work a circle or two. Erk, fasten your safety belts.

We’re going to an OakDragon camp. I’ve been invited back, and this is rather an honour. I was OakDragon’s originator. It’s a long story. It started in 1983, when a friend asked me to help organise a gathering in Glastonbury for earth mysteries enthusiasts. We did one at Samhain 1983 in the Assembly Rooms, seventyish people came and it was dynamite. In 1984 I did two gatherings in May, on earth mysteries and astrology. Again, dynamite. A weekend wasn’t long enough. How could we cheaply bring people together for a week? Ah, a camp. Hm, that’s much more to sort out. I was reluctant. But I knew it had to happen, and that year too. As an astrologer I pulled on my contacts, and Glastonbury friends appeared to help run it and, in late August 1984 the first Living Astrology Camp took place. A hundred people came. The Glastonbury Camps were born.

In 1985 we did three memorable camps, in earth mysteries, astrology and music and dance, and three or four more in 1986. One, an earth mysteries camp that turned into a Chernobyl camp, was a life-changer for everyone. But the volunteer crews were burning out and much was changing. The idea for a new start, the OakDragon Camps, dawned. The camps formula had worked and started proliferating – others started camps organisations in the following years too.

The OakDragon Camps’ first season was in 1987, running seven week-long camps in four locations. It was big, intense, amazing, memorable and tumultuous. But things also started going awry. There was a rebellion out of which, the following year, were born the Rainbow Circle camps – it weakened us but we kept on going. There were internal issues too, and by the end of 1988 I was leaving, rather burned out, undermined and unpopular.

I left them to it and OakDragon carried on. Within three years I was working for the Council of Nine and, in 1995, I started the Hundredth Monkey Camps. Here I managed to demonstrate more clearly what I had been seeking to bring about – the Nine had clarified my understanding of it all. Looking back, in the 1980s so many new ideas had been taking shape, we improvised as we went along, the challenges were big, and complex dynamics tugged in different directions. Yet it was a flowering, an awakening, an eruption of possibilities, a collective peak experience, and it was great to be part of it – and I think everyone involved would agree.

In late life, I’m moved to do more circle-working, with a little help from my friends, to share new ways of doing this work that have dawned on me during my cancer process. It’s not cool to build up expectations, but what’s available is quantum group transformation, if and when it works right. It’s the principle of ‘more than the sum of its parts’: when a group of individuals synergises into one being, something can happen beyond anything anyone imagined.

I believe that, later this century, this is how things will change. It’s all to do with the hearts and minds of humanity. It’s about mass focus of consciousness. When multiple minds give attention to one objective with a certain intensity for a certain amount of time, things can change, particularly in terms of human values, viewpoints and mindsets. It is these that determine so much else. Unless at least a majority of humanity joins together to pull in roughly the same direction, I don’t think we’ll get to where we need to go, this century. Humanity is in disarray, and this is no way to run a planetary home. We need to go through a kind of mass synchronisation of basic human intent, a re-resonance of human dissonance. This isn’t as airyfairy as it sounds: we have seen something like this happen in Ukraine this year, with the mobilisation of a nation.

How such a situation can be engineered globally is anyone’s guess, but a fortuitous combination of pressures could do it, if felt worldwide pretty simultaneously and if they evoke a similar response from everyone. Today’s major crises are quite unexpected, deeply stirring and breaking new ground, so this is in the hands of the Great Unknown. But there is something in the nature of these crises that is pushing us ultimately in a good direction. They are accelerating things. I’d even suggest there’s a guiding hand behind it, forcing us to face a plethora of important issues, for our own good. I’m not referring to Big Brother but to the group soul of humanity, or the heart of Gaia (or however you prefer to see it). A crunch-point could come where multiple simultaneous crises force us over a hump of social mobilisation and a collective melding of intent. That’s when the magic starts.

What is needed is an intense global situation activating sufficient shared feeling, fear, awe or goodwill, or all of them, so that billions of people find themselves spontaneously focusing on one basic thought – probably to do with survival or breakthrough. It needs to be sufficient to create a reality-wave that tilts the scales, making life look and feel quite fundamentally different, shifting people’s values and core aims over a critical hump. If we are to succeed in solving our problem here on Earth, some variant of this is what is likely to be needed.

Small groups can’t do it on their own, but they can lay tracks, train people, gather experience, evolve networks and embed and propagate the principles involved. It becomes a body of knowhow available to others to adopt when the need arises. It is a quality, not just a numbers issue, and a matter of time. For global-scale miracles to take place, a combination of factors must be dead right.

This has been a preoccupation for me since the LSE ‘troubles’. Fifty years later, I wasn’t expecting to be doing what I’m now setting out to do, but cancer has prised me open and I’ve seen something new. This winter I nearly kicked the bucket but my rebirth instincts eventually fired up and suddenly, to my surprise, by springtime I found myself with an ‘instruction’. It’s a bit like falling into hell and finding a lump of gold there, in the murk. I get these now and then.

It was strange because I had honestly felt I was heading for the final fall. But suddenly Life was saying, ‘No, there’s more’. I work on the basis that, if it is meant to happen and if I can pull it off, I’ll be helped and kept alive for it. Or the right thing will happen, whatever that needs to be. We shall see. But it does fire me up, this. And, as a cancer patient, having a good reason to stay alive is, well, a good reason to stay alive.

Meanwhile, OakDragon still exists decades later – and well done to them for doing that. No doubt it has changed a lot. I haven’t been part of it. I go now to the OakDragon as a guest, though it’s a bit like going home. It’s a healing. Everything comes round in the end, especially if we let it – and this is what’s happening. I’ll be interested to find out how I manage with camping – it’s one of those addictions I have difficulty letting go of, despite bone cancer.

On Tuesday 2nd August, during the camp, it’s the first ‘magic circle’ in Glastonbury and, whatever state I’m in, I’m going. Just as well, really. As a cancer patient I don’t know how I shall be on the day, so I can’t necessarily put on the competent airs of a normal person and get away with it. I’ll have to fall back on my root-resources, and there’s something rather special about that. It puts me on the line. Something in me loves that because it pulls out a second strength, or ‘superpowers’ that normal life doesn’t demand. So it doesn’t worry me, whether I’m weak or strong – the right thing will happen. It does. And, believe me, it’s a wee bit easier than operating in a war zone.

I have no idea when I shall next write a blog or do a podcast. They will come when they do. I’m peripatetic for two weeks, and around 15th August I return to Cornwall for my next shot of cancer immunotherapy, and to take a break before September adventures start. For you who cannot come on August 2nd, we’ll be in session from shortly before 14.00 to about 18.00 UK time so, if you wish, take a few pauses during that time to see if you can get us and pick anything up. Get a sense of the invisible presence that, I hope, will be with us. The next magic circle is in Avebury on Saturday 13th August (info below).

Hey, I really love you – whether I know you or not. I really appreciate your eyeballs and the goodwill you seem to feel, and it really does me good. Thank you so much for that – it makes a big difference to me. Thanks to Bruce, Ivan, Jackie and Jeanne for organising magic circles, and to Penny, Ruby and Lily for holding my hand. There’s an enormous smile on my face.

Muslims give God ninety-nine names, and they leave the hundredth entirely open. That’s pretty nifty. The Nine used to refer to ‘what you call God’ – they had their way of putting things. When Parkinson the talkshow host asked the Dalai Lama whether he believed in God, the Dalai Lama simply said, ‘No’. Spot on, Tenzin. Lao Tzu said, ‘The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao’. So when I say ‘God bless you’, you know what I really mean.

God bless you.

Paldywan Kenobi

The photos are by Tara Dancer, taken in Wales and Cornwall. Ironically, the campsite for the first OakDragon camp, held at Sancreed in Cornwall, is but a mile from where I now live, and I have the same landlord!

Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Magic Circles: www.palden.co.uk/magic-circles.html

Here’s a rather historic amateur video record of the second camp ever, Beltane 1985, at Butleigh, Glastonbury, made by the late Mark Walters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZaNwHo9wrM