A Magical Mystery Tour called Life

This was going to be my first blog post but because I procrastinated for far too long, it was quickly superseded by my Solstice post on the 21st, and then several more in quick succession, which is ironic because the subject matter of this post is life. Then I stopped because I ran out of steam, old habits of browsing and wasting time reappeared and my creativity, like a creek in a drought, dried up. I felt a bit dead inside because that is what it feels like when I browse and don't create, when I waste my time. I wondered what our ancestors would make of all of us fixated on pixelated screens rather than the abundant, teeming, bustling, blooming, flowering, fruiting, frolicking life around us. 

What is it to be alive? And why am I even asking myself that question? I breathe so I live but is that all there is to these questions? I'm no philosopher, I grant you that, but this existential question niggles at me because I know, deep inside, there is so much more to it, to being alive. So much more that I am not doing right now, so much that wishes to be expressed and to burst forth like a dam bursting, a spring bubbling up through the rocks of ages. I don't wish to judge in this blog but somehow I can't escape the fact that most of us just go through the motions, myself included. I spend far too much time on mundane tasks and wasting that precious time. When I get to the end of my life, will I look back and be thankful that I browsed myself into a trance? That I watched endless movies and Netflix? I doubt it. 

Mary Oliver's poem 'The Summer Day' comes to mind. It sums up my feelings so well:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, to fall down 
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the field,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

I love those last two lines asking such a simple question. It is almost transcendental in its simplicity. It begs an answer that I fear will not do its underlying subtext justice. 

Is being truly alive about embracing this wonderful, beautiful gift of life in all its myriad forms and representations and celebrating it? Squeezing every last juicy drop of it while you still live and breathe? Life for most of us isn't generally like that. It is pretty impractical, in fact nigh on impossible, in our current society to live fully in the sense that we live each day as if it were our last. Would we choose to mend a light socket or mow the lawn or go to a dull job if it was our last day on Earth? I think probably not. Of course, we have to attend to our jobs, responsibilities and chores because this is 'our life' and anyway this is also life even though it might be seen as going through the motions. I'm aware of the underlying judgement in this so I suppose what I really mean when I say living life fully is not that we jump out of bed in the morning and immediately start singing and dancing and being incredibly positive every morning of our lives. No, that would be a bit over the top. For me, it's really about how you approach each day. Doesn't mean that every day will be a good one. It's not about forcing oneself to be positive, it's about being true to yourself, being real.

Many years ago, I participated in a shamanic course called 'Darkness visible', which involved being blindfolded for 4 days and nights. One particular exercise, amongst many, involved sitting on the floor, listening to music. Our shaman teacher played us all sort of music and then put on some dance music and slowly one by one (or so I supposed as I couldn't see!) we rose up off the floor and started to gyrate and sway to the rhythm and beat. The music ramped up and intensified and our teacher encouraged us to move until we were all bopping away on our own footprint and then he shouted something along the lines of: "You only have a few more minutes to live. The world is about to be wiped out. Dance as if it's you last night on earth, these are the last few moments of your life, what are you going to do?' And I remember contorting myself energetically and raising my arms and doing just about everything I could do - not that easy really - as this was the last expression of my being alive. As you can tell, this has stayed with me all these years. It was a profound moment but I can't say that I have danced as if my life depended on it since. I have strayed backwards and forwards between being fully alive and being sort of half-alive. I have been distracted from the moment because I have been distracted and when I am distracted, I waste time on things that are unimportant. The San bushmen of the Kalahari don't get distracted by unimportant things, not in their natural environment anyway. They observe and notice things because their lives depend on it. We can go to the shops but they must find food and water, make shelters and so on. It is much more immediate. Would I want to live like that? Probably not but I can feel its immediacy and the aliveness in that. 

There was a night, a few years later, when I had perhaps the most significant realisation of what it was to be alive. It started with me in a meditative state asking to be taught Kriya yoga. I had been reading Autobiography of a Yogi by Parahamsa Yogananda and I was fascinated by the technique of Kriya yoga, which seemed to offer almost magical abilities for connection to spirit. So there I was, asking the spirits to guide me and give me this knowledge, when the simple instruction came, like a sort of felt sense, an understanding, and it was 'prepare the body'. I began to massage my fingers and thumbs and then my hands in an intense and powerful way. The understanding came that my hands would then be highly energised to carry on with the massage over every crevice, and topology of my body. The purpose, as I understood it at the time, was to increase blood flow down to the smallest capillary. This was to be deep and intense not leaving out any part I could not reach. Well, I massaged all night. I massaged my eyes, tongue, gums, nostrils, head. I massaged my internal organs as much as I could by pressing on my stomach. All that I could reach, I reached and as I did so, I had the most wonderful sense of aliveness I think I have ever encountered. I have had good massages in the past and they've left me feeling totally refreshed and almost toddler-flexible but this was different. As I progressed throughout the night, I felt my spirit rise and when that happened a whole slew of understandings arose in me also to the point where I was in rapture. I can't tell you enough how good it felt or how alive I felt and it occurred to me that one of the issues of being human is that we are not fully alive as we could be. 

We spend our lives in mundane pursuits because that is how we have complicated ourselves by using our minds towards different ends: earning a living; beautifying ourselves; shopping; travelling...all things that are OK but sort of not OK either. Where is the life in 'earning a living'? In, say, marketing or advertising? Things that I used to do. Or investment management? When we are born and toddle about and then learn speech and watch our parents, do we say to ourselves 'I can't wait until I am old enough to sit at a desk for eight hours a day and stare at a plastic screen?' I know that is simplifying our modern 'life' to the point of ludicrousness but at what point did we give up on imagination and play and dreams? Surely the world we have created full of its toxicity, busyness, noise, destruction, war, greed, poverty and so on is not one that we would envision as children. How did we get here? Where is the collective imagination that could help to envision a world of peace, harmony, equality, compassion, understanding and love? One of these worlds doesn't seem to be very life affirming to me. It's dead and can only ever end in greater misery, fear, anger, and death. 

Why can't we get out of this hellish cycle? I sort of know why. It's money. We need money to live. We don't live in the old ways of subsistence nor would many of us want to. We have become used to our easier lives and the 'progress' we make as human beings towards... Towards what exactly? Where are we going exactly with our 'one wild and precious life' ? Surely it's not so we get to play more golf? Or be able to go on holiday? But coming back to money, it's like a prison that we can never truly escape because if we jump over the fence, there's another fence, more bars and so on. We can't live like wild animals nor would we want to. We live in our prison and for the moment with the current system, it's all we can do. We go to school, get an education, go to university, get into debt (these days but not when I was young) get some letters after our name, enter the world of work, get a salary to pay off the debt, acquire more debt in the form of loans or mortgage and soon we are living the dream. And I say 'dream' in all awareness of that word because it is like a 'dream' of life and not as real and immediate as it could be.  Our lives are literally too busy to be fully alive. Maybe we have lost the ability to be fully alive. I think when you actually come across someone who IS truly and fully alive, you sit up and take notice. It resonates something deep within. Stirs a memory maybe from the pot of consciousness stew that bubbles away on a low setting in the background. Sometimes it might make you feel distinctly uncomfortable. It rankles maybe because we want it but don't know how and maybe it's the same mindset that many older people had for the hippies of the 1960s as in 'how dare they act as if they are so free! Lazy layabouts!'. Which, incidentally, reminds me that indigenous cultures not only hunt and forage, they also have plenty of time to lie about and tell stories.

Maybe being alive is going to work, shopping, watching a film and having a barbecue. There's nothing wrong with that. Maybe going through the motions of being fully alive in every moment is just not possible in our current system. Not anymore anyway. We can dream of that freedom but it's not for the likes of us. But then it is. It's our true nature, the one we were born with. We were not born simply to learn the Kings and Queens of England by rote or to do trigonometry. There simply HAS to be something else, something behind a veil, a deeper meaning rather than our cells replicating themselves until we die. The great spiritual masters say that truth is within if we only care to look. It is as simple as that as most profound truths are, sort of hidden in plain sight. We are not our minds. We breathe in, we exhale, we are alive. 

An ex-girlfriend once told me a story about something that happened to her at the funeral of one of her dearest friends who had died well before her time from cancer. The friend's spirit whispered to her: 'It's all in the breath, Sam.' I've remembered that as well. It is a deep truth. Without breath, we die. When I massaged myself all those years ago, I was allowing oxygen into my body by stimulating all the little blood vessels. My body then became a fully alive carrier and the subsequent euphoria was what it felt to be alive. What if we all felt like that? 

So, why did I write about this subject? Why did I pick those particular stories to illustrate this post? For me, at this moment in my life, I feel the need to be as fully alive as I can be because I feel the times demand it. I must be in the moment because distraction is not an option even though I often do get distracted. My day to day existence, my nocturnal thoughts all require me to take action and not get sidelined by what I haven't achieved and what I want to achieve. I have a vision of where I want to go but it demands my energy and being that much older I don't have an awful lot to expend. I can't afford to be idle. The forces at work in our world seem to be anti-life. Nothing that any of our great leaders do excites me. There is no Marshall plan to summon all our creativity and imagination to turn back the tides of our destructive habits and usher in a new world full of wonderful life-affirming possibilities. There is no one coming to save us from ourselves apart from us. It means I must work harder towards what I believe in and I believe in life. It is a gift not something to fritter away and when I see pictures of school children sitting socially distanced from each other in their classrooms, obediently wearing their masks, well my blood just boils. It is a time to inspire, to elevate ourselves and our consciousness as we strive towards real human progress and a world of peace and harmony, free of obeisance to tired ways of thinking and to deadening corporate visions of power and control. I can feel the quickening of the times, the call for action. We are evolving and you can't legislate against that. It is time to break out of our prison and be fully alive in the moment. The only moment there ever is.

Be alive.

      

Health and happiness

It's a strange time to be living through. At no other period of my life has the health of every human on the planet been pretty much the entire focus of the political, media, medical and scientific establishments. It is beyond compare. The COVID pandemic and all the measures taken to combat it have changed our world almost beyond recognition. Until relatively recently, we all enjoyed much more freedom. Now, we just have a pale version of it. I'm not going to get into the whole debate here about the virus and vaccines - these are huge subjects to tackle. I have my own views about them, sure, but I've noticed the increased polarisation of opinion and how this has effectively divided the country, families and friendships and for that reason I don't wish to write about it. 

Do I state my views here on my own blog though? And if I state my views, I guess that just starts a debate around it which is not what I wanted this post to be. Does that make me a fence sitter? Perhaps I should state where I stand. I do believe there is a virus about and a nasty one at that. I don't believe all the hype about it though. I had the virus and it came and went in a matter of days. One aspect of it was how it made things taste awful. A close family member also had the virus but for him it was a couple of weeks and it wasn't at all pleasant. He was very tired and breathless with zero appetite. Finally, he took some hydroxychloroquine, that much maligned medicine, and in hours he was feeling a lot better. It's strange that this method of treatment is not used or encouraged more widely.

Since I've had the virus, I see no reason to get the vaccine especially as it's still deemed experimental and hasn't gone through the rigorous testing process that vaccines normally undergo. I can understand why they were introduced because health authorities were desperate for some ways to combat the virus but they've effectively made us all into guinea pigs. Many people have had severe adverse reactions to these vaccines and some have died. What astounds me is that despite these incidents, the vaccine is still aggressively promoted. It is akin to a religion. A friend of mine who hasn't and won't take the vaccine told me recently that a mutual friend of ours who had been coming to visit him had asked him if he'd had the jab and when he said no, the mutual friend had said 'you've got to have it!'. It's this type of coercion and pressure that I resist strongly especially when I'm party to alternative information from qualified sources. To be honest, it's as if the world has gone mad. It was mad enough already but we've now ramped up the insanity stakes, pushed the lever to 11 on the volume scale and blown the speakers!

The news, which I have roundly ignored for quite a while now although obviously I still get dribs and drabs of it, leaking out as it does from every broadcastable orifice, is 24/7 wall-to-wall fear porn. It's relentless and the effect it has on already frightened people is to turn them into fanatics. It's interesting, or perhaps alarming depending on perspective, to note that fear turns normal, ordinary decent people into frightened, angry, cognitively dissonanced ones. Anyone who goes against the mainstream narrative is a selfish, deluded, conspiracy theorising lunatic. This is how we live now. It is far better, in my view anyway, to not engage in fruitless debate with people whose minds are set rigid and not open to discussion or even the possibility of entertaining facts that counter their beliefs. As I said, it's almost a religion and those who disagree are considered heretics. 

Anyway, the point is that this is a global health issue. It is like a reflection or a manifestation of the same sickness of our planet's biome. Our water, land and air are all full of chemicals and all are at risk - land becoming barren, usable water more scarce and air less healthy to breathe. We are facing environmental collapse on so many fronts because there are so many factors converging at the same time that will undermine our ability to get the proper nutrients we need to lead full and healthy lives. At some point, we won't be able to grow food in the quantities we currently need to feed the billions of people on this Earth because the land will become increasingly infertile due to the toxic levels of pesticides and herbicides that continue to be sprayed and ploughed into the soil, year after year. The soils of this Earth are finite and we depend on their health for our health. I'm talking about the soils for industrial agriculture here, mainstream agriculture if you like, where the majority of the world's food is grown. The US grain basket of the mid-west teeters at the point of collapse because it requires huge amounts of fertiliser to grow the vast amount of grains required. Grains in other countries are also at risk. Most fertilisers use a combination of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium compounds and again these compounds are finite. I looked at potash production, that is soluble potassium, and the producers estimate that they have thousands of years of supply left. That's wonderful but perhaps we are forgetting about the energy required to mine that potash. The effort of getting the material - probably oil - to get the potash to grow the food also requires energy and oil has passed its peak and is on the decline. 

Then there are the diseases springing up that affect our crops. New grain diseases, such as the ominously named Ug99, are becoming more prevalent and are spreading globally. This can wipe out an entire harvest. Simply put, we are walking along a knife-edge of sustainability unless we change our behaviours. It's not a question of whether we will face famine in our lifetimes, it's a question of when. We are living in a fool's paradise unless we take responsibility for the health of the planet. At some point, the dominos will fall and harvests will fail and prices will skyrocket. If nothing else, we all need to be growing our own food in sustainable ways. The knowledge of how to do this is already 'out there' if we care to look. 

First of all, soil health and preservation. In industrial farming, soils are degraded and lost as I mentioned above by continuous chemical treatments and rains that wash away topsoil or winds that blow it away. We can improve soil health by looking at what some indigenous cultures have been doing for a very long time. Just to pick one thing at random, biochar, which is basically a bio-active charcoal (i.e. it promotes the growth of bacteria, fungi and other micro organisms while ordinary charcoal doesn't due to the production process), this has the ability to improve soil health through carbon sequestration and moisture retention and thereby increase nutrients available to plants. Bio-char can be made from timber that is considered unsaleable and also animal dung. Research into its properties have shown increased yields and healthier plants.

On another different but related tack there is the humble hemp plant. Hemp was demonised in the last century by corporate lobbying. By depicting its psychoactive cousin, Cannabis Sativa, also an incredible medicinal plant, as the scourge of American youth in such propaganda as the film 'Reefer Madness' and a persistent campaign against its cultivation, associating hemp with marijuana, hemp growing was effectively made too complicated to be economic. There's a huge history about this which I won't go into here but suffice to say that this plant improves soil and can help to remove toxins. It doesn't need pesticides and herbicides and can sequester large amounts of carbon back into the soil. It can also be used for building materials, clothes, rope, and has highly nutritious seeds and oil and other medicinal properties. This is gradually changing now but it should be much more widespread and easy to grow than it is, knowing its amazing remedial qualities.

Water health and purity are similar issues. I've already written about water but in relation to the health of our planet and ultimately human health, it can't be ignored. We need to ensure that we don't pollute our water or our air. This is what we and animals ingest into our bodies. It is needs to be the best water we can drink. This is easier said than done because of the complicated jigsaw of dependency we've created plus the need to kill bacteria and other pathogens when we keep water in the large standing bodies required for urban areas. 

We have an over-dependency on chemicals in industry and farming so to simply stop using them is not going to happen overnight. It will take a long time to generate the required momentum to turn to alternative means. The massive chemical conglomerates, and importantly all their investors, employees and downstream wholesalers and so on are not going to stop overnight. There's too much money invested and it seems that even the truth staring them in the face just doesn't cut it. If this is the case, we need new ways to clean up the toxicity and try to limit the damage. In water, we need better filtration methods and means of keeping water alive. On land, we can clean up chemicals through mycoremediation, this is the term used for detoxing the soil and environment by using fungi. There are mushrooms out there which can literally eat toxic materials, ingesting chemical spills. 

Without going too deeply into it, we have the means to clean up the planet of all our pollution. The only ingredients missing are political and corporate will, and imagination. From what I can see, and I don't 'do news', this is not going to happen any time soon. They talk the talk but never walk that talk. There are massive forces at play. There is a deep reluctance to change, not only by the establishments that govern us but us too, as if we are being collectively weaned off highly addictive drugs: capitalism and its progeny consumerism. The enormous wealth disparities that are constantly being paraded in front of our eyes and the ridiculous wealth of the tech billionaires and others show us how insane this is. I believe we already have some trillionaires too. Many of them are planning space exploration! Meanwhile back in the teeming, squalid megacities Sao Paulo, Delhi, Jakarta, Manila and so on, we have some of the poorest, most desperate people on Earth. Somehow, these people survive although the death rate is probably incredibly high. 

To sum up, humanity is sick. Our priorities are skewed, our leaders are unimaginative and corrupt, our focus is off, and we are desperately lost as a species. Of course, there are many people worldwide who work tirelessly to try and bring back balance in a number of different fields such as science, technology, agriculture, environment and more but their voices are often not heard and the message is diluted if not ridiculed. Look at what happened to Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate activist and how she has been accused of being in cahoots with the climate change agenda and how it's all a hoax. Likewise Extinction Rebellion. Apparently, they were just too much of a nuisance. Many of their leaders or figureheads were arrested and charged with public order offences. 

So, I have rambled a bit on this post because the subjects are so large and I can only devote so much space to each subject within the larger story. The title of this blog is 'Health and Happiness' and so far I haven't really written about personal health, apart from some nods to the pandemic, and certainly not 'happiness'.

I do have some views about personal health and I have a number of issues that I am not going to discuss in any great depth because of their personal nature. Basically, I don't use the National Health Service or go to a doctor when I feel ill, which isn't often. I would only use a doctor for things like sprained ankles, broken bones, deep cuts etc and I have been fortunate not to have had any major illnesses. In Portugal, I went to the doctor maybe one or twice in seven years. One time was to get a particularly nasty splinter out of my finger that I couldn't shift myself. I can't even remember what the other time was, maybe it was just once. Usually, I take care of my own health. I do this by eating natural, organic vegetarian food, avoiding anything processed, and drinking clean, pure water. I stopped eating sugary stuff over a year ago although I allow myself the odd croissant or piece of cake but it is rare. I rarely drink alcohol and if I do it's in total moderation. I use herbs and natural medicines whenever I can and never take pharmaceutical drugs. When it comes to fitness, well, I'm not as fit as I used to be but I go for long walks as often as I can and try not to sit around. I could be a lot fitter that's true. That's my physical health and I would say that I'm not in bad shape for a guy my age and I'm no spring chicken!

When it comes to mental and emotional health, I would say that these are things I constantly work on too. I often fall by the wayside and make mistakes. Can I make mistakes though? Isn't this just about constantly learning about myself, whoever I am, and becoming more aware, more conscious and being OK with what is? Not going into stories or losing myself in anger and sadness. The same goes for spiritual health, something that is rarely if ever discussed in the medical establishment. I do have a spiritual practice of sorts but it is not something that I wear on my sleeve. I pray to a higher source but also recognise that I am part of this higher source too. That indeed spirit is infused in all of nature, and all things, that this source is all one and the same thing. I feel rather than believe and I am open to beliefs being challenged because belief can be a dangerous thing - look at all the wars in the name of religion, still ongoing to this day. In my opinion - and opinions are vastly overated! - people can do, believe and pray to whatever they want as long as it harms no one, no being and no thing. That's it. 

My own spiritual practices are my own and I don't discuss them with anyone else, unless they ask me, since it's between me and spirit. The teachings of Buddha, the original teachings are still taught, or perhaps a better word is broadcast, through Vipassana meditation. I've been on two ten-day retreats of this incredible technique and benefitted from it hugely although after some minor effort on my part, I stopped practicing it. It is a hard discipline to follow for undisciplined souls like me - and that's just another belief! However, it can lead to a very pure mind that is in the here and now and accepts everything. Buddha saw that most of the disharmony and unhappiness in the world was caused by two things: craving and aversion. In other words, desiring what was not here, wanting things that you didn't have or situations that had not happened and so on. And not wanting things, situations that had happened etc. Both took you out of the present. It is only the present that you have direct experience of. So, imagine if you're on the phone, pacing up and down, as people so often do, in some incredibly gorgeous garden, beside a babbling brook of clear water on a sunny day. The birds are singing in the trees, the bees are buzzing lazily, the flowers giving off intoxicating aromas and the stream is bubbling away but you're getting all upset on the phone about money or cancellation of plans or some such thing. The reality is that you are in a beautiful place, heaven, but your mind is somewhere else, hell. You are not present. This is not to minimise the problems you may be having because most people would retort that you are having the problem at that time but this is all going on inside your head mainly. You could just lie or sit beside the river and let all that beauty seep into your being but most people wouldn't. They would worry about things. It reminds me of a film where a captured Soviet agent in the US keeps getting asked whether they are worried and he keeps on replying: "Would it help?". Of course it wouldn't. Worrying is our mind kicking into overdrive, driving us to distraction, and worry seems to be a monster that grows and grows the more you feed it. It is a big illusion though. When you have a problem, the best thing is to deal with it to the best of your ability to do so and beyond that there is nothing more you can do. You have to accept things otherwise you go crazy. 

This is important because ultimately this is tied up with the concept of happiness. I don't think you can pursue happiness. It is a mirage, constantly eluding you. You can pursue a more peaceful state of mind though and in that state of mind, happiness arises as if by magic. Other ways of being also arise such as joy, humour, harmony and creativity. It creates a healthier way of being, a healthy mind free of wanting or not wanting anything. That is not to say your needs are unmet. You still need food, water, and shelter but you are free of this disharmony. Living in a consumerist society where values are placed on what you have in terms of wealth, occupation and property, there is a lot of disharmony about and hence not a lot of happiness. You do come across happy people though everywhere. People you meet in the street who smile and say hello, which always warms the heart. They seem happy enough. Am I happy? At times, I am but it is fleeting and I need to become more conscious of my inner workings.

In closing, I would say that health and happiness are inextricably linked. Happy people worry less if at all and this affects their physical and emotional well-being. Doctors used to never ask about one's emotional state if one was prone to sickness but it is slowly becoming more accepted that mind, body and spirit are all inter-connected. It doesn't follow that if you're happy you don't get sick. Other factors are also at play - maybe due to one's genes, environment or diet - but you would probably be in a better place to face it and hopefully get over it. 

Looking at how our world is so sick, one can understand the prevalence of disease. Like everything though, we have to start with our own health first and then find ways to emanate that wellness out into the world. I would start with food and water and go from there. Good nutritional food grown on clean healthy soil and clean, pure living water and perhaps even meditation. It's not everyone's cup of tea, I grant you, but it is a way forward towards a healthier and happier world.  

Be happy!   

The Sacredness of Water

I'm sort of obsessed by water and have been for well over a decade. Water for me is sacred because water is essential to life. Without breathable air and water, this planet would die. It makes up about 60% of the human body which makes us mostly water beings. I'm not sure what the percentage is for other species but it's probably going to be quite high. None of us here on this Earth can survive without water although some incredible life can remain dormant for long periods, years even, such as the African Lungfish although it too requires water to survive. 

Looking at our blue planet from space, it is clear that this is mainly a planet of water. When the Voyager 1 exploration spacecraft was just about to leave the Solar System for good, the first manmade object to do so ever, (and something that still brings a lump to my throat), 3.7 billion miles away, the mission managers, acting on a request by the eminent scientist Carl Sagan, were asked to turn the craft's cameras around for one last time and take a photograph of Earth. The 'pale blue dot', a term coined by Sagan and subsequently turned into a book of the same name was an iconic picture of this tiny blue dot hanging in the huge vastness of empty space, like a tiny jewel in the dust. It showed us just how precious and unique our world is, the blue being the reflection of the water. And we hang in a balance in a zone called the 'Goldilocks Zone' , where we are at just the right distance from the Sun for our water not to freeze or evaporate but to remain in largely liquid form, bar the poles of course. Since we have an atmosphere, our water can't go anywhere and remains pretty much at the same volume as when the dinosaurs first roamed the Earth and before. 

When we search for life on other planets, we always look for sources or evidence of water. We know that where there is or was water, there was, is or might be life in some form or another. It can also inspire space travel since spaceships can't carry that much water. We always have to think about how we are going to survive once we get there, wherever that is. 

Just how did water come to this planet in the first place? It is an abiding mystery. Scientific opinion usually focuses on comets and asteroids as the water bringers smashing into the Earth in its earliest days. These celestial nomads usually harbour large quantities of ice, they are like dirty snowballs. And the question begs to be asked: how did water get onto the comets? All the comets we know of exist only within the boundaries of our solar system, make periodic appearances and fly bys of the Sun sometimes not returning for thousands of years. Were comets part of some huge watery planets that disintegrated many, many aeons ago? The whole story of water and the formation of the universe are intertwined and I guess something that we will never know for sure. How did that combination of elements of all the possible combinations come to be the one that would allow the universe to observe itself? So simple, just two hydrogen atoms and one of oxygen, as stable a compound as there is and has ever been. It fascinates me. It is something we take for granted as we fill the kettle or have a shower yet it is so essential. It is something of the divine and its very essence sacred.

But back to Earth. I hear stories all the time - and have witnessed it myself - of how we're polluting this most precious, planet defining substance. The Yamuna River in India, that flows or rather bubbles its way past the Taj Mahal is a case in point. Huge crests of foam make it look like a gigantic bubble bath. The banks of the river are littered with plastic and other garbage. There are thousands of rivers around the world that are the same but obviously it's not just rivers. Lakes, ponds, marshes, seas and oceans, all are full of our toxic rubbish. It is an international disgrace. This garbage, which continues to proliferate day in, day out, is choking the life out of the streams, rivers and seas but it is out of sight and largely out of mind. As long as the beaches have sand and we can get water out of the tap or from plastic bottles we're alright. But we're not. Not really. There is something deeper at work here, something unacknowledged. We are not only harming our world, we are harming ourselves, becoming alien to our planet and to what gives it life. It is as if we are working against some divinity inside ourselves, as if we have forgotten our deep essence and connection to this world.

It is no wonder that we are destroying our environment and carry on regardless when we all experience a sort of collective cognitive dissonance, myself included. We have given power to an unfeeling presence, one that is in thrall to money. This is no idle conspiracy theory either. There simply is no political will to do anything about all the toxicity issues we are facing or if there is, it is minimal and paying only lip service to it, i.e. talking about it - the service of lips! Empty gestures, words of no meaning and so on. It is business as usual because there is no imagination in the corridors of power, or precious little that I can see. I know there are people out there who think and feel like I do and who do far more than me and my blog. Environmental protectors are the warriors of our age. I can't name them all but I remember so clearly the people that stood against the Dakota Access Pipeline a few years ago and at Standing Rock. This, among other things, was about water and the frightening potential of poisoning the rivers and a lake under which the oil pipeline from the Bakken oil fields was projected to run. Initially stopped, it was started again and completed in the Trump era. Many people were arrested and injured in trying to block its progress but it went ahead anyway and once again corporate power and greed trumped community, sacredness, and life. 

Anyone who has ever studied oil pipelines, knows that they can and do leak despite all the safety assessments. Once oil gets into water, it's game over for the life that the water brings until such time as it dissipates or is cleaned up which can take a very long time and enormous effort, sometimes even using surfactants that add another chemical to the water. Look at what happened when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and 40 million barrels of oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico. That's six and a half billion litres, more or less. Imagine that amount of water bottles stretching into the distance. It is almost unimaginable. It was the biggest oil spill in human history and the devastation and after effects 11 years later can still be seen and felt. And there are so many more. Carelessness, greed, apathy, arrogance all contribute and we must all bear this shadow because these disasters are not just the corporation's fault. It is our reliance on them, the corporations, to provide all the commodities and energies we demand that drives this insane treadmill and has given them so much power. Once again, it is a lack of imagination that got us here and it was due to our own apathy that this happened. 

This of course is a much, much larger subject than this blog post can even begin to cover in its thousand words or so. I can't describe, let alone research this whole subject of environmental degradation, especially that of water, and all the heroes and villains and how these two can be interchangeable because it is not my intention to point at individuals or to blame. Much as I would like to! There may well be demonic forces at work in this world, I don't know for sure, but the evidence is that there is something that stops us remembering the sacredness of life and of water to its detriment. There is a force that is not focused on life but on power, absolute power. It ignores all obstacles and pours its toxic brews over the soil, which leach into the water. It drills and mines regardless of harm to the Earth. It processes what it mines and drills for and creates objects that it turns into money and that money turns into power. That's the simplified version anyway! This power has become, or maybe always was, utterly corrupt. It has no end in sight other than its own satiation. It is not life-affirming in any shape or form. 

How did we allow things to get to this point? Modern life has become complicated and it seems this complexity grows exponentially and with that complexity comes the difficulty in finding our way back to a simpler, truer way of being where we are in connection with nature because, after all, we are nature. We grew from the earth, that stuff below our feet, like magical mobile plants, not exactly photosynthesising, but doing a pretty good version of a not too dissimilar process. As in nature, the more complex organisms become, the more they are prone to collapse in on themselves and that is what we are witnessing now. Most people's lives in the so called First World countries are complicated to distraction. If you're one of these people, just think of all the processes involved that allow you to live like you do. The morning coffee or tea came from somewhere else, usually some hillside or mountain in a warmer climate, the seeds for the plants that provided the beans came from somewhere else too, all of these processes involved energy, organisation, money, transport and all of these things had to be mined, drilled, processed, planned, manned and so on. That is just your coffee! So add in all the interactions of all the other things that you personally have to attend to or experience during a normal day and all the people, processes and materials they involve. It's huge. This is how complicated our societies are and how each part of the jigsaw relies on each other part. We've created a web of complexity that is mind-boggling. It's like a global set of dominos because if one part of it should fail, it will have consequences further down the line. 

Now this post is meant to be about water but the subject has been extrapolated to include space, pollution, corporate greed and modern life. See how it infiltrates into the global unconscious? It is everywhere but I want to close by mentioning my personal journey with water over the past few years. I don't know exactly when it was but at some point in the last fifteen or twenty years, I became more conscious of the water I drank. It was probably something to do with the taste of ordinary tap water combined with a bit of knowledge about what the water companies were treating it with and a spiritual awakening inside myself. After trying water filters, I started buying mineral water and then I started collecting water from springs using the bottles I'd bought from the shop in the first place. I went to Glastonbury and the White Spring and then someone told me about a spring on the busy A39 near Coxley and finally I heard about the spring at Hawkwood College, just outside Stroud in Gloucestershire, that arises beneath a huge, elegant elder statesman-like Sycamore tree. Since then, I have always tried to have the freshest and cleanest water I can get. When I lived in Portugal, I had water straight from the ground piped into my house. Portugal is a country where you often find springs in or near villages, especially in the mountains and some of these springs are beautiful places to visit. Many farms in remoter places will have their own 'water mine' where people have dug into the side of hills and mountains looking for a source. It occurred to me England too has many many springs but so many of them now seem to be lost or on private inaccessible land. When I lived just outside Bristol, not far from the airport but far enough for it still be a place of quiet and beauty, there was a spring right beside the little lane which was said to cure eye problems. However, it was almost lost in the vegetation and sometimes quite difficult to find. I believe we sourced some for my then wife's mother who had some eye problems but I forget whether it worked or not. 

Spring water has long been said to have special healing properties, both physical and emotional. Even spiritual. Now I live in the south of England once more, I am determined to find my closest springs and start collecting this precious water again. In fact, I have already found such a place and I am hoping that the people that own the land allow me to collect this water. My obsession led to the recent purchase of a number of books on the subject, mostly about Holy Wells. These places that were once pagan sites but were subsumed into the Christian faith and dedicated to a variety of ancient saints, many of whom I have never heard of, such was the early beatification process. Well known place names still attest to these sites - St Albans is one such place. It seems, somehow, that the natural clean pure water that flows under our hills and mountains and through our valleys is connected to our disassociation with our land and nature because we don't have free and easy access to it. Very few people actually collect spring water. 

Most people in this country, England, get their water either from the tap or from a plastic bottle from the shop. It is the consumerist version of getting water from a spring, paying for what is essentially your inherent right as a being of water. If we brought all the springs back to life, would there be enough to go around? Who knows. In cities such as London and even bigger cities around the world such as Sao Paulo and Mexico City, it is probably a resounding 'no'. These places are just too crowded to provide spring water for all the inhabitants. Should we all live in much smaller communities? I would like to think that this would be better for everyone, more healthy, but it is also highly unlikely and impractical. Water can still be provided to large numbers of people in densely populated areas but must it be treated the way it is? Adding chemicals to it to kill off bacteria and microbes effectively deadens water. I understand why it is done but can't help but notice that dead water with no life in it, and water is a living thing, doesn't bring aliveness to the people that drink it. Keeping it in static containers and in straight pipes doesn't help either. Water needs to flow. 

Viktor Schauberger, an Austrian forester living in the last century who died in 1958,  had a particular gift for observing nature. He saw that the water in streams didn't flow in a straight line, it turned and twisted, like the braiding of a rope. It was a vortex, the natural way that water moved. As a result of his observations, he invented a number of devices designed to bring back the living quality of water. If these could somehow be part of a design for an urban water system, it could bring enormous health benefits to people. I have already mentioned how we are water beings. We can't help but be influenced by the Moon cycles, just like the seas and oceans. It is a subtle thing but to lesser or greater degrees, we feel this cycle too and it manifests in different ways such as swings in energy, mood, and creativity. Imagine how that would feel if we were actually ingesting living water?     

After a recent fasting retreat, I went to a place in Devon, near Taunton, to visit a friend of a friend of mine. The house we visited was owned by a couple and the man had once been a water engineer working out in the Far East. He was passionate about the subject of water and we got to talking about water and all its wonderful applications and then he mentioned that he had his own spring source, which he could have bottled and sold but it was all too much as he had a huge house to maintain. I tasted this water and took some away with me in bottles. It was sweet water, constantly flowing, fresh and alive. I could sense its sacred quality and I use that word 'sacred' unashamedly. What do I mean by sacred? Isn't everything sacred? I mean it is of the divine, of the 'other', an inexplicable mystery that brought life to this little rock of ours. Clearly it is up to each one of us to put our focus and gratitude on whatever we think deserves it but for me I wish to honour this source of life. To that end, I wish to start a project to bring back the lost wells of this land, wherever they may be, and to think about ways in which to get living water to all the people living in cities. Springs used to be places of reverence. What if we brought back that reverence, beautified the wells, made them special, planted fragrant flowers, herbs and trees around them? Maybe it would lead to more gratitude in the world, more peace and harmony and greater consciousness. We can't expect the world to change overnight but just the first steps may lead to something truly wonderful. What are we waiting for?

Be well. 

The Idea of Home

A long time ago it seems, I received a song and I called that song 'Home'. When I say received, I mean that it just came to me fully formed - words, chords, melody and all - while I was stretched out in a hammock. It was a kind of magic. There was no song writing going on, no planning, it just came. I won't go into the whole song but it starts with the line 'I left my home a long time ago' and the final verse starts with 'I found my home beyond the stars'. I don't know why this particular song came to me, its message being rather metaphysical but over time I came to understand its mystical message. 

At the time, I had a home up in the mountains of central Portugal. My partner then and I were trying to create a beautiful place that would one day become a retreat centre. It was hard going, especially in summer, as the heat can be unbearable, and we lived off grid with no electricity supply apart from our solar system, no mains water apart from the water piped in from our spring and just gas bottles for heating water and cooking. When we first arrived in May 2013, we lived in a Bell tent for a few months and it was like an extended camping holiday and we just settled into a very different rhythm of living. Of course, friends were curious and we had an almost never ending stream of visitors that first summer plus we were getting to know our nearest neighbours and others who lived not far away who were also living similar quasi-hippy lifestyles! Suffice to say we didn't get a lot done that summer. In the autumn, we moved into a caravan on the land and began work on restoring the house. That took a while.

Although the spring and summer were wonderful periods, the autumn and winter were hard in a caravan.  Being on a north-facing slope in the mountains and having a large amount of mature Chestnut trees between us and the sun, we were often cold although we had a woodburner in the caravan that was at times just too hot. It could get very wet as well and extremely windy. Basically, we were at the mercy of the elements. We lived like that for three years until finally our house was ready and we, our two cats, a dog could move in. It was a real home at last even though the land had been home since the beginning. 

A year later and enormous fires raged throughout the country. We thought we were safe in our lush green valley but we were not spared. Slowly, the fire crept over the shoulder of a nearby slope, still far enough away that disaster could be averted. We had already evacuated the land the day before when the local farmer's wife, who supplied us with eggs and goat's cheese, had called my partner. "It's coming," she said, "you need to leave now." Ominous words that struck deep. And so we left. We sprinkled water for what good it would do on our garden, took a few basic things that in retrospect were completely impractical and yet inspired, packed our cats, Babu and Nushi, into cardboard boxes which they fought their way out of, and taking our dog Tinka on a lead we headed down to the stream, crossed it and went to our neighbours where they were packing their pick-up ready to leave. Unfortunately, our cats had escaped out of their boxes and all we could do was instruct them to stay by the stream. It was a heart-rending moment to leave them but we could not stay and at some deeper level, I knew they would be OK. The orange glow in the sky got brighter. At one point, it seemed like some Dante-esque inferno. We drove to the village above us and  from its medieval castle walls, we watched the fire's progress throughout the night, all of our neighbours and us and our various dogs taking refuge in some kind-hearted French people's holiday let. In the morning, it seemed like the fire had stopped, halted, and so we went to the café to celebrate, drinking coffee and eating toasted sandwiches. Laughing and sighing with relief, an air of joyous, peaceful contentment settling over us. It did not last.

By late morning, the wind picked up again, blowing at the embers of the fire, whipping it up into a fire storm of epic proportions. Although we could not see our valley due to a hill in the way, we could mark its progress by the colour of the smoke. Big black flumes spiralled into the sky and we knew that something toxic was burning. By this time, the fire had also reached the lower slopes below the village were in and thick smoke was hanging over us and we decided to evacuate the village too. We climbed into the back of another neighbour's pick-up and drove to a town about 6 miles away. This time, I felt like a true refugee, a strange feeling indeed, a juxtaposition, for me at least, between feeling devastated and free. I thought that perhaps we had lost everything bar the clothes we had on our backs and the few possessions we carried with us. When we got to another café, I called my elderly father in England and told him about this. He was obviously concerned but could not find the words to advise or comfort. We were then all invited to go to another house to rest by a Portuguese couple we met at the café. This house was a time-warp from another age and had not changed since possibly the 1940s or 50s. It was rather charming if a touch surreal. So all of us camped out there for the day, trying to rest, endlessly chatting, the smokers smoking, drinking coffee, eating, lying on beds and waiting for news. 

Finally some news came. A Dutch neighbour, Stef, who had stayed in the valleys to protect his house, came back and told us our house was OK. He had found a small fire on one of the doors which he had put out but it was all fine. Later, that evening, I went back with him along the rough tracks to check on the land. It had been badly burned but miraculously the garden in front of the house had been spared as had a teepee which was still standing in all its whiteness and in which we had had a ceremony just a few weeks before. We were lucky. All our neighbours' places had also survived. Most importantly, so had our cats who were a bit confused about it all but fine. The land was black and charred but we could still live there. Well, we did for a while but it became increasingly difficult. Our car, which had broken down on the first day of the fires, was still out and to cap it all, my mother died and then a deluge of rain brought down a mass of black sludge down the mountainside which ended up in our spring and poisoned the feeder pool of our drinking water. For a while, we carried on living there, getting water from the stream for cooking and cleaning and water from a spring a few miles away for drinking. I had the use of another car a friend lent us but I had to use the wheelbarrow to transport things from the track down our long and twisting drive. In the end, the whole process of living there became too much and another friend's father kindly offered us his house rent-free about 20 miles away. We took the chance and abandoned the farm, taking all of our animals with us. 

It was the beginning of a slow process of leaving our home. Later the next year, my partner and I separated and I travelled abroad, first to India to heal my body, and then to the UK to start an intensive three month storytelling course. 

After the course finished in June, I decided not to drive back to Portugal but to head north to Scotland, after checking up on my father. I envisaged wild camping on remote beaches, having small driftwood fires and declaiming stories and poetry to the bemused gulls and other wildlife. It didn't quite work out like that but during this time a process started inside me. I began to feel like I didn't belong here, in this country, that I had been away too long and that I had indeed 'left my home a long time ago'. It was an odd, uncomfortable feeling of rootlessness. I felt like an impostor in my mother country yet at the same time I felt a yearning to be at home here. The one home I remembered with great affection was the small idyllic oak-beamed cottage in Kent that my parents had rented for about 15 years while my brother and I grew up but that was a long time ago. I didn't know where I belonged now. As summer passed, the pressure grew on me to return to Portugal and take care of my business there in the only home I really had. I resisted. I watched the August harvest from the ancient Anglo-Saxon hillfort in Dorset near my father's home. It was somehow comforting yet at the same time unnerving because I knew I had to leave. I did have to get back by September because my house-sitter was leaving and my cats would be there alone. I had lots of stuff to do there too. I crawled back through the southern counties visiting and staying with a number of friends, putting off the inevitable until I finally found myself at Dover, waiting in line for the ferry. Then I was on the ferry and out the other side, driving through France in late summer. First to Paris to stay with an old friend and his family for a couple of days and then the big slog south, retracing in reverse some of the route that I had taken with my brother when we had driven north to the UK earlier that year. The anxiety continued. The feeling of not belonging here or there. I drove through France, camping at places that I had wanted to visit like the enormous sand dunes, the Dune de Pilat, and then into Spain and across to the Picos de Europa. Up and over the mountains I went, listening to Test Match Special to distract me from the gnawing sense of dread. 

Finally, after a long hot trip, I arrived back in the valley. It was incredibly hot for early September and the land was dry. The garden was almost dead but the cats were pleased to see me. I went across to visit my neighbours. It was empty and abandoned as if they hadn't been living there for some time. Sara and Emil's garden was usually lush and full of healthy plants and there were always happy animals about. Not this time though. I went up the track to Wallay and Isa's place. Again, empty, abandoned, dry and all the fruit trees they had planted were almost dead. At that moment, I felt as if I was again living in a sort of hell, as if I was the only surviving member of the human race. Life and home is all about community. Now there was none.

My feelings of hopelessness and despair filed themselves back into my mental filing cabinet for future reference and I set about my tasks again and soon got back into a rhythm. I had been trying to sell the farm since the middle of the previous year, maybe even before, so this became one of my main goals: to make the land and house look clean, presentable and attractive to potential buyers. I began to become quite good at showing people the land, developing a certain 'sales talk', pointing out all the benefits and things I would do if I was to remain. Why do you want to leave this paradise they asked. I couldn't tell them, it was just too deep inside, too personal so I gave them bland answers. Meanwhile, the urge to leave my home grew and intensified. I felt as if I was waging some sort of war - and in my mind I probably was! Events seemed to conspire to bind me to this overgrown land - it had recovered after the fires of two years before. I implored the spirits of the land to release me. They sent wild boar in response. No joke. It seemed the entire wild boar population of those mountains had found the ideal holiday retreat centre and descended on my land en masse. It had after all become a retreat centre but not for humans! The damage they made to the terraces was extensive and it presented a potential obstacle to a sale. I had no way of combatting their nightly antics. Friends told me of the different ways to deter them: find their routes onto the land and then... First of all it was oranges. Place oranges all over the place. My land was huge, maybe 5 hectares of wilderness and as many runways onto it as some sort of infernal airport. However, I did buy oranges, lots of them, and dropped them into the most obvious areas. The wild boar ignored them. Then it was mothballs. These I distributed widely too. Absolutely no effect. I may as well have opened a dry cleaning service for them. Diesel was also mentioned but I drew the line at that. One night, I flung open my skylight and shone my incredibly bright torch into the darkness to see about twenty boars fleeing up the hill. Without any means of deterring them, I could do nothing. My cats ignored my worries and carried on grooming themselves. In the end, after some fruitless attempts at filling in the massive craters the boars made, I ignored it too. In late winter, the boars headed back up the mountains.

In the spring and early summer of last year, 2020, I finally sold my place and flew to the UK. I stayed with my girlfriend at the time, in the north, for a while but I was increasingly having to travel south to visit my ailing father. In time, I started living in a tiny house in someone's garden a few miles away from him, which is where I still am. The idea of a home is still uppermost in my mind as I am now in a very expensive country where prices for homes are out of reach and where rentals are getting harder to find. I don't have enough money to buy my own place even with the money from my father's estate. He died in February this year and didn't own his own home. My brother and I have been itemising all my parents' lovely antiques and other belongings, readying them for sale. We may be lucky and get some good prices but it will most likely not be enough to buy a house. Much as I would like a home right now, it seems out of my grasp for now. Strangely, I am not overly concerned about this. I don't feel pity for myself either. I am just grateful that I have a roof over my head at all, albeit a small one. Inside myself,  I feel a proper home is coming and I need to be patient.

Quite often, I will go for walks, meditations and prayers in my local ancient forest. A few weeks ago I had a realisation that the forest was my home and in a wider context, our Earth itself. I have been fortunate enough in my life never to have been without a home, not for long anyway, and that somehow a home is always there. I think of all the unfortunate people in the world who don't have their own homes or who make do with shacks, often living with dignity in appalling and squalid circumstances. We all need a place to lay our heads where we can be dry and safe. We need to rebuild community and help those less well off than us. I don't wish to preach about it, we all do what we can for others and when one day we have reached a tipping point of consciousness on this planet, we'll address all the blatant wrongs that governments and corporations largely turn a blind eye to. Maybe if tech billionaires stopped trying to invest in billion dollar space explorations and put that money into community, into proper ways of feeding people, of cleaning up all the toxicity and giving people homes, we could avert catastrophe. I don't have any desire to live anywhere else but on this planet, although I'd love to visit other planets, and that wherever my heart is, that is my home. It could be anywhere because I am always at home in my heart, strange as that may sound but the phrase 'Home is where the heart is' can be reversed to mean the same thing. Home is not necessarily a picture postcard cottage with roses growing up the walls, much as I like that image. It is where I live and breathe and love and write and play. It is out in the forest at twilight when the animals reappear and the birds settle down. It is among the climbing honeysuckle that looks like sunlight in the treetops on overcast days. It is here in this tiny home where I sit and write. It can be anywhere. I belong here for now, where I am and when I am not here, I will belong somewhere else. I can let go of ideas of belonging anywhere in particular and pray for a proper home to come my way one day and I am sure it will but until then, and beyond, I belong to the Earth and to the great mystery.

Welcome home.

What does Freedom even mean?

This is a very tricky thing to write about and I'm not even sure I want to write about it but I will attempt it anyway. The reason I chose 'freedom' as a subject was because our freedoms are currently under attack like never before and I'm extremely concerned about it. A short time ago, in recent memory, we could still talk about what we wanted to talk about in public or online, we could congregate together freely and we could protest against things we didn't like that the government imposed on us or were planning to. All of these things, simple freedoms really, were granted and understood in a so called Western democracy and I say 'so called' because democracy and what it actually means and what it is in actuality are two entirely different things but that is something to talk about later on.

Let's take the last of these 'freedoms', the right to protest. Governments don't like it when enormous groups of people march against unpopular policies. They have to respond to justify their actions and plans and in the past, they would have done but it doesn't seem to work like that any longer. Look at the massive protests against the Iraq War in the UK and many other countries in February of 2003. They were the largest protests in human history and, in the UK, sent a very clear message to Blair and his government and to all the governments that we didn't want to go to war. And what happened? The government ignored the people and in some countries said it did not even reflect public opinion and we went to war. No marches or demonstrations against the whims of power have ever been as big since. The fact that people were not heard, that their strongly held views were so easily dismissed and we went ahead with a brutal campaign that has effectively ruined a functioning country and its people, despite a ruthless dictator at the helm, has demoralised people. Although protests and demonstrations followed for this and other issues, it showed government that they can ride roughshod over the people and so they do. 

Now, there is the very real prospect of protests being banned for arbitrary reasons such as noise and public disturbance. Increasingly the police act like the government's very own bouncers, not protecting the people any longer but protecting the government, protecting power. It is a very real possibility that protests may become illegal - well, protests of size and substance that can't be ignored, even though, due to the nature of the current media, they are now being ignored anyway. 

The there's free speech. We can still say what we like but it is being vigorously censored throughout the media and social media platforms. The current situation with the Covid virus has changed a lot of things regarding free speech and the terms 'misinformation' and 'disinformation', which have crept into our common lexicon during the past decade or so, are applied liberally. Now, if you say something that goes against a common narrative, it is shouted down using one of those terms and you may even get banned or thrown off those platforms. Fact-checkers have arrived in their unseen and unregulated droves to go through what we say and, you would have thought, check on whether it's a fact, an actual fact. But the truth of it is that they check on whether it is a fact that supports their narrative. There is a term for this, it's called censorship. It's not done to protect the public. It's done to protect the narrative. People have to be protected from the truth. It's Orwellian in the extreme. Even eminent qualified scientists and doctors who really know their stuff and have a once respected scientific opinion and verifiable evidence about all of this can be censored, de-platformed, ridiculed and so on to the point where their voices are only heard on sites that relatively few people know about. Think about having a debate about the efficacy of some health policy or a vaccine or anything that counters the mainstream view? Forget about it. Science fact is only that which wholly supports the narrative and the narrative will be broadcast 24/7 by TV news, online news channels, newspapers and even through other means in editorials and probably, although I don't watch TV or listen to news, gardening programmes and cricket commentary too. It is relentless. It has become the new dogma of our age and anyone who disagrees with it is a heretic. 

Think back to the Medieval ages and if you spoke out against the doctrine of the church and suggested say that the Earth revolved around the Sun and wasn't an immobile mass in the centre of the Universe as Galileo did, then you could be subject to imprisonment and torture. In Galileo's case, he was effectively placed under house arrest until he died. Now of course we know that the Earth DOES revolve around the Sun so you get an idea of how views change over time, with new knowledge, and how it is important not to be dogmatic about anything. The Age of Enlightenment brought in a wave of new ideas and thinking that freed up society to a large extent, even though to many they were still not free, but importantly it led to the separation of church and state which had already been happening in many countries where religious freedom of expression and belief had already taken root. 

Under present conditions, the freedom to congregate has all but disappeared. During the stricter parts of the national 'lockdown' (a term I still have problems with because of its origins - it's a jailhouse term, why use it?), we couldn't see anyone apart from on a screen or through a sheet of plastic. Now we are able to gather but large gatherings such as weddings, festivals, parties, clubs, race meets, concerts are still banned. I'm not going to get into my own views on lockdowns and vaccines here as this blog today is about freedom but the fact is that this public health scare has ushered in this new clampdown on freedoms. When we get them back or if ever is another matter. 

I've only been talking about external freedoms so far, the ones we think about when someone asks you whether you think you are free or not. The ones that most people think about when the subject of freedom arises and there are many more besides these. Freedom itself is such a large subject that I really can't do it justice in this limited blog. It deserves a book or books and there are many written about the subject. I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what freedom means in the wider world and how we regulate it to an extent because we almost have to otherwise we'd all be running wild and free. 

However, I wish to talk about the most important freedom of all. Your inner freedom. The freedom you give yourself. Inner freedom is something else altogether. It is about allowing yourself freedom to express yourself and simply 'be yourself' in any situation regardless. Most of us are constricted in how we present ourselves to the world. For whatever reason, many of us are not fully ourselves, we feel constrained, we are slightly rigid and this, I've noticed, seems to be more apparent with age. We don't act how we feel, we don't dress how we want to dress, we don't show ourselves to the world for fear of judgement and ridicule based on past experiences and conditioning going back to our earliest formative years. My Mother, bless her soul, was for ever telling strangers that my brother and I were shy. We weren't but we sort of became shy because she said we were. It was my mother who was shy, not us. Now I've been long grown up, I am not shy at all. I'm friendly and engaged but for many years I was sort of awkward in expressing myself. If I had been freer, I would have expressed myself exactly how I wanted to. The presence of a potentially quite critical father however didn't help matters. So I grew up not feeling or being free in myself. As I entered my twenties and the world of work and socialising, I did worry an awful lot about what people thought of me and this translated into trying to look good on the outside and presenting myself in a certain way, especially when I felt awkward or stupid in front of my better educated peers. It wasn't their fault. They acted like they did, well some of them anyway, because of THEIR conditioning and their experiences. They weren't particularly being themselves either. As you enter late middle age, all these constructs begin to fall away and it's like the Emperor's New Clothes in reverse, you are naked but you aren't ashamed any longer. It is how you are. And how you are is fine in my book. It's real. Never be afraid to be your true self. Anyone who tries to shame you or ridicule you is just the lack of freedom, the conformity of opinion, the shallow judgment of others showing itself. It is nothing to do with you, it is wholly to do with them.

When you are free on the inside, you are also by default, free on the outside. You live in the truth of your being. You were not born into this world to be a shadow of yourself: you were born to shine bright. No amount of laws and prohibitions can stop that. You express yourself as freely as you want as long as none of your actions are harmful. If you die like this, then you die free and it is better to live on your feet, than die on your knees. Being free in thought, just like the brave philosophers and scientists were before the Enlightenment, allows ideas to flourish. Ideas of freedom, of expansion, of breathing the air freely and these ideas can change the world. 

Be free.

Honey is for bees

Last night, as I returned from a visit to my brother's a short walk away, I came across a Bumble bee lying on the road. It was getting late and I knew instinctively that this bee was either exhausted, damaged in some way or perhaps starving due to all the bad weather we had been having. So I picked him up and took him back to my place where I placed him in an upturned lid and gave him honey that a friend of mine had given me (and which I initially declined but more of that later) and water. I could see his tiny tongue lapping up the honey but his right middle leg was retracted and upon further investigation, I could see that it was missing the two end sections. It made its gait rather clumsy but nevertheless he lapped up the honey and actually stood on the small mound of honey that I had provided which in retrospect was far too much for such a small creature, getting very sticky in the process. 

I decided not to turn on the WiFi and have an evening without it so that the bee could recover and rest. When I went to bed, I put him in a flower pot containing some Red Sorrel that a friend of mine had given to me and put a little bit of honey on a small piece of cardboard so he had a food source. Then I balanced a tea spoon with a very small amount of water as something to drink and went to bed. I half suspected that because his movements were so slow and laborious that he might well die during the night. It was warm inside though so I left him to it. 

In the morning, I found that he was still very much alive and had probably also been sleeping. He started moving around the flower pot and I provided another tea spoon with a honey/water solution which he also lapped up. Then he started climbing the stalks of the sorrel, rather slowly at first but determinedly, from one leaf to another before he fell off onto the table with a quiet thud. I had heard his wings buzzing and was full of hope but it lasted only for a second. After a while, I allowed him to crawl onto my hand and there he stayed. The sun was coming up by now and so I ventured outside but it was still cold so we came inside again and, eventually, as the sun heated up, we went outside once more and he moved around my hand, somehow reluctant to move off. The morning urge to pee started growing in me so I felt I would have to abandon him somewhere safe otherwise I would explode! I held him up to the sun in my hand but still he clung on. At some point, as he manoeuvred around my hand, he fell to the ground but before he reached it, his little wings kicked in and he flew. He did a wide circle, climbing steadily into the air and the sun and I watched him go with a huge amount of joy and relief. He flew strongly into his future and disappeared. 

Bees have been in my consciousness for quite a while and I have had some magical encounters with these little alchemists, the true alchemists, over the years. Many years ago, I began a training with a bee shaman. I took the whole shamanic thing with a pinch of salt at first but one experience that I had showed me how little I knew and opened my eyes to a truth that I was missing. We had a exercise one day that involved staring into the eyes of another member of our clan (the name we were given as a group of students) in a big circle. The act of staring was to last two minutes each time. Doesn't sound a lot, does it? But actually two minutes can be a long time to gaze into another's eyes. It ushers up uncomfortable feelings and people giggle or try to avert their eyes to cover up this awkwardness. It's like an intrusion into another's very private space. However, when the two parties are committed and serious, you begin to see all sorts of strange shapeshifting going on. People can look very old, very young, mad, weird, beautiful. Men can look like women, and vive versa. All very strange and wonderful if a little bit unnerving. On this particular exercise, we didn't get to look into the eyes of every member of our clan as that would have taken much longer than planned. The point of the exercise was to build and gain trust between each other. The shaman had joined the circle as well and my last staring match was with him. I stared deep into his eyes and once again the shapeshifting started but just before the end of the exercise it seemed as if he revealed some deep inner secret because I was suddenly staring into the eyes of a bee. It was just a flash but no less shocking as it was incredibly real. It had a profound effect on me and brought a new found respect for him as my teacher.

A year later, we were both in the Kalahari desert on a shamanic pilgrimage to the San bushmen. We had travelled to the Tsodilo Hills, near the Okavango Delta, which is perhaps the most sacred place for the bushmen. Laurens Van Der Post wrote about this place in his book 'The Lost World of the Kalahari', describing the ancient rock art and, importantly, a particular episode which I can only vaguely recall. It involved writing a letter of supplication, asking for forgiveness, to allow the expedition to continue: it had been stalled - all the motors and equipment had stopped working as if by some sort of magic - and they had been plagued by hordes of angry bees. Once the letter had been written and delivered however, being buried in the ground, the bees left. On my journey, I also came across bees. It was the early morning of the first day we were there, having arrived the night before. I heard the loudest buzzing ever as if bees were climbing all over my tent. My teacher was there too and I felt this was something to do with him and that I would find him outside completely covered in swarms of bees yet when I ventured out of the tent, there was not a bee to be seen. They were high up in the upper canopies of the acacia trees under which we were camped and which were in full blossom. It was a beautiful moment to be in that place with so many of these magical little creatures in a sort of billowy heaven of soft blossom. 

Bees are magical creatures. They have been around on this earth for a very, very long time. In fact, there is a fossilised record of them from a place in Aberdeenshire that I went to on a shamanic pilgrimage which I'll talk about another time. Bees make a substance that is so deliciously sweet and healing that it's treasured and cultivated by us human beings not only for our pleasure but for our financial gain. A while ago, I came to understand something about bees and our relationship to them. Time and time again, I have been asked to sign petitions against the spraying of pesticides, neonicontinoids especially, that harm bees. The bees are having a hard time of it these days and are under huge attack, not just from chemicals but from mobile phone masts and WiFi and from the commercial exploitation of all their hard work: their honey, propolis, pollen and royal jelly ending up in our shops. It is no wonder they succumb to mites. It is no wonder there has been a decline in numbers and that we hear of colony collapse. We take their work in pollinating our blossoms and flowers for granted as if we can do what we like at their expense but we simply can't. This world is not ours no matter what the Bible says. We share it with many other creatures and beings. Just going to the shop to buy a jar of honey says so much about our unconscious actions. There is a saying that if the bees disappear from our world, then we will follow several years later. In some countries, pollination is now done by humans and I can imagine that there are plans afoot for robot bees. Actions like this seem to disregard our environmental degradation.

Other bee encounters followed over the years. I began to work with a local beekeeper in Somerset, who I had met at a country wedding and whose house and garden, much to the consternation of his wife, was completely given over to bee work. John was a Puckish character, in his late 60s or early 70s, his rosy, weather-beaten face always had a shy, slightly cheeky smile on it and he was generous to a fault. He had hives all over the place and I helped him on occasion and took many photographs of his activities which he had laminated and then shared with schoolchildren. He was of the traditional type of beekeeper, using square wooden hives which had a number of sections. We went in with full protection gear including gloves, suits and mesh hats. One of his tasks was to mark the Queen and also to take out any other Queens since a colony would become very unstable with two or more Queens about. He was also treating his bees against varroa mite, the scourge of bees. When you got to his place, the garage was absolutely full of old hives and wax frames in various states of disrepair, the air buzzing alarmingly with many bees. John said he had been stung many, many times but it didn't bother him too much. Though I could see why his wife was a bit vexed by the whole business! Sadly, I moved away and lost touch with him but the last thing I remember was that he was invited to Nepal of all places to spread his wisdom and work with the beekeepers there.

When I moved to Portugal, I bought some land up in the mountains which was covered in sweet chestnut trees and many other bee-friendly plants such as rosemary and lavender. The previous owners took all their bee hives with them but they left behind the one that still had bees in it up on the chestnut terraces. Weeks or maybe even months later, I went up to check on the bees. I approached the hive. All was silent. Not a single bee was in sight. I put my ear against the hive and listened. No sound at all. So I slowly removed the first section and looked inside. It was full of honey but completely empty of bees. Not knowing bee ways, I took out the frame that was heavy with honey and took it down to the caravan and put it in a plastic bag ready for extraction. A day later I was up at the hive again and this time it was totally different. Bees were buzzing everywhere, all over the hive, coming in and out of the entrance, in the air. Oh no, I thought, they've come back for their honey. I didn't have any protective gear with me but I knew that I had to return the honey frame. I was going to have to trust that they didn't sting me. I collected the frame and came back to the hive, took a breath and slowly removed the top section. The bees were all over the frames, moving about, but fortunately for me they didn't seem too bothered by my presence. I took the frame out of the bag and then very slowly slipped it back into position. Of course, when the bees sensed honey, they started covering the honey frame so it had to be done carefully and methodically. Once it was back in position, I lowered the section back on top, taking as much care as possible not to squash any bees which is nigh on impossible when they are crawling everywhere. At last, I finished and then left them to it. A day later, I couldn't resist coming back to check up on them. This time there seemed very little bee activity going on as I drew near the hive. In fact, nothing was going on. I pressed my ear against the hive once more. No hum inside. I took the top section off again. It was empty again of bees and, this time, honey. Mission accomplished! My dream of having my own hives was dashed.

I did think of having bees but although I went and bought the wax sheets that fit onto the frames, I went no further. A few years later, I was outside with my brother when we heard an almighty hum. Instinctively I knew it was a bee swarm. Looking up into the sky, you could see how they travelled - not in one straight direction but in every direction all at once, zipping about like neutrinos, and slowly moving in one general direction. I wondered about trying to capture the swarm into my hive but I had no idea how and although a local beekeeper called Harold could have done the job, the moment passed. The bees settled in what I called my woodshed, which was the cellar of my other house, a dark and cool place and actually a bit too dark and cool for bees but they seemed to like it and duly set about cementing the open old wooden door to the stone wall, effectively locking it in place. It was a beautiful sight to behold as they began to construct an enormous wavy wax comb. There was a frameless window and they flew in and out all the time and being summer, I had no real need to go in there. I left them to it. Time passed and autumn approached and the days got shorter and cooler. The place they had chosen didn't get much sun and was chilly. As the temperature dropped, I stapled some packing blankets to the door to stop the wind and then rigged up a frame upon which I put more blankets. I noticed that under the window and on the window ledge, there were quite a few dead bees. When it started raining, the rain would come through the floor above, so I put plastic sheets over the blanket frame. Everyday I would come to the little entrance I had made, put my ear to it and listen to the hum and when I heard it, I was glad to know that they were still alive. This went on all winter. I brought them a shallow dish of water mixed with honey but wasn’t sure how effective it was. To be honest, they were in a very bad location and many of them died. The wind, when it blew, could blow very strongly so I had to jam the door open to prevent their home breaking apart. It was extremely cold at times since we were on a north-facing slope (a very bad idea in Portugal in the mountains!). Eventually Spring arrived, the rains stopped, the days got warmer and I slowly dismantled the frame, the plastic sheetings and the blankets. There were still bees there! Their comb was still intact. I thought this is the time for them to move somewhere else, with their honey. A day later, my heart broke when upon coming into the woodshed, I found that some sort of animal had already been there the night before and had destroyed the comb, taking all the honey. There were no more bees. It seemed to have been all for nothing and I was desolate. There was no happy ending to this particular story. 

My whole experience with bees however has led me to an understanding. I used to buy loads of honey in Portugal where it is often available and very affordable in local markets. I was obsessed with the stuff and sought out all the best types - hard amber coloured, butterscotchy honey, heather honey and the dark, almost black, medicine of chestnut honey. My morning porridge, much to the amusement of my partner, was covered in huge dollops of this heavenly food - I had an extremely sweet tooth. But as the years passed so this understanding grew: here was I greedily gorging myself on a substance that I almost take as my right to consume even though I have done nothing to earn that right. The honey market is an unconscious one - as if it's something you tap off from some massive, unlimited underground reservoir. Whereas honey was once considered as a supreme gift of nature, although never freely given, it is now gathered, processed, sold, bought and consumed with hardly a thought about all the hard work that bees put into making it. We take and expect so much from them and then wonder why they succumb to disease, colony collapse or mites as we read about it on our devices using the stealthy and dark energies of WiFi and mobile communications as we eat our cornflakes, grown in fields sprayed with dangerous harmful chemicals. I made a decision not to buy honey again. In fact, I don't buy any bee products these days. The honey I fed the bee with was bought for me by my friend and I explained to her that I wouldn't take it but then had a moment of insight for moment like this. So I took it. I haven't started preaching about this yet but this is the first time I have written about it. I could write much more. All the new fangled hives that have been developed, such as the one where you can just turn a tap and the honey flows out! What? Anyway, I don't need to say more. Hopefully the seed is now sown and will take root. When I said goodbye to my little friend this morning, I told him that I was so glad to be of service to him as he had been in such great service to me all my life. So much gratitude.

Blessed Bee. 

The Deep Mystery of Love

It's a funny thing, this thing called love. It exists completely free of us yet is in us and, I believe also, is us too. In more recent times, we've made love into a rather mawkish and over-sentimental emotion thanks in part to over-sentimental Hollywood films that do not reflect the true gritty nature of life. It is bandied around without thought. Love you, we say as a goodbye on the phone. That's OK of course but it somehow takes away from its profundity - not that we have time to think deeply about its meaning when we say 'love you'. It seems mean of me to say but I am fascinated by love and believe it is far, far more than we can begin to imagine but that's me and I guess love is what you make it. I think and feel that love is an energy, fundamental to life, a source of life not just for human beings but for animals, plants, all creatures that are alive that have a vibration and so this includes the rocks and the earth, the water and air and even the fire. 

Masaru Emoto, who sadly died seven years ago was a water wizard. Ridiculed by the scientific community for his so called pseudoscience, he nevertheless continued his experiments into the vibrations through water that showed incredible patterns when infused with certain words, especially the word 'love'. Understandably, the scientific community can't be seen to get involved in things they can't measure or understand through mainstream science and resort to ridicule as a sort of defence. But I know Emoto was right - and so did he. We are vibrational beings. Go down, down, down through all the layers of our physical being - and you can keep going for ever it seems - and you come across molecules of vibrating atoms. Each atom or molecule vibrates differently depending on its atomic mass as shown in the periodic table of our schooldays: lead atoms will vibrate slowly since all the molecules are quite densely packed while helium will be much faster and so on and so forth. Heat and cold excite or calm the atoms and molecules. Anyway, I'm no scientist and don't pretend to know about chemistry but the point being the vibration and whether or not we can affect it. Emoto wrote out words such as 'love' and 'hate' and stuck them onto different vessels containing water and froze them to look at the crystalline structure and they were fascinating. Love crystals were beautiful and perfectly geometrical while hate crystals were ugly and deformed. He found the same contrasts with waters taken from polluted rivers or pristine springs. 

The purer something is, the more akin to love it is. Love is a pure energy permeating everything. It is an invisible web that binds things together. A web of life that is hidden from daily view yet exists in a different plane and influences us throughout our lives. It is in the air, the trees, the rocks. It is between people and in people. It is a profound and wonderful thing. 

Love affects things deeply, vibrating outwards. You shower love on a young kitten or puppy and it generally reflects that love back to you. Obviously, the same thing happens with a baby. He or she grows up feeling supported and held and they become confident children and whole adults who can usually love deeply too. The feeling of being 'in love' is one of the most incredible and beautiful things we experience in life and when it is reciprocated fully, well, wow! It is almost as if you are one person, the rhythm and vibration of two lives operating on the same frequency. You dance along that invisible thread together but it is intense and maybe can't always be maintained. We talk about how being 'in love' changes to just loving someone over time and in some cases 'falling out of love' as if you've slipped from the highwire and if, heaven forbid, you end up hating each other then the thread is completely broken and ugliness has returned. I often muse on how love is a feeling, we feel it and can't think it but hate is a thinking thing that can't be truly felt, not by the heart. I feel the heart is too delicate an instrument to 'feel' hate. 

Of course we get choices as we grow up and making wrong choices can lead us down different paths, sometimes away from love. Being on a path of love, generally brings more loving into your life but love must start with self-love. This is not some narcissistic trait, it is a fundamental truth. Love starts within. This is not loving how you look by the way, it is loving who you are deep inside, accepting all parts of yourself without question. Loving your wobbly bits, your peevish bits, being aware of these. This is how you are and you love yourself, accept yourself. You don't have to please anyone, you don't have to be a certain type of person - this is how you are. It is unconditional. Loving what you do, who you're with, and where you live shows. If you love what you do and what you create, fulsomely without question - not always easy I admit and something that needs to be reflected on - then that is enough. You are already a success in life. 

Some people say they love money. This is not a pure love. It is using the word 'love' in a rather awkward context. This is muddy water. Money is an inanimate object, an idea more than a real thing. It exists in another sort of plane because in essence it is not real. Gold is real though but money is not gold. It used to be and sometimes is. Can you love gold? Being an artist, I know I love the colour 'gold' but not necessarily the feel of it. Big clanking coins - can I love them? Is this more to do with something called 'greed' and desire. Is this where the word 'love' is misappropriated and turned into something it is not? The same goes for the muddying between 'love' and 'lust'. For me anyway, lust can so easily be confused with love but is nothing like it. Love is unconditional - when we say 'unconditional' about love, it sort of doesn't mean anything. How can there be conditions placed on love anyway? Love is always unconditional. The word 'unconditional' is surplus to requirements. And then we come back to self-love which can mutate so easily into pride, considered the most pernicious of the seven deadly sins. In each case, and we could talk about the other four deadly sins, there is a fine but recognisable line between 'love' and the relevant sin. 

Loving another allows you to let go of them, in love, when the threads are not so strong. The feelings will persist even if they are not reciprocated. It happened to me. I had a beautiful, deep and pure love with my partner for seven years. A few things happened to us including the burning of our land by a huge engulfing forest fire and the poisoning of our well and, combined with my own feelings of being lost and angry, the threads unravelled. Still to this day, now 3 years later, I grieve for what I lost and for my part in allowing the threads to become unstitched. There were other factors involved but I take responsibility for the ending of our journey. It was as if I had broken the most precious object in the universe. The night I learned about my partners's decision was one of the worst experiences of my life. I was in agony. I didn't blame her though. I could see clearly how this had happened and before I went to bed I went and did one of my meditations and through this, I truly felt that all I wanted was the best for her and that I let her go in love. It didn't heal my agony but it ameliorated the feelings and I was able to sleep. I still wish only the best for her and her new partner. It fills me with love to think of them now and I have no desire to win her back or cause her any anguish. I know she loves me too even if she doesn't say it. After we had been separated for about a year, she came to our house, way out in the mountains, to get her things. We got on as always and then she told me that she loved me, that this love had never died and I truly felt the truth of it too. It was love and didn't need another word to justify where it rated on a virtual scale like 'affection' or 'fondness'. Love is.

All this writing about love has made me curious about its origins, its etymology. A brief trawl through the internet showed me how love and what it is has been a subject of debate and scrutiny since ancient times. Indeed, the very essence of love has permeated all our cultures and is closely associated with 'god'. Some said love was an actual god. 'God is love' is an often used phrase but what is 'god' and then again, what is love? I imagine we will never agree. It remains as a mystery, a deep abiding mystery but the closest I can get is that it is the glue that connects us to everything and fuels creation. When love is absent, things fall apart, like relationships or jobs. Love is all around, the song goes and I think that, yes, it is. 

With love to you all.