It's the dawn of the longest day and I sit here in my dressing gown typing away and sadly not observing the vigil at Stonehenge or at any other of the sacred sites in this country. For me, this day is not only a day of light, it is a day of a slight sweet melancholy, a nod to darkness. From here on in, until the Winter Solstice in six months time, the days shorten and darkness creeps back into the world. As the days grow shorter so the fruiting bodies swell, the corn begins to ripen, the trees and plants begin a slow process of packing up the deckchairs, dismantling the bunting, and making seeds. A maturation. The leaves grow darker in colour, become coarser, more leathery losing their lettuce leaf softness, gradually they dry up and fall to the ground and become the earth with which to feed the tree from which they fell. It is a sweet melancholy of the natural cycle.
But all is not lost. It is also a time when Summer starts, astronomically speaking, even though Mid-Summer's day, another auspicious time, is strangely just days away. And this contrast of dark and light, light and dark is very much how things seem in the material world too. It is Ying and Yang. You can't have one without the other. So, although things seems very bleak in our current world situation, this is only one version of it. There is another story and this is the story that flies under the radar, the untold story of awakening and growing consciousness. You won't read about it in the news: good news doesn't tend to sell newspapers!
If I was to believe what the news says is true, what is reflected back to me by the mainstream media machine, I think I might drive to Beachy Head and throw myself off those majestic old molars into the sea and rocks below. It would be simply too depressing to believe that there is no magic in this world. That it is a place of digits and zeros, barcodes, tax returns, utility bills, mortgages and credit ratings, MOTs, insurance, masks, vaccinations, permits and passports. Things designed to restrict, control, manage, and conform you. To fit into a pattern of society that demands you adhere to the rules and regulations while those that govern us do not. A world of inequality and poverty and curtailed opportunities and limited freedoms. To believe all that, would be depressing to the nth degree.
Is this what I was born to experience? And some people only experience that world and it shows on their faces because life can be very hard and a bit of a chore. Something to get through. Just a few more months, dear, just another year, racing to the finish line where we'll collect our prize, a gold watch, and then retirement (retirement from life?) and hopefully an easy death, no fuss, sprinkle of earth, gravestone epitaph extolling one's virtues in silent carved stone and cheerio. And some people did work very hard for years and years and years and all they did get was a gold watch, clap on the back, well done, old chap, and all that. Really? I don't buy it. I have been lucky and privileged enough in my life to have witnessed some truly magical moments. To have done some things that when I look back, I wonder who that was that did all those things, saw all those things, loved and caroused, danced and sang, made mistakes, learned, failed, failed again, learned again, lived and breathed.
However, I can't say I don't have regrets. I didn't finish college, collect the all-important degree and start climbing the rungs of the ladder of responsibility: career, wife, mortgage, children and so on. I was totally irresponsible, living in the moment (well, not all the time but irresponsible, yes), making it all up as I went along, striving towards something I did not know yet I could only feel. A memory dancing in a mirage just out of conscious focus, something tantalising and tasty, a morsel of magic. I was immature too. Unable to think beyond anything other than my own gratification and then remorse and then more gratification until that tiring treadmill came to a swift halt one day. Or in all honesty perhaps just the start of a swift halt! It was the day that my soon-to-be ex-wife suggested that I do a 'vision quest'. A vision quest, quoth I? A process to seek purpose and meaning in one's life beyond motorcycles, music, women, beer and dope - not in order of previous importance I hasten to add!
So, duly advised, I set about finding someone and somewhere that offered vision quests and on the internet I came across a place, an organisation that had a 'quest for vision' weekend. I rang them up but they said they were not doing them again that year. Try again next year. It was only September but for some reason, my search did not continue that year. I carried on with my work and wayward life. I did actually have responsibilities, I had work that I took seriously and a marriage that was on the rocks but sadly no children of my own, just a step-daughter that I smoked the odd reefer with.
After my wife and I separated, I continued to live in the same house for another 9 months. We lived separate lives in relative harmony, went on holidays separately, dated, and all the rest of it. It was a strange yet mutually convenient set up. In the spring of the following year, I got an email from the quest for vision organisation. They had resurrected the course and were going to hold it at the end of May and was I still interested. I was. I was more than ready. I had moved out of the marital home and my life was like a steamship about to move quickly out into the main channel. Moorings were being loosened, the engine was belching smoke and steam, and I was underway. An email duly arrived in the weeks before the course, instructing me to bring: a shovel, a pick, a tarpaulin, some pallet wood, and a sleeping bag. It seemed an odd choice but I duly complied and drove to my uncertain destiny with a curious mind and an open heart.
I had read about vision quests in the intervening time and had learned that they were part of the culture of native american and other indigenous peoples. Young men and sometimes women would be sort of turfed out of the village or community to spend time alone in the wilderness, facing their fears, living off both the land and their wits eventually coming back to the community as adults. It was a rite of passage, usually marking the journey from childhood to adulthood but not exclusively.
So I arrived and spent the weekend in the company of my teacher and five other souls who were marking their own passage with this rite. We didn't get to sit on mountain tops like I had imagined - Dorset doesn't actually have any mountaintops - but we got to dig our own graves through four or five feet of buttery but stony clay. Among other exercises to mark this initiation and deepen the experience, we dug in the sunshine and when it rained, we dug in the rain, laughing I remember. It was a mystical experience and one that I was to repeat several more times over the next two years.
Without spending too much time describing the whole process, suffice to say that I spent a night below the soil, praying, and, I have to admit, sleeping. But such a good sleep! When we were 'raised' in the morning at dawn, we were asked to go into the forest and be with nature, talk to a tree about our lives. And so we did. The axis of the world had shifted tangibly and the trajectory of my life had forever changed. My arrow's flight was now on a truer course once more. The softness I encountered in the forest was as if I was looking at the world anew through gauze. It had a quality of newness and freshness and through this its subtle meaning slowly seeped into my consciousness as a re-birth. It was 5th June, most significantly because it was my actual birthday as well as, now, my new birth day.
I went to visit my now filled-in 'grave' after we had refreshed ourselves to find a peculiar piece of red flint lying on top of what was a mound of sandy coloured clay. It had a 'face' and has travelled with me ever since as my 'gravestone', it is here, beside me, as I type.
So how did I get from the Solstice to talking about a rite of passage many years ago? I guess it was to say there is hope in darkness too. My own personal darkness was being lost in my life. The vision quest started me off on another path where I began to find myself and to cast away all that did not serve me. It was not so simple, I still make mistakes, and thank god I am a human being and can fail but I don't believe I will ever be lost again. Darkness can't exist without light otherwise there would be nothing to delineate it, nothing to witness it. My point was that there is always something more to life other than the current bleakness, the current offering if you like. More and more are waking up to the realisation that our current crop of leaders just don't have the imagination to tackle the problems we are facing. They offer nothing but more of the same, they have a poverty of ideas and that will not help us. The wheels of their bus are already coming off, their lies and empty words rising to the top, to the light where we can scrape them off like foam from the deep fermentation of our increasingly awakened state. This is nothing to do with the so called 'woke', this is being awake enough to see the dawn rise of a new world that is possible. It is just there, we just need to reach for it and grab it. There is a darkness, yes, but the light is coming, it is already here, it is around you and in you. So shine that light, starting from today of all days and shine your wild and free humanity. Be a beacon. Be that light.
Trust life and be well.
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