An Angel Who had Never Been in love Asked a Ghost Who had, “What was it like?” The Ghost said, “Like being in life”
An Angel asked a Ghost
Grace as a key
What “grace” evokes in me.
The quality of Grace is slow. Grace is in a rush only on rare occasions when it arrives with epiphany.
The quality of grace is visioned by the direction of growth in the natural world. Here a stem of a grass in flower. Or there fine branches of wind-swayed weeping willow.
Where creation by the forces of nature is actively at work on growing living life forms, one of the first aspects we notice is our pleasure at their geometrical shapes modulated by the in-built algorithms present in evolution over long timescales.
The way our own physical bodies operate is also determined by our long evolution. We recognise with pleasure how the factors which influence plants, other living things, and even naturally occuring inanimate minerals, cause shapes, forms and patterns to appear which we too display, both in our physical bodies and in our behaviour.
We observe the same patterns encoded through our own evolution, which are intimately concerned with our survival and well-being. These patterns in all of our living selves exist and conform to support our survival. Aeons of tumultuous patient evolution made this so.
The link to grace? It is in our awareness of pleasure at the recognition that our fundamental nature has uncountable numbers of factors in common with all other beings on this planet.
The consequence of letting our focus go to this pleasurable emotion is to realise our individual nature is as Pixels of Humanity. We are possessors in common of alive life.
With such understanding we can see we are not only waking, walking, small, self-sufficient units, but each possessors in common, without our conscious volition, of a portion of alive life with its global, perhaps cosmic reach.
At the point in life when we can fully accept this is our condition, without reservation and with the open-arms of present contentment and humility, we are most likely to sense a force far beyond the capability of our body, so powerful that it defies comparison with material strength.
The quality of such a concept, one which is beyond the scale of our day to day concerns, is also made of the reality we can come into contact with when imagining our place on Earth in contrast to the size of the known universe.
Grace, if we come into recognition of its arrival, floods our life to saturation. Grace reflects back to us with an astronomical power everything of which we are constituted. Grace reflects, it does not add or subtract. Grace has the effect of giving us the power to visualise the powers already available to us, powers innate to every one of us from birth.
Thus Grace is like a key that opens doors, it is like a brightness which shocks us by showing us that the darkness we may have taken for granted as the opposite of light does not and never has existed.
The effect of the acceptance of the presence of Grace, whether we are aware of it deeply or dimly, is to experience intensely the discovery of our arrival in time and place of who and what we are and always have been.
In the West, people tend to overlook the possibility that such epiphany could arise through a visioning for the first time of a force which has always been present with us. Western Dualistic conditioned belief systems anthropomorphise transcendent personal experience, often attributing the origin to externals.
My experience of epiphany in my life has shaped my understanding that there is nothing and no one but myself guiding or leading. All responsibility and all choices are for me to determine, to accept and act upon.
Soon eighty
The need to find the unanswerable
The bit about mystery which is accessible to me is awe. Awe is a natural impulse engendered by contact with mystery.
I suggest that awe is the effect that can arrive when we are intensely aware of the great mystery that is our body, mind, heart and existence.
Complex gatherings, such as Colourfest, [www.colourfest.co.uk] for example, work together in magic ways which promote shared feelings of awe. It feels woefully inadequate to sleep, get up, wash, eat, greet, go to work and then do it all in reverse.
I need to find the unanswerable all the time and everywhere. Only attention on the mysteries of my existence holds the key to happiness because these are without boundaries, without restrictions, and most definitely without end. There are no square-cut answers – only mysteries!
Feelings of awe come in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world.
Awe is the ultimate “collective” emotion. It motivates people to do things that enhance the greater good. Through many activities that inspire awe — collective rituals, celebration, music and dance, religious gatherings and worship — awe can help shift focus from our narrow self-interest to the interests of the group to which we belong.
[ SEE https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/opinion/sunday/why-do-we-experience-awe.html ]
Chatting to things
The ability to “chat” on equal terms to a stone on the road, a bird singing out of sight, or to a pretty leaf, depends on an unequivocal understanding. My awareness of what and who I am is perfectly and unhurriedly able at a deep level of faith to engage with one other in our jointly experienced one-ness.
On such a premise, I have to say that when I hold a ‘chatversation’ I experience a blissful two way flow. It’s maintained at an elevated state of mind where harm of any sort, anticipated or sensed, does not obtrude. There is an unswerving assumption of goodness.
Yes, blissful it is, as if connected in the sanctity of meditation, or in losing my sense of time listening to the harmonies of Tibetan singing bowls.
Gloriousness is not some abstraction “over yonder”. It’s an integral part of being here now, EveryNow.
We are all made of the same elementary particles. A stone may predate my existence by many millions of years. A late blossoming evening primrose may coexist with me. Both flower and stone and my awareness are ineffably part of the history of everything.
When my state of mind faces square on to the state of grace of the aliveness which we all inhabit, sentient or not, all trying ceases, because trying is a superfluous and distracting use of energy.
Ultimately, it’s impossible to go along with questions framed from duality. It’s the perennial problem of “I am here, all else is over there”, distinctly other in place, time and identity.
From the time my experience of ‘what is’ becomes suffused with the awareness of the beauty of simply being – being alive and freely sharing aliveness – dualistic mindsets become like a hindrance: unworkable, impractical, self-contradictory and without relevance.
For me, awareness of the beauty of being is a feeling of excitement that I describe as like having butterflies in my tummy, like in a state of being in love with everything and nothing.
This excitement is allied to a forever slightly puzzling sense of newness. The quality of what is passing through my various levels of awareness about the world I am engaging with is coloured – I could say it is spiced – by strangeness.
This is the strangeness of reduplicating newness. The same type of newness I feel in a place or situation never before encountered.
With that sense of lack of experience comes the disarming knowledge that it is not possible my understanding of my state of mind can be increased, because suddenly I find myself floating where no prior supportive certainties or well-founded assumptions exist for me to reach out to.
In some unhealthy states of mind, such as trauma, the absence of the familiar personal vectors of the meaning of reality could be destructive, or at least experienced as negative.
Bliss exists as the superposition of its opposite. Despair can result from an intensely unnecessary focus on only one of two sides of the receiving of grace. This is what some might refer to as a fall from grace.
The evidence of my senses and the input into my intellect is raw, unfiltered, and it is so intensely felt as to be sufficient in the moment. Such sufficiency is its own protective loving mantle of harmlessness.
The state of mind in which I step out into the street is one of surrender, a walk into life unarmed, needing no tools or instruments to discover as I go. Give up the fruitless quest for identity labels. Be all receptivity.
Surrender to the eyes of the eyes of other beings and enquire most diligently and with kind heart what their experiences tell them, be they ever so unfamiliar or alien.
The stasis of bliss
🐣The unexpected quiet trumpet call that awakens me to the stasis of bliss🕊️ As a boy, I was for a while an avid reader of sci-fi comics. They contained individual short stories. I willingly gave myself up to be lost in them. I always remember how one particular ‘Alien’ described itself. This being, stranded on […]
The stasis of bliss
Your restless heart
Your restless heart is your guide and your sentient compassion is the mover. Only rebefriend your heart, and let your heart lead. Not very long ago, I used to be eternally questing and questioning, investing the plain truth of the absolute with additional comprehensions and comparisons. I characterise this superficial dance of mine as ‘Living to love’. […]
Your restless heart
The beauty of connection to your heart
Infinity – the Permanent Invitation
“Feel the peace and beauty of connecting to your heart…”
I am always of the belief that it is possible to walk “through” the Stargate portal and to have an insight so immediate and all pervasive that your pain and hurt, every trace, drops away, and at last you can “let it be”.
This is an insight into love absolute, a place, a real place, where fear evaporates before it can take shape.
You must know I have had the good fortune to pass through some form of Stargate portal. To reach here, I had to have lived more than a handful of decades, to have retired, and to have experienced release from over 40 years of the nine-to-five treadmill.
I have undergone several epiphany experiences, closely accompanied by some shining, new, rare and true Soulfriends.
Before you arrive in the presence of such a magic portal, it’s likely you’ll still need to arrive at more journey destinations on the way.
You will need the Companionship of Time. Time to see the places you visit for their unidentifiably curious, fluid flowing shapes as they take root inside you. Time to tear down overgrown undergrowth, so you can see yourself clearly in the old stations of the journey.
The Companionship of Time is what you’ll need to allow the real significance of your arrivals and departures to carve deep grooves from which ancient tears are released. It will be necessary to allow their springs of redemption to overflow into your present you for the first time.
Only by touching courageous naked feet fearlessly onto invisible stepping stones such as these will you understand your leaden ankle weights and dragged shackles represent nothing so much as illusions.
Released, you will walk tall, and it’ll be the walk of your life!
The structures that have become so vital to the security and safety of your known self and to which you have devoted so much energy in their construction and maintenance, these are structures you have become accustomed to handle in a conscious, deliberate and deliberative way. You have framed them in finite phrases, as for example: “weights and shackles”.
Just like you, I know you can always stand in the light of your own being at a moment’s notice.
You may be moved to seek help, and find it with an intermediary.
You may find the light of your being homes in on you of its own accord, with the searchlight beam of your own unsuspected, unexpected lighthouse.
This can shock, startle and even perplex you.
You may be faced with a choice.
Do you accept the fact that your soul is staggeringly beautiful? Do you accept that your own heart beats out love-songs of praise and glory to you?
Or do you opt to refute the experience, and in doing so tell yourself platitudes handed down to you from the bland limp phrasebook of socially acceptable conformity?
This encounter with the happening magnificence of your being has not any words to enscribe, describe or circumscribe it. It’s yours before question or answer.
I say the nature of our being is independent of question or answer.
You have already entered many times into wordless wonder of living. You know it as an extreme that happens extremely.
You are far closer than you can begin to imagine to the shimmering entrance portal through which the glories of living are too intense for words of any kind.
The space, the extremely real place, perhaps the only reality, and which ever glows at a constant brightness, (“bright” is peace and “ness” is love), is the directly lived experience, the Now.
Now is not a mere moment. Now is every moment, suffused to saturation with infinitudes of beginninglessness and endlessness – I call it EveryNow.
EveryNow exists complete, without reference to a frame of words. EveryNow exists in completeness, independent of whether it is thought of, or sought after.
EveryNow exists completely and it is unaffected by being ignored, or overlooked either by negligence or on purpose.
Blink, and you can find yourself in it… it in you.
All you need is to be ready. Ready for the invitation.
If you give any of what I describe a modicum of credence, then your best tribute to it, and to your own innate beauty, and to your instinct of self-preservation, is to be ready.
You owe it even to your inner conviction, your most privately held personal view that the invitation to EveryNow is but a schmaltzy, superfluous, rose-scented pink cloud, to be ready.
The way to get close enough to the magic of EveryNow, so that it can guzzle you all up into its roseate field, is to be prepared and ready to accept its invitation card: Infinity.
Infinity invites everyone all the time with EveryNow.
Wakefulness is as precious as sleep. Remember sleep arrives bearing a unique gift. Sleep sleeps close to infinity. Sleep is a hallowed gift. Wrap yourself in it with respect, give yourself into its mystery.
Sleep well, dear Heart
Love is
the answer
to which
no question exists
¿Realia is truth?
If in reality, it’s 100% vibration, what to choose to give attention to?
A. All of it
B. Some of it
C. All or some of it all or some of the time?
It is in you and you are in it.
Do you feel it is you?
Do you allow yourself to feel you are it?
You have all the time in world
Feel
Allow
Be
~ Love’s presence EveryNow
THE ODD THING ABOUT ACCIDENTS
A cardboard box was in the middle of the pavement. I kicked at it. My leg fell into the coal hole whose cover had been removed. I had to go and have stitches to the cut.
This was 1974. I had come out of my rented flat near Gloucester Road Tube, in West London. I have no doubt I had been pranked and cruelly so.
Any person walking there on that day could have been the one injured. The key to it is in the “could have been”. The future perfect conditional is the closest description of my accident. It was waiting to happen to me. The part I played in it was really rather incidental.
When people say, “Everything happens for a reason”, I disagree. In the universe of time, I say, “Everything happens!” Simply because happenings happen, their sufficiency is self-contained. The richness of the moment of what happens floods my consciousness with joys unending.
The list of circumstances which set me up for this fall is as lengthy and varied as those which could equally have existed and resulted in no fall at all.
I can easily call to mind incidents (a nice neutral word) in which I was involved in road accidents, as the driver, as a passenger, or a pedestrian. My gratitude at having survived these few occasions of danger has close similarities to my gratitude for waking up safe and well every new day among my family and friends.
What chain of consequences might have followed after I kicked that cardboard box in 1974? My tibia could have fractured, causing immediate, severe pain. Poor medical treatment or infection could have left me with deformity or walking instability, and my life might have changed forever.
None of this happened. The point is that I almost never think back to that day. When I go there, I give no thought to what might have been. I never think about the person who set up the trap.
Where is this train of thought about events of a life threatening nature leading me, I wonder?
in my EveryNow blog posts, I write without dissembling or self-delusion about revisiting and rediscovering my time as a baby, child and adolescent.
I have come across no factors in my history which severely warped or misdirected my ability to maintain my identity and to lead a full productive life.
This life my parents constructed for me was primed for my safety and security. I cannot claim against them or blame them for laying foundations of my life based on anything other than human goodness and compassion.
I now understand I was equipped in rudimentary ways which I would not have been fully aware of as I entered the age of reason and self-awareness, to cleave to the source of my own humanity, compassion and inner peace.
My core being had never been subject to threat or ill-treatment. Curiously enough, that fact felt like a disadvantage when I compared myself to my peers, some of whom were savvy and street wise, one or two even street fighters.
I had periods of deep depression in my early 20s. I was hospitalised. My parents great fear was that I might lose my independent ability as an adult to take care of my basic needs.
Today I am retired. In the foreseeable future I see nothing stands in the way of a healthy married life, with children, grandchildren and more loyal friends than at any previous time in my life.
I see no single factor or event in my life story which prevented me from falling into ruin, whether physical ruin or psychological degradation.
In 1965, I wonder what held me back from refusing my girlfriend’s offer of shooting up her heroin? Caution, cowardice, informed fear? All of these.
In 1982, I was confronted by a massive and tragic life altering situation. I had clear choices. I could give up trying to fight my side for my future, not ask for help, and walk away. Without doubt I would have reverted to being a nobody, wretched and diminished perhaps for life.
Faced with a clear and present danger, I fought as hard as I knew how to fight. Against the odds, I saved myself and others from the brink of a disaster whose consequences would have damaged at least three lives, possibly beyond repair.
Nature affects the assumptions I make about the frames of reference I am equipped with. Nurture affects how I allocate and deploy the choices I make according to what I believe is best for myself and others.
I’m talking about the cultivation of a belief system linked to my personal view of the world I live and move around in, in relation to the most sacred centre of my integrity.
I have been composing my EveryNow blog posts and showing them on my Facebook pages since 2018. I now have readers in roughly 30 countries.
EveryNow speaks for itself. The belief systems that it relies on and navigates by come from never ending sources of ancient established spirituality. I hardly know what labels apply. The structures owe their existence to Zen, Taoism, Apophatic Mysticism, and to good old Powers of Positive Thinking, amongst others.
My story about the lessons I’ve learned from the Cardboard Box episode shows me that I have nothing that is specially of my own making to impart to the world.
I don’t intend to convert, or evangelise. My day to day, moment to moment intense experience of being alive and in Life, so heightened by my sudden unforeseen heart openings of 2013 — the Year of my Life — continue to need sharing to the best of my ability.
I proffer no message, hold out no quick fix. I am convinced that the epiphanies I have lived are available as positive transformative experiences to other people.
I am so graced by the massive shifts in my life, I will not ignore them, nor keep them to myself.
I am just this guy with his blog and the delicious sense of being on fire with love flames that burn, burn, and consume nothing. I am not about promotion. I am about sharing at high visibility with maximum openness.
I hope my readers will be motivated to read on, when they strongly feel that life in any formulation or format is worth continuing to live and enjoy EveryNow
~ Love is present EveryNow
🥚 Life lives me 🐣
The appreciation of the pure and mathematical fundamental principles which underlie the way living beings assume their form and ‘operate’ is one essential bridge towards a deeper understanding of my place in this experience of being alive. At times I might veer off and begin to wonder, “Is Life math?” Then I remember that neither […]
🥚 Life lives me 🐣
In a distant galaxy
In a galaxy a long way away, I found a Palace. It was made during millions of years of evolution, and its existence was the urge to grow. It grew away from the centre of its planet, and was admired by all who had ganglions to admire with. The empty Palace requires a visitor, for […]
In a distant galaxy
Enjoy
The purpose of my walks is to receive and fully live in enjoyment step by gentle step whatever the season.
Where does enjoyment come from? What conditions of being help enjoyment to filter into human awareness?
We can enjoy when physical constraints, pre-existing barriers, or other claims on our attention are not present, or when we gently accept to set these aside.
When superficial distraction is not the focus, that is when the delicate basis of our most sacred inner space receives light and space necessary to expand, as is its nature.
Humans share with other sentients similar qualities of our inner sacred space, such as inborne peace and love.
When we become aware of whence we came and where we are all to return, EveryNow is balm, haven and sanctuary
When we are open to flow peace and love outwards and inwards simultaneously, our human senses are primed, not only with the usual urgency needed for survival, but as participant witnesses to the omnipresent constant intensity that is everywhere.
~ Love is present EveryNow
True primitive wonder
Created or not created, it’s the generalised absence of true primitive wonder that characterises our era.
Whatever can today inspire and keep alive the awe of the unknown fulfills a vital function – to bring our noses up against the fact we are not the creators of what we observe.
We are stardust gathered up by ageless energy into sentience, and to stardust we return.
(
> {) ॐ
)
Single point focus on joy
Single point focus on joy.
Where the dust speck dances, there dance I. Lean towards a flower. Smell it.
No answers are on your computer. Whatever the place and at whatever the time of the night or day, dear Friend, you will find the times and places with ideal perfect opportunities to develop focused attention.
Why in such random places and at such unpremeditated times?
Why? The key component of the awareness you are tempted to study seated in a solo walled setting at your computer is joy.
Joy at the moment you deliberately allow yourself to recognise entry into your heart of any colour, sound, movement, smell, sight, taste, associative thought, flitting fly, tumbling dust mote lit by sunshine.
We are indeed talking about disciplined enquiry. The enquiry is not the means. The end is the means. Enquire all you like, you will simply discover more to enquire about.
You know full well what makes you smile to yourself or when in company. When you walk outdoors, immediately your radar sweeps wide and offers you more mild delights than any supercomputer can put in a list.
This is all about choice.
You choose to believe in the presence of the familiar things that meet the radar of your awareness from your first step out of your home. This offers security in the predictability of the familiar. You know your own mind. It will take the first step with you from the front door, and yet you will let it walk you with no thought of what it truly is you are doing. Billions do the same.
I say begin with a different set of choices. At the door, deliberately set your gaze on a living thing. A clump of green, a leaf that hangs. Look out for the questions this moment of contact can possibly trigger. Yes, I hark again to the valuable practice of Chatting With Things. The more you do this, the more joy you will notice around you and in you. This joy is of the same timid kind that is shared between friends who meet and walk together.j
We are born to joy. In our newborn incompleteness, we are joy. It’s not necessary, in this earliest time, to parse joy.
Determine the way gravity and the breeze act on the growing thing. Would you be moved in these ways, too, if you were the leaf, the green clump? Ask the question, then take your second step from your door.
Everything, small or not, light or dark, that meets your gaze as you step along is as sacred as you, as relevant and as full of potential meaning as you.
Your light thrives when it is noticed and seen by another. Your atoms and molecules are of this same after breakfast world you walk into.
Be the giver of your attention to those green things taken for granted by so many others.
The attention another gives to you, specially by some stranger, makes you quiver in your sacred inner space. Therefore, offer to those on your path, whether animate or not, the same impetus of your presence as you pass close. You can do this honour to them. They deserve it in their Gentleness of Being. And so do you, with the open heart you bring into their presence.
The world is singing, alive, rich in ancient history. No history is as venerable or as scintillating as the history of atoms. Take your integrity with you, your dignity, and believe correctly that all things that meet your solemn gaze are possessed of the same.
Stage props which once were street furniture and minor familiar landmarks have become your companions. In their immutable presence, their gaze turns on you as you pass. This is the Gentleness of Being. Your spirit, as you go left, right, left, right, is recognised by Things and by you as infused with the Gentleness of Being.
Begin to expand your list of greetings and polite questions in your daily chatversations. Discover replies come back to your heart from inanimate and from living things. This is not surprising. It is what occurs in the discourse of life with life.
See no limits to the interplay of joy between you and Things.
Hard edge boundaries to your perception are illusions of your mind. If you say they protect you, from what are they protecting you? Your mind wants to label this as this, that as that. In doing so, Gentleness is set at one remove. When you continue to let your mind explain things, all traces of Gentleness slough off.
Love and joy reside in and depend on a delicate matrix of compassionate tenderness. In this way, the reality of a kiss depends on remaining unexpected, unallocated, unlabelled. A kiss which is knowable, instantly ceases to be a kiss.
A soap bubble can exemplify the way the magic mysticism of a kiss disappears, and both parties cease to be involved, the moment the thought rises, “I am kissing”.
I stop my script here. I fear it may veer off and become stuck in that rut of exposition, and exhaustive explanation, far removed from the sunlight in which you shine, dear Friend, and in which dust specks do dance
~ Love is present EveryNow
Treeness for humans
Treeness for humans
A tree is not an active message bearer. We also stand vertical. We reproduce. We have inborne defences which help ensure our survival.
A tree relies for its longevity on tolerable levels of the influence on it of environmental influences, such as climate or pests.
A tree relies on the absence of human intervention during its lifetime. In a lifetime normally longer than human, a tree has safety in numbers, which dilutes the chances of it growing where humans are hostile or predatory.
Trees during their long lifetimes do not use communication actively in defence of their existence as humans do, nor do individual trees possess the ability to use mobility for avoidance of harm.
Trees disperse seeds which gives them the long term mobility they need to colonise new fertile soil.
When a person arrives at a tree, all these properties of its growing physical presence are abundantly obvious. No person has need to analyse a tree in terms of threatening behaviour or other risks. No one feels it necessary to be informed about the details of its origins or future in any detail.
When an adult person and a grown tree confront one another, the majority of the communion can be classified as static unconditional acceptance.
We both share the time in which we stand together. We take it as given that both exist in the present moment.
The solidity of the grown tree offers immutability to the softness of a human body.
The knowledge of the continuation of the tree’s existence after we are no longer in each other’s presence, offers reassurance for our own continuity, in a parallel timescale, be it ever so short.
We take away from the tree-to-human encounter the same invisible unknowns inside the hard density of a tree trunk, as soft-bodied humans possess, as we move over the same earth in our own silent life functions.
In the end, a person may stand near to a tree, and knowingly become sensitised to all the foregoing bland factual statements. The pathway opening between the two beings is mindful and compassionate, observing with no preconception the ancient will to live in our inner heart and in the heart of the tree.
Remaining like this, with feet on the same shared earth, we can join with the tree as an experiencer of pure aliveness.
What may then arise as one branching, five-pointed human stands and gazes on the noble treeness of the tree?
Here is where it becomes possible to perceive existence twinned with the human perspective.
Here can be a powerful sense of awe, delight and mystical reverence. Recognise and be astonished, in mutual wordless sharing, the life that rises in the tree and in you from life’s unboundaried love of life
~ Love is present EveryNow
Writing from the Heart 5 April 2022
An exercise in channeled writing
DIALOGUE one…
May I come closer?
“You are as close as you have been since the flame of your life ignited. So, enter, Child of Light.”
I know some of those secrets of the langorous silent spaces between me and you, hallowed by the silence interspersed among the combined generations of my brethren.
“We both know what it is fitting to know. All the rest is further nourishment and will mutate into soulfood in good time.”
May I stay close, dear my heart?
“We are one, my kindred kind one. We have been together as one for thousands of millions of millions of your years. SMILE at me and so fill us both with light and joy. Be on your loving way!”
……. <<^>> …….
DIALOGUE two…
“And I will come to death like a shadow under the sun”
The light of understanding exists at the deepest ocean trench. The power of clear perception infuses all animals of every size and shape with longing each for being united with their own kind, up to the highest altitudes.
I am in an existence where I depend wholly on the understanding and the longing of my self for my heart, and this dependency is in truth no dependence, but wondrous and ever unfolding results of striving for unity with one-ness
~ Love is present EveryNow
Ataraxia
Yes, it is is-ness.
Yes, it is is-ness and we have need of the awareness of it when it is least evident in the minutes of our moments.
I am one pixel of humanity. My heart is one of many, alive and no longer alive. There is such a grand inevitability of numbers, there is no point in counting.
I value human contact. I derive hope and I savour the pleasures of hoping in the way I relate to communion with the unending oceanic calm in my heart of hearts.
I bring into existence the image of myself afloat in an oceanic cosmos of calm.
What presumption is it to choose to float in oceanic calm?
First? The unwet waters are terrifying as drowning in unknowing. Burning alive has the merit of a sensory flash between life and oblivion. Inside kilometres of stifling unbreathability I can be free to choose to think.
Second and last? The baby, the youngster, the adult, the one beset with the inexorable advance of decrepitude, each and every aspect of my existence has the right to enter ataraxia with no payment fee.
These are choices.
In one of my fell swoops, I can lay waste to and destroy my universe.
Another swoop, and here is a rise up. It is a bright gigantic fountain arc. Here is a thunder of waterfall steaming. Here time is diffracted by light from ten thousand suns. Fractal dimensions intersect seamless haloed space. Every direction is a-dazzle.
Here in this chaos of living aliveness, I am totally content. I glare with wide gaze at the no of all nothing
For the fun of it
“For the fun of it”
Why do starlings participate in huge synchronised Murmurations?
My alternative to the “confuse predators” “fear of predation” idea comes from the viewpoint of the individual starling.
You are a gregarious starling in your prime. What better pastime could you choose than to mix it with your own kith and kin and indulge in a really fun, cool exhibition of aerial acrobatics?
Behaviours need not be only for survival. Birds and many other animals are also known to do stuff for fun!
Why, oh why did you do such a thing? When someone asks me that, I pose the question to myself. The first answer usually comes out, in private, “For the fun of it!”.
Unimportant areas in life often shrink the meaningful, or occult the valid and the valuable. In school, when a lesson in progress showed up as relevant, usable, with useful facts to ingest, I reacted against practicality.
I understood that factual structured information posed an unwelcome threat to my flights of fancy. I would fight to hold on inside my personal space, where I could wander free, wild, unchained, take risks.
I knew full well that being elsewhere, neither present nor correct in the room full of rows of other students, was potentially damaging to my future.
I wilfully ignored the danger, because the fun concocted by my imagination was sweeter, more alluring, more addicting than even my beloved chemistry practical class!
I approach my 80th birthday. From here I can see by siding with fun, I closed many roads to life’s successes. Why did I often choose not to go where I was supposed or expected to go? Today I get it that I was defending myself from and holding on to a variety of unrecognised, unresolved childhood traumas.
I recent years, with help, I buckled down to travel successfully into and beyond the grisly lands of trauma, fear and self-sabotage.
I regret nothing. Early on, my intellect lacked time spent developing self-discipline. My imagination roamed involuntarily then and now by choice in unboundaried intriguing landscapes.
These decades of mental air-ballooning have gifted me with a fine mysticism. I balloon out there, up up and away, now directed somewhere, now floating where air, water, light and love flow
~ Love is present EveryNow
He understands. He is angry. He knows he is now the only one who knows.
In the eight years before the Greater London Council was abolished, I clerked for the Clerk of Works at the Major Technical Problems section of the GLC’s Housing Dept.
The modern building our children called the Chocolate Layer Cake overlooked a desolate area overgrown and rampant with butterflies feeding on budleja. It was totally surrounded by a high wooden wall much favoured by fly-posters.
Now it perches at the junction of Parry Street and Wandsworth Road next to the major public transport hub, Vauxhall Cross. It’s still there, and it is still overlooked by much taller nearby buildings.
At lunchtime in high summer, an inquisitive soul might note the siting of the air-conditioning machinery shed on the roof provides an excellent modesty screen for said soul to eat his sandwich lunch while full length sunbathing naked.
Ken Livingstone mobilised a willing army of tireless volunteers (I was one of many hundred) to fight Mrs M H Thatcher’s dastardly, and to us incomprehensibly counter-productive plan to “Abolish the GLC”.
Abolish who? Ours was an establishment with lineage. Its valuable activities were rooted in the welfare of almost every facet of the life of Londoner and London. Its great-grandfather was the LCC. Worthy, buttoned up civic souls had established the London County Council in 1889.
I see now where my inspiration came from to write such an action drama. Broadside after broadside was fired at County Hall from the Mother of Parliaments across the Thames.
I wrote these opening taster lines at the time as a form of escapist release (1986).
What follows is now no longer inside of me, but I throw it open to the public.
It is here. It is up for grabs.
Only draw out the plot, build an international cast of characters, set up the historical diorama, and you will be ready to sell the film rights to the highest bidder!
I note with pride one scene I sketched has since appeared in the opening sequence of a recent action film.
—>
Music of a menacing beat is carried on a simple melody in a minor key…
The opening scene is set on Lambeth Bridge.
We see our Hero walking east along the bridge, on the north pavement, just after dark. His steps are short and hurried rather than purposeful. His features are a picture of puzzlement, frustration.
He is rehearsing to himself the events he has just observed when walking past by the House of Lords Victoria Tower. He is linking a name to a face. His questioning look gives way to alarm and immediately to a prickly panicked fear.
As he breaks step and begins to jog, he reaches the solid stone where bridge meets embankment.
This is what saves his life.
The complex of Gothic-Revival buildings that comprise the Mother of Parliaments, Lords and all, erupts in a silent sheet of white-red flame.
Our Hero is sheltered from the first inaudible shock wave by the sad grey stone blocks. He lies flat. Next to his nose, he sees the grains of dust on the paving slab brilliantly lit by flashes from the final chest-splitting explosions.
He understands. He is angry. He knows he is now the only one who knows. He exhorts himself to fill and then with an effort to refill his sore lungs with air.
Weeping with wordless rage, he lopes steadily east, aiming for his ‘drop’, not three hundred yards away, in Old Paradise Park!
When he recovers his safe deposit box keys, he will drive to Lydd Airfield in the clothes he stands up in. From there he will fly the country in his Cessna 150, never to return.
For all his covert ops experience, for all his uncanny ability to apply decision tree prediction under battle conditions, even he could not have forseen the catalytic role in world events that he was to play out, and which in a few days would bring him home – in the spotlight of national attention.
The View at 72+ 