Today I passed a group of modern houses on my new hilly walk and saw this child’s drawing stuck onto a window. I am not sure how clearly it will register, so this is what is written under the giant rainbow: “See you when the bugs have gone”!
See you when the bugs have gone
A couple of nights ago I went to my second live performance since the world’s axis slowed down 16 months ago. Singing, we were told right from the start, was a potential virus-spreader, and as such was banished forthwith to the screen, along with theatre, concerts, and indeed anything live.
The first concert I went to late last year was in one of the periods, somewhat akin to the principles of parole, that was supposed to lead to freedom, but didn’t. Two young and vibrant classical singers took us on a vocal journey celebrating the sea. 
It had been a joy to witness these young professionals and their smiling accompanist, ply their trade in living, breathing person. It reminded me how powerful it is to experience live performance (of any kind), where the performers’ desire to give to the audience becomes a gift to both. It says something when the performers emotionally thanked the audience at the end for being there. It was a teary moment.
The second live performance was given last Friday by my dear friend and singer, Rosie Ashe, a colleague from my days in the business. We got to know each other when we were part of an act for a couple of cruises in the early 1990s and have stayed friends ever since. She is a darling woman with immense talent, ingenuity and integrity, who has made her mark in main and character roles in the West End. 
Here she was in a clever one woman show devised by her in which she told the story of Ethel Merman. The performance was peppered with passionate and funny songs between salty tales of Merman’s four marriages. It was a triumph, and we, the socially-distanced audience, clapped and whooped Rosie and her excellent accompanist at every opportunity.
I was reminded once again just how much I miss the real transmission that takes place between performer and audience. In my performing days we’d talk about good or bad audiences. We’d often say things like, “the audience is hard work tonight”, or “they love us; they’re on our side”, or occasionally, “we might as well pack up and go home now”. But without an audience, whatever the size, or state, performers are nothing. Singing is a glorious, joyful means of communication cut down to the root by some unfortunate research that for many of us didn’t make sense.
For these past few years I have taught singing to people who love to join with others in amateur performance, either as soloist or choir member. I also run a singing group (in days we once called “normal”) for people with Parkinson’s that helps improve not only vocal function, but quality of life, not least of which is the joy of sharing with others. Now we – well the few members who can face it – are banished to Zoom. We battle with bad signals and other technical hitches, doing the best we can with a technology that is an unsatisfactory experience even at best. We do not mute our mics and sing to ourselves as so many choirs do. Personally I don’t see the point of that. Instead we take a verse each and sing to each other, thus making the best of a poor deal. Roll on live meetings.
We are not just meat and bone walking around, as our forefathers once were, trying to avoid death at all costs – a fact that has so far proved to be as unavoidable as paying taxes. Who we really are is fired by the many natural wonders that spring from being a fully-functioning human that is far from being just a body. Collectively we are mind, body and spirit, which provides the potential for boundless creativity. We feed one another on so many levels, singing being one amongst many. Whether as performer or audience, writer or reader, artist or viewer, we need each other to inspire and be inspired.
This is not meant to be a post about politics, policies, truth, lies, right or wrong, but what I personally feel about the handling (aspects of it) of the current situation, naturally spills out onto the page in my desire to communicate my passion via the less challenged act of writing – though even speaking one’s mind these days can lead to a metaphorical muzzle. Now don’t get me started on that one…tra la la!
What a gift this time is – albeit a heavily disguised one. We are forced to reassess, to think on the hoof; to revise any ideas we have of what is “normal.” Time provides us with an opportunity to view life with different eyes: to wonder where it might take us, what the future holds. 
Some days it can look like a dystopian nightmare and others a utopian world full of natural wonders, peace and harmony. Such is human nature that we will inevitably swing between the two: dark and light, bad and good. There is a richness to being embroiled in both sides. Though a soaring of spirits may occur with the lighter vision or a plunging into the depths with the darker one, this accelerated roller-coaster of feeling has the potential to lead to the rediscovery of our raison d’être – individually and collectively.
The French phrase “raison d’être”, long absorbed into the English language, takes on a visceral meaning when uttered by its native tongue, as it slowly growls its way out of the mouth, like a black panther ready to spring into action. in English, raison d’être means purpose. Translated word for word, it takes on a deeper meaning: “reason of being”, as in, here, now, on earth, in space, in mind, body and spirit. We are like individual players in an orchestra, each one of us masters and mistresses of our own instruments. Singly and collectively we have the potential for extraordinary communications. There is magic in our “voice”, whether spoken, sung, sighed, written, played, painted, danced, sculpted, built, etc. Our “voice” is the word given meaning in form. Even in seeming dissonance there is harmony to be found.
As I see it, it is where we come from in our “being-ness” that gives true reason, or purpose, to expression. The sounds and frequencies of the whole universe are inside of us. They just need calling out. Dig deep, persistently deep, and your raison d’être will unfurl slowly until it comes roaring out of you like a panther! It may be through your simple everyday communications, where you gladden another; not an outspoken voice, but a necessary silent voice – such as the pregnant pause before the finale of a piece of music blazons out. Or it may be the voice that comes crashing out of the silence, reaching the masses. Dark, light. Silence, noise. Yin, yang. Nature is beautifully orchestrated, its seasons giving meaning to what was and is to come, willingly dying to give life to each one that follows: Never fixed, always dancing to the frequencies of Life.
It is of paramount importance, particularly at this important juncture of our existence, to hone our own instrument, to find our true strengths and gifts. In short, to find our purpose, our raison d’être. Together we have the ability to take the next leap away from relying on the outside to tell us who we are, to allowing our inner voice to reveal our true reason for being and the part we can play in orchestrating the evolution of humankind and what lies beyond…
Day 49
There’s something easy about chatting to strangers. You feel close to them in a way that you don’t always in longer term relationships. 
There is no baggage, no history. You chat about dogs; the wonders of living in St Leonard’s. Many are DFLs (down from Londoners) who have a born-again texture to their joy. I remember that same sense of wonder 35 years ago which has been rekindled in this time of apparent deprivation. They talk about the sea, the clean air, but most of all about their dogs and the things dogs get up to; all shared communality. This morning a man with two border collies was being dragged forward by the young one and back by the old one. “Gilbert sit or stay whichever command you like!” he shouted jovially. Gilbert did neither. Later I saw him again and asked if the old one was called Sullivan. “No” he said, ‘but he should be.”
I didn’t get photos of them. I like to snap when nobody is looking. This is all so innocent. And yet… in the other world, the one I collectively inhabit, untold horrors unfold.
In the plant world you see what we call garden flowers standing next to wildflowers and what we call weeds. In truth they all flower so are part of the tribe of that which grows out of the earth. There is no sense of I’m better than you.
Words give meanings to things that were born wordless. We separate them with our definitions. We learn from the cradle. As you stuff mud into your mouth cos it looks like the mashed up food you eat, Mummy shrieks, “Uh uh. Dirty. Mustn’t eat that.” You talk to a stranger, Mummy runs out and drags you away. You don’t understand but you learn to avoid these things.
They say weeds multiply and their roots kill off the more worthy plants. A poppy is a kind of weed, an interloper. Each year in my tiny garden a poppy or two or more grow in a different spot, or out of the cracks between the well-worn slabs on my walkway, their random seeds impregnating the earth without a by your leave. And I love it. Can’t wait to see what will appear each spring and where. But disharmony injustice, marginalisation of animals, plants trees humans, has at its root cause the idea of one being better than the other. Celebrating difference rather than fearing it is our greatest fear. We’ve learnt to stamp out the different: I’m a flower you’re a weed. No. I live and you live and we are equal.
What horrors are committed in the name of individuation
In the park there is a sense of harmony. It is hard to be aggressive surrounded by the all-inclusive sheltering arms of this aspect of Nature. In the jungle I would be afraid. There is savagery there. Fight or fly. But “Man” is supposed to be superior. Man developed reason. Some reason..!
Yet here I am, my senses fed with every step I take; newly born beauties nodding their heads at me as I pass.
It is important we keep the balance between that which transports us and the bitter pill of the human story. Removed from an actual event, rather than disempowering ourselves with justifiable anger, we may be of more help by remaining sane, by examining where our own aggression towards those we meet daily lies. The raising of our own awareness and consciousness leaves its energetic imprint on the world.
As I see it..
I have a great love for poetry. It conveys so much in such a compact way – aside from those long tone poems we were made to study in days of yore! Even then stanzas leapt out at you. Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur and Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, appealed to my dramatic temperament and lit up a love for verse that has never been extinguished.
I have written poems at various times of my life, when moved to do so. I never know when the muse will strike. In earlier days I carried a notebook around with me in case a fit-of-the-poetics came over me. Now I use the notepad on my mobile phone. How times change! Yet the place from where the inspiration to write arises – heart and soul – never does. That, thankfully, cannot be tampered with.
I go through periods where poetry is all I want to write and other times when I need to leave it be for a while. 
In the first Lockdown last March I spent many hours walking through the footpaths and surrounding countryside in Upper St Leonards. All through that time I watched nature press up from the earth, stretch the fingers of bare branches, plump out shrunken hedgerows and everyday I saw walls and fences sprout little flowers from infinitesimal cracks. I wrote about it – not poems as such but with a lyrical turn of phrase that one might call poetic. I posted these almost daily walks, with accompanying photos, to Facebook. I had never used Facebook in that way before, but it gave me a focus, a raison d’être, and I believe gave some pleasure to those who came across the posts. The plan is to publish these walks on my site at some point.
In the meantime, I was looking through my poems, spread out over many folders at different times in my life and the one below leapt out at me. It was commissioned for Where the Wild Flowers Are, a project devised by Clare Whistler for The City of London Festival, 2012, celebrating all the wild flowers that used to grow in the City’s churchyards. Each poet was designated a single flower. Mine was Wild Mignonette, a flower I had never consciously seen. A humble little flower that might be passed by without a second glance. Each poem was either set to music or performed and danced to in different City of London churches. A Wildflower Anthology of all poems was published for the event.
Reseda Lutea* Returns to the City 
*Wild Mignonette
Nature sows, earth grows
wind carries, seeds tarry
ground accepts, water wets
time roots, plants shoot
earth powers wild flowers
green stems, yellow hems
clump together, summer weather
bees alight, butterflies white
mignonette – dry steppes
meadow grass, stony paths
wasteland, clay, sand
train tracks, between cracks.
In the city, what a pity
law sours wild flowers
man weeds, roots cede,
stone stark, nature dark
flowerless, years pass
man sees man’s needs
very pretty, in the city
man sows, nature owns
time roots, plants shoot
hand in land, land in hand
nature sows, earth grows
I was looking for some images to use in a project and came across a folder of photos I’d taken in America in 2015. I had been accompanying a spiritual teacher on a series of events in Northern California and some of my photos were randomly taken in places whose location I no longer recall. 
This quote from Maya Angelou was on the wall of a modern church – one of those independent churches that was roomy and filled with light. Pictures with quotes on them like this one were scattered all over the walls, which is all I can remember of my time spent there.
For all the thinking we do,
Love is always the solution,
however or whenever
or wherever it shows up.
On another day after a weekend mountain retreat in a modest yoga centre, where we slept in tiny individual log cabins surrounded by pine trees and a rushing river, we visited the Ananda Centre, an international Yoga centre on a much grander scale . Set in Nevada City, it is part of a vast estate flanked by the tallest of trees. Nothing modest here, including the vision of it’s founder, the somewhat controversial Indian monk, Paramahansa Yogananda, who brought yoga to America in the 1920s and is known for his deeply inspiring book, Autobiography of a Yogi.
The architecture of the sacred buildings and the almost sculpted gardens give you a sense of peace and majesty. I would like to have stayed there, not to have taken part in one of the intense yoga courses, but to walk amongst the trees and sit on a terrace in the tiered gardens, or round the little pond overlooked by a modest stone Buddha. I am reliving this visit as I type and a sense of the trees, soft light and space settles in my heart, heightened by the atmosphere engendered by a place dedicated to spiritual practice.
On a blustery January afternoon, six years and thousands of miles away from my physical visit, the gift of this memory rises up at the perfect moment, becoming an antidote to the world “out there”. 
Walking along the footpath with the trees leaning down as if wanting to join in the conversation I was having in my head, this question popped in: What’s the use of fear? 
Good question. Earlier, as I sat with my coffee on my window seat watching the light seep in and the sea silently pawing the shingle, I pondered the fact that a person not skilled in psychology, a politician playing a part of a this or that Secretary, had told the entire population of England to act as if they had the virus! The fact that this was a serious directive given to the masses to actually practice made me contract inside. Where is the positive psychology in that?
To give the above statement some context, let me share something that changed my life.
Many years ago I had cancer. The moment I was given the diagnosis I saw my life in a succession of speedy flashbacks (much as it is for some people in the midst of a serious accident). My life was out of control. I had run, like the proverbial hamster on the wheel, from one drama to another. As I stood with the telephone in my hand (yes, I was given the news over the phone!), I knew in an instant that this was not a disaster but an opportunity. A sense of relief flooded through me. The ‘why me’? question forming in my head, swiftly became, ‘why not me’? This is not the place for the whole saga of my journey to health, but it was in all senses, quite miraculous. Through hard work, good intuition and a lot of support, I transformed my lifestyle, mental, emotional physical and spiritual. In truth those different aspects are not separate; they are all contained in the mandala of each individual life. As the planet turns in space, as night becomes day somewhere else, so are we in ourselves reflections of those cycles. One earth, many different components. In that instant I saw that I had two choices: to be a victim, to give in to the pull of fear or to say No.
I learnt a lot from my journey at that time. Much I knew intuitively to be right, but I had been caught up in my story, of fulfilling my perceived “needs” emotionally and physically: a roof over my head, someone to love me; making a living. All these things are grounded in the instincts of survival, but there is so much more to life than this! When I rediscovered the “more”, that which had been hitherto left out in the cold, life became richer – not always without pain and disappointment but it became easier to see situations, feelings etc in a deeper context; not to be utterly driven and disrupted by outside events.
Our immune system does a very good job at keeping us healthy, if we give it a chance. Fear makes us more vulnerable. Of all the aspects that go to make and keep us healthy, such as good nutrition, exercise, and the various stress-busting practices, finding ways to disperse fear when it arises, is of prime importance. Fear is part of “jungle nature”. It spells danger. 
You watch a cat when it senses another cat, or a dog. It freezes and then, depending on the degree of threat, will fight or skedaddle. Simple as that. The same goes for us. If a man is following us, or a car swerves towards us, we run. But if fear is not imminent in a physical sense, but only ‘hearsay fear’, it becomes fuelled by imaginary situations that may or may not happen, and the energy or adrenaline of fear has nowhere to go but inwards where it has every chance of weakening our immune system. Undispersed fear becomes dread and impedes the flow of life. Living a life in fear and dread literally stops life in its tracks.
Yes a conundrum indeed.
So in this current situation, however restricted you are, there is much you can do to disempower the three related states: fear, stress and anxiety. I practice tai chi and qi gong, but if that isn’t your thing there are many types of exercise that will work. Fear has its place, but don’t invite it to stay in your house!
All sense of what we call normal, as in habitual, is fast disappearing. On social media platforms people from every nook of the world share their views and feelings, pontifications, rants and fears, alongside a constant flurry of videos offering help and guidance, ranging from spiritual, to meditation methods, Ascension (aka moving from third to fifth dimension) to planetary disruptions (astrology), plus a Heinz variety of what the pandemic is or isn’t. The earth has cracked open like a walnut, revealing the mechanisms of a vast unfathomable brain at war with itself. The divide is becoming bigger by the day. Look down through the crack and the chasm is as bottomless as deepest space. Is this the end of the world as we have come to know it?
We hold Earth in our hands. We
have diced with it and thrown it up in the air again and again… Where will the pieces land and what numbers will we get this time? Do we advance, step back, win, lose? In truth, hasn’t it been like this from the first syllable of recorded time? In essence Life is a game of chance, an adventure, a struggle, a road trip that each of us has taken from the dawning of individuation to the climax of now. We stand at the crossroads asking the question of ourselves: Where do we go from here? What’s next?
My thoughts make a coded rhythm on the keyboard and, as if by magic, appear on the screen in front of me; thoughts from a mind whose own sense of perspective has become scrambled. Not that I see this as a bad thing. 
It’s a process that is a part of being human. As I look into the chasm of our broken world, the phrase, “the darkest hour is just before dawn”, springs to mind. New beginnings start when the old expires. It is hard to see because we are so busy fumbling about in the dark for something known to make us feel safe. But is it possible to let go of all past ideas and just be present to the unknown? In the fields of spirituality, meditation, mindfulness, presence, whatever the practice, aren’t we invited to live in the ubiquitous “now”? But how many of us really do that? We have a concept of the now as something solid, something known. But it isn’t. Now is full of unknown potential and what’s next is yet to be born.
Amidst the doubt and uncertainty, the breaking down of the old, is it possible to let go of our fears of change? Whatever we have been asked to do by governing bodies, we can still, as individuals, be present to or own being, the world that is inside us and not “out there”. 
If we invite harmony and rest into ourselves, however disorderly external events appear, we may have a chance of finding a sense of peace in our own personal now. And then, even though we may not be able to physically hold somebody else’s hand, we can join together in a sense of communality that is freely available in every moment above the battlefield of the story. The future is as much a foreign country as the past.
I need to see trees on a daily basis, if possible. My horizon is smaller for their absence.
At some point growing up I was struck by the story in the Bible of the blind man healed by Jesus, whose first words were “I see men as walking trees.” In some ways we are like trees. If you half close your eyes and watch people moving you get a sense of what the newly-healed man saw in the first haze of sight. After all we have a trunk and our limbs are branches of a sort. When I stand facing a tree and focus my attention into the ground, I can sense the roots beneath my feet; if I raise my arms I am one with the rising growth of branches. In the Taoist practices of tai chi and qi gong you are asked to observe both the earth and the heavens; to feel the downward and the upward energy as you move through space, maintaining contact with both. That is a diluted description of that which takes time and practice to become second nature. We are far too much in our heads, ignoring, or blocking out the many energetic expressions of earth and sky. Words drive our existence when the swirling energy of the eternal now is constantly inviting us to dance. Words have their place – which I acknowledge as I use them like a palette of oil colours, in order to convey a sense of my walk this morning.
Winter, and the scene in St Leonards Gardens is a timeless picture; a 19th century Masterpiece that has barely changed amidst all the modernisation of the current age. It was landscaped by architect James Burton in the early part of the 19th century. He turned a village backwater into what became known as ‘a conceited Italian town’. Far from that now in much of St Leonards, but in the Burton St Leonards area of which I write, the houses and trees, the glimpses of sea from the gentle slopes that rise to upper St Leonards, remain, I suspect, much as it was when it was first created. I walk most days along the unexpected footpaths further up the hill that never fail to deliver little wonders of nature; such as fallen branches that snap easily after days of lying around and pop into my carrier bag as kindling treasure for my fire. Another gift of trees, that their death may still provide warmth to others.
In the summer there are bushy, pushy nettles and wild garlic, and a variety of delicate wildflowers sprouting from the edges of fences… All too much to mention in one fell swoop…
But now it is winter and just past the shortest day, the sun glassy bright. like a waning star, scrambles half up the sky, making a song and dance at bedtime, splashing the clouds with fiery red, like a child’s weary tantrum..
