Tuning in ...

Yesterday's early departure enabled late lunch arrival at the Phoenix Cafe in the Park, via a brief nostalgic wander in Aberfeldy, last seen in 1968 when a few winter months were spent working as a waiter at the Breadalbane Arms Hotel, before the exciting adventure hitch-hiking around Spain, France and Morocco. .. this in lieu of academic pursuits and much more educational ...

Anyway, the Hotel is showing its age, though the town looks good, even claiming the title of Britain's first Fair Trade Town ... a brief excursion up the Birks alongside the rushing stream evokes memories ... before the return to the A9 north to Aviemore, then across to Forres ...

The Phoenix Shop provides a couple of books for the library as well as preparing the mind for weirdness ... Robert Ogilvie Crombie's tales of encounters with Pan and others from beyond the veil, and Dorothy MacLean's stories of the devas taking care of the plants ... all perfectly plausible and reminiscent of the relationship with an elf from Switzerland discovered at Findhorn a few years ago ... before that, during Experience Week 9 years  ago, Brian Nobbs, a Findhorn pioneer and potter, described his own meeting with Pan ... seemed perfectly plausible at the time ...

After the long drive yesterday a 10 mile round trip to Forres stretches the legs and offers the sight of geese in fluctuating formations, preparing to head south ... hmmm, why not?

Afternoon walk across the dunes and along the beach offers wild cloudscapes and extra exercise for the body before the 4 day Game begins tomorrow ... no idea how many or who are playing or much about it ... someone in the Park who has attended just said "intense" .... let's see!

September Fruit

September abundance is blackberries and daily forays ensure freezer has supplies until Christmas ... mushrooms less abundant this year, though woods provide a couple of meals of tasty Blewitts ... occasional driving duties with the elders provide helpful boost for illusion of being of some use in the world ... annual agricultural Shows enable further community contact as well as visit from daughters, both thriving in their different ways ... house feels quite like home, especially with alcove bookshelves and new carpet, though legs and feet ask about another long walk ... maybe an Autumn return to the Primitivo?

Before that, in order to avoid contentment slipping into complacency, a trip to Findhorn is planned ... 9 years after Experience Week a 4 day Transformation Game is booked to round off the month ... stand by for reports, it starts Saturday, with minimal research so that expectations are minimised, a couple of extra days are booked at the Park and the recently rather underused car is looking forward to a decent run ...

Politics, domestic and international, continues to raise questions about our credulity. .. the unlikely President of the BSA is joined by another clown representing the best the DUK can offer ... whilst the teenage terror of the adult establishment, Greta the Great, continues to gain access to gatherings of the powerful in order to berate them ... credulity stretched by her trip by wind powered boat across the Atlantic (details of return yet to be announced) ... well, Shakespeare did tell us that "All the World's a Stage" and perspective suggests that he was right ... the scripts become less and less plausible, though perhaps anything is plausible to the gullible ... the game seems to be to evoke emotional reactions in the audience ... and thus make us susceptible to the hypnotic techniques which enslave us ...

On the other hand, of course, it's all real, and your correspondent has literally lost the plot ... never mind, either way equanimity prevails, there is no pain in the brain and life continues to intrigue and amuse ... perhaps transformation awaits as the dice is rolled in the weird and wonderful Findhorn Foundation at Cluny on Saturday ...

August at Brockwood and Dartmoor

Since Brockwood Park School is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a grand reunion, and since volunteers are required to help with the expected 500 odd visitors, the opportunity is seized to spend 3 weeks slaving in the kitchen and sleeping in a tent in the shade of a 500 year old oak tree.
A whole day off is offered each week and the shifts are 5 hours or so ... a special kind of holiday and a chance to be part of an amazing event with philosophers round every corner ... some remembered from previous visits, some encountered for the first time ...

Two key addictions are confronted early on - WiFi notionally available but not so easy in practice, coffee hard to locate and requiring a trip over to the Centre or a personal stash (or indeed the purchase of a large quantity to leave out for the other coffee seekers) ... the addictive mind also has the chance to cope without, of course! As the reunion proper begins a coffee and cake corner appears in the marquee ... twin addictions catered for at a reasonable price ...

As for slaving, the kitchen job is swapped for the garden, since garden volunteer David does his back in and requests lighter duties ... meaning plenty of sunshine and fresh air along with a variety of physical tasks to strengthen the body and prepare garden and grounds for the visitors ... work which switches again during the five days of the reunion as all hands are required on deck to keep the show on the road ...

Wonderful to watch the reuniting students and teachers from the different generations, all tasked with the modest aim of creating a new kind of human ... to what extent Krishnamurti's vision has been achieved is explored with those with experience ... an ongoing experiment perhaps ... and heartening to hear the optimism of young students already reshaping the world ... the main task of we elders perhaps to listen, learn, and get out of the way ...

Meanwhile a reunion within the reunion occurs with returning summer work party folks, which is nice ... along with days off spent reuniting with family and friend ...

As settled weather arrives after the event and clear up, a dear friend arrives at the station for a trip to Dartmoor and her reunion with friends from fondly remembered summers of childhood ... poignant since three of four parents have passed in the last year or so ... the main event, an old community ritual, Beating the Bounds, shared with a hundred or so locals, incomers, grockles and a camera crew ... a strenuous enough amble over the moors, a picnic at the top, tea in the village hall to finish ...

Thoughts. ..

This morning's early wander was an opportunity to think about thoughts ... how busy lives cause them to race along without pause for reflection, joining forces to become ideas, finding comfort in familiar patterns and imagining evidence for their validity ... a concept and trap known to psychology as confirmation bias ... ideas, of course, lead to stories and beliefs, since language plays such a key role in our lives ... the trigger for this particular thought stream the reflection on recent return to radio, previously rejected along with television in an attempt to clear the mind of clutter and conditioning ... strangely, even though radio sets offer many channels, this one, bought for its ability to play CDs, stays tuned to BBC Radio 4 ... a sophisticated service offering lots of interesting information along with dramas and comedy along with "News" ... and it is the latter that comes under scrutiny as the latest versions of current affairs invite us to believe that the Benighted States and its implausible President is still a civilised country, despite all the evidence to the contrary ... a longer view might assemble historical facts to suggest, having shaken off the yoke of the British Empire, it steadily applied the lessons it learned from the erstwhile master ... timing military interventions in both major wars of the last century to allow the combatants to weaken themselves and then throw decisive force behind the likely victor. .. emerging as the strongest Empire, having sent a chilling warning to the world by destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with hundreds of thousands of their inhabitants ... war crimes indeed, though winners get to write the history books and choose the language to be used ... further military adventures followed in the 20th century and into the 21st, all aimed to maintain economic ascendancy. .. gradually, as is the way with Empires, degenerating, though not passing the baton gracefully ... the BBC, meanwhile, offers ostensibly unbiased coverage, though certain basic assumptions go unchallenged ... its reputation for honesty enabling the smuggling of deception undetected ...

Anyway, the post is not meant to revisit the old stories, rather to reflect on the perspective achieved along the pilgrim ways, free from the daily dose of propaganda. .. which mostly led to the view that all the world really is a stage and cartoon characters in positions of power are possibly there to challenge our credulity and maybe invite us to look inside and see if there is any residual rubbish to clear out before we project it outwards yet again ...

Gala ...

July sees the annual gathering of socialists of various persuasions plus thousands of local folks from the surrounding area parading behind banners from their now defunct pit villages ... the Durham Miners' Gala, the Big Meeting, running on nostalgia and enthusiastic leftists from around the country ... attendance estimates vary between 100,000 and 200,000, which is a big variation, though even the lower figure is impressive enough ... the star of the show, Jeremy Corbyn, takes the tributes on the balcony of the County Hotel as the parade winds its way patiently through the streets, taking over 4 hours for the last banners to reach the racecourse and the speeches along with light rain ... plenty of tub thumping and rabble rousing from the platform, including a direct hit on the duplicity of J.C.'s disloyal deputy, TWatson, promoting the Big Lie drama of alleged anti-semitism, at the behest of its creators, Mossad, cleverly conflating anti-Zionism and anti-semitism in order to undermine Corbyn, a well known opponent of war crimes against Palestinians ... TWatson and others on the payroll as shown in the declared parliamentary records ... liberal sensitivities of public figures scared of being labelled anti-semitic harbour the plotters, prominent anti-Zionist Jews like Noam Chomsky are rarely heard in mainstream media or characterised as "self-hating Jews" ... and so the story runs on, along with the lie that Iran is destabilising the region, when some years ago the Pentagon plan to destabilise the Middle East was approved and has rolled out remorselessly ever since as the Benighted States and loyal allies, the Disunited Kingdom, Israel, Saudi Arabia and others have removed stable (not to say liberal or democratic) governments in Iraq, Libya and, maybe soon, Syria ... the economic war on Iran is well underway, along with gunboat diplomacy in the Gulf and threats of military intervention ...

Readers bemused by this diatribe need not fear that equanimity has been compromised by Saturday's day out with the comrades ... a cool head is still needed and old loyalties no longer hold ... polarised politics don't serve, Brexit is not the question, war is not the answer and neither is a centrally planned economy ... looking at the level of alcohol consumption and junk food at the Gala, despite the fine words, the vanguard of the revolution are in no condition to bring down capitalism any time soon ... still, capitalism is destroying itself through its inherent contradictions anyway ... all we need is a viable alternative which transcends the polarities ...

Proposals on a postcard please ...

Joy ...

A long weekend workout on the woodland at the Land of Joy Buddhist Retreat Centre near Bellingham, not far from the Scottish border ... the task: to clear the brash left behind after the Sitka plantation was cut down two years ago, in preparation for the autumn planting of 1100 native trees of 12 varieties ... enabling the regeneration of a diverse ecosystem, signs of which are already appearing with Rowan and Oak seedlings sown by wind, birds and squirrels. .. a post on FB with photo (still struggling with that on here) elicits an enquiry from a friend seeking an opportunity to sponsor some tree planting ... which is serendipitous. ..

Breaks between the rather tough physical work enable some exploration of the Nature of Reality ... the Buddhist perspective having plenty to offer the topic, of course ... the question of whether folks may arrive miserable and find joy is also explored a little ... probably better to bring a modicum of joy at least, to add to the joyful ambience ... misery maybe not a thing intrinsically valid, but an overlay suffocating the joyous natural state ... still, the psychological roots of the misery often run deep, digging them out not so easy, and launching into esoteric spiritual practises prematurely is often dangerous ... especially when the practitioner becomes a guru and plays out his or her psychodramas at the expense of gullible seekers ... which happens in all traditions ...

Energy, it seems, is the name of the game ... at the fundamental level found by scientific exploration so far, all is energy vibrating and coming into form and returning to energy maybe depending on an affair with consciousness. .. tricky to comprehend since consciousness is usually ascribed to humans and the geological record suggests matter appeared long before humans ... raising the interesting question of universal mind, or Universal Mind if you prefer ... anyway at the level of human interaction energy trading is the currency of our dramas ... attention being energy and attention deficit identified as a problem, we play our games, as partners in an equal positive exchange of energy, as victims of the energy stealing of others, as vampires hunting out likely life forms whose energy we may steal ... our roles in these games the result of our psychology ...laid down in early childhood, maybe even in previous lives ...

As the summer solstice arrives, misery mongers muse that it's all downhill now, whilst another reality suggests summer is getting started and warmer weather is likely, on and off, through to September ... as for shorter days, at this latitude that will help with sleep, since the organism tends to perk up with sunlight and calm down with darkness ... not that sleep is a problem here, equanimity prevails and that is the key to a calm mind and conducive to healing sleep ... joy meanwhile, pops up now and then, sometimes whilst sleeping, sometimes awake ... mostly in response to events in nature: the heady scent of an azalea in flower, a rainbow, a river in spate, the heron patiently fishing, the snowy owl on the fence post ...

Promised politics postponed ... all rather meaningless at the moment as the long drawn out pantomime of the election of the next Prime Minister of the Disunited Kingdom polarises a disenfranchised, disenchanted populace ... the prospect of a leader to match the standards of the commander in chief of the Benighted States hopefully alerting us to the dangers of nurturing shallowness and fear of the other. .. all entertainment at one level, our continuing attention somehow encouraging the charade ...

Flaming June ...

Blog has enjoyed the rest, readers too maybe ... shredded feet fully repaired, lessons learnt, though embodiment of the teaching that whilst pain is inevitable suffering is optional perhaps worth the experience ... May and June in Stanhope marvellous as days stretch out, enabling 2 hour walk before breakfast, through the woods and over the fells ... fresh and green from intermittent rainy days ... organism settled for summer, occasional minibus driving with the elders, thoughts of sharing process of exploring the Nature of Reality with others ... maybe at the Land of Joy next month ...

A winter adventure in a different culture takes form in the imagination department, wherever that is located, probably in the brain, whilst the skin votes for Sun and summer temperatures. .. Sri Lanka perhaps the destination, with 30 degrees on offer and UK Foreign Office advice not to visit an added attraction ... neighbour's granddaughter recently reluctantly recalled ... a K retreat centre right there in Colombo ... let's see, plenty of time to decide ... before that 3 weeks of volunteering at Brockwood Park, supporting the 50th Anniversary Reunion ...

Today is an indoor day, with persistent rain set in ... 2 hour wet walk before breakfast probably enough exposure to the elements, a reminder of epic wet days from the Camino. .. an attachment having so far fallen away, at least the routes in Spain and Portugal ...

And for any readers wondering about the random post about the Google Shop in Sunderland a few weeks ago: having delivered passengers to the theatre in Sunderland and with a few hours to pass before returning them to Weardale, a wander through the shopping centre, observing palpable poverty and distress, the Google Shop, set up, they said, to help reduce the digital divide, with basic IT skills essential for most jobs these days ... plenty of staff on hand and few customers meant an interesting hour addressing tablet related issues, including the unhelpful barring of certain sites such as the Bank for online transactions as well as the loss of photo upload on the blog ... the pic and post was the result, though whether the problem has been solved longer term will be tested with this offering, with a lovely photo from Sunday's sunny outing to Cragside to see the blooming rhodedendrons and elder daughter, though not in that order of priority, obviously!

Well, rain has eased and organism requests outside wander along river to enjoy the extra energy after all the rain ... politics tomorrow perhaps ...