ContentedLife

One of my favourite places in the whole world: Durdle Door, on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset.

Well actually, the Door itself I can take or leave, although I quite liked being able to catch sunset through it thanks to the fact that I was there on a very spring-like day in January. You can’t get this angle later in the year.

But I love what surrounds the Door, and the walk to it and past it from Lulworth Cove (I never head towards the Cove…)

I even enjoy the drive to get there, at least the last 20 minutes of it when I come off the main roads and snake up a single-track road to the viewpoint overlooking Tyneham and Kimmeridge, where I stop for 5 minutes to enjoy the view and watch the clouds doing a dance that I have never seen them do anywhere else, as the sea breeze rising over the Purbecks pushes them away. All the way down here the sky could have been grey and overcast and drizzly and unpromising, but here is where the clouds are turned back, they shall not pass, and the sun shines on the Lulworth ranges. Then I continue along the range road to Lulworth, and realise that once again I don’t have enough change for the car park…

Climbing the hill above the main car park, heading away from the Cove, provides a measure of whether I’m less fit or more fit than on my previous visit (this time, less fit. Oops.). Detour to visit the hidden hill, with its portal to another dimension, to stand atop it and face the full fetch of the Atlantic wind. The perfect diffraction patterns of the bay to the east of the Door, flashing with a million reflected suns. The sound of the sea just to the west of here, in one particular spot where it sends waves of almost orgasmic energy through my body. The cliffs and rock formations along the beach, so striking it’s enough to spark an interest in geology in someone whose idea of hell, once upon a time, was to be dragged around a museum looking at dusty display cases full of rocks. “They’re just rocks”, I thought, but of course now they hold the secrets of the Earth’s past, and the history of life itself. Rocks are beginning to come to life for me, and this place is the catalyst.

Butter Rock marks the farthest west you can walk along the beach. From certain angles it reminds me of an Easter Island statue, except that it faces the beach rather than out to sea as they do. It seems to be the quiet guardian of this, the quieter end of the beach. Tourists at the Door end can be raucous and rowdy, but the guardian keeps this space for those of a more meditative persuasion. Few come here, and those that do talk in hushed tones or keep a contemplative silence. Even dogs are calmer here.

This is the only place to which I return regularly, and know I will continue to do so. Normally I like to explore new places, rather than revisiting old ones. But this place is special. It’s where I plug in to the grid, recharge with energy from all the four elements: earth beneath my feet and in magnificent display, water as the sound of the sea, air as the breeze that almost knocks me over as I stand atop the hidden hill, soaking up its power, refining my balance, and fire from the sun that has shone on me on every visit so far.

This is my power place.

How about you? Where do you keep returning to, not due to lack of ideas for alternatives, but because you love it so much, because it works for you?

“Do you believe in God?” she asked. The trouble is, “God” is such a loaded word/concept. So is “believe”.

My current quest is for experience. Belief is, by definition, outside experience: it’s an attempt to explain experience — at best your own, at worst someone else’s — to cage it and control it. Having been subsumed by beliefs of one kind or another for so long, for now I’m quite content to avoid them wherever possible. So what I’m left with is a kind of day-to-day “this is how things seem to me to be”.
Now that I’m over the existential angst that is probably an inevitable initial reaction to a pretty steep drop from absolute certainty to near-absolute uncertainty about everything I held as important, it works for me and I don’t feel any burning desire to “know” more.

Instead, I notice the way that certain ideas resonate with me, as if I hear the ringing of some crystal of “truth” that they contain, “truth” in quotes because it is a truth for me, for now, rather than for everyone for all time. Today, for instance, alchemy; one of my keywords on a certain social connection website. Someone asked me why it was there, so I explained that it was in the sense of self-development rather than turning base metals to gold, but this got me asking myself why I’d put it there, and realising that the key component of alchemical transformation is fire, and it burns. There’s nothing like going through hell to achieve enlightenment. Perhaps indeed it’s the only way. Death and rebirth. Fear is conquered after the first Bad Trip. And so on. Anyway, then she mentions Crowley and that’s synchronistic with the part of the Illuminatus! trilogy I’ve just got to on 3rd reading, the black mass, and all the while I was reading it I was observing my own reaction to it, the fear and disgust which can only be a residue of Christian upbringing since I have no direct experience of such rites. Do I want to? Not especially, but neither do I want something from my past to continue to hold such power over my present. It maintains, and is maintained by, a lack of belief in my own power, my own ability to experience all manifestations of life without being possessed by any one of them.

I don’t have many ambitions. In fact I try to leave the Future well alone these days, since it tends to have no basis in reality.

But there is one thing that I want to do — on such a deep level that I know with almost absolute certainty (as much as anything can be certain, and considerably more certain than the day-to-day things that most people take as certainties without question) that I will do it, somewhen. I know this, or strongly suspect that I know this, because I have no idea WHY I want to do it, or HOW I’m going to do it… and I feel a certain amount of fear about it. But it is just there, hovering, glittering in the hyperspace of my backburner consciousness, like how my innocent and what-might-now-be-called-Aspy hyper-literal imagination used to interpret the phrase “since you were just a twinkle in your father’s eye”.

I will go to Burning Man.

I probably will not go to Burning Man until I can chill out a bit about it, so to speak. Having this level of certainty tends to provoke expectations of epiphany. I need to reach the point of knowing, on that same deep level, that (a) life’s purpose is revealed in every moment, and (b) life’s purpose is to wake up enough to see what is being revealed in every moment and receive it. One of the appeals of BM in contrast to other festivals, which always seem like temporary opt-outs from the real world and I have adjustment difficulties at either end of them, is that it’s a completely blank canvas. It’s not a gig, it’s not a festival, it’s just a gathering in the desert, and nothing is there except what you bring. I feel that may make it easier to bring home and integrate whatever I experience, because everything was done by ordinary people, rather than a faceless organisation. And because I will be determined to contribute, and to feel like a contributor rather than a spectator. To be through doing, not viewing. To be consciousness moving matter, instead of a disembodied lost soul.

I have a lot of work to do.

Bike on train to Soton, cycle to hosp for my eye checkup (all fine), then headed into the forest for a bit. “A bit” turned into “a while” as the faeries switched all the paths around behind my back; despite assiduously memorising my inbound route, I couldn’t find it again to get out. New Forest faeries are a tricky bunch, they do this sort of thing all the time. The best policy is to do what the ponies do, swish quietly and stay serene. Got help from a passing fawn (or was it a faun?), and made it out before it got too dark to see, which is always a bonus.

I never used to like the forest, but that was because I usually let S choose which bits of it we went to, and she always chose the same bits, which even if they’d been really spectactularly nice (which is not how I’d describe Deerleap), would’ve bored me eventually. I’m an explorer, I always prefer going somewhere I’ve never been before (or went to so long ago that I’ve forgotten it!). So not ready to settle down somewhere… but if the kids go to school, I may have no choice but to go back to Soton. That might not be so bad, I just dislike the fact that I never seem to have a choice, or only Hobson’s choice.

Tanzan and Ekido were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling. Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the road lest the mud ruin her clothes.

“Come on, girl” said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud and put her down safely on the other side. The monks then continued on their way.

Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he could no longer restrain himself. “We monks don’t go near females,” he told Tanzan, “especially not young and attractive ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?”

“I put the girl down back there,” said Tanzan. “Are you still carrying her?”

— traditional Zen koan

The past year for me has been about letting go of attachments. It’s not until you do this that you realise how many there are. People, places, objects, knowledge, experiences, expectations, the past, the future. Fortunately they are all manifestations of the same underlying pathology - the ego-mind. One technique is helping me overcome them all, and it’s very simple. It just needs practice. And the ego finds all sorts of reasons to avoid practicing.

The big one I’m wedged at presently is the past. I am no longer traumatized by “bad” past events. But the above koan makes an important point - it can be just as dangerous to dwell on pleasant past experiences as unpleasant ones. There is no difference; you are still not present, and scratching around in your memories for a reason to feel good Now produces only a fading echo of positive emotion that soon gives way to blues because you are no longer in that situation. It also allows the ego to continue investing situations with the power to “make you feel good” or “make you feel bad”; if situations have that power, You don’t.

It’s only quite recently that I discovered I had the choice to feel good (or bad) irrespective of my situation. Having realised that, you may think, it’s easy to choose to feel good. Oh no. The ego intervenes. It throws a tantrum. It does everything in its power to stop that choice being made. At times it can be tough to remember that I have more power than it.

It was easier being a Christian. You don’t need to be powerful, in fact the more weak and feeble you are, the better, the more you need God to come and save you from Satan. You are absolved from any responsibility for your own life. And God is more powerful than Satan, so will win the war in the end, even if he seems to be losing most of the battles. It’s all part of the plan.

Without that safety net, you need to find your own source of power. I had to go through some dark, dark times to realise just how much I needed a light. And then my wife walked away to show me that no-one, nothing outside of myself, could be depended on. I and I alone had to find my power, and in so doing, become whole. This is my quest.