Getting From Here to There

We have just been doing some travel planning and that set me thinking, once again, about my relationship to modern modes of travel.

One of my early heroes was Ivan Illich, who died in 2002 at 76 (the age I am now). I was lucky enough to meet and converse with him at one point in my life and it is to him that I owe many of my ideas about simple and sustainable lifestyles.

Illich, as he was when I met him

Illich was famous for pointing out that in many areas of human so-called 'progress' there comes an optimum moment in time beyond which the trajectory reverses and whatever-it-is, instead of assisting us, starts at best to lose its potential for improving our lives and worst to cause us harm, either as individuals or as a species.

This turning point has often come much earlier than we thought (and is almost always unnoticed). For example, as Illich pointed out in his 1970s essay, “Energy and Equity,” so much human energy is used up in the production and ownership of cars that they can be shown to be far less energy-efficient than bicycles. Bicycles, he said, were the really great breakthrough. All increases in speed beyond that have ended up actually being counter-productive—not to mention being damaging to the planet's ecosystems.

“Man, unaided by any tools, gets around quite efficiently, and is more thermodynamically efficient than any machine and most animals." said Illich. "Man on a bicycle can go three to four times faster than a pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals, as well.”

When I lived in town I used to ride my bicycle a lot. I rode it to work and back (on the days when I didn't walk) and I used it for all my shopping trips. The only reason that I don't use it now is that these days I live in a very hilly place and have to spend so much time pushing my bike uphill that it is easier and more comfortable simply to walk.

But whether walking or cycling, travelling at slow speeds keeps us in contact with the world around us in a way that car travel never can. Cars encapsulate us in little, fast-moving bubbles that somehow seem to create a barrier between our bodies and the environment through which we are moving. Of course, buses and trains, too, whisk us around at far beyond bicycle speed, but for some reason that I haven't yet quite worked out I always feel much more comfortable on a bus or a train than I do in a car. Maybe it is because I can move around more inside the vehicle—especially on a train—and because the space feels larger, airier and less claustrophobic.

Planes, whilst more spacious than buses, are a hundred times more claustrophobic—especially in the Economy section. Air travel catapults us from place to place and across time zones in a way that creates havoc in our body's energy systems, turns our vision of the Earth's surface into distant wallpaper, subjects us to all kinds of discomfort, indignities and airborne viruses (not to mention the awful food) and totally confuses our natural, animal sense of distance.

This is why, even though it takes us three days (and three buses, four trains and a ferry) to get to our favourite vacation place and costs probably four times as much as flying, I would still rather go there slowly.

(I only wish I had the energy and stamina to ride my bike from here to there instead. That way I would really see the countryside. But of course I'd still have to take the ferry across the watery bits)

Spiritual Teachers

Watkins magazine just published its annual list of the 100 most spiritually influential people in the world. It was interesting to see whose names made it on to that list, but I found it even more interesting to ponder about all those whose names didn't - and why they didn't.

How, I wondered, would you go about compiling a list like that? It seems they did it mostly by looking at how many times people entered those names into a search engine, but of course to enter the name of a spiritual teacher into Google you first have to know their name. It occurs to me, however, that at least 50% of the spiritual teachers in my own life have been people whose names nobody has ever Googled. Like the Scottish gardener for instance. Let me tell you about him.

Many years ago, when the daily walk from my home to my workplace used to take me through a small park, I often stopped to exchange morning greetings with the gardener who looked after the park. He was a short, bronze-skinned Scotsman with a happy smile and a jaunty air. And at least twice a week, as our morning paths crossed and we chatted briefly about this or that, he would make some seemingly simple comment that for some reason would echo in my mind for hours afterwards, a comment which, on later reflection, I realized was actually quite profound. It was no wonder, I sometimes mused, that this little park is such a pleasant spot; no wonder that the flowers shine so brightly and the grass is such a vibrant green, for this gardener, in his unassuming way, is encouraging them to grow, just as his words encourage growth in me.

It is experiences like this that have helped me gradually come to realize, over the years, that everyone I meet is my teacher and that every situation holds within it the opportunity to learn and grow. Yet as we go about our ordinary, everyday life,  this constant, two-way process of teaching and learning is for the most part something that happens below the level of our ordinary consciousness.

Then of course there must be a whole lot of spiritual teachers who do get Googled but presumably not enough to get themselves on to the Watkins list. Although I have been taught and influenced by many of those who names do appear on the list, the one whose influence on me has been the greatest of all is one whose name doesn't. Not yet, anyway. So let me introduce you...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=78Uka8csW7A

A Different Sort of Fresco

We spotted this bit of décor last month in a Fresc Co cafeteria in Barcelona (a welcome oasis for a pair of veggies like us in a country where, according to a travel guide I read, "The Spanish think the pig is a vegetable").

What a wonderful idea, posting the nutritional value of the food right up there on the wall – and in a pretty way, too! Well, with a name like 'Fresc Co' it is hardly surprising, I suppose. But I'm glad they thought of it.

Now how about posting, on the walls of certain other types of eateries, some info about the true health effects of trans-fat-full, GM corn-laden, over-salted, over-sugared fast food? 

As Plain As the Nose On Your Face

I wouldn't have the courage to leap out of a capsule 23 miles up, that's for sure. Hell, I could never even pluck up courage to leap off the high diving board. But one thing I do envy our culture's latest daredevil hero for and that's the chance to see the Earth from that incredible height, to get a greater sense of its curvature, its wholeness, its planet-ness. And to feel in his body, for four whole minutes and at a greater intensity than ever before, that deep strong pull homewards that we know as gravity.

One of the first astronauts to see our Earth from space spoke fervently about his feeling of identification with it. Just as we may see a photo of our own house, our own street, our own town and say "Ah, there's home," he suddenly realized that he was seeing, through the porthole of his spacecraft, the only home that humans have ever known. And exhilarating though that moment was—he said later that it changed his whole life—one can only imagine the profound sense of relief he and his companions felt when their feet eventually touched solid ground again.

Most of us never get further up than 40,000 feet and even then we are more likely to be watching movies, reading in-flight magazines or waiting for the drinks trolley to reach us than we are to be marvelling at our (somewhat) expanded view of the landscape. And millions of our fellow humans have never been inside a plane. However, the concept of flight, the concept of travel, even on a train or in a car, plays tricks with our minds. In fact, just our very ability to move from place to place on foot rather than being rooted in one spot for life, like a tree, gives us a false idea of who and what we are.

We talk about being on the Earth, as though anyone except Neil Armstrong has ever actually been on anything else. Religious people sometimes talk about being 'stewards' of the Earth, as though our planet hadn't managed perfectly well for millions of years before we turned up, a few cosmic seconds ago, to be its self-appointed 'stewards.' We talk about 'Mother Earth' and ourselves as her children, but most children grow up and leave home and that is one thing we cannot do. Nor would we want to.

We have no difficulty in seeing rocks and mountains, sand and sea, rivers and stones as being an intrinsic part of the fabric of our planet. Even plants, we can imagine as part of that fabric, since apart from tumbleweeds they mostly stay where they are. But moving creatures, the ones with feet and hooves and wings and manufactured wheels, those seem different to our literal, childlike minds and it takes a leap of intellect—a leap that many people seem unwilling or unable to take—to understand, to really get it, that we, too, are just as much a part of the Earth as a mountain, a pebble or a mushroom. The molecules and atoms we are made of have been here since the Big Bang and the energy forces that formed those molecules and atoms were here even before that, part of a vast mysterious universe that is beyond the grasp of our finite minds. 

Yes, it is an intellectual leap, but it is a leap worth making because it is a leap that can change your life. Some people can go even further than that and are able, even if only for a few seconds at a time, actually to experience that oneness and have a total knowing and bodily feeling of it that is way beyond all thought or concept. I long for the day when we can all do that. 

I want to say to everyone: you are part of this planet in the same way that your nose is part of your face. Yes, theoretically you could chop your nose off and hurl it out into space, beyond the sky, beyond gravity's pull…

But why would you ever want to?

September in Sardinia

Here we are, home again after a marvellous
month spent exploring Sardinia.

It was our first trip there but I think - and hope - that it will be the first of many. What a beautiful island and what warm and wonderful people we met, everywhere we went.

I just finished creating a report of the whole trip,
with lots of pictures. You will find it at:

www.elderwoman.org/sardinia.html

Self-Therapy Made Easy

Today, instead of my usual musings, I am going to do some shameless self-promotion. It's something authors do, I'm afraid. In fact these days our publishers not only expect it, they require it.

Why today? Because here comes another new book! This is another in the 'Made Easy' series from John Hunt Publishing. The 'Made Easy' books span several of the publisher's different imprints, so while  the last one I wrote, Downshifting Made Easy, was under the Earth Books imprint, this new one is under an imprint called Psyche Books.

http://www.elderwoman.org/self-therapy.html

Readers of my book The Lilypad List, may remember that there was an appendix in the back of that book with some ideas about self-therapy and quite a few readers said they found this useful. Those ideas are greatly expanded upon in this new book. I hope people will find this one useful also.

Here is a post from me on the Psyche Books blog that explains what the book is all about and why I wrote it.

The 'Right' Path of Relationship

Last Tuesday Margaret Wheeler Johnson, an angel-faced young journalist from New Orleans, now based in New York City and editing the ‘women’ section* of the Huffington Post (*they call their sections ‘verticals’ but I can’t yet bring myself to accept ‘vertical’ as a noun) published an interesting piece on relationships.

Following the lazy writer’s fashion for quirkily numbered lists masquerading as articles, hers was entitled ‘31Ways To Know You're In The Right Relationship.’

And I, being a lifelong sucker for quizzes, went through the list. Not that I needed a checklist to know I am in the right relationship. I knew that already. But 31 criteria? Goodness me!! I diligently checked them off, all of them, happily confirming what I already knew. 

I aced the test. And ended up wondering how Margaret devised it. Did she figure it out, based on her own experience of good relationships (even though she looks too young to have had much of that) or did she do lots of research, talk to marriage counsellors etc…or what?

At first I found myself wondering if there were any other criteria that I, as a psychologist with many years experience in couple counselling, might have added to her list. But then I decided that for me the ‘right’ relationship isn’t based on lists at all. The right relationship is the one you are in now. At a spiritual level, every relationship is the ‘right’ one because we are each other’s teachers and our most intimate partners are the greatest teachers of all. It is from them that we learn most about who we are; it is through them that we grow. The learning and the growing might sometimes be painful. All relationships are destined to change over time, simply because we change over time. Sometimes that change may involve conflict, estrangement, separation and/or divorce and always, somewhere along the time line, it will involve death. But no relationship ever actually ends: it merely changes form. The first man I married eventually became my ex-husband and then he became my deceased ex-husband but at some level our souls are still connected and always will be. It was never the ‘wrong’ relationship even though it ended in divorce.

 For that young journalist, being in the ‘right’ relationship probably means that you and your partner get along so well that you have a good chance of remaining partners till death doth you part. Her 31 criteria are perceptive and accurate. Combined, they could be seen not only as a good prescription for ‘success’ in relationship but also as a good diagnostic tool for anyone experiencing problems in this area. Topics, if you like, in a curriculum designed to teach us how to behave with our significant others—something most of us learn through trial and error. Because relationship is not about success vs. failure or rightness vs. wrongness. It’s about learning. There are no mistakes. Only outcomes. Only lessons. When we embrace this we are ready to enter into a conscious relationship, i.e. one in which in which both parties understand their relationship as a path of spiritual growth

I have one of my former teachers, John Welwood, to thank for this awareness. His teachings on conscious relationship have been my inspiration and my guide. As he says in his beautiful and seminal essay ‘Intimate Relationshipas Transformative Path’, “If relationships are to flourish, they need to reflect and promote who we really are, beyond any limited image of ourselves concocted by family, society, or our own minds. They need to be based on the whole of who we are, rather than on any single form, function, or feeling. This presents a tremendous challenge, for it means undertaking a journey in search of our deepest nature. Our connection with someone we love can in fact be one of the best vehicles for that journey. When we approach it in this way, intimacy becomes a path— an unfolding process of personal and spiritual development.”   Yes, oh yes.