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. 

Sunshiny Days

How very hard it is to stay indoors when the sap is rising, the birds are singing and the garden is calling me to dig and weed, and rake and sow. Who wants to sit at a desk, staring at a screen when they can sit or walk or work outside and feel sunshine on their skin? Well, some folks might, but I don't.

My skin craves sunshine. I know this is not just because I spent forty years of my adult life living in sunny parts of the world like Australia and California and got accustomed to it, because I remember how I craved sunshine as a child. It was as though there was some ancient piece of programming in this English brain of mine that made it well-nigh impossible to remain indoors on a sunny day. Whenever I awoke to a morning of blue sky and slanting sunbeams I would experience an immediate and powerful urge to leap out of bed and run outdoors. 

I can still remember, vividly, the power of that bodily urge and I remember how quickly and surprisingly it left me when I moved away from England. So much so that I forgot all about it for decades until, the first spring after I came back here to live, it reasserted itself with the same force as ever. 

There was an item in the BBC news yesterday about the importance of Vitamin D to our health and about how we poor denizens of the northern latitudes who don’t get enough sunshine on our skin need to take Vitamin D supplements to keep ourselves healthy. Those same health authorities who fussed and worried and sent us all scurrying for shade and slathering ourselves from head to toe with SPF 15, are now suggesting that maybe they went a bit too far overboard and a little sun on the skin is actually a Good Thing  (just a little, mind). Not that I ever took much notice of those warnings in the first place, except that I was always careful not to burn. 

My own experience tells me that sun-craving, for people who live as far north as I do, is actually an adaptive mechanism. I am convinced that, just as the food cravings of pregnancy signal a shortage of some dietary element or another,  sun-craving is a natural and evolutionary response to insufficient levels of Vitamin D. So, as with everything else, if we remain fully tuned to our bodies and fully receptive to their messages and requests—which, by the way, tell us not only when to get out into the sun but also when it is time to move to the shade—they will serve us faithfully and with much gratitude.



Productivity Rules (Forever, dammit!)

When I look back and muse upon it—which I frequently do each evening as I draw the curtains—the very best kind of day is one that has contained all the following ingredients:

● I created something

● I exercised my body

● I spent time outdoors

● I completed something

● I enjoyed myself

● I felt fit, healthy and in love with life 

Some days are like that. But how to deal with the ones that are not? How to deal with the days when I feel like Stephen Leacock’s character who “… flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”?

How to deal with the days when, as I draw the curtains, I cannot even remember one single thing I actually did except for eating meals, going to the bathroom and checking email?

How to deal with days when, despite all my good intentions, the piles of paper keep piling up and all efforts to bring order to my chaos fail (again)?

How to feel OK about a whole day spent sitting in an armchair reading the latest Michael Connelly murder mystery when I really should be out there doing Something To Save the Planet (or at least pulling a few weeds in the veggie garden)?

Over  the years I have convinced myself that it is perfectly OK to be erratic, perfectly OK to have quiet days and doing nothing days, perfectly OK to please myself from moment to moment as regards what I do with my day, especially now that I am retired and officially an old woman. Besides which, I’m a writer and writers need quiet gestation time as well as busy scribbling time, right? Yes, I have convinced myself of all these excellent arguments. And yet…

Something I have noticed is that it is heaps easier to feel good about a doing nothing day if it happens to occur on a Sunday. Interesting, isn’t it? Interesting to notice how deeply our childhood conditioning  sinks into our psyches, how it is reinforced throughout our lives by twelve or more years of schooling and half a century's exposure to the industrial culture* and how hard it is to eradicate entirely. Kind of like couch grass.

Anyone else noticed this?

(* not everyone is paid for what they do, more's the pity, but we're all conditioned by the so-called 'working week.')
 

All Our Relations



Have you noticed how so many of the ways that we talk about Nature and about our fellow creatures drive a semantic wedge between ‘it’ and us, between ‘them’ and us? So much so, in fact, that it is quite a challenge to talk about other life forms without falling into the trap of separating ourselves from them with our words.

There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that our species Homo sapiens is a member of the Kingdom called Animalia (we are animals), the Phylum Chordata (we have spines), the Subphylum: Vertebrata (a special sort of spines), the Class: Mammalia (we suckle our young), the Order: Primates (along with apes, and monkeys), the Family: Hominidae (one of the so-called ‘great apes’) and the Genus: Homo (men and women, boys and girls). Yet to listen to the way we speak about ourselves—and the way we think about ourselves—you would never know it.

After all these centuries of imagining ourselves as separate from the rest of the animal kingdom and forgetting that all of these other life forms are our relations, our language has been shaped by our beliefs. So yes, it is hard to avoid the linguistic traps. But I really wish we could all try harder. It really bothers me when I hear people say “humans and animals,” as though we weren’t animals. We need to reverse the trend and re-shape our language to fit our new realization of who we really are—one organism among the billions that make up the body of the living Earth.

It bothers me when I hear phrases like “walking in Nature,” as though there were any place on our planet were Nature isn’t. Nature is us. Nature is in us and everywhere and in everything. Even in the heart of the city, Nature is not just the pigeons and rats and cockroaches and mice and the slivers of living green that grow up in the cracks between the paving stones, but all-pervasive. The air is full of unseen creatures; our own bodies have other creatures living on and within them, creatures in their millions. We are Nature and Nature is us.

For all of my adult life I have consciously and delightedly revelled in the experience of being woman, being human, being animal. So when Stephanie Sorrell, one of my fellow authors at John Hunt Publishing, told me she was thinking of co-ordinating a new publishing imprint called ‘Animal’ I was delighted. If any of my readers are interested in Stephanie’s proposal, you will find it here.

So if you have a book in you and it is about other animals and our relationships with them, contact Stephanie. The email address, in case you can't read it very well in the box,  is animalpub(at)hotmail.com (just replace (at) with the @ sign)

My Solstice Message

Like most other children, I loved Christmas. I loved the mystery and magic of it, the scent of pine needles, the gifts, the food, the carols and of course the story. And like most other parents, I wanted my children to have the same experience. But in between my own childhood Christmases and my children’s childhood Christmases there was a very big gap: a gap of fifteen years and half a planet.

Oh I did all the same things that my mother had done and my grandmother had done: dressing the tree, hanging the decorations, wrapping the gifts, stuffing the turkey…and I made sure that the magic of Christmas was there for my children, just as it had been for me. It was—or so they tell me. However, it was not the same magic. Because by the time I had children I had relocated from one side of the globe to the other. So my children’s experience of Christmastime was not just the tree and the gifts and the rich food, it was also sunshine, blue skies and long, lazy days on the beach or at the local swimming pool.

It took me a long time to work out exactly why, as the years went by, I found myself disliking Christmas and wishing it did not have to happen. It was only when a friend of mine—an expert on symbolism—pointed out to me that almost all the traditional rituals we had taken with us from Europe to the Antipodes derived from ancient ways of celebrating the winter solstice— the promise of light returning to a dark, winter Earth—that my reaction suddenly made sense. Out there, in the blazing sunshine on the longest day of the year, why would I want to be lighting candles, stringing tinsel, hanging up stars, bringing in an evergreen tree…all those symbolic ways of honouring a midwinter moment?

Every year, I would hear various Australian friends talking about the irony of sending each other cards covered in snow and holly and eating rich, winter food when even the sparrows and mynah birds were wilting in the midsummer heat. “Let’s do it differently next year” they used to say, and everyone would nod and agree. Yet the old ways persisted. It seemed to me that there remained a deep disconnect between the migrants from Europe and the land in which they now moved. I felt it myself. The traditions and rituals we had grown up with didn’t work there but we all seemed incapable of devising new ones appropriate to the place and the season. To do so would require the kind of deep rootedness in the land from which rituals emerge organically, but the roots of many Europeans in Australia are still in the pots they arrived in. It may take centuries for the transplants to be complete.

By the time I came back to live in the Northern Hemisphere—and eventually, in retirement, to my native land—the over-advertised, stressful, jangly consumerfest that Christmas had become had no meaning or interest for me whatsoever. It now felt like something to avoid. At first, I felt like some kind of Scrooge, half guilty for not sharing what for others was still a joy. But as time went on that feeling dropped away, leaving me free to enjoy my own reality and seek my own sources of delight.

Nowadays, my partner and I quietly celebrate the winter solstice in our own small but meaningful ways—a meditative walk in the wintry woods, a glass of wine, a special, simple vegetarian meal at which we give thanks for the miracle of life within and around us, our deep and joyful belongingness to Earth and our faith that the days will once again lengthen and the sun will eventually return, as it does every year, to bathe and warm us with its rays.

What a joy it is to be free to choose. To be free of what the Russian writer Vadim Zeland—author of the much-acclaimed Reality Transurfing series of books—calls a ‘pendulum,’ a force field of communal energy that draws people into its embrace and traps them there. Over the years, dozens of people have told me they dislike Christmas…even dread it. Yet for one reason or another, they remain caught in the energy pendulum that Christmas has become.

This is one of the glorious freedoms we have discovered in our old age: the freedom, finally, to walk away from energy pendulums and do things in ways that are meaningful to us, regardless of what the rest of the world does. We don’t judge anyone else for their choices. For those who love to buy presents, send cards, hang baubles on a tree, pull crackers and eat some kind of bird, Christmas remains the magical experience it always was. And that’s great. For those who derive a special meaning and joy from the tale of a baby born in a stable, it is a special and holy time. Likewise for those who honour the traditions of their ancestors through Chanukah or Kwanzaa. For us, what is special and wonderful is that we no longer feel obliged to join in any of it. And we are fortunate in that, as far as we know, nobody judges us for that choice.

So my wish for you, as 2011 draws to a close and a new year begins, is that you will be happy in your choices and take delight in your freedom to choose.

(PS: Here's a great article on a similar topic, with lots of helpful and practical advice)

More Murmurations

I remember blogging about this last year - or maybe it was the year before. But it happens every year and every year it gives me a thrill to see the winter starlings arrive again in their thousands and dance in the sky. I love to feel the rustling currents of them around me as they swoop low over the hedgerows or take off from the stubble fields with a roar of wings.
Of course, it signals a few months of heavy traffic around the bird feeders, as these brash migrants from northern Europe muscle their way in amongst the more timorous locals. But when they put on aerial ballets like this one so beautifully captured on video by Sophie Windsor Clive (to whom many thanks),I cannot begrudge them even one seed.

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Future Primitive - an interview

Whenever someone asks me a question about how I see the world or what it is that I care about, my mind blossoms with a million answers. Shaping my response to fit the requirement of the moment is always a difficult task for me.

It is so much easier when I can give the answer in writing, for that gives me time to think, to choose, to employ the exact sequence of words and sentences that will best express my truth. But every now and then I am required to speak ‘off the cuff.’ And this was one such time. In this 47-minute interview with Joanna Harcourt-Smith, which took place a few days ago, I had an opportunity to talk about some of the subjects closest to my heart, especially conscious aging, simple living, green spirituality and the role of the elderwoman.

It was a great privilege to take part in Joanna’s project and I would encourage you to check out the Future Primitive website and download some of the other podcasts she has produced.

Meanwhile, here is mine, complete with all its ‘ums’ and hesitations and hastily-chosen words that the perfectionist writer in me would love to improve upon.

(The bio was taken from my website and is not entirely up to date, as I am no longer secretary of the WFA – my apologies to Tess for that oversight.)

Eradicating Ecocide

Wonderful news!
Polly Higgins's landmark book Eradicating Ecocide has won the People's Book Prize, 2011. Congratulations, Polly!
http://www.eradicatingecocide.com/general/eradicating-ecocide-peoples-book-prize/

And now, the whole world needs to read the book...

...and the whole world needs to come to its senses and recognize ecocide - the destruction of Earth's precious ecosystems - as the utterly heinous crime it truly is.

Shoulder High to a Thistle

This morning’s walk takes me through my favourite meadow. It is my favourite because it is one of the few fields around here that really is a meadow in the traditional sense, i.e. several unploughed, undisturbed acres of mixed grasses and wildflowers rather than one of those the ryegrass monocultures so beloved of present day agribusiness.

Right now, as we move into July, the meadow is a wild natural profusion, an effusive, flowering, seeding, jumble of colour, shape, size and texture. Except for the well-trodden footpath that runs through its centre, most of the grasses and flowers that live here are waist-high now.

I stand next to a tall, many-branched thistle plant that is at least a foot taller than I am. Looking around, I can see a dozen more such lofty specimens, each bristling with flowers, some already beginning to go to seed. Could that be why they aspire to such a height, to take advantage of the breeze when the time comes to waft their progeny aloft on thistledown wings? It can’t be just to catch the light that they grow so tall, surely, since the entire meadow is in full sun. But maybe, I think to myself, there is no basis for their decision to keep reaching for the sky except the sheer exuberance of the creative, universal life force that powers them. And I feel the tingling flow of that same energy in my own body as I stand there in the meadow in the morning sunshine, shoulder high to a thistle.

Which, when you think about it, is the sort of relationship in which we ought to see ourselves at all times, we puny humans, compared to the vast plant kingdom on which our very existence depends. In fact, if height were a measure of ultimate importance in the scheme of things, perhaps ankle high would be more accurate. Even that might be to exaggerate our own significance.

If we have any importance, any special role to play in all of this, I think it is, as Brian Swimme suggests in his chapter of GreenSpirit: Path to a New Consciousness, our ability to be amazed. Perhaps my role, right in this moment is merely to stand next to this thistle plant that towers over me and reflect on the wonder, joy and beauty of that and of this beautiful sunny morning in the meadow.

Downshifting? Easy Does It!

I am delighted to announce that my new book on downshifting,
Downshifting Made Easy: How to plan for your planet-friendly future is now available for purchase.

It is one of the first six books in the new ‘Made Easy’ series that my publisher, O Books, is launching at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday June 1st at Watkins Bookstore near Leicester Square in London.

Click here to find out more about the launch. It’s a free event, of course, so if any of my blog readers happen to be around I would love to meet you there.
The aim of the O Books ‘Made Easy’ series is to condense into small, inexpensive and easy-to-read books as much useful information as possible on a wide range of interesting topics.
The aim of Downshifting Made Easy, like that of my book The Lilypad List and so much of my other writing, is to inspire people to live more lightly and joyfully on this beautiful Earth.
In particular, I want to convince my readers of three key things that I have learned from my own experience and from that of many ‘downshifters’ I have met. These are:

- You don’t have to move house in order to downshift to a greener lifestyle

- Downshifting is an inward, spiritual process as well as an outward, practical one

- Once you start downshifting, your life gets steadily more satisfying and more joyful

Please break some (virtual) bubbly against the bows of this little book as it sails down the publishing slipway. And please share this post widely.
Thank you.

Definitely Voting 'YES' tomorrow

I lived in Australia for 35 years. At election time, I usually voted for a minority party that reflected my true beliefs In other words, whatever one was the greenest. At the same time, I knew that one of the other of the two main parties would almost certainly win. And I definitely had a preference for one of those (the Australian Labor Party) over the other.

Under the Australian system of preferential voting, I could express my loyalty to the party of my choice by voting for them. And at the same time I could indication my preference for the ALP. So that if it was a tight election, my vote would still count. In other words, my vote truly did express what I wanted.In full.

Here in England, under the FPTP system, if I vote for my party of first choice (the Green Party), which has a snowball's chance in hell of winning in my constituency, then in terms of the battle of Labour vs Conservative, mine is a wasted vote. I have no way, here, of expressing my full wishes. I am hobbled.

The UK Tories are telling people that Australians don't like their system. I believe that is a total lie. In all my 35 years there I never once heard anyone express a wish to switch to a FPTP ballot. A lot of people - including me - did say that proportional representation, like many European countries have, would be an even better way to choose a government. And maybe we'll even manage that, eventually. Meanwhile...

Brits are a conservative bunch and don't take kindly to change. I can hardly dare to hope that they will flock to the polls tomorrow to vote 'YES' and change this antiquated and unfair system to a fairer, more flexible and more democratic one. But oh, it would be so wonderful if they did!

Slow Boat to Sicily

I just arrived back from a wonderful five and a half weeks of 'slow travel' to - and around - Sicily and would love to share some of the details with you. So if you would like to read about where we went and what we saw, you will find my trip report and pictures at: http://www.elderwoman.org/sicily2011.html

Thomas Berry Meditations Book Now Available in USA

Last year, in my role as Publications Co-ordinator for GreenSpirit, I helped to birth June Raymond's wonderful little book entitled Meditations with Thomas Berry. This is a collection, lovingly chosen by June, of some of the most profound and inspiring things that Thomas Berry said and wrote over the course of his long life. And thanks to her, I am sure they will continue to inspire others for many, many decades to come. They will inspire not only people who, like me, were fortunate enough to meet this great teacher during his lifetime, but also those who are now discovering, after his death, what a truly wise man he was. Here is a small sample:

"There is an awe and reverence
due to the stars in the heavens,
the sun, and all heavenly bodies;
to the seas and the continents;
to all living forms of trees and flowers;
to the myriad expressions of life in the sea;
to the animals of the forests
and the birds of the air.
To wantonly destroy a living species
is to silence forever a divine voice."

(Dream of the Earth, p.46)



"Gravitation...binds everything
together so closely that nothing
can ever be separated from
everything else.
Alienation is an impossibility.
We can feel alienated,
but we can never be alienated."

(Befriending the Earth, p.14)



"Without the soaring birds,
the great forests, the sounds and
colouration of the insects,
the free-flowing streams,
the flowering fields,
the sight of the clouds by
day and the stars at night,
we become impoverished in
all that makes us human."

(The Great Work, p.200)


"Our human responsibility as one voice among
so many throughout the universe is to
develop our capacities to listen as
incessantly as the hovering hydrogen atoms,
as profoundly as our primal ancestors
and their faithful descendants in
today’s indigenous peoples.
The adventure of the universe depends on
our capacity to listen."

(The Universe Story, p.44)


Some of the quotes June chose were taken from The Universe Story, which Thomas co-authored with Brian Swimme, so some of those words are actually Brian's. And when he first saw the ones June had chosen, Brian remarked that she had chosen many of his favourites.

This little book, with an introduction by June and her guiding notes for meditation, has been on sale in the UK since last August but I am delighted to announce that as from this week it is also now available in North America and elsewhere, through Amazon.com. We eventually plan to have an ebook version available as well, and I shall be announcing it here when we do.

Reciprocity

Inspired by David Abram’s marvellous book Becoming Animal, I have been thinking a lot about reciprocity today. And about the lack of it. In our culture, insulated as most of us are from the realities of wild Nature, even when we are in the countryside our surroundings and the creatures that inhabit them tend to slide into a two-dimensional backdrop for our thoughts and human-based activities, like a kind of wallpaper. We forget to be fully present, to pay attention, to interact consciously with whoever and whatever is around us. Tuned only to signals from the human world—the voices of companions, the chatter in our heads and perhaps the music from our iPods—we fail to interact with the more-than-human world and fail to comprehend its depth and richness. We swim through an ocean of potential relationships in wetsuits of distraction and  withholding, in spacesuits of hollow solitude.

I have heard people who have spent all their lives in one place and know it intimately say that in a way they feel merged with the land. It  is so familiar that it has become a part of them—or they a part of it. They rest into it in comfort. And although they may not remain consciously aware of it at all times, since they know it so well they notice even the smallest change—the swelling of a bud, a slight rise in the water table, the first migrating bird. 

But those of us, like me, who have travelled a lot and lived on several different continents, face another problem over and above the problem of tuning out and that is the occasional lapse into nostalgic discontent. Walking under a dull, grey sky, I can so easily find myself yearning for remembered sunshine. Moving through the endlessly farmed and gardened landscapes of my native England I suddenly long for wildness and the challenge of mountain slopes, trackless forests and dry arroyos. And yet, when the wildness of a canyon or the strangeness of a strangler fig (or the sight of leeches crawling up my boots)  threatens to overwhelm me I start thinking about the benign nature of my familiar woods.

I have reminded myself, sternly, that every place has its own, particular beauty and that places I have known and loved are,  like old friends I rarely see, still a part of me. I belong here and I also belong there…and there, and there, and there. It is wonderful to feel that one belongs everywhere. But the dark side of belonging everywhere is to belong nowhere.

 There is one simple answer. It is that old sixties slogan that has never gone out of date—be here now. Be where you are. Be fully where you are. When you see a bird, the bird also sees you. When you touch a tree, the tree touches you in response.

Every step on the Earth is a question to which the Earth supplies the answer—yes I am touching you. Feel that pull of gravity? That’s me holding you tight, loving you. And as you walk, your feet massage my skin. Yes you are a part of me, yes you are here, we are always together, in death or in life it matters not which. We are one. All of us.

Reciprocity. An exchange of gifts. Breathing in and breathing out. To whatever is around us we give the gift of our energy, our attention, our love. And it comes back to us tenfold. Those are the times when the world suddenly seems to swell and deepen around us, everything leaps into three dimensions. Maybe even four dimensions. And there is such richness and beauty all around us that we can only gasp in wonderment. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does…wow!

Tomorrow, when I go for a walk, I think I shall write a reminder on my hand. Delight in where you are. Wherever you are.

Wild Elders

Just as we could say that becoming an adult it is the overall developmental task of the child, I believe that the overall developmental task of every adult is to become not just merely an ‘old person’ but a true elder. In my second book, Elderwoman, I listed what I saw as the twenty principles of true elderhood. These are:

Ø      simplicity: living lightly on the Earth

Ø      deep vision: seeing beneath the surface, the ‘big picture’

Ø      passion: caring deeply about what really matters

Ø      compassion: for humans and the more-then-human world

Ø      non-attachment: to people, possessions etc

Ø      Earth-centeredness: living ecocentrically, not egocentrically

Ø      comfort: in one’s community and surroundings

Ø      connectedness: with all that is

Ø      respect: for others, all other life forms and the Earth itself

Ø      creativity: in what one does and how one lives

Ø      delight: in one’s senses, simple pleasures and life in general

Ø      lightness: and the freedom to become one’s true self at last

Ø      enoughness: living within our means, and those of the planet

Ø      heart-listening: trusting the voice of intuition

Ø      peace and quiet: enjoying solitude and a slower pace of life

Ø      authenticity: being all one can be, like a ripening fruit

Ø      responsibility: playing one’s part in the healing of our Earth

Ø      radical aliveness: living fully  every moment. A ‘yes’ to life

Ø      acceptance of change: knowing it's the only constant

Ø      balance: balancing the yin and the yang in one’s life

   

Although Elderwoman, as its title implies, was written specifically for ‘third age’ women, I have been surprised and delighted by the number of men who have written to tell me they enjoyed it too. But my list of ‘Elderwoman Principles’ is probably appropriate for both genders.

One principle I didn’t include—although in a sense it is covered, in a way, by several of the others, is the principle of wildness.

‘Wild’ is not an adjective one often hears applied to older folk. And yet, when I read the following passage on page 414 of Bill Plotkin’s book Nature and the Human Soul (New World Library, 2008) it set my heartstrings twanging. That’s why I want to share it with you. Bill wrote:

“A genuine elder possesses a good deal of wildness, perhaps more than any adult, adolescent or child. Our human wildness is our spontaneity, our untamed vitality, our innocent presence, our resistance to oppression, and our rule-transcending vivacity and self-reliance that social convention can never contain. We are designed to grow deeper into that wildness as we mature, not to recede from it. When we live soulcentrically, immersed in a lifelong dance with the mysteries of nature and psyche, our wildness flourishes. A wild elderhood is not a cantankerous old age or a devil-may-care attitude, nor is it stubbornness or dreamy detachment. Rather, the wildness of elderhood is a spunky exuberance in unmediated, ecstatic communion with the great mysteries of life—the birds, fishes, tress, mammals, the stars and galaxies, and the dream of the Earth” 

Wow! Isn’t that great? I wish I could write like that!

(Thanks to Jay Luttman-Johnson for the picture. It is one of my favourites.)