Panic by the Tree Line
Dear friend,
The pigeons are back on the roof. They seem to becoming shy in that they cease their courtship dance and flit off the moment I mention them. The mornings are getting cooler here. A breeze reaches me from the open window, the way it gently plays on my skin is very similar to how it feels when you’re aware of the subtle energies dancing around you when you connect in a loving way with another being.
I wonder how it would be to do away with the concept of species. The logical mind loves to categorise and separate out into jars and boxes and glass cabinets. It’s a phase we’re going through, and useful too on the material level.
In school we were taught only the material level exists.
No-one spoke of the divine as inner peace.
This feeling that comes to you when your mind soaks in gratitude and you recognise the one life, as the life in you. The surface, infinitely diverse, the depths still. Spirit pulling on the mind the way the moon pulls the ocean. Functionally speaking there is only one ocean on earth and we are it.
Chiara and me bought a new machine that makes plant based milks. We…
Hold the press.
Maisie, one of next door’s kitten just visited our house for the first time! She popped her head around the door and froze. Even though we’ve spent hours cuddling when we look after her and her sister, she doesn’t seem to recognise us out of context.
She’s retreated to the garden, incredibly cute and looking a little spooked. It’s tempting to feed her as an incentive, but I won’t. It’s not like I don’t know whose kitten she is.
This moment.
Just to be in it.
No place to get to.
We rush around like we’ve lost something, but it’s always here.
Easy to forget.
The practice is to remember.
A crow, sounding like a seized hinge gives a single cry and is silent.
The machine makes oat milk without the packaging and processed ingredients.
It makes other milks too. Our friends have one which is what gave us the inspiration to buy it.
Buying things, can become addictive. Those parcels coming through the door. How many human beings are completely lost in the material world, as if only it were real?
Within and behind all we see in omnipresent Spirit.
Spirit is our ultimate source of safety and support.
It’s always here, never leaves us, we forget is all.
Yesterday I promised another story.
About dogs.
We’re in Romania nearing the end of our trip and both now in pretty good shape.
There was a walk described in our guide that was ambitious, but possible in a day if the start was early enough. The guide recommended to start by hitching a ride with loggers on their way into the forest and to our surprise the advice turned out to be good.
A car full of men stopped for us and enthusiastically waved us into their beat up vehicle. There were three on the back seat and they made one of the guys squeeze into the boot, which had its parcel shelf missing so I could sit in the front with both of our back packs.
Chiara was wedged in the back with the other three guys and the contortionist.
They were passing a bottle of beer around and smoking filterless brown tobacco cigarettes. It was six in the morning. We’re heading along a dirt road into the forest and an icy regret started orbiting my head, looking for a way into my mind. There were jokes flying around which mostly seemed to be at the expense of the guy jammed in the boot, who was successfully draining the plastic bottle of beer and grinning, both of his front teeth missing.
Chiara looked tiny in the back. If this went horror movie there was not a lot I’d be able to do about it.
It was simply a matter of staying calm and trusting, calling on the saints and teachers to be with us, and they were.
The guys turned out to be generous to a fault.
When the road became impassable for the car we all tumbled out at a spot where their tractor was parked. Another group of men were there already and one of them was welding something that had fallen off the tractor. The guys from our car picked up their tools from under a tarpaulin on the ground, and waved goodbye. Smiling and joking and shoving each other, they disappeared up the steep banks of the forest while we stood and watched the sparks flying off the back off the gigantic rusty tractor.
The driver gestured maybe another fifteen minutes and we’d be on our way. It was a wild place, and these men were tough and full of humour. You got the feeling they’d known each other forever.
Tractor fixed up, he took our back packs and threw them in the cabin. We were to stand on a metal platform at the back of the tractor and hold on for dear life. The platform’s function was to dig into the ground and stop the tractor from tilted over backwards when the slope became too steep.
The machine started off with a lurch and we powered up the foot of the mountain, ridged wheels digging into the soft earth of the forest floor, heading for the tree line.
We were all silent under the clatter of the engine.
The desolation of the logging work was apocalyptic, we had no idea if this was a managed cull or unregulated exploitation. We felt uneasy, not on account of our companions now but at the impact our presence was having on the environment we’d come out here to be part of.
Eventually the driver gestured for us to jump off and he threw us our packs. We hadn’t realised that we’d taken the place of the guys from the car who would’ve ridden up in our stead.
I couldn’t work out if it would offend the driver to offer some money. Out of embarrassment I fudged the issue and let the moment pass. Looking back I think they would have gladly accepted. But you never know. A truck driver later on in our trip, flatly refused to take anything from us.
It was still early morning as we waved our thanks to the loggers and trudged out of the forest onto open mountain pasture. In the near distance you could hear the bells of the sheep and it wasn’t long before we saw our first shepherd dog.
You know when someone has their attention on you and it makes you turn. It was that feeling as a shape darted out of the forest up and to our left and hid behind an outcrop of rock. A cute black and white young shepherd dog’s face popped up over the ledge, took us in and then disappeared again.
We thought we’d met another friendly mountain guide. There was not a hint of malice about the creature. We were still adjusting our packs and getting our bearing when the dog returned. This time there were seven other heads peering down at us.
The little one had gone for back up.
The pack came streaming down the slope, moving like liquid they formed a prowling circle around us, teeth bared, snarling.
Chiara and me instinctively stood back to back. Each holding out our walking sticks as the pack took turns to lunge. I started shouted out a phrase I’d heard shepherds use to call their dogs which had no effect other than to delay the actual shepherd from calling off his.
I’d never before felt how it must be to be hunted. To these dogs we were prey.
Deep down I knew this is not how it ends.
One the surface I’m screaming now and then we hear a whistle and as if a storm had suddenly blown itself out the attack stops.
The dogs sit down and look like harmless pets.
They’re so cute and good natured, they could be golden retrievers in the park.
The shepherd lets us know how stupid we are for making so much noise. Waves us away with his sinewy sun bronzed hand, turning his back as his dogs form a furry bed around him on the grassy slope.
I get the feeling he might have been playing with us a little, but I’m so glad we’re both alive and unharmed, what does it matter?
A few hours later, we’re still buzzing with adrenaline and the mist comes down so thick you can’t see more than a few metres ahead. Then we hear the sound of the sheep bells and we have no idea what we’ll do if the sheep dogs come for us again.
But they don’t.
And you learn how it is to surrender and keep putting one foot in front of the other.
The best of our memories, don’t they come from the times where we took a chance, stepped out of the comfortable?
When we heed the call to adventure?
Isn’t there something you want to experience but have been hanging back from?
What would be the one thing you could do today to start that adventure?
There’s no better time than now.
No other.
In
Fact.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey