Dear Friend,
I’m reading Bessel Van Der Kolk ‘The Body Keeps the Score’. I’m also reading ‘Demon Copperhead’ by Barbara Kingsolver, ‘A Course in Miracles’, ‘The Self Realization Fellowship Lessons’ by Paramahansa Yogananda, ‘Pattie Smith’s Collected Lyrics’, and ‘How to Make it in the New Music Business’ by Ari Herstand.
Those are my main reads at the moment. I’m surrounded with books and bookmarks.
We don’t own a television set. Not anymore.
I had cable tv back in 2004. I’m not anti television. I just don’t know where the time would come from to watch it. We’re looking after our neighbours kittens, and they have cable, our neighbours, not the kittens. But maybe it’s not called cable anymore. Digital? Lots of channels and I did skim through them while the kittens settled on my lap yesterday afternoon, curling and stretching and falling asleep purring.
Heavenly. Truly.
Time spent in the present moment with animals, are peak experiences. They draw you in. I thought why not have a look at the television, how bad can it be?
There were people rummaging through flea markets and searching for a place in the sun. Someone was cooking for someone and going on a date. Reruns of programmes from the nineties with Felicity Kendal as a detective. The American version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda and Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck.
I watched a bit of Roman Holiday, the tearful part when she leaves him and goes back to her life in the palace.
Being out of the habit of channel surfing, it felt disorientating and unsettling. Reminded me of being home visiting my mam and dad. Something I can’t do anymore. If I could sit in the stifling heat of their front room, watching day time tv with them now, I’d jump at the chance. Perspectives change.
But what I’d do now is persuade them to turn off the telly and get their outdoor coats on. Get into the car and visit the Lakes, just a twenty minute drive and we’d be by Bassenthwaite Lake. A few more minutes and we could be in Keswick and have a pub lunch, roll dad’s wheelchair round Derwentwater, probably buy some fudge from one of the tourist shops and then regret eating the whole bag on the drive back home.
Participate in this topsy turvy world of ours.
The news does get through. I heard about the young man who set himself on fire, and I wept. I can’t remember a time outside of the innocent days of early childhood, where the news wasn’t bad. Starvation, nuclear threat, war, terrorism, corruption, economic doom, ecological disaster, the list could go on. Like Leonard Cohen sang;
You want it darker
We kill the flame
But the flame doesn’t die. The light in the human soul shines on. It seeks its oneness, its home in the Creative, the Divine, God. Words are signposts, better still they are portals to someplace deeper within us. A place where hope does not die, cannot be extinguished.
I see a world where peace is the norm. I see it spread across all of the earth, the people, the animals, the plants and the living beings. Maybe for those of us who are outside of the war zones, this is part of our role? Not to succumb to hopelessness.
I was once in a business meeting when I heard myself being described as a visionary. It was a shock, not unpleasant, but my only response was to let it skip away like a stone skimming across a lake. Disappearing amongst the ripples.
It seems like a big word to bandy about, but it’s not.
To see, despite the present circumstances. We can all do that.
Deep down inside each one of us, we know peace is real. Maybe we won’t see it in our life times, but it is real.
The seed of peace planted in each individual mind, grows into a forest in our collective human consciousness.
We belong in the forest.
Our earth once was so.
It will be again.
It’s not a matter of believing.
It’s a matter of knowing.
Finding peace within.
Till tomorrow,
Love
Mikey
