Dear Friend,
You meet people with varying degrees of awareness of you. Spacial awareness is something you notice in a city. We’re crammed into this one. Crossing one another’s paths. Safety also.
We’re afraid of each other.
The summer before I left my home town I was with a group of classmates walking up into towards the church on the hill. We’d danced all night in the function room of the local football team’s clubhouse. The ground was on the north side, near the docks.
I was relaxed and kind of happy. I love to dance, it’s the quickest and easiest way for me to feel free in my body.
The group I’m walking with aren’t as I recall exclusively close friends. Some of them my false self most likely had a problem with. One or two of the girls probably hopeless crushes, mine not theirs, but this is the end of school, we’re on the verge of taking flight.
The air is soft and warm and I feel held somehow by the night and these bodies walking with me into a future non of us can predict.
Vaguely I recall seeing a group of boys, our age walking down in the opposite direction. They’re wearing sports tops. I think I see Celtic green. Grown up boys in men’s bodies. Stocky.
The hill becomes suddenly strangely steep. So steep I’m leaning into it, finally it’s become a vertical climb, the night incredibly dark. The others have vanished and I’m crawling on my knees. Someone somewhere is laughing, their laughter is trailing off into the distance.
Someone else is pulling me up by my arms.
One of the boys had punched me out.
I hadn’t felt the blow, thanks to the alcohol and bizarrely there was no bruising in the morning. Angels maybe. Or Nana.
It’s not the first attack. Young men are susceptible to random acts of violence. Sudden offences, just being you in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The body’s survival system takes the data and stores it.
Now we live ten minutes from the Spurs ground. Match days there’s a river of male energy clad in sports tops streaming through. In the pubs. Sometimes staggering around swearing at the traffic.
Decades later I’m on alert, uncomfortable. My false self wants to make me superior, it wants to dehumanise these fathers, sons and brothers. Splitting unity into opposing fragments. It’s got reason.
But then you breathe and come out of your head and you listen and they’re talking about what a friend said, or did. A band that’s taken a turn for the. worst. The price of concert tickets. A visit to Nashville. Gran. The kids. Who’s on form. Something off the telly.
Humans gathering together to feel what we know is real, somewhere beyond the false self, that we have so much more in common than what divides us.
Peace comes when we stop dividing and start to feel the unity behind things.
Light is omnipresent. Science says it, not only the mystics.
Even in the darkness.
Crawling on your knees.
When it breaks the light gets in and you see differently.
Judgements come, you just don’t believe them anymore. The survival mechanism kicks in, you work with it.
It’s not frothy. It’s the depths.
It’s all of us.
Feet on the ground.
Peace starts with us.
Working with what we’ve got.
Perfection is not required.
Like the flowers as the morning comes.
Opening to the light.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey