Wolf Weather
Dear friend,
This post was written over the course of the week. It brings together some of the ideas and experiences that unfolded along the way. It moves back and forth in time, much like my own mind does. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
It’s just after sunrise — grey Monday rain and damp cold, the kind that worms its way into you. I’m waking with a mild sense of anxiety which melts as I swing my legs out of bed and begin moving, following my morning routines. I make coffee, or join Chiara who’s awake ahead of me, and drain the pot she made for the two of us. Sometimes there’s bread baking. I gaze at the plants in the garden, hung with watery jewels, feeling their stillness. The awareness dawns in me that — whatever happens — it will be okay.
I can’t know it now, but four days in the future I’ll be sharing the same sentiment with Jason, a guest on the show. Sitting on his couch in his flat in Bexley, South London, I hear myself say that the very worst things I could imagine have all happened to me.
“And here you are,” Jason says.
“Yes, you just keep going,” I reply. “Somehow it works out.”
I’m not turning up with a list of questions and I’m trying to be agenda-free, not pushing for a particular outcome or story, but I do realise I’m searching. I read the introduction to Merlin Sheldrake’s book on fungi, Entangled Life, where he’s digging and attempting to follow the threads of mycelia in a forest, and it feels a bit like that. I’m aware that I’m rooting around in the conversations for the connections under the surface. I do worry a bit about my approach to the interviews — mainly that my searching can be too much for people.
As I write that line, I hear my Dad’s voice from the depths inside: “You always take it too far,” which, now that I translate it, means I was curious about things and willing to go places he was uncomfortable with. My body reacts to the remembering with waves of tension and release, and I see an image of mushrooms on a forest floor.
What I hadn’t appreciated — and how would I — is that a mushroom is the fruit of a fungus in a similar way to a pear being the fruit of a tree. The fungus itself is a network you can’t see unless you dig for it. Beneath the surface, connections and exchanges are taking place that support the health and diversity of the world at the planet’s surface.
I’m beginning to realise the value of connection in ways that have always been here but hidden from sight under the surface of things, and I think I’m also beginning to see the shoots and the roots of new ways of living and organising.
Bob Proctor taught me about the fear barrier we all must push through to expand our personal universe. In ACIM it’s visualised as a bank of fog that surrounds you in a circle, a full three hundred and sixty degrees. Everywhere you turn there is the cold, tumbling wall of grey and black, and in the churning mist you imagine monsters that would capture and mistreat you. Maybe they’ll expose the parts you’re wishing were not part of your human faultiness.
All around the banks of fog is sunlight we cannot see or feel. We want the light, but we stay in darkness because of the phantom projections of our minds.
The exercise in ACIM is to reach out your hand and feel that the fog does not push back and cannot resist you. You take one step and then another, trusting you are being held and are guided, and despite the fear you are safe and all will be well.
Many of us are stepping with outstretched hands into the unknown and finding one another in the fog, connecting like those underground mycelial networks. Exchanging kindnesses and offering what we can to one another. We don’t know what we’re doing or where we’re going, but we do know why.
Why is the key to all of this.
It is a natural state of affairs to live in peace and abundance on earth.
How we do it is the journey.
That’s what fascinates and draws me.
The why of it is to love.
Our age might be called the age of fear — the shrinking of the heart into a tight, cold ball. No wonder people are persuaded to grasp for certainty. How do you make sense of the state of things without enemies to blame?
And under the surface, the networks are formed and forming that hold the soil of our forests together in drought and flood.
When our minds change, so do our realities. It’s biological time. Wounds heal. The sun rises and sets. The moon waxes and wanes. Great cycles of time orbit the single-pointed present moment where we sleep and dream and stretch and yawn and open our eyes as the fog clears and the world is illuminated and alive before us.
You wonder where these visions come from. Isn’t it the same for everyone? You go through the dark fog and cling to hope, and if hope abandons you then you turn within and trust there is a light inside to keep you company. It’s the same light in me as is in you.
In our dream world, the fog too is real — but not solid.
We pass through it.
This might be the middle passage — a time of fog and shadows, where what used to seem obvious and dependable drifts away from you.
To rest or dance, eat and drink, and be in good company.
A smile, maybe?
Something inside the caged heart that beats warm with life.
If I cast away the idea that I will ever know something and reach the end of it, that feels true.
It feels hopeful too.
To confound that notion there is also a new awareness. The unspent days are now a number my mind can count. It’s the sensation of looking down a valley from the highest fell on a day when you can see all the way across the water to Scotland.
There is no end to the land or water. Our earth bends forever until you return to the start. I can see how the great cycles of life continue and, at the same time, if there were an end to my road — which there is — my mind’s eye has picked up on what that might look like.
Were that golden light to be thirty years in my future, then that would equate to the time I first entered this city. Although that were another age, it was also yesterday.
The unspent days left to me were always finite in number; it’s just that you can’t count them when you’re young. No matter how many well-meaning, thick-set, unfathomable beings tell you otherwise, to the sapling self the idea cannot take root — that this twig will become a mighty oak and then one day fall and rest and be welcomed once more into the dark soil.
As ever, we are dancing. Light in shadow and shadow in light.
Both alive and dead at the same time is a strange way to think, but it feels true to me right now. I read about the death of the initiate and of the terror that attends it. It would be too early to know if it’s a case of death by degrees that brings us back to life or if there is a sudden moment of realisation. I suspect — and it is also my wish — that it be the former, a gentler, gradual process.
My heart suddenly surges in its cage so that my eyes tear and I want another espresso coffee. Thick and dark and bitter cups of comfort. I could drink them all day if my body could tolerate it.
It doesn’t quite fit, but the image I have is of a path with a finishing line where all of the ones gone before gather to greet and show you around your new world. Only this present point and that one are clear; the journey from here to there is unformed. What makes us afraid of the mystery of our lives? A dangerous culture afraid of itself.
Dad travelled, though he tried not to. Sitting in his chair, a tiny dot of bone and light flashing through space-time, watched over by angels.
It’s Wednesday, I’m going to see Julie, a friend of Kevin, my brother - to talk about her journey from our small town to becoming the head of a music label. What’s emerging for me is that, at least when speaking with guests on the show, I’ll be coming from the perspective of one who doesn’t know.
What I cannot know is how many days are left in my bag. All we can do is dip in our fingers at the dawn to draw yet one more, fragile as a rock dove’s egg — a tiny sun melting like butter in the palm of your hand.
It took fourteen months to find a new direction, or for kairos to find me. But when I look back, or try to turn around in my mind, there is an unbroken thread tracing the contours of this map. I can no longer find anything or anyone outside. The cosmos is inside us — all of it: the agony and the ecstasy, the sun and the moon, the depths and the heights. Gossamer spider webs, the giant fin of blue whales, our own species, rocks, rose flowers. Thorns and feathers.
If there is an outside, I cannot reliably describe or know it.
The deepest misery, followed to its source, will run dry. The simplest reminder from the most unexpected inspiration: remembering the source of love is inside us. What we search for out in the world is inside all along — a spring of water and season.
What I’m relearning is to show up in friendship and to let that be my motivation. That’s as complicated as it gets in terms of strategy. What I feel drawn to is to create live events for people to meet and have conversations. It’s humans re-awakening to our social being. It was Julie’s idea, that came to her while I was interviewing her for the radio.
All ideas belong to all of us.
Our greatest need is to remember to be friendly and helpful towards one another.
That’s the “be the change you want to see in the world” part of it.
It might be unnerving at first to be in the company of friendly, helpful people, but it doesn’t mean dull or repressed. No fixed grins and white knuckles. We’re all as different on the inside as we are on the outside, so we’ll still be strange, unfathomably messy creatures — just a bit more sane with one another.
I can go for that.
With the energy and life force available to me.
That feels like a liveable goal.
It’s Sunday morning for me now.
On Saturday, plans got upended, as they tend to do. I was due to drive over to see my friend Patrick, but it’s a match day. On a match day at his end, I’m unable to get a visitor’s permit to park outside his house. It’s a match day here too, so I’m heading for the bus, but a water main pipe has burst, knocking out the bus stop. The streets are incredibly crowded, with people flooding towards the ground.
I’m walking to the next stop in the opposite direction to the flow of people, looking at fathers and their sons and wondering what each has absorbed from the other. From the bus I see two Orthodox Jewish gentlemen walk together in immaculate black fedora hats and shades. They are each holding their arms clasped in front of them. I’m moved by the image. All around me, fathers and sons.
I’m to pay attention. The world sends clues and messages without cease. Its surface is like the pages of a book — but one you enter, and so you don’t know where you end and it begins.
My hair, since being washed, is refusing to comply with my face. It keeps getting in my eyes, so I’ve tied it back samurai-style, which makes it even more obvious that it’s time to dye my roots. But making the time for it seems to be out of my grasp now that the weekly schedule for the radio show has kicked in. No sooner do I cross one deadline, another looms.
Ideas are clarifying a little. Threads that go back almost three decades to a love of aural history. Amplifying voices that may otherwise not be heard. I don’t know what’s in the conversation until I edit. It’s like digging for diamonds.
I saw my friend Patrick yesterday. He gave me a book by Tom Blue Wolf, an Elder of the Star Clan of the Eufaula Band of the Anicoosa Tribe among the Muscogee Nation.
The book’s title itself is beautiful enough: The Great Remembering — We Are the Result of Thousands of Love Stories in a Little Piece of Heaven.
I email Tom to see if he would like to come on the show. Then I come back here to write to you and see that, similar to last week, a wolf has made its way into the title.
In between sentences, Tom returns with a yes and calls me brother.
Something in me relaxes, like a connection I needed was made.
Till next week,
Love,
Mikey