Further up the mountain

Tired. 

It's been a long day. Nothing unusual or strenuous, just the normal things like cooking a big pot of red cabbage in apple juice and walking up to the the post office with a parcel, making a poster for the church coffee morning featuring the band I go to sleep listening to as they practice downstairs. Ordinary and happy things, but I'm ready for the day to end.

So, continuing to think about ageing and the last section of life, I wanted to tell you about something I think of as "going further up the mountain".

I have always preferred to live quietly, but in the last few years this has developed an imperative quality. I have come to prioritise peace.  Nowadays, when trouble comes looking for me, I just up sticks and move further up the mountain.

It's meant, with sadness, severing some longstanding close relationships that were a source of significant and consistent stress. It's meant withdrawing from professional opportunities. I've closed my Facebook account and stopped watching the news. I only just manage to hang on to going to church — and I do still go because my church community has in it the gentlest, dearest people on God's earth.

Where once I'd have done battle, or struggled on, or put up with adversity, now I choose peace. Quietness. Calm.

I apply the maxim, "If in doubt, simplify," whenever I come to a crossroads or a dilemma.  

Life as I now shape it is characterised by peace more than any other thing. I treasure silence and solitude, the calm space yielded by owning few possessions (I've still got too many, I can feel it), the simplicity of ordinary daily routine.

I avoid arguments, crowds, social gatherings, traffic, interviews, complication and busyness. I go to bed early and I get up early.

"Avoid loud and aggressive persons," said Max Ehrmann; "they are vexatious to the spirit." I take his advice. I go further up the mountain.

This hunger for quietness and peace that simply cannot be ignored, I have noticed many friends who read here share in common. I have found the need for peace has increased steeply and assertively as I've grown older.

My father lived to be eighty-three, and in the last decade of his life he withdrew more and more from the world. He remained married to my mother, but stopped living with her and moved into little country cottage on his own. He occasionally took holidays in remote Norwegian fishing cabins. He had a dog whom he loved and took for long walks, and he fed the birds. He ate cheese and biscuits and fruit cake, and drank red wine or Earl Grey tea. Every day he drove (he loved his car and kept it in tip-top order) to the supermarket café where he could purchase a cheap hot meal for which someone else cooked and washed up. He enjoyed chatting to the café staff, but avoided any prolonged contact with people in general. He used to go indoors and hide if he was out in the garden and his neighbours came out.

He refused to co-operate with anything required of him. He parked on double-yellow lines (that's curbside strictly no-parking indication in the UK) outside the bank when he went to get his money out, and preferred to pay the occasional £60.00 fine incurred than do what he was told and didn't want to. He wouldn't separate his rubbish into black bin, cardboard and plastic, and in the end the council gave up pressurising him to do so, because he wouldn't.

He cut his own hair and fixed his own teeth as far as he could — when one of them fell out, he super-glued it back in. If he ever got ill he ignored it until it became a serious and acute emergency, then had the necessary surgery done and went home.

His house was always neat and tidy, almost impersonal, furnished with the greatest frugality — the things he had been given by his family — his armchair and electric fire, his telly and electric kettle, his rug — plus a few basic items like a bed, a table, a sofa, a desk.

He took an interest in current affairs, enjoyed moving his savings into different currencies in pursuit of higher interest, and he liked watching Countryfile on the telly. Politically he was staunchly Conservative, because his vote was for the kind of government he believed would leave him in peace to solve his own problems and live how he wanted to. 

Quiet, solitary, and gentle, in the last few years he came to one or two family events — the eightieth birthday party we gave him, the funeral of my previous husband, my wedding to the man I'm married to now.

He died suddenly, quietly, alone. His aorta broke, and he just stopped living. When I found him the next morning, he was neatly dressed in his pyjamas and dressing gown, lying where he had fallen onto his bed, his featured settled in their habitual primary expression, which was one of kindness.

He was a wanderer-off his whole life, travelling the world and rarely at home. Retirement in the close company of his wife and associates was too heavy a burden for him; so he just went higher up the mountain.

He was seventy-nine here.



I do believe this instinctive questing for peace and solitude is a typical feature of ageing. A hunger for simplicity.

People often make a to-do about loneliness in the elderly; but though undoubtedly some of them are lonely, they often don't seek to do anything about it. They don't want to share a house together, for example. They just want to be left in peace, living in solitude on the brink of loneliness, but prevented from falling over the edge by the administration of chatty visits that ask nothing and aren't too long. It is a form of simplification, a withdrawal from the heaviness of involvement and complication. Moving higher up the mountain.

No point to the moon

So I posted a couple of days ago about the direction my thoughts are taking now — about how to grow old well, how to die well, how to relinquish life. I think I shall have my nose to this trail for some long time now, until I've figured out some basic parameters and principles to work with.

Some things I do have in place already. I pre-paid my funeral about fifteen years ago. The thing to understand about funerals is they are very labour intensive, and involve a number of different skills and departments, all with their own plant. You'll need two people to collect your body (possibly at an hour when overtime pay applies), a mortician to prepare it for burial, a driver for your hearse, and another for a limousine if your mourners need one. There'll be a crematorium attendant and crematorium office staff, a funeral director and usually four bearers for your coffin (six if you're tall and heavy), an officiant for your service and an organist if you want an accompanist for hymns (do; it's way better than singing to a tape). Then if you want a church service as well there'll be further clergy fees and possibly other staff. The funeral director will also have a receptionist and a cleaner. And then there'll be a florist, and a coffin-maker. Plus of course the church and the crematorium and the interment plot, the flowers and the coffin all have to be paid for — and all these separate costs increase annually, as do the hidden costs of buying and maintaining vehicles, garages, fridges, offices, coffin-shops etc.  This all adds up to a lot, and there's no getting round that because of its complexity. When you breakdown and analyse the total, you'll find nobody's being greedy. Pegging the cost by paying early is a great kindness to your family. I did mine through Golden Charter, who work with independent family funeral directors, but there are plenty of alternatives.

Something else I've addressed in recent years is the paring down of my possessions to a very small amount. I hope that in the next couple of years I can do a further cull. On the day I die, I hope to leave behind earthly possessions that can be sorted through in a morning, packed up and taken to the charity shop in one trip, with all paperwork clearly filed and handy.

I've taken in hand a number of health issues, addressing the creeping accumulation of problems and dispersing them.

So far, so good. I have a number of things still to address, that I'd like to post about and I'll be interested in your opinions and input as I go along.

But today, I was asking myself the questions, "How do I make the time count, that remains to me of this life? How do I make it purposeful and useful? How do I make the best of it?"

It was evening as I was turning this over in my mind, and the sun had just set but still lit the sky from below the horizon.

I'd been out in the garden putting down food for the fox. We saw him earlier in the day, when we'd been walking in the park. As we climbed back up the track to our house at the top of the hill, he slipped out from a garden bordering the path, and looked down the slope towards us. I called him, "Foxy! Foxy! Foxy!" and we stood where we were doing the slow blink and head tip that animals recognise as a reassuring welcome sign. He stopped, and walked towards us a little way, and I called him again. So we stood and looked at each other, until, quite relaxed, he continued on his way, and we carried on homeward. And now it was time to put out his bowl of food at the bottom of the garden, on the verandah of Komorebi.

I cannot walk through our garden without being overwhelmed by its beauty and joy. I came back to the house through the trees, saying "Thank you . . . thank you . . . thank you . . . you are so beautiful . . . " to each one. Oh, I love our garden. The evening was cool and the air so fresh; it had rained on and off through the day, and a breeze stirred the air. The sky still shone with silver and pale gold where the sun had gone down, but when I reached the house and looked back, I had to marvel at the wonder of the moon. A slender sickle of light, so luminous, resplendent, beyond describing.

I wanted to photograph it to show you, and I rushed into the house for my camera, but by the time I came back the cloud bank had drifted across, obscuring the moon.

When I'd had my supper, I looked out again, and the moon now shone clear but the last light of the sun had gone so the sky was dark. When I photographed it, the contrast was too great so the lovely slender sickle shape was blurred by the brightness in the photo.

I wish you could have stood with me, to see the beauty of the moon.

It made me think. So much in my life feels alarming and difficult. I find church hard, and personal relationships. I worry about money and about offending people. I get tired and anxious and lonely. I worry about disappointing God. I typically don't live up to the expectations of others.

But when I stand in the garden, or by the sea, or walk alongside the stream or the lake in the park, all that falls away. I love the light and the clouds, the sun and the rain, the stars and the trees, the flowers and birds, the sparkle of the sun on the waves of the ocean. I love it so much. When I looked at the moon this evening, it called my soul right out of my body, it was so beautiful.

And the thing is, there is no point to the moon. It's not for anything. It's just the moon, and that's enough — and that's the place where beauty is.

So I think one of the tasks ahead, one of the wisdom areas into which I must look deeply, is developing the art of pointlessness. If I ever made a difference to anyone, if anything I did ever counted, well, less and less will that be true. In the time left to me on this earth I will become steadily less useful. Less and less like a potato peeler or a vacuum cleaner and more and more like the moon.

Even though that will happen anyway, I think I will enjoy it more if I do it on purpose. So something I'm going to work on is the divesting of my potato peeler self little by little so that my inner moon shines more clearly.

Like the seventeenth century poem by the samurai Mizuta Masahide (art by Figren, linked),

("Since my house burned down, I can see the moon more clearly.")

The task of growing old is the slow burning down of the house of my earthly body, to give me a better view of the moon. What was once useful — to bear children, to write stories, to cook stews and sweep floors and grow a garden — is now merely in the way. So the purposeful must now give way to what has no point that I can discern, but is purely beautiful.

I think this is my first lesson in the course of study I have set myself. I'm thinking about that, and about what it might mean in practical terms — not as a notion, but as a way.

Oh — my thanks to Jill, who, having read my earlier post sent me a copy of this excellent booklet (image is linked):

Martinmas

Good morning!

I'm speaking very softly because it's so early — only half past five. I can hear my husband gently snoring in bed just the other side of the wall. I mean, he's not making a great thundering racket, just a peaceful little rumble; it's not why I got up.

I usually wake up around five, and I got out of bed to put my coffee on. I have it down to a fine art. I put ready in the kitchen the night before anything that might clank or require me to open a noisy door. We live in a town so it's never really dark, there's always enough ambient glow to get around — plus in the hall there are the lights of the internet hub and upstairs on the landing the light for the central heating furnace, though the furnace itself is in the attic.

So I put a pan of coffee on the hob without turning any lights on that might wake up any of our slumbering household in the downstairs rooms, then measure a mugful of water from the iron spring in the valley from our Berkey water filter. I can't see when the mug is full so I crook my finger over the top edge of the mug so I can feel it. I put the water in a little pan to heat on the stove-top too — an electric kettle is noisy, but heating on the hob is silent. Relatively. When the coffee boils, I turn it down and draw it to the edge of the hotplate to simmer for half an hour, then when the spring water boils I pour it back into my mug onto a nettle tea bag, and take it upstairs. After that I came in here to chat to you, because it's way too early to be in and out of bed — I can slip out once, but I'll have to be back down to tend the coffee in twenty five minutes, and the more I'm in and out the more likely I am to wake up my hubby.

So, while the coffee simmers, I'm all yours. The cats are up, and have occasional little merbling remarks to make, but apart from that it's just you and me.

It's very dark! 

Can you see me? Just?

Let's put our glasses on . . .

Is that better?

Oh, yes!

D'you know what day it is? What feast?

It's Martinmas.

I think if he's looking down from heaven on us right now, St Martin would have a great big grin on his face, because he really didn't want to be so important, and because he was a soldier, and guess what — his feast has been completely overshadowed by Remembrance Day. 

Here in England it's poppy mania and men on the telly marching about slowly and reading out poems by Wilfred Owen and talking about the tragedy of war as if the refugees in the woods north of Calais, driven out of their homes by our bombs, didn't exist, as if our weapons factories and big prestigious arms fairs were all in the great cause of peace. Ours is a violent nation, and we train attention onto the first and second world wars not least because it fosters a narrative of ourselves as brave and honourable instead of predatory and opportunistic. I respect the honouring of those who died in the horrors and terrifying violence of war, but it causes me disquiet when it is coupled with ignoring or promoting the continuing horror in the present day, and turning aside from the thousands whose lives have been ruined by war right now.

In addition to those fleeing war overseas, our own homeless charities here in the UK estimate we have about 7,000 rough-sleeping military veterans with post-traumatic-stress disorders. Laying a wreath to honour those who died in the first and second world wars is an honourable tradition, but its meaning is diminished when we are so careless of those who suffer from war in the present day.

Remembrance Day is huge here, and it's on the 11th November — the feast of St Martin of Tours. He was a Roman soldier (born in 316 CE in Hungary) who, on a cold winter's day, saw a beggar shivering in the cold. He'd joined the military when he was fifteen, and this was three years after that, so he was still only a lad really. Anyway, he got off his horse, drew his sword (I bet the beggar was terrified), pulled off his cloak and cut it in half. It must have been a nice big wooly one that wrapped round him almost twice, because he gave half to the beggar to wear and kept the other half for himself without that looking pointless and silly.

So he was by nature a generous man who noticed when someone else was in need and responded with humanity and compassion. If Martin was alive now, you'd find him with the volunteers of Care 4 Calais, taking winter coats to the rough sleeping refugees, after he'd been to the Cenotaph with the government ministers whose principle contribution to the plight of the Syrian refugees we created was reneging on the promise to take in the children, refusing even the disabled, and building a £3,000,000 fence to keep them all out.

When Martin was fast asleep in bed the night after the beggar incident, Christ came into his dreams. Has anything like that ever happened to you? An astral visitation? I've not had loads and loads of them, but enough now that I've come to recognise the difference between a dream and the interception of an astral encounter. We do go wandering while our bodies lie asleep. I've found some of my encounters fascinating.

And it was Christ himself who interrupted Martin's dream, wearing the very half-cloak that Martin had bestowed on the beggar to keep him warm.

Meeting Jesus changes people, and Martin became a Christian, then a priest, and he was loved in the community of faith. He was a monk and a hermit, and it's said he helped establish the first monastery of Gaul — isn't that the one with the famous plans of a really good layout of the buildings and garden? So much was Martin esteemed that they decided to make him a bishop. But Martin was horrified by the idea of being made special and important, so when they came for him he went and hid in the goose run. They found him anyway, and he was duly made the bishop of Tours.

Martin was the first non-martyr to be made a saint. His feast became a really special moment in the church year, because it was the time when the beasts were slaughtered. In Old England, root vegetables weren't yet a thing. There was fruit and grain and salad greens, and there were onions, garlic and leeks. But, especially if the grain harvests had been poor in rainy weather, there wasn't really enough grain to feed both people and livestock through the winter. So the brood and stud animals were kept, but the rest were slaughtered at this point. They must have dried and smoked some, but they would also have massive great barbeque parties for everyone to join in. And there'd be enough meat for a really big party, to have some yourself and some to give away. And since sharing half of the good things in life was what Martin was remembered for, they made it his feast.

But in every church the length and breadth of the land, the young soldier who gave away half his cloak to a beggar will not be remembered. The example he set of sharing what you have with the homeless refugee will be forgotten. Martinmas is no longer kept in the church, because it's been edged out entirely by Remembrance Day. But I don't think he would have minded. He was a soldier himself after all, and he never did want to be important.

Right. Time to get that coffee off the hob. 

Oh — but wait — I'm so sorry — did you have something you wanted to say? I'm sorry, have I just made this a monologue? Oops!

Enquiry

Hello.

There's a subject area in which I am very interested, but am failing to find my way to the work on this topic that's exactly what I'm looking for.

It's to do with dying well.

When I was a very young woman, I began to explore into how to live well. St Francis of Assisi and Mohandas Gandhi influenced me strongly, to the extent that I became convinced (I still am) that a life of disciplined simplicity lived in some form of community was key to human flourishing.

Also as a young woman I became interested in how nutrition fitted into the shalom of creation, and the part it played in the practice of compassion and pursuit of health. 

I developed a strong preference for alternative therapies over mainstream medicine, and explored into healing herbs, naturopathy, homoeopathy and spiritual healing. 

In keeping and caring for animals and looking after my home, I turned to the work of Juliette de Baïracli Levy, from which I learned a huge amount. Back in those days, she was still producing animal feeds, and I used to buy her muesli for our collie and wolfhound, and followed her advice on caring for our goats.

When I started to think about becoming a mother, I read the work of Ina May Gaskin, Frederick Leboyer, Sheila Kissinger and Michel Odent. Ina May Gaskin's book Spiritual Midwifery is one of the best books I've read in my life. I found her guidance immensely helpful in pregnancy, childbirth and the neo-natal period.

Once I had become a mother, the education of my children became the focus of my attention, and my teachers were the great educationalists John Holt and A.S.Neill.

Throughout all of this, in addition to constantly absorbing Christian teaching in person from a number of wise and inspiring leaders, I also found light and wisdom in Lao Tsu's Tao Te Ching and in the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh. A few others — Stephen Gaskin, Carlos Castenada, Sheila Cassidy, Ursula le Guin, David Whiteland, and no doubt others I have forgotten, have also shaped and enriched my thinking.

During my middle years (my thirties, forties and fifties), I had a great deal to do with death. I spent some years working as the free-church chaplain in a hospice. As a pastor of, in all, ten churches, my work included time spent with chronically sick, dying and bereaved people. During these decades I took literally hundreds of funerals, specialising in working with bereaved people to craft liturgies that would express exactly what they needed to say in these deep and tender farewells. I also accompanied my second husband through his own dying, so that it could be — just as he had wished — in the peace and privacy of his own cottage in the woods, surrounded by birdsong and many wild creatures, blessed by music, touched by the night breeze and lit by dawn and dusk, by stars and moon and sun.

I have also worked as a care assistant in a palliative care context, with people dying or chronically ill. And I have worked as a care assistant with comprehensively disabled people as well.

As time has gone on I’ve encountered a variety of health challenges myself. I have two elves — my Mental Elf and my Physical Elf, and both require thought and attention to flourish.

I have learned a lot about natural remedies and nutrition, and have successfully addressed a variety of difficulties such that I am now very well.

But now that I am in my sixties, I want to begin learning about natural and peaceful death. So far, I have been unsuccessful in finding my way to exactly what I’m looking for.

There is a UK movement for natural death, which focuses mainly on funerals — but I have considerable experience in that area; it’s not that I’m looking for.

The Dalai Lama, and various other Buddhist teachers, address to some extent this subject area, but in general I have found their books (though no doubt wise and learned) boring and wordy, and I am not very interested in following religious methods and exercises.

I recently came across a book which I read eagerly — Katherine Mannix’s book With the End in Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial.  It’s well written, and she is an engaging writer and delightful person, but it didn’t have the information I wanted. It was full of stories about people’s actual deaths — but I am very familiar with end of life care in a hospice, hospital, nursing home or home context. Also, it deals with dying after going through the terrible ravages of chemo and surgery etc; there isn't one truly natural death in the book.

I have on watch a book by Glen E. Miller called Living Thoughtfully, Dying Well: A Doctor Tells how to Make Death a Natural Part of Life. I’m going to investigate that.

I have been helped and supported in my own health journey by the work of Charlotte Gerson, Eric Berg, Tom Monte, Gerald Green and others — but their work is solely focused on curing diseases; they don’t address the questions I have about so managing life that the transition from living to dying to death is managed with dignity, understanding, intelligence, peace and simplicity. And I want to know about that, because all of us are mortal and must one day consider this carefully.

I have had plenty of opportunity to watch death and dying both well and badly accomplished, and I do have some definite ideas already, but I feel that now I am starting to grow old it is time to begin my education in this area.

What I really want is someone who has done for the subject area of dying what Ina May Gaskin, Frederic Leyoyer and Sheila Kitzinger did for the subject area of pregnancy and birth, and J.S.Neill and John Holt did for the subject area of the education of children.

At present I have no disease. I am very well — though I certainly feel the increasing slowness, weakness, quietness and detachment of ageing, which is not a problem to me.  I have no desire to live a long life; I would prefer not to live to be very old (as in, eg, 90s), and I don’t mind if I die in my 80’s, 70’s or 60s — even next week is fine, though it would be irritating to my publishers who have just signed me for a new book to be delivered in the late spring of next year.

It’s not that I am sick and want to read up on the management of it. It’s more that I am looking for general advice/wisdom on the natural, nutritionally based management of growing old and entering death in a life committed to quietness and simplicity.

I have lots of thoughts of my own, but if there were only a writer like Ina May, who could supply lots of case studies of what ageing and dying looks like outside the interventionist medical model, supported by skilful means, wise practice and nutrition for optimum health, I’d be very interested to read it. And I like books with pictures.

I feel a profound distrust of Authority — whether educational, political, medical or religious; I've had some wise and helpful advice from health professionals, but also some that was inaccurate and lead away from shalom; and I cannot help feeling there are better paths to follow, in managing the decline of life and the beginning of dying, than the poison/cut/burn alternatives offered by mainstream medicine.

So, friends, if you know of a writer or speaker or teacher, whose style is lively and accessible, who addresses the specific area of how to manage the transition from living to dying as our ship turns homeward — with an emphasis on nutrition, natural lifestyle and simplicity, I’d be most interested to hear more.

Thank you.

xx

Oh, wow! I love this one!

Jay Shafer's Stunning $5,000 Tiny House:

Rachel & Jim — makes me laugh

This morning while cooking (oh, yes) beetroot brownies, some of my household listened to this old favourite by Fat and Frantic. Made me laugh. Reminds me of my sister.

2 Precepts

Hello.

Last night, just before waking, I had a very vivid dream.

I was in a residential compound, similar to a monastery or a school or a university campus.The weather was fine and people stood or sat around in groups here and there, but not where I was walking, which was along a properly surfaced road — the kind you get in such places, with just room for one or two car-widths, so vehicles can come through slowly.

The road surface ended with untidy edges at the foot of low banks where oak trees grew, lining the track, their roots forming a gnarled network in the mossy earth, pocketed with places where small rodents had made homes or the earth merely collapsed into hollows.

On the edge of the bank, catching the sunlight, I spotted a pound coin, and stopped to pick it up. As I bent down, I noticed that tucked unobtrusively into the uneven ground, partly hidden by leaves, there was a whole stash of coin keepers. 

Like these:

I picked them all up! Then I noticed another such collection a few yards further on — and a third one a few yard after that.

I concluded they had been left there on purpose for three different people to find, and that the solitary pound coin had been left as a sign.

On top of the second and third stash I saw a spectacles case, and also a couple of hard pouches — similar to the exterior case of an old-fashioned travel alarm clock. 

I concluded (don't ask me why, you know what dreams are like) that in these pouches were drugs, and these stashes were left by drug dealers as part of their trading.

I wanted the money but I was frightened of being intercepted by drug dealers, who I thought could be violent and unscrupulous.

So I filled my hands and my pockets with as many of the coin keepers as I could hold, and began to hurry on my way. I thought the hollows in the ground could be concealing more, but I also thought it more prudent to get clear away with what I'd found than to hang about where I could be found and risk losing what I had already gathered. 

As I moved away from the place, I started to reflect on my decisions — and carried my reflections on into waking up.

I felt worried that the money was not mine to take, and that taking someone else's stuff would be bad karma. I considered taking what I'd found to the police — and maybe taking the suspect pouches I thought had drugs in as well — to report possible drug trading. But I didn't want to, in case the police took the money away from me and I never got it back.

Then I began to wonder if it was in fact okay to take what was merely left lying around on the ground in a public place, under the oak trees like a squirrel gathering acorns — the natural gleaning of an animal.

I also wondered if ill-gotten gains were in any case morally forfeit, and all right to take away.

I thought about Judgement Day and what the consequences of my actions might have been — perhaps someone who had left money for a drugs dealer would have been brutally attacked and tortured when the dealer found no money, and it would be all my fault. Maybe they would be killed, and what I had done would contribute to that.

I thought about the eighth Commandment, "Thou shalt not steal", and debated with myself whether taking something I'd found lying at the roadside was — or was not — stealing.

My final reflection, as I broke the surface into full consciousness, was of the corresponding precept from the world of Buddhism: "Do not take what is not given."

I was glad to wake up, and leave behind the money and the anxiety and the moral dilemmas of the dream. But it left me thinking about the two precepts — "Thou shalt not steal" and "Do not take what is not given" — and turning over in my mind the crucial difference between them, as made clear in my dream.

To steal something, I think, means to sneak away something that you know belongs to another person. It implies active theft. It retains the possibility that if something is everybody's, or is just lying about, or belongs to nobody in particular, it's fair game; lucky me if I find it.

The Buddhist precept is quite different. It implies waiting until life by some means or other offers something clearly intended for you, before helping yourself to it. 

Putting the two together gives, I think, a more nuanced and helpful insight into possible moral approaches to property, than just the Jewish one by itself.

Something that's consistently puzzled me in the Christian faith community is the tendency to regard other faiths with hostility and suspicion. It depends a bit what branch of the Church you're in — in general the Catholic end is more tolerant and open-minded about this than the low Protestant (Evangelical) end. But there is a pronounced tendency to regard spiritual wisdom in a very competitive light — if it's Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Taoist or (especially) New Age, it's inadmissible and deeply suspect.

Why?

Surely, either something is true or not, wise or not, helpful or not.

My own take on the religions of the world is that they each offer their unique insights and perspectives, and that we are enriched by them all. They don't seem to me to be in competition. For example, we have the teaching at the heart of the Christian faith of the act of healing reconciliation achieved by the cross of Jesus. As the Koran puts it, Jesus is "the healer of man and nature". No other religion says anything of the kind. And then there is the Christian teaching about God's grace, which may have equivalence in other paths, but is essentially also unique to Christianity — but on the other hand I have learned a lot from all the others (especially Buddhism and Taoism) that my own religion seems to have completely missed out.

I belong to Jesus; I am his property, he is my Master. That's non-negotiable. But as I go along, I find the religions of the world all shed light on my path and help me find my way. 

That Buddhist precept, "You shall not take what is not given," is, in my opinion, immensely helpful in establishing a moral approach to personal property; and we do not have any such precept in the Christian church.

Rumer - You Just Don't Know People

Oh this! Just the most brilliant song! I love Rumer's songs, and this is so good.

The Sprig of Thyme

The gardener was standing by

And I asked him to choose for me

And he chose me the lily, aye, the violet and the pink

Ah, but surely I refused them all three



For thyme it is a precious thing

And thyme it will grow on

Aye, and thyme will bring all things to an end

And so does my thyme grow on



I love this song, and I think this version by Coope Boyes and Simpson is my absolute favourite.



Time. It is indeed a precious thing, and it's so important to live in the light of the awareness that all things come to an end.

Consumption

From childhood the Sugar Demon has been my close familiar.

Kinesiology demonstrated clearly to me that sugar was responsible for adversely affecting my adrenals.

As a person, I am flimsy and quiet, somewhat like a net curtain in a breeze, loose and vague. Well, sometimes. I can also be like a blowtorch, if focus and attention are required.

All my life, I used sugar to override the exhaustion of my energy. When people frightened or upset me, I used sugar to regroup. For all adrenal challenges — fear, discouragement, weariness, timidity, shock, threat — I used sugar. 

Our the last few years, by a combination of skilful means, I have addressed this. I rarely eat sugar now. The axe that finally broke the link was frankincense, which dealt with sugar's addictive power. It arrested the Sugar Demon. I was very grateful.

In the process, I uncovered an absolute morass of buried emotions stuck in the tissues of my body. Little by little I have been releasing them into the wild. As a result I am calmer and more effective.

But once the Sugar Demon was laid to rest, I discovered something that both did and didn't surprise me. The Buying Demon and the Sugar Demon are close relatives. Well, you knew this and so did I. We read of "retail therapy" and "compulsive spending" and "consumer society"; but knowing something intellectually and hypothetically is entirely different from looking it in the face inside your own soul so that you can delineate its features and read the look in its eyes.

I began to be able to intercept myself trying to patch an inner pain by purchasing something nice. The Sugar Demon makes that worse, of course. Because the Sugar Demon doesn't say, "Eat sugar now"; it says, "Ooh, wouldn't it be fun to have a party?" or "Gosh, it's ages since we went out for afternoon tea!" It represents its desires as fun or relational or happy. It keeps quiet about the crash and the tiredness and the gradually ebbing of energy until bed is the only option, chronically.

So if the Sugar Demon has its wicked way, whooshing a person along on its roller-coaster rides, purchases are often part of the reckless and headlong careering.

I have found that, like the voracious seagulls that queue behind the crows to steal their food, the Buying Demon stands invisibly behind the Sugar Demon. It is what Taoists call the Second Mountain. You see a mountain in the distance that is your mountain to climb. You set out on your journey, and you climb the mountain. Only when you have conquered the ascent and stand at the summit do you see the second mountain, hidden by the first. And that's the mountain you have to climb.

The pursuit of simplicity is a walk through many hills.