Ssh. Just stillness

Find something

Read something

Watch something

Complete something

Eat something

Prepare something

Write something

Record something

Check something

Clean something

Buy something

Put something away

Look for something

Cook something

Think about something

Discard something

Listen to something

All of that.

But in between there are gaps.

Moments for stillness; to breathe and just be.

In awareness of the everything behind and beneath all the somethings that come and go.

This everything — it has a heartbeat. It has a smile.

Namo’valokiteshvaraya Chant

In loving memory of the teacher Thich Nhat Hanh

who shone so bright a light

and taught us so much.

"Empty-handed I entered the world

Barefoot I leave it.

My coming, my going—

Two simple happenings

That got entangled."

~ Kozan Ichikyo

Reverence for life

 I want to say something about how we regard and behave towards farm animals — that are raised for our meat or milk or eggs.

First, though, in these days when vegan lifestyle is increasingly advocated as essential for a sustainable future, I want to say something about that, and explain why I am not a vegan even though I hold all life in reverence.

I am not vegan for three reasons.

The first is that I believe mixed diet to be necessary for nutritional health. There's a good article here that carefully explains why vegan diet can be an excellent de-tox and weight loss programme in the short term, but in the long term it tends to create nutritional deficit. Like many people, I don't do at all well on a vegan diet, though I certainly choose to restrict to small amounts my intake of meat (I avoid dairy because it makes me ill), since it is obtained at the cost of an animal's life. Only a little is necessary.

The second reason I'm not vegan is that I believe mixed farming is crucial to regenerative agriculture. There are various online sources of information about this, but I think Allan Savory is one of the best. I'm aware that others have challenged his perspective, but it remains true that animal dunging and trampling in herd movement on open ground (not just forest) is an important contributor to bio-diversity and planetary health. Permaculturists also include an animal component (chickens usually) to their regenerative land projects. I am utterly opposed to huge feedlots and factory farms — as I am opposed to mono-crop arable farming too — but 100% pasture fed animals are good news for the Earth, because to achieve that it is necessary to manage the land regeneratively; poor pasture won't deliver the goods.

The third reason I'm not vegan is that I believe all life is ensouled — rocks and rivers and plants as well as finned and feathered and furry beings. So I believe every being should be treated with reverence and respect; and as we do have to eat something, that reverence must extend to the beings of any species that we farm — and to the land itself, which is holy and belongs to God.

In general, when I see people propose vegan lifestyle, what I notice is that they love the animals — they honour the gentle cows and clever pigs and the chickens who have so much more personality and relatability than most of us imagine. But the thing is, without farms, those animals would cease to be. They wouldn't have a better life — they just wouldn't be born in the first place. I'd guess most animals would rather pass up life on Earth than be born to the living hell of the meat plant, but an animal can be happy in a well-run farm with trees and streams and wallows and a byre to shelter from bad weather.

Also, it's important to consider how animals die. Farm animals are slaughtered in an abattoir. The meat I eat, I buy from small family farms where the animals are slaughtered on the farm, so they never have to endure the stress of live transport and mass slaughter. Death is always a solemn and fearful prospect, but it can be done humanely. 

And the alternative is not living comfortably, for ever. A wild fox, for instance lives for two to four years; in captivity a fox can easily live to be fourteen. Predators, accidents and disease all happen to animals that are not under human care; and their deaths can involve more pain and violence, and be far more protracted, than dying in an abattoir. Best case scenario, dying of old age, if you are a ruminant will probably be from starvation when your teeth fall out.

It isn't simply a matter of life versus death — because everything that is born has to die. It's about how you live and how you die, and how to manage that responsibly, kindly and respectfully.

I eat less meat and pay a premium for the meat I do eat, in order to secure as part of the deal the highest possible animal welfare, and regenerative farming of the land.

But what I want to say here, really, is something about treating with reverence and respect those living beings who die so we can eat.

I saw a video of fishermen — pole-and-line fishing, not trawling, so sustainable and responsible — who took the fish they caught and flung each one back over their shoulder to land with force on the deck of the boat, and there bounce and writhe until they died. That's awful. They should have been killed swiftly and expertly as soon as they were caught.

At Christmas I saw a Facebook post from a local butcher showing a cartoon of two little pigs, one saying to the other "They said they're getting us blankets for Christmas." That isn't funny. It's desperately, unbearably sad.

In the same way, I hate the shop displays or online videos of Thanksgiving turkeys, dressed up as something or used like puppets. I think it's shameful.

It's important to understand that the attitude flows from and relates to the person with the attitude, not the topic they are considering. So someone who mocks an animal in its helplessness destined to die, or ridicules and makes fun of its poor dead body, or laughs at the suffering involved, is degenerating their own soul. They are sick. They are spiritually diseased. And so are we if we participate in this or tacitly go along with it.

So I support mixed farming — I eat meat and fish and poultry and eggs — but I consider that has a responsibility inescapably accompanying it; to treat farm animals with consideration and respect, to honour them, and to regard their being and their death not as a joke or a light matter, but as something holy, a gift of life to us which we should receive with humble gratitude. We should love them. We should love all the Earth.

Peregrination

 In the last two or three years of her life (she lived to be 93), my mother's astral body left the place she physically was and went on journeys.

"You don't know where I am, do you?" she'd say, dreamily: "I'm not here."

She had a soul friend, an astral dog called Lou who had no physical being so far as we knew. Lou used to travel with her to keep her safe.

She used to return to places where she'd lived, or places she'd visited and loved, and wander around there and look at them, with Lou walking close beside her to take care of her.

She went back to the family home where we lived most happily, the culmination of all her patient buying and selling her way up the property ladder, a thirteenth century house in five acres of land with woodland and a river running through it — where we kept sheep and hens and grew vegetables and had as many apples as we wanted picked straight from the orchard trees. She and Lou revisited that place, and lay down and slept there for a while.

But the place she most often returned to was the North York Moors — "Is there a cardiologist on the North York Moors?", she asked me one day. There she would wander along sheep tracks, with Lou to nudge her or tug at her sleeve to keep her feet in the way she had to go.

"I'm on the North York Moors . . . " she'd say, dreamy and happy and contented; and in my mind I could picture her there, because I also love the North York Moors.

One night among many when we were called out in emergency because she'd pressed her Lifeline button, she said to me, "I want to live for ever."

"Well, you will," I said. "We all do."

But she was not to be fobbed off.

"I mean in this world, " she said fiercely.

But even while she was here, she wandered away. She saw a fairy once when she was a little girl, stood quite still and watched it for a while. One time when she was driving in her car up to a crossroads near the church in the village where she lived, she had to wait at the intersection for a funeral with black horses to go by. It felt very special to have been there just at that moment, watching the horses pulling the carriage down the lane. She asked, the next day, whose funeral it had been; but there had been no funeral, and no such horses in the village.

Once, driving up the M1 with my father, she (the passenger) had cried out to him to be careful because of the black dog jumping up at the car. One of my daughters has seen that black dog, too.

And when my father died, she opened to door one morning to find him standing there, smiling at her, young again.

Back to her mind along the paths of memory came things she had physically seen, too — Fred Denby who gave her a lamb of her own, sitting her on his knee and telling her nursery rhymes, her Aunt Kate saying she was a dirty blossom because she buried her wet underpants in the fields of their farm, a great stud stallion being led along the lane to the brood mares, the Hindenburg flying over the farm one day, the prisoners of war who worked there, the animals in the fold yard with their breath hanging in clouds on the frosty air, and the men taking the kitchen door off its hinges to carry in the man who'd slipped and fallen in the fold yard and broken his leg. They brought him into the kitchen, with its great open fire place and the dairy off the back, and cleared the table to make a place where they could put him down and set the broken bone.

Most of all, in those last years she remembered our sheep — going across the bridge we built over the river, at nightfall, to check they were all safe and well in their byre. And she'd call out to them, "Goodnight, boys!" and they'd call back to her. "Baaaa!!"

She rejected the frequent urging of her next door neighbour to take up knitting or at least listen to the radio or turn on the television.

She just sat quietly in her chair with her head resting on her hand, and let her mind and her soul and her astral body roam free.

She said she thought she was just a waste of space now, but she was never bored.

Candlemas retreat on Facebook and possibly here too

 Hello friends.

As you'll probably know, we (me, Buzzfloyd, Tony) run a Facebook group called The Campfire Church. 

We started it to offer fellowship and connection to folk online when their regular churches couldn't meet through the lockdown months of the pandemic. We met every Sunday on Facebook through that time — a very happy international fellowship.

Then when restrictions eased and the churches began to open up again, we judged it time to stop our every-Sunday gatherings.

But when we asked within our group what people would be doing now, we found that during the pandemic so much had changed that 'going back to normal' wasn't necessarily what felt right. 

The pandemic season has been a very revealing time, during which we (you too, I expect) have learned a lot about ourselves and the world around us. 

This phenomenon meant that Tony, Buzzfloyd and I, and several who belonged to The Campfire Church, felt differently about how they related to the church community. Things had changed.

We saw that just disbanding The Campfire Church would therefore leave some people with no fellowship at all, and they would all miss each other — we came to be such good friends through those Sunday meetings. On the other hand, we didn't want to set up a rival church organisation to pull people away from the faith families where they already belonged.

So we've moved on to a different pattern.

On the second Sunday of every month, here in Hastings in East Sussex, we have a small physical gathering (we can only wodge about a dozen people max into our front room, including children), called Second Sunday Circle.

Whenever there is a fifth Sunday to the month, The Campfire Church meets on Facebook in the usual way.

We also looked at where there were gaps to be filled. For instance, some of our people are elderly or disabled, and many of us feel less confident about going out late at night than we once did — the lockdown months somewhat shrank our optimism and resilience, and increased our sense of vulnerability, I suspect. So we offered a Campfire Church midnight gathering on Facebook, for people who love to go to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, but feel daunted now about venturing forth late at night.

And at the beginning of February we are offering a Candlemas Retreat online at The Campfire Church on Facebook. So people will set the time aside in their own homes, and we will meet online at intervals through the time frame of the retreat.

It's called Journey Into Light, and it's set up here on Facebook — there's nothing in it yet, obviously, except an introductory post giving the outline of what the time together will contain, because it won't begin until February; but nearer the time I will begin to put up various posts (activities and links) to resource those coming to the retreat for the quiet times between the sessions.

This retreat will start on Friday 4th February at 8pm GMT, and run through to Sunday 6th February late afternoon (GMT timing).

I'm telling you about this in case you think you'd like to join in. I know you sometimes miss me if I don't post here very often, and since I last posted a few days ago I've been busy getting our Second Sunday Circle ready (we met yesterday) and beginning to plan the Candlemas Retreat. So if you are on Facebook you can connect with me more than if you look just look out for me posting here.

I do know, though, that some of you find social media overwhelming, and really don't want to be on Facebook, and would rather not open a Facebook account even to go to something you'd like to attend.

What I'm wondering — and I haven't totally thought this through, it might be a disaster — is whether, for those of you who'd love to come to the retreat but really don't want to be on Facebook, I might be able to offer some level of participation here on Kindred of the Quiet Way.

Of course, you wouldn't be able to participate as fully; I could give you links to the short videoed input talks, and give you the text of the prayers, and links out to any music we'll be including (devotional songs), and I can post links and info for any activities etc — but you won't be able to join in with the conversation, which we do by text comments on posts, not by Zoom-style rooms (as many of us are introverts, this works well for us).  

I don't know how well it would work, but we could try it. So I just thought I'd run the idea by you, and see what you think. Ideal would be for you to join The Campfire Church — or you can just join the Journey Into Light retreat, as it has/is its own Facebook group — because that would be the most rewarding way to experience it, but if for your own reasons you can't stay Facebook, do you like the idea of a more limited participation here?

Just in case you were wondering, let me say that I made a decision that any ministry I offer is part of grace, so it's given freely as a gift to those who find it useful. There is no cost to attend the retreat on Facebook, and you will not be asked for money at any group I run. Keep it simple, keep it small, keep it free, is my approach to church.