But Where Was Me?

Grandmothers should be wise.  It’s one of those archetypal attributes of the crone, isn’t it?  So when I fall short in the wisdom department, it bothers me.  

A little over a year ago, my grandson and I were chatting about the first house he lived in – a place he dimly remembered, having moved away when he was a toddler.  His younger sister was confused.  She insisted they had never lived in a house with two huge trees in the garden.  When her brother pointed out that this was before she was born, she became almost hysterical.

“But where was ME?” she demanded, her eyes filling with tears and panic.

That was when I fell short in the wise grandmother stakes.  I knew my answer to the question, but I would have struggled – when put on the spot – to find the words to explain it to a tiny child.  Even if I had managed to leap that hurdle, I was anxious about straying into the sphere of beliefs.  I’ve spent a lifetime as a teacher carefully and meticulously respecting a wealth of different creeds and cultures.  I knew my grandchildren were being brought up with a nominally Christian belief system.  Christianity has plenty to say about an afterlife, but is curiously silent on before life.  It talks vaguely about dust and ashes, which, I felt, wouldn’t help much.  Did I have the right to impose my own beliefs on those they were being brought up with? 

So I failed.  I gave the child lots of comforting cuddles, chatted to her about how excited we’d all been when she was born, and generally distracted her without ever answering her very important question.  And it has bothered me ever since.

When I came to write my children’s novel this year, I decided it would give me the opportunity to revisit the events of that day and to provide Ruby Rose, my fictional toddler heroine, with a fearless crone figure who is more than happy to address her question head on and provide a suitable response.

It was one of those parts of the book that quite happily wrote itself, while I obediently pressed the keys.  Interestingly, Misty often took control of me, as well as the situations in the story, when she appeared in the pages!

Misty waited for the girl to settle down and for the pounding of her heart to slow.  “Now,”  she began, finally.  “That was a very sensible question you asked, my dear.  I’m going to answer it for you, but you will need to listen very hard.  Can you do that?”

Ruby nodded miserably and Stellan sat on the grass at Misty’s feet, because it had never occurred to him that there could be an answer to that question.

“Before you were your mama’s little girl and Stellan’s little sister, Ruby, you were living in the Dreaming Place.”

“What’s the Dreaming Place?” Ruby asked, sitting up.

“It’s a place you know very well.  Why, you go there every night, while your body is in bed, having a rest,” Misty replied.

“You mean when we have dreams?” asked Stellan.

“Exactly.  Haven’t you ever thought how odd it is that your body stays in bed, fast asleep, while you are off doing all sorts of other things?” …

“That is strange,” agreed Stellan, who had never really considered it before.

“So,”  continued Misty, in the same calm, gentle voice, “while we have bodies like these,” she tickled Ruby Rose gently on her arm and the child giggled, “we live in them for most of the time and just put them down to rest at bedtime.  Before we are born, though, and after we have died, we spend all our time in the Dreaming Place.  That’s where you were when Stellan was a little boy and Bella the cat lived with him.”

Both children were silent for a moment, while they considered that.

“Weren’t I lonely without my ma and my pa and my brother?” Ruby wanted to know.

“Not at all,”  Misty replied.  “You were having too much fun!  You see in the Dreaming Place, you can be whatever you want and go anywhere you like.  You might have tried being a fairy or a brave explorer or even a dog or a cat.  What do you think you would have been?”

“A fairy who could fly in the air and do wishes!” Ruby announced.

“Well that would be quite splendid, wouldn’t it?”  Misty smiled.  “But after loads and loads of dreaming, you decided that what would be even more fun would be to become a little girl with a body.  You see, in the Dreaming Place there are things we can’t do.  We can’t feel happiness or pain or full up with delicious food or the softness of an animal’s fur when we stroke it.  You decided to find yourself the most perfect family for your new body to live with.”

“How did she find us?” asked Stellan. 

He couldn’t decide whether this was some kind of made-up tale to calm his sister and cheer her up or whether Misty believed all she was saying.

She smiled at him.  It was a serious smile, not the sort of winking smile grown-ups give when you and they both know they are pretending.

“As I said, in the Dreaming Place, you can go anywhere you want just by thinking about it.  Once Ruby Rose had decided she wanted to slip into a body and find a family in this – Waking Place, she travelled all around the world, deciding which would be the very best family for her to live with.  Eventually, she chose the family she wanted and when your new little sister was born, here she was!”

“I was very clever to choose my nice family, weren’t I, Misty?” Ruby smiled.

My grandson is reading The Glassmaker’s Children at the moment and maybe, when she’s a few years older, his sister will do the same and find a belated answer to her question.  

 

The Art of Magic (and the magic of art)

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Pablo Picasso

That from the artist who also claimed that it took him four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to learn to paint like a child.  It’s a perspective that interests me.

About thirty years ago I recall a family picnic on the banks of the River Stour on the Essex-Suffolk border.  My 18 month old son (now a professional graphic artist and illustrator) seized his father’s sketchbook and pencil, stared intently at the reeds and bull rushes growing at the water’s edge, then proceeded to draw a series of vertical and near-vertical lines on the paper.  It took him seconds.  His first representational landscape drawing!  The child moved on to other ways of exploring the environment immediately.  It was as if the drawing was some kind of instinctive yet fleeting need to capture the 3D world in just two dimensions.  He didn’t, as his older siblings might have done, compare it to his father’s sketches or seek anyone’s approval or praise.  In fact he was confused by our excitement and delight.

A tiny child will not seek out the ‘right’ colours or consider shapes and ratios.  What they do, though, when you think about it, is pure magic.  They use their crayons to create the significant people and objects around them at that moment in time.  Their art freezes an aspect of the swirl of life and movement and emotion they find themselves in and places it on a flat sheet of paper.   How very different that is from our own self-conscious attempts to draw a representational image.  We are hung up on how realistic it looks, whether our lines are straight or whether the perspective is right.  Most of all, we are worried about how others will judge it.  That, I suspect, is the ‘problem’ Picasso was referring to.

“That’s a lovely picture.  Would you like to tell me about it?” we were taught to say when I was training to be a teacher.  It avoided the problems of, “What a beautiful picture of Mummy!  Oh, I see – it’s a green tractor with lots of mud, is it?  Right.”

Gradually we ‘help’ the child to fit their depictions to the conventions of art in our world.  In medieval times, drawing the mother or self far larger than other people would have been quite acceptable.  The convention was ‘important people are shown larger than less significant people’.  In our modern world the convention is photographic, so a person shown large is closer in physical space to the artist’s viewpoint than those standing further away.

And what of magic?  I would argue that this, too, is something a small child experiences and responds to in a very natural, comfortable way and trying to regain that instinctive connection to the magic inherent in their lives takes many years, once the child has been trained to put it aside.

We allow – even encourage – small children to fill their lives with magic.  We tell them of Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny and read them stories or show them videos of unicorns and dragons, magicians and heroes with fantastic powers.

At some point, though – perhaps around the same time we start insisting that humans should be drawn with bodies, not just a circular head with legs and arms – we begin to teach them what is ‘real’ and what is ‘pretend’.  What many of us don’t recognise is that this is just as arbitrary and incomplete a world view as the one we are asking them to leave behind.

Magic has a strong similarity to art.  When painting and drawing we encapsulate three dimensions in two.  With magic, we bring multiple dimensions into the three that form what current convention sees as our world.  (Again, I suspect our ancestors would have viewed it quite differently.)

In the children’s story book I’ve just published, I made sure enough magic was embedded within it to at least allow my 8-12 year old audience to keep wondering.  My metaphysician (yes, of course there had to be one!) observes three members of a family who find themselves confronted with a magical ‘coincidence’ as follows:

The lady in the blue dress looked from one to the other of them – the mother, who was slowly shaking her head and muttering, “Extraordinary…”, the boy who was now clutching his cheeks and laughing with amazement and pure delight, and the small child beside her who was still young enough to understand how real magic was and therefore not surprised at all.

I’d love to think that a few children reading The Glassmaker’s Children will recognise the magic my young hero Stellan rediscovers and notice how, by using attention and intention, both he and they can find way of surviving and thriving, despite the setbacks and challenges they encounter.

Small note:  I originally set up this blog (back in 2012) as a vehicle for my metaphysical ramblings, and I’d like it to stay that way.  For that reason, I’m placing most of my posts about The Glassmaker’s Children on my Open the Box blog.  This one, for example, explains the particular challenges my two young characters face as they battle to cope with a narcissistic parent.

The Day the Muses Died

They’re not truly dead, of course, those Muses.  They are immortal – even the ones who consider themselves to be human.  They’ve gone though, for now at least.  Another one left this morning.

Have you noticed?  Are you missing them too?

There was a time when they reached so close, touched our thoughts, answered our tremulous questions and inspired our imaginings with a generosity of spirit and a wisdom so deep and wide that we felt nothing was secret, nothing was hidden from us.  All we had to do was to wonder and they would be there with a sign, a comment, a synchronicity that proved to us that we were heard and supported and – yes – expanded by their inspiration.

We were such a sensitive, anxious bunch, back then in the years surrounding Y2k and 2012.  Was the world going to end?  How would that look?  Were we ‘birthing a new Earth’, some kind of parallel planet where we would be gods?  Would there be the fires, the floods, the earthquakes and famines that had ended previous ages?  Did we really have to go through all that again? Reawakening, rebirthing, rediscovering our true selves… re- just about anything you could hold a candle up to.  What did it all mean?

We needed answers.  We needed to know the things religions had never seen fit to share with us, the things science hadn’t addressed, the things Hay House and Gaia and the Shift Network tantalisingly offered to sell us, if we had enough $$$$.

That was when the muses arrived.  They were quiet, gently spoken.  They answered our questions with courtesy but rarely initiated the conversations.  Each utterance was filled with a Knowing of divine proportions.  I would listen with reverence, take their words and wrestle with them until I could make some sense of what I was learning.  Then I’d pour those words into my blog or my coffee shop conversations with trusted friends.

Now, save for a very few, they have gone.  Did they answer all the questions we needed to ask?  Perhaps.

I miss them, that’s for sure.  But maybe they shared all the Knowing they needed to before moving on to other missions.  For those we know as fellow humans, those ‘other missions’ may be happening in some part of their greater selves which is not currently visible to us at all.  For those who came to us through channelled voices or spiritual guidance – well – we can’t even guess.  All I know is that during those magical years, the Muses gave us precious gifts, and I will always be so very grateful.

The Quietness is sad and deafening, at times, but I take comfort in the thought that, like the legendary Arthur, who sleeps beneath Albion, ready to awaken when he is needed, they will return when the time is right.  One of the Muses – the one who left today – instructed me to “Trust the Silence.”

I will.

Stasis – Unlimited

It’s been ages since I last did a course.  I chose one of those science-meets-spirituality online ones.  It struck me it would be a good way to settle back into my life, after all the disruptions of last year – allowing someone else to lead me, gently, into my old ways of learning, musing and wondering.

So there I was, following the course leader’s instructions and working my way into an altered state.  All fine and good.  Next, we were to ask questions and allow the heart to provide an answer.  The yes/no queries worked perfectly, but then we were instructed to ask our hearts, “What do you need from me right now?”

Clear as a bell, the answer came back:  STASIS.

Sorry, what?

An image of those spacecraft pods you get in sci-fi films flashed into my mind, the ones with rows of people suspended somewhere between life and non-life waiting to be brought back to themselves before landing on some far-distant planet.

To be honest, I didn’t get much from the rest of the module I was studying.  I was too busy thinking about stasis – wondering if it had some other meaning I wasn’t aware of; wondering how and why it applied to me; wondering why my heart would wish me, or itself, to be in that state.

The next question we were supposed to ask was, “What do you want me to know right now?”  We were told that the answers would be brief – a short phrase or even a single word.  My heart is clearly less loquacious than its bearer.  Another single word answer: UNLIMITED.

Since then, I’ve pondered on these odd messages.  I checked ‘stasis’ for other meanings.  There are medical ones to do with veins and something about ancient Greek tyrants, but I settled on ‘a period of inactivity or equilibrium’.

(Yes, my heart is doing that glowy, expanding thing that means ‘yes’ as I type this.  I’m simply learning its way of communicating, the way I did with my pendulum, when I first started dowsing.)

My heart has been through a great deal over the last year – all those dramas and emotional upheavals, anxieties and accomplishments, terrors and triumphs.  It needs, now, a period of stasis to recover, to rest, to relax.  It needs me to wrap up in a blanket, light the log burner and spend these winter days regaining my equilibrium.

After that, our potential together is – unlimited.

 

 

A Partridge in a Pear Tree

I know, I’ve been very quiet again lately.

It’s not that I haven’t been writing.  I have – and considerably more than usual.  It just isn’t ready to put here yet.  One day soon, though, I’ll be inundating this blog with the thoughts and ideas that have just about taken over my waking life in the past few weeks.  Maybe you should enjoy the peace while you have it…

Many years ago, a very talented psychic told me I would collect up all manner of information from all kinds of places, and one day I would put it all together in a new way, and this would be original and of interest to others.  At the time I laughed and told her I could scarcely remember where I’d put my keys, let alone recall great tracts of reading and learning.

She was right, though.  Somewhere in my mind (a place I now understand far better) they were all lurking.  I explained the process by which all these semi-forgotten snippets formed themselves into a coherent whole in my previous post: The Answer.  The question these words were answering can be found printed in green at the end of another fairly recent post: A Trail of Breadcrumbs.
OK, it isn’t exactly a question, but it implies one, and it’s one I’d been wondering about and trying to answer for many years before William summed it up so clearly.

So the information slotted itself together very easily.  The hard part has been trying to find ways of recording it in something approaching coherent text.  The different parts jump and fizz and turn cartwheels in my mind, while I’ve been trying to sequence them, so that one word follows the next and it makes sense to someone other than me.

I think I’ve done it, just about.  There are around eleven thousand words there and they seem to make sense.  So the next step is to pass them on to Will.  It was he, after all, who asked the question, and he will be my fiercest critic and most diligent proof reader.  There’s a useful synchronicity there, too; what do you give the man who claims to want nothing for Christmas (but does really, of course)?

I’ve packaged the information up into sections, which will be emailed to him throughout the Christmas holiday season, with ‘The First Day of Christmas’, ‘The Second Day of Christmas’ etc. in the subject line.  Hopefully, he’ll critique it and add more to it than he already has … and then I’ll be ready to share it with you.

Needless to say, in order to work out how people with autistic perception receive and process information led me to question how the rest of us do so.  How else could I understand the differences?  My journalling journey took me to places I never expected to visit, but I’m so very glad I did.  I found nuggets of truth lurking in the most incongruous places, so seeing a partridge roosting in a pear tree would no longer strike me as strange at all.

Wishing you all the happiest of festive seasons, in whatever way you celebrate this turning of the year, and I look forward to joining you again in 2018.

Syncing without Trace, but Czeching

I wish I could trace them – the tracks of my synchronicities.

Sometimes they feel like cross-hairs gradually coming together, to home in on the target, but it’s far more complex than that.  There are many strands and they cross and recross, ricocheting off one another in an apparently random mess, until gradually and subtly they begin building up a pattern.  Finally, with no clear idea how I got here, I find myself standing at the centre of an amazing piece of sacred geometry and the whole thing is laid out clearly for me to see, like those transit patterns the planets make with each other.

(Is that how astrology fits in?  Is it sacred geometry working out at a macro level??  Maybe Pluto or Uranus are not ‘influencing’ us – they’re just making the patterns of the synchronicity working through our lives visible.  Sorry: digression.)

So once I’ve had the ‘Aha!’ moment, I can try to work back to how I got there.  What was it that pushed me to open this file or buy that book?  I think – if I were the kind of person who could create such things – a diagram or flow chart would work better.  Alas, all I have at my disposal are strings of words, so they must suffice.  The process is not linear, but this attempt to unravel it will be, since that’s the way writing works.

• I publish a post on here which includes this image.
• Someone comments on it and directs me to an interview with Stan Grof.
• I become intrigued and read a book referred to in the interview.  At this point the lines of synchronicity are shooting off in multiple directions; one even points at synchronicity!
• Grof intrigues me and, like my grandfather, he is a Czech emigrant.
• The book tells of psychiatric regressions, with patients picking up ancestral stories from their bloodline, which were later authenticated.
• In a quite different part of my life, I am buying a piece of Moldavite for a friend’s birthday.  I don’t know why.  I simply have a very strong feeling that this person needs Moldavite, now.
• Intrigued again (being intrigued is a very strong indicator for synchronicities at work, I’ve found) I begin researching Moldavite.  I discover it comes from the site of a meteor impact, many centuries ago, and is only found at this one place on Earth –  in The Czech Republic.  ‘There it is again,’ I think. (Repetition/dêja vu is another indicator of synchronicity.)
• While I’m musing on that, I start exploring that country, trying one more time to locate the village my grandfather came from.  I’ve tried on many occasions.  I knew its name from the postmarks in his stamp collection, which I inherited, but the German language forms of many border towns’ names were eradicated after WWII and I didn’t know the Czech equivalent.
• This time, though, I find it.  I’m delighted and make a mental note to explore some more when I have time.
• After an exhausting and rather frustrating day, I decide to have a quiet evening watching TV.  I select a film called The Secret Life of Bees, a rather sugary tale of life, death and the civil rights struggles in the American deep south in the sixties.
• Incomprehensibly, I find myself weeping uncontrollably throughout the entire movie.  I’m identifying so strongly with every aspect of the story line and characters.  It feels personal.  It feels as if I’ve been there and experienced that and the pain is still unbearably raw.  Yet I haven’t.
• By the end of the film, I’m a red-eyed, snivelling wreck, with a mountain of soggy tissues beside me.  ‘It’s just been a hard day,’  I tell myself.  I need to go and do something enjoyable.
• I head for the computer and go back to researching the Czech connection.
• I find the village my grandfather came from on Google Map.  I wander through its streets and peer across the mountains he grew up in.  I even find the post office where my ancestral relatives sent the letters whose stamps now lie, old and yellowing, in his album.
• I read other sites, with histories of the area.  They tell how this once prosperous mining town, with rich seams of silver and agate crystals was ravaged by the Thirty Years War, fell into decline, was subsumed by the Austro-Hungarian empire and the native Bohemians persecuted and viciously suppressed.  This continued for decades.  The young men faced compulsory 10 year military service in their oppressors’ army.
• So that was why my grandfather fled to England!  He died when I was a young child.  My father was embarrassed to talk about his origins while I was growing up.  Bohemia had become part of Czechoslovakia by then and was part of the feared Eastern Bloc during those Cold War days, so Dad pretended he came from Austria.
• Finally, I feel I understand my heritage.  I know why the Bees film affected me so deeply.  I accept that ancestral memory still travels through my consciousness.  I see why dissolving prejudice has been such a huge part of my life.
• I turn away from the computer – and stare straight into the eyes of my grandfather, whose pastel portrait hangs on the living room wall.  I pass it a hundred times a day, but at this point I really see it.
• And he is smiling slightly.

The Book of Caw

I was woken this morning – as I am almost every day – by Caw.  And I knew, suddenly, that the Book of Caw needs to be written.  Maybe by me, maybe by someone else.  Who can say?  All I know is that the image of The Book of Caw is lodged in my mind now and the only thing that will move it on is for me to start writing.

So what is Caw? I imagine you asking.  (And why are sentences – proper ones – so elusive this morning? I ask myself.  Probably because the words are coming from somewhere where punctuation doesn’t hold sway.  I’ve visited that somewhere quite a bit recently, which would explain a lot.)

OK.  An easy way out of the definition conundrum would be to say something like, ‘Caw is Oneness, or All That Is’.   That, though, is so all-encompassing as to be almost devoid of meaning for us – a bit like asking someone to imagine an infinite universe…  Fortunately, Caw can be explored in many ways, and each of them helps us to discover more of the truths behind the truism, and to apply them to what we know of our own existence.

Say the word aloud, and you will immediately have one of it’s aspects – Caw is core.  It lies at the very heart of every facet of existence.  It’s the point we come back to, after our little forays into the game of materiality.  We have Caw strength at the centre of our existence.  It’s unmoving, solid, steadfast and entirely dependable, yet it will flow with us, wherever we go.  (Yes, there’s a paradox there – the first of many.  Always think ‘and’ rather than ‘or’ with Caw.)

If it were an acronym, CAW could be formed from, perhaps, Consciousness Applying Will.  In that sense, it is placing intention into consciousness – or vice versa – in order to manifest or create.  That, after all, is how our miniverse here is fabricated.

Let’s stop metafizzing, briefly, and bring Caw into our familiar material world.  As I said at the start, Caw wakes me each morning.  It is the sound of the corvids – the rooks and jackdaws and magpies that restlessly circle  my cottage, squawking to one another, playing some complex aerial game of tag and scattering black feathers in my garden.  I won’t even begin to delve into the folklore that surrounds this family of birds, but it’s found all around the world.  They are mysterious, intelligent, cunning and wise.  Certainly not light and fluffy.  They have a gravitas that commands attention and respect, verging on fear at times.  Caw is all that.

Caw is the rook on the chessboard, too.  Sometimes hiding in the corner, biding its time; sometimes castling – not afraid to reveal itself in order to protect what is of the most value.  Then, when the time is right, striking suddenly – covering vast distances in a dead straight line to get to the core of the action.  Caw is that too.

Caw is gnosis, knowing, deep knowledge that comes from a point of insight and certainty.  It is not born of opinion or consideration.  It is not gradually acquired through study.  It is our direct link to the Akasha and it comes in instant flashes.  Once recognised, we know – absolutely and with utter certainty – that this is right.  It cannot be any other way.

That is in no way an exhaustive account of Caw.  Other aspects will occur to you, and they will all be valid, but I will let that serve as an introduction.

 

To work with Caw, we need to dispense with a few sacred cows.  We need to try to rid ourselves of:

• cause and effect
• common sense
• rationality

There is, of course, nothing wrong with any of them, except that they only work in 3D.  They only apply to the mechanistic model of the universe we built for ourselves with our cosmic construction set.

To work with Caw, we need to put aside that much-loved toy and move into reality.  It is Caw that will lead us there.

 

When Worlds Collide

A three hour coach ride passes so much better when you find yourself seated next to someone interesting to chat to.

My neighbour yesterday was, it emerged, travelling to London for a brief, bittersweet half day with her daughter.  It was the girl’s birthday.  She’d booked herself into a posh hotel in the West End.  They were to have champagne, then lunch somewhere luxurious.  The daughter would unwrap her presents then – ‘a comfort sack’ with such items as a thick duvet, pillow and covers, hand warmers, hot chocolate mix…  Tomorrow the young lady will take all her spoils and return to Greece, where she works for the UN, caring for the refugees.
“It’s so desperately cold there, Mum,” she’d told her mother. “Just so desperate”.

I wondered how it felt for that young woman to move between those two quite different worlds – her opulent English lifestyle and the squalor and tragedy of the transit camps.  How must the smells, the sounds, the sickness and pain feel to someone who has grown up in such a different culture?  How, indeed, must it feel for the inhabitants of the camps, wrenched from their lives in such violence and terror?

 

“And you?” my neighbour enquired.  “Why are you going to London?”

“Oh,” I said, with a slight smile, “I’m probably going to enjoy a few hours in the British Museum.  And I might be meeting a friend.”

Well it was a long journey, so gradually my story came out too.  If we did meet, it would be no less shocking and difficult a transition for my friend than her daughter’s move to Greece had been.

Just as the refugee camps would seem overwhelmingly disgusting and sickening to us – their sights, smells and emotional charge far beyond what we feel able to cope with – so our world is, for people like my friend.  For him, and so many other super-sensitive people who live with autistic spectrum perception in its many and amazing forms, our world – in all its raw, visceral physicality can be almost too much to cope with.  Their senses are easily overwhelmed by what, to us, would seem trivial.  Their anxiety never sleeps.  Their fears grapple constantly at their throats with sharp, threatening fingers.  Small wonder so many would prefer to remain in the insular, relatively safe surroundings of the worlds they have built for themselves.  Why – given the choice – would they venture out into the uncertainties of our unfamiliar and terrifying world?

The answer is the same as for the young lady working for the UN – compassion, humanity, generosity of spirit.  They want to help us.  They want to build bridges.  They want to reach into our world and show us their perspectives.  If they manage it, we will be so much richer for it, but if they don’t, we have no right to criticise them.  Every single day, they struggle to do what they can to reach into our world.  And there will be days they just can’t.

When I reached London, he was still at home, holed up in an agony of indecision.  If he managed a meeting, it would be the first for many years.  The least I could do was to make it as easy as possible for him.
‘No rush,’ I messaged.  ‘I’ll head for the museum. Text me later if you feel able to meet somewhere.’

An hour later I was a stranger wandering in the world of the Abyssinians: huge bas-reliefs of Kings and courtiers.  ‘Spirit helpers’ with the heads of eagles and small handbags held objects like oversized pine cones against the backs of the humans’ heads.  Why?  Pineal gland connection perhaps?  What was in the bags?  What favoured realm had these beings descended from, to help their human counterparts?

Then my phone pinged.

‘I’m going to come.  I’m in central London.  Shall I meet you at the British Museum or elsewhere?’

‘The museum’s crammed with people,’ I told him, when I’d had a moment.  ‘Let’s meet in one of the squares nearby.’

On my way out I paused to stare in awe once again at the Rosetta stone, that magical jigsaw piece that had given the modern world a way into the world of other races at other times.  For me, at that moment, the stone became a talisman, allowing my world and my friend’s to come together for a short while.

Bloomsbury, like much of London, has many lovely, peaceful squares – small oases of calm and greenery amidst the hubbub of traffic and commerce.  I selected a calm, pleasant open space where I felt he’d be most comfortable, sat on a bench and waited.  I sat at one end and placed my bags beside me, knowing he’d need more body space than most would consider normal for lifelong friends.  I remained seated when he arrived.  No exclamation of delight, no bear hugs or grasping of hands.
“Alright?” he said simply.
“Yes,” I said quietly.  “And well done.”

Old friends.  Old friends.  Sat on a park bench like bookends.
Paul Simon’s song echoed in my mind from another of my distant worlds.

I’d written much of what I wanted to say on paper.  He finds the written word easier to handle than speech – less unpredictable.  So for the first few minutes he sat and read in silence.  Then we talked.  He kept his eyes fixed straight ahead; body language and facial expression are confusing for him, so it’s easier if he cuts them out.  Still there were deep discussions and moments of humour, with both of us laughing out loud.  There were connections and shared memories of times when we’d spent so many days and hours together.  It was wonderful.

And because I know he finds transitions difficult, I made the decision on when to leave.  Or perhaps the weather did, as the rain that had been threatening all afternoon eventually began to fall.

Neither of us said, “See you soon.”  Who knows?   And what does it matter?  Our worlds had come together for that short while without any explosions or disasters and we are closer for that experience.

You the Creator

Algie and his device

Four or five years back, when I wrote that book about Life, I called the final section Creativity and Creation.  It began thus:

What have you made lately – a model; a cake; a piece of furniture; dinner; a mess…?  I’ll bet you’ve done quite a bit of creating over the last week or so.  And how did you do it?  You got some stuff; you changed it in some way – maybe shaping or cutting, heating or cooling; you probably mixed it with, or joined it to other stuff and carried on changing or modifying it until your creation was complete.

OK, so you might be protesting that all you did was take a ready-meal out of the freezer, pierce the film lid and put it in the microwave, but you still created a hot, steaming meal out of a frozen lump.  You created something by changing stuff.  Hold that idea.  Hold it nice and tight.

I knew – at an intuitive, rather than an intellectual level – that creating ‘stuff’ was important.  Not just important, but vital.  I also knew that it didn’t actually matter what you were creating.  It could be a painting or a compost heap, a symphony or an ad on eBay.  It was the creative process that mattered.

Thimble sized machines

That idea came back to me a few weeks ago, when I was engaged in my latest hobby – creating  miniature Steam Punk characters and their equipment from up-cycled dolls’ house dolls, wire, watch parts and the like.

Bella: 6 inches/15 cm tall

It takes ages.  I completely lose myself in the process and come as close to absolute happiness and satisfaction as is possible when I hit technical problems and find ingenious ways to overcome them.  There’s a kind of excitement bubbling up inside me as the transformations take place.  Yet that’s been tempered by a mocking voice from my rational mind:

“Why waste so much time on something this pointless?  What use are they?  Shouldn’t I be putting my energy into something more ‘worthy’?”

Amelia – before and after

Lars

So the internal dialogue has been going.  I can’t deny the rational thoughts.  No one needs a 1/12 scale Steam Punk figure.  Yet at some very deep level I have known that the process of creating them – battling with the limitations of the materials and my skills – is hugely important to me.  I have felt the same as I did when renovating my dilapidated cottage – an initial mental image of how I want the finished product to look, a moment of doubt when I compared that idea to the reality of the items strewn around me, an intense fixation on the eventual result, an unshakeable belief that it would all work out perfectly and – finally – jubilation at having created the end product.

Henry: yes, they’re very small

It needed a mind and voice more finely tuned than my own to put the importance of ‘You the Creator’ into its true perspective.  I found these words in The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher:

It is the tension between the search for fulfilment or perfection and the actual performance possible in the physical world that promotes creative acts as they are understood.  For true creativity always destroys limitations and increases the mental, spiritual, psychic or physical areas of expression open to man.

That’s it.  It applies as much to the time warping experiments I’m engaged in with William to the little figures I’m building in my study.  It applies to every creative process you are engaged in, too.

 

I think therefore I am;  I create, therefore I am The Creator – and so are you.

 

The Symptoms of Normalism

Not easy, but I’m trying, for a moment, to look at my tribe – the people who regard themselves as ‘normal’ or ‘neuro-typical’ – from the outside.  I’m trying to see us from the perspective of those Version 2.0 people who are wired differently.  (I’ve reverted to my ‘Version 2.0’ label because not all of them are on the autistic spectrum as it is normally described.  Many are – but there are others, variously called ‘sensitives’, or ’empaths’ or those with various diagnoses or descriptions of differentness, and I wish to include them all.)

Disclaimer:  I use the term ‘Normal’ throughout this article in a somewhat ironic sense.  I personally consider terms like ‘normal’ and ‘disordered’ to be chauvinistic and symptomatic of what is wrong with common assumptions in our society.  Also, I am a person with ‘Normalism’ and I love words.  I can’t imagine life without their richness and beauty.  This post is just a thought experiment, okay?

 

Probably the most difficult aspect of Normals to comprehend is the disparity between what they say and what they actually feel or think.

“No, it looks great on you, honestly.”

(‘It would actually suit someone twenty years younger much better, but I understand you’re going through a bit of a mid-life crisis and if it makes you feel good to wear it, that’s fine by me.’)

“Oh it’s nothing.  Really not worth reading – just something I scribbled off last night.”

(‘I poured my heart and soul into these words, but I’m terrified you won’t understand and will dismiss them as trivial or stupid, so I’m pretending it’s not important to me in order to shield myself in advance from any critical comments you may make.  Anything hurtful you say will still upset me deeply, though.’)

“Well who’s the teacher’s pet, then?”

(‘I feel envious of the praise you received for that assignment and my inability to produce anything that good.  I am therefore attempting to make you feel uncomfortable.  It is my hope that my negative reaction to your success will encourage you to try less hard in the future, thus letting me gain more approval from the teacher.’)

“It’s important for you to get an expert opinion.”

(‘You are inferior.  You are incapable of reaching a satisfactory answer, due to the prejudices and fixed ideas lodged in your brain.  There are far better individuals than you whose prejudices and fixed ideas come for other individuals with letters after their names.  These people know what is best for you, despite not knowing a great deal about you.  I know this because I learned it from experts.’)

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I’m aware as I write this that I live in southern England, an area particularly renowned for this kind of double-speak.  Northern Brits, Americans and Australians, for example, would readily assert that they are far more inclined towards plain speaking, calling-a-spade-a-spade and otherwise using spoken language to express what they feel.  Really?  Try, for just one conversation, to avoid any sarcasm, any ironic aside, any well-meant but artificial compliment, any indication that you sort-of agree, despite the fact that you don’t, or any self-depreciating statements that are not in total resonance with what you feel.

You’ll argue, perhaps – you Normals – that without such social niceties, speech would be brutal, hard and cold.  People would be offended.  They might take against you.  They might (this is the greatest fear) not flatter and praise you in return.  Normals require an almost constant drip-feed of approval.  Without this, paranoia sets in.  That’s why Normals struggle in their contact with the other tribes.  The Asperger guy is not going to tell you that you look good, that it’s great to see you, that he’s glad you came.  You’re there; he’s there.  No more to be said.  Normals are needy, though.  They want that stuff.  They’ll cheerfully relinquish honesty to get it.

In a previous post I mentioned the 7 year-old Version 2.0 child who came to me distraught after a quarrel with his friend.  “She told me she was sorry,” he said, “but I can see into her heart and that isn’t the feeling that’s there.”
It wasn’t the quarrel that had upset him, but the fact that his friend didn’t respect him enough to share her heartfelt feelings. She insulted him by feigning an apology.

If the Version 2.0 people can ‘see into someone’s heart’ (all this is explained far better in the previous post, written by The Snacking Sage and in Suzy Miller’s important book ‘Awesomism’), nothing but honesty will do.

The small child who asks, “Why are you sad, Mummy?” and is told, “I’m not sad, dear.  I’m fine,” by a mother who attempts to conceal the truth because she doesn’t want to worry him will – obviously – worry all the more if he knows he’s being lied to.

There are more of these Others – these Non-Normals – than might be imagined.   They are way-showers.  They can teach Normals – if we’ll truly stop chattering and listen to their silence – to discard the fake conversation and to return to the openness that is a natural by-product of telepathic communication.

Yes, I can see that there would be difficulties and challenges, but ultimately, aren’t we all yearning for greater transparency?  Aren’t we, after all, sick to death of being lied to and cheated by those in authority, by multi-nationals who mislead us for their own profits, by those who claim to be acting in our ‘best interests’?  It’s worth considering that there are many individuals who are similarly sick of the lack of honesty in ‘Normal’ social interaction.

This is only a personal viewpoint, but I suspect the ‘shift’ that occurred around 2012 involved a fundamental change of mindset amongst humanity – a desire to move beyond ‘them and us’ towards a fairness and openness based on personal responsibility, not the imposition of rules by a corrupt leadership.  That could work, if only we could communicate heart to heart.