Talking the Walk

Transcribed from an ad-hoc recording made on December 14th between 12:30 and 13:50, while walking the above route. To hear the audio please click here. It will be played in a new window.

There are problems with politics [referring to words rather than deeds]:

1. when it’s diminished to binary options, with clichés replacing awareness
2. when it makes assumptions about people, [classifies them into groups, to the point where they’re seen as abstractions—to be wooed for their votes, or maligned for their opposition to the doctrines promoted]
3. when everybody thinks they can play, no experience or wisdom required
4. when everyone professes to know what future will result from given actions
5. when it doesn’t take into account the wealth intrinsic to oneself, one’s profound well-being; being alive and giving thanks [which politicians can neither give us nor take from us]

I’m unhesitatingly on the side of God, though I don’t know at all what that means. I can’t say whether there is a God, only something unknowable. People imagine the powers, intentions & modus operandi of a divine “being”. But all we know is from observation—of the wider world and our own hearts. All we have is what we’ve got. And all I can say is that the heart bears witness to whatever it bears witness to. I shall allow wide latitude to other people’s witnessing, the language they use. [For myself, I don’t even know where or how to start.]

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We must have politics. We must have government, I suppose, and capitalism, because any attempt to alter that would result in—I don’t know what. I don’t think I’ve ever taken part in any activism. Unless there were something happening close to hand, and then conscience might tell me to intervene because I could do something. In lots of ways I feel a stranger to 2016. I admit to having been a stranger to every year that I’ve lived.

[There are years I felt I had missed: for example in the early Seventies I lamented missing the Sixties. It gave rise to a nostalgia which led to plunging deep into hippy communes, weed, LSD &cetera, unwise for a couple with young children at the time.]

Now I can look back & feel more at home in the past than today. I wonder what it means to feel at home. Now, I would say that wherever I can reach in walking distance from my house, is home. I can greet it with confidence, warmth, affection and acceptance. [It keeps changing: people, landscape, the general pace and atmosphere. But it’s still home, to welcome and be welcomed.] As for driving in a car, I’m too scared to feel easy with it. I had to go yesterday to a business meeting followed by our annual dinner, just a few of us able to attend. Like last year, the boss paid for a hotel room so I didn’t have to drive home through narrow lanes in dark and fog, after a drink or two. As last year, I chose to quit the room before 6am, without waiting for daylight, to rejoin K & have breakfast at home. It was fine, I was nervous but always had the option of slowing down, & kept a reasonable speed when I could see my way clear.

So if I had to live in America, I guess I’d depend on buses and stay in places where things are not miles apart. [I’ve been to Long Beach where the buses are free, and downtown Miami where the language is Spanish and most are poor. I feel at home in unsophisticated surroundings, even when I don’t speak the language.]

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With our neighbours on this street we’re having an exchange of Christmas cards and season’s greetings. They have their prophet’s birthday, last Sunday I think. We were going off to Gloucester for a day with my daughter R, and they were closing off the road for a procession, headed by a lightly-decorated float with Happy Birthday Mohammed on the front. They’ve been putting strings of little green lamps in their windows. And we have Jesus’ birthday coming up, and are decking out our Christmas tree with multi-coloured lights.

It is not always easy to reach across. Here we are at a sort of peace frontier, I like that. Not in terms of “virtue-signalling”—conscious gestures beyond natural behaviour. Not from my side at any rate. [K & I aren’t the outreach kind of people, not like my elder daughter in Gloucester, who resembles her mother in that regard, with her outgoing hospitality & openness; getting to know her Asian neighbours to the point of swapping recipes, invitations to dinner etc. But that’s a middle-class area, with its own ways and aspirations, not like here.]

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So I slept last night alone, in that pleasant hotel room, something I hadn’t done since this time last year. I noticed that in a suddenly unaccustomed environment, if you’re attentive and let it wrap you like a blanket, you are taken to a different mental space. And I thought, what if I were on my own, as a widower—of course I cannot answer for how it would be. But I thought I’d be a sort of monk, not asking things from the world. How I would occupy myself, what would unfold—that’s not to concern myself with. But I would simplify, as would befit my age and status. And I would be available to the world’s wish, which is to say God’s wish [according to what I can offer].

For all my needs are satisfied. I feel in my deepest self that nothing can change that. Things can be taken away, one by one, till finally breath itself is taken, from all of us. But I don’t fear any future loss. This sense of being settled, connected, holds a certainty of permanence. I have had this sense of certainty before, about things which have stayed solid and unchallenged to this day.

She doesn’t like this photo, says it’s not her. Reviewing this post four years later, I see through her eyes and agree

For example, thirteen years ago, Karleen & I met online. Our trajectories conjoined at once. Seven days later I proposed, she accepted. We didn’t meet face to face till several weeks later, confirming a knot already tied, souls yoked, though another year was to pass before we could marry. The certainty has never faltered, the bond has only strengthened. For another example, an illness, chronic across decades, left me in one clear and conscious moment. I felt it go, knew it was gone—and it was. There can be certainty in the heart, but none in this world of events.

There are ways to receive blessings. That is to say, the blessings are there [already]. The way is how to remove the barriers to our enjoying those blessings. There are places one can look. Among books, I think of the sermons of Meister Eckhart, or, I guess, certain Buddhist writings. But then, the precepts of most religions give us guidelines. Dogmas are irrelevant, I’ve discovered, not embracing any myself. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that there may be teachers or role models who could help. The one Fate picked for me was not a teacher in the normal sense, and certainly not a role model. I had to free myself from him, his thought-patterns, everything he stood for, after thirty years of fidelity. Then I was able to realize that he probably didn’t know what he was talking about. [In the first place] guruhood had been foisted upon him. That was the harsh blessing he was given, which he has yet to work through, so as to achieve the same sort of renunciation that his disciples have to go through, to realize that it’s somehow the wrong model. There is confusion there, and it tangles people up, until they can get rid of it. And maybe for some people, it is very harmful indeed, but that is their harsh path, which for some people I’ve known has ended in suicide. I don’t understand. [But there are plenty of ex-followers, moved by conscience, who try to warn against, and wean others off.]

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As to politics, it’s a dirty job which somebody’s got to do. But I can’t quite understand why all of a sudden everybody—a lot of people—some people—want to get in on the act. In “mature democracies”, if you please. I mean, why assume that one person is more corrupt, biased, evil-minded etc, than the next? That’s the whole point of democracy. That the politicians (on all sides) are no better than the voters. We get what we deserve.

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There is no point in trying to enumerate my blessings. For there are [in my life, truly speaking] nothing else but blessings, even when events stop me short, block my path with their challenges. [One happened today when I was nearly ready to publish this. The entire post was hacked, the title replaced with something about 9-carat gold stuff, the content replaced with three links to similar offerings. It was a shock, but when I recovered, I saw it as an angelic game, to teach me something. I’ve said it somewhere before that the quicker you learn the milder these games are]. These too are part of the whole cloth. Life conspires to teach us till we learn. Blessings are tough love, to be absorbed. One has to be in that state. And if anybody says, “Well, you could be in such-and-such situation. Where is the blessing then? How would you [be able to] see it?” —I would answer “Etty Hillesum”—[as she reveals herself in journals and letters [Complete Works, 1941-43). She knew trouble, she knew the golden thread of blessings through that dreadful time for Jews in Holland.] Near the end, getting everybody singing in that cattle-truck, on the way to Auschwitz. She made sure not to go in the same truck as her parents, because she knew that they couldn’t do anything like that; and that she would have found it too upsetting to be with them at that time.

Sometimes there’s discussion as to which was the greatest [the most heinous] atrocity of all time, and the Jewish Holocaust is cited. I listened to a programme on Radio 4, in which Elie Wiesel had his turn to be featured on Great Lives, as nominated by Ben Kingsley, for a retrospective on his life and thought. Kingsley mentioned often thinking of Anne Frank. We don’t want her, or her Diary, reduced to a cliché. The moment that happens, understanding is blocked off.

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This sunshine, these footpaths, snaking between the bottom fence of people’s gardens. I see a robin against the sky, on a sawn-off branch, singing in full throat, its red breast swelling, interspersed with short pauses for listening. Enjoy, in this joyous season. Nothing can bring joy to an end. They were talking [on the radio] about some technology, weaponized rockets to protect us from stray comets and asteroids detected coming our way, deflecting them. Okay, if that’s what mankind’s gonna do, all right! All right to everything. I have my allotted space here, so does my reader. We do what we do.

All I hope is that while we are trying to improve the world and make it safe, we seek not just blessings but the fount of all blessing. And then it will be improved to an infinite level, for one more person.