Dear Saram,
Hey! How’s it going? Good, I hope: all good here. I want to write to you and ask you a question – and I did, but I ended up writing seven and a half thousand words and, having just come to end of it, I’ve figured it’s probably a little bit mad. I will, of course, still send it you, just in case you’ve a seven and a half thousand word-shaped hole in your life – but also I thought I’d sum it up here a little more briefly too, just in case you’re normal and sane and haven’t time for the words of a raving loon. ;-)
So: question is: once upon a time when we were young we were sort of ‘spirit buddies’ and I often think back to that time and think it somehow magical. Looking at myself, however, I seem to think that I lost most of whatever I had – if that’s indeed possible; probably wasn’t ‘mine’ to begin with – by going off the rails and I often wished I could get it back. It’s been an interesting twelve years, that’s for sure – but probably not the twelve years I would have hoped for back in ’99.
Anyways, what think you about those days and about where your life went after?
Love and smiles and anticipation and gladness,
Your friend forever,
Rory
PS Here’s the original. ;-)
My dearest Saram, how are you? I’ve been meaning to write to you for years and ask you how things are going but I never seemed to find the impetus (I’d be a fool to type ‘time’: time is something I’ve plenty of). See, I’ve oft been curious to find out how things have gone for you since we last hung out – wow, we’re talking like nearly twelve years now! – and since I’m still working away on my America
Anyway. The big question is really the spiritual question – because back then it seemed to me like there were so many people I knew, people I was close to, and it was like we were all together, doing wonderful things, learning and realising and growing and experiencing and it was all wrapped up in spirituality and – dear I say it? – God and, really, it was a wonderful time. I felt like, because of all the moving I did, I was a member of this inter-city ‘light club’ of swinging young bucks who were all groovy and cool and really going places. We wanted it, right? Enlightenment? Universal enlightenment? Y2K and the forecast Earth changes and all that other mad shit? I mean, I don’t know about you but so much in those days I felt like I was on the verge of something – even as I was making breakthroughs – as though I was gonna burst through to the other side, or have a ministry thrust upon me, or be there all expectant and accepting when the dimensions collided or collapsed or did whatever they were supposed to do. Mad days! Of course now I look back and think, wow, what phooey – but, well and truly, it felt so real. Well, I guess there was realness in with it all but also a lot of delusion and false belief and mad stuff – and maybe even madness. Yeah, I think I went mad and went a little bit too far down that path of…whatever path it was I went down – and I look back on it all now with no small measure of embarrassment. And still…there was joy, and there was a goodness I felt inside, and I do believe that was real – and that also somewhere down the line, I lost it, and that’s a little bit sad.
So here I am and I guess what I’m asking you is how have things been for you in all this area. Was it just a passing fad or was it something more? Do you get where I’m coming from? How have you managed in the days and years since your own young swinging buck days of those heady late nineties and now looking back from this vantage point of being almost even grownups? What do you think about that?
I suppose I ought to share my own story.
It’s like: there’s the life I’ve lived, and then there’s the life I’ve convinced myself that I should have lived; that I went wrong somewhere; that I need to get myself back on track. I’ve been thinking like this for years…
It starts, even, way back in America ’99, when after Vipassana I got all hung up on thinking that I had to be somewhere special for millennium and that maybe something was gonna happen. I’d foolishly got into reading these channelled newsletters and stuff and they were always predicting this and that – you know the sort of thing: financial collapses, tsunamis, earth shifts and events that’ll bring out people’s fears, speeding up of karma, etc – and I was determined to be in the right spot, thought about it months in advance. Which was totally daft, because every other thing about my life was just taking it one step at a time and that always worked out fine. Anyways, I decided on Mexico Mexico I hit Albuquerque UK Mexico
In the meantime, of course, I went bonkers, and even though I was kind of love and light embodied I’d also drifted way into delusion and come down with a full-blown case of Messiah Complex. Oh dear. That was rough. I know it’s common but it’s no fun to look back on. I was a loon: even my wild drunken days aren’t as embarrassing as that. So there was good and bad. If I could turn back time…
1. Mother Meera’s helpers were always asking me what my job was, and shrugging off my blissed-out dippy answers (not sure what I would have said: but you can probably imagine) by saying things like, Mother likes people to work, have families.
2. Right after that lovely Siridharma (who you know, from Amsterdam) hooked me up with a job and a place to live there (working for Yogi Tea) and looking back now it seems like another one of those great providences and blessings but at the time I couldn’t see it because I was too hung-up on thinking providences and blessings would only really be sending you down avenues of classical supposed spiritual things like meeting saints and having mystic mad experiences and not doing things like getting jobs and flats and learning how to work a washing machine. This, I think, was to prove costly.
So I worked the job, and it was good, and in the track of my life that I didn’t walk down I probably stayed in that till I realised a few things about not being Jesus and got myself nice and grounded and then maybe went back to the UK. Except, in the track of my life that I actually did walk down, I only lasted about three weeks, and pissed off Siridharma by leaving half-built pyramids on his roof and flooding his apartment, and then quit and walked out ‘cos I thought jobs were for losers and what I really wanted was enlightenment and maybe a forty day fast in the desert or something. What a maniac. There were two older women at Yogi Tea and one was all lovely and said, much to my ego’s delight, you remind me of Jesus, and the other one, who was a bit more stern – and with maturity, a bit more grounded – said, it’s all very well being high but it would be good if I felt like you were here and weren’t some feathery ghost (or words to that effect). In any case, I got this spam email one day that said, quit your job! and I looked out at the sun through my window, and thought about freedom, and I quit. Oh, but before doing it I pulled a tarot card to try and gain some wisdom and the card said, pride comes before a fall – and for some reason I can’t for the life of me see I took that as getting the go-ahead and off I went. Somewhere in the middle of all this I’d already been booted out of Vipassana for being too high and doing other practices (mantras, healing, various bliss-promoting exercises; I took their boot as a Christ-ian rejection, their worldly vibrations revolting at my exulted state) and also been deported once again from America
From that I went on the Amma tour and in material terms providence and grace once more flowed and I made it all the way around Europe without money or begging. Also, I got higher and higher until I was barely there in physical terms, a floppy blissful rag who gave not a shit for his body – who giggled in Paris November doorways under thin blankets and didn’t care – and all the body was to me was an inconvenient weight I had to drag around and feed every now and then. I don’t know why Amma let me get so high or continued to get me higher – but she did – and off the planet I went. And then I met these French people and the decided they wanted to sort of adopt me – they said we were soul family, that I needed to stay with them – and given that I was just going with flow and it felt pretty right I was down with that. And that was the start and the end of something else too.
There was a girl. She was a pretty girl and a sexy girl and a spiritual girl and a crazy girl. She wanted me and I didn’t see any reason to say no: ‘specially as I wanted her too. It was like we were on magnets, so drawn to one another we could barely stand to be more than a room apart. I remember at some point not knowing what to think, convinced women weren’t a part of my path and that I had to be beyond all that. I remember feeling torn and having been told of her intentions sitting in their car alone and flicking on the radio to John Lennon’s Imagine and thinking, no, I can’t do that, I need to save the world. And then I went and did it anyway. The magnets were too powerful. I had no fight left in me. I was a floppy rag and she mopped me up.
The beginning of the end. The beginning of my time with Eve. Mad time. Crazy time. Painful time. And grounding time. I don’t know what was going on – but ultimately she broke my heart by cheating on me and I realised I sure as shit weren’t no Messiah. I cried my fuckin’ head off. I punched the other guy. I screamed and spat and I saw that all I really was was a poor little human boy. And then I went crawling home to Yorkshire . We’d had the pride and there was the fall. If only I hadn’t quit that job in Amsterdam
How do I see it now? I see it as: yes, I should have stayed in Amsterdam Amsterdam
I remember a little after that going to Glastonbury France Glastonbury Yorkshire and I quit meditation and I started playing football instead. I suppose that was the beginning of my road back and my journey into manhood.
I got a liking for football. I still had something back then – a local Baptist church I played football with didn’t know my surname (hell, there were times when I didn’t know it!) and put me down as “Rory Peace and Light” – but slowly I guess it dripped away. I don’t know where it went. I was still mad and talked crazy and had delusions of grandeur, despite downsizing them a bit I suppose. And though I was on the road back I think I still took, again, the wrong road, when all the signs were pointing me in one specific direction, which I believe I see clearly now: everyone kept asking me if I went to the local university; and I met two girls who had studied writing there; and I really, really wanted to write my book that people were always telling me to write; and I did a tarot card reading on it and it said something about becoming as a student – though I took that as meaning the mindset, not the literal thing – and also I was living for free or cheap in my mum’s house which was only a short bike read from that uni anyways, which was in an old stately hall in beautiful grounds out in the country and you couldn’t imagine a better place – but in the end I missed all that because I was still so hung-up on following my so-called ‘spiritual path’ and I was determined once again to not tie myself to anything ‘cos I was all set to go once more on Amma’s European tour. Looking back I see how often I’ve ignored the signs and the path for what I felt I should be doing – ie, meditating, following saints – when now I feel living the spiritual life is really just about walking the path your heart wants to go for the growth of your soul – and sometimes that path and your heart want you to work, to settle down, to shag women and kick balls and mebbe watch a bit of TV and just gad. I don’t know: but that sort of makes sense to me in some way. But like I say, I was all hung-up on doing what I imagined the spiritual life looked like – following Amma, not living in Wakefield – and off I went again, and again she got me high and at the end of it I landed in Mother Meera’s lap and next thing I knew I was off to Canada to fall in love again with a girl I’d met in Mexico right back at the beginning of ’99.
Confusion here. If my idea of right and wrong tracks is right, and as I believe I should have been enrolling as a student at Bretton Hall (the stately home university) in 2001 instead of tripping off around Europe and getting hugs from a saint then I don’t know where the girl comes into this. Going to Canada felt right – I was at Mother Meera’s after Amma, and the feeling to go there came out of nowhere, and was overwhelming, and everything was provided for – another miraculous plane ticket – even when I let go of it – but for what purpose, that’s the question. Was it for the girl or was it for something else? Here, again, the track of my mind diverges:
1. I fell in love with the girl (we’ll call her Sara) and, wow, I wanted to be with her.
2. She wasn’t into me – I was too high – so I bent my being to becoming the thing I believed would win her – not high; stable; grounded; normal – and a year later I succeeded.
3. I guess she gave me something to live for in the real world, in which I’d not really had any interest before. After Canada
4. When I went to uni I remember so tangibly the feeling of walking down to town (Canterbury
5. And at uni I learned plenty and though I was still pretty high and mad when I started gradually I had all that beaten out of me (ha!) and knuckled down to playing lots of football and then mid-way through my first year I on a strong urge whim flew right back out to Canada and this time she was into it and we began something.
I get confused here. I can’t tell anything. I started my degree doing one thing (Religious Studies) and after my first year I realised I really didn’t like it and I miraculously switched to Creative Writing (decent, wonderful story) and, again, I recall walking down to town and fairly skipping ‘cos it was like my life was right back on track and finally in the right place and I was there doing what I should have been doing all along if I just hadn’t gone wallying off into weird and pointless side streets all in the name of lunacy. The path that had led me there was crooked – it took in living crazily in Dublin and a desperate phone-call to Mother Meera and then working as a postman and then living with a postman’s mum and then enrolling in the wrong course till I realised what the right one was – when really if I’d been paying attention I could have just done all a year before, in a different city, at a better place, and that all makes me weep ‘cos who knows who I would have met and where my life would have been if I’d managed to follow this so-called and believed in ‘right track’. I swear, man, several years later when I went back to Yorkshire and strolled around that luxury campus I wept at the not seeing what I should have done and being where I should have been. The years I would have been there were the last years the place was open and everybody talked about how special it was and I just can’t believe I missed it. But, still, by hook or by crook I got somewhat back on track and there I was in the second year of a Creative Writing degree, in 2003, and only one year and 200 miles off target.
But what about the girl? What was she? More grounding, like Eve? The final spur and impulse to get me to wake up and go to university? A little bit of bait dangling on a line, a carrot on a stick, much as the lure of teaching was (that was the final clincher in going to university: I was volunteering at a school and I loved it and I said, I want to be a teacher! It’s my vocation! and they said, well you’ll need a degree for that and off I went to get one – except by the time it came around and I finally gave teaching ago I realised that I hate it and there it all was, just a cunning trick to get me to where I needed to be when nothing else would work). You see why I’m confused.
What about the girl? I took a year out of uni to go and live with her in Canada and that was all right but also sort of weird – and lately I’ve been looking back at years when I’ve felt sort of weird and realised it’s because I absolutely wasn’t doing what I wanted to be doing. And I suppose even though I loved her like a crazy man – even while I asked, but what is love? what is it? – there were weird and bad times there too. We had four years of it; I never wanted anyone that strong before or since; and I hated it when we ended, thought it was the damn stupidest thing in the world that we weren’t together, but…well was it love? Or were we mad? I can’t figure my thing with women out – someone a couple of years back says this super-strong feeling we have as couples for each other that we often call love is really our pain-bodies attracting to each other, responding and reacting and longing to get close for whatever unhealed thing we have and we just mistake it for love and there we go, committing ourselves to and making children with people who are wrong for us and thinking all along it’s love. More important to like someone, no? More important to have harmony in a relationship than grand feelings and heart and whatever? And yet, whenever I look back – and it’s been like four years since we broke up – I always think she’s the one, she’s the one, damn, I screwed up there. But then, my dad always says the same thing about my mum and they’ve been divorced nearly thirty years and you couldn’t imagine two people more wrong for each other. Are men just destined to be foolish romantics and always looking back with longing but rubbish in the actuality of it? Or is there something more and woe and sorrow at the breakings up and mistakes of this world? We broke up because of communication problems. Because I was thinking about women with better boobs. Because my job was getting me down and I wasn’t functioning properly in any aspect of my life. Because we didn’t make the effort. No real good reason though – nothing a bit of counselling wouldn’t have sorted out – and still I look back; still I look back, and wonder, and see myself as my father, harking on about the only woman he really loved…
So what about the girl? Either she was grounding and good for me and got my head sorted and that was all, or she was the one and we blew it, or she was something in between. Or maybe all three – and probably it doesn’t matter. It occurs to me that all of this is just the normal course of things for everyone’s lives – but not many people analyse and sweat over it and try so desperately hard to always be this mythical thing called ‘on track’. I blame it on awareness. I blame it on the experience and the belief that there is such a thing as ‘on track’. I blame it on signs and directions which I experienced to such a massive extent that it worked its way into my bones and I couldn’t help but see it and aim to follow it always. And then of course it’s always possible that all these mistakes and side alleys and deviations and so-called wastes of time were all really what I needed – as it was when I was young, before there was awareness of the finer points of life – and that hopefully one day I’ll see it. Probably I’m mad for even thinking this way but – there it is, that’s the way I’m thinking. And I’ve been thinking this way for long enough to know that I couldn’t just stop so easy as a man can snap his fingers – or could I?
Anyways, point being, right track, wrong track – and we’re nearly there ‘cos I pretty much think I’m on the right track now. I graduated uni in 2006 – two years behind schedule now – and in front of me I had either going into teaching – aim all along (and, of course, financial security and career prospects and all those good things that certain women like, like a man who can pay a mortgage, etc) – and I had, after a meeting with a Creative Writing tutor who said, you should go on and do a Master’s, maybe, that: doing a Master’s. Which is what I’m doing now: starting in 2011. But where’d those five years go man! Oh, I’m getting old! Five years of trying to be a teacher, a charity shop manager, a boyfriend, a Londoner. Five years and I don’t feel like I’ve got a thing to show for it – wrong track again, and I think the only reason I didn’t go for the Master’s was because of money and when I finally realised that earlier this year, and thought again about how much I loved writing and not much else, I applied for it – to three places – and ended up right smack bang in the place where I grew up and at the campus that stately home Bretton Hall moved to studying with professors who had been there and who would probably have been my tutors right back in 2001 when I was still young and had piss and vinegar and vim and vigour and years ahead till 30 claimed me – and now 35! – and perhaps could have been somebody. That’s where THE RIGHT TRACK was supposed to lead me: 2001-2004, a degree in Creative Writing; 2005, a master’s; and then somewhere in there, or after that, or whatever, the right of my America and Mexico spiritual travel book, and publishing, and maybe even financial security and finally the freedom to perhaps get back to more adventuring and maybe even mysticism. So, you see, I weep and moan a little when I think of all this and see how far off track I got – well, yes, even I snigger when I contemplate the concept – and think of all the ‘wasted’ years and how much older I am now than I should have been. Only thank God that it’s only my birth certificate that gives it away! lol
And I’m not even sure if any of that was what I wanted to talk about. ;-)
The point is: spirituality. All these wanderings and groundings and getting to grips with the real world have sure brought me back to Earth – but what I really crave when I think of it and look back – as I always must until this damn book of mine can ever finally stand on its own two feet and make its way in the world – is that magic, that ecstasy, that bliss and wonder and excitement and voyage and discovery and tremendousness. Times with John Milton having my mind blown and feeling the cogs of it just stop. Times realising things and applying them in my life and times when everything made sense. Times when I sat back and noticed that all I’d been doing for the last two hours was breathing and I felt better and clearer and more peaceful than I ever have. I don’t know of anything in this world that compares to that. I wish I could marry the two but I seem incapable. I feel cursed to this writing life – and I love it – but it’s not like anybody wants me to write anyway. People don’t read my words – well, some people do – but nobody needs them. What’s to say that hasn’t been said? Nothing that I can think of. But to live as an example: good for both parties. And I think always my thoughts will bend back in that direction whenever I think of the best thing I ever did and probably the best thing I could be doing with my time too. But am I incapable? What of you? Did it pass or fade and comeback or have you moved on or do you look at it like a teenager looks at the days he played with dolls or it something that haunts you and nips at you always somewhere deep down as it does with me? Or did you keep it, and is it just me that failed, unable to shake off the weights I entered this world with and whatever other weights I picked up along the way?
Really, that’s the main question. I want to know what happened to the light club? I want to know where all those 22- and 23-year-olds ended up: the ones I hugged and loved and shared things with: our yoga and our meditations and all our groovy realisations and discussions about energy and all the things we learned. Everybody’s young and learns stuff and perhaps never has times like those again – but when I look around the world – around England, sure: perhaps it ain’t never gonna be here – I don’t see the same thing in today’s young guns’ eyes, I see something else. Where curiosity? Where burning desire and longing? Where insane conviction and urges for body-sacrificing displays of faith? We wanted it, huh? We got promised something – oneness, enlightenment, Buddhahood – and I guess it wasn’t wise to promise that but we still went looking for it anyways. Did we reach the end of the road and find there was nothing there ‘cept a lovely view and content ourselves with that? Turn around then and make babies and work jobs like everyone else, ‘cept in our hearts we remained different? I dunno: I guess I still want to think there’s more to it than that, that one day I will get called up the mountain and force my way into heaven and return bearing the tablets of truth to bring something real and helpful to this mixed-up crazy world of moneygrubbers and insane religionists and haters and bad parents – that, I still can’t let go of. But until I complete my education and get this book and my writing urges finally finished and done with once and for all, I guess everything’s on hold. And still, there’s women…
I can’t let go of women: I can’t shake ‘em off. I went to Israel earlier this year – mad, final pilgrimage walking in Jesus’s footsteps without food or luggage or money, as some crazy hitchhiker-friendly propher had told me to do right just before I left America in 2000 – and somewhere down the trail I found this incredible wonderful cave and sat in it and did my meditation and looked inside myself to see what I truly wanted, as I had once done half-way up Mount Shasta with dear buddy light club member Shawn. That day, the answer was “to know God, to know the truth” – it burned in me; I would’ve died to find it – and I guess something came. I went again and I expected something similar – but that wasn’t it, those words would just have been head stuff, ego-Messiah-desires again. No, what I had inside was “to write” and “to find a wife” – that was what I really wanted – as it had been, I remembered, a year previous at the end of another long wonderful pilgrimage across Mexico back to my fabled hot springs. To write and to find a wife – that was the truth of me then – and probably has been for a while. The humble truth. The truth of a human boy. The truth of just the simple bloke I always was, deep down, and am. And so back to England I went, and there I met this woman, and something in me said, she’ll do – not, she’s the one; or, oh my God, I’ve got to have her; or, I saw you in a dream; or, you’re the one I’ve been waiting for; or, lights and flashes and visions and miracles – just, she’s nice, she’s got her head screwed on, she’s got a fit body and she doesn’t give me hassles and she’ll make a good mother and probably let me do whatever I want: lots of boxes ticked there. Humble, blokeish reality. And now we’re together and if we’re not careful one of these days she’s gonna get knocked up – and we’re not – and then life will take a whole new turn still. I kind of want it to but at the same time I’m afraid. I’m afraid she isn’t the one. I’m afraid there is another out there with bells and whistles and visions and love and I don’t want to jeopardise that. I’m afraid I’ll never have the money or be able to provide – or, rather, beyond that, I’m afraid that I’ll have to sacrifice my freedom and let go of the mad desires I still have for travel and mystic adventures and Buddhahood (interesting irony there, of course) in order to do that thing called provide, be the good man, the good dad. Of course, from all who go there – all decent chaps – there’s apparently no better thing than fatherhood and no better place to learn love but, not having yet had the experience in this lifetime of a loving father or even mother I guess I don’t possess the in-the-bones knowledge or belief in that. I dunno: I keep saying I need a woman and I keep getting them – lovely women, good old life – and then I turn them away for reasons I’m not quite clear about and then I say, damn, damn, why did I do that? next time I won’t be so stupid and I’ll keep a-hold of her and do the right thing and not be such a fool – and yet here I am with another fine and lovely woman contemplating the future days of not being with her and wanting to be alone and starting to wonder maybe I do just want to be alone after all. Of course, there are ways to satisfy those urges within relationships – modern relationship making it harder and harder to do that all the time, I think – but…I don’t know how. How to know if right one? Through feeling? Well I been there and that didn’t work. Through personality? Well I been there too and it seems sort of empty and difficult without the feeling. Through both? Ah, now there you’re talking – but how to find that? Hard these days when we’re all such strangers instead of imagined traditional idealised indigenous culture all growing up in tiny village community with smiles and peace and knowing everybody’s history and choosing childhood sweethearts and ain’t everything grand? All are strangers. All have got their own thing. And most of the girls I know like pubs and dance and want their guys to like them too, and that just don’t work for me. Although not the one I’m with now. :-)
Oh, to let go of the urge to write: to be free of computers and book ideas and chasing publishers and thinking it means something and needs to be done. To be just once more that young free wild online journaller who wrote when he could, and wrote plenty, and probably did more good than he does now even though now he’s actually trying to play the game. To be back on the road. To be discovering new things once more. To be sharing the joy of that instead of dense and heavy concrete England
Where you at man? That’s what I want to know. I’m sorry this has been long and mad and, really, a rather random and I suppose bizarre communiqué after all this time but – well, I just couldn’t help it. Would you rather me not send? Or is it a bit late for that?
By the way, everything is groovy here and now that I’m back doing my studies in writing and making progress in that instead of sitting unhappy and confused in London trying to live someone else’s life I feel everything’s in place. It’s great to be back in Yorkshire, and great to still be playing football as fit and sprightly as I ever was – my job now is football referee, by the way – and I do believe that things will be revealed in the coming year, ‘cos though several years late – by my weird way of thinking standards – we’ll be coming I suppose to the end of a certain segment of the track – the section called EDUCATION – and I suppose there’ll have to be something groovy after that. Only thing is, really, I’d better keep me eyes open for it and not miss it, like an ass!
This degree, by the way, which I postponed for so long because I thought, I’m not shelling out three or four grand just to be told to write a bunch of stuff, I ended up getting paid for me. Imagine that! Five years avoiding it, and then earlier this year one day realising, fuck it, it don’t matter, it’s only money, spend the damn thing – and then when I apply for it they say, want to apply for a bursary? and I do and they give it to me. Madness! Four thousand two hundred pounds and not a penny for me to pay beyond my modest living expenses – which I can pay for in just six hours of reffing a week, leaving plenty of time for everything else. I shake my head. Providence
And with all this time do you think I should do spiritual practise? I stopped meditating, really, years back, back when I was first at uni. I went to Amma’s in London
Anyways, how are you? lol
Lots and lots and lots of love, remembering you as you were, and as I was, back in a tent in New Mexico smiling and looking glinting eye to glinting eye, and sharing and excited and magic.
Your friend, forever,
Rory
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