My Oldest Friend.

The oldest friend I still know intimately is my guitar. Not the same one but a procession like a long multiple train journey, nine of which I still have. They follow my sixty-year procession through skiffle, classical and jazz, through gentle and more recently upbeat. But this is about how rather than what. I wasn’t a natural performer, not your born front man, I didn’t know that connection. Like many introvert folk singers I hid somewhere between the song and the audience not really connecting with either. It was a quite lonely place with only myself for company, up there exposed yet hidden in some protective cloak of invisibility. I got a clap and that helped but I knew it was a consolation prize. Slowly through mastering the technicals I found space to play the song, to let it flow through without obstruction. But churning covers out to order wasn’t enough. I found songs I wanted to connect to and began affairs with them. I began to build the confidence to be their lover, to build a mutuality, to sing them in the moment as lovers do. That connection was made. Then the greater challenge, to be exposed; to perform this love making in public. Performance and acting are often mistaken to be forms of duplicity. Some are but true performance is real. Only true feeling will illicit true feeling. Through clowning I began to venture into the innocence of the moment that connects us all. There are countless elsewheres to get lost in but only one moment that we are all in together, this one. That’s the power of it. So finally I’m beginning to glimpse a way of being, a way of showing heart through music. It’s taken a long time and is easier for some but this has been my process. I suspect Robert Downey Junior knows it well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1crxmBTxRlM

Spirit Camp 2015: Maryettamouse.

Maryettamouse was chopping prayer sticks when Billmouse and I joined her. She asked for guidance but I suggested she work it out herself. If there’s one thing I can’t stand about Spirit Camp it’s helpful advice. It’s like every time I do something a queue of people form behind me with suggestions, “Perhaps you could….” or, “You might want to try…..” and their variants. NO, FUCK OFF, GO AWAY, LEAVE ME ALONE! So Maryettamouse didn’t get any from me other than a bit later on saying pick wood with straight grain and no knots. Anyway we chatted. Her face had the beauty of honesty rather than the bland sugary looks of a model, designed to be memorable rather than flattering. Later we smiled in passing. During the dance my eyes of their own accord were drawn to Maryettamouse, her purposeful truthful elegance. After it I commented, “You walk backwards strongly.” Oddly she knew what I meant and added it was walking forwards that was her difficulty. After my song performance rather than the usual ‘loved your song’ she said ‘that was so you’ like she knew me.

The following day I hesitantly said, “I think we have a special relationship” not knowing the response I might get. She leapt in the air like an electric shock and agreed with a beautiful smile, “yes!” We both knew but not the basis or origin of it. It’s strange when this happens. Easily explained but only with explanations that carry no weight. We never met again. I hope you have found Stiffmouse and read this. With love for your future. 

Spirit Camp 2015: Voice.

I sang a song. It went well, at least I remembered the words, which is always a bonus. The following day a woman asked if I could sing it to her again. I said I thought it wasn’t possible because the guy with the guitar had gone home. Later it turned out he hadn’t so I asked if I could sit and play for a while. Getting me, the woman and the guitar together seemed almost impossible amongst the chaos of packing up day, but when I looked up she was there sitting next to me. I played the song and by the end she was in floods of tears. It was my own song and special to me. She asked if I could play it again. At this point I began to wonder if I had acquired a nutter but I sang the last verse again. Through her tears she explained, “Yesterday I didn’t know why I was crying but now I do. You have connected me again.” She gesticulated to her body, her belly. “I thought I had lost it, I might never feel it again.” I felt for her tears. “No my tears are joyful not sad. Crying is like a car wash, you know.” We smiled. Now I don’t want to appear mercenary but I wrote that line down to use later. Too good to miss. We parted, she wanting a CD if I made one, and me with a renewed wanting to make one. For me this had become a recurring theme over the ten days, how in the most unforeseen and delicate ways we connect by heart. 

Spirit Camp 2015: Traps.

All is not well in spirit world. You know when you walk into a department store, say for perfume or electronics, a helpful smiling sales operative will gladly assist your purchasing. In their breezy pleasant way they will point out the virtues of their offerings as if helping you step ever closer to a future nirvana where all is nice and good. And 15% off. Their care for you is of course motivated by their own income and career prospects. With the Head of rugs and soft furnishing soon up for grabs they’re keen to show willing and turn a profit. In quiet moments with friends they will show the reverse of the coin. The pay is shit, their manager is a bully and head office is a bunch of OCD shysters who’ve lost the heart for good retailing This of course doesn’t happen in spirit world where all is already nice and good. So picture a happy go lucky seventy-year-old teenager on the bottom rung, a dog soldier with nowhere lower to go and no vested interest in becoming employee of the year and a junket to Arizona HQ. He might at some below-stairs meeting express a negative response to the management’s latest motivational initiative by saying, “Get the fuck out of my brain!” and be immediately tempted to apologise to his colleagues for his outburst. He needn’t have worried. One by one here and there in this way and that people thanked him. There was overwork, there was bullying, that too many rules and initiatives were losing the heart of retailing. Truth from the heart is a beautiful, poignant and precious thing. It’s the means by which our spirits connect and is un-ruled by mercenary thoughts of influence and manipulation. It’s what the Indians knew and what spirit camp should be about. It’s not about nice and good, status and influence, it’s about heart. 

Spirit Camp 2015: Taps.

Faith, hope and prayer must never appear in the lexicon of a designer. Materials have no compunction to do you a favour; they’re best viewed as immoral. In fact one begins to see God’s problem in creating man. Over three Spirit camps I’ve tried to fix the knee operated automatic water valves for the four hand-wash stations. The first camp was taken up understanding how they worked and believe me that’s not obvious. The second was spent postulating and testing various theories as to why they didn’t. I mean they did but not reliably. This year began similarly. Now one assumes as they’re manufactured and sold in a nice box etc they are designed to work reliably but in this case the designer had faith and hope: Faith that a small o-ring would not compress under constant pressure and hope that it would magically centre itself into a small hole to cut the supply off. Obviously magic is another no-no concept to the designer. A good design must give zero alternatives to a mechanism other than to work. These valves had several and have now been junked for ordinary taps. This raises an interesting philosophical point. If, as is supposed, God or Spirit gave man free will might the master designer junk his protégé as an unsuccessful prototype if we prove unreliable? A salutary thought. Might he not appreciate our faith, hope and prayer approach and prefer we follow his own design philosophy of the rigorous application of truth and reality to create our best solutions? I know no better focus for contemplation than the simple phrase, “Everything is.” Its linguistic simplicity allows it to go any and everywhere without building a complexity of manuals, codes and beliefs. And of course magic.

Revolution Time.

Remember the other revolutions, the French, Russian, the collapse of Communism, the Boston Tea Party etc? They all began when the people weren’t getting enough to reasonably live on. Time and time again a ‘system class’ has risen to take control and within their own concept of reason has considered themselves worth more and more. It’s a basic loophole in cognition that it is wholly comparative. Cognition doesn’t have absolute or objective measurement. I was going to say we have rulers to do that, which throws up an interesting double use of the word. The system class thus has no means of judging their needs other than in comparison with their equally wealthy neighbours, and just like the rest of us they’d just like a little bit more. Wealth becomes unbalanced simply because of the nature of cognition, and at some tipping point there is a revolution. It’s surely time we took account of this basic cognitive impairment and designed a system around it. The Greeks, God bless them, have reminded us of the philosophical struggle they went through millennia ago to create such a system. Democracy, though we cling to the word, has been much subverted since then by many different circumstances. It’s time we went back to its philosophical root. This time the system class is global and the whole planet is at stake. They are unaccountable to any populous, government or rule of law. The checks and balances on their cognition have been overcome and all that’s left is a decent into Caligula. 

Karma Dharma.

I don’t know much about these two but as I see it Karma is getting in your own way and Dharma is not. I suspect there’s probably an area of the brain that constantly figures out what’s gone wrong, and because we don’t like things going wrong it makes up stuff as to why it’s all gone wrong. Of course nothing has gone wrong, it’s just gone the way it’s gone, just not the way we wanted it to so the stuff it makes up is a fabrication of how it could have gone right if it hadn’t gone wrong when it was neither right or wrong in the first place. These fabrications form an insulator between reality, which is neither right nor wrong, and one’s inner state that’s dam sure it is all about right and wrong and that you’re getting the worst of it. You then act as if that’s the case and retaliate to even things up. Basic mistake because what’s wrong will have a different version of what’s right and wrong and retaliate back. These retaliations reverberate around the system producing karma. Basically don’t take it personal. Then comes the butterfly state as one exits the “get this fucking shit off me” cocoon. Here the same stuff happens but that little area in the brain has given up, it’s gone on a sabbatical, (from which it rarely returns) and everything just is. And it ‘is’ in a gently humorous way. Imagine you’re a Velcro covered hedgehog. Everything you come up against snags and tags and you become a big ball of twigs, leaves, slugs and cat food. OK I don’t know why cat food but it’s possible. Yuck! And then as if by magic the Velcro turns into glossy straight spines. Nothing snags, the crap falls off and you’re a clean go anywhere hedgehog just like you’re meant to be. And the only way you can go is forward. That’s Dharma. And don’t blame me if this is all bollocks, I learnt it from our cat Britney. 

The Power of Tea.

Yesterday I was given a cup of tea, which was nice. Today I measured the time it took to boil two mugs of water as it’s virtually impossible to boil just one in a kettle. (one minute) As the kettle is 3 kilowatts it thus takes 1.5 Kw minutes per mug full. OK so far? Now the person making the tea yesterday filled the kettle to around a litre, enough for around four mugs full so the other three would be left to go cold. I’d guess on average two mug fulls will be left to go cold waiting for the next brew, which is 3 Kw minutes of wasted energy per cup. Now I drink a lot of tea but I’d say on average a typical adult will drink five cups of tea or coffee a day. That’s then 15 Kw minutes wasted energy per adult per day or 0.25 Kw hrs. As this happens most days, say 350 per year, that’s 87.5 Kw hrs per year. OK lets say around 40 million adults are in the habit of drinking five hot drinks per day, that’s 3,500,000,000 Kw hrs per year, which is 3.5 million megawatt hours. Now the Drax power station generates 3,960 megawatts. Times that by hours in a year, 8760, and you get KW hrs/yr and a very big number, 34.6 million megawatt hrs per year as opposed to our 3.5 million. But it does mean that 10% of the energy of our largest power station is being wasted by overfilling electric kettles. So here’s the thing. Turn on the cold tap fully and count the seconds it takes to fill a mug using the tried and tested “thousand and one, thousand and two” method. On ours it’s three. Then fill the kettle on that basis from empty. Keep doing it this way and it will always be near empty, which is fine, and it’ll boil twice as quick too. If you have an old kettle with an element in the water you’ll still have to cover the element and waste energy, but you can begin to see why power stations dread half time in the world cup final.