Olympic Running About.

My only success in athletics was at primary school when I came third because I was desperate for a pee. In a parents race many years on I was way behind our neighbour, a 5’6” woman, when my legs just couldn’t move any faster. Apparently some of us have fast reacting muscles and some slow so my inability is genetic. My other is lethargic hence my leaning towards motorised sport. Flying for example is not an Olympic sport though most of us can do it with the aid of a jet engine. But how many Olympic sports are there? There appears to be millions. It seems like any physical movement either unaided or with any lumpen object is now a sport. Where bicycles are carbon fibre and as light as possible weights are as heavy as possible. I mean with a little high tech ingenuity a shot-put could weigh grams and be aerodynamic and go much further, and you wouldn’t have to be built like a giant meat pie to throw them. And synchronised swimming. Elegant but you don’t see many ballerinas smiling like they’ve just seen John the Baptist with a nose clip. It’s all quite arbitrary. But rather like Swedish Spirit camp that’s not the point. Codify some arbitrary activity until everyone knows what’s required then work your balls off to achieve your best and your “I’m so important” lower self will be occupied in what it’s good at; the arbitrary, whilst somewhere else some unfathomable progress occurs. It’s been suggested we have three brains, reptilian, mammalian and human due to our long evolutionary ancestry. The first is pure emotion, the second instinctual reality and the third a constructional, imaginative unreality. I spent last evening in the company of three lovely cob ponies and if they were saying anything it was, “Get real guys, run about.” So maybe that’s the Olympics in a nutshell.

Loose shorts, no nickers.

A little light Sainsbury’s on a sunny Thursday afternoon and I have to say loose shorts with no knickers is a little thrilling; freedom tinged with apprehension. Quite the opposite of the black lycra clad Olympic athlete who, had I bought a decent sized Taste the Difference courgette, I could not have competed with. Strangely though no attractive women, plain at best. Anyway uni applications are down 8.8% due to increased fees so there are now only slightly more places than applicants. That sounds fine but as applicants for textile design aren’t likely to change to criminology unis are likely to have a similar drop in income, and if university economics are as tight as that athlete’s lycra suit some unmentionable tackle will become evident. That, the elephant’s todger in the room if you talk to anyone involved, is money. Universities are as corporate as Microsoft or Man U. It’s not ‘all about the fans’ or ‘all about the students’ or all about Windows 8 for that matter, it’s all about the money, or more accurately about the wage bill. In these last two weeks UK Inc has won more Gold Medals than the USA and everywhere else in the world apart from China, won by enthusiasts who love what they’re doing not for the £1++,000 a week of footballers, who incidentally last won World Cup gold in 1966. There’s a clear message here. Don’t shop at Sainsbury’s on Thursday afternoon unless you can subtly display elephantine equipment. Loose shorts and no knickers may be comfortable, even thrilling, but they can’t compete with showing the world the best of what you’ve got.

Spirit Camp 5 2012

http://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_huey.html

Spirit Camp 4 2012

And personally I had less desire to be keen, strong, resolute, skilful and capable. I put a good shift in but no panting at the bit to do more. The food, though wholesome and generous, I didn’t digest well. I muse that we don’t take into consideration the emotional element of digestion and focus on calories and nutrition. What my body does with food irrespective of those numerical counts is possibly a more subtle business, that fat or thin is a systemic choice of what needs to be held, that thin people hold a need to run and fat people have a need to hold against the needs of some emotional famine. All I know is I had a little belly by the end. In the midst of all the jolloping back and forth to the tree a young Estonian woman danced like the queen of swans in high-armed elegance, power and precision. Here again the body holds and expresses itself without the clutter of words and counts. I may not look like her but in dance I experience the same sense of perfection that only my body knows. So often the servant to my daily mundane actions, if let rain it can fill me with the sense of perfect grace that I know no other way of experiencing. At the final impromptu concert I sang a song. I was feeling quite confused but had to step into it. Out in the open, night falling to a grassy bank full of people I could hardly see. My choice of thought was to fill the night with my voice. Not be loud, not project to the people or act as might a performer just fill the night air. I think it sounded OK but more importantly I achieved what I wanted; I brought it into being. Like the young woman dancer, I hope, I was with practice able to bring it bodily into being. Later that evening a man, Stephan who runs a recording studio in Berlin, asked me enthusiastically to come to Berlin to record something, anything. So here’s a question. What did he hear to be that enthusiastic? Me, the night, my body or something higher that I was calling from? And what was he calling me to do from that something higher? As a cat might say when you command it to heel, “Interesting words.”

Spirit Camp 3 2012

The Deer Tribe way is in need of a dramatic spring clean. It is drifting towards the Baptist church or some other Godly institution. It could end up being niceness. The people at Spirit Camp are all lovely which is no bad thing but I sense no chaos, no awkwardness. If it is Shepard-ing towards a uniformity of smiling I spit in its face. Personally the teaching of wisdom has always troubled me. I have come to the consideration I have a donkey head (conscious) and ‘it’ will conform what is given to suit my lower self. This lower self will strut with the confidence of ‘knowing’ whatever peculiarities it has knitted together and attach to them the credibility of the source. The aural tradition of Two Bears when written down and printed out in Swift Deer’s manuals becomes a very different thing. Aural requires ‘being with’ the teacher and all that that entails. Manuals have none of that. It may seem like a good idea for fast tracking knowledge but it is not appropriate to wisdom. Even my lecturer at Art College where I was learning design refused to teach me how to design. My personal process towards becoming a designer was sacrosanct, inviolable. A whole bag full of contrariness, failures, fun and discoveries would have been bypassed by a few simple instructions. But he did threaten to throw me off the course if I chose the wrong exam project that would have lead to my failure. He could have taught me and I could have become a good designer but that’s not the point. I hold that teachers of wisdom only produce more teachers of wisdom. This is very evident at Spirit Camp where I couldn’t pick up a stick without at least two people offering me advice on how to hold it. “Fuck off and pick up your own stick!” And all the self-congratulatory speak of the high-ups, ‘You have all done a great job, thank your arse for getting you here’ etc. Bin it! It’s bollocks. I witnessed our Dog Soldier leaders, with one leaving, speak with focus from the heart. That was an honour to hear and be included in; it was not PR to boost membership.


But how might it change from a moderately challenging holiday camp? Oh dear that’s’ me ostracised at dawn. J What comes to my mind are many diverse opportunities to ‘be’ outside ‘the box’ of one’s comfort zone through dance, clowning, theatre, trance and meditation, but these are way outside the tradition. I must simply conclude I belong to a different tribe. But then after all this arrogance I must also conclude that the Deer Tribe creates many beautiful people, and that’s a wonderful gift to the world.

Spirit Camp 2 2012

This opening of the higher self to the lower self applies to the dancers of the ceremony too. Without discipline the chattering monkey of the lower self holds sway. It is thought, a continual stream of self-importance that must be followed like the orders of a Sergeant Major. In order to maintain who I (think) I am these things must be done. “I am keen, strong, resolute, skilful, wise and capable” along with the clutter of roles we or others have assigned our self; to be a good father or mother, a breadwinner, a star, an alcoholic etc. Because our lower self continually confirms all this in its internal dialogue we become fixed, we fail to see outside the box we have created for our self. There are many ways to break this box, meditation, mundane stressful endurance or constantly attempting different unexpected things driven by perverse curiosity. The dance is the second of these. It works because it uses the strengths of the lower self against itself until it breaks down. Those who dance and are not stressed to this breaking point miss the point, like the woman who apparently sat in the arbour, didn’t dance much and complained about everything. I find that beautifully amusing. Why did she come? Why didn’t she stay at home and have sex with the window cleaner? The difficulty with this approach, the woman being an extreme example, is that the lower self can learn to cope with the dance. It can come back year after year assuming being there will in itself contribute to raising the shamanic energy of human existence in some airy fairy way. No! that is the chatter of our individual monkey. We are not individuals; we are not ‘special’ humans though we have a particular part to play in the continuum. This is the realm of the higher self, hearing the flow of the continuum and giving life to our role in it. There is no more to magic than this. To the lower self the higher self will appear a mad thing, a clown, a ruin-er of dreams, a breaker of the plans you have made for yourself, and ultimately the destroyer of the self you cherish so much. To choose it is madness or wisdom; be careful. But it can be the end of misery also.

Spirit Camp 1 2012

Well, back from another Swedish Spirit Camp for a second year. Last year I had the grace to keep my mouth shut but this year I found it drifting open. It’s an odd event based on ancient American Indian Shamanic traditions. Odd in that it somehow doesn’t do what it purports to do yet in a sense it does. That needs explanation. As a Dog Soldier for example we are well organised to do numerous different tasks to support the ceremony. We all eagerly pitch into every task with enthusiasm and the leaders of the team lead with the same fervour. It requires considerable focus over long 18 hour days. Our orders change and conflict due to changing circumstances but all the tasks are very simple and one very soon learns initiative is not required, just obedience, though self initiative is lorded as a virtue. Countless arbitrary rules of ceremony are to be obeyed that can be changed on a whim by the higher-ups and make no apparent difference if they’re broken. This, as anyone who’s worked in a large corporation will attest, leads to stress. One begins to rail at the stupidity, the inefficiency, the blocking of any personal input. All this is in the name of doing what needs to be done. Over days this regime creates strain where it purports to be quiet efficiency. At some point or another individuals give in to this strain and ‘can’t take it any longer’ and at that point they’re left to recoup with no mention that that is the purpose of the exercise. It purports to be a support role yet its real role is to break the lower self of the individual. With enough ‘breaking’ the lower self opens its awareness to the higher self. It’s a sort of ancient boot camp principle. One chap made very valid comments on how the working system could be improved and the work made easier and more fulfilling but in a way that would make the whole thing less effective. One could argue that human progress is built on that chaps suggestions and that we would all feel much better if our work was easier and we felt good about ourselves, it’s definitely been the basis of my self development, but being a member of an ancient tribe where daily life was a matter of survival one needed to be tough and resolute. Though today life is much easier they’re still necessary virtues.
Whether this is spiritual is another matter. The modern variant of this ancient tradition doesn’t call for teenagers to do this once or twice as needed but for people of all ages to do it yearly time and time again. I find this strange. I mean if Battymouse has done 43 Spirit Camps does it mean he is very wise or the world’s slowest learner? Either way I’ve done two now and I’ve figured it out and needn’t go again.