Seventy times seven

The work is always inside you.
This knot does not get untied
by listening to the stories of other people.

The well inside your house
is better water
than the river that runs through
the entire town.

Mevlâna Jalâluddin Rumi

Well, I had quite a strong reaction to writing last week’s blog. Having written it Saturday, and posted it Sunday morning, I spent a lot of the rest of Sunday in waves of tears, source unknown. I just let the waves pass through me as best I could. Sometimes there was grief in a particular wave, sometimes regret, sometimes shame, sometimes loneliness – sometimes a nameless combination of currents and undercurrents.

During all of this emotional undulation I saw that one of the problems with last week’s blog was that I was trying to fit a very messy and chaotic and drawn-out and frightening process – or entanglement of processes – into a rather graceful analogy. And part of my being was reacting against that. Because that part of my being is hungry for coherence between my inner and outer worlds – and it’s particularly hungry for coherence between what going on inside me and what I communicate to others. I suspect that’s why my maverick churchwarden stepped in at the end of the blog, disrupting my high church sermon preparation with some low church mischief, reminding me that there is a price to be paid when you try to fit living, chaotic, possibility-rich analogue experiences into neat, wordy, formulaic, analogous boxes.

Yes, the caterpillar-to-pupa-to-butterfly-or-moth story is a rich analogy to play around with, but, no, it does not actually describe the fucking awfulness and lost-ness and stuck-ness and desperation of some of the times I’ve been through – and I suspect others in the middle of their own self-disintegration processes might concur. Could I have surrendered as gracefully and trustingly as a caterpillar? No fucking way. I was way out of my depths. Dread, despair and death – of old identities I took for solid – were sometimes daily company, as was a very delicate nervous system, which “tripped” under very little pressure. Did I enjoy having my old muscles of certainty broken down? I kicked and screamed most of the way.

These waves of tearful emotions carried on into Monday, and by Monday lunchtime I suspected I needed to do something more than just let them pass through me. So, I decided to do a little DIY ceremony. I was just following a hunch, that some sort of ritual and structure would help me find the information and insight and wisdom that these waves were carrying.

So, I did the washing up, swept the cabin, prepared the room, and lit half a dozen candles. And then I had some sort of arguable brainwave: if I gather together all the dog-end-of-winter recreational drugs in my possession, I probably have enough to launch me into a fairly altered ceremonial state. Did I want to do a DIY ceremony in an altered state? Yes. Were my motives pure? No – there was definitely some psychedelic greed in me. Greed for an extraordinary experience. Was there a deeper wisdom beneath this impure brainwave? Yeah, my inner wisdom felt like it could work through my inner stupidity – not for the first time – and I felt refreshingly enthusiastic for a bit of deep inner diving.

So, I mustered my end of season supplies: three quarters of an acid-infused fruit pastel (probably not vegan), a dozen old Scottish mushrooms (probably vegan), and the remains of a bottle of nicely-balanced CBD-THC oil (definitely vegan). Not quite a sacred cup of ayahuasca – but post-modern-higgledy-piggledy is how I sometimes roll. More Blue Peter than Songs Of Praise.

But, you know what? It all worked a treat. Dosage, set, setting, ceremony. The whole afternoon and evening – it was one of the more powerful ceremonies of my life. And somehow, I managed to journey deep whilst simultaneously holding and sometimes even directing the journey. I reckon I was focussed for about a third of the time, semi-focussed for another third, and drifting and daydreaming for the remainder. Given how far and easily my focus often strays, that’s a pretty good statistic for me.

Before I opened the ceremony, I wrote down my prayers and intentions.

I realised that a big part of the ceremony would revolve around forgiveness. In particular, I needed to forgive myself for the last seven years – because I have a lot of self-judgement about how crap I’ve been, and how much time I feel I’ve wasted. If only I’d been more skillful, if only I’d been more together, if only I’d known how to ask for help, if only I’d known what help I needed and so on and so forth... Painful to admit – to myself, let alone to others.

In order to forgive myself for these last seven years – whatever that phrase means – I realised that I also needed to truly accept what I have been through – whether my choices were wise or unwise, skilled or unskilled. To accept and to honour my experience as it’s actually unfurled. And to accept and honour myself, as I currently am. Otherwise forgiveness would run the risk of being a running away rather than a loving letting go.

My third prayer was both grand and specific: to ask Love to enter my heart and warm me from within; to really know Divine Love at the heart of my heart and the heart of my being. Why not? Why not just admit my lack of connection and my hunger and my thirst? I may love reading some of the mystics, and love quoting their words, but most of the time I feel on the other side of the mystical fence to them – and that they’ve definitely got something that I think I haven’t. Their grass looks a lot, lot greener, however much they try to convince me of the already-present-and-inherent greenery of my grass  – or even the non-existence of the fence. I’m with Maggie the Mare on this one.

I stoked up the wood burner, curtained all the windows, smudged the room and myself, sounded the meditation gong, ate the pastel, drank half of the mushie tea, and took a couple of drops of the oil. I made sure the rest of the oil was at hand – in case I needed to smooth out the journey, bring myself back to earth, or perhaps even provide a gentle boost.

Quite early on in the ceremony, whilst looking for music to play, I stumbled upon my Funeral Playlist. In one of my slightly more melodramatic and thankfully-brief suicidal phases, I’d compiled a playlist of funereal music. Perfect! What a great way to honour both the dying process I have been through – and am still going through – and the fact that I didn’t actually kill myself.

Ah, and it was such a moving mix of music – it warmed my heart with sadness and longing and love. And I couldn’t but help think of James, who took his own life last month. One particular song – Flower Of Light by Nick Barber – particularly made me think of James, and I sang along to it, with him in my heart, especially the Rumi-infused chorus:

And even if you’ve broken
Your vows
A thousand times
Come home again
To the arms
Of the one who waits
In the stillness of the centre...

Even if James would have found it far too soppy.

It reminded me of one of those gentle, devotional Christian choruses I used to sing back in my evangelical teenage days. I’ll see if I can find it on Youtube and post a link at the end of this blog.

And then The Beatles came on with All Things Must Pass. Oh my – that song could be played at any funeral.

Sunrise doesn’t last all morning
A cloudburst doesn’t last all day
Seems my love is up and has left you with no warning
It’s not always going to be this grey

All things must pass
All things must pass away...

By which time I realised that I was in quite a high and altered state of affairs. The DIY cabin-shamanic brew was definitely working – not too little, not too much, but definitely pushing me to a liminal and creative edge.

It was time to turn and face my last seven years.

Seven years! I moved home to look after mum in March 2013 and she died in October of that year. What on earth have I been doing since then?

Simultaneously resisting and navigating my way through a fairly thorough and protracted breakdown, that's what.

How can I tart that up for my CV? I must have learned some transferable skills at least.

It’s almost amusing now – I thought it would take maybe a year tops to get over mum’s death, and then I’d be back on the film-story-writing horse, trotting out of sunrises and galloping into sunsets. Oh my... I swear that when I signed up to being me I should have read the small print.

Be Not So Fearful by Bill Fay came on, the last track of my funeral playlist. Don't know why that man and his music aren’t more well known.

Oh, I found myself sobbing properly snotty tears, and, once the music finished, a stream-of-consciousness forgiveness prayer began to tumble from my lips.

forgive me
my longing and my loneliness

forgive me my
broken heart
and my broken-heartedness

forgive me my violence
and self-rejection

forgive me my impatience
and my cruelty

forgive me my lack of wisdom
forgive me my lack of skill

forgive me my confusion

forgive me my powerlessness

forgive me my avoidance

forgive me my cowardice

forgive me my lack of love

forgive me my lack of connection to Source

forgive me my overload of shame

forgive me my lack of kindness towards myself

forgive me my self-judgment...

I just kept praying out loud and asking for forgiveness until I felt all prayed out and all forgiven out too.

And then I found a sung version of that prayer from the Hawaiian Ho’oponopono ceremony:

I’m sorry
Please forgive me
And thank you
I love you

And I sang it over and over until I was both the one asking for forgiveness and the one granting forgiveness, and even the song of forgiveness itself. I wasn’t interested in who was wrong or right, or even if anything wrong had actually been done – I just wanted to be free of all the unforgiving bonds that were binding me to the past, and free from my interpretations and free from my stories and free from my projections and free from my judgments and all that heavy, heavy, sticky stuff that weighs us down and tangles us up and saps our strength and keeps the possibility of joy at bay. That obscures our true nature.

Phew. I got to a point where I felt I’d done all I could to forgive myself – and Life, including God – for these last seven years. I still felt there was some more work to be done – a deeper acceptance, perhaps, or perhaps a deeper letting go – but I’d definitely got stuck in, dug deep, and now felt much more loose and free.

I had myself a little boogie.

And then my dad appeared, in both my mind and my heart.

Now, unfortunately, me and dad never really got on. We could have a whisky and a laugh together, or have a political argument or philosophical debate, but I kept him at arm’s length and largely out of my heart. He’d been my headmaster when I was at primary school, which was quite a headfuck for a five-to-ten-year-old son. And then when I was sent to boarding school, what remaining trust I had in him largely disappeared.

I’m sad to say that I never really got to know him or properly love him whilst he was still on planet Earth. But I am happy to say that my love for him has grown and grown since he died. As has my appreciation for his good qualities. Bizarrely, it’s still a living, changing, ongoing relationship. But to get to this place has involved quite a bit of forgiveness.

What did I have to forgive him for now?

And then it hit me: no, I was the one who needed to ask him for his forgiveness. For all the shit I’d given him.

So, once more, I free-styled a prayer, speaking out loud, tears streaming down my face, asking dad forgiveness for all the emotional stress and psycho-political hassle I put him through whilst he was still alive – my lazy school ethic, my many arrests, my dropping out of university, my imprisonments, my rude poetry, my slack work ethic, my failed relationships, my partying and drug-taking – man, I’d given him as good as I thought he’d given me. Forgive me, dad, forgive me...

It was such a relief and release to clean out our relationship that bit more. I felt so much love for him, and so much missing too. I’ll never again get to see him in that particular Colin Hancock fleshy form. Oh my, where do we go, and where is “he” now?

At which point, quite a technical revelation occurred.

Several years ago, during a plant medicine ceremony, I was instructed to install my mum and dad, and their parents, and mum’s sister, Doreen, in a very particular order in my heart. Which I did.

But I was now shown that the version of dad I’d installed was both inaccurate and unhelpful.

I’m grasping for words here, because none of this came in words as such.

I saw that I was still holding onto a picture of dad as a bit sad and depressed, and suffering, and wounded – and I was carrying this frozen, and unreal, image of him around in my heart. But this image wasn’t helping him, and it certainly wasn’t helping me. Instead, I was instructed to picture him already free and already whole and already beaming with Divine Love – and to reinstall that upgraded version of him in my heart. My dad whole and free and beaming with Love! As soon as I did this, I felt light and lightness flutter about my heart. And I realised that I had to reinstall all of my relatives in this new form – but could do so at a later date.

And I further saw that I’d attached myself to a detrimental story: that if I healed myself, then I’d be able to heal my parents and ancestors. But as long as I was carrying around wounded versions of them, I’d struggle to get well myself. But if I installed healthy and liberated versions of them in my heart – that was the best medicine for them, and the best medicine for me.

I think this is a fairly accurate rendering of what I was wordlessly shown. Does any of this make sense?

I sat down and sang the Ho’oponopono prayer to dad, over and over again, love beaming and streaming between us:

I’m sorry
Please forgive me
Thank you
I love you

I had myself another boogie, in order to digest what I was going through – also, my body really wanted to move and to be an integral part of the ceremony.

And then my mum appeared, or, rather, a sense of my mum. And even though I had thought that I had forgiven everything between us – and had been forgiven – I realised that there was still more to say. And I knew I wasn’t asking to be forgiven for things I’d done wrong – mum would have been aghast at what I was asking forgiveness for – but I needed to speak it out loud to her, anyway.

I was sorry for not being able to save her from her suffering and her pain, that I was not able – I’m weeping as I type this – to save her from her cancer and her dying and her death, that maybe I could have done more, that I couldn’t keep her alive, that I could have been wiser about how to support someone through death, that I could have been stronger... And in all of this I realised that I was still carrying this irrational “belief” that her suffering and death were somehow linked to my lack of skill, and to my lack of love.

And all sorts of strange sentences and sentiments came tumbling out of my mouth.

Oh, another wave of grief is passing through me right now. Time for a cuppa, and maybe time to do the dishes too.

The thing is, even though I knew I “didn’t need to apologise” – I gave mum the very best love a son could – just saying all this stuff out loud, well, it was medicine to my heart and mind and soul. I needed to get this stuff off my chest, however irrational it seemed.

And then I found myself apologising to her for the last six years, especially confessing my shame at not being able to cope. And it was obvious that I wasn’t just confessing – and releasing – adult shame, I was primarily confessing my boyhood shame at not being able to cope with boarding school, shame that I never got to share with her. Because I was ten years old and too ashamed and too vulnerable and no longer trusting, and because she wasn’t able – or emotionally and culturally equipped – to open up the deeper conversations that we both needed to have back then.

I prayed until I was exhausted.

And then I sat down and sang the Ho’oponopono prayer to her:

I’m sorry
Please forgive me
Thank you
I love you

Over and over again, asking for forgiveness, granting forgiveness, being forgiveness... Just wanting us all – me, mum, dad, my ancestors – to be free and whole and loved and loving.

And that phrase from the gospels about forgiving seventy times seven kept on coming into my head, like a chorus. When Peter asked Jesus how many times he had to forgive his sinful brother.

“Seven times?” asked Peter, half grasping the stick.

“Not seven,” replied Jesus. “Seventy times seven.”

The unfathomable mystery of forgiveness...

In the wake of these three journeys of forgiveness – of myself, between me and dad, between me and mum – something very sweet began to happen.  I found an old ambient and electro Dub playlist on my phone, and was soon dancing around the cabin, feeling the forgiveness and the love and the release all percolating and circulating through my body and being. And as I danced, I was overcome with a real tenderness for myself.

As you may have guessed, one of my old survival mechanisms is to be very self-critical and self-judgmental (and, ahem, judgmental of others) – so it was really lovely to find myself genuinely acknowledging and appreciating myself: my beauty, my fragility, my vulnerability, my innocence, my kindness, my courage, my creativity, my imagination, my sense of humour, my faithful friendship, my generosity, my emerging wisdom, my compassion, my love of justice and peace, my playfulness, my honesty, my wordsmithery...

And I found myself praying out loud to God – almost the sort of “God out there” that I used to believe in when I was a Christian. I gave thanks for the mystery of what was happening in the ceremony, and for the cleansing and deepening of my relationships with myself and my parents. But I also shared with God my sense of distance and separation, and I shared my sense of hunger, and my tiredness at knocking at the door of the Divine, knock-knock-knocking at heaven’s unresponsive door. It felt good to be honest like that with a version of God like that. Even if the joy I’m looking for is supposedly already inside me, I’m still knocking and looking. I’m still a seeker. Still exhausting my seeking. My knuckles are sore.

I then read a beautiful piece by Rumi – Banners of Praise – and embarked on several other little branch line journeys – to do with my body, and my heart, and my relationship with the feminine – but I found I was increasingly losing my focus and could sense that the ceremony was coming to an end. It had probably taken three or four hours in all – I don’t know, I never looked at a clock, and I was in quite an altered state for most of it. At this point I really felt my DIY ceremony’s weakness – and I remembered those times, particularly with the Huni Kuin, when guitars had appeared and the ceremony leaders had brought us back to earth and back together with songs of praise to Pachmama, sung with pentecostal joy and innocence.

I wrote down some commitments that had arisen from the various journeys, smudged myself, and just as I was about to sound the finishing gong, I looked up and, there, through a gap in the curtains, I could see a sparrow hawk, sitting on a branch, twelve or fifteen feet away, staring back at me. I felt like it was a blessing direct from Mother Nature. But then hawkish she or he morphed into a very tall and comical pigeon with a gently pulsing iridescent chest, and then back into a proud and sage sparrow hawk, before flying off down the hill, low to the ground. Whether sexy shamanic hawk or mundane sub-shamanic pigeon, it was a thrilling avian meeting, and confirmed to me that the meat of the ceremony had been served and eaten.

And that I was still quite high.

I closed the ceremony, thanking all my helpers and guides, thanking my deeper wisdom and soul, and thanking the elements too – in particular Grandfather Fire.

I made up a bed on the floor next to the faithful woodburner, made myself a pot of fresh rosemary tea, and played music into the night, slowly drifting back down to earth, assimilating the wonder and intensity and information and insights of the ceremony.

Well, that’s one way to spend a soggy Monday afternoon.

It’s now Thursday. I’ve just been down to the sea for my daily maritime medicine and beachcombing. Even found a complete brick, sea-worn at the edges, but handsomely chunky! But it felt like a very old brick: solid red clay, no frog and no holes neither. I’ve heard that Seaton used to have a brick-making factory. Maybe every now and then one of the old sea-buried bricks rises and beaches itself? How long does it take for a brick to be rounded by the sea? Days? Months? Years?

Maybe that’s a better analogy. You’re a brick. The sea of life might break you into pieces, or maybe it will allow you to stay whole. But it will definitely smooth down all your edges. And there’s nothing you can do to resist it.
It’s been a satisfying beachcombers’ haul this week: one whole brick, one half brick, several rocks with sea-blown holes in them, several driftwood pieces for a driftwood spine I’m making, and a length of yellow and red rope which might well thread that spine. Daily finds and simple joys.

Hmmm, probably time I wrapped this blog up. As you can see, there’s been a lot to digest this week. I’ve been writing and pondering and dancing and moving with it all for three days now. Quite delightfully, my body is really involved with this process. There's a lot moving through my system.

This morning, during my morning prayers, I tuned into my freshly-reinstalled parents and grandparents – and they too were all dancing. I’m generally not a very visual person, but I could see the joy on their faces – and could see that they were all holding hands in celebration. And I could sense all my ancestors – a long and ancient spine of them – joining in the dance too.

I am still reeling with the delight of this vision, and the knowledge that these ancestral dancers are all in my heart.


One Love

Stephen
Thursday 30th January
Devon



Flower Of Light by Nick Barber, sung by Maneesh De Moor – I think:

P.S.
If you’ve made it this far – haven’t you got anything better to do? No, seriously: if you’ve got this far, I’m well chuffed, whatever you make of what you’ve read – or even whatever you make of me?

I’m not too sure I quite know why I’m writing this weekly blog. Just the decision – back in December – to begin sharing and blogging set in motion such remarkable inner events that I feel it must be good medicine for me. Whether anyone else finds it useful, or helpful, or entertaining, or annoying, or medicinal...
 
When I perform poetry, it’s often easy to see the eyes of the audience – and this makes the performance so much more enjoyable, because a sort of attentive loop of giving and receiving enters the room. It’s a bit more difficult out here in the digital world. I only publish the bloglink (sounds like a Lincolnshire bog sprite) on my Facebook page, and email the link to a self-selecting few (currently numbering three). Other than that I’m a bit shy. As you can hopefully see, I’m being quite honest and vulnerable and self-revealing here, even if there's often a part of me still trying to manage my image (haha). These are my choices, for sure. But any feedback or comments or encouragement or concerns or suggestions are appreciated – either to me in private, or in public below. Being a bit of a hermit, this is one of my major social outings...

If you want to be included on the weekly email list, drop me your best email address.

Phew.

Let's go out with a bit of Rumi – a great one for Imbolc.
If you're conceptually or linguistically allergic to the word "God", then just replace it with "Life" and see how it goes...

Banners of Praise
by Mevlâna Jalâluddin Rumi

Our fasting is over; it’s the feast day of Spring!
O dearest guest, welcome; sorrow be gone!
All praise be to God!

O Love once forsaken, abandoned heart be forgotten now;
your Beloved has arrived, and will forever remain.
All praise be to God!

Parting is forever parted; separation is severed at last;
union is united with no more delay:
All praise be to God!

Flight has flown and exile’s pain is banished;
distance is now distant; our nest is filled with joy:
All praise be to God!

The moon in the heavens, the rose in the heart of Love’s garden,
the King in his palace, the Queen upon her throne, proud banners show forth:
All praise be to God!

Life stirs in the root of a hair; fluid sap spreads through each tiny leaf;
green buds on the branches crown God’s dominion:
All praise be to God!

Let the despised enemy come, for he’ll meet our Defender;
we challenge his approach, for now in safety we say:
All praise be to God!

Flood me completely, with the fire of Love’s burning,
for now I can bear it and not burn away:
All praise be to God!

For now in certainty, my soul is free,
and all of earth’s sadness has dissolved in earth’s clay.
All praise be to God!

O chalice overflowing, poured out for these thirsty worlds –
we thank you, we bless you, and we drink while we pray:
All praise be to God!

The world lay parched for so long, an open desert,
until the dew glistened, and your breath
came on the wings of morning.
All praise be to God!

As we waited we were longing for Spring’s sun
to renew this life or ours.
Today, Jalâluddin’s warm breath arrived from the East.
All praise be to God!


(translated by Camille Helminski & William Hastie, with a few little tweaks by me)

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