2nd tier guff here
. . . in the beginning and in the end. My mum's death left me with two pieces of paper, alpha and omega, her birth certificate in my right, her death certificate in my left. Is that all a life is, two pieces of paper? If so, if all we amount to is a couple of documents to bookend our lives then does it really matter what we do? So long as we try to be happy, to love and to share, well what else? Certainly all our stuff amounts to nothing, the status we think accrues to our possessions the product of our childish projections. Stand and look at the stars, if you can see them through the haze of our city canned lives. Look long. . .
What do the stars tell us? All those stars in the sky, there are so many damn stars!
Tripped out a few weeks back, camp fire burning at my feet, the stark of the sky from the country, dark and dank in a valley. My friend stood up at the same time, her shape next to me, we were scattered towards the stars, our belonging, our home. The trouble with the ineffable is it evades. But stood there I truly felt, in that moment, a shattering peace, a sincere and heartwarming sense that all was okay, that something somewhere was just fine. Peering up at the night, the gauze of light, the empty and silent stillness of eternity, I felt rooted to the ground, the solid earth of the rock beneath a part of this immensity.
The Earth felt like my solid friend, the earth I would find myself clinging to a few weeks later, a cartoon wrecking ball with my lanky form sprawled across it, my progress arrrested by its contingent swipe. We were on a tiny little rock in an ever of space, a precarious but for the time amenable state of affairs.
And what else? I was chatting with a fellow I met today about the stars seen from 5000m, up in the Himalaya. I was 25 then, one of those wandering around the sub-continent, very lonely, very confused. Too cynical to embrace India, the tropes of the hippie culture repulsed as I tried to tread an impossible path between observer and freak. I was one of those lost souls, one of the many plying an alternative to London Bridge of a winter's dawn day. Somewhere in all that time away I ended up in Nepal trekking.
Now I preferred Nepal to India. It is a small country with an easily digestible geography. Here my terrified and overwhelmed ego could get a fix on something. No trains, a few roads, couple of towns, some mountains, plenty of the creature comforts of the west to be found in its capital's restaurants. Walking in the Himalaya slowed me down, let me feel a bit more, think a bit less. The books that lined the hippy trail were starting to work their magic on me: 'The Tao of Physics'; 'The Dancing Wu-Li Masters' and most importantly Aldous Huxley's 'The Perennial Philosophy'. Huxley boils all religion down to a series of universal precepts. He emphasises the similarities between each rather than their differences. Each system is a culturally specific interpretation of the same truth. They may sound very different but they're all pretty much saying the same thing. Essentially, it's all god! But it gets better. . . not only is it all god but it's a god that is, to coin a phrase, 'all about the love'.
That's what I learned. It wasn't a truth I grasped immediately but, some months later, back in Brixton and struggling with the culture shock of my return, my frenetic mind pieced it all together in a flourish of universalising love. I saw it all. God is all, the universe a whole and to simply belong ensured a
MORE
