Seeing now rather than then.

So I found myself, as usual, late. No car, it seemed too far to cycle, and so I decided to hitch. Hitching is easy if you’re a nice looking young woman. A smile works wonders. Normally I have to wait about 5 minutes. On fast roads cars often go by too fast for the driver to consider a change of action but normally after 5 minutes one stops. On slow, empty roads, the first car comes by and picks up, usually after about 5 minutes. Always with really nice people in them, the kind that want to help by giving others a lift. Big hearted people. For me it is heartwarming to hitch, to meet wonderful, kind people.

So I step out of my house, in the middle of nowhere, onto the slow, empty road, and start to walk.

No car.
No car.
No car.
Car, wrong direction.
No car.
No car.
No car.

I realise it is a Sunday. It is a Sunday lunch time. Not much chance. I’m getting later than late. Will he still be waiting for me where we said? I imagine having to walk all of the way. Of course I have no phone. So I make an executive decision: I will walk across the mountain, on the dirt road, to the main Nauossa road, and there I am BOUND to get a ride.

So I do.

And I do so like a little pig, squealing all the way, bottom jiggling, eye-balling my watch, panting, stressing and looking straight ahead at the dirt road as if my vision could pull me forward faster. 

After a while of this, I suddenly start to feel like a fool. It is Sunday lunch time, the main time in the week for relaxing, and I am surrounded by this wonderful Greek countryside, all these spring flowers springing...meanwhile I am looking only at my watch and the dirt road and sweating, and panting more than is really absolutely necessary, as if it will help somehow to be exhausted and sweaty when I turn up...evidence of trying against the tides of life... 

I realise I am thinking more bullshit, again. So I decide not to slow down, but to stop stressing, to walk fast, in an enjoyable fashion, as if I had chosen to do sport for my own pleasure instead of self torture. My whole body relaxes, I look around, I like it, my legs are going in a nice rhythm, a pleasing velocity of flowing power, and I began to enjoy myself without stressing about being late. And in that very moment, I realise: I can do nothing now.

I can do nothing.

This is it. I’m really doing all I can. I can only walk fast. I cannot do anything else.

And a space opened up in my mind and I realised with my heart: though I can do nothing I can actually chose how to feel inside, how I will experience this moment.

I can either stress out because I am bound to be late and my friend might not be there and all is heading into certain disaster and I am a mess, and how had I allowed myself to get into this situation once again, this is so rubbish, I’ve been sitting around all morning doing nothing, what a disaster (I’m well versed at this one)...OR...I can calm all the inner shouting down and look about and ENJOY the journey, because there is nothing more to do but to walk fast to the next junction where will be able to make decisions and affect change.

Wow.

It’s really true. When we can’t actually change where we are, or what we are doing, when we are stuck in a situation, we can choose how we will live it.

So I walk, and enjoy myself, and forget about being late until I can actually do something about it, and enjoyed myself so much that I really did forget about where I was going. I am power walking through the beautiful mountain behind my home, where the flowers are greeting me and I am smiling at the view, with the sea and the bay of Kolimpithres shining their colours for my pleasure.

When I get to the main road, I get to a ‘power’ point of being able to change the course of my ‘destiny’. I had to put my hand out, and do the smile, with the puppy dog eyes...but there are no cars. Again, I feel myself getting ready to stress out. I had now re-remembered I was late. I look at my watch, for the third time, checking if time was speeding up or slowing down. I am late. There are no cars. No cars. No cars.

I can do nothing.

I decide to relax, given my recent pleasure walk, and look closely at some flowers growing beside the road.

A car comes.

Doesn’t pick me up.

Another car comes.

Doesn’t pick me up.

A car comes.

Picks me up.

I sit in the car. Was I going to be late now? My mind makes calculations as quick as possible. Time and clocks and numbers have never been its forte. Yes, I’m going to be late, but not half an hour, only 10 minutes. Time somehow had sped down. I sit there, and consciously don’t eyeball the road trying to make it run under the tyres of the car faster, I just sit there and enjoy the view, and talk my ohh-not-so-fluent Greek to the driver.

We arrive at said destination. And he is there. My knight in shining armour, holding high his sword of a telephone. He is still waiting for me. I mean, of course he is. He had little choice given zero information. There was really no need to have worried at all.

It was all a big learning for me: when you cannot do anything about something, you can choose to enjoy or make it horrible.

So a month or so later, I begin modelling for the life drawing classes at the Aegean Center. It is a rather strange sensation standing in the middle of a room lined with friends and dropping the sheet from around one’s naked body. I handled it by disassociating, a great defence mechanism I would heartily recommend. Slowly I began to get used to it. To come back into the room. I remembered from a couple of semesters ago, being on the other side, being the student who would look at the lines around the model, at the negative space, at the shapes made in space...only a few times would I jump out of that consciousness and think ‘Ohh my! A naked person!’ But she wasn’t naked actually, she was nude. So, nude me, began to get used to it.

It’s not easy standing still. Really it’s not. And so I began to meditate to relax myself into the stance. It was then that I suddenly really did feel naked. Psychically naked. Here I was meditating in front of a group of people. Could they see in? And as I focused into the room, I realised they weren’t looking at me at all, they were looking at my body. I was inside invisible. They couldn’t see the ‘no-thing’ inside, not much.

So, three modelling sessions later, now more used to the whole affair, I am standing there nude, unmoving, in a delectable posture. Until then I had found it all rather exciting and relaxing at the same time. I mean you really cannot do anything. You cannot even lift a little finger. This is the state I like to be in! And being forced into it, 20 minutes at a time, had actually been really calming. I was face to face within myself. What to do? I had meditated most of the time, other times mused on how I was feeling in that rather unusual situation. Power balances around nakedness and nudity, wobbly balances of my body, how my arm is starting to hurt, how a part of my body has gone numb etc. Sometimes I got so relaxed (in the lying postures) that I was half asleep. But not this session. Not so one day before my big journey back to England. I was freaking out. I was ovulating. Not a good combo. Really, not.

At all.

But being professional I let down the blue sheet and stood there naked for all to draw, and inside I am all over the place. I bemoan romance, is this man right? Is this what I want? Can it work? I go over all the problems I can possibly have, all of the emotions I don’t like having. I worry about the flight and the weight allowance. I try and hold back that terror of the ‘airport people and their rules’ that somehow I think could kill me, or my laptop, or dent my trumpet. I worry about moving house and what to leave behind and if I will be ok on the journey and if I will make my connections...

It goes on continuously for some time, a quantity of time that I cannot measure, because I cannot move to look at the clock behind me. It feels like an eternity. Feeling bad.

I had a little break in the clouds and remembered where I was, that I was being divine for all to record on their papers, that last week and the week before I had found it exciting and relaxing...and here I am having a right tantrum...and I can do nothing.

It was now that it began to sink in: I can do nothing; but I can chose my inner world.

I was choosing hell.

So I relaxed, in my nothingness, in the stillness of time, in the unable to move a muscleness...and silenced the within.

Ahhhhhh. It was like hearing next-door’s lawn electric mower being turned off. It was like the silence after the birdsong, or bird fight. It was like being able to turn off heavy metal music and sit in the silence of a deep forest.

I relax, and become calm. I can do nothing and right now I’m going to enjoy it. And how about the worries? Well the rest of the day just went swimmingly. I did all that I had to do, but I had lost that hysteria of feeling all those panicky emotions all of the time...and now that I had myself under control, the points in time when I actually needed to do something were easy, (almost) panic-less...

And now I am in England. There was nothing to worry about at all. Did it, it all went smoothly. Managed to get all that I needed and wanted across, and myself. And even when it actually well less than perfect I was composed enough to let time flow through me, knowing I could do nothing at all. Not right then.

Are our stories real?

St Anne's Square, Manchester

My mum said she’d buy me a pair of shoes for Christmas, and so we wandered around, but all I really wanted was a pair of Campers. I like them. They are cool. They remind me of my friends, of my life lived in Barcelona. I’ve never had a pair. I warn Mum: ‘They are expensive! I could pay for half.’ But as my wonderful mother would have it, they are a gift, and she would not gift only one shoe. We find the Camper store in Manchester’s St Anne’s Square, and they are just perfect. They are the colour I want, they are the type I dreamed of, they are leather on the end of my legs that make me jump into a silly looking dance straight there in the shop. I love them, I love my Mum, I love the world, I even, in that moment, love Manchester.

 

A couple of walking weeks later, I stay over at my friends’ house, and Claire in the morning says sheepishly, ‘Sorry the dog took one of your shoes to bed.’ I was alarmed. ‘She didn’t do anything, she just likes sleeping by shoes.’ But when I picked it up, we both saw, quite unexpectedly, that the inner side of the shoe was of a completely different leather to the rest. It was old and wrinkly, and I did not like it one bit. Though ‘til then I had never actually noticed it, now it was all I could see.

So, I went back to the shop. It was not clear what could be done. They gave me the standard line ‘They are made out of natural leather, it varies from piece to piece. Look it says it is here in on the shoes’ he fingers a tag on a shoe in the store. ‘But,’ I claim ‘they are SO different!’ I do puppy dog eyes. The shop assistant seemingly obvious to my deep inner pain, drops any responsibility claiming ‘The people making the decisions are in Spain.’ We come to an impasse. I pull out the oldest trick in the book ‘What would you do in my position?’ and look down sadly at the two shoes on the shop counter that is now manifesting as court house, and hold my silence. 

So he took photos of the ‘obvious disparity’. 

It got escalated. 

I got an email from the head of the store about two weeks later, which I read while my feet warmed the wrinkled leather of the shoes. Yes, he writes, natural leather varies, but in this situation they would be prepared to exchange. So, I went to the shop, walking in a pair of flip-flops as my only substitution. I mentioned at the now, familiar counter that I had talked to the boss. Julie? No it was a man. He says ‘I mean is your name Julie?’ ‘Ohh,’ I say ‘yes.’ We both ignore how stupid I have just been. Nice man.

He has the shoes waiting for me. As he bends down into the cupboard I blather on about these shoes not being the same, that I have always wanted Camper shoes, that I really like Camper, what a good company it is. Etc etc. I was so pleased that a company was prepared to see from the client’s point of view. And with baited breath I watch him deftly open the shoe box. I don’t continue to breathe on seeing them. They were...? The manager says ‘Ohh these are different too!’ and he goes on about leather again, and natural leather, and explains that if we were to skin a human the leather on our hands would not be the same as if we skinned our forearms...he realises he’d gone a bit too far then and shuts up. I look at these new shoes...one was almost entirely ‘old’ wrinkly leather cut from the face of a cow that had used botox all of its life. The saving grace is that it is fortunately the left while I had a problem with the right. So the manager says ‘You could take just one if you wanted?’I look at him quisitively.

 ‘As you like,’ he says and stands back for me to make a decision.

On the outside I look calm, apart from my eyes darting backwards and forwards, but inside I have the whole of the court house yelling a cacophony of completely, contradictory ideas. They are not right! They look like really old leather! You could take the new pair! Stay with the old pair! Would you believe these are really expensive shoes? Take just one, keep the other! I imagine a woman not concentrating at her shoe sewing machine. Was there no overseer? Is there not another pair that has nice leather all around it?

‘Is there another pair in the shop I could compare with?’

‘No,’ he says calmly (quite incredulously in my opinion), ‘these are the last, I saved them for you.’

I breathe in deeply, hoping to get some oxygen to the decision.

‘I’ll take the new right foot and keep my old left.’

‘As you like,’ he repeats.

As if in a sort of dream world, I take the new right shoe, give him my warm one and put them on my feet. I take off the little tag that tells customers about the values of real leather, and the warnings...and walk out of the shop. I feel like a prize wally. I just broke up a perfectly decent pair of shoes, and are they right now? I look down. They are hand-made and as I look more closely these hands on the right, had a different idea of dimension to the ones on the left. The stitching goes further up, the distance above the tongue is different, and is the colour exactly the same?

I stand there in St Anne’s Square, looking down at my shoes trying to use my heart. I stand there long enough to worry passerbys into thinking I’m a weirdo. But I can’t get my head around it. These are not perfect either - My dream - My Camper shoes!

Eventually I start to get too cold.

I return to the shop ‘I’ll just take my old shoe back. I’ve broken up a perfectly good pair you can sell, and they are no better than what I already have. You are right,’ I admit, proud of my lack of proudness ‘natural leather really does just vary.’

‘As you like,’ he says placidly. This has obviously been no rollercoaster for him, and gives me back the shoe that has been slowly shaping into the form of my individual, unique, foot.

‘Thank you’ I say. The skies have rightened themselves. The court house is happy at the justice and my heart suddenly realises, as if entering into a brand new field of vision: ‘Life is not perfect - it is as it is.’

And now I love my shoes even more. As I start to get freaked out about life not being as I have imagined it should be, as grapes are not lowered into my mouth, as I travel to Greece to sing but don’t get into the choir, as I wonder about a man and if he will be wonderful company both day and night, I start to realise that life is not as I imagine it. It is aspirin taste hard to swallow; it is hard to realise that what is in my head is not actually real.

And what is?

I walk around in my shoes, wondering about what I have thought and held to be God’s own Truth (capital t) just because I have thought it, and things start to emerge out of the woodwork.

A couple of weeks later I go for a walk by the sea, and in a moment of heart connection realise that the stories in my head are actually ego stories that support my whining complexes. Somehow it is comforting to be a victim. Somehow it is comforting to feel that I am not worthy. Somehow it is comforting to feel I am not loveable. I get something from it. It needs so little effort and excuses any real lack of responsibility to my own creation of life. I realise to maintain all these ego thoughts, all these self limiting belief systems, I need to create stories in my head. I like to daydream of perfect worlds and perfect shoes, and perfect relationships. And then I look on at the world around me and in the gap between what is, and what I would like it to be, I fill with monsters. 

I wonder, can I stop telling myself all these stories of doom and glory? Can I let go of my stories where I am who I think I am, along with the glorious victimhood, superior inferiority, of a misunderstood poet? Can I let go?

Well, yes, I say, I’ll give it a go...but like, erm, how do you start? Let go of ‘what’ exactly?

And it slowly dawns on me, as the sun begins to set, that I have to forgive the world, for not being perfect. As I sit there in the glory of nature, where the death of the seed creates the flower, where dry brittle stems co-exist between young spring green. Can I forgive?

Can I forgive people in my life for hurting me, for not being who I want them to be, for not being perfect? Can I...?

And as the sea breaks softly on the shore, breaking down hard rocks into sand, I feel myself slowly softening. Can I forgive people for being human?

Yes, of course I can! I feel an expanse in my chest, my heart is wonderfully dipped into deep peace as forgiveness floods through images of myself, and my stories of past pains dissolve into stories of humans doing their bestest and managed to wholly mess up. The facts of the past remain the same, but my perspective of them is suddenly very different. I realise that no-one wanted to cause me pain.

I sit there on the coastal path, and feel connected, feel expanded, feel more like I feel I am.

But still I am not done...I feel it in my bones...there is something more here...I look at my Camper shoes. And stay still, allowing the question to arise.

Add caption

I breathe in.

What is it?

I breathe out.

Slowly I start see my stories from the other’s point of view. I see my own actions not from my own story board, but from a higher place. I see that I have not been so absolutely perfect. It is shocking.

The questions come up fast and furiously calmly: Can I let go of my story that makes me ‘right’? Can I allow myself to be honest with myself? Can I forgive myself?

Uf. I dont’ know what you are talking about. What? I start to get tired of this internal conversation and feel an itch on my body. My leg hurts. I notice I am now sitting quite uncomfortably by a beautiful sea. Ohh what is going on over there? I peer into the distance as my left hand tries to remove a stone from under my buttocks.

The actual boat at the actual time (which is sort of evidence that I did actually take a photo...again, my story not quite in line with reality).

Peering at that little boat on the horizon ideas continue to come into me. I realise that I straight-jacket myself into trying to be so f%*king perfect. And when I’m not I come down like ton of bricks on my own head. I push people away. I don’t like it: it is not my dream; it is not perfect; it is not what I have imagined.

But can I forgive myself? I continue, pressing myself for an answer. Can I forgive myself for not being perfect every minute of every day...?

I want to float off, and pretend that I want only to look at the white clouds in the ohh so blue sky. I wonder about taking a photo.

But I don’t. I continue with task. I realise that if I can forgive others for absolutely messing up so much so they get a Scout’s badge for being so terribly imperfect, then, well, actually, yes, I can forgive myself too.

If I can forgive others for just being imperfectly human, I can forgive myself for being an imperfect human?

Yes. I say suddenly letting all this weight of heavy stories float off my shoulders. Yes I can, and, Yes I do.

Feeling almost weightless, apart from a slightly numb bottom, I float in a cloud of love and feel really, really good. Feeling just how I want to feel normally. Thinking ‘this is real’, this is being alive, this is being true.

Nothing is perfect, not me, not them, not this world. It is, just, as it is.

And in this wonder of experiencing deep forgiveness, I brush off the little stones and branches from my grateful bottom, and continue walking in my naturally disparate leather shoes barely discernible within the picture of the whole.  

Being together

William Morris, Vision of the Holy Grail, 1890

In Barcelona we studied Wolfram's 'Parsifal', the oldest book in the Western culture. Perhaps the first book ever to be written. Eduard, our kind, deep, speaker, showed us through the myth, and being a doctor brought it down to a cellular level. Fascinating. One such delight was him explaining how the innocent fool (Parsifal) enters into the Magic Castle of the Fisher King that arises out of the middle of the mist in his search for the Holy Grail. He explained how a cell protects itself from invasion by setting up a bouncer-like immune defense, hence the invading cell cannot jump over the moat of the castle, nor ram through the jammed-shut big wooden doors. However a cell does allow fusion with another cell when the cell appears to be exactly the same. Out comes the red carpet. Wow! 

Mind blowing! The power of the innocent: of being nothing more and nothing less, of being just exactly the same allows entry to that healing place, to sup of deep connections, of deep love, and really what else are we really looking for? We are nothing without our connections to others. We are nothing without being able to connect to something bigger than us.

We are allowed entry when become unthreatening, when we are simply the same.

-

If I were to think that I was to live in a foreign country, even a place like Nepal where I’ve already been, I would still feel nervous and worried. But I wouldn’t be surprised to feel knots in my stomach. I would expect to feel different in my western clothes, I would expect not to understand with my different language, I would expect my body to react in rather unpleasant ways to the incomparable food and hygiene levels. And I would consider this all part of travelling.

But not in England. ‘England,’ is the response I give to ‘Where are you from?’ England is the place where I took my first lung full of air. England is where I was brought up on baked beans and jacket potatoes with cheddar cheese. England is where no one takes the piss out of my accent.

At England's finest

But when from the age of 21 you’ve only clocked four years in the country, with the other fourteen years being in countries recovering from dysentery, or selling chickens in the street, learning how to communicate in different languages, or learning new value systems, England is suddenly as foreign a Timbuktu. 

I am still struggling to turn on the television. In my own mother’s kitchen I can’t work out where she puts her stuff, how to use the potato peeler or where the recycling should go, my piano has gone, and I have no idea what people are talking about when it comes to culture, TV, bake-offs, and other such stuff that without knowing has become a national secret code. If you don’t know who Gary Barlow is (not to be confused with Ken) you will be laughed at, stared at in amazement and asked ‘Where the blummin’ ‘ell ‘ave you bin?’ To which I have learnt to be quiet.

Quite frankly. I am out of it. I am wearing the same clothes, I am speaking the same language, the food warms my innerds with childhood memories, and yet, I just cannot get 'in'.

And so faced with tremendous nothingness month after month I found myself dribbling on the dirty floor of my psyche rolling around in moderate to severe depression. I was drowning in feelings of being pathetic, unworthy, despicable.

Plunge. Into the dark.

It was while I was slobbering into my isolation that my good friend Rafa shouted down the ravine ‘Julia! Julia! Get up off the floor! Get up, stand up!’

He told me that it was horrible to see a friend wither away.

He told me he knew he could do nothing.

He told me to stand up. On my own.

I told him I couldn’t. I had no friends. I had no resources. No car, stuck in a village. No nothing.

He said ‘Excuses! Get up!’

It was such a harsh message, with an undercurrent of deep love that - I heard - I heard it in my heart - and from behind the waterfall of snot and tears, I managed to shakily stand and take a few gingerly steps back up into the world.

I thought about how I would have reacted if he had told me what to do, if he had given me direct instructions, or if he had simply gone ahead and done it for me. I would have wondered ‘Is this right for me? Is he seeing me and my situation properly? Is he projecting his situation onto mine and trying to heal himself vicariously? Is he trying to manipulate me, consciously or unconsciously, for his own ends? Where is his motivation coming from? Can I trust him? Can I trust these actions that I am taking because of him?’ etc etc etc Is he being guileless?

The thing is, him just being there in Spain, saying ‘I’m here,’ was enough for me to feel him. Any more would have jeopardized the whole thing. 

And so, feeling his innocent support, I went to a psychologist for help, and she invited me to a Pesso Boyden workshop the next Saturday. It is a marvellous technique which, to my eyes, was like family constellations except more directed, deeper, more healing. I felt it was more contained. I shan’t go into more details, else I’ll be off through other fields and valleys, but part of the workshop was to stand in on the others’ ‘structures’ as their significant others.

I found myself being a woman’s mother. She was in desperate need of being accepted, of being unconditionally loved. And so I set to task. I sat behind her, along with ‘her father’ with our hands on her shoulders and I channelled love, feeling it, really going for it, pouring it into my hands to enter into her body. But she wouldn’t take it. It was like pouring my all into a black hole, nothing coming out. It was swallowed whole, without a chance to shine even a little bit. I kept trying, I keep really trying, until I started to feel frustration and the welling of anger. All she had to do was accept and she wasn’t. She was consuming and destroying. Resentment. It slowly dawned on me that me sitting behind her in her healing session with my hand on her shoulder sending frustration, anger and resentment was not exactly textbook. So I gave up. I just sat there. I thought it was better than anything negative. Her shoulders suddenly relaxed. Her muscles allowed entry, her psyche opened just a little to allow in a shaft of light. I didn’t do anything, because I’d got myself into this new posture, of just being. I just was. I didn’t try and force love onto her, I didn’t force her to accept my offering. I just sat there. I was just was. I am be me. I mean it is difficult to put into words, because it is so simple. I was just present without forcing me or anyone else into what I thought should happen. I just was there. 

And I learnt for the first time to be in this powerful place: healing power.

-

Being in the north of England, back to my roots, I have had the pleasure of reconnecting with Brass Bands. If you don’t love brass bands, then it’s a sure bet you’ll dislike them, scoff and jeer. But if you love them, you’re in the secret society of loving something that is heritage, that is part of our northern English blood, that has been with us since we were all in villages and down the pits, in the mills and building canals. This is flat cap and steak and kidney pie. This is authentic. Brass bands are like folk music compared to Opera. Opera is fine. It is beauty close to the sterility of perfection descended from heaven. Folk music is the gut of music that has come up from the ground, fertile in its natural knobbiness, along with the potatoes that kept us alive through the winter. Like Tim Blanning quotes in ‘The Romantic Revolution’ (p122) ‘It was the innermost emotions of the folk that created folk songs and so the folk sees them as its children and loves them with its whole heart’.

First row second to the left: that blob over a Tuba is my head.

So there I am, suddenly playing music again with people I had played with when I was a teenager in the National Champion (...pause for surprised admiration...) Stockport Schools’ Brass band. People keep asking me ‘Is it Julia or Julie?’ until I get confused myself. We’re practising for a contest. It is starting to get hairy. We are down to last minute detail and three rehearsals a week. We’re off to Blackpool ready to put ablaze the Winter Gardens this Sunday. 

I really want to give it my best, for the sake of Marple.

So I do.

But last night, after a rather disastrous practise concert on Saturday night in Crewe, we were all very sensitive, open to change, because we know we have to. We didn’t show hardly any difference between ff (double forte) and f (forte) nor mf (mezzo forte)...nor did we have a range of pianos (quiets). We are just blasting it out; all of the time. This is not colouring; this is that grey brown muck you get from muddling colours. So, I decide I am going to soften all of my dynamics (which to be fair I think the other members of the band do too...all of us a bit afraid to play out, to become exposed). I stop putting so much into it, I stop blowing so hard, I just ‘play along’ with the others. I stop trying so hard. I can barely hear myself for I’m merging in with the others’ sound. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what you need in a cornet section, and in the band in general: one sound.

I realised I’d been trying too hard. We all had. We now have the notes down pat. We know the piece. Now it is time to allow it to breathe, rather than the asthma attack we were giving it before. And suddenly the band, for my ears at least, had a step change. The music became subtle. Parts came out and flew above in wonderful somersaults chirping spring without being stepped on by the heavy giant feet of us blasting out our parts. Music began to happen. We played as one.

-

I don’t know if I’m getting my point across? I have had so many conversations with people, who deep down are afraid of being mediocre. I strive. I strive to stand out, to be something. I want to be noticed. I don’t want to just merge in. I want to have an active role, so that I have a chance to stand on the pedestal and receive the jubilee cup prize amid crowds of applause. Of course in my speech I don’t talk about how brilliant I am and have been, just how it was thanks to the effort of the team - and that makes me all the more brilliant. 

Ego bullshit dreams.

Is a better perspective that our power is in simply knowing who we are and being it, unashamedly, quietly, gently, kindly, boringly even, without forcing ourselves to be anything else? Is not our part in humanity to sing our song in delicate harmony with the others so that we merge into the symphony (‘syn’ together ‘phone’ voice)? 

In this communion of simple silent being is the role of the innocent, guileless fool, characterised by Parzival, where we are at our most potent?

....and will it work in England?