22
Mar
I’m curious to know where I am going next. Several timely quotes have presented themselves to me at a time when I am feeling transient. The first is from Steve Jobs:
“Remembering I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already dead. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
It is the fear of losing “it” that makes most people hold on to tight, play a cautious game. In his essay, “Our Feelings Reach Out Beyond Us,” Montaigne says it is fear, desire and hope that “project us toward the future and steal from us the feeling and consideration of what is.” These feelings of fear, desire, and hope trap us into spending to much of thoughts on what we imagine will be.
Plato’s remedy for this is to “do thy job and know thyself.” And as Montaigne says “he who would do his job would see that his first lesson is to know what he is and what is proper for him.” And once you know yourself, you will know longer spend time on irrelevant busy-ness and refuse “superfluous occupations and useless thoughts and projects.”
Love and cultivate yourself before anything else as Montaigne reminds us to do.
(Neil del Strother)
Back in January, I posted a short review of The Flower in the Desert, by Neil del Strother. Recently, I had a opportunity to interview Neil about the book and his inspiration for writing it.
Clay: What is the book about?
Neil: The story is simple. My book is about a boy growing into a man, and a man growing through his life. It is about his trips into the desert and what he finds…and what he leaves behind.
At another level, it’s about that place of meaning, of being, of becoming, that all of us know…even if we’re not always consciously aware that we know it. It is the mystery, and each of us brings our own experience and heart to it. My hope is that my book creates a space where this place is felt.
Clay: What inspired you to write the book?
Neil: Many things.
One is an experience I had around twenty years ago now, where I became the plants, the air, the earth, the moon and the stars. It sounds implausible I know, but for a short while (far too short – I was scared I was dying) I was everything.
Another is simply my experience of life. The rhythm, the unfolding, the very slow coming to terms with my many imperfections (I wish this would get a move on!), the gradual and growing awareness that there is so very much more than me and yet nothing more at all.
Clay: If each book is a journey, what journey are you enticing the reader to take?
Neil: Every reader is already on his or her own (and our shared) journey. There is no other journey that can be made. I wonder is it even a journey at all? In the awareness is our unfolding freedom. It’s often a challenge.
Clay: You wrote the book as an allegorical tale, allegorical stories are meant to teach us lessons about how to live, what is your tale teaching us about ourselves and our relationship with the world and each other?
Neil: An essential meaning in my life has been and is about opening; about becoming aware and letting go of my many unhelpful (and often fearful) beliefs and patterns…and anything and everything else that keeps me from a connection with wholeness. I know this might sound like a load of old cobblers. Ultimately it isn’t about words, it’s experiential. For me it’s a long old road.
My experience is that I open that much more into the space each time I manage to let go part of my personal baggage. It’s a place of individual and shared wholeness. I believe this is the same for us all. It is on the cusp of this space that we may meet our deepest fear – the fear Marianne Williamson (and Nelson Mandela) have spoken about: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” I feel this is essentially a fear of losing ourselves, of disintegrating, into the whole. We are nothing; we are everything.
I hope in some small way (actually, I hope in a big way) that my book speaks to every reader of their greatness. I have written no words for this, it is about our individual stories dancing in the spaces my words leave alone. A lot of people have told me what they feel my book is about…they are right, even though it’s often been the first time I’ve realised it.
Clay: Tell us a little bit about your background.
Neil: My childhood was not altogether easy, although I have heard many many people speak of childhoods a great deal worse. I was, to an extent, emotionally neglected and I learned of the emptiness that this can bring. I was also lucky enough to learn just a little of love from my grandmother and her friend Ms Barnes.
It took me some time to find my feet as an adult. When I left university I worked in a range of jobs trying to find one that felt right for me. None did. My greatest loves were football and writing and, as I wasn’t signed up by Manchester United or the mighty Brighton and Hove Albion (their loss), I drifted somewhat tardily into journalism. I freelanced for papers and magazines before finding a niche writing about education for consultancies and government departments.
I have a degree in Politics and American Studies, an MA in Journalism and a Dip Psych. I am a qualified, if non-practising, Journey Therapist (www.thejourney.com). I also have some experience of shamanism, attending workshops and taking part in healing ceremonies with the San Bushmen in Botswana.
Clay: What attracted you to write a book of this kind?
Neil: Perhaps it sounds daft, but this book wanted to be written…it had been waiting within me for some time. I finally got around to writing the first draft during the weeks that I walked the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, an ancient pilgrimage route across Northern Spain, a year or so ago.
Clay: Is the book a part of some greater spiritual awakening?
Neil: I hope it is part of a greater spiritual awakening that is happening within all of us. We all know that we need to step away from the extraordinarily destructive and life denying actions of our current human world into a place of greater love and reverence for life and our planet.
Clay: Anything else you would like to share?
Neil: Yes, when I write I sound a darn site wiser than when I speak (and act). Or a great deal more pretentious. Take your pick!
Clay: Thanks Neil.
To find out more information about The Flower in the Desert, visit the site here. You can also download the first chapter and experience Neil’s wonderful book for yourself.
28
Feb
How the soldiers fall, whose god and faith is the Czar.
The Czar is angry: let us die, and make the Czar happy. – Adam Mickiewicz
5
Feb
I’ve allowed myself to be seduced by things that glitter along the path, not fully realizing that not all things that glitter are gold.
4
Feb
Where are you headed and how will you get there? And what does it matter in the end, the prince and the pauper travel different roads to reach the same end, buried six feet beneath cold earth, food for the worms and a silent eternity.
This hit me smack dead between the eyes this morning. It’s a passage from a book by a Russian guy named Gurdjieff, who basically dedicated his life to answering the question: “What is the sense and significance of life on earth and human life in particular?” He developed a school of thought called The Fourth Way, but I won’t go into that just yet. The passage in question that caught my eye was this – and I’m paraphrasing here – life is like a river that forks into two branches. There is the involutionary branch and there is the evolutionary branch. People who take the involutionary branch essentially just spend their whole life meeting the basic requirements of nature. In polite speak they are like cattle and all of their energy is focused on eating, breeding, raising their young and being a good member of the herd. People who take the evolutionary branch embrace life. They are never satisfied with the status quo. They are always pushing the boundaries. Always looking for opportunities to grow. These people, according Gurdjieff, will have something extra in life that other people will never have.
Now the thing is I think there is no end to the amount of people who talk about personal growth, who talk about not living life in the comfort zone. I’ll hold my hand up and say that I too have been guilty of loitering in the comfort zone, which is why this passage probably struck such a cord with me this morning. Although I am a cautious man, I have never been known as someone who doesn’t like pushing the edge, but lately, I have been sitting back in the comfort zone with my feet up, six pack in hand, and the beer belly to show for it. But they say it only takes the right passage at the right time to change the course of your life.
Now where did I put my sword?
Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book out that addresses this issue called Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
I was having lunch with a friend the other day and somehow during the course of the meal the topic of death came up. I think it was because we both realized that we are getting old.
I’m 41 and she is 38. I said to her that if we both live to the average life expectancy of western society, which is between 77.5 and 80 years, then we are basically at the halfway mark and wether we want to admit it or not, we are on the downward slope of the inevitable march to the Big Sleep.
My friend said that this was a bleak way to look at it. I, however, think it’s a very motivational. It means to me that I better get busy doing the things I want to do in life.
But, my friend said, death is only the gateway to the next adventure.
“But what if it’s not?” I asked her. “What if when we die that is it…no more…nada…nothing!? What would that mean to you?” She said that she would start living it up, going wild, getting the most out of life.
Isn’t that strange? The thought that this life is just one phase of an eternal journey allows my friend to plod along letting one day bleed into the next, no sense of urgency about taking control of her life and living it how she would want to live it. Whereas the thought that this is it, one life to live – no afterlife, just daisies and dirt, fills her with a sense of urgency to “live it up.”
I’ll leave you with a statement and a question: this IS your life, the only life you will ever have, what are you going to do with it?
30
Sep
In times of reflection I sometimes turn to the Tao Te Ching (the book of The Way), written by Lao-Tzu, for guidance. Over these past several days my thinking has taken several synchronistic turns and I realize that the path I chose to walk several years ago is still the path I am on. It seems though that over the past 10 months I haven’t been walking the path, that I had rejected that which I had once embraced. But this morning I realized that I have just been taking a break, that I had only momentarily set my backpack aside to rest for a moment on the trail. And now I feel ready to continue on with a clearer sense of purpose and thought.
I opened the book of The Way and the passage I settled on was this:
He who stands on tiptoe
doesn’t stand firm.
He who rushes ahead
doesn’t go far.
He who tries to shine
dims his own light.
He who defines himself
can’t know who he really is.
He who has power over others
can’t empower himself.
He who clings to his work
will create nothing that endures.
If you want to accord with the Tao,
just do your job, then let go.
And even as I reflect on these words I can feel the weight of my pack settle on my shoulders, hips and back, and it feels good and right.
(This translation of the Tao Te Ching was taken from Stephen Mitchell.)
28
Sep