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Answering the Call

I find that mythology often offers me deep insights into my own nature and human nature in general. To the people of old, the myths provided answers not only about nature and the workings of the universe, but also about themselves and their fellow humans; Almost a kind of accessible psychoanalysis long before the word was ever invented, built up over millennia, crystallised into memorable real-life characters and handed down from generation to generation in the form of stories of love and war, heroism and deceit.  It’s little wonder that pioneering analysts like Carl Jung found mythology to be such a rich source for understanding and mapping the human archetypes.

Most people have heard about the myth of Minotaur, but how many recall how it came into being? I know I’d forgotten. The name literally means “Bull of Minos”. Minos’ mother, Europa, was carried to Crete on a white bull and many years later, when the throne of Crete became vacant, Minos asked the sea god Poseidon to send a white bull out of the ocean as a sign of his divine right to be king. In return, he promised that the bull would be sacrificed immediately in Poseidon’s honour. The god obliged and Minos took the throne, but the bull that he had been sent was so beautiful that he was unable to kill it, so he added it to his herd and sacrificed his best white bull instead. Of course he didn’t know it, but in this action he planted the seeds of his own ruin. Pasipaë, his wife, became infatuated with the bull and instructed the craftsman Daedalus to construct a wooden cow into which she could enter, and which would deceive the bull. Her plan was successful and the offspring was the Minotaur, a monster with a human body and the head of a bull. Although she initially nursed it, it soon grew to be ferocious and could only be nourished with human flesh. Deadalus was again summoned, this time to create a labyrinth in which the monster could be hidden. There it lived, and was fed Athenian youths and maidens every year until eventually the Athenian hero Theseus was able to enter the labyrinth and slay it, its death signifying the fall of Crete and the rise of Athens.

Although one might be inclined to lay the blame on Pasipaë, ultimate responsibility, of course, lay with Minos. In the simple act of refusing to do what he knew he had to, Minos became a tyrant-destroyer and set in motion the path to his own destruction and the fall of Crete. Today we might wonder what all this has to do with the present, but the underlying theme is universal and timeless; We must make peace with our own truth, free it, and honour it, if we are not to become imprisoned by it.

I think that possibly the greatest cancers of our time are suppression and denial, not only at a personal level, but across the breadth of our social structures. I suppose it’s not hard to understand this, given the nature of what’s happening in the world we live in where we’re surrounded by horror as never before, even if that horror is obscured from us by webs of deception. It’s not that we can’t find or see the truth, but that consciously or subconsciously we choose not to, and having made that choice, become slaves to its suppression ourselves. But truth will not easily remain suppressed, so we fill our lives to the brim with often meaningless activity and entertainment; Anything to avoid the terrors of introspection and holding ourselves to account. It’s no surprise that there is little resistance to attacks on press freedom and increased state surveillance, for instance, or little support for threatened organisations like Wikileaks, dedicated to revealing facts without interpretation. We don’t want to know the truth because it’s a grave threat to our happy delusions. We’re just too busy to care, and denial is so much easier. But the timeless lessons from antiquity tell us that we are on a descent into tyranny and that even at a personal level, known truths not honoured will torment and keep us captive.  We become the monster.

To live and express one’s truth can be lonely and terrifying, but it can also be profoundly liberating; As we cross the thresholds within us, it’s as though we shed our skins, allowing new growth to come. Each truth discovered, accepted and freed becomes a break-out, opening a new path; The past is past, we see the present through new eyes, and the future beckons with renewed promise.

A Legacy of Love

We have a family tradition that stretches back as far as I can remember. Every Christmas Eve, we listen to the story of The Snow Goose, by Paul Gallico, narrated by Herbert Marshall and Joan Loring. As a child, my parents had the vinyl record in their collection, and a few years ago I bought it on iTunes perpetuate the ritual. This week, I found that the origin of the tradition dates back to the early 1950s when the recording was a Christmas gift to my mother’s family from Francis and Jessica Brett-Young, who shared the Christmas celebrations with them in Montagu all those years ago. Francis died in 1954, but the memory lives on.

Christmas Eve, for me, has become a time to reflect on the real values that underpin my life. Friends, family, and most of all, Love. Not just romantic love, but love in its most general form; compassion, empathy, kindness, forgiveness, honesty, humility, courage, understanding, and the multitude of other of Love’s derivatives. It’s fitting for me that at this time, we remember the birth and sacrifice of the Prince of Love for the sake of our mortal failings. A beacon of light in the darkness that is human existence.

How blessed I am to have an abundance of love in my life and what a gift to be given a chance to teach love to my children, so that they may carry the fire onward. Without love there is nothing but darkness and the void.

As I go through Life and try to piece the parts together; what will last and what will fade, what’s important and what’s just a distraction, I find increasingly and perhaps fittingly the paradox that everything of value and permanence is fleeting and ephemeral while at the same time there is no value in anything tangible. Life is only about Love and the tales of Love that live on once we’re gone, and life ends only when there’s nobody left to tell the tales of the Love that came before.

And so, at this time, I give thanks. For the love and light at the core of my being. For this crazy McSweeney clan that I was born into; a tribe of dreamers, artists, bleeding hearts, lovers and bards, with all their mortal failings and weaknesses. I love you more than you will know. Merry Christmas to you all.

Sailing by the Stars

I try to imagine what it must have been like for the early explorers as they set off in their little ships across the vast oceans. What courage it must have taken to sever all ties with home and journey into the unknown. “Here be Dragons” was used by the mapmakers to indicate the void beyond the known, but they didn’t let that deter them. I wonder what motivated them to abandon the comfort of the known and embrace the terror of the unknown. Of course, we will never really know, but ultimately only dreams have the power to draw us to venture into the true unknown, and with every bold dream, the mystery of the vision at its heart.

The boundaries of today’s world are so familiar and natural to us now that it’s easy to forget about the earlier times of sirens and demons, maelstroms and terra incognita. But it’s not just lines on maps; In the sciences, humanities and every human endeavour, it’s the dreamers that have pushed the boundaries and in doing so, redefined them and changed our world, or at least the way we perceive it.

Like so many other aspects of Life, I think that the boundaries that most define us lie within us. Quite possibly, they are the most difficult of all to identify and challenge. It’s so easy to go about life without really testing ourselves or pushing our own boundaries, and I find an inconsistency between one aspect of myself which wants to live easy in the moment and has its roots in appreciation, and another which is founded on pursuit and dreams and is rooted the hope of a better tomorrow. I suppose that the answer is to somehow find a balance between the two. In so many respects my life is and has been a never ending search for this. Balance. It’s almost as though to punish me for the disdain that I would hold for astrology, the stars saw to it that I was born with the sun in the constellation of Libra, and then ensured that I turned out to be the archetype of the sign.

And now, having set out naively and without much sense of direction, after following the winds of circumstance and having relished the journey, I find myself at the verge. At some point in our lives, I believe we’re all called to account. To take stock, as it were, of where we’ve been and what we’ve done and left undone. A recovery of truth divine and a reckoning of truth denied. Which way shall I go? Shall I stay in the realm of the known, or do I dare to venture beyond?

In this way I make my voyage. In my mind the memory of a vision draws me on. In my heart, the search for truth guides me. Like the needle of a compass turning North. But like mariners of old, I sail without compass in cloudy skies. Navigating by night, praying for a break in the clouds and an anchoring glimpse of Polaris. Scanning the horizon by day for the shore of the land that haunts me. Is it real, or is it just a dream?

Kakapo

The ship lies lonely on the beach,
beyond the tide and out of reach of waves
that cruelly plotted her demise.
They can’t touch her now.

And stripped of all but heart and bone,
naked and abandoned, she waits alone for time
to take her slowly, inch by inch,
defiant to the end.

Beyond the bluff, a lighthouse, raised to late
to find and guide her from the tragic fate that took her,
a maiden, to this forgotten place,
and left her.

And all the while the waves claw at the wall
of sand. Her last protection from the horde, grasping,
unrelenting, for one last chance to ravage
what’s left behind.

Reflections and New Beginnings

I love Spring and everything that this time of year brings and all it symbolises. The freshness in the air as all of nature celebrates new beginnings with the return of the sun and the rapidly lengthening days and shortening nights. The blue skies make me look back on storms of the past as a necessary part of the appreciation of the present. Caterpillars are busily going about their ways and a few days ago, I found one making its way across the sterile floor of our warehouse with the purpose that few apart from caterpillars have. I’m sure it thought it knew where it was going but of course it didn’t and I saw to it that it got safely moved outside and put on a better path. I remembered a day on the central line in London so many years ago, commuting from the City, as I watched a ladybird on the floor of the busy carriage, as oblivious to its surroundings as were the passengers to its presence, and oblivious too of the reality that at any instant its life could end with one unfortunate footstep. But the footstep never came and after watching it for some time with morbid fascination, I coaxed it onto my finger, took it out of that dark place and set it free on a leaf in the sun outside. I don’t think the ladybird understood or cared, but that didn’t matter; Life and liberation was my gift and the gift is for the giver.

So it’s with some appreciation that I view nature’s choosing September, the month of Spring, as the month of my beginning, fifty years ago. How time flies. It all seems to go by in the blink of an eye. How clear the childhood memories of looking upon people as old who we would now consider young, and somehow it doesn’t seem that we come to see ourselves as old even though through the eyes of a child we are. Perspective is everything. But we are defined more by the way in which we see than by the way in which we are seen.

I’ve always considered myself to be the master of my own fate, but increasingly I see a life shaped by the larger forces of circumstance. Or destiny. I suppose we like or need to feel that we’re in control, but are we really?  Perhaps in the details we are, but what about the larger realm? By chance we’re born into our cultures, faiths, and families.  By chance we meet people or have experiences that alter our lives.  Little by little, life’s chance happenings change our course and as they accumulate, guide us to destinations sometimes different to what we’d anticipated or planned. How fortunate then, to arrive at a good place.  How easily one wrong turn could have led elsewhere.  Somehow, in the end, I feel as though the Universe has conspired in my favour and that I have been given so much more than I was ever due.

Looking back, I can’t help but feel deep gratitude for the countless blessings that have always been there in such abundance. How easy it is to overlook them as we lose ourselves in the immediacy of our day-to-day lives.  I think that one of our greatest blessings is that which allows us to appreciate the true value of the blessings we already have; It turns out that like many of our most wonderful gifts, appreciation has a way of multiplying itself.

One of the things I appreciate most about life is the way that it’s offered me new perspectives along the way and never more so than in the recent past. They have left me with more faith in our innate humanity than ever before and feeling more connected, but at the same time with a deep sense of unease about what we’re allowing to happen, and with grave concerns about where the world is headed. Sometimes I look at the way we desecrate nature, or how we routinely treat people and animals in the most inhuman ways, and then I look at people around me going about their lives without an apparent care, and I wonder; am I the only one seeing the world this way? Perhaps they think the same of me, but if that’s so, then it only confirms the strange paradox that despite the abundance and sophistication of today’s communications, beyond the superficial we may be more disconnected from each other now than ever before. And although I feel connected, I’ve never felt more alone.

It’s seems to be the modern way to fill every open space with clutter, every idle pause with activity, every silence with noise.  We now say so much, but so little of consequence. The quiet voice drowns in cacophony.  Somehow, we have to find our way back,  to rediscover that it’s in the emptiness and silence of that idle moment that we have the chance to connect with the sacred and to find and embrace the heart of our humanity.

I can’t look at the issues facing us and give myself over to cynicism or hopelessness. Neither will I live in denial.  The only other course, daunting as it may sometimes be, is taking action and it’s a course that I feel myself increasingly drawn towards and defining my purpose. We can’t all do great things, but we can all try to be more honest and aware about the effects that our lives and our consumption have on other people, other living creatures, and all of nature. We can all search for truth and use it to undress evil. We can all dream of a better world and do little things to live and share our dreams, and in so doing, turn them into reality.

In truth, I’d never planned to climb Kilimanjaro this year or ever, and the dates for the expedition were set long before I knew about or became part of it. That it happened to be coincident with the full moon and my birthday was just another fortuitous accident in what I sometimes feel has been a life filled with a myriad such accidents. But despite its accidental origin, the expedition became symbolic for me – the ascent a fitting way to punctuate the life lived from that beginning. In years past, I never dwelt much on how I would feel when I got to 50, but had I done so, I would never have imagined that I would feel so full of purpose, dreams, and hope.