Samhain

Written Samhain 2010

Was it her or was it me?
It overwhelmed me, like an empty vessel filled with poison, seeping into my pores. I couldn't bear it.
To be walking around on this miserable afternoon with the people, and the buses, and the noise. This dreadful silence of shadow.
Where did it go? Why this empty shell? What else to do but continue walking and being?

A vulture circles overhead. Round and round it circles, focusing on its prey. A wooden hut in the middle of the desert. The sun blasts down from on high and the sky is terminally blue. A faceless shape huddles agaisnt the bar, hiding behind a cowboy hat. I try to communicate with it but SLAM! the dog has been hit by the car. Holding my ice-cream I mourn alone on the grass, listening to Enya.

A dead child bobs up and down on the pool. Figures dressed in black gaze on, impassively.
A flute plays in a forest. Skipping and dancing the worm eats the lungs out of the doughnut. The door opens as if from nowhere. Now what to do?

A demented woman screams from behind the bars. The other patients are priests sitting in confessional boxes. A sea of hooded faces look out from the stands, watching the spectacle. A gong stikes and a disembodied voice screams "Testimonial!"
The woman screams and stutters and sputters as a clock ticks from an empty toy shop.
"Sorry but you are too late. A banging noise hits against the desk.

The sound of the sea swishes against the stand. The beach is pure and empty. The moon shines down from on high and the stars bounce and sparkle like bubbles in champagne.
"No longer a person at last!" screams the madwoman. "This beach is all. There is no more words banging against walls and sirens, and drunkards, and moments filled with emptiness and disatisfaction.
"But why?" crys the eagle? Why?"
The eagle is a figment of the woman's imagination and only exists in an empty corridor in a darkened mansion.

What is this bullshit? Me thinketh thou art trying to make some sense of nothingness. Me thinketh thou shoudst face fact that thou are depressed little boy with nothing to say.
Can we switch this off? Yes I think it is impossible to conjecture the madness of the situation but why? said owl. You are far too old. I used to go to the cabaret on a Monday night, but now I sit on my own and listen to Enya.
But aloneness is the way to be. Aloneness is the prize!
"But I'm so bored of it", said the monkey. I keep asking to enjoy this, but all you give me is depression and loneliness.

The lighthouse was flickering through the darkness like a knife. A ship of ghosts was shipwrecked on the jagged rocks. "I remember how I loved these ghosts. But now they are dead and nothing remains". Nothing remains but a cat looking out of the window on a darkened street.

The hooded lady bends over her altar and lights a candle for Samhain. The veil is narrowest, and she wants to reconnect with the energy she has lost.
A cat's eyes flicker through the fire.
A shadow creeps across the wall in a dreamscape while the moon is pregnant with desire. Figures in white skip under the bare trees in the abandoned courtyard. How I long to be with them!
The forest surrounds me like a blanket. I am untouchable. My fear is swallowed up by the moon and the stars which remind me.

Sitting outside, looking up at the sky, I see a star shooting past. I make a wish.

She has her back turned to me and she is deep in meditation but I follow her through the darkness. She wears a blue cape and her eyes sparkle like electricity.
I tap her shoulder and they open.
The shadow disperses and a barn owl glides across the deserted country road.
At Samhain, redirect yourself to The Goddess. Through the eyes of a cat the mystery is reborn.

Remember the insomnia and the fox? The fox that stopped on your path and looked into your eyes? Follow the barn owl. Follow the barn owl across the field, under the stars where words are no longer necessary.

But how can I retrace my steps? How can I turn an angel turn into a monkey?

I was sitting in the cafe with Jim drinking some steam and inhaling some cake when she came in.
Her hair was frazzled and she looked a bit confused. She came over to the table, and asked if I wanted to have her watch. It made me sad.
"What about your memories?" I asked. "How can you just give them away like that?"
She didn't answer.
Dedicating one's life to an owl one went into the forcfield.

It's gone.

Fireworks explode and Celtic music drifts through the castle. The cat sits quietly, gazing out the window.

The Cafe

The little cafe is packed. Blue spotty tables, green and blue circles on the wall. Music plays from behind the counter. Small hands hang in the air beside brown sauce and bread. Outside the drab drizzle of angels lost in the rain. The little head dribble is replaced by grey and pink.
A woman in purple enters the room, like a duchess. All heads turn. Her hair floats like wind. She sits sideways on a chair and surveys the scene. A match glows temporarily before being crushed into the spoon. Smoke floats out under the moon.
"I appear to have lost my way" she declares.
The moon looks down knowingly through the window. Stars shine in the cold night sky.
"I fear that we all may be lost" replies the Mexican. "I don't even know where this cafe came from, or why I am sitting here. But the badge on my lapel says that I am 'manager' so I guess that's who I am not. I am, I mean am".
The woman in purple curls a sliver of purple smoke in reply. She is suddenly very bored of this cafe. But she can't remember what came before. She was somewhere else and now she is here. She will be here for a while and then later on she will be somewhere else. The cakes in the window glow seductively, but it is all too much. She screams like a harpy realising that it lives in a story book.
The cafe disappears.
She is in a forest. She is sitting beside a stream with her eyes closed. She opens them and then remembers what she had forgot. A white barn owl floats across the sky like a spectre, becoming one with the stars.
The river sparkles in the moonlight.
A fox appears in front of her and stares directly into her eyes.
"Oh fox! I was so caught up in the dream that I forgot"
Her voice echoes out under the stars.
A beautiful silence answers.
The silence permeates her being.
She is back in the cafe, but now she knows. She knows she is sitting in a moonlit forest dreaming up this scene. She suddenly wants to fly, wants to write, wants to confess. But then she looks around and sees all the people trapped in the cafe, drinking tea, watching the X factor.
She wants to scream "The cafe isn't real!" She wants to tell the old woman that she is dreaming her old age. She wants to tell the child to stop crying. She wants to tell the tatooed woman with the slicked back hair that she is only shouting at herself. She wants to tell the manager that if only he took of his badge...But.
She decides to go undercover. She's going to pretend that she's a person in a cafe eating cake. But inside she will remember that she is actually beside a tree, bathing in the moonlight.
The moon sparkles. The stars are waiting. The night is cold and the wind rattles the tree while a solitary figure reads Tarot, beside a river, bathing in the light of a dream.

Sick

Sick

Sick of England. Sick of the accents. Sick of the fake bohemian brighton pretenciousness

'Oh look at me, I'm a student whose parent's earn a million pounds a year and yet I'm so left wing and politically minded. ' etc etc

Sick of the flagrant gays mincing down the street, sick of the high prices and sick of my job.

Daggers

Daggers chime and shine
In empty stairwells
Where oil lamps glow
The silence of memory
Fills the space
And then the face
White and ghostly
Shimmering in a silver mirror
Looking into my eyes
Like a foggy memory

I cross the river and I cross the stream and then I dream
Of a land by the sand where no human hand has ever been
Where birds fly high in a wide blue sky and the church bells chime
In time like a place in the dream of a face in a scene in a book
By a bubbling brook where a lady in a veil is drawing out ale
And a little boy sits on a swing
A chest full of gold in a story once told
Where an old woman sat cross-legged on a mat dreaming a dream by a stream

And then the dwarf fell into the well and landed in hell
Where the fires burned high into the sky and the broken souls cried and asked the lord Why a face peered from under a beard from a place behind a screen covered in green
Where the spirit was gone and the song it was wrong and the dancing was simply obscene
And I thought of naught from a very high spot looking down from a dream
And I wondered was it I who had seen?

The Laughing Jesus

An excerpt from a brilliant book, 'The Laughing Jesus' by Freke and Gandy, about the true nature of reality.

1. You have a dual nature. You appear to be a person but essentially you are awareness.

2. Lucid living is adopting a both/and perspective in which you are concious of both your apparent nature and your essential nature.

3. As awareness you are a spacious emptiness which contains the world. You are a timeless presence which witnesses the flow of experiences which we call 'time'.

4. Life is like a dream in which one awareness is becoming conscious through infinitely various forms.

5. We are unconciously one and conciously many. Gnosis is becoming conscious that all is essentially one.

6. Awakening to oneness is the experience of big love. Knowing you are one with all you find yourself in love with all.

7. The purpose of life is to love being this moment. When you are driven solely by other desires you miss the point and become engrossed in the life-dream.

8. The foibles which keep you unconcious in the life dream are your qualities which have become distorted because you presume yourself to be an isolated individual.

9. The way to love appearing to be a person is to become concious of your impersonal essential nature as awareness.

10. Lucid living is a state of enlivenment. It is loving being human.

The Present

For most people the unknown is terrifiying. After the past week, I have discovered that sometimes the 'known' is even more so.


When nobody knows you, it is like you are a blank canvas. You don't feel that you have to act a certain way, talk a certain way, be a certain person because nobody knows you. And the most beautiful thing you discover, is that you don't know yourself.

So you can be who you want to be.

When returning, you don't have that pleasure. You have already been typecast. You revert back to the old self. Everything that went between seems like nothing more than a dream, an illusion.

And it is an illusion. But so is this. When we go to the cinema we are aware that we are watching a movie, but for the movie to be effective, we need to get lost in it. We need to believe that it is real. We identify with the protagonist, we have to for the illusion to work, for the movie to become real. But at times we realise we are not in the movie. We are in a darkened theatre, watching.

The protagonist of the movie is the person that we see as 'ourself', our Ego. The person we think we are, the person that we create in our daily lives. But what exists behind that person? If we sit still, shut down the endless chattering in our head, what are we? We are awareness, watching a set of experiences, that we call 'reality'. Awareness is everlasting. Our bodies change, our friends change, our thoughts change, we change. But awareness doesn't. Awareness lasts forever.

When we are asleep, and we dream, we think that the person in the dream is us. We feel fear, we feel happiness, but in the end, we wake up. We are therefore both the person dreaming and the person being dreamed. 'Real' life is exactly the same. We are the person dreaming (our awareness) and the person being dreamed (the 'self)

When we realise that all is illusion, we do not give up on life. Quite the opposite. We make this dream, the best dream it can possibly be. Because it is all there is.

Years ago I dreamt of going to Australia. I dreamt that dream into a reality. Now that it is over, I'm not going to stop. I always dreamt of living in Brighton. Now I am dreaming that dream also into a reality. In a few days I will be living there. Not that happiness exists in travelling, or in living somewhere else. Happiness exists in only place it can. The present. Wherever that may be taking place.

This world is nothing but an illusion. So why don't we make it the best illusion it can possibly be? We exist in the eternal, never-ending present. So why do so few of us rip off the wrapping paper and see what is underneath?

Go on, rip off the paper. I dare you.