Someone's been sleeping in my bed...

You did what? You stayed in the house of a random stranger. Half way around the other side of the world? And what if they murdered you? Are you mad?

Earlier this year, as part of our tour around the north western states of New England in the USA, my wife and I couch surfed. 

Couchsurfing is not a novetly olympic sport of standing on piece of IKEA furniture going down hill.Its a way of travelling and journeying that involves becoming part of a community of travellers and hosts around the world. Whilst we travelled around New England in colourful autumn, Kajal and I were hosted by two delightful families who opened up to us in their homes and treated us with kindness and warmth.

Before we went out to New England we searched the online pages of couchsurfing.com. We noted some interesting sounding profiles of potential hosts. We contacted plenty of them and some replied with a 'sorry, not this time'. Others were not sure whilst a few were positively bubbling with enthusiasm. 

After a bit if back and forth on phone and email, we crafted and moulded our itinerary around the area to include some nights  being hosted in two different spots. 

We set off from the UK with plans to stay a night in a B&B in Concord, Massachusetts, home of Ralph Waldo Emerson and host to Henry David Thoreau. 

After our first night we headed north where we met our first couch surfing hosts on the shores of Lake Winnipesauke. We stayed a couple of nights with a delightful family  in a farmstead complete with seven horses, various chickens and a pet rat. We then moved on into the White Mountains, back to B&B territory. And then after that we spent another couple of nights couch surfing - this time in an old paper mill town on the edge of the White Mountains.

The stays we had we fabulous. We were hosted really generously and we had beds, not couches to sleep on. We met some really interesting people and had rich, warm conversation. And we were also given space and time to explore the local area by ourselves, with hints and tips by locals who know. 

Some people ask whether you have to pay anything to surf. Well no, you don't have to pay a penny. If you like to carry on doing this, then you probably ought to be curtious and kind, as there is space for references attached to your profile, so that would be hosts can hear a bit about you from others who have had the pleasure of hosting you. Every time that I have surfed, I have cooked dinner for my hosts and this seems to work wonderfully. But you definitely don't have to pay a penny to surf.

So, if you don't pay a penny to your host, then - people immediately wonder - what on earth they get from hosting you, if not money?

Well, despite the best efforts of our estimed bankers, politicians, media moguls and advertisers, it turns out that not everyone evaluates life choices on the basis of effect upon their bank balance. Some people seem to think that meeting new and interesting people, having unexpected encounters and discovering the small connections that make us part of a shared web of living can be payment enough.

Couchsurfing is not for everyone. 

If you are convinced about things, if you know precisely what life is about and have it all sussed out already then it may not be for you.  But if there is a bit of you that is still not sure, then it might provided you with some curiously intriguing clues by sleeping in some else's bed.

A Gift for Life

We often talk of life being a great journey, as if life is some great conveyor belt along which we travel or like some tourist trip on which we will see new places.

But I think that this image can only take us so far. Its also good to see that it is not you or I that is on the journey of life, but that Life is making a journey through us. I mean to say that by doing what we do and being who we are, we take Life on a journey.

Now, we all know that we can get staid and unthinking sometimes. And so it is with Life (or better 'this strange ongoing, always-only-in-the-now activity of living'). Its good to introduce Life to new places, challenges and tastes.

One of the most interesting ways to take Life on a journey is to bring another person into your home. Sharing your palace with a warm, blooded human being is guaranted to shake up Life. The journey that you will take Life on by bringing someone into your home will lead it to unexpectedly wild realms, into souks of dazzling mystery and museums of the past, present and future.

Whilst you may find it a little challenging, you could see that you are doing a great thing for Life. For Life is nothing if not curious for discovery and novelty. So let her enjoy the journey.  

Can you hear something out there?

I am sitting here with a quite lively breeze questing through the trees just outside. The garden seems to in a noisy mood today and its given me a sense of communicating out there. And this speech brings to my mind an experience I had the other day with, Anay, my 18 month-old nephew that might tickle you....

My nephew's voice is beginning to discover him at the moment and when the moods strikes, he practices making noises, babbling, languaging. On this early summer morning, whilst he was sat in my lap, I heard a delightful sound coming from him. He was repeating the noise over and over again and sensed he was getting deep pleasure in explore the various inflections and variations he could put into this one word. Each time, the same phrase, and each time, a slightly different sound.

I listened for a while, trying to figure out what word he was trying to express but couldn't quite get him. Then I just found myself repeating and discovering a pleasure in making this sound. We entered into a conversation as I walked around the house with him.

I then decided to step outside with him. There we continued making the noise together and we both became louder in our calls. And as we became bolder, I was gifted a moment of grace.

Standing there under a vaulting blue roof and framed by leaf-laden trees, a third voice joined in our dialogue. I gasped in joy as the noise Anay was making made absolute and complete sense. My nephew had not been copying a gujarati word he'd been hearing inside the house. No. He'd been mimicking the sound of a bird outside his bedroom window and what I had been hearing was a fragment of his conversation with those light wonders.

In that moment, I saw that an idea that we humans talk and the rest of the planet makes noises is just a little more than hubristic. I saw also how our own communication has its deepest roots in our relationship with such more-than-human language. From where else would our language come, if not from the birds and trees alongside whom we grew up?

We carried on for a few moments - the three of us chatting away - and then I returned inside feeling rather honoured for receiving this unexpected gift - a chance to hear the sounds of river, breeze and caw whilst talking about tea and toast at the breakfast table.

Presence and presents

Hello there

Various of you have asked Kajal and I about what we want for our wedding. I wondered whether we should think about what we might like to receive but Kajal admitted that she was not comfortable with preparing a list of things that you should buy. We discussed this some more and I also felt a little unsure. After going around in circles, we thought we'd offer you a list that would serve our purpose well. So here goes.....

1. Both of us would love to be more peaceful, enlightened and creative human beings. Any presents/presence you can give that would move us towards self-understanding and liberation from the cycle of birth and rebirth will be gratefully accepted.
2. We'd love to receive any 'experience' or 'thing' that is crafted, created or inspired by you (obviously if it could contribute to achievement number 1 above that would be great).
3. The chance to spend time with you learning, discovering, playing or just kicking back over a cup of tea and home-made strawberry tart. Combining 1, 2 and 3 would be the jackpot.
4. Our deepest dreams involve having a set of towels in a variety of shades, such that when guests come over to stay we can match the towel colour to that night's sunset. Given that between us we only have three towels at the moment - cream, dull green and chocolate brown – you can help us achieve our toweling dreams by getting down to John Lewis asap for some vouchers. 
5. We'd love to walk El Camino, Hadrians Wall or some other great route. If you can give us the gift of time and knees to do it we'd love you. You could join us as well if you like.
6. We enjoy reading, and we already have too many unread books lying around. Whilst a book would be a dear present, the ability to read more efficiently would be a greater gift.

At this point I realise that several of these items involve giving us 'time' and 'space', which are really gifts of the gods. If you can have a word with your particular boss man/woman or animal in the sky and see what's possible on that front it would be great.

7. A guarantee of good weather whenever we go camping. Or, if not available, a portable, solar-powered, wind-up, ethically-sourced, vintage-effect, light-weight, Lib-Lab, vegan lamp to go in our beautiful tent.
8. Nothing. I think it was the Arabs, or Indians, or perhaps Scousers, who invented the number zero. Whoever it was, their genius transformed human society and form 2 maths lessons beyond belief. We think you could effect a similar change in us by presenting us with nothing. And remember, you don't need to give us your gift of nothing on the day of wedding itself. You can wait a little while and offer us a bigger, higher-spec, wide-screen nothing when it comes out next year or the year after.
9. Your own happiness and peace. And we're back to where we stared just from the other side. If you can offer us this gift, we're sure to derive a lifetime of joy from that.

warmest

Rupesh and Kajal

Searching space for humility?

It was Diwali last week...a festival for Jains, Sikhs, Hindus and many others who might care to use light as an aid to marking the sacred nature of existence.

Orion Nebula

Throughout the period I received text messages wishing me good fortune for Diwali and the new year. Amidst these was one verse that I found intriguing:

"Faith makes all things possible.

Hope makes all things work.

Love makes all things beautiful."

Sweet. Its a nice little reminder to be faithful, hopeful and loving, because if I do that then - the verse reassures me - all things will work out beautifully.

But what happens if we're feeling a bit low on faith, if we're not able to bring up all that hope or that loving feeling is gone? Does that mean that nothing is possible, that things won't work and that beauty disappears.

That seems a bit harsh really to me, if not even a bit of hubris.

 

The logic of the (uni)verse

This verse seems work with the premise that the human is the centre of knowing and being. It indicates that its up to us humans to have love, hope and faith and when we do, we almost produce beauty, possibility and working order (love makes all things beautiful, etc.).

I find it odd to think that beauty would disappear because of what we do. That the world would stop working if we lost hope. I can get the idea that if I hope, then things may work. And I know the idea that beauty is in how I look. But this way of looking seems to imply that there is a quite inert, blank world out there and that has no shape or direction of its own and that all that exists is the stuff inside our human head, hearts and bodies.

Are we really happy to say that without these human experiences and ways of being beauty, possibility and working order won't exist?

Fool Praying, Cecil Collins

Turn it up upside down

Of late I've been employing Carl Jung's practice of turning everyday, taken for granted notions on their head, of inverting the logic. I tried it with these three lines, and when I did so, something really interesting showed up:

"All things are possible and this makes faith.All things work and this make makes hope. All things are beautiful and this makes love."

And now, I can read it like this...

• that the universe is one in which all things are possible and this creates, produces or results in the thing you might call faith;
• that the universe is such that all things work and that stunning, elegant, ineffable working order creates the experience and the emotional sense of hope;
• that all things in the cosmos are beautiful and that reality of complete beauty creates the experience of love.

Suddenly, I find this way of looking at these experiences much more intriguing. Much more inviting in fact. I can see that this working, generative beauty is out there already. It exists in the cosmos. Everything (even things that can't manage faith and hope and love - like bad humans and non-humans) can participate in this universe fully because its there. And it doesn't require hope, faith and love in the human way.

A bit of humility?

And if we start with the notion that the reality of this universe is such that all things are possible already, that things work, that beauty just exists, then perhaps we can worry less about whether we are performing properly, whether we've got enough hope, and love and faith. I wonder whether we can then be invited into a humbling process of appreciating this working, beauty of possibility alongside (rather than separated from) the rest of the cosmos?

Tight Spot

Tight spot.

Tilting starboard.

Use head jam and lean to.

Sharp angle threatens golden spill.

Heads out.

Written Aboard Coral

August 2010

How to be Glum

We've all been there. You've been in the doldrums, been going through a series of misfortunes but the times are a changing and life seems to be looking up. Such positive developments can be worrying and its important to nip them in the bud. This is of course easier said than done and so in this article I present some tips on how to build and maintain an attitude of glumness when faced with potentially challenging positive circumstances.

My first tip is to cultivate a habit of saying no to people. Being a block on other people's energy by invariably saying no is quite tricky but will be worth the effort. Its important to make this a reflex and unchanging response, so that any offer that you are presented with is met with an instantaneous no. It won't do any good to think or show you're are thinking about the offer. If you manage this trick of being primed to say no, you'll soon find that offers and invitations from others will dry up. Once that happens you would be in a strong position to view your situation as one of 'me against the world'.

Its really quite important to maintain an aloof and distanced attitude towards your emotions if you wish to stay glum. For example, some people make a mistake of trying to make sense of their sadness, to try and find meaning in it. The problem with this strategy is that you're likely to come to some conclusions. The worst of which is the tragic idea that you are some how responsible for your own emotional experiences and that you could change your feeling at this immediate instance, without anyone's permission. Such an action-oriented attitude is anathema to those seeking deep glumness. So, my advice is to avoid any kind of process of productive reflection.

The challenge here is more complex than it first seems. This is because you want to use your brain to the fullest by replaying the difficulty of your situation over and over again in your mind. However, the untrained brain is notorious for suddenly making sensible and productive conclusions and wanting to move towards action. So watch out.

My next tip is much simpler. If you want to stay glum you should try to maintain a health attitude of scapegoating. Blaming other people for the situation that you are in is a critical tactic in ensuring you feel no gratitude nor grace in daily life. If you have a particular person to blame this can be quite helpful, though the cosmos in general is also quite adequate.

It is important not to get too carried away with the blame game though. If you allow blame against a particular individual or deity to develop too much, there is a danger that you could become angry. Anger is a difficult emotion as it sometimes can lead to sudden outbursts of invective. An underlying state of inaction and passivity is critical to the glum lifestyle and so getting angry at someone can seriously endanger the inactive bubble you're building for yourself.

My final tip is to avoid physical exercise. This may strike you as a little strange but its been shown to work time and again in the modern age. The pursuit of glumness is much, much simpler if you are able to deny the reality of everyday existence. To be glum you need to live in a perpetual state of low level anxiety about a past that no longer exists and a future that is yet to come. Exercise has been shown to foster a sense of grounding and connection with the physical reality of life, to put people in the present moment, and such an attitude is likely to distract us from the task of cultivating the internal damp misery of glum. So stay away from the treadmill.

Being glum is by no means easy and maintaining that attitude for any length of time can be really quite exhausting. In this article I hope I have inspired you to see that with some creativity and discipline there is quite a lot you can do to sustain your glum.