Writing this post feels surprisingly daunting.
What I intend to do with this post is to basically write an in depth summary of who I am and where I am at on my spiritual journey and I intend to mainly home in on the spiritual side of my life, though I will be dipping into things that concern my everyday life. This feels daunting because I am feel I am essentially putting my heart and soul on my sleeve for better or worse. This feels as if it's quite emotional and that I am trying to do a bit of sole searching.
This will possibly be the first of such posts, or it could be the only one I am to do. I'm not fully sure at the moment. This will be a diary entry and I intend to be as honest as I can about a few things. I am new to putting my thoughts into writing, and making them view-able to any who wish to read them feels, as I mentioned before, very daunting.
What I am hoping is that having written this down, I will gain better clarity and focus in where to proceed. This will be a consolidation of my thoughts and beliefs as they stand at this moment. I'm sorry if this sounds as if I'm rambling, but I think that's I am aiming to do: a constructive ramble.
Chances are, one of the first things I do after I complete this is to hone some of the background parts of this blog so that I can better express who I am and where I am going to you. I hope this will clarify things to you as well as clarifying my own thoughts. I may even explore certain aspects of my past and write up my thoughts on them as a post.
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I was born in November 1985 and I suppose there was nothing of particular note in the way of there being anything particularly religious or spiritual. I remember asking my parents what religion I was and them replying that they hadn't decided for me. religion was a thing that I was to decide. I am pleased that my parents made that decision. I think that spirituality is a personal journey for each separate person to explore for themselves without being fully swayed by others.
My father is - still - an engineer and my mother stayed at home to raise me. We lived in a house on the outskirts of a small village of Aston on Trent in Derbyshire and I remember doing the usual things of going to play group, primary school in the village and then onto secondary school.
I think I may have to start with telling you my earliest memory. I can't have been more than a year or so old, it is very hazy, but I remember that at the time I was still learning the use of my limbs and was very unsteady on my feet. I remember propping myself on the bottom step of the stairs and looking up them. The thing that I wanted the most was to be able to climb them all by myself. That would be the greatest accomplishment ever. But as soon as I'd lifted my leg up onto the first step, I was whisked away by my parents and told that it was too dangerous. I remember trying again. It doesn't feel as if its too much later, and I remember, under my parent's protective eye, I was allowed to climb the stairs, and getting to the top was accomplished. I'm not too sure why I'm mentioning it, other than first memories seem to feel important. Maybe its that they are the first glimmers of awareness, of perceiving one's surroundings.
I do remember that the village later on starting up well dressing festivals - despite the village not exactly having a well but there was a disused Victorian pump - as a summer village fair. It also had the indistinct remains of three barrows.
I remember going on bike rides with my best friend at the time and seeing how far we could go in an evening. Once, we got as far as a village called Swarkestone which was famed for having a huge bridge that was built by two medieval Ladies who's husbands had been washed away when the flood plain they were crossing was flooded in a huge storm. Apparently the bridge is still haunted by them.
One of my earliest memories is also one of my most vivid. I must have been three or four at the time and I was in the passenger seat of my mum's car as we pulled into a large multi-story car park by the centre of Derby. We'd pulled up at the barrier to get the ticket and as I'm looking about impatiently, I see a small, leathery brown figure. He can't have been taller than my shoulder if he were to stand to his full height, but in retrospect, he looked a lot like Dobby the house elf from the Harry Potter films. He was terribly afraid and cowering behind a metal box that protected some of the workings for the entry system to the car park. He, with panic in his eyes, would lean up from behind the box - possibly one foot or so in height itself - and then duck down behind it again. My mum didn't see it as she was concentrating on driving, but as the barrier raised and we pulled through, I was peering over my shoulder to get a final glimpse of the strange little fellow, which I think I may have caught. I remember wondering if I should tell my mum of this but I didn't. Though it freaked me out a bit at the time, I thought it wasn't something I should share. For quite a while afterwards, I'd thought I'd seen an alien, but a few years ago when I remembered the occasion, I wondered if it was more likely that I'd seen a goblin that had got itself lost and didn't know how to return home.
Well, aside from that and back to how I grew up. I suppose that I was always a quite boy that preferred my own company to read and play computer games to going out to play, apart from with the few good friends I had.
If I am to be honest, I do remember having a few issues at school. I had a tendency to go off on a tangent and take my time over things. This got to the point where there were talks about having me tested. I wasn't tested. Whether that was a right or wrong decision. Who's to know. I think one of the worries was that if I was to be tested and something was found, would I then be treated differently by the other kids and not included.
Anyway, remembering back, I think I may have continued with those traits to some extend. At the time, teachers would say to specifically talk about a certain subject and I would go off on a tangent because I saw that they were still relevant to the subject. Though I couldn't quite describe why at the time, now I see it more about recognising that everything is interconnected. Any specific thing can not exist in a vacuum, away from the influence of other things or beings.
The other thing that was recognised, me taking my time over things, I still do that now in a sense. If something is to be done, it is to be done properly and with a full understanding of why it is to be done and what its consequences will be.
I also remember in primary school, I occasionally had felt as if I had no friends and on one occasion got into a huge fight with my best friend because he had been ignoring me for a small number of weeks. I remember running away in tears because I I had lashed out and that had shocked me. I couldn't believe my own behaviour at the time. I remember being made fun of afterwards. Kids thought I'd run in tears because I'd hurt my hand. I'd found this frustrating and couldn't quite communicate why. That hadn't been the case at all. My friend turning his back on me had felt like a betrayal at the time. But we soon came to an understanding.
Though the school did disappointingly want to investigate my outburst further as I'd never had one before. I remember finding out much later about this much later. My parents had been called in and I think I would agree with them, that they had noticed that I was a very intuitive little boy who only makes friends because of the compatibility and goodness I'd sensed in others and for a friend to change their behaviour and shun me, I wouldn't be able to quantify it and I would lash out. I think that this has also passed on into my adult life in some regards - more on this in a while as it factors into one of the main reasons I am writing this post - but I am not very good at communicating my emotions. I can sense the feelings of others to a strong degree sometimes and can quickly tell what mood they are in. Though I cannot quite explain fully what I am feeling or what I sense others are feeling, it was a learning curve to find that a lot of the people around me could not do this and needed to have emotions explained. I just act on what feels right and it more often than not is, where I've found that that isn't the case with a lot of people.
I also remember my first day at school, or perhaps I may have melded a few of these early memories together and what I'm remembering is an amalgam of memories that occurred over the course of the build up between finding I would be going to school and school's first day. I remember feeling confused as to why school was needed. It was taking me away from my mum, from watching Sesame Street with lunch - that was a big thing for me and one of the most distinct things I remember. It felt like something I was forced to do. I couldn't see why I couldn't learn all that was needed from my surrounds. It had been noticed that I was a busy child, always curious about his surrounds. I couldn't see why that should end. Perhaps there is more there than I'm willing to think about at the moment. Perhaps there's something there that's telling about my subconscious and general outlook that I may like to think about later on.
I do remember during my primary school years, going into the fields that surround the village to explore and make dens. It's naughty I know, but if there were any hay bales left after the harvest, we used to find one that wasn't baled very tightly and then dismantle it to build a fort.
I also fondly remember family holidays as a child during my primary school years. We used to go regularly to a town in Suffolk, on the coast, called Southwold. It was a market town and had become a seaside resort in the Edwardian period but had never continued much as such to rival Blackpool, Brighton or Skegness, as its pier had washed into the sea.
I remember this was one of the first distinct places where I could get a general feeling about a place, it was almost as if I could feel the town's aura in a sense, though I'm not too sure if it can be described as such. I don't think I've carried too much of it into my adult life, which is a shame. It's something I feel a little melancholy about loosing. It would be nice to get that feeling back.
I could feel the safe, happy, casual feeling of the town. That the town was still the visiting spot for holiday makers and that this town had successfully held onto its past despite modern development. It felt relaxed and cheery.
This carried on when we used to walk along the beach to the south towards its neighbouring villages of Walberswick and Dunwich, or walk into the marshlands on that side of town. It felt distinctly more lonely, more barren. That this was a land that had been weathered and become hardened. In Walberswick harbour, I could feel and recognise that there had been fishermen and boats here for centuries who had lived through storms and the hardship of life at sea. And this was the first time that I became aware of Dunwich as well. The old capital city of East Anglia that had been washed into the sea by successive storms which had only left a hamlet behind along with the ruins of an old abbey.
I also remember the latter years of primary school, my family and I would holiday in Ireland. Though the visits here air chronologically later than holidays to Southwold, I still hold Southwold with more vividness in my mind, it made more of an impression on me. I suppose I never really got a distinct feeling for the places we stayed. Thinking about this now, I do find that I get ill-defined feelings about whether a place is comfortable, sad, lonely, jolly or relaxed for instance.
Of course, there are some vivid memories about the holidays. We mainly returned to County Wexford or Wicklow and I remember the deep, wild green of the places. Every where seemed to have that present, even the towns we visited. And I also remember the rain. It rained a lot when we holidayed there. If it didn't rain, it was foggy. Though it feels a little silly to say, the green wildness does seem to have been tangible - even the green and I'm not too sure how I would go about feeling a colour - like the sort of aura feelings I got about Southwold. Recalling it now, It does feel as if the wildness had almost been forgotten about, but was always going to be there, like a benevolent shadow, always watching and protecting the land.
There were a few episodes I particularly remember about visiting Ireland. There was my mum's insistence that she wanted to visit Cork. She'd had family there in the 19th century. I do remember her getting quite emotional. I think she'd had an inclination that she'd returned to the land of her ancestors and could feel that 'in her bones'. I remember the wistful, nostalgic wonder in her eye of times lost. I remember an Abbey in ruins that the locals were still angry with the English about because, as it transpires, Oliver Cromwell had demolished it for political and religious reasons at the end of the Civil War. Religion hey.
I remember us staying very close to a village that had been used as the set of a drama series called Ballykissangel. A series that gave Colin Farrell his acting break. I remember being irritated because friends and family would ask if we'd gone there because of the series when it was just a coincidence that we'd booked the stay in the cottage a few weeks before the first series aired. I remember car rides over rugged mountains and hardy moorland.
It was about this time I seem to remember deciding to write a couple of stories. One I never finished about viking ghosts from the village's barrows, another about ghosts in an Irish mill and another - another ghost story - based on the marshes outside Southwold about the ghost of the airman leading a man to find all the remains of his crashed WW2 aircraft.
I do remember one more incident from later on in primary school. One of my friends had been involved in a huge car crash and had had to spend quite a bit of time - a month or two - in hospital and convalescing. There had been a class project where we all made something for him, to entertain him and to keep his spirits up and remind him that we were all thinking of him. We all basically had free reign to make whatever we thought would cheer him up and I remember making him little pictures of bomber planes, takes and squads of men, all cut out of paper so that he could play soldiers as he rested. Years later, I must have been in my late teens or early '20s, I bumped into him in the village pub and he told me that he still had them. It had been his favourite thing from the whole class and he'd only got them out again recently, remembering that while he was in his hospital bed, he'd moved them around, pretending that the folds in his bed sheets were hills in which the soldiers and planes would pass over. It was perhaps my first example of synchronicity, as he'd only recently found them once more. The thanks I got from him was one of the most heart warming things to have happened to me at that time.
Now onto my secondary school years. Struth, this looks like it'll be a long piece. This feels like a cathartic process, so I'm sorry if I'm boring you. This does feel as if it is more of a brief but full biography at this point. Whether I use this as a way of looking into things I'd rather not fully think about, I don't know, but I possibly will touch on them as I do plan to be fully honest. This is meant to be akin to a diary entry. And diaries are for true thoughts, or there isn't much point in recording them down. Sorry, I am reminding myself of this point more than anything.
At secondary school I remember much of the same things happening in classes. I would just get on with the work. I made a few friends in the nerdy crowd - they were always up for the most interesting of talks. I remember that this was also a time where I got into Warhammer and I would spend lunchtimes talking about bits of the background involved in the game.
Starting secondary school also marked a change in where my family and I would go on holiday. We started going to Normandy in France regularly, though we did visit Brittany two or three years in a row, and this feels like a distinct marking point in becoming aware of something greater.
Throughout those holidays my parents and I visited several site related to druids. I particularly remember on one occasion, under a brilliant blue sky, with the lush greener - green seems to be particularly predominant in my mind at the moment - countryside around us, visiting a druid graveyard by a small village I unfortunately don't remember the name of. Stretching away from the village stood a curving band of megaliths, all equal to the height of a man yet much wider, following the bank of a stream. It was an awe inspiring moment, to visit somewhere that hadn't been altered by the passage of more than a thousand years, to visit the graves of several score wise men that had been deemed worthy of being remembered like this. Though their names had gone, their remains stood there as a monument. And though they were tucked away in a comparatively forgotten corner of the countryside, they side stood as if watching and standing guard over the land. I imagine they're still there, their grave still unmolested by development. And I imagine that they'll still be there for many centuries to come.
Another incident I remember greatly was that we'd seen a megalith marked on our atlas and we'd decided to go and spend the day there, imagining that, like in England, it may have been turned into a tourist site or to have some attempt at protection put about it. We arrived, driving down this single lane track, deep in the heart of agricultural land, steep sided banks on either side, capped with hedges, awaiting a farmer to bucket along the road on his business through his land and having to swerve out of the way. We came across it. It was a stone. Maybe one foot tall and set into the side of the side of the bank that lined the road and stood on a plinth on a sharp corner in the road. I seem to think that it may have had a plaque marking it as a monument, but I can't quite recall. We pulled up and my dad stayed with the car, ready to move, should a car come around the corner quickly. My mum and I went to the stone - again this was a hot day and the soft hiss of crickets sounded about us - and my mum placed her hand on it and gasped in surprise and retracted her hand. She touched it again and asked me to put my hand against it and I felt what she felt. There was this pleasant glowing feeling that came from the stone and travelled up my arm. I've felt similar sensations, but only when I've been well into a meditative state and never have I felt it come from an actual object before, and off the top of my head, I've not felt it come from an object since.
Holidays in France were very important to me, because we even visited Mont St Michel as well and many an article has covered that.
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This may be the end of me typing up this piece. I know that it has turned into something different from what I first intended it to be - a spiritual diary to help me focus my mind on what I really do belief in and where my journey will take me next - and has turned more into a biography of the first decade or so of my life. I think writing this has partly fulfilled what I intended, to help focus me a bit. More recently, I had lost focus on a number of things in my life as there had been a couple of things that had 'derailed' me. And that is what had motivated me to start writing this piece. Part of that has been sorted out as time passed and consequently, part of the need to finish this has been lifted.
I do realise that this is a lengthy 'biography' covering the early years of someone who has little in the way of drama to offer from that period, and I do realise that it is rambling and that few may want to read it all the way through - if at all.
Thank you for the indulgence. I have come away with something from this. I have found some focus in my mind and have also come to terms with some aspects of myself by writing them down.
I may very well return to this piece and finish it off. I hope so. It feels like a weight off my shoulders to acknowledge things from that era of my life. I hope to do the same with later eras.
At some point soon, I think I will look through this again and perhaps highlight points that I think are of particular importance for me to work on or explore. I may even right up those experiences. I also think that soon, I will also do a similar piece, specifically concentrating on the events of the last year, a period what I seem to have become more aware of my spiritual side. It will be difficult for me as there'll also be a few instances of periods that have been difficult in my personal life that I may not want to fully acknowledge at this moment. I would definately like to keep a record on here of the things that I have explored, partly as a record and reference to myself and perhaps for someone else to use as the same. Perhaps it will be useful to others and will add a fresh angle on things.
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