Came back from two weeks up in Scotland and the Lakes to poignant decay in the house.

backhome

It was a powerful fortnight away.

Didn’t really want to go. I’ve been too busy. Too many things clawing at my attention. None of them really getting it.
But the Island always roots me somehow. Even though I didn’t do much practice – or perhaps because I didn’t do much practice.

I wondered around in the rain, looking at things. Exorcising ghosts, pulling up phantoms and laying them on the grass for the gulls to nosh. I sat very still at the water’s edge and enjoyed the suchness of things.

But I also made peace with images, thoughts, emotions. I realise that most of this ‘spiritual’ work has been a form of psychic anorexia. Starving thoughts and emotions out in favour of pure experience. What ever that might be.

Rob Nairn said something brilliant: ‘Loneliness is isolation from Self’. Not from others or the world but from the vast continent of the Self – which is rich and deep and utterly untranslatable.

James Hillman calls it the underworld. We live mostly in the overworld but the huge repository of energy and riches (Pluto is not accidentally God of the underworld and wealth) is in the depthless interior. Dreams access it. Images. But we must never bring the freight of the underworld up into the light. Like Eurydice, once it’s looked at squarely then in vanishes back into the dark.