Intermission

It's been seven years since I have posted anything on this blog, but enforced isolation, the need to fill time and turn the current madness into meaning has brought me back.  

In the intervening years since I last posted, my adventures have continued. I'm going to summarise them here, but will return to write about them - and hopefully link to other posts - periodically.  

I spent nearly four years living in a conscious community in a big Victorian house with seven other people in North West London. This time enabled continuity from community / spiritual life in Asia. It also gave me a safe haven whilst I navigated the traumatic life event of losing one of my best friends, very publicly, in an unresolved incident. I played a role in an international media campaign to find him and later decided to change my career to mainstream media and PR. 

Living in the house allowed me to save up the deposit to buy my first home in Brighton. 
I've been here over three and a half years now, in a leafy spot in a tranquil corner next to Queens Park, on the border of the Hanover Community. In a relatively short space of time I've managed to build up new community locally, in the freelance and media scene and in the spiritual space Brighton Unitarian Church. Hanover is a quirky place, with coloured houses built by the railway workers who worked on the London to Brighton line. It sits on top of a hill, that is fondly known as 'Muesli Mountain'. Here I've made my home, and I'm ferociously proud of my flat, my anchor, by the sea. 

I took up canoeing, and regularly go paddling on various bodies of water with a ragtag group of people called Little Paddle.

Living in Brighton has meant that I do lots of walking and wild swimming, about which I started another project (currently on pause but I hope to return to it at the right time.)

I had pondered starting a new blog, but if there was ever a time to say "I'm not in Kansas anymore" then this would be it - at the start of the outbreak of COVID-19. And it's not just me here with Toto: the whole world is now living in strange, unprecedented times. 

I'm rather fond of a book by Mark Matousek called When You're Falling Dive, the central premise being that, through a process of internal alchemy, we can transform pain and suffering into meaning. In his book, he quotes Marcel Proust as saying:

"I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die, as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it - our life - hides from us, made invisible by our laziness, which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly."

I'm hoping to use this space to regather momentum on my own writing and to turn this catastrophe into something positive. Without the ability to procrastinate, I'm going to make myself sit down at the keyboard and document this journey. 

As I (metaphorically) stretch out my hands to everyone in the world during this collective time of suffering, I hope that these words from Victor Frankl in his seminal novel Man's Search For Meaning give us hope that we can do this.

"What is to give light, must endure burning". 

I hope that the world will emerge stronger. 

One thing is certain, things will never be the same again.