EPISODE 69: ON CHANGE

 Welcome to my blog which this week begins with the subject of change. As Palmer says: 

‘The only constant in the universe is change…Everything flows…Experiencing the flow permits you to direct it or to exist in harmony with it or to transform it. You welcome and experience the change – recognising new opportunities – or you struggle against and resist the change – thus experiencing suffering. Everything changes. Life and Death are both aspects of change. To live forever or to be dead forever are equally futile struggles.

Choosing to resist the experience you have chosen to experience (by your knowing or unknowing adoption of beliefs) creates the effect of suffering, of being swept alone, of being out of control. You create against yourself – feeling is replaced by thinking.

But when you change your attitude and experience what you have chosen to experience (acknowledging yourself as the source of the beliefs that attracted the experience), you may then create new beliefs as to what you experience you will attract next.

Those persons, places, events, conditions, viewpoints and ideas that you resist experiencing will continue to be created with slight variation until they are experienced as being in accord with the beliefs held by that particular stratum of consciousness that is creating them.’

I didn’t actually mean to quote that much but I was actually thinking about my friend Ella who recently has been somewhat ruthlessly dumped by her partner of six years.  I spent some hours with her yesterday and listened to and comforted her. It is always a delicate balance, of course, when someone is leaning on you for support and validation because you have to both absorb and acknowledge the suffering with genuine empathy while remembering this person needs empowering to get out of the situation that their body minded brain has got them into. As I was copying these words on change, I saw how I could help her reframe the story once she’s allowed herself to feel the feelings – something she is very reluctant to do.

Anyway, the change I wanted to write about is of a different variety. Until a week ago, the neighbour to my right was a slightly mad hippy woman who was almost entirely silent apart from when she drummed and wailed or was complaining about my complaining about her drumming and wailing. My partner had become intimidated by her and very disturbed by the noise and even wanted us to write to the Housing Association to see if we could get her moved – which I wouldn’t do for a number of reasons, not least because replacement neighbours could be much worse.

Last Monday, the hippy woman knocked on the door and said, ‘You won, John. I’m moving. Got a detached place where I can play my music.’ ‘That’s good,’ I said. And that was that. For the rest of the day there was banging and knocking and voices shouting and vans and cars arriving and going until at 6.00 pm there was another knock at the door and there was a small woman with grey hair and few teeth introducing herself in the broadest of somerset accents as Annie. By 7pm she was sitting on an armchair in the front garden, chatting to every single person who walked down the street.

On Tuesday morning, at about 10am, there was the sound of a chainsaw. A man was cutting down the hedge of next door’s front garden, so that her front window can see straight onto the street, and vice versa. This now means that my house is also revealed to the street; not absolutely, because I still have my own hedge, but enough to totally change how I lead my life, because up to now when I’ve opened my front door, I’ve been able to be in my front garden unseen, to sit in the sun (if there were any), to have a smoke, to breathe some air privately, to compose myself…not possible now. And if visitors came, no one would know which house they were coming to. Now they do.

On Wednesday, all the other neighbours came to chat and gawp at the damage.

On Thursday, my neighbour’s workman razed their back garden. First he chainsawed 18 years’ worth of miniature cultivated wilderness and then he set fire to the whole lot. It burned for twentyfour hours and has left my garden, and many others, smothered in black ash. The wildlife has screamed and it is like a burial ground. Throughout all, the cheery raucous somerset shrilling of my neighbours, chatting to her dog or yet more neighbours that she has known all her life.

Don’t they say, be careful what you wish for?

Tuesday Morning: The idea that grew too big for itself.

It is almost a year now since I had the thought, ‘I wonder what a Glastonbury day of the dead would be like?’ At this moment I seriously wish I’d noticed the thought, maybe played with it for a few minutes, and then forgotten it, as I do most of my thoughts and ideas.

For a start, I hardly know anyone in this town of 10,000 and the people I do know are mostly left of any centre you can think of, rarely do anything in the ‘real’ world and represent the tiniest percentage of the Glastonbury demography which is predominantly over 40, white, Christian and conservative.

Mind you, everyone dies. (Or no-one does.)

There is now some 10 weeks to go and the whole thing is insanely underprepared and unready. 

And I’m in panic.

Do something.

I have a megalist, some four A4 pages of things to do. I updated it last two weeks ago and not much has changed since.

So far I’ve not made one phonecall and basically everything has been done by email. Hence long waits not knowing if I’m sat in a junk box or have been considered and denied.

Here is a dilemma. A friend designed a poster for the event which I more or less liked. My eldest son has since designed a poster too. It couldn’t be more different. And it isn’t really appropriate, seeing as the event it advertises isn’t quite the one I’m designing. On the other hand, it is eye-catching and professional.

Here’s another dilemma. I really want to say yes to the brighton theatre group’s £1500 cut price offer. But there is no way I can recouperate that money. And it could take my potential losses up to 5 grand. (I’m already personally overdrawn.) I suppose all along I’ve been hoping someone will be inspired to hand over money because they are moved by the concept of the event. Nick Cage and mike Eavis have, so far, failed me. 

Friday morning:

So I solved my dilemmas by booking the theatre group and deciding to use both posters; one in glaston, one outside. Meanwhile, I made contact with a woman who had ideas about how to attract the death professionals and another woman who knows all about mask-making. A third woman, who had been going to put on an art exhibition before going incommunicado, has returned from her absence with an interest in honouring her committment. For a few days the panic subsides and I feel slightly excited. Who knows what changes next week will bring?