Wednesday 1 December 2021

Standing on The Edge...


 

 

I cannot do it. I know I want to…

 

So often I have imagined this feeling of being poised, toes just behind the edge, keeping perfect balance. I’m in harmony with the earth beneath my feet, the wind on my body and that vast expanse in front of me. How glorious!

 

But I know I cannot do it. Because, if I crept to the cliff’s edge and stood like some courageous and remarkable creature on the crumbling white chalk, I would not be able to stop myself from launching into the air to fly between the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky, soaring, gliding over the waves in an ecstasy of freedom.

 

Instead, I stand some three metres back from that place which is calling to me. My mind is possessed by panic, my stomach somersaults, whirling around like the sails of a windmill in grinding anxiety. I must turn and leave, but I am held by the light cascading to and from the heaving water. The shifting sound of the sea is filling my head with such infinite delight, so hypnotic. White frothing water mixes with the chalk that towers out of the sea. Towers that have been separated from the land by the unceasing power of the waves.

 

I am held, imprisoned by thoughts of fear, of blind terror, of unconditional love for the sea. I need to escape. I need to walk back down to safety. 

 

Then up from under the cliff rises a seagull, the white feathers of its body are teased by the breeze that sustains it. Once it is level with my envious gaze it holds its course; effortlessly still. I am mesmerised. My mind is emptying, flowing out over the precipice. The gull’s black tipped wings are open, stretched in a delicate balance until it shifts sideways to hold me with its pale amber/ grey eye The sharp black point of its pupil becomes the focus of deep connection.

 

Still watching me, it’s lifted way up and out. Until it closes its wings and falls, skimming over the boiling salty white rocks, leaving behind the echo of its cry and the ghost of its presence.

 

 

From the stillness a memory emerges of a previous encounter with a seagull. I had just been to the hospital café and purchased the most delicious of fruit flapjacks to eat outside in the sunshine. Suddenly, it was as if a white sheet had been thrown over me and I felt the deft removal of the flapjack from my hand. I looked down to see a gull standing on the tarmac looking straight at me. If it wasn’t for the crumb that fell from its beak, there would have been no evidence with which I could have held it to account.

 

 

Slowly I come back to the sound of the sea. And, as words return, I realise there is no hope - there is only understanding. What exists beyond that I don’t know… Instead I watch, and I listen.

Tuesday 19 October 2021

Learning in the time of Coronavirus: Part Three - a way forward?

  

There is no going back: the Covid 19 virus has exposed our fragility and we cannot continue with such a level of disrespect for the planet and its inhabitants. Change is being forced upon us, and the education system that has been built upon mechanical, measurement and outcomes approach is crumbling. We are living in a time of climate breakdown, species extinction, social inequality, unrestrained technological advancement, deep religious and ideological separation. The way we educate ourselves and our young must respond to this situation and to those fractures in the fabric of our lives that are being fully exposed.

 

The modern education system is built on human greed founded upon comparison and competition. This leads to the destruction and exploitation of our fellow human beings and the planet, creating separation through age, gender, race, class, caste, religion, intellectual ability and economic well-being. The system is run on commercial lines with learning being a commodity serviced by teachers and schools; parents are the customers and young people are the raw material to be shaped to the desires of the school, parents and society. 

 

Education is dominated by the language and values of the marketplace, arising from the exploitation and destruction of the industrial age, and resulting in the climate breakdown and species extinction that we are witnessing. The coming generations are going to be engaged in finding their way through this mess, and the worst thing we can do is present them with the illusion of a future rooted in how things have always been. Tests and exams leading to qualifications that will find the ‘good job’ are irrelevant in a world that is under threat.

 

I would, therefore, suggest that we do not begin with the mass, not replacing one system with another, but with the individual. 

 

A child is full of wonder, intelligence and the capacity to learn. They have their own particular interests, abilities and ways of being. The process of education as it is now, is more attuned to the ideology of individualism. This ideology is expressed through the exploitation of the individual for commercial gain, creating division and separation through conformity, comparison and competition. However, humanity is made up of individuals who are indivisible from each other, from other living beings and the world of nature that sustains all life.

 

A process of education, exploration and learning that has the individual in mind also acknowledges the relationship of that individual to the world as a whole. Therefore, this process does not concentrate on separating into categories, but is always looking for connections, looking for the whole picture. 

 

 

Listen to the young:

 

Pressure… I must be motivated.  The click and grind and motion of the wheel in my head; the treadmill of the brain.  Cannot, must not stand still… must move on.

 

Success… I must be inspired.  Please inspire me; inside I am empty.  Please fill me with your wise words, positive statements, your exhortations to achievement.  Without them I am nothing, another statistic in the data bank of human misery.  You tell me I am nothing and then you tell me to be something – thin, beautiful, clever.  And you say: don’t talk so much; then, don’t be so silent.  So I cannot tell what you are thinking.

 

Anxiety… close cropped and bare as barbed wire.  What is going to become of me?  You exhort me not to be a failure and urge me to follow my passion. You talk to me of the global race and the part I have to play in it.  So I am looking for the finishing line and thinking about what will happen when I get there.  Will I then be spat out, chewed over and over until all outward form is lost?  Will I be digested then excreted in some unrecognisable form that once was me?  What do you think of me?  Do you like me?  If you don’t, then I won’t like you.

 

I can no longer do this on my own.  Absorb me in your cleverness, your silky long words are like hypnotic snakes, and maybe, just maybe I could be like you.  Tell me what to do; don’t ask me questions; don’t make me think.  Reflection takes place in a darkening mirror, and these days the dark frightens me.  Comfort me.  I am frozen in time, like a mammoth in ice…

But I want to be alive!  For I am young, and confusion is the state of all humanity.  I am young, please don’t ignore me.

 

 

 

Humanity cannot exist without children, cannot exist without the natural world and neither are resources for exploitation; the world is a living entity. The time has come for a coordinated framework outlining an approach to living which values the young, their education and the Earth that nurtures them. Over the years there have been ideas, insights, books, schools, universities that have pointed the way to educate as if people and planet matter. Experiments have come and gone, and some continue. 

 

The urgency for change is imperative, but it is also obvious that we must proceed slowly, with care, kindness and sensitivity.

 

There is fertile ground for a global conversation, for dialogue, where through exploring this question of education and its purpose, it will be possible to address the accumulation of crises that face us. A group of people talking together openly with attention on process rather than outcome, allows for real change to emerge. This is a situation where learning takes place – this is education.

 

I would suggest that there is no barrier to who might participate in this conversation, because we never cease to learn. Nevertheless, it is how this conversation is conducted that will inevitably define its outcome. Conflict will create division and anger; however, cooperation and collaboration will create understanding and agreement. There can be no hierarchy, no leaders, no ideology, only listening and observing with respect, and a mind that understands that we are working for the good of all that lives and dies – towards survival.

 

Let us return to the individual, but this time not define who we are talking about by age and let us explore the conditions under which they might thrive. It is possible to create an atmosphere of learning that steps out of the restrictions of punishment and reward and a rigid hierarchy of knowledge, to one where learning is essentially a collaborative process of discovery. This implies an informality of relationship, after all, education is a supremely human activity involving many subtle relationships which are unable to be explored in an atmosphere constricted by formality. 

 

The relationship between teacher and student is fundamental to the process of education, being a complex flow of communication that requires humility, sensitivity and humour. Teachers being referred to by their first names, dropping the use of uniforms, and by having small, human-scale institutions, relationships in learning can flourish. Also there must be an acknowledgement of the importance of the use of questions, how they are framed, how they are asked, and the quality of listening that receives them. Underpinning this is understanding the destructive nature of violence, exploitation and separation. Instead of outlining a set of values to which the individual must adhere, there is the possibility of developing insight into the consequences of human behaviour.

 

Listening and observing are the bedrock of understanding and exist deep within our relationship with the natural world. In order to understand ourselves we need exposure to the sky, winds, birds, insects, trees; all the living things that share the Earth. By observing and listening to ourselves through our relationship with the rest of the world, then we can create a world that is not based on greed and violence.

 

Our industrialised thinking must be challenged fundamentally for a new approach to education to come about. Ideas concerning the number of people involved in different learning situations, the nature of the learning process, different environments in which learning takes place, what the meaning of discipline is when it comes to learning, and how time is used, need to be examined. The exploration into the process of the socialisation of the individual within diverse cultures at differing stages of life has been sorely neglected and has led to serious and continuing conflict around race, gender, religion and age. Key aspects of human life are becoming devalued, notably parenting, teaching and generally caring for others. 

 

For humanity to flourish, its connection with the Earth cannot be lost, and the careful exploration of this relationship must inform all aspects of a new approach to education.

 

The ground is right for conversations to flow, understanding to develop and a clarity to emerge within the contradictions and paradoxes that are an integral part of human relationships. Education is a collaborative exploration into what it means to be alive.

 

Let these conversations take place in open spaces, without fear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday 11 October 2021

Overland to India 50 years ago: Postscript

 

 

 

Four of us, two girls two boys, travelled by train to the Indian-Nepalese border and took the local bus to Kathmandu. Half sleeping along the narrow roads, I watched the rhododendron covered hills loom toward us and woke up again to find that those hills had slipped away and the magnificence of the Himalayas lay almost in snow-capped touching distance.

The city had just one tarmac covered road. From our basic, but clean hostel we would wake to the regular dawn chorus of throat clearing and the olympic level spitting out of congealed phlegm built up from the night. Side streets held the sweet acerbic aroma of fresh urine, and little children happily defaecated where they played. The mountains, snow-topped and majestic beyond the petty wanderings of humankind, surrounded this ancient city; forests below them.  Large painted eyes looked out from Buddhist stupas with their ragged flags fluttering in spiritual disarray. There were very few cars. 

We walked to a nearby monkey temple high on a hill.

‘Bloody hell! What was that?’

My friends looked pale and shaken. I was pale and shaken.

The Nepalese Army appeared to be indulging in target practice below, and either by design or sheer incompetence a stray bullet passed between us as we looked from the temple over the vast space of green trees, grey rock, and snow-covered peaks. The scarlet robed monks around us appeared unperturbed, and as we climbed further the gentle salute of a tiny novice in his fledgling attire calmed spirits and fears. A couple of days later we hired bicycles and rode into the forest. We cycled through squares that seemed to have only young tourists there.

‘You want acid? Weed? Hash?’

Long haired men and smiling faces of young women proclaimed a narcotic nirvana. What would become of them?

However, other things were taking over. We ate in dimly lit restaurants that played music by Cat Stevens and Carol King, an alternative universe imported by young westerners, the creeping tentacles of global culture. At one restaurant, dark, noisy and friendly, a young Nepalese man came up to me and looked intently into my eyes. My full English reserve was put into play, and I stepped back.

‘It’s OK, man, all cool. But you’d better get to see a doctor quick. Look at your eyes in the mirror. Look at the colour. You’ve got hepatitis.’

I got back to the hotel, and, sure enough the whites of my eyes were a deep, dirty yellow.

That night I woke up with intense stomach pains and only just made it to the toilet to deposit that evening’s meal into the appropriate place. I felt dreadful, all I wanted to do was stay in bed and sleep.

 It was time to visit to the local hospital. I was weak and helpless. The doctor, probably driven by experiences of treating young travellers in various states of ill-health, was keen that I should return to whence I came. The war was taking place mostly in what was East Pakistan and hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi refugees were streaming across the border into Northern India. Commercial flights were still taking place, and I wanted to go home. 

Was that weakness, a lack of courage? If I had taken some time to get better and carried on with my travels, what would have happened? My parents had insisted I take out an expensive insurance before I left, and this was to take me home.

An emaciated, yellow tinged body took the train back to Delhi with one of the girls I had been travelling with. The other two friends flew out from Kathmandu to travel further eastward as there were fewer and fewer flights. We shared a four-bunk compartment with two Indian Army officers – their servants would appear from time to time to make sure that they had everything they wanted. My companion was frightened that we were going to be caught up in the war.

‘This will be very short, but there will be much suffering’

The officers sensed our concern.

‘East Pakistan will be no more. And Bangladesh will exist, but there will be many refugees and many deaths’

There was a hint of compassion in the voices of these military men.

‘This war is not necessary.’

My companion was crying quietly, she wanted to go home.

A day later she flew from Delhi. Then it was my turn.

 

 The war lasted under a fortnight, but the cost to Bangladesh was devastating, with an estimated 300,000 to 3,000,000 civilians killed and a further eight to ten million refugees entering India. 

This insignificant individual arrived  into Heathrow to be greeted by the dank cold of a December day. I was met by a taxi driver who must have seen my condition and offered to take me to Liverpool Street Station. Once in the taxi the driver announced that it would cost twenty pounds (around the value of £100 today). I had £10 and insisted he drop me at the nearest underground station. He did and took £5 from me. I was very ill and disorientated. I took the three-hour ride sitting on the floor of a crowded train full of Christmas shoppers.

I was wearing my Afghan coat, Afghan boots, a shirt I had bought in India and a not so clean pair of trousers.

 

‘I shall never forget meeting you off the train,’ said my mother. ‘You had hair all over the place, your skin was yellow, and you smelt terrible… I wondered what I was meeting.’

 

I had been to lands that no longer exist under that name. I had walked in streets which have since been obliterated by bombs and bullets. I had passed along roads where a long look at the beauty of the surroundings was to be imbued with peace. Only for a few years later those very same roads were to be too dangerous to travel.  Aleppo is rubble, Baghdad is rubble, much of Afghanistan is also rubble. There has been so much destruction, so much human blood spilt and so much suffering. Kashmir has since been the centre of brutality and cruelty for its inhabitants – a descent from heaven to hell on earth. Kathmandu has suffered a devastating earthquake. 

Like many, I question deeply the notion of human progress. I had witnessed such beauty in nature that completely dispossessed me of myself and I was lost in eternity, immortality, for even a few seconds. So often I received the smiles and kindness of strangers. 


I was home by Christmas.

 

Thursday 23 September 2021

Overland to India 50 Years ago: Part 4 (an ending)

 We came upon Srinagar in the Himalayas, through a winding mid-November ride from the Punjab to Kashmir stretching up towards the snow, yet another world. When would war come? Would Kashmir be the focal point? Anxiety about travelling onwards and worry about what war would mean to us had dragged our spirits down since leaving Amritsar. There were some on the bus who wanted to get to Delhi as soon as possible and push on to destinations beyond India. 

 

However, Srinagar was on the itinerary and that was where we found ourselves. We left the vehicle with our luggage and peered into the autumn night air and the enveloping scent of woodsmoke. We passed by pale, soft lights, and a distant tide of murmuring voices as we approached the Dal Lake to take up residence in one of the houseboats moored upon the banks. It was a night where time had no meaning, where the distance between humanity, water and the cold breeze disappeared and merged into an ecstatic strange dream. Even now the smell of woodsmoke in the dark of night when I am out in the cold returns me to that place and that time.

 

Please burn my body on a pile of wood and throw my ashes into water. 

 

The lake revealed itself in the morning with autumn trees mirrored in stillness; sellers of fruit, vegetables, and stuff for tourists, slid by like ghosts on the glassy water on their shallow, narrow boats, and their voices echoing beyond the trees up to the vast snow-capped mountains beyond. On the houseboat we were shown the visitors’ book signed by George Harrison just five years before, when he stayed by the Lake to learn from the guru of the sitar, Ravi Shankar. I was also delighted to see, lying enticingly on an uncluttered table, the spectacular album cover of the Incredible String Band’s ‘The 5000 Sprits or the Layers of the Onion’. 

 

We rode on scrawny, tough mules up into the snow lapped mountains. Later we took a slow rowed boat journey along the lake fringed with golden brown leaved trees; all sound absorbed and subsumed into the surroundings. No engines, no drills, no aeroplanes, no cars, nothing but people, birds, the wind, the cold – another time, another life. It is so easy to vaunt the progress of man, and to dismiss as sentimental rubbish and nostalgic musings of a romantic the questioning of modernity – our brave new world. 


It is indeed impossible to recreate the past, for the past is a dead land full of misconstruction. However, to deny the past and its play in the present is to enter a fool’s paradise shorn of complexity and housed in mirrors of distortion. Can you see what is? Are your perceptions real? Are you aware of how your actions of today create the path to tomorrow? How can you be so sure?

 

As the rumbles of war took us from this place so close to the Pakistan border and essential focus point for conflict resulting from that archetypal bureaucratic blunder by the British in partitioning India, we moved to the blackouts of Delhi. Occasionally, a siren would wail as preparations for the experience of attacks by warplanes and bombers was becoming more of a reality. There were anti-aircraft guns surrounded by sandbags and operated by helmeted men in camouflage uniforms placed strategically around the city.

 

 

How is it that I, like so many people in the past and the future, fell in love with India? Was it that naïve, romantic streak trying to escape cruel reality? It couldn’t be for there is more daily evidence of ‘cruel reality’ as you travel round India than in many other places in the world. It is there in front of you; on the streets; in the villages; in the fields; not much is hidden, but when this ‘reality’ is revealed, there can be horrors that shock to the core.

 

Delhi is where we parted company; at the YMCA in the centre of the city where taxi drivers sidled up to us to offer a variety of services one of which was a ride in the car. An early morning city of tennis players on the nearby courts and the sad, silent ragged creatures that stirred from their nocturnal homes on the street. We had been together for almost three months, finding a closeness, a travelling community. But then, once we had stopped, the communal ceased and individual purpose took over. 

 

Accident of birth is all that is needed in this stiff framework of inequality. To be male instead of female; to be white  instead of black, brown, or yellow; to have a home; to have food; to have a good chance of survival. We were the lucky ones, the privilege afforded by where and to whom we were born. We knew that in this there was held a responsibility. 

 

We had arrived in a country so totally different from the one we had left. But, because we had come overland and had experienced gradual culture and environmental change, we had been able to assimilate this transformation and connect with both land and humanity. To travel like this is the very antithesis to air-travel – to be picked up in one country and dumped in another. It takes a while to catch up with yourself. 

 

My only connection with my family was through letters. The company running the trip set up designated Post Restante places, which were post offices that held any post for us to pick up on the way. Generally, we were able to get post about every two weeks. My mother had written weekly to my brothers and me when we were at boarding school. She kept this up so that there was always a letter for me to collect – I wrote home more sporadically. We never communicated by phone.

 

As a parent, I have been incredibly grateful for the ability to communicate with my children as they have travelled to many places, and lived for a lengthy time in other parts of the world. However, when the communication ceases for a time, anxiety can so easily surface. When I made this trip to India it was really a case of there being ‘no news is good news’.

 

Our ancestors walked, went by horseback, camel, oxcart, open to the elements, in discomfort, slow, but in deep connection with their surroundings. Even travelling by bus, we had to stop frequently; we had to interact with the people we met on the way; the roads were often poorly maintained, narrow and winding; mostly we travelled slowly. 

 

Maybe the wheel will turn, and we will have to travel slowly again.

Sunday 19 September 2021

Overland to India 50 Years Ago: Part 3

 The southern coastline of Turkey held beaches, warm seas, and ancient ruins, so the fact that we had stay a little longer and then go to Iran via Syria was no trouble. Entrance to Iran was closed for a time whilst the Shah of Persia celebrated the 2500th year of the Foundation of the Imperial State of Iran with the dignitaries and Heads of State being invited to attend from around the world. The borders were, however, closed to lesser mortals, particularly travellers like us with very little money.

 We drove through Syria via Aleppo and swum in the River Euphrates. The biblical deserts were still peopled by shepherds tending their skinny flocks, and the occasional tented nomadic community could be seen from the road. In Baghdad we camped under date palms just outside the city. When wandering about the city I happened to glance into a steel bucket and saw sheep heads, their eyes staring back in mild accusation at my presence. Tehran led to Isfahan with its magnificent mosques and extraordinary artistry and colour. 

 

We slept beside the bus under the stars in the open land ready to cross the border the next day. I lay feeling the cold of the desert air, so far from anything I had known. We entered Herat, and the magic began shifting again, sliding across the border at dusk the next day into Afghanistan and the low, dark houses looking as if they had grown out of the rocky sandy land. Wood-smoke curled round the roofs and the soft light of kerosene lamps blurred the edges of rooms and entrances to houses. The city was rooted in the past, ghosts of ancient traders paraded their goods by camel, horse, and donkey. Incomprehensible whispers emanated from gatherings of merchants, past and present, soon to be drowned out by the thundering of trucks – but not quite yet. Modernity was slowly creeping on its belly towards this place, and with it would come great shudders of terrible violence.

 

After six weeks on the road, an imperceptible transition in my mind and character was taking place; even as I was having to deposit the contents of my stomach behind some low wall outside a tiny restaurant. The local purchase of a stinking, but lovely Afghan coat and cheap leather boots furnished me with the look, the outward show of a naturalised western traveller ready to travel further East in the turning year.

 

In these lands poets had travelled through mountains and deserts, ruthless warlords had rained down a blood-soaked hell with metal honed to part body from soul, and wild horses were tamed by women, children, and their menfolk. It was these lands that the British Empire, for which this boy was educated, had sought to conquer, and impose their civilisation on this wiry, wild, and striking dark race. It was only a quarter of a century since global war had subsided, however, and the oil-rich nations had now become dominant in a fatal game of who would own that finite liquid gold. Thin, brittle humans were no match for monstrously greedy demand for resources and the fat few that could broker any deal and suck up all the money. 

 

I think maybe it was here in Afghanistan that I reconnected with the child that had been hidden so long beneath the accumulation of knowledge, the words of admonishment, of how to be, and the terrible, terrible fear of doing something wrong. 

 

A man, thin and dark, with a dirty white cloth wrapped around his head and with a long white straggling beard made to throw a punch at me whilst I was walking down a street in Kabul. I flinched, he laughed, I laughed. He shook my hand. 

 

Is it likely that being young in the 1960s there was an inevitable exposure to a tide of questioning? Had my materially privileged upbringing created a kind of soft barrier to the harsh realities of life so that I could indulge in romantic dreaming? Nevertheless, I think there did emerge a glimmer of connecting to something other, something unnamed, before crass consumption took over, smothering so much with superficial aspirations that shone out in the display of possessions.

 

Then on the road again, but we had to wait as one of the young drivers who had driven us so far disappeared in Kabul with the stash of whisky that he brought from England. He left behind him traces of his Scottish accent, images of his bushy beard and the tears of a young female fellow traveller. Another driver was flown out so the journey could continue.

 

Up and over the Khyber Pass we went, round perilously sharp bends, glimpsing the broken lorries down below, skeletal after crashing down the mountainside, all placing ourselves in the hands of providence. The vast rush of adrenalin that comes with a roller-coaster ride was never my cup of tea, but there were views that destroyed all rationality and a confluence of space and time. I was happily sitting in the front of the bus.

 

Onwards to Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Lahore, where vast colonial houses nestled by the narrow streets, and prayers were called in a regular undulating expanse across the city. Shops were openings that drifted back into buildings and acquired a tempting glow after dusk. Streets and roads crowded with all living creatures and humanity jostled with both the past and the future.

 

We crossed the border leaving this young country, barely twenty-five years old since the British drew the line through the vast sub-continent that was India. There were tangible signs of a rumoured war. Under the warm December sky, against the backdrop of the people going about their everyday business, soldiers were on the move by the truckload. Tanks crept along the narrow highway; jeeps mounted with machine guns weaved between them – they meant business. 


We passed through the Punjab over the border to the Sikh holy city of Amritsar. On a road that had been awash with blood not so many years before, the machines of violence were driving over the spectres of women, children and men. It has been said that the savagery brought about by Partition was without comparison in the history of Asia in its ferocity and long-term effect. 

 

To view, as travellers, this expression of human existence against the background of unfolding wonder is to be brought up sharply by the extraordinary stupidity we constantly display in our ideas and conclusions. Peaceful coexistence appears to be an anathema to humanity and is consigned to the overflowing bin named ideals.

 

Once over the border into India and travelling again, we silently watched with further feelings of foreboding what was unfolding on the roads bordered by lush fields of wheat, more tanks, more lorries carrying more men, more guns, more death. 

 

Then on to Amritsar where the Golden Temple shone with the devotion of over two hundred years. We gazed at the huge carp swimming gracefully in the waters of the enormous, deep tanks that separated the walkways, their movements augmented by the intonation of the readings from the sacred books. Women in their bright saris, men with magnificent beards and colourful turbans, all walked with humility, the light of the sacred shining in their faces, tall, straight backed with fiercely independent gaze. 

 

When the possibility of understanding the narrowness of a background that comes with being brought up in any limited social environment, a perception may come as a sliver of light in the darkness or a steady glow of dawning colour. Words do not suffice, neither are they necessary; what is learnt is not consigned to memory but remains alive in the consciousness of the individual.

 

We were a group of travellers passing through lands together with different perceptions of shared experiences. 

 

Now, half a century later, I do not see them individually, but sense them as extensions of that person I was then – similarly I am part of them. Their names I cannot remember, some faces drift into view in hazy relief. The couples, the young women, and men – the backdrop to a dream. The spectre of my being is floating entwined with theirs as memories locked into the past. Looking back there is magic in remembering and no regret in forgetting. 

 

Tuesday 14 September 2021

Overland to India 50 Years ago: Part 2

 Worried about spending too much money, I barely ate for the first few days, aware of the time and space that lay before me. With a significant lack of exposure to the practical details of life, this excursion into the unknown was challenging to this nineteen-year-old, not long out of the cocoon of boarding school, well versed in words, but little else. Various stages of the journey opened diverse doors, revelations of possibilities. There were thirty individuals aged from nineteen, that was me, to an American couple in their sixties. This couple pulled out of the trip in the early stages, unsure of the level of comfort and the actuality of arriving safely at the destination.

 

The first stop was the Munich Beer Festival, not the beginning of a series of spiritual experiences which would deepen my understanding and enable me to go beyond the material world one might expect. Groups of people, mostly, but not exclusively young, from various parts of the world, fuelled with the flow of amber frothing liquid, created a sense of camaraderie that I had not experienced before. It was not long before I began shedding the skin of uneasy and debilitating self-consciousness, quietly becoming friends with everybody. 

 

‘All Pommies are bastards! All Pommies are bastards!’

 

The mellifluous tones of young long-haired drunken Australian men filled the bus returning us to the campsite on the edge of the city.

 

‘Are you a Pom?’

 

 Where this was leading was painfully obvious. What might happen afterwards was a matter of hoping for the best.

 

‘Yes.’


‘Then you’re a bastard!’ 

 

Howls of uncontrolled laughter followed.

 

‘Are you a bastard?’ 

 

The Australian’s bearded face loomed towards me.

 

‘Actually, I am not.’ 

 

Oh God, I sounded like someone from the 1950s announcing on the BBC .

 

‘Yes, you are, you’re a Pommy bastard. Because all Pommies are bastards!’ 

 

The two of them proceeded to embrace me and pat me heavily on the back.

 

‘And you are a real Pommy bastard! You’re our mate… mate!’

 

More laughter, more chat. More alcohol fuelled friendship.

 

But alcohol assists in building a window of deception and leaves both physical and mental wounds that over time do not always heal effectively, lubricating false friendships and destroying lives.

 

On our return to the campsite it became clear that one of the bus drivers had disappeared. So, on this mild September night several of us wandered back into the city to look for him – we had no idea where we were going, or how to get back to the campsite. However, it was one of those occasions when all the right things happened – he was found, we returned, and all woke up feeling unsure of ourselves in bright sunlight the following morning

 

Soon we passed through Yugoslavia, a country that now only exists in echoes a shadows of brief unity; and we were becoming conscious of fewer vehicles, more animal traffic and different modes of dress. I realised that I was changing with the journey, a mind being opened by what I saw, although not fully realising the significance of what this meant in terms of the lives of the people we were seeing.

 

We swam off the glorious coast of Greece, camping on the beaches. We walked round the ancient wonders of Athens and then moving on to Turkey. What an assault on my seriously under-developed senses.

 

Istanbul heralded the advent of the East, although already my outlook had moved in synchronisation with the bus towards a slower, more rural aspect of life; peasant farming was still prevalent in most of Europe. In Istanbul I stood outside shops selling the most wonderful cakes and puddings, fully aware my money would not allow such luxuries. 

 

I listened to conversations of the many travellers who gathered in the cafes and outside the shops; tales of drug use, prisons, illness and danger. All the while I breathed the heady air of unwashed bodies, stale cigarette smoke and marijuana, caught in the romance of abandoned youth, dowdy beards, long straggly hair, and the warmth of smiling young women. I was entering another world. Magic was taking place, the magic of infinite possibilities, a magic that was never really to leave me.


A young couple from Wales, who must have been in their early twenties, regaled us with their own tales of sex, drugs, jails, illness encountered through hitchhiking around Europe. She was short with long unkempt, brown hair and a lively, friendly face. He stood taller and they had their arms around each other as they talked; his smiling face framed by darker hair of about the same length as hers, stained teeth shone through strands of wispy beard. Both were clad in dirty denim dungarees with what appeared to be very little underneath. They smiled as they talked of the friends they had met, who had been arrested by the Turkish police, who had been searched for drugs and then beaten up. 

 

They told stories of young Americans they had heard of who had been found with drugs on them and had been thrown into prison and left to rot with no food, sharing cells with murderers and dangerous criminals, only a bucket for a toilet. For some reason Americans were not well-liked in Turkey at that time. What we thought were the exaggerations of these natural story tellers at the time was clearly true.

 

 

 I was used to being with people but was discovering that the tendency to keep my distance from others was still very strong in me. Shyness? Self-protection? To share such a journey in the close proximity of others was both a joy and a challenge. Most of my fellow travellers were under the age of forty. There were young couples from the UK and Australia. Individuals travelling to the Far East and beyond. There were nurses, teachers, students and those who were taking time out from all types of work. We shared laughter, worries, silence and the marvels of the lands we were passing through.

 

An Australian couple from Wollongong took me under their wing. She was small with long dark hair hanging below her waist. He was taller and blond. They both exuded a vitality and openness that entranced me. With them, Steve, a young man from the UK just a few years older than me, and another young couple from the UK became the people I was most friendly with. We were all from different backgrounds, heading towards diverse destinations; and thoroughly enjoying the ride.

 

There were also several girls, one or two travelling alone and others with friends. Despite spending a year in London, I was still very uncertain in the company of young ladies. Nine years in boys only boarding schools and a short lifetime at home with five brothers had firmly placed me in a very male world. I liked the girls I was travelling with, but such close proximity to them made me nervous. 


So much to learn.

 

 

 

 

 

.

 

 

Sunday 12 September 2021

Overland to India 50 years ago: Part 1

 I am sitting on a bench on the edge of Clapham Common on a cloudy September day in 1971waiting for a bus to India.

 

It was a time when many young people took the overland trail from West to East - to find themselves. The perceived spirituality of India had been being exported wholesale to the West since the early 1960’s.  Some years before I had seen footage on the BBC News of the Beatles with their exotically robed, long-haired, bearded, guru, filmed at the colourful ashram on the edge of the milky blue holy Ganges against the backdrop of the mystic Himalayan mountains. A story of fairy-tale qualities. 

 

I harbour no doubts of being heavily influenced. Influenced by the assimilation of the sounds of the music of the East that had emerged in the 1960s, and words that had been culled from ancient Hindu texts. The jangling sitar of the Incredible String Band heralding that ‘all the world is just a play …’ in their song, “Maya’ echoes and intertwines with the classical ragas of Ravi Shankar, the master of the sitar. Influenced by the words of Jiddu Krishnamurti, who, though constantly reiterating that he was not a guru, seemed to hold the door open to another world – a world that had its origins in India. I had come across his work when attending a meeting at the London Buddhist Centre earlier that year. Through friends I had also read several poems written by Rabindranath Tagore, half-remembered for their simplicity of observation, anchored in nature, and moving effortlessly from the particular to the universal. Through both their work I had been touched by the expression of harmony with nature through which lense the world of humanity could be seen and understood. 

 

‘Why are you dropping out of this degree course? Have you thought about leaving it open? Why not come back next year.’

 

The college lecturer was interested and encouraging – he did not ask why I was going to India.



The length of my hair and beard was not conducive to good family relations. 


'India? Why India? You look like a hippie and now you are going to become one. You’ll never come back.'


However, that Christmas I received from my parents a very small book entitled ‘The Little Book of Indian Wisdom’. This contained short quotations from the Vedas and Bhagavad Gita. 

 

‘So, are you looking for enlightenment? Are you going to find yourself?’

 

A friend asked with not a little hint of irony.

 

I had read the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and had been drawn to a small volume – ‘Zen Flesh, Zen Bones’ a collection of Zen stories published by Paul Reps in 1957. I had also read the Tao Te Ching. This journey was to be, without doubt, a spiritual quest, but I was not seeking enlightenment. Maybe I was looking to regain a sense of spirit, a feeling that seemed to have existed most strongly in me before I was sent to school.

 

Indeed, the journey, though born through a haze of romanticism, was fuelled by a perceived need to continue to educate myself, to find out how others live, to see great mountains, wide rivers, all kinds of birds and animals – to explore. 

 

What was surprising to me, sitting there on the edge of Clapham Common, was that I did not feel afraid; for fear had continued to be my constant, hidden companion, emerging from the depths of the past, threatening to paralyse all activity. As it was, I would not be alone, for there were two buses each expecting to carry thirty passengers of various ages. For this was not the brave pioneering step of a free-spirited individual; it was a packaged tour run by a professional company, one of the less expensive ones operating at the time - £84 London to Delhi and £84 back.

 

I was aware and immensely respectful of the courage of those young people who took to the road with their determination to be free, their sense of adventure, and their relaxed approach to all that the previous generation held as taboo. They would hitchhike, take an old van, or pile into trucks and travel in basic discomfort. But I did not feel that this was part of me; caution, hesitancy and reticence existed where there could so easily have been that carefree attitude I so admired.

 

I enter the bus with wide- eyed excitement. This is the step into the unknown I’ve been craving. At last, I can shake off the demands of others as to what I should be and who I should be. I know I’m not alone, but I sense my exploration is beginning from a sense of isolation or separation that had formed an integral part of my schooling. I am looking into the possibility of something that might reveal the connection with the universal that creates a depth of perception that goes beyond the daily routine. It is this quest that takes me to India.

 

 

Thursday 9 September 2021

From London to Delhi Overland: Fifty Years Ago

 Introduction.

 

In early September 1971 aged nineteen, two years after leaving boarding school, I took a bus for a ten week journey overland to India. A great-aunt had left me and my brothers £500 each, and I was excited to have this extraordinary opportunity to learn about the world first hand.

 

We are approaching the ending of our second year dominated by the COVID virus which is severely restricting travel. The people of Afghanistan are being subjected to further devastation and pain. Political, economic, and social disturbance are on the increase throughout the globe. Floods and fires signal climate breakdown. Fear causes people to retreat into isolation and aggression towards those who are different, in the hope that clinging on to the prejudices of the past will lead to a more secure future. Information flies instantly around the world with no reference to the true or the false.

 

Consequently, I have decided to create a series of blogs that will follow my journey from London to Delhi as a reflective experience to understand this personal journey as a human being. I write to understand the world around me, to explore what life is, and to come to terms with ageing. I feel that I am writing within the context of the totality of human consciousness, not as a single, separate being.

 

My intention is to produce a series of four blogs outlining the journey that will be relatively brief and accessible. The first one will appear this weekend.

 

Who will read them? I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter.

 

Tuesday 4 May 2021

Learning in the time of the Coronavirus: Part two.

 ‘This is a crime against Humanity’

 

‘The system hasn’t collapsed. The government has failed. Perhaps “failed” is an inaccurate word, because what we are witnessing is not criminal negligence, but an outright crime against humanity. Virologists predict that the number of cases in India will grow exponentially to more than 500,000 a day. They predict the death of many hundreds and thousands in the coming months, perhaps more. My friends and I have agreed to call each other every day to mark ourselves as present, like roll call in our school classrooms. We speak to those we love in tears, and trepidation, not knowing if we will ever see each other again. We write, we work, not knowing if we will live to finish what we started. Not knowing what horror and humiliation awaits us. The indignity of it all. That is what breaks us.’

 

On India’s Covid catastrophe: Arundhati Roy – The Guardian 29th April 2021

 

My wife, Maggie, and I consider we have many homes, including the one we are renting at the moment in the solitude of the North Dorset countryside. A significant number of these homes are in India.

 

Fifty years ago this coming September I stepped on to an old single decker bus at Clapham Common to join twenty other people for a ten week trip overland to India. I was a naïve, hesitant nineteen year old, a somewhat isolated product of professional middle-class privilege. The journey ahead was to open my mind to an extraordinary diversity of life and ways of living. I was able to adapt and change with the flowing countryside and disparate people as we made our slow journey eastwards across Europe. Once we had entered Asia, traversed Afghanistan, driven through the Khyber Pass and crossed the Pakistan border into India just two weeks before a war between the two countries that would result in the newly independent country of Bangladesh, the goal was reached.

 

I loved India then.

 

Twenty years later Maggie and I, individually, began to take groups of students aged from sixteen to nineteen from the school at which we were working to Rajasthan to learn from people in Jaipur and some surrounding villages. Ten years after that we began to make regular visits to India together, visiting schools associated with the work of Jiddu Krishnamurti, educational institutions founded by Rabindranath Tagore, and other fascinating places where work was being done around education, ecology and biodiversity.

 

We have made so many friends, received so much kindness and affection over the years, and joined in so much laughter and happiness. Occasionally, we have also shared the sadness at the passing of friends – truly feeling that we are part of a wide community. Perhaps it is because all the places we are associated with are informed by philosophies which care for the young, the vulnerable, and the poor.

 

India, however, is a chaotic place full of dangers, contradictions and misery. Where so often life seems cheap, and emotions run high. Travelling is intense and there is always a sense of gratitude when the destination has been safely reached. The appalling poverty of so many people is so evident on the streets of the cities and towns and in the villages. How are we supposed to react as descendants of the white colonialists that looted and divided that vast sub-continent? 

 

Nevertheless, India has been our constant teacher where learning has been a continuous process, and conclusions are rarely found. So many paradoxes emerge in discussions, in chance meetings, fleeting observations, sights, sounds and smells that invade the senses. Sweeping statements about life rarely work, and spending time in India makes that clear every day. So much is nuanced, ambiguous, what you see is not necessarily what is. Relationships are lived out through a background of caste, creed, economic status, gender and, not least to our sensibility of British politeness (superficial and hypocritical?), considerable cultural differences. Being aware of our own cultural biases is vitally important. It is only then that understanding can come about through suspension of judgement when observing and listening.

 

Now, as we watch the destruction, horror and intense suffering so many people are enduring as the result of the Covid catastrophe, the wisdom, much of which has emerged from India, of living with humility and compassion is teaching us the need to care for each other. The Indian government, like many others, including the UK, has a “strong man” at its head and is set on making money rather than looking after its citizens, and in order to do this it is deliberately divisive. The provision of affordable healthcare for all has never been a priority - if you have money there are excellent hospitals in most cities, if you don’t have money, and especially if you live in rural India, there is almost no healthcare provision.

 

Arundhati Roy’s article ends: ‘No, India cannot be isolated. We need help.’

 

There are individuals in India with vast amounts of money, there are corporations in India with vast amounts of money, and there are countries in the world with more than they need to address the pandemic. Meanwhile, our sisters and brothers are experiencing terrible pain, fear and loss. 

 

Action is happening, but will we all learn the lesson of these desperate times?