Ramblings of a well intentioned fool.....

Hey folks!

So I'm thinking about some deep stuff this morning and my ramblings may be a bit disjointed, but I want to get my thoughts out there before they fade into another day of routine and prosaic activities.

Forgive me please if what I am about to say is in any way upsetting, or lacks the kind of polished cohesion you prefer from the stuff you devote your time to reading.

So here at the Leicester Peace and Love Collective we experience all kinds of conflict. Personality clashes abound in a house full of strong willed and dynamic people with busy lives and different priorities. We are, for the most part, a happy bunch of folk who have become genuine friends over the time we have spent together, but it is not always smiles and hugs and hippie ideals being realised. Often it is squabbbles over who has or has not washed the dishes, who has moved somebodies laundry, who hasn't put the hoover back in the office, who has paid what and who hasnt, whose turn it is to do this job or that chore and why hasn't it been done and oh for fucks sake why can't you just clean up your shit! We are all lovely folk who live here but we are not saints, or anything special. We are just people, and sometimes peoples needs, expectations and desires clash, and there is conflict.

How we go about resolving that conflict is the mark of how strong and cohesive we are as a community, as well as a mark of how mature and evolved we are as individuals.

Some of us are more passive than others. Some of us are more direct. Some of us are more confrontational. We can all, at times, be very judgmental of each other.

Yet the key to a successful and forward thinking community lies in the strength of it's relationships and that means our ability to appreciate each other, and respect each other.

I often feel that I get off very light and receive far more respect and appreciation that I probably deserve when I weigh up all the factors of my role and place here.

So friendship then is the key. Honest, emotionally involved, and appreciative relationships.

I posted recently (when feeling a little down with one thing and another) about the concept of tribe and within that post I made some comments about the failure of the family unit within western culture.

Please do not misunderstand me and think that I am dismissive of the importance of family. Although it is true that my own relationship with my blood family is somewhat disfunctional, yet I love them and am grateful to them for the start in life that they gave me, and I know that they also have great love for me in spite of the difficulties we have faced in communicating with, and appreciating, each other over the years.

I met this wonderful man last year in a muddy field, living in a tent, who had made the arduous journey all the way from war torn Syria. This man changed my life and shall always retain a very special place in my heart.

He asked me a question one day before I left for the UK, using the privilege of my passport and British citizenship to escape the mud drenched and fearful uncertainty his life had become. He asked me why it is in our culture that people do not look after their elders. How it is that we feel justified to abandon their care in their old age to strangers, employees of private companies or the state on minimum wage. From his perspective our attitude and relationship with the concept and reality of family was indicative of a profound moral bankruptcy within our culture, and I feel he was absolutely right to say so. His words struck deep into the core of my heart and have settled there very uncomfortably as I continued on my way in life, building community, building relationships and failing miserably to maintain any meaningful connection with the very people to whom I owe my existence.

I am working on it now, and have resolved to make far more effort in this regard, but it has given me much to think about as to why and how this decline of the significance of the family unit has developed within our culture, and if his cultural attitude to family, tribe and people is in fact more or less enlightened.

When I, and everyone of my generation and the one that preceded it, were growing up we had a terrible doom hanging over our heads. We lived in constant fear of the sudden reality breaking out of nuclear armageddon. We were shown films in school, as children, as to what we should do if and when the infamous "three minute warning" should sound. It was absurd, especially where I grew up which was so rural that I doubt very much that we would have heard any such warning in the first place, and the instructions were equally absurd. In the face of nuclear war we were in effect told to hide under the table, or in a cupboard under the stairs and not go out until it was declared safe to do so. Great. Nothing like being prepared for the worst eh?

I remember in 1989 when the Berlin wall that divided the two super powers came down, and the collective sigh of relief was tangible. Everyone had been holding their breath, some of us for the extent of our short lives, and some for the forty years since the end of world war two.

The spectre of global extermination was no more, and now it was time to party. Some of us, myself included, partied hard and long.

But we failed to grasp the true nature of our existential threat, and we failed to realise that it had not passed at all. The true nature of that threat was our moral decline as a culture and our unwillingness to address the very real and very visceral results world wide of that decline. Deep in the core of ourselves we all saw the writing on the wall. We all watched Bob Geldof swear on national TV "just give us your fucking money!" as images of starving children filled our screen and rent our hearts. We all learned in our science classes the very real and very fact based folly of the environmental destruction we, as a species, were inflicting on our world.

We watched our political leaders become corrupted plutocrats, actors, liars and thieves. We watched the military become the rogue and unaccountable bully of the global school yard and we watched the law enforcement and intelligence community become gangsters and drug smugglers on a global scale.

And still the children starved, the jungles became deserts, the seas became ever more poisonous and bereft of life and we clung on to the hope that this time, this election, this man or this woman would turn out to be honest, and live up to the promises of making things right again.

For some of us, like myself and many of my peers, it was all too much and after trying naively and immaturely to shout at the world, warning it of it's imminent danger, we too took the stance of the ostrich and I for one buried my head deep in the sand of hedonism and the comfortable emotional oblivion of heroin.

I woke up from that heroin trance in 2012 and what I woke up to was inspiring. People were realising the danger. People were catching onto a new way and model for living. People were focusing on solutions, rather than problems. A cultural and spiritual revival and re-awakening was going on and I happily jumped on board.


I know it is a cliche to say the "the children are the future", but it is no less true for that, and it is for the children of today that I strive for a better tomorrow.

The times I have spent in the refugee camps of northern France have given me much to consider with regard the future we are now building.

The conditions are being set for a whole generation of traumatised and disillusioned children to become traumatised and disillusioned adults with no reason to have anything but contempt for the institutions and peoples of the western world. They have been bombed out of their homes and lives, forced to flee the imposed wastelands of their homes, driven by need onto the shores of our glorious fortress continent that purports to stand proud in the defense of freedom, dignity and respect for all life.

And yet, the response of these self appointed defenders of freedom is to let freedom drown in the ocean, while fencing themselves in and handing over their essential liberties to the same warlords and gangsters we have watched lie and cheat and manipulate the people all of our lives.

So we have come full circle and now we face the consequences of the true threat to our existence within the infinite mystery of time and space that we always faced. Moral decline. Yours, mine, ours, everyones.

I am privileged to know a few very young people, one of whom lives here among us in this community. When I look at her, as when I gazed in sadness at the children in Dunkirk, I cannot help but wonder what her future reality will be, and I cannot help but accept a moral obligation to give her, and her peers both near and far, the best chance for happiness and meaningful joyous life that I can.

For me this has taken the form of trying to build community again. Attempting, some may think naively, to help formulate and create a wider sense of family and a deeper connection of relationship with the "others" around me. I want for her, and for all the kids of today, a way and means of weathering the coming storm. I want to give them the tools to explore the best of all the cultures now being forced together by the injustices and inhumanities of those institutional forces of war, law, and so-called intelligence.

I want to help build something real that they can hold onto and believe in as the future becomes their now.

I have been inspired by a wider vision. A realisation that we are indeed not alone in this universe and that there are watchers among us, eager to see us mature and to welcome us into their sense of community.

However, there will always be conflict among us people. As we seek to balance the imperatives of different needs, different priorities, different ways of relating to and understanding what life and reality actually are and what it means to be a living, thinking, feeling thing within it.

I have come to the conclusion that the death of ego is the pre-requisite for effective community to flourish and true bonds of genuine friendship, appreciation and respect to be formed. For here in our western world we have pursued the ideal of individualism to the point where we no longer seem to notice the significance or sacred nature of the "Other" at all, be that "Other" in the form of the animals we enslave and torture for our convenience, the people we demonize and condemn to hell for our own sense of saftey or the world we live within and depend upon that we inflict ever greater levels of suffering upon in the deluded notion that it is our right and our freedom that we are defending, often in the "name of God".

And we destroy ourselves. And we do well to remember that to everyone else we are the "Other" too. How we relate to the other is ultimately exactly how the other shall relate to us.

Love Courage and Strength to you all.