buddhafield! some moons ago, 2015 0r possibly 2018?! I love to sing!! few things make me happier… tho obviously I can’t hold a tune, stabbing wildly, and with bewilderment, at each and every note this pic a pleasant stumble upon, I’ve never seen before today, i’m malingering at home with the vestiges of a summer virus, cheerfully whiling away an hour rummaging through the official bf photo account… some beauties in there! such fun to find friends in photos of yore, else to spot myself ‘wheres wally’ styleee lurking somewhere in the crowd scene… weirdly comforting to have passed through such emotional extravaganzas and somehow to have left a trace, not too much, not too little… a soupcon anyway singing!! hurrah!! it really is such an profoundly joyful and glorious thing to do… particularly wonderful at festies in a large group, singing spiritual songs in four part harmony. communion. euphoria. belonging. i’m always burrowed away in the bass section (had to google to make sure it wasn’t base!), standing in solidarity with most of the men… it has a proper brotherly tribal vibe there i tend to be in the front row, luckily many british men are foot shuffling shy grunters, so there’s usually room at the front! which means I can dance! and gawp at all the beautiful faces across the circle… I really love to dance too the front is also the best place if your a singer lacking in confidence, your held by the voices behind you, there’s normally at least one strong bass singer, so follow their lead and try to mesh with them… if your stuck at the back, why, guaranteed you’ll just just get lost, drift off and wander away! down the front your cocooned by voices… oh and it’s even better when you go right in the middle of the circle… that’s where you can hear the full interplay of parts… it’s the most healing and nourishing of things to be caressed by several hundred human voices.. really is the pinnacle of being human. kindred. vibration after a singing workshop, theres a real synchronising of moods… everyone leaves mildly radiant ha! so many times someone will seek me out elsewhere in the festival, tell me how much they loved watching me in the circle mantras/kirtan are brilliant too… and this year never managed to leave the ‘land and social change’ fire before 1:00… singing around a fire, so many lovely talented people, primordial, full power… my throat chakra is always really open by then, sapphire blue, i love warbling along in a resonant basso profoundo just to clarify, when i say i can’t sing for toffees, i mean that i can’t hold a tune, or hit a note, i actually enjoy the fruity timbre of my voice, congealed wisdom (yeah baby!) but nope no musical ability in my family… not allowed to be in the choir when i was a child… music teachers love to spout something like ‘everyone can sing’… yeah after a fashion mostly i think it’s more like an aptitude for say maths? ‘everyone can do maths?’… well i can anyway, possibly one of the reasons why most money I’ve earned is from programming? a brain box for book learning… i remember tutoring my daughter for her gcse maths, which, absurdly, everyone has to pass… watching her failing to grasp what seemed like the most obvious of concepts… anyway i get the same polite blank incomphrehension when the choir leader looks at me when they teach the tune, a diligent effort to supress their eye rolling, incredible people. hmm somehow I’ve digressed?! long windedly! how does that happen… daughter passed her maths! i love singing! huzzah! x
a blessing: radiant white gem of clarity and constancy
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watching tree creepers in the glade… for Joanna Macy
heat bludgeoned at Buddhafield, plunge into the cool shadows of the glade, deep within this submarine realm of myriad green hammock marooned, a cheerful sprawl, limbs strewn, arms and legs akimbo above, glimpsed through patchwork leaves, the blue calm of sky girth of benign pondersome oak, surrounded by slender silver birches
a tatter scrap of a bird alights, nervously it skitter stitches up the trunk, spiraling higher. then scarper flits from tree to tree I recite the dictum ‘nuthatch down, tree creeper up’ another bird joins, then another, a whole family, shy oblivious, as, again, buddhafield bloom blossoms around them
I love to walk this land, a deeply storied place within this glade, standing in circle, as friends made their wedding vows, else the soft solemnity of the grief space
tumble into sandals, hoik heft of rucksack, follow the path towards the stream, heading for crew food, tea, friends the gentle chatter before shift the background ommmm of nature? we the creatures of busy burden
but here, earth rumpled, astonished, a molehill in the path earth fresh excavated from the night before, a blacker dirt, a more recent tumnulii than it’s neighbours, volcano splattered about fresh grave? Joanna, your personal turning within the seasons and cycles of our own great turning but more, molehill, with the steady measured comfort of your words, seek for sanctuary, this soft earth turned burrow of being almost home Thank you
pic from bf website
context and natter chat!
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another Buddhafield festival come, and after 10 days in the field (for me!), gone
Buddhafield is a conscious festie, ‘no drink, no drugs’, held in the Somerset Blackdown Hills every July At its heart it’s a Triratna Buddhist festival, with Meditation, Dharma Talks and Pujas… yet due to the nature of the movement, theres also yoga, inclusive spaces, shamanism, dance, singing, permaculture, 12 steps, live bands, music around the fires… the whole hippy kit-kaboodle!! hundreds of beautiful people to dance with, laugh with and hug!
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On the Sunday afternoon, as the festival was beginning to wind down, I ambled along, grooving to the musicians jamming outside old tree popped into the beloved arms tee-pee for a smattering of a Kirtan, before ending up in the dance tent… where Sofia and Sandra, Italian friends, were holding a ‘dance of the elements’… think dance followed by Didge and Singing Bowl Sound Bath whilst I was nimble prancing around the dance floor, a seed spore blew in from one side of the tent… one of those huge ones, spore sputnik, hairy awesome gossamer spider THINGS… it was drifting towards the ground, so i wafted it back upwards, like you would with a giant Rainbow soap bubble… a gentle gyre, then it caught the gust of wind and exited through the other side of the tent… i chased it to see it drifting deep into the dark, ominous fairytale woods reminds me of Bedes Olde English Saxon tale on the stark brevity of this life on a winters night a sparrow flys into a mead hall, where a King and his thanes are feasting, a brief flutter, before it leaves through the other door, back into the cold and dark which, to mind(!), chimes well with Buddhist thinking
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I’ve been coming to the festival since ooh 2009 and, thru a quick head mathematical totting up, as an ex programmer, I love being logical(!)… reckon, that down the years, I’ve spent over three months in this particular field… and what a joy that has been! every year several old familiar faces don’t return… but always there’s new people to Love! the inevitable truth that in fair time, one year, however distant, I will no longer return… which admittedly sounds a little maudlin and nostalgiac, but in my opinion is exactly how life should be Anyway I’ve always stewarded, usually running one of the teams up by the front gate… Rocking the Podule!… I love the energy of arrival, greeting people just as they first get here
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oh, the poem, I was going to say something about that… I wrote it sitting in the glade, between shifts, we had heard that Joanna Macy was in the last few days of her life… I’ve always loved ‘the work that re-connects’, usually popping in for at least a couple of the daily sessions at BF… it’s a profound body of work, crucial for all of us alive in these times… and also a great smorgasbord of a workshop, which has a little soupcon of everything… bit of eye gazing, a few games, a lot of soul sharing! In the poem I wanted to give voice to the other creatures that live on this land, all year round… the owls that hoot deep amongst the trees… the frogs, that go hopping about the site every time it rains… the brawler hares that live in the fields up by the front gate… what do they make of it when the glade is invaded?… by slack liners, teetering along a rope… by kids whooping… by the tranquil sanctity of the grief space they just get on with it, going about their tree creeper and mole ways… oblivious to the festival, but beyond that, oblivious to the throes and heroism of human mortality i would wish that when i die that this is treated with deep nonchalance and disregard, by nature, going on with it’s own business but my fear, THE fear, is that this is now only the case in isolated pockets? that such the hubris, such the sickening tragedy, of our reach that this has become the exception rather than the norm?
anyway, i’m hoping the moles don’t mind too much the dance tent, foot stomping, earth juddering base sound resonance? part of the impetus to write something came about because when Love Patrol (they bring us tea, biscuits and love) came by where I was working, Meera had a book of Mary Oliver poems, a couple of which i read aloud to the team… I love reading aloud… Mary an obvious, and much more lofty-profound influence
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Stewarding in the sunshine and the rain… bekky took the sunshine snaps, she wanted to send her mum a couple of pics showing her how it was… her looking wholesome, before donning war paint and reverting to the feral, loving Rainbow child she really was! One of my favourite tasks was driving ‘Dancing Queen’ around the site… the stewards purple vehicle… so named because it only had one cd, Abba, which would play the first three songs then spit it out! I arrived laden with charity shop cds ‘Bat Out of Hell’ which sadly would not play at all, scuppering my plans to dawdle about with ROCK melodrama blaring out the open windows… my other cd was Prince, a purple vehicle deserves tunes by his regal purpleness! This vehicle a huge improvement from the one in previous years, a scrap yard salvage, completely missing 1st gear, this would make getting up the steep hill from slope a wheel spinning extravaganza!! Anyway I’d pop down to pick up a huge vat of crew food, enough for all the Stewards working up top… then with Halley cuddling it in the passenger seat, a human gyroscope to stop it spilling! we’d crawl slowly up the hill, the fruity sounds of ‘Head’ blaring out and deliver grub to all the stewards… there was a huge double rainbow, it’s arch radiant over all the site… slightly soggy, starving, delusionally happy stewards were most content as ‘meals on wheels’ finally arrived!
dancing queen
(to be cont’d)
pujas next! (note to self)
cdslove patrol bicciesold friend from healing gardenbf websiteold tree
channeling a ‘boat of the sun’ venetian gondolier vibe… yet more prosaically, just an impromptu sunset river swim in piddinghoe, post downs bike ride. Ridiculous sun soaked days!
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no Stonehenge/Avebury jaunt for me this year… couldn’t find anybody who fancied it, tho didn’t look that hard… fun, but a long old haul instead i went for an afternoon cycle… rattling along the river upstream towards lewes, then following the cycle route to glynde saw on the zu page that pete, vicar of firle, was having a low key solstice celebration up by the beacon… so i set off for that a steep, steep haul up the road to the top of the beacon… the vicar waved as he drove past! i ended up walking nearly all of it… i’d presumed the celebration would be near the car park, but no, rather they’d opened the gate and, in their 4 wheeled drive vehicles, driven the mile or so further along and up to the beacon itself out of puff, i couldn’t be bothered, so, rather followed the ridge along homewards to where it dropped back down to Beddingham majestic views, an umbrous mellow light, all the way back along the river, arriving at piddinghoe… a gaggle of folk having a sunset, solstice dip… so in i hopped the tide was just turning, so there was a harmonious balance between the fresh water river flowing down stream and the sea salt water surging in within ten minutes the ocean began its retreat, my body began to be sternly, resolutely tugged downstream… time to get out! the tide was just turning, much as within the greater cycles, the tide of light is also turning solstice blessings x
Bloomsday! Ulysses is one hundred and twenty one years muddle aged… such a gush gobbledygook, babble clamour of a book… both an incomprehensible compendium of tedium and a work of flabberghasting genius, this restless, and relentless, churning of words and lives I was listening to the audio book when foolish awake at 5:00 this morning… one of this, my summer of 60, regurgative projects… the audio book really helps! brilliantly read by Bishop Len Brennan, from Father Ted… Jim Norton… his narration is marvelously nuanced… often Joyce brain hops between 3 or 4 characters, allusively, all within the same sentence… but a subtle shift in intonation nudges you somewhere towards comprehension also really helps with the cadence and flow. recommended I’m up to chapter 12, about a third of the way through… no expectation of finishing… but thats not really the point… brogue, vim and fortitude!
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I first read it whilst living in a squat, next to Karlov Most in Praha endlessly roaming the streets, always with a colourful hippy bag containing Ulysses and my juggling clubs… preposterous drunkenness, surprised I never lost neglected them in a pub! took me more than 2 years to get to the end, the gusto of youthful pretentiousness (not that much has changed)… forever bewildered, having to lurch back to the beginning, or some other random point in the tale I remember finally finishing it in Piran, Slovenia… i’d hitched down to see Boris in Ljljljubljana… sunset, somersault into summers salt water, sitting on a rock on the beach, where i’d sleep that night, a murmuration of starlings weaving a spell around the church on the hill above… from my seat, a view across the water to Trieste, where, curiously, Joyce had been living when he began the book… pleasing linear circularity
anyway snap of me, from yesterday, with my old battered 90’s copy… and one of curati and i, spring 91, on the steps in Staroměstská (thanks RP!) Bloom to my own Dedalus
random vid, popped up when i was searching for something else, 2 am somewhere in Poland, 2019, James and Magdas wedding… made me laugh, ‘sweet sweet lovin’ … the vim of youth!
