Soul On The Hill

Life is difficult, but miracles, serendipity and grace abound. We just have to hear the beat of a different drum. Meaning gives purpose to our suffering. We have a responsibility to choose meaning as a map to navigate by and the discipline to stick by it. If we can summon up that courage we’re better equipped to stay balanced. We’ll meet anxiety, guilt, fear and insecurity head-on and bound forward resiliently. How do we develop and flex the muscle of meaning? Through risking love and trust. By getting to really know ourself we penetrate the soul whose compass points are meaning, truth, love and trust.

Once we know ourselves we can blaize a brighter trail and re-establish some order to the chaos. We can think more clearly and command the ship of our personalities with our higher self at wheel. We learn to sacrifice for others (in recognition of the Other) and our soul purposefully leads us deeper into knowledge of our Self. We can aim at our goals with better accuracy – what we aim at determines what we see. So during this virus pandemic (whilst plagues of locusts simultaneously devastate four continents) we can aim, better. Aim for character, ethics, active hope, curiosity and expecting best outcomes. This is how you can re-orient your resilience magic, with eyes wide open.

What else can we do to increase our resilience and grow our inner magic? Discipline as we’ve said (oft strongly cited by psychologists M. Scott Peck, James Hillman and Jordan Peterson) is very important. We must be actively engaged with how we show up on the hill of life, everyday. It is on this hill that we practice living.

If we can practice this, then we’ll start to see a network effect. Everything we do has a ripple effect extending out into futures not yet written and changing pasts. If we can keep a lid on the pressure cooker of stress during challenging times, we’ll have the flexibility and creativity we need to help solve our problems.

By taking a different perspective we can recognise all the choices before us and be responsible for what we choose (and what we don’t choose). We’ll generate alternatives, new probables for living. With love and integrity we move from self-imposed prisons to possibilities. If we can tolerate our frustration at this slow Saturnine time we’ll emerge from heartaches on the road more resilient. If we face it, it will meet us. So what else will help us face it? How do we push on? We can start to envision what it is that would take our old stale, depleted and tired energies and raise them up high. We can develop success strategies to fuel us forward, enchant up new and more soulful resources.

By harnessing our inner strengths, previous and new learnings, our inner intuitive voice (soul) as guide, we can shoot for the more favourable and minimise the worst. If we face up to the worst that could happen, summon up that imagined fear, stare it hard in the face and ask ourselves: Ok, so this happens. Then what? And again. Then what, and then what, and then what? And then what?

Once we have faced that we have the vision to see life through, no matter what is thrown at us. We adapt. We have soul food. We get comfortable with being uncomfortable. We work to maintain a positive outlook even when all around us there is collapse. We take strength. We write a new story.

We can draw support from all our networks that love us and help us – family, friends, work, community, skills etc. We mix this with all that we already have inside us, the magic that we already have to offer others. We light up. We vibrate, in harmony. We see our own shining potential reflected in the potential of those around us. Together, we navigate with new magic maps, over the ups and the downs. We form our own psychic self defence and prep our own physical protection. We’re souls on the hill

Speaking of hills. So here we are on the last day of June, soon to start the second half of 2020. What propels me forward now is to finish writing a book that I ideated and started back in 2017. I’ll still blog here every month, keep learning magic, devouring books, practicing resilience coaching, developing soul with depth psychology, practising herbal healing. But mainly I’ll turn fiction writer’s eye to Highdown, a neolithic hillfort megalith. My green portal, my Rivendell.

When I first devised the idea, at the time I saw societal breakdown and chaos as a response to climate change and job automation by AI. But at heart it’s a love story. I am a Downlander and inspired by the magic of ancient hill. It’s a fantasy where all time happens at once in one place (like Jerusalem-Northampton for Alan Moore just with more pagan bits!) mixing human and non-human, the magical and the regular life.

Right now – with climate crisis, protests for justice, surveillance, consumerism, plagues and immunity passports, AI prediction models, biometrics, streaming entertainment culture, the fourth industrial revolution, social credit, digital IDs, the Great Reset, augmentation, transhuman innovations, neuralinks, lockdowns in lockstep, more and more extraction from the land and rampant technocracy, economic collapse and civil unrest – some of real life seems to have beaten me to a story, but one without the magical creatures. We are living in an inverse world, everything is upside down in a perverted back-to-front logic. Magic is strangled under soulless prescriptive monoculture. We're like a hermetic serpent biting its own ourabouros tail to feed on itself. We need to put the good magic back in the mix! To draw a new circle in nature and seize it, put ourselves inside it, to imagine and engage our collective Will for humanity and nature - a new hope.

Chaos has exploded from the old order. But out of chaos must come a new order, Ordo Ab Chao. A better world, a re-imagined future for humanity. We've a wakeup call after tragedy. Golden opportunity, a silver lining in these unprecedented times - to create anew, to rebuild, redesign, and to re-hope. Values shift to live within planetary means for the good of all wellbeing. Disruption brings change, stimulates a greener cleaner fairer world - a rare slim opportunity, a window, to radically fix the broken vessel. Out of the ashes, the phoenix must rise. And that phoenix is symbolic of the Alchemist and tarot Magician.

As Buckminster Fuller said: “You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” We've no choice here. We are out of (our?) time. The new is already here. 'The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.' to cite cyberpunk William Gibson - the new story is ready. And it needs green clean energy, biodiversity, UBI, redistributed wealth, fairer opportunity, removal of injustice, smart ethical tech to eliminate carbon production, equality of education, healthcare security for all, better local governance at community level, geoengineering for good, space exploration, new goals beyond both Keynesian capitalist profit growth and beyond neoliberalist ideology and achievable shared goals for planetary health and species survival, all species survival. 

So it's time for me to help in telling that new macro narrative from a microcosm point of action, for me to write new chapters, create new words in type. I hope to prove Twain wrong. That, truth be not stranger than fiction. My response is in fantasy and scifi, because all the best futures start in fiction by writers.

Here’s a vision board for my Downlanders fiction trilogy I made up three years back in 2017. I now look at it through 2020 high weirdness eyes...

This story - both mine in fiction and the world's in reality - needs to be re enchanted. It needs magic. It needs beings and species beyond human alone: magical creatures, other 'persons' and personhoods who dwell with us here in our animistic world, hybrids, alien, fairy, elves, dragons, witches, wizards, our dead, demons, angels, hybrids, trans species, horned gods, warrior huntresses, AI, trolls, ghosts in machines, prehuman and posthuman, ancestors and descendants, star folk and other travellers. Because it takes a biodiverse whole village of life and being, not a monad, to build a world, a whole universe of imagination and divergent creative thought and life. Not a New Jerusalem or Moore’s Utopia or evening a Star Trek one, but a new Arcadia, here on Earth. A Regeneration story. A story of environment, nature, plants, planet, Gaia, earth, life, ecosystem and human survival.

And that story, that narrative, is one of place.

A place that has everything. And everyone. A kinda green new magic place. For all souls to dwell. For all souls. 

Perhaps that’s true healing: a magic place, a real place – oozing with true history, imagined futures and much faerie. See you on the Hill. I call that place, Home.