Spring has sprung after winter's darkness...

Hmm, a whole week ago since I last wrote here. So what did the last seven days bring to my life? Well I had a Facebook conversation that led me to realise I had missed something off my list of things to do before I die... I want to go on retreat.. or something like that!

When my son, who has learning difficulties, was little and when I was also working at a school for children with learning difficulties, I saw a documentary on the Camphill communities.. some very special places where people come to share their lives for a while  in community with people with learning difficulties, with an emphasis on a calm and spiritual atmosphere and a kind of other-worldly, outside of the rat race, way of being. It made a big impression on me. But at that point in my life it would just not have been possible or practicable to follow my heart and spend some time in one.

Growing up in the Seventies, when everyone else was moving on from hippy thinking, I was still at heart a flower power child, running a decade behind. I liked the Beatles and the Stones when everyone else was enthusing about glam rock, then the Bay City Rollers, then disco, then punk. When it was fashionable to spit on people, I still wanted to give them flowers. The inner hippy never quite left me. I would have sworn that yes, actually, all you did need was love.

I hung onto my rose tinted glasses for dear life for a long time, through battles with an educational system so reluctant to actually provide appropriate education to my child it employed all sorts of evasions and dirty tricks to get out of it until it was too late for him, through encounters with the helping professions who turned out to be mostly anything but helpful and on some occasions very dangerous, right up until the point when they were finally ripped off my face when my "foster daughter" was treated with utter cold lack of compassion by the social services who had failed her when she herself was little and now employed every dirty trick to take her own children from her as a vulnerable adult.

Cynicism and anger ruled for a while. The world was inherently a cruel place where every living being survived at a cost to another living being, even the best intentioned of people were weak and selfish and the worst intentioned were evil. I was very depressed and I lacked faith in everything and everyone.

It's taken a while to re-find a sense of faith. I have long periods when I do not want to watch/read the news because sometimes it fair breaks my heart to do so, particularly if I read a spate of reports about cruelty to animals, or if I read something about forced adoption or about the rights of people with learning difficulties being trampled over. I am still only one fragile step beyond that sense of despair.. but like a spring coming after a winter, the recovery of faith is starting.

It's not a case any more of seeing the world in a rosy light, nor in a dark one, it's trying to see it in a spirit of acceptance... that it is what it is. We are cursed with the mental ability to judge stuff all the time, to analyse it as good or bad, right or wrong, to worry about it and fear it in advance, in a way that our animal companions are not. Sure they are not too happy about starving or being killed and eaten as and when it happens to them, but they don't get all depressed or anxious about the prospect or decide the universe is an awful place and carnivores are inherently evil. They feel their emotions and sensations at the time and act and react but on a sunny day when the grass is plentiful there are no awful doom and gloom judgements of the world running through their minds. Only that "flow" and that "balance" that they are still instinctively connected with/part of.

I would like to find a place to visit from time to time where I could step back from our incredibly complex world into something more simple and connected with whatever it is I am trying to talk about here. It might heal a few wounds. I have connections I don't want to lose, I am not young, free and single, so I can't disappear into some kind of hippy new-age commune for a year or two...but if we could find a place to live for a while that was near some such project, or near one of my Camphill communities, maybe in some way I could be a part-time participator or contributor. Or even just sometimes go for a retreat...