Pilgrim's Road: Feb 2024
Live event: 'Lord of the Rings & The Reality of Myth', A Poem 'New Ithaca'
A distinct thank you to my paid subscribers, you are helping to nourish this creative garden. Thank you Jurnee, Zach & Kathryn.
Also a warm welcome to my many new subscribers. Your arrival here (at increasing rate) reminds me that the Culturepilgrim in me it resonates with the Culturepilgrim in you.
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Pilgrim’s Road: When the conversation comes to you
These past weeks were, for me, a mixture of new love, discombobulation, consternation & realisation. On Ash Wednesday, yet unaware of Lent, I was in San José Del Pacifico to work with plant medicine in the mountains. In the spirit of uncertainty, my solitary plans had shifted somewhat after encountering a German traveller on the drive up to the mountains.
He turned out to have practiced hitchiking as a intentional form of travel for more than a decade. His choices reflected a deep engagement with uncertainty that I throughly appreciated. By choosing to actively commune with the uncertainty of never know who he’d meet he was in my view ‘leaving room for God’. Recently, he had found himself walking and hitchiking alongside the tens of thousands making their way from South America to the North through Mexico.
Like many Germans, he had distinctly rational and secular mindset which was might have been hostile to my ideas were it not for a significant degree of openness and curiosity. While I frequently sense my words triggering closures in his body in his body he continually showed up with curiosity allowing us to hold rigorous and transformative dialogue. As became apparent 1 hour into the conversation, he was heading to the mountains for his first psychedelic experience and, to his good fortune, had sat next to someone with substantial experience.
It became apparent he had failed to secure lodgings for that night and bought his bus ticket on trust, he also had a small tent. Arriving late after the stomach churning 45m-1hr of non-stop winding roads I was prompted to extend a trust to offer the floor of my cabin. The following day what began as a ‘trip preparation’ on the porch soon turned into a dialogue on religion and christianity in the West. He gave voice to that sensibility of ‘why go back to Christianity, why not draw from other traditions, science or mindfulness?’. We were talking at different levels, for each time he sought my rational argumentation, I gave voice to a journey that was wholly non-rational: a following of winding paths and intuitions, an appreciation of aesthetic and symbol, a search for sanctuary amidst crisis and an effort to read the language of visions and dreams.
As it turned out, he had recently stepped back from christianity having stayed partly out of commitment to a family legacy (his grandfather was a pastor and his great uncle a famous German theologian). At this point, I knew there was some provenance to our very serendipitous meeting. In the end, he had a little sickness and decided to postpone the mushrooms. I offered instead a gentle conscious cannabis hike in which we partook ceremony and furthered our dialogue and connection with the plant. All this proved a further curiosity for me since the last conscious cannabis hike i’d led had been 2 years prior in Bavaria with another German.
Our dialogue proved a case study of where the ‘Christianity beyond itself’ that I am walking can actually meet people in the mainstream in novel ways. I appreciated being sent the challenge of a rigorous German mind and I sensed that he and other the europeans i met on the trip served to draw me out. The tests of these dialogues confirmed to me that it is time to speak across paradigms to hesitant audiences. When such opportunities present themselves the practice of dialogue becomes engaged service, opening up doors, worlds and new imaginaries; to ends I will never fully know.
Discombobulated Devotion
The next night after several hours lying on the mountainside and watching the cloud banks roll across the hills I had returned to my cabin and by the fire connected with a deep sense of hunger. I had eaten not long before, this was a different sort of hunger; something in the bottom of my guy which initially showed up as anxiety. The medicine was showing me that I need to connect with and ‘stand in’ this root, not cover it over. In the midst of these hours by the fire Jonathan Rowson’s wonderful reflections and poetry prompted me to remember it was Ash Wednesday. How curious that the medicine should teach me so focally about hunger on the day of the commencement of lent (symbolising christ’s fasting in the desert).
I felt a deep clarity this kind of sacrificial commitment was a necessary piece to bring forth the several ‘kingdom projects’ I've been sitting with. However, the next few days were bumpy for me and the devotion to that 'hunger' awareness served to exhaust me. The food poisoning that followed completed the flip of my lenten sacrificial warrior mode into receiving care and love from others. I forgave myself for spending my first ‘fast sunday’ with churros and fruit smoothies. Sometimes the vision is right but timing is not. Pastor and interlocutor of mine Joe Welker wrote a substack that gave me comfort in this, reminding me that lent is ultimately more about becoming receptive to christ than any particular form of practice or sacrifice.
I had received a deep insight on fasting but I need to situate this in a deep patience, a sense of enoughness and a ground of abundance from which creations can grow. Rather than exhausting my soils in order to yield a quicker harvest , I want to be in deep harmony with forces greater than myself. Today two weeks on from my first attempt I finally began my devotional fast.
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SENSESPACE Live launch
SENSESPACE podcast will enter its 4th year this March with the first SENSESPACE Live. A space to bring out provocative, current and visionary conversations that invite contributions, confluences and novel realisations.
The first event will be on The Lord of the Rings & The Reality of Myth. Tolkien’s work is the most significant mythos in modern times. It resonates across generations and across the world and struck chord in my heart from childhood. Tolkien and his friend C.S Lewis both bore a capacity to express the deep mythos of Christianity while weaving it into other European mythologies and contemporary questions of technology, industrialization, and extra-dimensional spiritual forces.
Last December Kumankaya healing center, my sense of the LOTR myth began to shift. On the first day, Jordan Bates burst out laughing describing how his recent sessions with Ayahuasca had indicated that (in some sense) ‘the lord of the rings is actually real’. To my surprise this prompted a lot of LOTR related visions in my own ceremonies in the following days including some inexplicable occurrences in relation to another person the retreat. The liminal space of Ayahuasca and the 'rivendell' like sacred ground of Kumankaya brought my dreams, my waking life and the mythos of the Tolkien and C.S Lewis into a closer confluence. The meaning and metaphysical reality of these mythological landscapes began to take on mysterious qualities that I can only compare to my first awakenings to the mythic reality of christianity after reading Kazantakis’ The Last Temptation.
In the SENSESPACE Live event, I’ll be enlisting guests including Ken Lowry to contribute their insights into the enduring significance of Tolkien and mythos for our time; particularly from Christian and psychedelically informed perspectives. If you are keen to hear this dialogue and/or would like to contribute to the conversation, please register.
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A poem I wrote during a reflective men’s retreat I was invited to by my friend Kenton during which. we had beautiful reflection, prayer and dialogue while sailing around Greece last October.
A New Ithaca
All mighty silent powers in the pre-dawn hours.
God was moving on the waters,
fathers watching sleeping daughters.
Hours, pregnant beyond measure
and each man knew he laid up treasure.
Inside, a stillness resided
and as each man slept in his cot
dreams stirred awash at a rate of 15 knots.
The past drifted slowly as a distant isle
and in the fog grew a potent and alien land
a new Ithaca.
This dark mass, ranging,
called to the men not in their minds but in their bones.
As they surged over the waters a new wind gave shape to their sails
in partnership with the rising sun.