A Glimpse of Something Greater
The stumbling, fumbling, early steps along my path to spiritual enlightenment and unconditional Love
Michael J. Roads
Published by Six Degrees Publishing Group at Smashwords
Copyright 2010, 2011 Michael J Roads
License Notes: This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, please return to the eBook retailer to purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior consent, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
ISBN: 978-1-4524-7545-5 (EPUB Edition)
ISBN: 978-0-9758476-7-1 (Print Edition)
For information address Six Degrees Publishing Group. by email at:
publisher@sixdegreespublishing.com
or visit
http://www.sixdegreespublishing.com
For more information about this author, please visit
_________________________________
This book is dedicated to my late, beloved wife, Treenie. She shared in many of these stories, accompanying me through so many major chapters of my life. She helped transform the raw material of a callow youth into the mature man that I have become. Even though we now occupy very different realities, my Love and gratitude for her remains undiminished.
This book is also dedicated to those people who are mentioned in the stories – many or most of whom have since passed on – relatives, friends, and often complete strangers, but all are people who, however briefly, touched my life.
I also dedicate this book to my present, beloved wife, Carolyn. She has given me insight into an expression of Love that is rare and beautiful. With her, I have learned that the human heart has an endless, boundless capacity for Love, and that an open heart is an open door into life. I Love you so very much, my darling. I am truly blessed.
To these special people; may your life path always take you toward endless Love.
__________________________________
To my daughter, Tracey, who is always there when I need help with a very smart, but uneducated computer that simply cannot read my mind . . . thank you very much. I Love you, my daughter . . . even when you don’t come the instant I call!
To my beloved Carolyn, who prides herself on being the first and most fierce critic of my impeccable writing. She is also my first and most loyal fan. I confess, that is the part I most enjoy. By the time she has read a new manuscript, I know in which direction we are heading!
Thank you for being in my life. Thank you for bringing all your boundless Love with you. Thank you for every one of the many “I Love you” moments that you bring to my every day. I Love you more than I knew it was possible to Love.
Finally, to Brian and Theresa Longhurst, authors both, who nevertheless find time to edit and correct my afore mentioned impeccable writing. Together, they make impeccable even more immaculate and unblemished, yet doing it in such a way that I am able to learn from them. This lifts my potential as a writer to ever greater heights. Whether they do it from sheer friendship, a love of my scribblings, or because they have plenty of time to play and work, matters not. Thank you both. I Love you.
___________________________________
Under the title, Simple is Powerful, a version of this book was first published about two decades ago. The characters mentioned are real people, but apart from a few, most of them have since passed on. I have changed their names only where I consider it necessary. The single, most prominent person mentioned is my late wife, Treenie. After forty-eight years together, she, too, has returned to her spiritual Home.
As the subtitle suggests, the bulk of these stories come from the early years of my spiritual journey, when I had an enormous amount to learn. The last few episodes are more recent, attempting to share both my experience of spiritual enlightenment, and the mystical experience of unconditional Love.
I have attempted in this update and rewrite, to give it some sort of chronological order, giving the year the various events occurred, although a few chapters cover events several years apart. I confess I find it far easier to recall the event or incident, than when it actually happened. To remember the month is all but impossible, but mostly I have been able to deduce the year.
I have made up-to-date comments and observations in italics before and after each story, and even within a few of the episodes!
Many of the stories I have chosen to extend, filling in parts that I previously left untold. Some are new. As I look back through the years, I realise, now, just how much more holistic my present view of life is, yet many of the stories have also surprised me with the degree of insight I had, when they were originally experienced. It seems that always the intellect has to chew on the bone of knowledge for quite a long time before it is able to get a full belly. To be truly nourished by our knowledge, we are obliged to live it, not endlessly salivate over it, or bury it deep in the garden of the mind.
My intention, with this book, is to reveal that within us all there exists a profound soul-knowing. This is our place of power; a wonderful inner space from which to live, to redesign our lives, and to express, or share our wisdom, for the enrichment of all who are ready to benefit from it.
As you read these pages, you may recognise yourself, for each of us faces the same challenges, no matter what our culture. Each of us laughs at the same ridiculous things we do and say, and each of us cries over the same hurts and fears. Whether we are aware of it or not, each one of us is on our spiritual journey.
For most of us, life is busy, busy, busy. The daily rush as a commuter is a trial of nerves and monotony, the pace and problems of work a daily pressure, while the intricacies of family life consume any spare time we get. We have created lives that are complicated, and we have become complex. This complexity takes away our ability to express and be the uncomplicated soul-self whom we truly are.
So during your smiles and chuckles, or amidst a deep, sympathetic sigh, please be aware that in every moment of life, a glimpse of something greater is continually on offer. It was this nebulous . . . something greater . . . that drew me ever onward.
Oh, and my frequent references to Oz are, of course, Australia.
~ Michael J Roads
Contents
________________________________
Three – Of Endings . . . and New Beginnings
Eight – The Ability to Respond
Thirteen – Humbled by a Battler
Sixteen – Pardon, I Can’t Listen
Seventeen – A Dream Made Manifest
Eighteen – Very Effectively Gagged
Nineteen – It’s a Good Day, Isn’t It
Twenty-one – Fears and Tears of Community Life
Twenty-three – An Act of Courage
Twenty-five – A Story with a Sting
Twenty-six – Victims - So Easily Victims
Twenty-seven – The Swing of Things
Twenty-eight – Sleepless and Unsettled
Thirty – An Enlightening Experience
Thirty-one – A Bridge across the Years
Thirty-two – Unconditional Love
Way back in 1954, I had no thought of the lessons life had waiting for me. This story was one of those lessons. I had been brought up to show gratitude to those who helped me, or gave me a gift, or in any way improved my life, so I expected that it worked both ways; that I, too, should receive gratitude when it was my due.
I was wrong!
The One-Pound Note
I was a strong, strapping young man at age seventeen, not at all afraid of work, but rather given to daydreaming. With my parents, I lived in Trumpington, (what a delightful name!) a village just outside Cambridge, and about twelve miles from Dad’s farm where I worked. I had taken over responsibility for the garden at about fifteen years of age, so on occasions I would have a day in the garden catching up on the work that needed doing. We had a large vegetable garden, and on this particular day I had stayed at home to dig it the old-fashioned way, with a spade; the only way then, I might add.
I enjoyed digging. It was a rhythmic action, rather like physical poetry, and I found it deeply satisfying. Within the first fifteen minutes, a graceful, repetitive motion would catch me in its rhythm, and I could turn the soil hour after hour with scarcely a break, so sustaining was the flow of energy. The spade and I became one in this age-old action. I found the contact with the sweet-smelling earth stimulating, the sight of the fresh-turned soil a constant fascination.
When our retired next-door neighbour, Mr Allen, popped his head over the garden wall and offered me one pound to dig his vegetable garden, I instantly accepted. I knew that I could easily accomplish it within a day, and one pound was a normal weeks wage for me. Dad had no objections, so I did the job.
Two days later back on our farm, I held up the one pound note to Stan, a man who worked for my father, and with whom I was working. “You see this,” I said. “I worked damn hard for it. Five hours of non-stop digging a vegetable garden. If anyone deserves this more than I do, they can have it.” It was one of those brash, foolish statements of youth.
He looked at me thoughtfully, a gleam in his eyes. “Do you remember a week ago at the local shop, seeing that old crippled woman in the wheelchair? She was trying to get in through the doorway as I was coming out.”
“Yes, I remember her. What about it?”
“She deserves that one-pound note more than you do,” he said cunningly, “’cos she hasn’t got any money. I happen to know that.”
“So how do you figure she deserves it more than me?”
“’Cos you can work and earn more; she can’t.”
I stared at him in surprise, my own words echoing and mocking in my head. Despite all the many ‘buts’, I knew that he was right.
I sighed. “Okay, she can have it. But there’s one condition. You’ve got to give it to her; I’m not.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because I’d be too embarrassed. I won’t do it. Either you give it to her or I keep it.”
He held out his hand. I watched my hard earned, one-pound note disappear into his pocket. Me and my big mouth, I thought. I had had that money less than a day! But inside, I felt good about it.
Neither of us knew where the old woman lived, so we agreed that Stan would give her the money the next time he saw her in the local shop where they were both regular customers. I told Dad about it on the way home. He gave me an odd sort of look, but said nothing.
Three days later, Stan told me he had seen the crippled woman in the shop the previous afternoon. He had given her the one-pound note, told her the story that went with it, and comforted her when she burst into tears.
“God help me,” she wept. “Do you know I’ve only got one and a half pence to my name?” (In the currency of that time there were 240 pence to the pound.) And she cried some more. She told Stan that she had come into the shop to buy a couple of meagre items, not knowing how she was going to pay for them. The one-pound note was more money in one go than she had seen in over a year.
When I heard all this I felt rather good about it. In truth, I felt better than if I had spent the money on myself.
A few days later, Stan and I looked up from our work to see the old woman laboriously making her slow way up the long farm drive, pedalling her wheelchair with her hands and arms. When she reached us, she introduced herself as Miss May Hazell. She had come to say, “Thank you”.
Miss May Hazell proved to be a tough, cantankerous woman from the East End of London. During our time of getting to know her, she told us that she had been a bus conductor during the Second World War, and that it was a bomb exploding near the bus that left her a paraplegic – and very angry and deeply embittered.
She was as crippled emotionally as she was physically, but for some perverse reason most of her present bitterness, caustic and scathing, was aimed at me. While she loved me for what I had extended to her, she hated me for the fact that she should need charity.
Because of my one-pound note, Stan and his entire family took an interest in May Hazell’s welfare; so also did my Dad. Under our collective influence, she found a new home and she got a motorised wheelchair. Dad paid for it. My contribution was to buy her a ton of coal each winter to keep her warm.
When Treenie and I got married, May Hazell often called in. She adored Treenie, but continued to treat me in a very acerbic way. It got so bad, it became a joke. Strangely, I was not particularly hurt by her considerable spite toward me. Her thinking did not exactly command my respect. She was a member of the Salvation Army, and while I have nothing but admiration for all they stand for, she was not their greatest example of stalwart love!
One afternoon she was ranting about how she hated the Americans. When I asked her why, she turned on me with her customary anger. “Because they are sending rockets to the moon. Rockets are the Devil’s work,” she said.
I looked at her, nonplussed. “What are you talking about?”
“The Devil’s rockets will make holes in heaven as they rip through on their way to the moon. All the good people will fall out and be killed all over again. I tell you, it’s the Devil’s work, and he’s working through the Americans.”
In the face of her anger, what could I say?
After one particular visit, when I copped a tongue-lashing unusual in its vitriolic fervour even for her, I turned to Treenie. “Why do I bother with her?” I asked. “Why don’t I just tell her to go to hell?”
Treenie smiled wisely. She put her arms around me saying, “My darling, you put up with her and continue to help her because you are showing yourself your greater virtues. You do it because you care, not because you need her approval or friendship.”
I looked at her sceptically, but she was perfectly serious. Later, when I thought about it, I realised that her insight was remarkably accurate. I continued to help May Hazell, regardless of how she treated me, because I had uncovered a streak of unrealised tolerance within myself.
At this impressionable age, I suspect that if May Hazell had told me how kind and wonderful I was with the same vigour that she scorned and rejected me, I could easily have become a person who ‘gives’ simply to ‘receive’.
Her rejection took me deeper into myself, beyond the deceit of conceit, revealing a core of compassion based on caring about people, regardless of their personalities, or attitude to me. The gift she offered me was simple, but it was a hidden gift. Finding it revealed an insight that years into the future, I would sorely need.
All this, for a one-pound note!
As I look back on this, I realise now just how seriously disturbed May Hazell was on an emotional level. She hated men, all men, because men caused war. History would probably indicate that she was right, but it is not quite so simple an equation as that. The hate she was nurturing was continuing to destroy her life far more than the original bomb.
In retrospect, I realise she disliked me so intensely because, through me, she had to face the reality that men can offer kindness, as well as violence. I confronted her with my kindness and compassion when all she wanted was to hate me, inadvertently maintaining her own emotional violence. Because I was the catalyst for her accepting kindness from a man and from the other men on our farm, she was not able to so comfortably nurse and maintain her lingering anger and hatred.
As far as I remember, she passed away a few years after we emigrated to Australia. I believe, sadly, that she maintained her anger and aggression, despite the kindness directed toward her. It takes a great effort to release such a negative emotion as anger, even when you are choosing to let it go. I do not think she ever made such a choice, believing her anger to be completely justified.
This incident took place back in 1956, when I was a young man of nineteen. I often wonder, now, at how vastly different my life could have been, resulting from that precarious moment in time. One micro-moment . . . yet it was one of those life-defining moments for me, as you will realise when you read it. This is also one of the stories that I will expand and extend, sharing further insight into the incident.
I am often asked about destiny. Do I believe life is preordained, or do we choose our life’s path? This is a question not to be taken lightly. When I am asked it, my memory invariably serves up this incident from my youth. As I reflect on this very strange incident, shaping my answer, I recognise that most of humanity lives in such a fixed state of unawareness that true choice is not possible. We cannot choose a path in life if we are unaware of other paths, of other choices. We are stuck on the path we are currently living. We cannot pick the single red apple from a basket of green apples if we are colour-blind. And overall, our ignorance of a holistic life is blinding!
But what happens if the single red apple chooses us? What happens then? You might think this impossible; but are you sure? Life flows easily through an open door; it is the closed door that really limits insights and choices.
A Litany of Spite
Let me tell you about this incident from my youth, because probably more than any other moment in my first twenty years, it affected my destiny.
It took place on my father’s farm in East Anglia, England, when I had just turned nineteen. Early summer had arrived, but it had several times brought rain onto our freshly cut hay, gradually spoiling its quality. The way to make good hay is to cut the crop, then get it dried and baled, and finally get it undercover as quickly as possible.
This particular day the sun was shining, with a warm, drying wind. I was using a long-tined pitchfork to turn the damp rows of hay, so the hay would dry quickly for baling. Normally this would be done by a machine, but the hay had become so brittle and damaged that it needed a very gentle touch.
Working with me was the previously mentioned Stan, a man probably forty years my senior, one of the working-class in a very class-conscious England. He was a man very embittered by his life’s experience of inequality. Few people knew as deeply as I, how much he hated and bitterly resented this class discrimination.
From the time I began work on my father’s farm at age fifteen, Stan had used me as his outlet for the deep-seated anger, humiliation, and resentment that had simmered and festered in him over a lifetime of servitude. It took the form of vicious verbal violence, not so much directed at me personally, but at my paternal grandmother and her family, for whom he had worked over so many of those years. Strong willed, very opinionated and dominant, she was the obvious target of his malice, yet I was the one who had to endure the regular spite. I, who was completely non class-conscious!
Stan’s diatribes were a subtle violence, psychologically disturbing for both of us. My family were very closed people, never volunteering their history to me, never discussing family indiscretions with me. My ignorance of this made me vulnerable to Stan’s malice, lies, and half-truths.
In retrospect, I realise that his hostility caused him a degree of guilt, because he was rather fond of my father, having a great respect for him. Paradoxically, he also had a genuine affection for me, but his class hatred was too great for him to surmount.
It is difficult to convey the effect of being regularly subjected to a vindictive and demoralising onslaught, especially when my tormentor was so much older that a fight was not an honourable solution. During this time, I never confided in my parents, or anyone else. I endured it silently for four years, holding my rage deep inside me, fearing the consequence of its emergence.
I need, here, to mention the rage I once had. It seems that I was born in a rage, for I am aware of its presence in many of my earliest memories. At school, I was thrashed too many times as the teachers tried to curb it, but it served only to fuel the fury. At nine I was fighting a boy in the playground – how well I remember this – when we both fell to the ground. I saw a half-brick near us and, lost in my rage, I grabbed hold of his hair and lifting his head high, slammed it down onto the brick. He was knocked unconscious, and there was blood everywhere. I remember how fast the jeering, onlooking kids disappeared! I got a public thrashing in front of the whole school for that, but it made no difference. In my rage, I would refuse to cry at a public thrashing. The fact that they could not make my cry left me feeling that I always won those vicious, physical and psychological confrontations.
By my mid-teens, I had become very aware of the damage I could inflict in my rage, so I had learned to lock it away, deep inside me. This rage was nothing like a hot temper, which despite being an Aries, I seldom experienced. My rage was ice cold; implacable, dangerous. Although it seemed to have been born with me, I had no idea how to get rid of it.
On this particular day, Stan and I were working in the welcome sun, the faint crackling of drying hay mingling with the ethereal song of the male skylarks. About fifty to a hundred feet above their mate on her nest in a tiny hollow in the ground, they sang their hearts out. Inside, I also was singing, when suddenly, Stan began again his litany of spite. He had stopped his work and was staring at my back. I could feel his eyes boring into me, an old, familiar feeling. He made another cutting remark, this time more personal, and I also stopped the regular, rhythmic motion I used to turn the rows of damp hay.
I felt something inside me shift, and my rage came flooding to the surface. I had no thoughts, no feeling; I was raw, cold, savage ice. I turned, and our eyes locked. He saw that he had gone too far, way too far. He had never before seen my rage. Fear and apprehension washed his face, draining it of colour.
I was empty of all feeling, a seething cauldron of raw emptiness. Even the rage had vanished. I felt only to end the spite, to end him. With two deliberate paces, I closed the distance between us and, lost in the emptiness, I drew back my suddenly deadly pitchfork as a weapon.
Every muscle explosively tensed, in that micro-moment before stabbing forward with the eighteen inch (45 cm) tines, I saw the shock in his eyes, the horror. In that frozen moment, my body poised to unleash all the long-contained violence, I was flooded by what I can only describe as absolute Love. To my shock, every cell of my body became Light, tingling and vibrating. The emptiness within was instantly overflowing with the experience of Love. It was not something I just felt – I became Love.
It seemed that we were both immobile for ages, but it was probably only seconds, before I calmly lowered the pitchfork. Sweat beaded Stan’s face; his eyes were still shocked. I think he must have doubted my sanity when I spoke; I know I did! Listening with disbelief to my own words, I heard myself say, “It’s okay. It’s over. You’ll never be able to hurt (I had never even heard the word ‘victimise’ in those days, but it’s what I meant) me again with your spiteful words. I forgive you. I love you.” Those last words really freaked me out!
I was so embarrassed that I walked to the other side of the twenty-acre field, keeping well away from him. We were both very quiet; withdrawn and subdued. My day was over-lighted by a sense of sheer wonder, and a fading experience of Love that, sadly, I could not sustain.
The experience completely changed our relationship. His litany of spite gradually dwindled away, as he sensed that I was now impervious to his words.
Years later, when Stan died, it was while sitting in his fireside chair. He died so quietly that his wife and grown daughter knew nothing, until they tried to get him to go to bed. I believe that whatever happened to me also affected him. In some way, my Love and forgiveness, however brief, seemed to exorcise his own personal demons.
Which brings us back to destiny. At the moment I was poised to kill him, something intervened. Did that intervention change my destiny, or did it prevent me from changing it? And what was that something?
These were my unanswered questions for many years. I speculated that my guardian angel intervened, but I was never sure, and thirty years were to pass before I had a clear answer.
Suffice it now to jump forward in time to the moment in 1986, when (see, An Enlightening Story) I dramatically Awakened to the realisation of Self. During that moment I simultaneously ‘experienced’ every frame in the holistic movie of my life. I saw myself, newly Awakened at forty-nine, moving down the timeline of my present lifetime.
As the Awakened-Self, I placed my own hand on nineteen-year-old Michael’s shoulder, just as he was about to plunge the pitchfork into Stan. In that moment, teenage Michael felt the Love of his own Awakened-Self; he felt his own experience of Love flooding his every cell, completely transforming the moment.
In that moment, Michael became the person who, in not killing Stan, would live the life that would enable him to Awaken, and metaphysically travel the time-line to become the person who would provide the Love to prevent the killing so he could live the life to become the person . . . !
It begs the question; which comes first?
The answer: in a greater reality all time occupies the same moment. Equally, all consciousness occupies the same no/time moment. Neither event comes first. Physically, we live within a linear experience. Metaphysically, we live holistically. The illusion of linear time and separation is just that; an illusion. All is One.
I am very happy to state that just as it seemed to resolve the class hatred in Stan, my experience of Love as a young man of nineteen proved to be the end of my rage. In hindsight, I suspect it was the Loving closure of a negative emotion that had been with me for a very long time.
This episode begins when I was a young man in 1963. Mainly, this story is about Love. I often capitalise the word Love to denote the difference between a statement like, ‘I love my car’, and the true value and deeper meaning of real Love. We are too inclined to trivialise the meaning of Love in our conversation; it is something to which I have become increasingly mindful. When I say Love these days, I mean Love. However, this is also a story of father and son, and of death . . . and emigration.
Of Endings . . . and New Beginnings
I was twenty-five years of age when my father went into hospital for an exploratory operation involving his bile duct. Afterwards, the surgeon told my brother, Christopher, and me that Dad had cancer of the pancreas – and the bottom dropped out of my world. The cancer was inoperable and considered incurable – a death sentence. The surgeon’s estimate of nine months was to prove remarkably accurate.
The surgeon very strongly recommended that we not tell Dad, or my mother, the truth about his condition. Knowing no better, we both agreed. I have no doubt the surgeon meant well, but today I consider such an approach little short of criminal; to presume that a person is unable to face the fact of their death, strikes me as the height of medical arrogance.
Naturally, I told Treenie about Dad’s condition, and it was then that I went through my grieving process for him, while he was still alive. When he died, I was calm and quite detached. The initial shock had long since eroded. Daily, I watched the effects of cancer slowly ravage his fine mind and strong body; daily I witnessed the frightful deterioration as he literally turned yellow and withered away.
His end came unexpectedly. I guess for most people death is always somehow unexpected, even when it is predicted. I was in his bedroom and we were talking. He asked me for a drop of brandy, so I put my arms under his shoulders to lift and support him while he sipped. After only one sip, he passed me the glass, gave a sigh . . . and died. For a few bewildered moments, I did not realise he was dead, but as I let him gently back onto the pillow, it became obvious. Downstairs, several relatives were visiting, and I could hear the buzz of their conversation, but I sat quietly with Dad for another four or five minutes, watching his last involuntary breath fade away. Finally, I kissed him, said goodbye to him and went downstairs to tell the rest of the family.
As was to be expected, shock, grief, hysteria and pandemonium broke out. Feeling calm, I retreated. I felt no shock, just a mild sadness. For those last, precious minutes, I had watched the imprint of prolonged suffering slowly withdraw from Dad’s face, to be replaced by an expression of indefinable peace. I watched years fall away, as the deeply etched lines of his too-serious face eased and softened for the first time in so long. This was years before I made my own investigation into dying and death, but it was a trigger for my inquiry. In some odd way, Dad’s death seemed more like a coming alive, only he was no longer available to us.
Strange as it may seem, the last few months of his life were some of the best quality time he and I had spent together since I was a child. Dad’s father had died when Dad was only two years old, so he had no role model of how to be a father. I loved and respected him, but much of the time we were not close. We were father and son, with endless arguments between us. Toward the end, as he became more seriously ill, Dad had no energy left to bicker, and I had no will for it, so together we found an acceptance of one another, and peace.
I am certain that, in his heart, Dad knew he was dying. About six weeks before he died, an incident occurred between us that was to have a profound effect on my life. He wanted to share a few feelings, which he was not practised at sharing or putting into words.
I can never remember Dad saying that he loved me. Like so many men of his generation, he found it impossible to speak words of love to someone of the same sex, even a boy. I have a clear memory of him picking up Josephine, the girl next door, when she was about six years old and I was about eight, and telling her he loved her. I remember the inner pain I felt. I so badly wanted him to say those words to me.
On this particular afternoon of sharing, Dad began hesitatingly to tell me that he had misjudged me. He was always one for proverbs and aphorisms, and I can still hear him saying, “Ever since you were a boy, I’ve had to keep reminding myself that wild colts make the best horses.”
He went on to apologise for comparing me academically with my intellectually brilliant brother. “Since you got married, I have seen a side of you I didn’t know existed,” he said, confessing how he had earlier failed to appreciate the qualities in me he was now attempting to acknowledge.
I was married at twenty-one, and he had opposed it, claiming I was far too immature and incapable. Yet, as the first few years passed, and he witnessed my marriage to Treenie going from strength to strength, he had slowly begun to reshape his opinion of me.
He struggled for words, groping uncertainly into his deeper feelings of affection for me. How desperately he tried to tell me he loved me, but the words defeated him. Sadly, I was as unpractised as he, so the words were never spoken between us; but we both knew and felt the love that transcends all the petty and personal issues of differing personalities, or those between fathers and sons.
During those last few weeks, when Dad finally must have accepted that he was dying, he realised that it was time for him to make his last will and testament. I’m sure his generation frequently put off making their wills because the action was too close a reminder of death. Did they think it might even precipitate it? Whatever the reasons, will making was regularly overlooked in the previous generations of our family.
One afternoon, the family solicitor – whom Dad had known since his school days – came to visit. They discussed all aspects of the will, covering all the necessary details. Then the solicitor went back to his office to put it all down on paper for Dad to sign. Instead, however, the solicitor went back to his office, had a massive heart attack, and died.
News of the unexpected death distressed Dad, and at this point his own deterioration accelerated; he was unable to muster the required concentration, and the will never got made. Even though he had told me what the will was to contain, I remained silent.
Within a few weeks, he died. Dad had been a farmer, and having worked with him for the past eleven years, I continued to run the farm, but things were no longer the same. Suffice it to say that within a few months my brother and I agreed to sell the farm, each to take our share and go our separate ways. Treenie and I planned to build a large, modern piggery on a particular piece of land, and plans for that were well underway while the legal aspects of the farm sale were thrashed out.
One evening, my brother telephoned. “I’ve been making a few calculations,” he said, “and it doesn’t look so good. I estimate that we’ll get about half the money we expected by the time the death duties have been paid.” A few more words were spoken, but I scarcely heard them. That single sentence had just laid waste to my cherished dream. (Thank God!) Half the money we expected fell quite a way short of what we needed to build our piggery. One reality leapt out at me, and I spoke it aloud to Treenie when I walked back into the living room. “Let’s emigrate!”
The idea to emigrate had been mentioned and dismissed, never to be seriously considered. Now, however, the signposts were up and they spoke a bold, clear message. Our future did not lie in a farming career in England, nor in the modern pig industry.
Ironically, when our plans to emigrate had been finalised, and the Oz government was to sponsor us as a couple of the ‘ten pound poms’, we discovered that my brother’s calculations and his subsequent phone call reflected his own worries, far more than the facts. We inherited half as much again as we had originally estimated. To this day, my brother does not know what prompted the fatal phone call that became the deciding factor in our lives. Our emigration was not what my brother or my mother wanted, nor indeed, any of Treenie’s family.
Thus it was, instead of going by sea, we became one of the first families to emigrate by air, propellors and all, arriving in Darwin, and then on to Launceston, Tasmania.
We all come to crossroads at various times in our life; I call these the truly pivotal moments in our life. Sometimes we try to take a wrong road – if there is such a thing – and life leans against us, giving us time to make a different decision.
Without any question, our immigration was the best thing that ever happened to me; not the easiest, but the best! The thought that I might have been a pig farmer curls my toes! Take my advice, when you reach a crossroad in your life, take the scariest direction . . . almost certainly, it will hold the potential to your greatest conscious growth. And that, after all, is your purpose for being on this beautiful planet!
This is set in the period around 1965 – 1968. Shortly after we emigrated to Tasmania, we bought a grazing farm on the foothills of Mt Arthur. Almost from the moment we settled in, a caterpillar plague, a three year drought and a long-term rural recession began to negatively impact our land, our pastures, our herd of beef cattle, and our income. It was a desperately difficult time; a very harsh introduction to farming in a strange, new land.
When I look back and I ask myself, ‘Why did I continue with farming?’ I would like to be able to honestly say, ‘because I loved it’. While there is truth in this, a greater truth reveals that farming was all I knew. It was all I thought that I could do and the only chance that I thought I had of success. And success meant self-approval! We all too easily follow the path that our feet are already on. This is not always to our advantage!
Labels Without Meaning
One of the more difficult lessons I met with in life had to do with success and failure. I have had to learn that those terms, success and failure, are part of the brainwashing of youth, the imprints of school, the rhetoric of parental concern for the welfare of their offspring, and the belief and conditioning of a judgemental society.
When Treenie and I emmigrated to Oz, we continued in the only way of life we knew . . . farming. The path our feet were on!
Within a few months of our arrival, we bought a hill farm in Tasmania with the intention of farming beef cattle. Life, however, had other plans! In our first year of farming we experienced the worst outbreak of army-worm caterpillars the region had known in well over thirty years.
Voracious, ever-eating caterpillars filled our water-holes, polluting and poisoning the water. They stripped our pasture of every blade of grass and every leaf of clover. They seemed to continually be on the march, looking for new leaves, more pasture. They were so thick on the ground that when waves of them crossed the railway lines, local trains were forced to a halt, their iron wheels spinning and skidding on the crushed and greasy bodies of the caterpillars. As a consequence, in that very first year of farming we lost half our cattle to poisoned and polluted water. At the time I classified this as my failure, even though common sense suggested that I could not be responsible for the extreme vagaries of Nature.
After borrowing money from the Development Bank for our economic survival, we then began dairy farming. It took me less than eight weeks to learn that I detested the monotony and regularity of milking, but eight long years before it came to an end.
You may well ask why we did not sell the farm if I disliked milking so much. Good question! Following directly on the heels of the caterpillar plague, we had three consecutive years of the worst drought on record for Tasmania. Cold, dry winters slid into hot, dry summers, and every day was a struggle to survive. During all this – as though we needed more anguish – a savage rural recession set in, made far worse by a nationwide city boom. The price of milk, cream, and beef plummeted to an all-time low. Nobody, but nobody was buying farms! The rural, dairy and beef farming recession was to last on and off, mainly on, for six very difficult years.
How we held on through all the hardship, I do not know how, but we did. In Tasmania and Victoria, the farmer suicide rate peaked during those years. It’s times like this when you find out what you are made of! The farm even grew when I bought another 240 acres on borrowed money in an effort to survive. In those earlier days, the bank manager twice advised me to sell the farm at the first opportunity, but to me, that meant one thing . . . I had failed. This was unacceptable. I knew that all our farming relatives in England would say, “Ah, they failed then. I told you that’s what would happen if they emigrated. I was right. I knew no good would come of it.”
As a young farmer I could not handle that. I needed their approval. In my ‘role as a victim’, I aligned myself with the years of conditioning that judged my actions and efforts as either successful (hanging on meant I was successful!) or, horror of horrors, a failure. (Oh God, no!)
However, life has a way of promoting change, and during my years of struggle and hardship, a change was taking place in me. I became one of the pioneers of organic farming in Tasmania, an innovator – and so, in a natural way, my self-worth also began to flourish. Gradually, I came to realise that my fear of failure was exactly that – fear. I learned that failure is an expression of self-fear, while success is no more than an expression of self-confidence. I learned that success and failure are meaningless labels, but labels that hide the real contents of the package. They were labels of deceit and deception; labels that created unneeded, unnecessary pressures.
As each year passed, I grew ever more aware of my previously untapped abilities, and the value of a loving and supportive relationship with Treenie. By the time the recession ended, we had bred our remaining beef cattle back into a sizeable herd, finished milking, reduced our debts while increasing the size of the farm, improved the health and vitality of the land, the pastures and the cattle, and inner-grown ourselves to a point where our confidence and self-expression were stretching the confines of our life as farmers.
We now had a herd of one hundred and fifty beef cows and I was exactly where I wanted to be when we first immigrated. Despite this, I was no longer the same man who had emigrated! I had changed. I had changed myself while changing our way of farming. I had learned that I had a different path to follow and that I could no more fail in life than I could succeed. I now knew that life is all about experience.
It had become very clear that my farming career had come to an end. At this point, selling the farm no longer meant failure. In reality, by the definitions of a fickle society, we had survived an agricultural holocaust. We were successful! But success and failure were labels that no longer held any worth, or meaning, for us.
Through the years that were to follow, I further learned to see success and failure in other ways. Success is the label of approval from a judgemental society, while failure is society’s label of disapproval. As metaphysical Beings, we are ageless, immortal. What is the judgement of a single incarnation, when it is but one frame in the infinite movie of the Continuity of a Soul? I also learned that success is tied to the accumulation of money, while failure is a measure of its lack. How shallow can we really get when money is the measure of a person’s worth? Although most people should know better, it persists, with regular assistance from a very conditioned, unaware and cynical media.
This covers the same period that I wrote of in the previous chapter; a time of serious drought and rural recession. The following account, however, documents a very different lesson. This is where I learned that where you focus, energy flows. It seems that first we need to have an intellectual understanding of these principles of life. Then, if we live that understanding, it becomes our actualised reality. Isn’t it a pity we learn so much more effectively under hardship than we do when everything is going smoothly and easily?
A Ritual of Hope
In retrospect, I am grateful for the difficulties I experienced in my early years as an immigrant farmer. Adverse experiences either make us or break us, or, to be more accurate, we either find our competence and capabilities, or slip uncomfortably into an apathetic state of self-pity, blaming the government or the weather or . . . !
During our years of regular bills and reduced, irregular income, Treenie and I faced many challenges. At one stage, we had so many unpaid bills that I only had to open the desk and look at them, to be instantly stricken with diarrhoea! At times I was so worried and anxious that I lay awake at night sweating from sheer, mental torment. I hated being in debt and I hated being unable to change the situation. I was a victim of not only drought and recession, but also of my own mental attacks. I learned the real meaning of ‘worried sick’.
Those farmers who, unable to deal with the pressure during those unrelenting years, committed suicide, simply transferred the burden of responsibility to their long-suffering spouses and families. For me, Treenie was a tower of strength. If she was as worried as I over the unpaid bills, she successfully hid it. While we paid our bills in drips and drops to the merchants, we survived. We followed a policy of strict honesty with our creditors, always telling it the way it was. In turn, they honoured that policy. Like many farmers, we got into the bad habit of self-denial. Any spending money we had went into either the farm or the children. Spending money on ourselves was a rarity.
Nevertheless, on the epicurean side of life, we lived like the proverbial monarchs. We had a large, abundant vegetable garden and I had developed skills in self-sufficiency that kept a twenty-two cubic foot chest freezer filled with succulent goodies. The financial pressure, however, was unending as one year of hardship followed another. It all seemed to be beyond my ability to cope with it. Even when we had the occasional good financial year, it was swallowed in a gulp by paying for the many poor ones. With endless long hours and very hard work, it seemed so unfair, for while I had no control over the price of our farm produce, my less patient creditors gave every indication that my debts were my fault.
It was during the very worst times, when I was white-faced with anxiety, that we found a way to relieve the pressure; a way to cope. Some of our land was around seven hundred metres (two thousand feet) above sea level in the foothills of Mt Arthur, high above the rest of the farm. Here, in this beautiful, open space, surrounded by dense forest, we could look out over the distant ocean.
On a regular basis, when the pressure was too great, Treenie and I would drive up to the highest point of our land and count our blessings. We deliberately switched our focus from what we did not have, to everything that we did have. It became a ritual, a badly needed immersion in all that was uplifting and positive; a ritual to counter balance the negative drag of our daily battle, to survive and continue.
“We have four wonderful and healthy children,” we would affirm. “We have good health, plenty of strength and energy, and we have each other. Gosh! We have so much to be thankful for. We have the blessing of abundant Love in our lives, so much Love. We have a lovely farm with healthy cows. We have abundant fresh-flowing water and plenty of land and pasture. We live in a truly beautiful place. We have many kind and generous friends. We live in a new house in a large and beautiful garden, filled with vegetables, fruit and flowers, and a freezer filled with meat and fish. We have a life of richness and blessings.”
We would then say, “The only thing we lack is enough money to pay our bills.”
The list of our blessings was so long, while the list of lack so short that this would give us a whole different perspective on our situation. Blessings – that became the key. We had so many blessings compared with the one thing we lacked – money. The words were purely mental, but they lifted us high emotionally, and that emotional high was what we so desperately needed.
Each time we drove up to the highest point of the farm we went through this uplifting exercise, and every time there seemed to be more to be grateful for. The single ‘not enough money’ became less and less threatening, as we began to regain our inner power. Without ever realising it, both of us, particularly me, had been inadvertently surrendering our inner power, replacing it with fear. Such a subtle emotional erosion, but enough to gradually drain me. We learned to count our blessings and, with conscious effort and deliberation, to focus on them in the times of pressure in our daily lives.
As we practised this, it became increasingly obvious that money was not as important as we had thought. What had been crippling me was not so much the lack of money, but my constant negative focus on what I lacked, on what I did not have.
To this day, I am certain that it was our very changed perspective that changed our fortunes. Focus on the negatives in your life and they grow. Focus on the blessings – and everyone has them, no matter what the situation – and they multiply. It is neither luck, nor random chance, that determines the quality and content of our lives. It is our focus. Where you focus, energy flows. Focus on what you have, and ‘have’ grows; focus on what you lack, and ‘lack’ grows. No matter what the situation, consciously choose to focus on your blessings. We all have so many; our blessed eyesight, the joy of good hearing, our ability to walk, the ability to freely breathe, to be able to speak, the joy of family, to share and receive Love . . . all so easily overlooked and taken for granted.
In general, humanity has developed away from Nature. We have become aggressors, seeking to dominate and subdue the Nature that surrounds us, rather than to peacefully and harmoniously integrate with it. Now that we have so-called climate change and we feel ourselves to be environmentally threatened, we are seeking to make changes in our attitude and approach to sharing this planet with other species. Even so, we react aggressively rather than respond intelligently. Increasingly, we are becoming alienated from the land. The next decade will see the greatest animal migration the earth has ever known; this is the migration of people from the land – China as a prime example – to the cities; right now, it is gaining momentum as never before. Even in a country as vast and empty as Australia, over ninety percent of the citizens are urbanised. Come to that, over ninety percent of the world’s population lives in the northern hemisphere!
These episodes happened mostly during the period 1967 to the early 1970s.
In Harmony with Nature
While farming in Tasmania, I became one of the leading organic farmers in the beautiful island state of Oz. This was when I learned about cynicism first hand. Anything to do with organic was mostly met with cynicism and scepticism. To be fair, there were many who welcomed and embraced the very idea, nevertheless they were the minority. I remember when, in 1978, during my first book tour, promoting my first ever book, A Guide to Organic Gardening in Australia – which became an instant best seller – I was often introduced on radio talk-back shows as ‘The alternative gardener with radical ideas’. Hard to imagine now, isn’t it? But the people who listened to me did not think it was radical. A non-fiction book only becomes a bestseller when the timing is right for public interest. When, ten years later, I was publicising the book’s rewritten, enlarged and updated version, The Natural Magic of Mulch, it was taken for granted that any intelligent person knew that organic gardening was the only way to go. Even then, I was surprised to learn that many people had no idea what mulch is . . . so much for Nature’s natural biomass!
Just to close this subject, I have now written my very last book on gardening, Conscious Gardening, a book that interweaves metaphysical and practical aspects of organic gardening. A being-with while doing-to, type of book. It is about creating a deep and lasting metaphysical connection with Nature, by way of the garden.
In my early days as an organic farmer, I was acutely aware of how much I needed to learn. I read most of the books on the subject, certainly the classics, but so often they had little application to my property on the foothills of Mt. Arthur. I watched, bewildered, as my cows, standing in lush, improved pasture, stretched their necks through the barbed wire fence to graze on some of the sparse forest grass and weeds on the other side, but, by observation, I learned why. I watched my cows get bloat grazing the new season pasture on a wet night; I also pumped the usual syringe full of penicillin into each infected quarter of the udders of my milking cows, wondering why mastitis was such a scourge of the dairy herd – and by observation, I gradually learned why these things happened. I noticed that despite having a fair number of earthworms in the garden and in the farm soil, they were very rare – and by observation, I learned why.