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If
you have
a
thousand reasons
for
living
If
you have a thousand reasons for living,
if you never feel alone,
if you wake up wanting to sing,
if everything speaks to you
from the stone in the road to the star in the sky,
from the loitering lizard, to the fish, lord of the sea,
if you understand the winds, and listen to the silence,
rejoice, for love walks with you,
love is your comrade, your brother, your sister!
Dom Helder Camera
Someone
who always had my interest at heart once expressed the wish that a magic
wand could be waved and somehow everything could be restored to a state
of serenity. It was a lovely thought and wish, and at the time I am sure
that I fully agreed. Now, having lived for over twenty more years, I am
not so sure. Somehow, I think that it would be rather like being lifted
to the top of Mount Everest by helicopter - great view, but sense
of achievement? Not really. For successful climbers, I am sure that the
actual climb will figure more in their thoughts than the view from the
top. For myself, at the time - the early days of 1980 - I hadn't yet come
to terms with my new knowledge and experience, let alone realised that
there might be a goal. I had yet to meet anyone who showed in their face
that they had seen the 'twin peaks of Mount Meru', and so, basically,
I went about the business of regaining my confidence and coping with the
reality of living.
Even if I had had my 'visionary's' goal, I doubt whether I would have
proclaimed a pilgrimage. Always I have kept my emotions and inner desires
and ambitions private except to a limited and close 'few'. Public and
ostentatious displays of sentiment, or spiritually inspired emotion, have
always embarrassed me, and so I sought not my palm from the Holy Land,
nor my coquille badge from Santiago. My pilgrimage, if one there
has been, has been into myself, exploring myself and my actions with a
new vision, and becoming aware of the possibilities and potential that
reside in practically everyone. I have always been a Christian - was I
not baptised in the chapel-of-ease of the abbey church? Did I not attend
regularly at the Sunday School and services of the close-by Calvinistic
Methodist church, when we moved to our new home; and did I not become
a communicant there and, later, in Glasgow? And did I not then become
a Roman Catholic, with full conviction, at the time of my marriage? And
then did I not put much into the local church life and belong to the St.
Vincent de Paul Society that is charitably working for young people? Having
absorbed the tenets and practices of a Christian life with my childhood
breath, I had only deviated from them in minor ways, and yet looking back
from the stance of maturity, I wonder and speculate whether I was confusing
form with substance. There was obviously not a deep and abiding spirituality,
however that may manifest itself, for where had been my resources when
I so desperately needed that extra 'something' in hospital in the 'sixties
and afterwards?
There were, anyway, new and imperative factors in my life that I would
find difficult if not impossible to ignore. Could I put aside, turn away
from the new knowledge that I had acquired, and the experiences that had
been mine during the previous nine months? Had I wanted to do so, I would
have found it impossible; entry had been gained into my mind and into
my person, and now the question was to try to maintain control of as much
of my thought and function as was humanly possible.
Yet again I have to ask your indulgence over this problem of communication;
partly the choice of words with which to describe the indescribable; partly
in how to assert my own personal certainty without in any way conveying
a sense of 'spiritual superiority', or any form of exclusiveness. There
are those who, having gained what they see as enlightenment in one or
other of the world's esoteric philosophies, crushingly put down the neophyte
with "If you have to ask that question, you obviously won't
understand the answer!" No, there is nothing of that in me, nor in
what I am trying to convey. I, myself, have never been a seeker after
hidden truths - if anything, I went along in a sort of humdrum acceptance.
I didn't see much future in the sort of analytically religious debates
that sometimes went on in one particular naval mess in which I lived -
the books of C.S.Lewis were making their appearance at the time and provoked
new ideas - and yet, many years later, my friend David said that he had
then admired my certainty. Who knows? Maybe I did have a solid belief
that I applied in my life. My religion, if I thought about it at all,
centred around the way in which I lived it and applied it, as a matter
of practice rather than endlessly debating it, particularly if
that debate was at the expense of another and different denomination or
creed.
Possibly that is one of the keys to my way of thinking, to the ways in
which I instinctively act, for the practical always seems to prevail -
again a component of the intake of my infant breath, for the 'if you want
it but can't afford it, you make it yourself' philosophy was around me
from the beginning. Thus, in my early years, I wore clothes some of which
my mother had made on her machine, or which she had knitted; ate food
every bit of which, apart from bread, she had cooked; sat on chairs, or
used other furniture, some of which my father had made; listened to a
radio that he had constructed - I can still see the coils being wound,
smell the solder and flux, see the outdoor aerial being strung between
the chimney and a tall mast that he erected. I can still remember the
tedium of taking accumulators into him at work where, as an electrician,
he put them on charge. (Though there were benefits, for if I went to the
works at a convenient time, I could stand above the coke ovens and watch
the red hot coke being pushed out, and be smothered in the clouds of steam
as the heat was quenched, and long to be the one who had control over
this great big jet of water. Or I could go, preferably at night when it
was all so much more dramatic, and watch the blast furnaces being tapped,
and see the flow of slag into the huge ladles, and the molten, glowing
iron run into its pig moulds.)
This was the father who, outside work, slaved away as the local union
branch secretary: who didn't smoke or drink, but instead was able to buy
a small car long before they became a common possession; the mother who,
with her north-country canny thrift, ensured that we were buying our own
house, and also had money to finance an annual holiday, well before holidays
with pay became the norm. Within the family from which my father came,
there were the beginnings of a parallel innate 'compulsion', for want
of a better word; a compulsion to be involved in activities for the benefit
of others. Thus my grandfather, who had served and been wounded in the
Boer War, had come back from service under Baden Powell and, inspired
by him, had founded the first local Boy Scout branch. It was he, who,
with my grandmother, had created the first local spiritualist church.
They both worked according to their convictions and desire to help others
in the early developing new approaches to 'healing' - as also, as I was
later to find out, did my Uncle Gwyn. If I wanted to, I could go and watch
Gwyn at the local copper works, where he skilfully turned the vibrating
sheets of copper as they passed between the rapidly spinning rollers.
Or I could watch him and my Aunt Grace in their other life as market gardeners,
where the hands that healed had a way with plants also.
It was a family from which I came that, as far as I was aware or can recall,
never sought 'preferment', never pulled strings. This has been the way
of my life, of self-enrichment in the intellectual sense, of avoiding
absolutely any self-seeking, self-advancing 'brotherhood' or whatever,
and rejoicing in developing my life as much as I am able by means of my
own efforts. How could it be any other way? One hears more and more of
'foetal programming', well, I haven't had much time yet to think about
that and its consequences, but certainly there was 'childhood and adolescent
programming' in its broadest sense, and for that I am most grateful.
I could not have been kept in closer touch with reality and the practical,
than when ultimately I left home, and became a number, C/MX 656045, in
the Royal Navy (where I did learn the negative preferment of a
Welsh accent!). The greatest 'hands on' reality was in my work as a Radar
Mechanic, which I have already touched on. The equipment for which I was
responsible had to work and be kept working by my efforts, and it had
to be accurate, whether it was 'ranged' electronically, or pragmatically
from the harbour at Haifa to the distant Crusader fort at Acre. Without
its function, it was useless hunting terrorist infiltrators at night along
the Palestinian coast, while it also contributed greatly to the safety
of the ship as it 'went about its business in great waters', as the daily
Naval prayer has it. I had experienced the reality of German bombs and
V2 rockets; had looked down from my training establishment, HMS
Ganges, onto 'buzz-bombs', as they sped up the estuary of the Stour in
Suffolk. I had faced the reality of Irgun or Stern Gang terrorists in
their attempts to put limpet mines on the ship as we lay at anchor in
Haifa Bay. I had seen the reality of the destruction of cities and the
impact upon their inhabitants, whether in Britain, Valetta, or Naples.
I began to experience a new reality when, following graduation, I began
my career at the Windscale Works at Sellafield, for what could be more
real than the nuclear weapons, that were the original purpose of the plant?
I had no problem with that, for such was the thinking at the time, and
nuclear bombs had been seen to bring to a horrible end, an incredibly
horrible war. Nevertheless, I was more at ease within my involvement with
the peaceful application of nuclear energy at the Calder power plant,
even though I had an exceptional reality in my responsibility for its
measuring and safety devices. Perhaps the ultimate responsibility
and reality came on the day on which the Queen opened it, and the world
was watching. Because of this very public gaze, it would obviously have
been a great embarrassment if the reactor should shut itself down automatically,
as the result of failure of any of the safety devices themselves. As many
of the devices were new and innovative, it was a possibility that had
to be faced. So, a piece of wire was put in place to bypass all of the
automatic shut-down circuitry, and, during the Queen's tour and the official
opening, I stood ready to snatch off that wire if there had happened to
be a genuine operating reason which demanded that the plant should be
shut down quickly.
If it is not obvious, what I am trying to demonstrate is that I am not
some head-in-the-clouds, ethereal, self-deluding being who is totally
out of touch with reality. The converse is by far and away the truth.
At a basic level, consider the room in which I am now, and every aspect
of its function, in which I can see something from my own hands and mind.
It is upstairs and runs at two different levels, north to south through
the house. The computer is a bit of an oddity in this setting, but I have
grown used to it. At the moment, a bright November sun is streaming in
at the far end through a large picture window of my own design. The opening
was enlarged by Oliver, whose house I can see nearly half a mile away,
now that the trees are bare. Oliver is brilliant at working with the cobble
construction of these thick walls. The window was made, installed and
glazed by my joiner friend Alec, who has supplied me with much good wood
and also contributed his handiwork over recent years, as time has become
more valuable to me and I pay to have things done that hitherto I would
have done myself. Beside me as I sit, and with a view to the west, is
another window, hole courtesy of Oliver, window from Alec, and the distant
Irish sea, viewed between three century-old pines, is where I often lift
my gaze when short of inspiration. In the same west wall, towards the
far end of the room, is another window, this one courtesy of my long dead
friend Bob, also a genius with a cobble wall, while immediately on my
right is a north facing window that I renewed myself. My gaze through
the latter takes me to Lakeland's highest mountain, already with its first
winter snow touching the summit. It is a room that is so full of light,
and which is so nice just to be in, just to sit and look out to sea, or
south, through some more mature pines to the 'earth-mother' rounded contours
of Black Combe.
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