If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my life
And you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots
Remember
That on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms
And my roots will set off to seek another land”
― Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems
2024 was a shattering. A reminder that life can have plans that we are not party to which are meant to dissemble us, not just in a moment in this case, but in a series of them. I have written about those experiences ( the end of a long relationship with a mentor, the death of my Father and the break up of a relationship all within an 8 month period) but what I speak to here is the story of what follows such a breaking open. What has happened to me and for me. A conscious attempt to allow the deepening of my awareness and presence, a continuation of living with an open and broken heart, a beginning of the rebuild of my dismantled ‘self’ as a path to a ceremonial walking through the world. Conscious intimacy with life. As I began to write this piece I encountered a wonderful essay here at the Stack. This quote jumped out at me.
To be truly intimate is to be dangerously unarmed. It is to step into a space where your cleverness cannot protect you, where your prettiest metaphors fail, and you are asked not to perform, but to remain. (My italics)
The word remain comes from the Latin remanere, from re- (expressing intensive force) and manere ‘to stay’. So I am offering here a translation that suggests ‘to stay more.’ To root. To slow down. To seek depth. To become more deliberate. It asks the question, ‘can loss actually lead us to more?’
Let me unfold that thought a while.
Consider the making of whisky. The wild environs in which this practice was born in the Highlands of Scotland, a place I now call home. The barley grains, the water, the yeast, the mash tuns and the copper spirit stills all working together with the human distillers to alchemise what is in the end a clear and potent liquid. Before intervention and taxation at the decree of the King of England, the making of this spirit was illegal and widespread and produced an alcohol in excess of 90% proof. Potentially damaging no? Nowadays, after the spirit still phase it is watered down to a palatable 43% for a standard dram but up to 60% + for Single Malts. This liquid is then poured into a wooden cask, which might be virgin oak, one year old ex-bourbon stock or an old sherry butt stained red by years of use in Oloroso or Pedro Ximenez hogsheads in Spain. Regardless, the cask is sealed and the colourless whisky begins the process of ageing. The character of the spirit seeps into the wood and is met by the wood leaching its way into the clear liquid in an exchange that is an ancient dance. Through the cracks and porosity inherent in the coopering of the cask, elements of the liquid gold therein escape over the course of a year. Up to 2% in fact. At the same time the outside world is being poured into the cask. Reciprocity. So after 25 years we might open a cask to find half of it’s content gone. Leaving less in a volumatic sense. But now there is colour, fragrance, taste and of course depth. There is that invisible pouring from outside. The 50% that remained, stayed more. It is not just half. It is a deeper more resonant half than the whole amount that was first put in the cask. It is a half with a fullness that could not have been possible without the loss of it’s twin, known as the Angel’s share, to the ether. In the Gaelic language, whisky is named “Uisge beatha," The water of life. They knew what they were doing right? Not just life giving but a metaphor for life itself. Deepening by lessening. Breathe that in. Life has its way with us and if we can remain broken open to that, it deepens us too. This is a visible and palpable depth. So what does that deepening look like for me right now?
The early months of 2025 were messy. Very messy. My days were a veritable caterpillar soup in the making. So very very difficult for me in so many different ways. I was lost at sea in my own life and as I write this I can attest to still having days when that rings true many months later. My own blessing in all of this is that I live in a cabin in the woods in a beautiful part of Scotland. Meadows, woodlands, soft rolling fells and a host of birds and animals surrounded me in this process. Held me. I cannot speak enough to how i am so grateful for all that I have here in this tiny home, in a tiny forest. Being held by the more than human world is a gift of unending proportion.
I have consciously given myself this gift of time, which quite beautifully contains within it the gift of no time. A radical proposition in a world full of scrambling and climbing upwards in a frenzy of unlimited growth. My gift then, is simply just more presence, more being with. Since the turn of the year the solitude and loneliness of living off grid have oftentimes been hard bedfellows and yet they are also the deepest of teachers. I have grieved like never before. Howling and raging against my infinite smallness in the face of this storm. Curling up around my trembling self and totally vanishing into the experience. I learned to be lost. To drift on the currents of a sea that I had no control over. Nothing but a cork on that wild ocean. But one that could think. Could feel. Question. Philosophise. Try to understand. Fail. Curse. Blame. Weep. Oh my how I wept. The ocean grew with my tears as she took them into her depths to merge with my own growing shadow. This was a reckoning. Here. Now. Find the will to face this. To embrace this. To be humbled by this. Lessened. Deepened. And then, when you have crawled across the glass shards of your former life, then, begin to live again. Slowly.
This is the story of those baby steps off the floor. It is not a ‘how to do life.’ It is a song of myself. It is my prayer to this unfolding. Read it as such please.
I had to rebuild the architecture of my being from the post storm flotsam and jetsam. Were there any foundations left in tact? Of course there were. Not everything was taken during that time when I truly believed all of it was. Some essence of me, some core pillars remained. These are the deepened legs upon which I now inch forward.
Gratitude
Every morning for me now begins with a hand ground cup of coffee. Grinding beans is a presence practice. Listening to the sound of them tumbling and shredding, smelling the rising notes as they break open, feeling the resistance to the grind until it is released and the frictionless and freed momentum of the handle signifies that the grounds are prepared. Then I ready my bright red ceramic V-cup, a gift from my three children who are with me every morning in this ritual, by warming both cup and filter paper with hot water. Then I add the grounds. I trickle not long since boiled water onto them with an ornate Moroccan silver pourer that my son bought me and watch the slow dripping dark liquid land in the glass container below. I trickle again. And again. And again. Until there is coffee. In the glass. Dark and light, dancing there in the morning sunbeams that fall through the window of my cabin in the woods. The trees waving the morning outside as mirror in the oil slick like liquid. But it cannot be drunk just yet.
The first mouthfuls are poured onto the Earth for my ancestors, along with a splash of my home brewed water kefir ( They like something sweet too. What can I say?) This is a simple and yet deeply meaningful ritual in which I speak some words of the ancient Gaeilge language of my Irish forbears.
Beannaigh mo shinsir/ Good morning my ancestors
Beannaigh an talamh/ Bless the ground
Beannaigh an ghrian/ Bless the Sun
Beannaigh na fia/Bless the Deer ( I have an affinity with this animal and they visit the land here. My family name is of the same root)
At this stage of my learning the ancient Gaeilge language I can say that ‘Tá cúpla focal agam’/ I have a few words. An exploration into the making of a new pillar. This the language of the land of my ancestral home in Ireland and the land upon which I wake every morning in Scotland. I have no sense that I will become fluent but some words have meaning when spoken daily and that might be enough for now.
After the blessings I drink the Kefir and the coffee with pleasure. This wee ritual helps me begin the day in a place of gratitude for those that came before and gave me life. In the ancient animist tradition of the Gaels this includes all beings, plant, animal, stone, human and so on.
Presence
I find a morning period of reflection, meditation or silence to be essential to my personal well being. To my locating a sense of me in the web. To develop presence as an underlying and foundational part of my day. In this I am consciously holding myself open for both the gratitude and the grief which inhabit my bones these days. One Coin. Two sides. A presence practice can open the door to a witnessing aspect.
After meditating for some years, I began to see the patterns of my own behaviour. As you quiet your mind, you begin to see the nature of your own resistance more clearly, struggles, inner dialogues, the way in which you procrastinate and develop passive resistance against life. As you cultivate the witness, things change. You do not have to change them. Things just change.
Ram Dass
The development of this witness can be brought to any activity we engage fully with, allowing presence to unfold and this witness to flex and to form. Meditation, playing a musical instrument, walking quietly, running, reading, writing and of course falling apart. If approached fully, any kind of practice can bring our attention to the present moment. Who is it that is doing the thinking here before pen hits paper? Who is it who is feeling distraught? Is it me or am I able to notice that I am the one thinking? The one feeling? Is there perhaps a witnessing part of us that can observe the thinking and feeling self? That calm ocean bed sitting deep below the turbulence of the surface waves? I believe from experience that there is. A quiet witness to it all which can be cultivated through practice or simply recognition. A deep and timeless stillness. A knowing that lives in an oppositional and connected dance to the not knowing. A space from where the muse speaks to you as an emergent voice. Not, I must add, a space for escape. For bypassing reality. For a transcendent holiday away from being the messy humans that we are. That the sky holds the weather and that we are both is a good metaphor for what I am grasping at here.
Of course, regular ‘conscious’ ventures into arenas of presence can help to develop this witness but perhaps in more simple terms the work that is required of us is simply meet that which shows up in the life that presents itself (read that as gifts to us perhaps) in each and every waking moment. That unfolding, unknowable, emergent wave. Engaging fully with this concept and practice enables us to access the wisdom that always exists within us and all around us through a simple practice of inquiry, embodiment and experiential learning. Everything we encounter is the path, the work, the way, and it is yours to walk, engage with and understand however you choose to. Does being conscious of the walk make a difference to the walk? We are where we are, right? Or perhaps we are where we ‘see’ ourselves and, if we develop presence and through that a witnessing awareness, our perceptions can shift and so the reality we perceive can shift to.
Dip the cloth. An old meditation teacher gave me this analogy. White shirt, tub of blue dye. Dip the cloth. It comes out blue. Dip it again the next day it is bluer. And so on. Deepen the hue. Developing the ‘witness’ and deepening the shades in your experience of life. Dip every day. In my days, drumming, emergent rhythm practice, photography and creative writing all contribute to the dyeing of my cloth. Constantly dipping into the pool of life. Moment to moment. Impossible? Try again. Still impossible? Try again and again and repeat from moment to moment. For ever. Be resilient. Be persistent. Be committed. It is for your life. Just in the way we can notice that we are not aware of our breathing and then return to it, we can begin to bring the same awareness to all our moments in life. Of course, we will breathe anyway, noticing or not noticing, but again, I think that becoming conscious of the breath changes our relationship with it and so bringing full awareness to our life will offer the same. We know from science now that experiments in the quantum field are changed by observation.
Everyone has had the experience of ‘time flying by’ whilst you are immersed in something that you love doing? I can take my camera out on a walk and spend time looking through the lens at the world when suddenly the sun is setting. Where did the day go? I can pull out my favourite hand drum and begin to play or teach a class and suddenly hours have gone by in the blink of an eye. My emergent drumming practice is an ongoing training in learning to listen deeply and be present. In the presence of a circle full of humans with drums and percussion there is a silence available that allows you to hear, feel and see, every point of music and rhythmical connection and all of the spaces in between. It takes a certain kind of radar to locate this. Presence.
In the present moment there is no experience of linear time. Interestingly and paradoxically, the moment you notice that you are not experiencing any kind of ‘time’, time lands right there on top of you and you lose the flow, the presence. Divinely paradoxical huh?
Movement
Post morning presence practice I like to do some physical activity like Qi Gong, dancing to funk music from the 1970's or maybe some Reggae. Dance is a true opening for me. I find myself in a freedom there where no one is watching, save the trees and the birds. In dance I connect and I find joy. I loved dancing with my last partner and those that came before her but in truth I love dancing just for me much much more. I have in this recent time curated a playlist that gives me wings. It is impossible not to dance to it. Movement helps release the stuff that your mind cannot reach. It is why the Sufi’s whirl.
Sometimes I walk a Labyrinth crafted in collaboration with the rock beings here just yards from the cabin or perhaps I might just walk slowly around the land upon which I live if my body needs a softer beginning to the day. Walking in nature when you are broken is sometimes all you can do. That and weeping. The number of times I fell to my knees sobbing as I walked in the woodlands here begging the gods of place to bring me a holding my own cracked being could not find. Drumming is also a movement based activity and a core part of my path in the world thus far, although I have to admit to prefering to do that with others rather than as a solo practice.
Writing
Writing has always been a pillar. Poems, journals and scribbles.
I write for myself. I write to re-member. I write to discover. I write to make sense where I can. I write to open the door for the wisdom that surrounds me here in the woodland. The quite beauty of the birch which whispers to my soul in ways that whisper her Ogham name over and over. Beith. It sounds like a deep long connecting breath. The majesty of the Beech, (Phagos) holding space for me to be birthed again. These are the Cathedral of trees. The old Willow, (Saille) whose presence here is as sentinel. Watcher. I am seen.
The rabbits who scurry less now as I open my cabin door on the world as if they sense I am not a threat and me, aware now of how dangerous that might be for them if I found myself in dire need of food. The bird nesting above that very same door and her young now waking to the morning and joining the feathered chorus in the trees above. The sun rising to my right in the East, bathing the land in a prayer. The rhythm of the land meeting the need I have for slowness, despite the fears which that brings of not doing enough. I track the arcs of the sun and the moon across my days now. Listening. Struggling with the lengthening of the days and the idea that I must fill them with usefulness. How hard it is in our western society to give space for quiet brokenness. For being ‘not ok.’ I write in order to be able to inhabit my soul.
These morning pillars lean into an old Irish proverb that goes, “Tús maith leath na hoibre- a good start is half the work.”
Soul and the shadowlands
Rising slowly and gently from my most recent disintegration and leaning on these pillars, I am walking with the question ‘how did I get here?’ What is my story and the learnings therein? Is there a pattern to these unfolding spirals? As answer, I am listening to my own deep knowing sitting alongside my own deep not knowing and this morning pillar practice opens a door for entry into my own stumbling days, which are informed by all those, human and not, that came before me and who, in the great spiraling mystery of time, are waiting for me in my future. The road ahead leads to my ancestors. That is where my becoming an ancestor lives. All of this is for me a venturing in to the crucible of Soul and to the Shadowlands that are a part of that landscape.
“You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.”
John O’Donohue
I believe it is essential to be with such a Soul informed relationship to myself. It is not that I have refused to lean in to this question of soul in my life before but more a recognition that it is a spiral that returns endlessly. If you are alive you are spiraling. Once more I am being called to tend the aspects that need holding. To the wounds that have whispered, ‘we are not done’ from the shadows. I have pulled myself up off the floor so many times. I know what perseverance and learning how to remain is in my bones. My Irish ancestors survived famine and the mass exodus of their kin to far flung corners of the world. I would not be here but for their strength.
We must, I believe, always go again, as it is clear that there is more still to do if I am alive. Each spin around the spiral brings the version of me into play with all the learnings picked up to date. This iteration of me is different from the last one that got off the floor. This is a deepening of my becoming. And of course it hurts to shed skins like this. Really hurts. This is no imagined pain but a severance from who I thought I was. I am in a moment of rediscovery and rewiring, unworlding and re-worlding the relations with my own numerous parts.
Time to bring the deep grief that comes with knowing how I have hidden my whole self at times in the search of other. Bring the light of awareness, the compassionate witness. Bring the heart, the love and the intimacy home to me, that I have sought externally for too long.
I am uncovering gems in the mud of my life now and am now polishing them with tender love. Bringing the Warrior forward with a new caring and discerning perspective. Bringing the Sacred Wounded Child to be with and be seen. The Critic. The Crumbling and Tyrant Kings. The Lover and his too much and not enough. The Magician. The Rebel. Bringing them all in. To accept them all. To invite each take his place in the Court of my Sovereign King. My centre. My ground. He is the one writing these words. He has emerged from the ruins to step up and hold the centre. He is guiding me forward and I will from September of this year until June 2026, go deeper into this process at a series of Men’s gatherings.
Photo by Samuel Austin on Unsplash
The Miracle of life
In the midst of my struggles earlier in the year I met time and again, moments when I could not bring the pillars into being, when I could not practice. What to do when grief throws us to the ground? When anger calls us to rage against everything, our practice included? When turning over in bed feels like the only choice? Well, I think we have to begin from where we are. Be with what is present as fully as we can. Embrace the grief. Fully inhabit the bed. Rage away. Make them your practice. Witness yourself. Bring compassion and howl at the oblivion. And try to remember The Way It Is.
The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
William Stafford
I and I alone can walk my path. I and I alone can experience and learn from my emotions, my thinking, my struggles, my joys and my pain. I make the steps, consciously or unconsciously. This is my life in human form. It can seem at times a lonely path, one that no one else can understand. Am I going crazy here? Am I the only one that feels this way? Am I alone? The answer. Yes and No. Yes, you are the one that is feeling, thinking, and experiencing all these things and living your joy and struggle and no, you are not alone in having such experiences. Everyone else is having their own experience, which, whilst not yours, shares some commonality. You are somehow collectively connected. You are, quite paradoxically, walking alone together! Think of Jung’s Collective Unconscious, and Rupert Sheldrake’s Morphic Fields.
Maybe, just maybe, that place, where we all meet collectively, is akin to our home. A place where the collective mind and perhaps soul abides and where everything you need exists in every moment if only you will get out of your own way and let it emerge. Some call this state flow, a place of no-mind. Others refer to the transcendent or pure consciousness. To God or the Goddess. What it is named is not so important to me as how it feels. I personally identify being there through experiential and embodied criteria. It has a vibrational quality which for me, quietly hums at its own beautiful frequency, causing me to smile a specific kind of half smile, my own personal Mona Lisa moment. This is a sense of pure is-ness. Full immersion in whatever it is you are doing. The place of my deepest knowing and paradoxically not knowing at all. It is, I think, the doorway to my relationship with the Great Mystery. The cloud of unknowing. The liminal. The Soul.
I am not there, living that goal fully moment to moment, day to day, not by any stretch of the imagination. Living off grid and being silent for much of my days in the last 7 years here has shifted something. There is nowhere to hide. Showing up is the one thing I consistently do, even when I do not feel like it. Small steps towards presence.
I can notice all of it. I can notice the deep anxiety that sits underneath everything in my neurodivergent world and becomes more visible now because I am quiet enough often enough. When l listen and pay attention I do not need to fix it at all. In witnessing, in being there for myself, I am the space in which it exists and all I need do is be there. Holding space. For my own anxiety. For the voice that says this writing is no good. Pointless. Who wants to read this crap? For my own disintegration if necessary until perhaps finally the disintegration includes the witness. A fullness of death that births transformation. Metamorphosis. A new cycle of spiralling beginnings.
Right now I am in awe of what is emerging in my life and simultaneously flattened by grief. I am also getting to notice how I feel things in response to other people’s actions or words. How I am the one feeling irritated, amused, concerned. How I am the one holding on to those feelings and creating stories out of them. How I can create a reality about someone that in actuality may not align with who or where they are in themselves. It is just my idea of them. Here in the quiet space of witnessing I begin to peek behind the screen which has been projecting my WIZARD OF OZ like movie onto the world. I see how the post-production works, how the whole thing can get edited. How I can view a world that only I am watching. How knowing this allows me to wait, see and not act impulsively to them. Don’t take it personally Paul.
It is hilarious. It is terrifying. Seeing the absurdity of your own being is a powerful and beautiful thing. Maybe Camus was onto something? It levels the land somewhat. I catch a glimpse of the idea of me and how it rolls out into the world and I can laugh at how seriously I take it all. How a thought can hold my attention for days. One that I am thinking and overthinking. For days!
The more time I spend in witnessing the more I understand I am no different to anyone else in how I get caught in thinking and feeling. It is a human trait. And yet at the same time I am a totally unique expression of this unfolding intelligent and magical life we are all part of. No one else gets to be me. I am that one unique particle in the collective wave, in that one unique moment in time, in the great ocean of it all. I am the one writing this. I am this miracle. You are that miracle. Together we are miraculous.
It is miraculous though right? Totally, Absolutely, Miraculous!
It blows my mind in the same way that the clearest milky way draped night sky does. In witnessing all of this and more to the deepest level I am willing and able to explore, I meet an emerging authenticity. A true expression. The clear vibration that is Paul John Dear. Once I recognise that place, feel it fully and let go of what is supposed to be in favour of what is, I can open and share without the baggage of shame, without maintaining a self-judgement, without fear and with a sense of deep truth and abiding flow and an ability to laugh at myself and at life.
What emerges here is always, always what is required. Not good. Not bad. It is a place of deep and profound trust that paradoxically is also a place of deep ‘not knowing.’ That which becomes known emerges from a place of not being known? As Miles Davis once said, “Don’t play what’s there; play what’s not there.” Maybe this space where we get to witness is truly a space where we do not know and do not need to know, because the idea that we can know that which is yet to be, is absurd. I have no clue what the next moment might bring! Not at the fundamental level of life unfolding. Not even on this manifest physical plane. Back we come to the now. The present. That gift. I think it is important to dwell here in this space ‘between no longer and not yet.’ The still point between the notes. The arc of the parabolic. The blink moment.
So, for me right now this has also become a practice. I am privileged to be in a comfortable place in my off grid woodland world, to have a small passive income which I can get by on and to be able to teach in person rhythmical events. Of course my practice falls apart too. It is part of the process. Learning to walk a tightrope requires, REQUIRES, that you fall off. That is where you learn about the balance.
I have, in my lifetime, had periods when not all those privileges were present and so I am filled with gratitude for where I find myself today, despite the profound losses I have recently experienced.
So for now I continue. Continue to make one step and then another. Continue to be open to what emerges. Continue to not know and to simultaneously enjoy a deep knowing that this is how it is. I am realising that this last 6 months or so have been a period of gestation for me. A cocoon. A place I was able to lean in a bit more, inquire a bit more, feel a lot more, listen more and be with more as the unfolding quietly got on with itself.
Start where you are. Dip as often as you can. Find the practice that works for you. It really does help. Make time for complete and utter emergence. When it comes it comes! The world unfolds in her Beautiful Animistic way. My work here is to stay open. To be ever curious. To practice. To witness. To be present. To dive in.
One thing is certain, the transitions in life are ongoing and the need to be open and curious is an ever present companion on the journey and very necessary in the world we inhabit today.
Let it be so.
“the moment you notice that you are not experiencing any kind of ‘time’, time lands right there on top of you and you lose the flow, the presence. Divinely paradoxical huh?” Indeed, I practice fielding that moment of return, becoming as intimately aware of it as breath. It can be gently rolled away, sending it back, and returning us to presence. When you say it lands on top of you, I agree, it does! And that can be keenly felt in the body and so metabolised by it too. And now off to continue this guilty midnight pleasure…
Reading this in the middle of the night and right now you’re making me want to get up and make my morning coffee—loving soaking this read in. Back in a while.