In my end is my beginning

Taking stock

I began this Substack on the 21st December 2023, since that time I have slowly gathered readers and recently the number passed one hundred. Most of you won’t have read this first post so I repeat it here:

In the beginning was the Word, the Logos.

And let’s be honest, if we human beings are anywhere it’s always at the beginning. The wonder of us is that we start anew each day, that if our intentionality wills it we can awake fresh into the moment and start each day by making it new and shaking off the old.

Sounds easy doesn’t it?

But let’s be honest habit is cloying and we find ourselves repeating patterns that bind.

Yet, we can transcend our fate and initiate our destiny. And, I suppose, this is what these articles of mine will over the weeks, months and years enquire into. I have been fortunate to live a blessed life, although not always an easy one. I have learnt to bear witness, as all of us who have tasted from the fruit of the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil must bear witness.

I also believe this is the right time, in what will be the last stage of my life, to reflect back through the lens of my individual experience the multiplicity of all that is and connect with my community, all who I call friends, both known and unknown.

It’s going to be fun and it’s going to connect us all. So we return again to the beginning and we begin…

Strange reading this now.

Life is so very different now, than when I wrote that - something of a re-birth. The work I was born for, my dharma, in schools has ended. This has brought a certain freedom. I now live in a magical place near the sea and the time is free. I have retired from the world.

And yet you only have to turn on the news to know that the darkness has dropped again and the ceremony of innocence has drowned. Human consciousness has dropped to a low level in some places, as it did in Germany in 1939, and Blake’s’ Golden Builders must build again, must build Jerusalem.

This is not the time for heroic gestures, the need is for consistent efforts in the moment that lead us away from mechanical tendencies and what Blake calls, ‘Newton’s Sleep.’

A clarion call!

My writings are eclectic.

I am fortunate to have met some remarkable people - poets, philosophers, yogis and artists. I have stories to share and I am sharing them. I hope they benefit and help you. I am also grateful for those who leave comments and share their work, Joshua’s wonderful poems and Philips observations. Friends like Valentin and Dominic. It’s connection that matters. I am also interested in the different stages of life, how in middle age we ‘fall upwards’ and how the tide turns and we either return to the source to be renewed or pour our remaining life force into this dying world of forms, rendering to Cesar or to God.

I also continue to write creatively - my Biography which I include extracts from but is written for my children and my novel which I have been writing for over thirty years, ‘The Dance of Shiva’ which is nearing its end.

I also write verse:

Why would you not

rewire the world,

use magic,

bend it to your will?

The circle squared,

lets the pattern emerge,

bends the bow of heaven

and says, “Return’.

The beloved dead,

alive through absence,

are shapes cut from darkness

swallowing the light.

Here is redemption,

the end and it’s beginning,

a silent submission

to what is.

This is not for everyone,

not everyone wants it,

but all will know it, taste it,

and become it.

Thank you for your continuing support.

David

#thebrazieroftruth - please follow me on substack