I’d always had the feeling that something wasn’t quite right with the world, but growing up on East Hull in the 70s and 80s, I don’t think I really had the ways and means to put me finger on it. I’ve got memories of being drawn to nature, the unexplained and also I had an interest in current affairs. My mates used to take the piss out of me as I’d want sometimes to go home and watch the 9o’clock news or sommot like that. I remember once finding an old yellow oil skin type jacket – not sure where I found it but probably Alex Dock where we used to go fishing and swimming – and I scrawled a big CND Peace sign on the back and wore it to school one day.
Music had always been a big part of our lives growing-up. I’ve got great memories of us dancing to the top-forty on a Sunday after we’d got home from the rugby and had tea. Then in my mid-teens me and my mates started dropping acid and listening to Pink Floyd and it started to open up this other world. The dad next door introduced me to The Clash, then came the reggae and suddenly there were words and ways to describe what was wrong with the world.
In my early 20s I ended up going to a rehab in another city to get off the skag, then from that found myself at Uni and of course that just opens up all sorts of new ideas, theories, art, music and all that stuff.
It was around the age of 30 that the spiritual side of life started to open up. I came to realise through a few awakening experiences that maybe there was something, and I’m not sure what that thing is, but now aged 50 I can’t help but have the feeling – and I say this fully aware of the complexities and contradictions of life, of what it is to be human, to struggle to survive, to see all this oppression and unfairness – that something seems to want us to connect, to have good lives, live well and have an experience of the oneness of it all. Serendipity might be a good way to describe it.
I think that given the right circumstances we can all thrive through cooperation, solidarity and mutual aid. We can live those good lives on planet earth. That doesn’t mean to say it’ll be some utopian bliss, but it’d at least be a place we can look after one another and this amazing planet we live on. And – as bad a taste as this might leave in our gobs – it seems that goes for the 1% too: the very wealthy, land owning, aristocratic, corporate, political class who’re leading us further into the shit. On the one hand, it’s class war politics of course, but aren’t most of them just born into this shit system too? – Discuss?
For me these days the radical politics and the inner, spiritual life meet. How can we have one without the other? How can we transform our communities without trying to transform ourselves? And that’s the difficult part aye? To transform, as the mystics say, we must travel through the dark night of the soul. See ourselves for what we are: the good, the bad and the certainly f-ing ugly. But then when we do this, each time something seems to happen. I think it’s a bit like a snake that sheds it’s old skin and heads off afresh into some new lands. And then we seem to be better at loving ourselves, others and our world.
It’s easy to complicate it all – as I defo do at times – but really it’s pretty simple stuff. As them real feral ragamuffins Jesus and Bob Marley say: just try and be nice to each other….
