MY OWN WALKING - June Journal 2026

In the history of my spiritual practice, my resistance to doing it, and my response to my resistance to doing it, have frequently been an area for patience, practice and experiment. In the first flush of enthusiasm and excitement of Beginners Mind, one rarely encounters much resistance. Only as things settle down into the more hum drum regularity of daily practice, does resistance start to raise its head. Because in those early days the sense of practice opening up new vistas on yourself and reality sustains you. It creates a tangible sense of you making real progress. However, deceptive that might actually be.

In my experience, this freshness rarely lasts. And whilst one is always being encouraged to keep hold of the openness and curiosity that Beginners Mind relies upon. In reality, this is pretty tricky to impossible to self consciously maintain. When anything that was once new becomes familiar, it loses its ability to rejuvenate because of its bright shine tarnishing.

What in essence resistance is, is tedium. Boredom with the same routine. Boredom with not appearing to make any progress. Boredom can even be a fundamental disappointment with oneself. And what one chooses to do in response to boredom rearing its apathetic head, has significance. What do you do when you are bored? Are you able to actually do anything?

I'll tell you what I've done, for good or ill. I look for something new that interests and fascinates me. Not necessarily in the practice. It might be another new unknown subject to explore and be excited about. A fresh way of looking at a the familiar object of one's practice, or at oneself. Yet this search for the shock and fizz of the new and novel, I'd say is a major tendency in the Western approach to spiritual practice. It turns spiritual practice into an adjunct to consumerism. The latest novelty practice, to move on from the moment anything becomes unrewarding or remotely boring.

Another response I've had to resistance, is the strong application of self discipline. Now I'll say right here, that this is very different from willpower,. Willpower requires you to be already 'willing' to do this practice. Self discipline recognises that to an extent you are not willing to do this practice regularly every day, unless you coerce yourself into doing so. One way or another you'll get your bum on that cushion. You make a commitment and you stick to it, regardless of your resistance. Self discipline also has a tendency to carry with it a tone in its approach that may not be kind.

This overriding of resistance, has it uses. In extremis it can be useful. But, if used too frequently, it does lead to not even acknowledging the presence of resistance. I found this to be extremely detrimental to my enthusiasm for spiritual practice in the long run. I wasn't taking the whole of me into practice, I attempted exclusion of the truculent non cooperative side of myself. As you can imagine this did not go down well with my psycho-physical being.

It is good to make commitments. But it's also good to recognise when the level of things you are committing yourself to carrying out. has become overwhelming or too burdensome to be consistently executed. It's important not to see dropping some of these commitments as a personal failing. It's just you finding that one way of approaching practice may have run its course, and the need to rethink and review this has arrived. Simply ease off the acceleration pedal you are pressing down too much on.

There was also a time whenever I met resistance or boredom, I simply stopped practicing altogether. This might be for a few days, weeks, months, even years.  I allowed resistance to rule over me, and hence ruined the quality of my engagement. These days, I'm experimenting with a gentler, more receptive approach to resistance. I recognise that my practice has different levels it goes through, on waves of enthusiasm and troughs of fatigue. And when I'm enthusiastic I can take on all sorts of things, try out additional practices, add this or subtract that. And if resistance re-emerges, I'll start pairing away elements of this practice, Perhaps stripping it back to a really basic level for a while. Ready to pick it up again when the fire for it appears to be rekindled again. This means I don't stop doing a daily spiritual practice of some sort, I merely readjust the quantity and intensity of it. To accommodate the indicator that resistance is, without completely capitulating to it. Believe me, this is what real progress looks like.

There is always the question to be asked of yourself. Is resistance a sign that you really don't believe in the efficacy of the practices you are doing?  You have to acknowledge this could be a possibility. Doubt, however, I've found is a pretty reliable test for faith being present. Doubt is just your faith wobbling a bit. It emerges when that faith feels ignored, threadbare or hungry. I'd be more worried if I was indifferent. Have you recharged your faith lately, and what do you do when that is required? What things do you do to put yourself in touch with your faith?  Whenever I am bored or resistant, I have usually become alienated from what I hold faith in. Practice can often become a bit too much of an idea, over idealised, be ego or head driven. Then I need to put greater effort into those more nebulous mystically orientated areas that ground me, point me in the general direction of faith - Imaginative. Poetic, Aesthetic, Mythic, Ritualistic, Raw, Rustic and Elemental Nature. It's like gathering around a freshly lit raging fire at night, with a cuppa tea, and gazing into the primaeval flames and communing with its spirit.

PROTEST & PROGRESS - 1215 - The Magna Carta

My purpose in writing this Protest & Progress blog post, is to explore for myself the history of English Protest Movements. What effect they had, and the changes they may ( or may not ) have instigated. Today, it begins where else but with Magna Carta.

Imagine, you are the younger less handsome, less charismatic brother of the heroic crusader King Richard. You were his Regent. You kept the country running whilst Richard was off committing atrocities (with Papal sanction) in the Holy Land, chivalrously slaughtering Saracens. You can understand why John might have had a chip on his shoulder. 

Once he became King, did he feel unfairly maligned, undervalued, not respected or revered in quite the way his absentee brother had been? Richard was undoubtedly a hard act to follow. But, I mean, what had Richard actually done for his adopted country, except neglect it?  John, however, did appear to be cruel and brutal, with a perverse ability to make any bad situation worse, so his subjects actively feared and loathed him. The issues that really pissed off his barons, however, were very common ones in the history of English protest - war and taxation. 

Plantagenet Kings like Richard and John were not English, they were French. Who ruled at their peak half of France. For them England was an occupied territory, one that increasingly took time and energy away from their home country. Hence John found the need to fight wars in France to retain control of his home feifdom. But with each ensuing battle he was defeated in, he lost control of larger swathes of his territory. Wars were expensive to perpetrate, and royal coffers were emptying fast. So John had to raise finances through imposing taxation on the citizens of England. 

He was not the first king to find himself in this predicament. But in his case,John was losing a war quite shamefully, and would be further humiliated by having to pay his enemies compensation for it. Turning around and asking the citizens of England e.g his own barons, to stump up the cost. Well, this went down like a lead balloon. Had he won, perhaps they might have begrudgingly paid up. But there is nothing like abject failure in a war to foment dissent. The barons having had enough, rose up on mass and captured large areas of southern England, including London. King John was dragooned into signing the Magna Carta on the island of Runnymede. He may have been thinking of this purely as a tactical capitulation, to prevent the wider spread of civil unrest.

This was one hundred and forty nine years after the Norman Conquest. These plucky barons were two generations distant from being French migrants. So don't imagine they were Anglo Saxon Englishmen fighting for their ancestral rights. What they called 'their land' was stolen property, given to their families by William the Conqueror. But England was cash and land rich, that's why the Normans wanted it in the first place.

Charters similar to The Magna Carta were being signed all the time, in order to try establish in law firm legal precedence. The complete lack of a strong legislative making Parliament, made that virtually impossible in 13th century England. But let's be clear here, this charter was concocted entirely for the barons benefit and vested interests. Only by implication does this charter apply to every person in England. As it turned out. King John and the barons both reneged on it pretty quickly and conflict between the King and the barons erupted.

After John's death in 1216, Henry 3rd kept reissuing Magna Carta, using it to try and placate the baronial turbulence he'd inherited in 1216, 1217 and 1225. Under pressure he began to bequeath more power to Parliament. And his son Edward 1st reissued the charter again in 1297, but this time making sure it became Parliamentary statute law, with the intention of it forming the basic foundation for future national law. This was the point at which The Magna Carta began vaguely to resemble the proto-democratic document later generations would laud so highly.

As a piece of law making Magna Carta had a pretty shambolic progress towards enforcement. Only through historical retrospect, roughly from the 16th century onwards, through English Civil War Parliaments, to the Victorians desire to re-write English history with more noble people and principles actively present, has this document gained the significant reputation it now has.

Magna Carta demonstrates the morally compromised approach to law making in English history. Never start from establishing first principles, but give far too much consideration to the short term pressures and vested interests of an era, so end up doing only what could pragmatically be got away with?

However, given time, what this Protest established ( eventually) was the following, and because we once had an Empire these became established more widely in what were our former colonies.

No citizen is above the law, regardless of status.

Everyone has the right to a fair trial

No citizen should be arbitrarily stripped of their rights, without legal process.

No citizen should be taxed without prior Parliamentary agreement.

Judicial process should be impartial and not subject to bribery or corruption 

Any citizen can own and inherit property and not have it unjustly seized by another,

Religious institutions and practices should be free from royal or political interference.

To create the conditions for any change you first have to recognise the collective power that you possess. With Magna Carta the barons certainly grasped that. Over a hundred years later the peasantry of England were to learn what collective power they might have. And in the process encountered the duplicitous nature of the royal house of Plantagenet.

Next Episode - 1381 - The Peasants Revolt 

FINISHED READING - Hope In The Dark by Rebecca Solnit

" The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be" - Virginia Woolf

Stubtitled - Untold Histories and Wild Possibilities, Solnit's book, was first published in 2005 in the aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq War. There is a new foreward to this third edition published in 2016. This might appear to have little to give us hope in this Trumpian world, where we reverse into the future with a blindfold on. But what she has to say here about purpose and the results people can achieve if the have hope, still stand proud. Collective action still works, and the tech bros do fear that it might rear it's none co-operative head. Focusing on keeping us distracted, passively consuming the endless amounts of dreck on the internet.  When we look up from our start phones, then we might start to think. This book does stirs ones confidence, to grasp hope and fight for what you want. Nothing ever progresses or improves without cultivating the imagination to hope.

" Your opponents would love you to believe that it's all hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn't enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons."

I bought this book because I was finding in our contemporary zeitgeist, it was all too easy for me to fall into despairing, and I wanted to be more In touch with a more open hopeful demeanor. Though as a Budfhist I should already know, not everything we do produces the change we desire, that over desired desires are problematic. Solnit asks us to step back and look at things from a broader perspective, to perceived how change happens in the longer term. That perhaps one small campaign that appeared to fail or fall short in it's aims, might actively change the terms of a discussion and lead to a turn around in public opinion in later years. Hope is for the long run. If we expect revolutions and instant changes, then everything will undoubtedly fail to live up to the expectations we hold. It's so easy to get caught up in despair because what was achieved is only a compromised shadow of what we'd wished for. This may not be the perfect solution, but it is going in the right direction.

"Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough."

Naysaying, becomes a habit. Yes, this completely glorious thing had just happened, but the entity that achieved it had done something bad at another point in history. Yes, the anguish of this group was ended, but somewhere some other perhaps unrelated group are suffering hideously. It boiled down to: we can't talk about good things until there are no more bad things. Which, given that the supply of bad things is inexhaustible, and more bad things are always arising, means that we can't talk about the good things at all. Ever."

Solnit uses the example of the abolition of slavery, that the campaign took from first utterance to completion, around 250 years to reach abolition. Even then slave labour was often instantly indentured, which was another way of tying them to a particular landowner. Slave owners wanted compensation for the loss of their 'property', which they were duly paid. Though this could look like recognising that slaves could be personal property. All these things got the abolition bill eventually over the line and into law, imperfect though they were as mechanisms. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's was able to build further on that, by removing some of the lingering prejudicial circumstances that bedeviled black lives. And so on, through to # Black Lives Matter. None of this was a perfectly clean fast track trajectory, in the treatment of all humankind with dignity and respect, but it is being driven by the hope that it could be.

"We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voices and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless,or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. There are forces that prefer the giant remain asleep."

" One of the key recognitions is that the change that counts in a revolution takes place first in the imagination."

I found myself excitedly pencilling brackets around the clarity with which she expressed ideas in sentences and whole paragraphs sometimes. Particularly her criticisms that people on the political left get too self absorbed, and paradoxically like those on the far right, become all about what is wrong, not what it is you want to create. You oppose the comfy consensus by pointing out all its self evident flaws. As a result the left today, can be perceived as constantly in a negative state of mind, in relation to how the world operates, neglecting the need to offer hope and a positive vision for what a better world might look like.

" The despairing were deeply attached to their despair, so much so I came to refer to my project as stealing the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left.  What did it give that particular sector of the left ? It got them off the hook, for one thing. If the world is totally doomed no matter what, little or nothing is demanded of you in response..... And those who were active were often hopeful, though it may be the other way around, some of those who are hopeful are active. Yet the range of the hopeful extends beyond that, and you can find hope in surprising corners."

The assumption by the authorities is that in a time of disaster, civil society will instantly crumble, and tight authoritarian controls will be required to prevent anarchy breaking out. When in fact the opposite is what occurs, people pull together and organise themselves and form alliances to help as many people as possible. During the San Fransisco earthquake in 1906, the city authorities literally impeded and got in the way of ordinary San Franciscan's organising soup kitchens and housing homeless families. 

Solnit champions nonviolent protests, and a growing use of none partisanship in solving problems or issues at a local level. The old left/right polarities were collapsing even in the noughties. You don't come in now with your preformed ideological solutions to solve issues anymore, it's more about finding where the common ground is, listening and being open to hear where the direction of ideas, and possible solutions maybe going. 

"Every act is an act of faith, because you don't know what will happen. You just hope and employ whatever wisdom and experience seems most likely to get you there."

This book is a welcome short shot in the arm. As she points out through examples again and again, those expectations of ours for what is possible, and how quickly it can be achieved, need careful monitoring. Otherwise despair will appear and apathy will get in the way.

" Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.'

All quotations taken from Hope In The Dark by Rebecca Solnit, Published by Canongate Books, 2016.

2026 PLAYLIST - No 14 - Cursive by Mandy, Indiana

Cursive - Mandy,Indiana

Based in Manchester or Berlin, Mandy,Indiana have this stance that they appear to be coming from another world entirely. Their music is pretty uncatagorisable. There is definitely a debt of inheritance from the whole Manchester scenes of old. I'd say post punk more generally, in its melding of different genres into a cohesive whole. A commitment to pushing at boundaries that reminded me of early Faust, and it is that seventies German experimental rock/electro/Stockhausen/improv vibe I largely settle on. This performance of Cursive on Later...with Jools Holland, has the customary vocals in French from Valentine Caulfield. Not speaking French, I can't tell you what she's singing about, a lot of it sounds as if it might be nonsense lists of associative word play. But it moves along a great propulsive groove. That breaks at the end into guitar playing that sounds like he's scratching nails down a sheet if metal. Very Test Department like. I think I love them.

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 140 - On The Ethics of Bird Feeding

The usual barometer of when Spring arrives is activity on the bird feeder in our back garden. The number and frequency of birds feeding upon it reaches a new peak, as enthusiastic broods of fledglings come to learn the ropes - Here is a bird feeder. Here is the meal worms suspended in fat  Here, is a lot easier than scrounging about for worms and insects in earth, I can tell you. You babes don't know you are born these days. So, pull in your bum fluff and get the hang of it boys and girls. I'm going to take a bath in the water jacuzzi with your dad. What's going on there? Well never you mind, just tuck in and look away.

Robins appear particularly stupid. They try and they flail. They flap wings madly, whilst simultaneously attempting to peck at the feeder. They make real hard work of what ought to be a simple enough task - Land on bird feeder, grip the wire with your feet, extend the head towards the food object, tuck in. Repeat. It's not rocket science. I thought birds and animals were genetically pre- programmed with such abilities. Weeks later does it dawn on Robins finally how you get the hang of it. 

This year has been noticeable different. The birds didn't really stop breeding over the Winter, because everything was 'so unseasonably mild', as the weathermen like to put it. This Spring there's been an increased volume of bigger birds trying and failing to make bird feeders work for them. Because, if truth be told, they are too f.....g big. Bird feeders were designed for petite birds, like sparrows, blue and great tits, reed warblers, coal tits, pied wag tails and robins, these have all come to use of our increasingly deluxe boutique bird feeding facilities.

The problem for larger birds is that they are large. And by large I mean more than medium large - blackbirds, jackdaws, magpies, thrushes and woodpeckers. We get mega large wicked looking crows and fat wood pigeons rolling in on their wobbly chassis. Flapping about manically, they get at most a peck or two and then go. It's exhausting just watching them struggle to snip even a small morsel between their beaks  Unless you are our local spotted woodpecker, who turns up early every morning, and gets stuck into a hanging half coconut of mealworm fat. This bugger will happily gorge itself till he explodes. I have, I admit, cultivated a disdain for woodpeckers, they are bloody greedy fuckers and are extraordinarily messy eaters, to boot. Throwing as much food left and right and onto the floor as what they eat. No one wants to watch a glutton eat. He keeps the wood pigeons happy though. With a wild scattering of crumbs on the ground beneath.

It got so bad recently, when half coconuts of mealworm in fat were being consumed at a rate of two a day. I mean, I'm not made of money. I just stopped putting them out for half a week. I've tried going to war with them, giving them a preliminary warning -  look just don't abuse my generosity guys and gals or I'll get really mean. Larger birds are the bullies of the bird world, they scare off anything small. My getting annoyed,however, is a waste of energy. There is no point in discriminating between small and large birds, no matter how vexing I find the greediness of a spotted woodpecker. They have, I expect, ravenous broods to feed like everyone else. I am penalising all birds if I do that. So I have tried to learn my lesson. Put up and shut up. Through heavily gritted teeth.

As we are buying a lot of fat sticks and half coconuts stuffed with mealworm lately, I have good cause to raise a concerning question. The birds who come into my garden and feed on the bird feeder, am I just training them to be lazy and creating a new obese generation of tits? If I put seed or peanuts or hard fat balls out, they are not remotely interested, far too difficult a digestive problem. My goodness, do fledglings have rubber beaks that can't chew or masticate. Because ours simply want to gorge on the softer mealworm fat. Now I know these are hungry fledglings learning to eat for themselves, but shouldn't I be encouraging them to eat wholesome stuff like insects, things they will consume as adults,? Am I merely storing up trouble for wild birds by making them dependent on me serving up the bird equivalent of a McDonald's Cheese Burger?

AI reaches new nadir
Yesterday, I was trying to type 'Papal sanction' into a blog I was writing.  AI apparently knew better what I was really trying to say, and automatically changed it to Pay Pal. It's becoming increasingly the case that as I write my blogs, half the time I am recorrecting the AI auto correct of what I originally wrote. This is the future we are going to be f.....d over by.

Blog Stats For May - 170,357 views.

ART 'N' AB ART - Global Textiles at Blickling Hall

Karun Thakar's fabric collection must be absolutely huge. This is a man totally obsessed with design, pattern, the skills and techniques of fabric makers. And what we see here is only scratching the surface of what he holds in his personal collection. There are some truly stunning pieces of cloth just hung up in the entrance hall alone. What you find as you walk around the house, is that the Indian fabrics are where the strengths of this display are, but there are also some superb Japanese kimono, African and Russian cloth too.

It aught then to have been a feast for the eyes, to come away both awed and enriched. So why did it feel lacklustre, half arsed even? Well, it came down to the way they chose to display the fabrics. It would have been much better had they displayed all the fabrics in a tighter sequence, and not have them sparsely spread out across many rooms. This diminished the impact of them. Also, draping them informally over sofas, across floors and bookcases, treated them far far too casually. You can't really get a sense for them as full patterned lengths of cloth. They end up appearing scrunched and scruffy like someone's put their laundry out to dry. Plus they are really hard to see in most of the rooms. This is not helped by the house light levels, which for the sake of conservation I know are kept low with the blinds down. And from behind a rope a stunningly embroidered fabric hung over a bookcase, well I could tell it was floral, but not much more from yards away. 

The attempt to link the fabrics to specific individuals from Blickling Hall felt trite, and a bit of a skimpy afterthought. It was on the level of, he worked in India around this time - so what? I would have found it much more interesting for the researchers to have gone into more specific detail on how Indian textile designers adapted to the Western market. How European textile manufacturers took over the production of popular Indian cloth designs. The influence it had on European aesthetics and fashion trends. Not to mention European protectionism of their own cloth making industries. Was there asset stripping of Indian cloth designs? What were the Calico Acts etc ? I suspect it was assembled on a very low budget, hence the poor level of display, or came together hurriedly in a short space of time. I'm afraid this was a missed opportunity, and hence disappointing as an exhibition overall. 

CARROT REVIEW - 3/8

WATCHED - Mare of Easttown ( 2021 )

Erin (Cailee Spaeny) is a teenage single Mum. Bringing up a child is not easy for her, and though she loves him to bits, she is struggling.  She never gets out much, and rarely meets up with friends her age, or goes on a date.  Then one evening she arranges for her son's Father to look after the kid, and goes to a wood where all the young set hang out, to meet a blind date. Erin never returns from this trip. She is found the next morning her body abandoned in a stream, murdered.

Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) is a local detective. She's pretty much known or is related in some way to everyone. Divorced, she lives with her catty Mum Helen ( Jean Smart), her eldest daughter, and the boy her son had before he took his life. Her ex-husband lives with his new girlfriend just across the lawn from her house. Mare. Is bad tempered and unpredictable, doesn't really look after herself. She's never really come to terms with the suicide of her son. Solving crimes keeps all that messy emotional stuff at bay, just about. Her police department aren't sure she's able to handle this case alone. so bring in Colin Zabel ( Evan Peters ) as her side kick, which she initially deeply resents. But as the investigation progresses the case and everything related to her starts messily coming home to roost.

Mare of Easttown is by far and away the best crime drama since The Killing. And it shares a few common qualities. It has a great sense of place, the character and landscape that Easttown sits within, the range and type of individuals who live there. The script does not put a foot wrong. It's a crime procedural, but this one has a heart and a soul, that paints a vivid picture of the consequences for people of the murder of someone you loved, of people not being able to handle their grief. The characters are all believably well rounded. They take their time just letting you get to know and love them for all their flaws and eccentricities. All of this makes Mare of Easttown dramatically punchy. By the time you reach the final episode you are left drained and emotionally moved by the overwhelming sadness and tragedy, with all the hurt, betrayal, guilt and loss on screen. Deservedly it won Emmys for the scriptwriting, and the performances of Kate Winslet, Julianne Nicholson and Evan Peters all won gongs.

Highly Recommended 

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8