Resting in peace

These last months have been incredibly reinforcing of why it is that I have made the decisions that I have made, and also very exacting towards myself to absolutely connect with whatever I went through as an adolescent.

The home of my youth is soon to be moved out of, my mum has sold it and is moving on to dreamlands, and I go to the land of my future, the community that has already stirred and started my life in so many ways, in the realm of gods and golden skies of west Wales.

But, this is by no means and ending of anything.  If anything, it is a reckoning of life in its fullest extent:- a realisation that things all evolve from something.  I am not what I have become without having gone through everything that I have gone through.

I worked at a vegetable factory for 4 days in August.  Those days were the most intense of days.  The love I fell into kindled me, caressed me, and yet my back was like as if about to break.  I had no choice but to quit, despite having found such amazing grace whilst for 11 hours a day sorting rapidly through trillions of beans on a conveyor belt in a completely artificial environment.  Amma, Amma, Amma.  How your name comes to me in the most trying of times…

Last December, early in the morning of Wednesday 17th, I awoke to banging and thick smoke.  I was watching over the house that I was living in whilst the friends I lived with were on holiday in Thailand.  I ventured downstairs, and the living room was a blaze.  Thus became an incredible fight and stark visions.  I was almost naked, yet the heat was pumping me into hypospherical state.  By incredible grace, I was still alive, and I put out the fire, but this was the beginning of a new beginning for me.  I got kicked out of the house a few months later (which was really good of my friends, to give me a few months to steady myself, maintain a sense of solidity..), and this, pretty much, pushed me to see no option other than eventually moving into Skanda Vale.

I don’t want communication with huge amounts of people anymore – no matter how good the communications are, nor how nice the people are.  I don’t want to have comforts anymore.  I don’t want to be earning money so that I could do something with it.  I don’t want to even go dumpster diving anymore.  I want solidity, and to deepen the connections of my heart, and that is all.  Come along and check me out with my progress with that, and you will find me at Skanda Vale.  I move there a week today (Monday 17th October).

Last night, I had a dream.  I had a somewhat apocalyptic dream.  In the dream, there was fire, and smoke, a lot of smoke, everywhere.  The date was 17th October 2015.  And, maybe it is just full of symbolism.  I am burning it all up into smoke.  Just as Chris would often speak of Babylon burning, maybe making a decision like this is all that is needed to send it up into smoke (metaphorically).  All the desires, the putrefaction of life, it can come to an end like this.

Over this past weekend, I have been filled with huge amounts of insights and realisations about loads of things.  The strongest thing was my intimate connection with so much around me.  I had really intimate connections with quite a few people around me, and going to the Thursday Waves 5 Rhythms in Caledonian Road exasperated this, and then just several outpourings of lots of love from different people at the London Skanda Vale seminar filled me to the brim.  This kind of connection needs to be plentiful, and shared all around, to everyone and everything.  You have no idea how far it can go.  It really really does make a massive difference to give someone a hug for a minute instead of a second.  And to dance with even the most lost of people.  And to hold hands, to reach out to each other, to say ‘I am here for you’ over and over whilst looking deep into the other’s eyes and then being told ‘I am here for you’ by the other.  We need to be real!  We need to say things that may sound like they would confuse the situation, even make things weird between us and everyone else, and just say them because there’s no point holding it back anymore!  Say it all!  Express all the love, all of it, all of it.

Jason Rowe taught at the Thursday Waves about going further, never giving up.  He said about how he’d had a really terrible day, everything was going haphazard, to the point of him needing to scream as it had all got too much and I imagine he probably cried a lot too.  This happens in the dance a lot, too.  When we dance, we dance the dance of our lives.  We have our whole lives come out, and speak through movement, crystalise everything around it, freeze it all in time.  And, our lives are full of so much, and so much is really full of emotion.  It follows us upto death, and beyond to everything that goes beyond death.  And all we can do is either ignore it or allow it to take hold of us and cradle us all around this universe.  We are universes waiting to be collide and form all new things.  Our emotion takes us further than anyone or anything else ever can.  We are guided so much more strongly by our tears than a plane by its fuel.

So maybe I am saying goodbye to the world now.  Maybe I am soon to be going into a monastery, where I will spend the rest of this lifetime.  I do not know.  All I know is that it is my next massive leap.  I am leaving everything behind physically, but on a deeper level I am taking everything with me much more so than I have ever done before.  I am taking childhood friends who RIP’d over the years, I am taking former and present loves, I am taking bands and music and energy from projects and the world’s political everything and all of the sufferings of everything that I have taken on in these last few months.  Don’t think I’ve been here just to hang out.  I’m taking it all, and in the world of revolutionary-needing-to-change-absolutely-everything, this is my final big explosion of doing it all.  My activist marching days ended a long while ago, when I realised that I was actually leading hundreds of rioters to wherever they went with my drumming.  I’d got to that point, and it was time to retract, to withdraw and prepare my next hand.  I feel into everything, feel everything that everyone’s going through, take it all in like a hydrogen collider, and store it to be all processed in the only way that I see possible anymore.  There is no place elsewhere in the world where I feel it possible to do so much change.  So don’t think that I’ve withdrawn from the world.  Because I haven’t.  The revolution will not be televised, for there is no television anymore where there is revolution.  We have always been tapping into deeper levels with all this, and a deeper immersion into it all is the only way.  I’m not saying that I’m suddenly better or more elite than anyone else, but that when Phil Ochs ended his life he was ready to work on a deeper level than apparently possible in the world at the time.  When yogis retreat into disappeared places, they don’t do it to forget about or escape the world.  The Buddha was always bigger than Lenin, or than Che Guevara, or than Gandhi, and everything that he did was completely revolutionary.  Thinking and doing and being out-of-the-box.  There’s a reason why there’s a box in the first place, and most of the apparent activist movement, as well as spiritual and everybody else movement, is really quite tightly wrapped up in it because that’s what maya, delusion/illusion, is capable of doing.  We believe so much in our ‘self’ that we see nothing outside of it, and forget about the omnipresence of deeper and more beautiful things because we’ve theorised ourselves away from it.

Resting in Peace.  Here’s to Sophie for building me up for a change that I would’ve never got to had I not been so messed up and thrown all around by our teenage breakup.  Here’s to Phil and Tom for, through the deaths, igniting inspiration to live deeper and fuller than I had been, for clearing the cobwebs inside of me and making sure things really really do count.  Here’s to Graham and the King’s Lynn Firm for combining forces inadvertently in making a real night to remember for me, January 14th 2006.  Here’s to the Fox’s (neighbours) for the comical connections that we’ve shared over the years, seemingly concluding in style more recently.  Here’s to all who have helped this body get to whichever place when it has stuck out a thumb.  Here’s to Alex, for not being afraid or resistant to what felt right.  Here’s to Welsh James, for becoming the life-friend of Nessie, and for joining me with much of the teenage needs to just set fire to things.  Here’s to my parents for all of the dramas that have unfolded in my childhood and adolescent life – all of which, really, they’ve had no choice about at all on a universal level.  Here’s to all three of my siblings, for their continued enthusiasm and always keeping their arms and hands open when I’ve come by.  Here’s to Kudo for providing so much fruit to all around.  Here’s to Larissa, Sam, and all other loves/nearly loves that have taken me on a trip somewhere.  Here’s to pretty much everyone at Skanda Vale for accepting me somewhat unconditionally, every time I’ve gone there, and just allowing me to go through everything I’ve needed to.  Here’s to Nikki, Nikki, Alina, Gabriella, Victor, Dyal Singh…..all who encountered me and offered so much healing and love.  Here’s to Linda, and to Tara, and to bloody Occupy Rob, incredible people to have had as friends at incredible times.  And here’s to the bands that have transformed everything for me all along this journey (in chronological order from oldest to newest..)….AFI, Sick Of It All, Arch Enemy, Bridge To Solace, Vanilla Pod/Frenzy/Stranglehold, Social Distortion, The King Blues, Bomb The Music Industry, A Silver Mt Zion, Okkervil River, Modern Life Is War.  And here’s to Ajahn Brahm, and to Ray Raine, Lama Chime Rinpoche, Guru Sri Subramanium, and all other teachers who have ventured into my life to give nothing but total grace.  Thankyou, even in the darkest of experiences, everything that has happened is everything that has happened, and that is beautiful.

If anyone would like to write to me at Skanda Vale, my address will be this:

Simon Jilley
Skanda Vale,
Llanpumsaint,
Carmarthen
SA33 6JT
United Kingdom

Out!