From just about as far back as I can remember my life has been marked by an interminable series of esoteric experiences - a kind of battle on the spiritual plane running in the background of my personal software programme - informing and influencing events in the tangible. I soon stopped sharing with family what appeared normal to me, as my stories would inevitably be met with rolled eyes and enquiries of ‘more tea?’
As a young man with three chords at my disposal I cheekily dared to call myself a musician and ran around half the planet making an unholy din. A botched spinal operation at the age of thirty two soon put a stop to that, however, and with no ready knowledge of natural health at the time I succumbed to the NHS-offered cocktail of pharmaceuticals as all quality of life slipped away and I morphed into two years of immobility and pain.
Searching high and low and inbetween for solutions, embracing Harley Street, a Bolivian Shaman and Chinese medicine I ended up spending six weeks in Andalucia with an ex-patriot Russian Bio-energetic healer who, for all intents and purposes, gave me my life back. This was the steepest learning curve I’d ever encountered as I learned about healing energy, diet, exercise, meditation, fakirs’ beds, malignant entities and Russian magic. I returned to the UK healed and with a head full of new ideas and fresh dreams.
After two years of living with no quality of life whatsoever, watching season follow season from my Wimbledon window I decided that I wanted to live as intensely as possible! And that is how I went to live in the most intense city on the planet - Rio de Janeiro.
I’d long been a fan of Latin American ‘magic realism’ and coming to live in South America I soon realized how that literary genre had come into being. Working as an English teacher I’d be teaching classrooms full of oil company executives and other businessmen – pragmatic people, to whom talking about spirits walking through the room was second nature. I found the acceptance of different planes of existence, the frequencies of the spiritual plane and the physical, co-existing in everyday parlance both intoxicating and stimulating. Brazil was filled with spirituality – the syncretic Afro-religion of Candomblé with its Orixá deities such as the goddess of the ocean Iemanjá who engendered such devotion and gratitude to the ocean and the elements, the practice of Santo Daime, involving the ingestion of yagé, and a pantheon of other elemental practices.
A brief sojourn turned into a love affair with Brazil, which lasted for five years until the tragic death, in a car crash, of my mother in Bavaria which saw me unexpectedly, and under sad circumstances, return to Europe to help sort out her affairs.
A couple of months later I was back in Brazil, before finding employment in Colombia, another destination whose spiritual influence had weaved itself into my psyche through the magic realism of the works of Gabriel García Marquez. More magic, of both the black and white variety, was to be experienced there. I encountered some incredible healers and spiritual practitioners and finally got to have the ultimate ayahuasca experience in a clearing on the top of a hill in the Colombian jungle south of Cali, under the stars, presided over by Taita Angel Chinmoy from Putamayo. A beautiful, life-changing ritual during which I met everyone I had ever met in my life, floating up to me in a place that I, and others, call ‘the dazzling darkness.’ I was also healed of the mourning I had been going through since the tragic death of my mother in the crash, and finally found peace, laying her soul to rest on a Colombian mountainside.
I spent a total of ten years in South America between Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia and Cuba, another year and a half in California, and a further ten years in Thailand. I returned to the UK finally, after twenty-two years in exile, at the beginning of 2022. Twenty two years in countries with deep spiritual roots gave me the feeling I’d been constructing a temple within. I certainly returned to the UK a much changed man. I also returned with a burning desire to create – create what I didn’t know, but the desire to somehow contribute in some small way to the New Earth humanity was surely rising up through the frequencies towards.
And so it was that in around April 2023 poetry chose me! Spiritual poetry! Poetry for New Earth as I have since christened it!
My first poem ‘The Time Before The Moon’ was turned into a beautiful song by the wonderful Canadian singer-songwriter Lynda Szabo. This was most touching and encouraging. I began to pour all that I had been assimilating on both my inner and outer journeying during the past two decades into poems. One a week, one every three days, then more frequently. As I write, some eighteen months later I’m putting the finishing touches to my first volume of verse.
During the last nine months, with the encouragement of my sister Jackie, I’ve been reciting my poems at poetry evenings around London, Oxford and as far north as Glasgow. Naturally quite shy, with a low, soft voice it wasn’t easy for me at first, but I’m becoming more comfortable now and have enjoyed being touched by the incredible poetry I’m hearing from other poets at these events, as well as making new friends along the way. In May this year Jackie and I held the first event of our own in the wonderful Baroque-Edwardian environs of The Bedford in Balham, South London called New Earth. We’ve featured many of the uplifting spirits reciting poetry we’ve met on our journey this year. We’ve just held our third event and our ‘family’ grows each month.
