Month: April 2017

18th June
In the grass, in the sun, looking out over the forested hills of Machynlleth, I reflect on this magic that we call life. This morning I took my leave of the tribe of Spirit Horse, a deeply sacred in the most natural sense of the word, people who have a community village in a Wooded dingle in the woods of the Cambrian mountains below Dylife.
Their founder, storyteller Shivam O’Brien, came upon the valley 26 years ago, first renting it for a few weeks at a time, later for longer is and eventually raising the had a million needed to buy the head of the valley from the farmer landowners.
But I am going ahead of myself in my story. It is past six o’clock when the warrior like Shivam comes to find me in the Star. I have sheltered from the mist outside call day here, writing and resting and talking to Louise, its new owner.
We head off back along the road I have followed till we turn right up to Pennant. As we drive Shivam points out the deeply cut gorge a young river has forged out of the landscape, where the waterfall is. The mists of are not so low now.
Then we head off down tracks and through farm gates to reach the land of this young river where an old young community is learning how to be again after some thousands of years. For Spirit Horse, although it didn’t set out to be a community, but rather a place of deep inside inner learning, following the tenets of Tibetan Buddhism, has become, over the tears, just that.
In the kitchen heart of the village I meet Crispin and Lil, the only other current inhabitants of the summer camp of the tribe of Spirit Horse, who, like the Buddhafield community used to be, live a somewhat nomadic existence, spending most of the summer months here in their round house village in the Welsh mountains.
Tomorrow the three will set out en route to the festival of Glastonbury, but tonight they are here, and able to host me, and tell me their tales. I feel privileged indeed to be welcomed into this very special living breathing piece of magical land that Shivam has caused to return to its natural state and young and oak and ash have self seeded along the high paths and banks of the valley with its clear mountain spring water brook. No sheep graze here, and all of the dwellings, that over the years have been granted planning permission with the full support of the local farmers, all except one, who none of the others liked anyway, who caused a boundary dispute and three years of lack of access for the Spirit Horse folk, are of earth wood and canvas.
Once the dispute was resolved in their favour, Shivam is well liked in the valley, his Irish blood means he is understands the way of the Welsh, slow to befriend, but loyal to those who show themselves to be good neighbours, the Spirit Horse folk returned and found their canvas structures, their yurts and teepees and canvas topped round houses had fitted in the wet climate, so they set to to make good their structures with good solid wood with wooden roof shingles and sturdy willow or reed walls between firm posts of local wood from the forestry commissions plantations that they were allowed to take, helping to thin out, in exchange for a couple of bottles of good whisky.
Shivam takes me and on a tour of the dwellings, the men’s hut and the women’s, used in ritual for the sacred masculine and feminine workshops they have run for 25 years, filled, particularly the men’s space, which is older and been used for many rituals of all kinds over the years, with a deep sacred sense of peace and aliveness, and, the jewel in the crown, the temple by the stream edge.
This structure, it is plain to see, is an act of reverence to life itself. It is built of wood and carved in exquisitely all over. Up the paths leading to it are little wooden houses housing clay gods and goddesses fired on site by a clay oven built from clay found on site then destroyed afterwards. Below the temple is a sauna that heats the temple above. Washing at Spirit Horse is in the stream so a sauna is a welcome part of living here.
Inside the temple my jaw drops. It is painted throughout, all over the walls, in fine Tibetan art, the like if which is normally only seen in n Britain in high quality volumes of Tibetan art or on artefacts brought back from the east. The bright colours and the faithfully produced tantric gods and goddesses are set against a stunning back drop of scenery copying the steeply wooded valley of waterfalls in which the temple sits. Shivam explains how it was a whole community activity to create this building, an act of love and service for all involved.
Words are not able to do justice to such a place as Spirit Horse. The feelings of heart and senses are more trustable. Reverence and sanctity come close but these words have lost their true essence over hundreds of years of misuse of their true essence and can only be reclaimed and understood by personal experience of the qualities they describe.
Supper is a delicious feast of different dishes, one prepared by each of my three hosts accompanied by home made chapatis and finished of by sharing a ripe red pomegranate.
We sleep in the communal spiral yurt, a round house with a central hearth and heated by an external wood burner.I am surprised that my room mates strip off but when I awaken in the middle of the night so hot I need to strip off several layers I understand that this is certainly not like camping. Our mattresses radiate out spoke like from the central hearth and in the morning we wake together early and are soon out and about doing the tasks Shivam had outlined the night before that need to be accomplished before we leave the camp. We work silently without needing to ask for direction. It is satisfying. I gravitate towards the kitchen, clean down surfaces, scrub the cooker, sweep the floor, and then we have a breakfast of Dahl and chapatis and Shivam talks more about his learnings of 26 years in community here.
First and foremost, what make a community are storytelling and ritual. I ask if he uses particular stories. There are many of course, and my storytelling skill is for creating the folk tales of today, not to preserve the ancient tales, so I know little of this art. Cinderella, he tells me, is the oldest known story, told in practically every tradition and country in the world.
Here at Spirit Horse he began with the Celtic tales I am beginning to explore, seeking to tease out the essential teaching truths hidden within them. There was the legend of Llew and his warriors, a tale that served became his men well when they were first building the structures here. In the end though, he explains, what we have in the Celtic tales are a mixture of legend, folk tale and ancient historical lineages, so that is is very difficult to pick out the threads of the original stories. Now he is using Russian tales, as he has found them to be more faithful to the original tales.
Storytelling, he says, teaches us of the archetypes, and how to recognise ourselves and others in them. In the Irish tales of the hall of Tara all characters are mentioned equally, of equal importance, though there is a hierarchy. A good king archetype recognises what the role of each person truly is, even if a community may need a little time to identify their qualities when they first arrive.
In the Celtic tradition kings come first, followed by the poets, bards, storytellers and musicians, then the warriors and so on down to the ordinary folk. It is interesting to see how far we have come way from this divine order of things where the bards and poets are not asked to guide the leaders in decisions of national security import as once the Merlins were.
Shivam promises to write his book one day soon. He has learnt a little of how community works in these past 26 years, what some of the lost the ingredients are.
A few he talks about with me; rightful community action comes from people acting from their rightful roles. There are no rules in a properly functioning community. There is no need.
All types are included and welcomed in a real community. No one is turned away who wants to be there. This includes the mad man and the troublemaker, this although they often take up more of the time of the one who is in the role of king than the steady stalwart valuable members who do most of the work without needing direction. This is the way of things he says and it makes sense to me. These are the ones whose roles remind us not to be complacent, to consider what we may be neglecting, to remember to always bring compassion along with us on our journey.
More than anything else spoken these words tell me I am in good company; only the truly enlightened understand this…and do it.
Another thing Shivam has noticed about a functioning community is that some do loads of work and others little, and that this will always be the way.
Though Spirit Horse is a place of no rules, it does have healthy boundaries, learnt about the hard way. No more than two mad people at any one time. Once they had four and found they took up all the community’s time. A balance, as in all things, must be found.
I find out that when channel four made a programme about this place in the 90s they called it The warriors way, and so it is that I find the 7th treasure here; it is the end of stage one of my journey and the beginning if the next; at the waterfall and a young river just beyond the source of the Wye, the end of the warriors way stage, and with it I find a crystal of quartz on the banks of the brook and the seventh quality comes to me, tenacity, for once purpose is found then many challenges are to be faced, but right wins through if the gods are on your side. We all know when this is so, for it is when we follow our purpose with integrity and all that we touch seems to flow around obstacles as if by magic, like a river smoothing boulders. Above us I see the waterfall that had been so invisible in the previous day’s mist. Magical valley indeed.
We pile into the van and wend our way up and out of the valley, through the many gates, past sheep holding pens, neat farmhouses and messy, listening to the soulful spiritual music of Mahmoud Ahmed, divine Ethiopian songs that sound to me as if they were written in these mountains, for these mountains. I feel so touched, so in the moment that my imminent departure draws tears to my eyes. I recall similar journeys, many years ago, to Glastonbury in a van like this, with a partner and many friends, and feel the kinship witness folk so recently met. Shivam has reminded me of a truth I have forgotten, if you want to change the system then you have to do things that do not follow convention, and this is how I lived as a young woman. It was hard to seem not to fit. It is only with a wisdom gained through age that I am able to understand that pioneers, catalysts and visionaries must always live outside of the norm, an inner compulsion demands it, and the rewards are great, yet the cost is to give up on the being normal label that can be so comforting.
With hugs and kisses I take my leave of this newly won tribe of less than 24 hours and am on the grassy verge of the main road to Machynlleth. I wave them off to Glastonbury and wonder at my map, should I take the windy lanes through sheep farms I have come to dread, and know why now, they eat away at the natural woodlands and flower meadows our collective memory recalls as paradise, as they are penned into this farmer or that’s private land rather than being able to roam at will, till the fields grow nothing but thistle, indicator that the land is being over used, or should I take a bus? I walk to the bus stop, wondering when there will be a bus come by, and it comes. As I hop on board telling the driver of the synchronicity he says with a smile
Yes, its like magic isn’t it?
And we are on our way. Twenty minutes later I step out into the now familiar town of Mach, as the incomers call it. I learn that locals do not like this shortening and learn later why not. Wales, of all British places has retained its names for thing for millennia so it is still possible to trace back ancient history here whilst in England and even Scotland and Cornwall, names have changed, mutated over h breeds if tears and almost forgotten. Robert Mc Farley in his latest book Landmarks has catalogued all those old names he could find. There are less entries for Wales, there is no need, here people still remember. All the more reason to learn Welsh. All the more interesting to understand why the English tried to stop the language from being spoken.
I lie down on the soft green grass looking out at the wooded hillside that rises up beyond the park and sleep the afternoon away, by the Pavilion performance space where in the evening I will tell my tales.
When I awaken I meet my host Rosie and we go to water the vegetable plants at the housing co-op in the house owned by George Monbiot. Rosie and other growers share a polytunnel and some beds here that they pack into thirty or forty veg bags for local people.
We visit local artists creating a wooden globe that is to be floated out to sea with a dancer inside at nearby Borth. Machynlleth nowadays is a hive of artistic innovation as well as green technology.
We return later to the pavilion performance space in the park and I tell my tales to a select group of four and then we all head back to the house Rosie shares with three others for supper. I recall what Shivam has said about including the madman as Jacob, a man I met earlier in the park, and told about the stories, comes along too, and observe how we all include him, but struggle with his half with us, half away in his own world state that sometimes cuts across our conversations in disconcerting fashion without appearing to notice.
A lesson it seems is being presented. How do you preserve integrity, honour diversity, as I have told of in my tale of the mala of many coloured beads I brought from the convent. How do transition folk walk their talk with this most challenging of tasks. In transition town Totnes the madman was rejected, the troublemaker too, in the interests of progress, and I realise that this is why although the projects are steaming ahead they are not as inclusive as the insiders would like to believe. Many feel excluded, and I realise that Shivam is right, we are relearning community, and it is not easy to relearn something lost to us a 1000 years or more ago.

 

19th June – 20th June
I have a day to rest here, the day I should have had at Cwmbiga. It as things always are works out perfectly. Rosie has told me I just visit the bookshop in the morning, the one by the art gallery we pass on the way to her house, near the train station.

I go in and meet Diane, the owner, along with Geoff. Two hours later I depart, having learnt of tales from transition Nottingham where she ran a community arts collective in the deprived area of St Anne’s, where a community rammed earth building was built that stands to this day, though folk said in that place it was bound to be razed to the ground. Diane videoed the whole process and you can now watch this historic time on you tube.

More than stories though, Diane is an inspired guide to her high quality new and used books and searches for volumes that might help me in my search for Merlin’s tale. She turns up Watkins The Old Straight Track, the seminal work on ley lines, written in 1925, but sadly nothing on Merlin. I leaf through books on Bardsey by a Christine Evans, the famous poet who lives part of the year there, and a photographer and wildlife expert, but no one be mentions Merlin. Diane checks the internet and finds that the black books of Carmarthen contain most of the oldest poetry about him. This will mean a visit to the national library of Wales at some point.
I have given up when I decide to browse the bottom shelf where the folktale books are kept, where Diane has already looked. There I find a familiar name. Shivam has told me of a man called Laurence Main. He made maps for OS until he’d walked this land so much he became a pilgrim, drinking from holy wells, a spiritual man. He knew all there was to know of the old stories.
There, in the bookcase, is a book by Laurence Main entitled King Arthur’s Camlan. Camlan is the place where King Arthur’s last battle was fought. No one knows where it was though plenty hazard guesses, trying to make their geography fit.
When I show the book to Diane she says the book is free. He brings them in now and again. On the back if the book the blurb says:
Who was the Merlin who went to Bardsey?
It is clear that since leaving OS Main has lost his credibility but this has never been anything that would deter me from a search for the truth. I search the book avidly. I hold the right map. Camlan is indeed marked. It’s in a valley of the Dyfi surrounded by steep mountains where Powys becomes Gwynedd. I know that I must go there.
I buy a book of north Welsh vocabulary to supplement the lesson in the sounds of the alphabet Rosie has given me, The Old Straight Track and some poetry by Gerald Manley Hopkins, for the poems stir me with passion. Diane has told me that this Victorian poet, like the Welsh, rhyme their lines with consonants, not vowels to me most poets. Since I hate the mediocrity of practically all poets I have ever read, I am delighted by this find. Not many people succeed in inspiring my passion with their writing.
I am well satisfied with my mornings work, but especially with the precious Main’s book. I am on the trail once more. Having found the warriors way, now let the journey to the heart commence.
Of lessons life has plenty in this department, not least that of Jacob, Machynlleth’s newest madman. Rosie talks of the challenges of keeping an open house, for he comes all the time and outstays his welcome. Her housemate Gareth brought him first, he teaches Buddhist meditation and this week has been running a course up at CAT. I am delighted to hear that CAT have made moves since my visit last year, to embracing inner transition. Jacob is a Buddhist and goes about the house lighting incense and candles and every now and again prophesizing unintelligibly. He feels like a character of great power trapped in an aspect of himself who still behaves like a boundaryless child. Rosie and I talk about the challenge of being one who knows to listen is part of our gift, to set boundaries to keep our own sense of well being safe. Shivam’s story of madmen has felt pertinent to us both.
I leave the bookshop and enter the gallery next door. Diane has bade me go and see the mural on  the tale of Taliesin. I see the mosaics of hound and hare, otter and salmon, hawk and swallow that Ceridwyn and Taliesin shift shape into, aware that I will visit ospreys soon on my storytelling way.

I lunch at the Quarry cafe and meet my old neighbours Chris n Sheila who moved here last week from my village in Devon. We marvel at the synchronicity and invite me to stay whilst I house hunt. Then we meet Kirsten from DANCE, the community of Buddhist meditation teachers in Totnes, here to teach at CAT. I last saw her when we saw my fellow pilgrim, Eve, if the Buzz Tour of n her walk around England last year. I am indeed amongst kindred spirits. I only wish I were the cook, for though all else is good about this community cafe set up by CAT many year s ago, I know I can cook better.
(CAT – centre for alternative technology)
In the land of the Welsh finally the tales begin to lift out of the the flatlands and live. I sense my quest has shifted into another dimension as it inevitably had to.
I have few days left to explore the river of the Dove and the Borderlands of true Wales, but I am now within the right side of that border. I am in Gwynedd; Welsh vocab book in my pocket.
In the morning I open the book by Rosie’s bedside; Soil, Soul and Society by Satish Kumar. The page I open it on says:
Waste is violence
Gandhi
I think if the roles for everyone for spirit horse and couldn’t agree more. I go on to read more of Gandhi’s wisdom;

The Seven Blunders:
Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Knowledge without character
Commerce without morality
Science without humananity
Worship without sacrifice
Politics without principles.

It feels good to take this with me on my travels.
I am up first thing on this solar solstice morning to catch the only morning bus to Dinas Mawddwy to see the battlefield where King Arthur fought his last battle and was taken mortally wounded, according to some sources, to Bardsey island, Ynys Enlii.
Only seven from each side survived that battle in the strategically placed valley bottom of the river Dyfi (Dove), under the shadow of Cefn Coch, and the other mountains that surround this place where the river could be forded.
I arrive in the village and quickly find the back lane where Maes Camlan can be found. It was here, according to Laurence Main, that the final battle was fought. I look at the shoulder of land, the foothill of the mountain facing Cefn Coch, and then the flat land sitting neatly in a loop of the Dyfi and am immediately aware of the perfection of this place for a battle. I can almost hear the battle cries as the mighty warriors launch at one another, each believing right to be on their side. The valley is steeped in a living silence. The mountains breathe here and man and his spawn are small. Their majesty frightens me as much as their splendour awes me. Powerful place this, the border between Powys and Gwynedd. Small wonder the English got no further. Here then, the beginnings of the lands where the true Britons can be found. My resolve to learn the language of north Wales strengthens.
Of the seven who left Camlan unhurt, the Merlin, Y Myrddin, was one. Laurence Main identifies him as St Derfel, of whom some can be learnt from histories of Welsh saints. Main traces his exploits through ancient texts, he was more than warrior, more than sage or saint, he was wizard too, and women loved him and he them. Small wonder than, that he finally fell for a woman who was more than his match.
St. Derfel went to Bardsey island and became its third abbot. Arthur was taken there too, to receive healing. They took him via Arthog, where I shall be tomorrow night.
I feel content that I have picked up Merlin’s trail again, and a sense of which way he might have travelled.From the Wye to the Dyfi and over the mountains, past Cadair Idris, the ways of the legends live still, in the old lanes that cross this ancient land.

Summer Solstice 2015
I’ll start this entry with my latest bit of Welsh
Hirddydd haf da
Happy solstice!
I spent the morning of this day in the place where King Arthur fought his final battle on the midsummer of 537; Camlan.

I went by bus for it was too far off route to Dinas Mawddwy /Deenas mauo vrey/ ..the fort of Maud or to give her her more known name the goddess Ceriwdn who birthed Taliesin, but more of that later.

The battlefield is so very clearly the most obvious place to fight a strategic battle, at a ford over the river and on up a couple of fields to a loop in the river. I could almost feel the warriors clash.

I returned to Machynlleth for lunch and internet to catch you up with my adventures and left it too late by 1 minute to catch my afternoon train to Tywyn. Synchronicity this, for the next left in two hours meaning I needed to find a place to spend some time that was worthwhile to my quest for Merlin, and of course I found it.
The bookshop next to where I had stayed I remembered from having been with the man who was once my greatest love some years before. It had been closed since I arrived. Now, this Saturday afternoon, it has finally opened its doors. Its a dusty old rambling maze of a place, the sort of curiosity shop where you just know you’ll find something unexpected. I enjoy browsing old maps. I ask about books about Bardsey but the owner doesn’t know, and though he does know where there are books on myths and legends there are hardly any, but it doesn’t bother me unduly; I have found the Welsh section and am thrilled with what is there; a trove of books written, published and printed in Wales but written in English, at least enough of them to keep me happy.
I marvel at so much knowledge that you simply don’t come across in England. I realise that it is here in this land that I will find the ancient, supposedly lost, knowledge of our island, and I begin to, in this shop.
I pull from the shelves a small cloth bound volume in red with gold lettering as fresh as it were printed yesterday, though the spine has faded in the sun since it was written in 1887.

The Welsh Question and Druidism
It says, written by Griffith with his coat of arms beneath ‘the red dragon leads the way’ motto.

Inside the first few chapters are concerned with answering a bigoted Englishman’s letters to the Welsh Morning Post suggesting that, having lived in Wales some years, in his opinion it really should be under English rule and its language squashed! I am pleased to report that Griffith, a Welshman living in London, very ably cuts this ignoramus down to size.

It is in the second section of the book though that I find the magic that makes me buy the book, though, being a very collectible volume because of its binding (!), the owner clearly has no sense of its content being of any value, it costs more than I have ever paid for a book.

Somewhere into the middle of the very interesting discourse on Druidism is an explanation of the three orders that could be attained by ovates or initiates;

Elphin ( or elf)
Myddyn ( or Merlin)
Taliesin

Suddenly everything makes perfect sense to me. More than that but the initiatory stage of Myddyn is one of 13 steps, for each level has 12 stages to pass through.
The Merlin is one who embodies the marrow, the life of man, after the full o f life but half the understanding of the elf. It is only when an initiate reaches the level of Taliesin that he can said to be he of radiant brow, ie with a halo, it means continuing consuming desire.
The book goes on to explain that the tale of the birth of Taliesin is another way of explaining the journey to becoming a Taliesin through the cauldron of Ceriwdn, whose namesake is Maud, or Mawddwy.
When the old stories then tell us that the maiden took the Merlin’s power, it becomes the obvious that what we are dealing with is a Christian corruption of the ancient wisdom, the spiritual teachings of the druids they supplanted, that taught a person how a mature knowledgeable man became in effect a saint, an enlightened one.
I am sure more of this will become clear as I walk through n, but for now I just feel relief. The tales I have believed lost, as academic after academic dismisses the old ways as impossible to reconstruct are actually quite simply hidden from view of those who take what they find at face value.
I get on the train to Tywyn and enjoy unparalled views of the Dyfi estuary and alight in Tywyn to walk the three miles or so to Bryncrug where I shall pass the night where Cadair Idris can be seen.
My host in the Bed n breakfast I have chosen is a delight who believes that as we women get older we are free finally to accept our own selves, to dress and be as we please.
In the local pub I find mainstream culture prevails, so that though the food is good the men are drunk and loud by eight thirty, the music could contend with a nightclub for volume and I shudder to think that the old Welsh culture has been subsumed by this heathen culture of noise drunkenness and irreverence.
My being longs for the old ways and I begin to know that it is time to vote for Wales to have its independence so that it might start the long journey back to what is truly good and hope they will accept incomers with only a very small diluted amount of Welsh blood to come and reside in these lands of mountain and mist where still the oak reigns supreme.
My host Maureen tells me the tale of how she and her now deceased husband bought this place when it was a tumble wreck with a dirt floor. She insisted on buying this rather than others that were made re suitable she trusted the little inner voice that told her this was the place. That was 28 years ago and to look at the lovely house and out buildings now you could not have guessed what state it had been in. It is a good lesson that the inner voice us always right no matter how unlikely it may seem. Things will come to help them to work out if you follow your intuition.
Over breakfast I hear about Black Country dialects and how I must visit the Last Inn in Bamouth for a fresh water spring runs through it, just as I have imagined in my visioning of the place of refuge I seek to offer.
I set out to Fairbourne bright and early. I want to catch the train between two request stops because the alternative is to walk past several farms and I now longer find this a pleasure for too many farmers act as though the lane is there as much as their land and have territorial dogs.
I walk swiftly and purposefully but still manage to enjoy a backward glance at Birds Rock that looks like a birds head and, I gave been told over breakfast by my fellow guests that it gets covered in roosting commorants.
Once I am on the lane to the train stop I cannot help but notice

The way is strewn
With hearts and bells
As dog rose
And fox glove
Shed petals
Blown by the wind

As I round the bend
A farm for sale
Nestles
In a south facing
Lee of the Tal Y Gareg
In the bay
Of old Ceredigion

I am thrilled with possibilities and soon descend to the train halt where myself and two other walkers put out our hands for that train that leaves me five minutes later in Llwyngrwll where I am thrilled to see that the whole village is covered in knitted bunting and sculptures as a community fund raising endeavour.
Then I walk the next couple of miles along the main road, the railway far below by the sea, the high mountain looms high above and I small figure wend my way along the narrow freeway frightened again by another mountain pass.