MEDICINE WHEEL ON ZOOM Sunday 29th March

I am hosting a meeting on the Medicine Wheel: East on Zoom this Sunday 29th at 7.30pm GMT (8.30pm BST - clocks go forward.) It will last up to 2 hours. We can talk about the East, or anything else we want to talk about. But hopefully there will be a focus on living the East for this month. Let me know if you wish to join. See comment below for the link you will need.


Barry Goddard is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Medicine Wheel: East
Time: Mar 29, 2020 07:30 PM Universal Time UTC

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/458953317...

Meeting ID: 458 953 317
Password: 739685

THE MEDICINE WHEEL: A LOCKDOWN INVITATION

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 I've talked about and read about and thought about the Medicine Wheel, and I've had one outside my caravan, carrying my dream. But I haven't lived each direction/ element, one by one. The Medicine Wheel is a great Native American vision of life, dividing us into the 4 elements of Fire (Inspiration), Earth (Incarnation), Air (Mind) and Water (Emotion), and building relations between those elements and between the stages of life they represent, as well as the various animals that traditionally belong there. We have just had a new Moon in Aries, which is Fire, so for the next month I am going to be living the Fire Element. This is the East (in the universal wheel that I use) and represents the divine spark that begins life, it is imagination, inspiration, and the magical child. It is outside time, and is the colour yellow. So if you'd like to join me, you are welcome. Get yourself a stone from somewhere east, maybe paint it yellow, and begin to construct your Wheel. Think of all those times when something new has entered your life, that has changed who you are. Note the synchronicities that occur. Maybe chronicle them in the comments below.

My 1st synchronicity is this: I got 1/2 way through a programme about Eagles this evening before I remembered that the Eagle is an animal of the East. He soars high, and has a vast perspective. He has the infinite perspective of Spirit. I'll see you on the way!
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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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STOPPING THE WORLD

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Don Juan said: “The world is such and such or so and so, only because we talk to ourselves about its being such and such or so and so.” The world is as we dream it. We are not usually aware of this. The world, and the way it is, often seems all too solid and inevitable.

Usually we have to withdraw in some way or another for other possibilities, other ways of seeing, to open up. But the world itself, this crazy modern monoculture, which can seem like the only possibility, is stopping for a while. Collectively new possibilities can, and probably will, present themselves. Listen out for them, tell people about them.
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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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THE BEAUTY OF THE PRIMITIVE

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"Our tribal medicines, our power centers upon this earth, our ancient ceremonies and our spiritual forms of knowledge cry out to be used." So says Medicine Grizzlybear Lake, a guy of Cherokee-Seneca origin who seems like prime fodder for the Indian 'plastic shaman' busters. The quote is from a book called The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination by a Russian academic who lives in the US. (Thanks to Jez Hughes for the recommendation).

If you are a serious reader - which is maybe not most of us - then I think this book is required reading. It is scholarly but readable, a combination I like (I'd also put Reindeer People by Piers Vitebsky and The Spears of Twilight by Philippe Descola in that scholarly but readable category).

The book is a history of western interaction with Shamanism, beginning with the 18th century German ethnographers in Siberia (Russia didn't have an educated class that could do this work), that takes us right up to modern neo-shamanism and the various perspectives on that. The Enlightenment anthropologists considered Shamans to be mentally ill; 19th century Romanticism, with its valuing of the Imagination and the non-rational, was willing to give them more credit. But the view of Shamans as ill or neurotic still persisted overall, so that in the 1930s the Freudians were having a field day: it is astonishing the amount of nonsense that psychoanalysis can spout from behind its front of technical and professional competence. Equally crazy were the Procrustean class-based interpretations of Shamans manufactured by the Soviet Communists (who pretty successfully wiped it out.)

It was only with the rise of postmodernism, and its insistence on there being no absolute certainties, and that cultures need to be considered from their own point of view as coherent systems of their own, that some real understanding was able to enter academia. More than that, there has also been a view for some time in academia that to truly understand you have to go native, you have to live the culture. This is, of course, profoundly true. And it represents a deep cultural reversal of the ruling academic conceit that it understands more truly through the 'objectivity' that comes from standing outside. This is now understood by some to be a product of the colonial mindset.

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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Some academics go a bit further, and use the term 'Shamanisms'. Their point is that the singular term refers to Shamanism as a universal phenomenon - as used by eg Michael Harner and Mercia Eliade - and such an overarching idea contradicts the postmodern position of different perspectives and cultures, each of which needs considering in its own right. 

 

I like this idea of Shamanisms, because it is anti-fundamentalist. There becomes no right or wrong way of doing it, and that enables our creativity, which I think is vital. At the same time, I think there ARE some universal themes, such as the ideas that the earth is alive, that we are part of her, that there is a 'Spirit' aspect to existence woven into the material and that aligning with that Spirit in whatever way is what makes our lives work. This sense of universality is also important to me.

Incidentally, Shamanism as a term to describe more than just Siberian ways - in this case, Northwestern American ways also - goes back in academia to 1908. Shamanism is a term of western invention anyway, and it sets the lie to the position of some of the western fundamentalists that the broader use of the term is recent and New Age and needs to be fought.

Znamenski's position is open rather than fundamentalist, which I appreciate. The opening quote of this review is indicative of his feeling. At the same time, he is an academic, and he does justice to all the different positions and shades in the modern neo-shamanic world. So Carlos Castaneda is well-known to have invented his spirit adventures with Don Juan, yet presented them as fact. This was fraudulent, and Znamenski does not hold back from saying so. Yet he gives Castaneda a lot of credit for inspiring many people towards Shamanism, and crucially also for opening it up to the use of Story and the Imagination. 

Carlos Castaneda

As maybe a slightly spikey academic, he does occasionally have a swipe - describing William Burroughs as a 'spoiled bohemian' - whatever 'spoiled' means (probably just class-envy) - but he is always willing to give credit, even in stuff we might want to dismiss as flakey New Age stuff. And I appreciate this, for I think people are generally trying to do something that is real even when there is a lot of nonsense around it. It is easy to be dismissive and judging - and we get something unwholesome for ourselves when we do that - and much harder sometimes to see the good.

He doesn't, however, have much respect for the Indian fundamentalists, the proponents of the idea of 'cultural appropriation'. He considers culture to be a living thing that is always changing, and that these fundamentalists are attempting to freeze Indian culture somewhere in the 19th century. This is a conclusion I have come to myself.

Incidentally, as I have said elsewhere, if you find someone on the newage frauds and plastic shamans website, they may be worth looking at: they may be open-minded and generous people doing some worthwile work.

I found this book very stimulating. I have been on the lookout for something like it for a while. The only problem is its price-tag: about £45. In the end I though dammit, it's probably worth it and got it.There is, however, a free pdf version here.

WHAT IS CORONA MEDICINE?

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This life, and the death that comes with it, are part of a bigger dream that encompasses both. This slow realisation lies behind the traditional yogic virtues of non-attachment, surrender to spirit, the lofty eagle perspective and the ability to chill on a level most of us can only dream about. And because there is this bigger dream, and we are currently enveloped in bodies, it means that what we can actually know is zilch, nothing - all is the Great Mystery. 

These ideas we often take so seriously about scientific truth and the earth being round and the importance of getting the Labour party in power and what is authentic Shamanism - all these are just stories we create to keep going, and we do need those stories, because they are all we have. 

But the stories we take really seriously need to be preposterous, and we shamans score well in that matter: we have these imaginary friends we talk to and we even quote what they say as unassailable truth (well, that's maybe where it starts to go a bit wrong 🤣) 

So where am I going with this? I began with wanting to say something (again!) about Coronavirus, and also talk about a book I've just read, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination (thanks to the recently-suntanned Jez Hughes for that one). Note there is a free pdf for this book, which otherwise costs around £45.

I think I'll stay with the first topic. The secret to being read on the internet is to stick to 500 words, be entertaining and make your points concisely. Which I am not doing today :) 
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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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What I want to say is this: the government needs to stop fighting Coronavirus and let it take its course. Not just on the principle of living with other life forms, instead of trying to eradicate the troublesome ones, which shamans and anyone who loves the earth understands. (Now here is a thought: for the American Indians, the forms of life that were dangerous to us had powerful medicine also. So there is one to think about. Corona is technically a mildly pokey virus, but energetically clearly has something huge going on. So how can Corona heal us? Maybe she can wake us up to the fragility of our 'powerful' civilisation, that it can be dismantled in a matter of days! Now that is a strong medicine. Humility is its name. And she is also showing us that we are one interconnected humanity.)

No, the government also needs to stop fighting Coronavirus because death is not the worst thing that can happen. There is a trickster at work here: Coronavirus is midly pokey, yet we treat her like the Black Death. That says so much.

And that brings me back to the start. In our culture we have a terror of death (look up Stephen Jenkinson on youtube for this, he is great.) The government is trying to reduce the number of deaths from Coronavirus by attempting to make the pandemic manageable (itself a laughable aim, life is not manageable), but in so doing it is shutting down the country. Look at the amount of suffering that austerity caused. That was nothing compared to what is coming now. I would happily give up my life if it meant life was liveable for those still on their earthwalk (deliberate shamanic cliche there 😂). 

Let me be plain: more people will die if we do not try to contain Coronavirus, because the NHS will not be able to cope with it all happening at once. But, in my opinion, that is a price worth paying, rather than something far worse than austerity occurring. But we are terrified of death, it is the great annhiliation, and this is skewing how the government sees the situation.

To me, this is common sense. It comes out of this sense of a bigger dream than life and death. And life teaches us to trust death, saying that if we stay with what is happening, on a deeper level we gradually learn to always trust what is coming next. It's as Tagore sang: "And because I love this life I know I shall love death as well." Life, in this sense, is a long preparation for death. 

Rabindranath Tagor

So come on Boris, let's get Coronavirus done! Let it happen. Don't let the cultural abomination of death (Read: 'Flattening the curve') stand in the way of the living!

LIVING WITH CORONAVIRUS

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 The Coronavirus is a new guest in our human house. We haven’t yet learned how to be around each other, so we humans are feeling discomfited. We live in a society where feeling discomfited is ‘bad’, for we have got used to the idea that technology will eventually rid us of anything uncomfortable or inconvenient. Instead of that discomfort being understood as part of the nature of life itself, and something that we can learn from.

The Coronavirus is a part of life. She is our unruly sister. If we take the approach of trying to ‘defeat’ her, as modern medicine frequently does, then we are taking up arms against life itself. And that can never work. 

Look what happened in the US when they tried to eradicate the Coyote: the animal’s response was to spread from part of the US to the whole country. Coyote is the trickster, and that was a perfect example. The trickster is a way life has of bringing us back into balance, by upsetting the rules we humans sometimes try to impose on life: if those rules are rigid, then they become a product of the narrow self, the ego, rather than Spirit. And Spirit, which is infinitely bigger and more powerful, will respond by undermining those rules.

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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Coronavirus has come upon us quickly, and there has been no time to develop a vaccine or drugs that will kill her. So we are being forced to work with her. Governments are taking the approach that this epidemic is going to happen, but if we can delay it, it may not be so bad overall.This approach seems to me to have more respect for life, and is more in line with a traditional approach of working alongside, of finding a new balance, rather than trying to eradicate. 

The mentality of trying to defeat and destroy is rooted in the western attitude of conquering and exploiting nature, as though we are not part of her.Our sense of separation from nature has been growing for 3000 years, so this attitude is deep-rooted. It sets us against ourselves. We turn ourselves into ‘good’ bits and ‘bad’ bits. Shamanism sees life as an indivisible whole in which we are continually striving to find balance. This is why shadow work, living with the parts of ourselves we have rejected or repressed, is so pivotal. It creates a completely different attitude to life.

So in our prayers and ceremonies and ongoing thoughts around Coronavirus, let us treat her as a guest we need to find a way to live with, rather than an enemy to be defeated. In that way we maintain our feeling for life, and that will leave space for Coronavirus to respond accordingly, to find a way of being with us that is less destructive. Life responds well to fellow-feeling. And because the governmental approach is, for now, to work with instead of against Coronavirus, I think the outcome will be better than it might have been.

THE HEALER AT A TIME OF COLLECTIVE FEAR

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If we are any sort of healer, then one of our functions in the community is to stand apart from the collective compulsions, as real as they can appear, and be a still point that, energetically, can feed back to the collective in a good way. This is the North of the Medicine Wheel, the place of the Mind and the Elder, that is cool like Air and has objectivity.

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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This principle applied to the referendum division we experienced in the UK over the last few years, and it was unfortunately rare to find healers who were prepared to do their job and appreciate both sides. Now we have the mass fear that is being generated over what seems to be the equivalent of a fairly potent flu. So let us see if we can do better this time and not join in with the collective compulsion. That is what we are here to do.

CORONAVIRUS

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The thought I was having this morning on Coronavirus - and maybe that is 'Spirit', who knows, it would give it more gravitas to some because after all we are 'Shamanic' - 🤣 - anyway the thought I was having was that it shows us just how much we are one world these days. The whole world - apart from 3rd world countries who have more important things to think about like the next meal - is plugged into this flu in a panicky kind of way, which is unfortunate, and it's easy to try and blame someone, like 'the media', but like most things, it is just collective consciousness at work, which is why I am not a conspiracist.

But like I say, it is showing us just how connected we all are nowadays, and it is good to feel that, because it is too easy to view our trade competitors like China as somewhat hostile and 'other'. We are all in this together, exaggerated as it may be, and this is something we can experience, and I think that is a good thing. And this is maybe a real globalisation, unlike the fake one we have had, which has just meant cheap labour in China for Apple and Dyson etc until the Philippines gets cheaper.

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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THERE THERE

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This is a 2018 novel about urban Indians in Oakland, California. I'm used to reading novels about Indians that are set on the rez rather than in the city, by Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexei or - going back further - by D'arcy McNickle. Either way, these 4 are all very good native writers and you get a sense of what it's actually like in an everyday way. The title is a quote from Gertrude Stein: there is no THERE there, the Indians are rootless, they have no homeland. It's pretty grim. But plenty of the Indian spirit and way of seeing the world shines through in this story leading up to a pow-wow, written from the point of view of 13 different characters.

If you are a fan of TRANCE DANCE, then read this quote from 'There There' about powwow dancing:

"Now you young men in here, listen up. Don't get too excited out there. The dance is your prayer. So don't rush it, and don't dance how you practise. There's only one way for an Indian man to express himself. It's that dance that comes from all the way back there. All the way over there. You learn that dance to keep it, to use it. Whatever you got going on in your life, you don't leave it all in here, like them players do when they go out on that field, you bring it with you, you dance it. Any other way you try to say what you really mean, it's just gonna make you cry. Don't act like you don't cry. That's what we do. Indian men. We're crybabies. You know it. But not out there." he says and points to the door of the locker room. 

Orvil looks around the room and sees all these men dressed up like him. They all needed to dress up to look Indian too. There's something like the shaking of feathers he felt somewhere between his heart and his stomach. He knows what the guy said is true. To cry is to waste the feeling. He needs to dance with it. Crying is for when there's nothing else left to do..... He tries to shake off the feeling of feeling like a fraud. He can't allow himself to feel like a fraud because then he'll probably act like one. To get to that feeling, to get to that prayer, you have to trick yourself out of thinking altogether. Out of acting. Out of everything. To dance as if time only mattered insofar as you could keep a beat to it, in order to dance in such a way that time itself discontinued, disappeared, ran out, or into the feeling of nothingness under your feet when you jumped, when you dipped your shoulders like you were trying to dodge the very air you were suspended in, your feathers a flutter of echoes centuries old, your whole being a kind of flight. To perform and win you have to dance true.

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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ON SAYING YES TO SPIRIT AND NO TO AMBITION

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There is a tradition that medicine people don’t teach or heal or run ceremonies unless they are asked. And of course that ‘asking’ may be implicit, it may be that a situation demands something. But it is in quite stark contrast to how we work in the West, particularly as regards teaching, where the standard method is to dream up a course and then advertise it.

But it is not something I can bring myself to do. Believe me, I have tried. I have tried to imagine it in every which way, but something big in me always goes no. And this year I seem to finally be grabbing the bull by the horns and saying to myself OK, I will trust that. I can take this pressure and judgement off myself and just roll with whatever happens and whatever doesn’t happen, and trust both. Even the journeying group I am currently co-running was the other person’s idea, and I just offered to help out.

Now a lot of good comes out of teachers dreaming up courses and advertising them, and I have no intention to criticise that in any overall kind of way. But what I notice is that there is usually – though NOT always – some kind of ambition, some kind of proving of something personal, or some kind of avoidance, going on alongside, which sets a limit on what Spirit can do. Because Spirit needs us out of the way entirely, in an ideal world; it is what the hollow-bone thing is about. And this is how I make sense of the traditional requirement that one be asked before one teaches.

I’ve just been reading a book about Rolling Thunder, an American Medicine Man. He worked as a brakeman on the railways. Being a Medicine person was not his day job, though he was very well known. And I think medicine work doesn’t make for a very good day job. Again, I’m not ruling it out. But I think it would take a lot not to have mixed motives, which again compromises the hollow-bone principle. Because this work is about Spirit, not about what we need personally, and I think those 2 things are best kept as separate as they can.

And even when teaching, the traditional way seems to be responsive, rather than coming in with too much of a set idea as to what is going to happen. Take story-telling, where again the contrast is very clear. In the modern West, story-tellers generally turn up with a story prepared in advance. But a traditional story-teller I knew would turn up and ask the audience what was on their minds, and as people spoke, gradually a story would present itself to him in response, and he would tell it, and expound its meaning. He had no need to prepare in advance, because all the stories had been educated into him at a young age. And this responsive approach leaves more room for Spirit, and reduces the ‘performance’ element which seems to be so strong in our culture.

So I feel like I’m taking a risk with my life, because somewhere in my mind I have this notion that I need to ‘achieve’ something, and that this comes about through an exercise of will and intention, and this is what responsible adults do. And occasionally in the background is this awful ‘realisation’ that I have avoided the main thing in life through my lack of measurable ‘achievement’. So I have on the one hand this beautiful open feeling, that leaves all the room in the world for Spirit. And this other side that can feel a bit wrong-footed, like I’m not the real deal yet because I am not taking a proper place on the stage and volunteering a teaching etc.

But goddammit, the deep places I have been to and the deep transformations that have occurred along with that, I have kept my eye steadily on that ball for at least 40 years now, I have stayed with it through all the difficulties it throws up and that takes something. There are things I know deeply, and maybe I am boasting, but I want you to know this about me. And I couldn’t say what those things I know are, they come out in the saying.

I’m getting there, ‘there’ being a place of rolling with Spirit and not directing my life and not judging myself (or others!) It is an adventure and a different way of looking at the world. There seem to be plenty of individuals turning up in my life who want to interact with me, and good stuff happens, I love that. And I’m being asked to do the odd thing like sweatlodges or medicine wheel stuff for groups of people. And because I trust in what is happening, I don’t need to feel anxious any more – though that is still there as a tendency – because Spirit will take care of the event, all I need to do is turn up and do what comes naturally. One thing I love is being drawn out. I have a lot to say when pressed a bit, and I can surprise myself. I am always learning through my interactions.

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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And I trust it too when very little is happening. I guess I have a kind of commitment to always saying yes, and that is genuine, I will travel a long way just to be with 2 or 3 people in their front room, and if they can contribute towards my petrol, so much the better. Just so you know 😊 So my modern conditioning tells me my approach is a bit soft and flaky and lazy. And I am becoming something of an expert in going bollocks to that, I am on an adventure of the Spirit.