This darkness will not endure.

                     This photie was taken this afternoon at ten to four up in my hut. It is only two days till the winter solstice. Hurrah! I don't care about Christmas or the New Year. I want the light back. Even in January when the weather is horrible, there is hope since the days are slowly but surely getting longer.

                     I used to dread the winter. After the Edinburgh Festival finished in September, I used to think here come the dark, the wet, and bugger all going on. Also, for most of my life I have not welcomed the holidays at Christmas and the New Year. I never needed holidays. I didn't work that hard. What the winter holidays meant to me was that I had to press the pause button on all the things I enjoyed doing, such as writing and training and meditating, so that I could laze about doing bugger all with folk who did that anyway with their spare time; bugger all.

                       This attitude has changed over the past few years. I resolved not go on about effing Christmas, and such like, and to try to just accept it. Then came the lockdowns. I loved the lockdowns, particularly the ones at Christmas. I think last Christmas I had a cold and had to tell folk that I couldn't celebrate Christmas with them. The folk I see these days are different from the folk I saw a decade ago, and although they do as little as possible at Christmas, they still do something. The Christmases I've really liked and remembered well are the ones I spent on my own. That was last year, 2012, and the two or three times I went to the Samye Ling to avoid the night after night of parties and piss-ups. Thank God that doesn't happen, the parties and piss-ups I mean, these days. A benefit of getting old.

                    This year I started writing another book about dharma, and I've got about 35,000 words of the first draft done. This is the first bit of writing I've felt really enthusiastic about for ages. I really want to write it, so that's a definite positive. I might even try to get it published, but I'll have to write it and re-write it and so on. This could take a couple of years since I haven't got a definite writing schedule these days. I used to be bang on with two hours or so every day when I was working. Somehow, it's harder to find the time now. I am meditating for four hours a day and the training and bathing take up about two hours, so ...

                       The writing and the meditating are kind of integrated when you are writing about dharma, and that somehow makes things better. You life fits together somehow. 

                        Practically every week there seems something improving in the meditations. That's a normal feeling though sometimes I think it can't be truth since it can't have been improving every week for the last decades, but that's the way it seems. This is a convenient perception if you want to keep meditating: that they're always improving. But they do seem to be. This is especially true over the last couple of weeks. I can't explain to you what is going on here because I don't know myself. 

                         Have a lovely holiday. 

                    

The end of the allotment year.

         I was really looking forward to going back to the Samye Ling a couple of weeks ago after not being able to go there due to the pandemic for a couple of years. But the best laid plans ... it turned out there was a rail strike on the Saturday I was due to travel. I contacted the Samye Ling reception because I tried to book about four days from the Wednesday, when I reckoned the train schedules would be back to normal. They said no. They said I had to be attending the course and the Drupon Rinpoche, I know, is a stickler for folk going to all the sessions.

        So I don't know what the score is there now. Few people use the Samye Ling like I used to. I don't generally go there to be part of a course, but to meditate on my own. I could have done this for the several days I was going, in fact, I'd prefer that. But whoever was on the reception seemed unresponsive to this. If the Samye Ling aren't going to let me go down there for simply meditating .... well, that's too dumb to contemplate. As it is, I haven't been there for two years and I've no great desire to go there right now when the winter is upon us, but .... I idea that the folk now running the Samye Ling aren't going to let me go down there to sit beside the river is laughable. When the Springtime comes around, I'll work out a way. At the moment, it's not as if I'm plagued with visitors at home. 

        The meditations, as ever, continue to develop in baby, baby steps. Wherever I am, as long as I keep meditating. I need to get my times up, but it looks like I'll have quieter weekends from now on in, with more time at home.

        I need to take the book I'm trying to write more seriously or it won't be finished for years. But I'm very happy with the way it's going. Just need more time with it. That's the problem. I don't have enough time to do all the things I want to do.

        The photies are before and after shots of the allotment. I dug all the bare bits over a week or so ago. Looking forward to spending winter afternoons in the hut and lighting fires!

A Favourite Spot!

 

                    I get stuff from the Samye Ling landing on the Facebook page and as I was clicking through some photies, I found this one. Just had to put it somewhere since it's probably my favourite place in my favourite place.

                    If you walk through the Samye Ling and get down to the river, there's a path that goes up to your left. It's probably not a hundred yards before the path runs out beside the wee water fall. In the summer, just below this there's usually a this wee island. If the river is low, there's sometimes some big stones you can jump over to get to the island. For most of the winter it'll be submerged.

                    If you get onto this wee island and sit facing the far bank, you can hear the birds and the river and the wind in the trees, but little else. I used to try sitting there for most of the afternoon. I'll be down that way when I'm at the Samye Ling in October, but then you have to sit on the stones at the edge, depending on how full the river is.

                    This photie did spark a little joy when I saw it yesterday!

The Lama

 

            Some guys have all the luck. Lama Rinchen came to stay with me last night on her way to the Samye Ling. We had a very long talk. No teevee, no music, just talking. I don't do enough of that. I never do that.

            She was at Nantes University in 1968. A big number. Stuff would be thrown about, Bliss it was that dawn to be alive. To be young was very heaven. The Sorbonne in 1969. These are times of big uproar. Then to Amsterdam, London, and finally the Samye Ling circa 1972, two years after Trungpa left. You could still feel the reverberations two years later. 

            She asked me if I'd taken cocaine. I said yes. She said when. I said two, maybe three weeks ago. I was glamping with the Bellshillbillies.  I think being told to just say no has perverted my response systems. I always just say yes. Anyway, she didn't regret the acid, but the cocaine wasn't to her taste. Too self asserting.

            Knowing this person is the best thing about me. This morning over breakfast we found out that the Samye Ling is open, under some obvious restrictions, at least from the anniversary of Dr Akong's death, October the 8th. Oh, how I have missed my visits to the Samye Ling over the last few years! Can't describe how pleased I am to be able to go there again.   

            I've written about 24,000 words of my latest book. This is supposed to be a blog about writing. I've had something else to occasionally look at since I got back into my kindle account, the free downloads. About 18 downloads this month and at one of each of the eleven books downloaded. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone might be reading one of my free ebooks and saying, what a pile of shite!     

The summer seems to have slipped away, but ...

         There's a wee bit of me that thinks I should be somewhere else. It's always on my shoulder, whispering this in my ear. You know you should be somewhere else, JohnnyBoy. The lama looked the hut over. I know she wants me to sit in the hut. I would like to sit in the hut. There must be reasons why I don't do that. One of them is that it would take a while to settle in. Also, it is a kind of deprivation and you'd want to be sure that you were depriving yourself to some purpose. There are no signposts and no lights on this path. You just have to keep on keeping on, and who knows to what end. So you have to have an awful lot of confidence in where this meditation stuff is all going, and I don't think I have that in sufficient quantities. But the summer slips by. I did sleep over once. Dearie me.
        Uncertainty enters my life in July. The deities come lose from their positions on the mandala and move around. Sometimes they come from abroad. You have to stop and see them. You know you should be somewhere else. It's the same around Christmas and New Year. People appear. 

        I'd like to see the people when they appear if I'd been behaving myself when they weren't around. I'm always wanting to be somewhere else. Or maybe, I'd like to be someone else. A more contented joe. Happy just being here. I'd rather be there, up the allotment.

        The lowest photie is of wheat. It flew in. Someone told me it was wheat because you can take its photie and your phone will tell you what it is. Wheat. Beam me up. It's a lovely bit of grass, wheat. I'll keep the seeds and plant them in the spring, and they won't grow, but that's alright. I am the worst gardener in the world, but I like the surprises.

        

The end of the diggings and plantings.

 

                            

                The first photie was taken a couple of afternoons ago when I was able to get on my bike now that diggings and plantings up the allotment are, more or less, complete.

                My allotment is half the size it once was, so it's just a joy to have it really. Not too much work and there is always the hut for sitting in. 

                By little, little baby steps every day or so, the mediations continue to develop. It's hard to see how it can ever stop or reach some terminus until I'm dead. Or have gone demented. Even then. 

                You might get "dry" spells with the bliss, but I'm certainly not in one at the moment. The other night I spent two hours in the bath after my training session. It's not like lying in the bath recovering from a long run (in the past now unfortunately), but I had trained hard at the shadow boxing and such like and was tired enough, but there are degrees. But when I was doing the road running, I couldn't do that bliss in the bath. Because Lama Rinchen told me never to meditate with my eyes closed, I don't count lying in the bath as meditating and I do shut my eyes. Stronger and better. 

                After an hour or so the cannabutter coffee came on and that was me for another hour. Once you get the thoughts calmed, you get the hit off the cannabutter and the "hit" from the bliss co-mingling, and I didn't want to get out of the bath. Because I'd spent two hours in the bath, when I came out, there was no time for any writing, or anything else much. Like now, only time for the beer. Liverpool are about to win (I hope) the European Cup in Paris. Kick off, right now. Come on, the scousers who boo-ed the National Anthem and the Duck of Cambridge recently. Come on, the reds!

            Lama Rinchen asked if she could stay with me in August on her way to the Samye Ling and whatnot. Be interesting to see how far the baby steps have gone by then.

Hut time

             I was in the hut after dark last night.. It's eight years since I bought this new hut and this is the first time I've been there at night time. This is to keep me away from the beer and increase the opportunities for more meditating.

            I felt very happy to be there as it grew dark. The fire was spectacular. I spent many, many nights in a tent down at the Samye Ling before I was sixty and after I was fifty five and that was much more awkward what with the fight with the midges and all that. 

            Let's have more of that then!!!

Apple Blossom Time.

                I've just finished putting up new free book promotions. Makes me feel connected somehow, but who knows what with? Agency, I think is the word I'm looking for. Feels as if you're doing something.

                 The last time I put up free book promotions something odd happened. Bugtown was downloaded over forty times, I think. Usually, I'm expecting each of the eleven books on Kindle to be downloaded a couple of times. So why so many? Maybe for a class of eleven year olds, I hope. I have a lot of confidence in Bugtown. After a year of trying to find an agent for it, I think I got one agent to read three chapters. But kids loved it. The Land of the Demon Masters was written just to see, but I tried to write a kidsbook with Bugtown. 

                Last week I sold two copies of The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf.  Most surprised. It's rare to sell anything these days (well, I don't want to read them either), but that's 70p to me. Who said there was no money in books.

                I worked in the allotment today from about half two till have five. Normally, I do an hour at most, but I'm late this year. I'm starting to feel really positive these days. This is the same as feeling really negative, but with different chemicals. Better, of course.
 

This Life

        This is a very good time. My allotment is about five hundred yards away. Now that I am healed from the plague and the weather is wonderful, well, what else could you want? Beautiful weather. Had that for the last four or so days. So about ten days without the covid and after being part of this Easter Holiday life the weekend before last ... I had a rest. Next weekend, my companion is away somewhere and I have a chance relax into my self in life in Stockeree. With the way the meditations are going and all ... I don't deserve this.

        I drank some cannabutter coffee the other night. Sometimes the best thing about being stoned, or intoxicated as the ancient Greeks may have it, is that you get a view of yourself from a different perspective. 

       Sitting up doing the juju on Sunday night around midnight, after my companion fell asleep, I just felt great about everything in my life. I didn't feel frustrated about the books I didn't get the chance to write and stuff like that. I thought all  my relationships were great. My health is fine. Life being an accumulation of effort and joy.

        I'd found an FB post about City Whitelight when I'd read it whilst scanning it for Kindle circa 2011. A wee gothic classic. Then I felt fine about all the writing stuff in my life. You do what you can. Everything seemed smoothed out and better than I could have hoped. I had a forty two year old relationship with Wena and that was much better than anything I could have expected. This is a veil of sorrows, but I've been so lucky. I feel great just now and I don't have to go to work tomorrow, or ever again. I'm not skint either. I owe almost everything to the good fortune of having such a great lifelong partner. Sometimes, I can't believe my luck.

        By the way, someone in Washington D.C. is still haunting my statscounter monitor. No one else comes here, pal. It's just you and me. Meditate for fuck sake! 

The diggings have begun

                     A little later this year, I've started the diggings. If I dig four rows at a time, it'll take about twelve or fourteen goes. 

                    For twenty five years or so, I dug this ground once, sometimes twice, a year and managed to kill everything underground. I didn't know about this happening till I saw a farmer plowing this field. In the first year, the tractor was followed by hundreds of birds. Twenty years later, there's no birds following the tractor because all the worms and whatnot have been done in.

                     Then I saw worms on the telly coming above ground to take down fallen leaves. Amazing. So for two autumns I put fallen leaves on the ground and today at the diggings ... worms all over. I assume I enticed them back, but how did they know about the leaves.

                       Watched a YouTube vid from the Western Festival of Science about Intelligence Without Brains. Because of this, I bought the book by Monica Gagliano called Thus Spoke the Plant. Looking forward to finding the time to read it!

                        I've been really enjoying working on my new book, but if you meditate for four or five hours a day ....

Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

 

                        I haven't cut my hair since Lama Rinchen took me all over North India looking in on places connected with the Buddha. A friend chopped into it once, and took a couple of inches off, and fucked it up, but that's all that was done to it.

                        Usually, there's a time in the year when you have to put on a hat. A woolly hat. Then you'd better have your hair shortened, but when I went to India that time, I didn't get the cold stuff till a bit later than usual and my hair was long enough ... I'd been wondering if I could grow my hair out. Everyone I know is baldy, or is half baldy with grey hair, and I enjoyed winding them up. But hair is inconvenient.

                        When I was in India yon time, I thought I'd let my hair grow out and pose as a more yogi joe to mark some development with the meditations. You always seem to be breaking out into another plateau and then you forget what all the fuss is about since you've kind of acclimatised. Anyway, I've been wanting to get rid of the hair and thought I'd wait to mark some other plateau which I would soon forget.

                        My practise has been crap recently. If you spend a lot of time with folk who don't have meditations as their thing, well, what can you expect? And I've been spending too much time like that, but last Friday things seemed changed once more. You get warmth from almost every vase breath. You don't have to wait for the third meditation of the day. You're getting it on the first one ..... except after the drinking and drug taking and having hangovers ... I don't know if I could stop the momentum with the deity yoga if I wanted to. It's a very divided self thing. You hang out with folk and live their life, but when you take a vase breath ... shame there's not more integration. 

                    I might have a run of three days coming up when I can do what I want with no one to see and no appointments to go to. Bring back the lockdowns!!!

                    

BUGTOWN

 

                                One of the good reasons I wanted to get back on the Kindle Publishing site was to put my books up for free. Nobody is going to buy them otherwise! I don't need the money and if folk can find them and download them ... well, someone is going to read them. They are not dead.

                                 So you can stick them up for free for five days every three months. Normally, you will get maybe twenty downloads from the eleven books on my page, so you get a couple downloaded per book if you are lucky. 

                                  Few people have downloaded my two books for 10 to 14 year olds. But I put all the books up for free for the five days starting with my birthday on the 8th of February. On the first day, Bugtown was downloaded maybe thirty times. What? This is weird. I guess maybe some teacher somewhere has come across it and got it downloaded for a class. It's been downloaded 47 times as of now.

                                    I'm pleased that some folk will read it. I got lots of kids to read it when I was a school librarian, and told them it was written by Alison Main, so that the questionnaires I got them to fill in would be uninfluenced by me being the guy who wrote it. 

                                    I had a look at the entry on Kindle and read through the reviews I got from the kids at the school I was working at then. Remembrance of things past. The faces of some of the reviewers were still fresh in my memory,

                                     I didn't manage to get a single agent to have a look at this book. Weird. But it's not what you know, it's who you know.  But it doesn't matter. I loved writing the two kids books. Still alive in a way now.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bugtown-John-McKenzie-ebook/dp/B004XZUE3G

When the Springtime will come ...

            Nothing but good stuff to report. On Sunday I picked up four hundred wee onions from the allotment shop and that felt great. Although there will be snow and sleet yet, I feels like the end of the dark times. Next Sunday I'll be picking up my tatties, so every afternoon when the weather allows, I'll be able to go up to the allotment and dig for a bit before meditating. Digging, planting ... I'm really looking forward to it. As you can see from the photo, it needs a bit of work done.

            I'm just about finished a book by Gopi Krishna called Kundalini, The Evolutionary Energy in Man. It's not as good as Living with Kundalini, but it reminds you to watch out what you wish for. He had two kundalini arousals which seem to be just about killed him. He got this from meditating. I remember the wee conversation I had with Ringu Tulku in the long ago when I was asking him about raising inner heat. He said opening the channels is not too difficult, but you have to be able to close them again. You have to do things in the right order. You'd be daft doing Deity Yoga without having someone to ask about stuff. 

            Of course, I completely ignored that advice from Ringu Tulku, but I've been lucky so far and I've only had good things from meditating. And everything in that regard is getting much better. Much, much better. Something is happening in there!!! Maybe something wonderful. What a fortunate creature I am, I am. What a fortunate creature I am!

            I think only two people regularly read this blog. It gets hits from folk looking for vase breathing instructions and that's about it. But recently someone has been reading big chunks of it here and there. With the statscounter thing, you can find out roughly where hits are coming from. Tappahannock in Washington, Virginia. The thing that comes up is the Tappahannock Police Department. Well, as a Scottish school kid I was taught the mantra for all occasions: it wisny me. A big boy did it and ran away.

        The Susquehanna River runs into Virginia. Susquehanna was my mantra for over a decade when I started meditating. Just looking at it on the page engenders pleasantness. Susquehanna, susquehanna, susquehanna ... that's the way to do it!!

            

 

Here comes the next bit.

 

                I love fires. These have not encouraged up the allotment since the lockdowns, but I had a excuse for this one. I just love fires.

                Next week I'll be getting my onions from the shop and the whole allotmenteering thing is just about to take off again. This year I will do better! 

                There were ten downloads on the Kindle site. You can put them up for free every ninety days if you can get onto the site! Four of the downloads were for the Ecuador book. I was more pleased that copies of Bugtown and In the Land of the Demon Masters were downloaded. I'm sure under fourteen year old folk will like them.

                  I've started a new book. I read the first draft of Cold Killing and the plotline is okay. I need to add another ten thousand words to the next draft, but I'd rather use the time right now in writing something more personal. 

                

                

Back into the Kindle account!!

         After about two years or so, today I managed to get access to my Kindle Direct Publishing account.

         When I was going round the houses with this back in the day, I ended up phoning Seattle twice and twice I was cut off when my mobile phone money ran out. Then I tried to phone them on my land line and discovered then that the landline phone was fucked. So I bought a new landline phone, but by then I'd grown in resentment against the time the machines took from me, and hadn't the heart to proceed.

        So many false dawns, but today I decided was going to be the day. So I spent the usual hour or so on the laptop, trying passwords, looking for phone numbers and all that jazz. Eventually, I got on the landline and phoned Seattle. 

        I had managed to get to the bit on the computer where it asked me for the expiry date of a visa debit card long since discarded (fraud. Bugger all to do with me! As usual). I managed to get to to this part of the conversation with the person in Seattle and then we could go no further. None of this asking you your maw's maiden name. Naw. What is the expiry date of a debit card you stopped using years ago? Sorry. Okay, after thirty five years plus of meditations, you'd hope not to go into meltdown at this point, but I'd expected the business of working for the machines would last all afternoon, so I phoned the bank to see if I could get the required expiry date.

          There's a half hour queue for the bank on the phone, so I walked down to the bank branch nearest me. Lo and behold, they did have the details. I went back down the road and phoned Seattle again. A different person answered the phone. We got down to the bit where the person asked me about the expiry date. I told them the expiry date. They said this still wasn't enough for them to re-open my account. I could set up a new account. I asked if my eleven books on the old account would switch over automatically.

             At this point I was just about finished with the e-book world. If they told me that the books weren't going to fly from one account to the other automatically, there was no way I was going to spend the time doing it. Dave Bayliss did most of it for Kindle.

            But when I mentioned the eleven books, the person said they'd make an exception and open the account for me. This was an interesting response. Very much a human response. The person maybe had some discretion and didn't like the sound of weeping Scotsmen. Not a machine.

            I tried to buy a book in celebration at getting back into Amazon. That machine still doesn't work, but at least I won't have to phone Seattle. I'll get that sorted out manana.

            I put an old photie (a favourite!) on this post because I still can't get the photies to go from the phone to the computery thing. The more things change, the more they stay the same.