Author: linda

Madly Singing in the Mountains

Posted on By linda
Orgiva, 26th January 2018
 
 
It is beautifully bright this morning and my phone says it’s eight degrees but it feels much colder.  I am huddling under a duvet and a thick wool rug in this tomb cold hostel, and unless I go to the hassle of putting my socks and shoes on I am going to have to nip down the ice tiled corridor to the loo in my bare feet.
 
Winter is short out here and not too severe. People, at least the ones in the South of Spain, just seem to endure it without going to the hassle of installing central heating. They stand in lines at the bars, keeping their coats on and huddling together, the energy of their dialogue warming their bodies and the entire bar. I am taking it easy today as I walked for more than eight glorious hours yesterday, a most exhilarating walk where I had a nowhere-near-death-experience that scared the living daylights out of me. I was walking the mountain path from Canar back to Orgiva when the mountainside fell away steeply to the right and dropped many hundreds of feet into a gorge below.  The footpath, if you could give it such a grand title, was barely visible along the edge of this gorge but not for a minute did I think of turning back, even though my legs were like jelly and my heart was thumping like a teenage boy’s hatch-back. I took this photo from the other side just after I did a little dance to celebrate remaining alive!
 
 
After seven hours of walking and still a while to go before I reached Orgiva, I found myself on the road. Even before I got out my hitchhiking sign, a battered red VW transporter van pulled up alongside me and a thickly accented voice asked if I wanted a lift. At this stage I didn’t really care where he was going, I just needed to sit down for a while. I was profuse in my thanks and beamed at him in gratitude. We chatted as we rattled along and soon he turned off the main road and onto the rougher road that led to Bayacas, a settlement a mile or so from Orgiva.  His name was Harald and he was an Austrian with huge blue eyes that sparkled and rolled in a very comical and endearing way. He stopped the van disappointingly soon but we chatted for a few more minutes, time enough for me understand that he was a very unusual human being.  He seemed both highly intelligent and ridiculous at the same time and we immediately connected in laughter. We hugged as we parted and as I walked off towards Orgiva he called, “I suppose first time is not too soon for a kissing on lips!” I laughed and continued to walk, leaving him behind.  After a few moments I suddenly felt a sharp stab of regret that I hadn’t returned and given him a kiss, and blessed him with a, “Namaste,” the divine in me kisses the divine in you. Convention had paralysed my instinct to love and be generous. The mind leapt in with its judging and having weighed the situation, concluded that such an act as kissing a stranger was beyond the pale. I had forgotten that we are here in this life for such a fleeting and beautiful moment…..and then, what? 
 
Why does everything have to age and decay? Even the plants, the trees and the mountains will crumble and fall. Why are we brought into existence to die and die and die? I feel these moments of burning joy like a match in a black cavern, blinding and bright and then they are gone. Why must life be snatched away just as we begin to get the hang of it? I feel as if I have spent most of my life in a barely conscious state, not realising that everything has a consciousness, even the mountains, it is just an older and much slower consciousness. You know your are held by it when you walk there for eight hours.  On my return to England I was asked by my Spiritual Guide to finish this sentence:
“When I was walking in the mountains I was……”
Without hesitation I answer, “Praying.”
 
 

Madly Singing in the Mountains

Posted on By linda
Madly Singing in the Mountains.
 
 
One Wonderful Life
 
Writing  a blog for my website is a lot harder than I thought it would be.  You start out wanting to share something of your own experience of life and find that your life is completely enmeshed with the lives of other people,  And you don’t want to implicate some unsuspecting friend or relative in your possibly weird or unusual experiences.  Neither do you want to embarrass your children, which I am delighted to say is getting more difficult. And then there are always my lovely Christian friends who are likely to come to all manner of conclusions ranging from not being at all surprised to being rather shocked, depending on how well they know me.  Honestly, I think that if everyone’s life were laid out for inspection we would be both shocked and delighted at what we found lurking behind the well managed image we present to the world.
 
So here I am in Spain, with the words of one friend ringing in my ears, “Tell people you are going with a friend or they will think you are having marriage problems!” As if having marriage problems is the absolute worst thing I could possibly have! I AM having life problems, or not exactly life problems but something more akin to uncertainties. That sounds much less grave, except when you have built the foundations of your life on these certainties. Certainties ranging from the existence of God to what are the best ways of being human. Concerning the last topic, I and many of my friends think that we live very upright, responsible lives.
 
In Orgiva, Spain, where I am staying there is a community called Benefício.  It is a small village that nestles in a small river valley and has a Rivendell feel about it. It is co-owned by many of the residents and within it there are small businesses, including a shop, bakeries, free range eggs and cheese making.  They have shared facilities like composting loos, sports area, large tipi, and outdoor kitchen.  There is no electricity or plumbed water.  This comes from a mountain stream and electricity, if you want it must be generated by solar panels. The children are like healthy ferrets, running about covered in freckles with very very bright eyes. These people hardly leave a footprint on the earth and they turn up on market day in Orgiva. You know they are from Beneficio because their clothes are often very worn out, they have unkempt hair, they might not smell of persil, they are strong and walk with animal grace. But if you met them in the street of Cambridge, you would likely disregard them.
 
Drop outs is what they are. They have dropped out of polluting the atmosphere with their cars, from contributing to landfills, from filling their houses with goods they want but don’t need, indeed from nearly all of the destructive practices that the rest of us in the affluent west are engaged in and would defend with all the democratic vigour of people who feel entitled. So if god exists, would he/she prefer a person from Beneficio, or someone who likes to have the correct religious credentials to earn them eternal life while defending the capitalist rights that sustain the annihilation of other species and destroy the planet? An interesting question that leads me straight to the conclusions that NO WAY could I live like those good folk of Beneficio. Maybe if I was 20 but not now. So what can I do or not do? Plenty, but that’s written about in much more creative ways than I can do here. What we mustn’t do is nothing. And I do know that’s a double negative but honestly I think it deserves it. What are we waiting for? Someone or some government to rescue us and impose green policies on us? We don’t vote for them. Not only that, we won’t clean up our own shit until that country over there clears up theirs. The first will be first and the last will be last.
 
But how to live more simply in a complex and competitive world that is hardly fit for humans any more? Many people are doing jobs they hate for far too many hours in order to provide goods that other people don’t really need. And I ask myself, why do we continue to live like this? I have taken a sideways step because I feel I am failing at everything I do.  Not that it doesn’t look good on the outside, but inside I feel raw and empty and I feel like a loser. Don’t consider patting me. I am glad to be here. I am beginning to understand that I want to be accepted as a human being, not because of what I do or achieve but simply because of who I am. This is the message that Christianity, the religion that has formed much of the thinking in the west should be teaching surely?  That we must become losers, have little, be simple, not laud our achievements, even be despised and rejected….Now there’s a thought. Instead we learn to run and many of us keep running right to the end of our lives to keep the plates of achievement and success in the air. But we are worth so much more than life on a treadmill.  We are glorious and wonderful and creative and deeply lovable but most of us have forgotten that we only have one wonderful life….what will we do with it?

Madly Singing in the Mountains

Posted on By linda
Madly Singing in the Mountains
 
 
Jan 23rd Orgiva, Spain
 
The pencil begins to write but what am I going to say in this brand new notebook, dated at the top and located by the word “Orgiva”. What have I come here for?  In the taxi on the way from Granada I told Daniel, the driver, that I had come back to find my heart in the mountains. I had somehow  misplaced it here last October. Mi corazon, donde esta mi corazon?
 
As the plane lifted off from Gatwick I whispered, “Good bye my beloveds,” and we swam upwards through the dense grey cloud and drizzle.  It began to get brighter, so bright that my eyes started to water, and like a drowning man the plane burst out of the cloud and into the sunshine. Up here in the blue I had detached from England and I was crying. I ate some bendy sandwiches and slept all the way to Spain barely hearing the announcements that precede the trolleys stuffed with food like substances or must have goodies that promise eternal youth and beauty.  Somewhere over the Sierra Nevada I opened my eyes. Here I was at the start of this strange turn of events in my life. 
 
Snow has blanketed the mountains above Granada and the range floats above an indigo landscape like a dream. I want to devour those sharp peaks until they are all inside me, crisp and dry like a meringue. The poor woman next to me must be convinced that I am terrified of flying because I am, to my own surprise, crying again. At that moment I have a strange realisation that if we were to crash and my body were to smear and burn into the Spanish landscape, I would be content, and a few minutes later, stepping off the plane and into the warm, golden afternoon sunshine I unexpectedly feel a huge surge of relief.
 
It was here that some terrible mountain god shoe-horned a great empty space inside me and filled it with a painful longing for mountains, nature, and a deep hunger for the Divine. I have been running around ever since, looking for comfort but really nothing has touched the sides. Music, no matter how loud, just sounds clamorous there, the space is too vast to fill with dance, only friendship and love light a candle in the cavern from time to time, and even then, only once has someone had the nerve to stay and watch with me. 
 
I wonder, “Why me?” why have I become unplugged from the Matrix? Why do I find myself standing on the edge of burning reality watching the dead bury the dead, shouting, “Wake up! Look at the terror and beauty that grip you in their wild dance! It’s what you’re made for. You are Divine! There is only one dancer and only one dance!” I don’t remember swallowing the red pill yet here I am with my walking boots for two weeks, leaving behind a few bewildered people, and hoping to return to them with more than just blisters on my feet.
 
 

Ecstatic Dancing

Posted on By linda

It’s Friday evening and I am crawling through the traffic on Hills Road in Cambridge. Around me I see people, lots of people, all rushing somewhere and I wonder if they are happy. At the red light I want to leap from the car and take hold of one particularly harried and weary looking woman and say, “Come with me and in an hour you will be dancing with joy.”

I am on my way to St Paul’s Primary School Hall, where Alex Svoboda, a charismatic Russian man, is teaching Freedom Dance. I am greeted with hugs by three thirty-something women who are taking our money at the door and around them are piles of coats, clothes, and shoes. Behind them the school hall is subtly lit and packed with people. There are white heads and dreadlocks, farmers and nurses, artists, hippies, business people and students, people of all ages and sizes, and they are listening to Alex who invites us to, “open to the music”.

For thousands of years people have left the grind of work behind them to meet under the stars and the trees or around fires where they would hold hands in a circle and sing songs to begin the dancing, spinning and whirling faster and faster until a climactic sense of unity and bliss was found. This exhilaration and ecstatic emotion was seen by the celebrants as a direct experience of the Divine, and was particularly attractive to working people. Inevitably it drew the disapproval of the civic and religious authorities, who had no control over this unruly and ungovernable behaviour.

This deeply human and instinctive activity was stamped out around the 17th century when worship became mediated by Priests, who lined up the worshippers in front of him, in straight wooden pews. In spite of this suppression, dance kept bursting out all over the place in carnivals and festivals but now, having been separated from the Divine presence it became experienced as a purely hedonistic activity.

Tonight as I join with sixty or seventy other people, I am about to experience a mystical state, not one mediated by religion or therapy but by this lovely Russian with excellent taste in music. Dancing is not some special ability, gifted to only a few people who have skills, it belongs to every human being who is prepared to let go and give themselves to the music and the dance.

When describing their experiences people use words like, home, healing, self acceptance, no judgement, a return to who I really am, or as a discovery that you’ve got a second, third, fourth and fifth gear of perception, when all you have ever accessed before is first gear. In neurological terms, our brain waves on a day to day basis are dominated by beta waves (problem solving, cognitive) but we can tune into our alpha waves (awareness and power of now) and delta and theta waves (creative and transcendent) through intentional activities like meditation and freestyle dancing.

The music flows and sometimes we dance alone, moving around and between each other, sometimes we hook up in twos and threes to dance together. It is exciting, exhilarating and often very funny, and comical. Alex skilfully blends one track with the next, building and building the rhythm and pulse until it reaches a heart thumping crescendo where we all let go in utter abandonment and an incredible high. This shared experience can often create a deep release in the dancer and it is not unusual to see people in a silent embrace while one weeps silently into the sweat soaked clothing of another. With this shared intensity of experience it is hardly surprising that real friendships are made and a supportive community grows up around the dance.

The dancers come from many back-grounds and life experiences and there is no dogma here. From my own Christian perspective I see myself as a creation or expression of the Divine who wants to dance with me in an ecstatic and direct experience of worship and joy. For others it is a cathartic release from a week of stress or anxiety at work, and there are those who just love to dance. When the music ends a dozen or so of us decamp to the local pub, famished and thirsty. From our table gales of laughter billow around the room and I notice envious glances being sent in our direction.

Medical research shows that dancing has huge health benefits. It is a great cardiovascular work out and according to the New England Journal of Medicine, “dancing dramatically reduces the occurrence of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. But not just any dancing will do. Freestyle dancing requires constant split-second, rapid-fire decision making which is the key to maintaining intelligence because it forces your brain to regularly rewire its neural pathways….Frequent freestyle dancing was shown by the study to reduce the risk of dementia by 76 percent, twice as much as reading and playing sports or practising choreographed dance sequences which had no benefit at all.”

So leave your inhibitions behind, get into some loose clothes, grab a friend and find the dance. They are not exclusive and although you might have to travel to a town or city, I am certain you won’t regret it. On the Internet search for “5 Rhythms Dance” or look here “www.5rhythms.com/EventSearch.php

(Linda Richardson)