4th August 2016
ce each morning


Dear Asher

I hope this reaches Amanda in time for her to print it and give to you when she visits on Friday. When I review all the things that have squeezed themselves into my day since arriving back I the UK after giving some talks in Croatia, I can’t think of any more important than this letter to you. So I’m beginning writing this letter to you whilst still struggling with a sense of shame that I didn’t begin my day with a clearer sense of my priorities. Truthfully, nothing I have done in the last few days or weeks compares to this. I guess we each have our challenges and learning is achieved one step at a time.

You, my brother, are in my heart. I hold you close. I know who you are and I know who you are yet to become. The birds told me this morning. Each day after waking I take a cup of hot water and go to my ‘sit spot’, or as I prefer to call it, my ‘sweet spot’. My SS is a small space located in my garden where I can deeply listen to whatever tutorial the birds, squirrels, snakes, weasels, mice and insects (to name a few) have prepared for me. In this place I have a wide spectrum into which I can lean – my listening, my feeling, my sight, my intuition, my body, my mind. I spend about 45 minutes in this place each morning, and if I’m away on my travels, then I find somewhere similar and do the same thing. A new friend, Jon Young, re-introduced me to this practice a few weeks ago and I’m so glad he did. It is, of course, a kind of meditation, but with ‘sweet spots’ you don’t tend to close your eyes but instead allow your eyes to unfocus to any specific point and instead see across the full width of sight from extreme left to right, bottom to top. Breathing steadies and deepens, pulse drops, and with practice you enter a place of deep alert and awareness. I have always spent long periods of time in nature but I’ve never really allowed myself to become deeply familiar with one small piece of ground but getting to know individual birds, their mates, their children, and the language of their calls: songs, companion calls, territorial aggression, adolescent begging, and alarms. Bird species also speak to other bird species, and then even to mammals etc. Over time a 3-dimensional web of conversation reveals itself that and I the human find my aching longing to belong, answered and accepted. While all this is going on other things happen as well – the trees whisper their truth, the wind brings messages from the four directions, the waters move in natural underground culverts created by moles and worms, the sun warms, the rain nourishes, the clouds like great puffs of smoke from the Peace Chief’s medicine pipe swell and erupt. While observing two crows who having enjoyed their morning feed were preening themselves in an ash tree and hanging out for a while, I realise they were trying to connect me with you. The birds launch out into air and ride the freedom trail, swooping, calling, connected to everything, subtle and at home in a way that most modern humans will never know. You are a young man bird and for a while you have been deprived your freedom. You have been caged and I can only guess at the agony this will have caused you. One day you will regain your freedom and you will be able to spread your wings. I suspect that it is everything that we call ordinary that will give you the most sustained experience of joy. When Viktor Frankl wrote his seminal work ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ after many years imprisoned in Auschwitz concentration camp he made a great gift to all those who believe that they have had the most precious and defining gift granted humans torn from them. The gift of ‘choice’. In different circumstances and in a different time, he, like you, was incarcerated against his will. There is no value or meaning in comparing your circumstances, the fact is that you have lost your freedom and the pattern of your days is in large part, decided by others. What can never be taken away from you is the choice that you have in deciding how you will respond to this experience. I know that you will have dived very low, perhaps to a place where you feel that you have been broken by the experience. I know that you will have experienced loneliness and grief and perhaps despair. Who wouldn’t in such circumstances?  But dear friend Asher, you will fly again, and you will taste freedom in a way most of us never can. Like the Kogi Indian children destined to be shamans, who spend their first nine years in the darkest recesses of their cave home, never ever seeing sunlight, colour, experiencing scent, or the cacophony of life sounds accompanying the life of their village, one day you will walk into a beautiful future. One day you will walk back into the as of people who love you. Who have always loved you. One day you will walk in sunlight and be blessed by the trees, and birdsong will assault your ears with symphonies of cascading joy. One day you will know the preciousness of life, the profound value of this ‘ordinary’ life. In the meantime, and I know that this must be very difficult to take from someone as privileged as me, in the meantime you must focus on the choices that are still yours and that can never be taken away. Gandalf speaking to Frodo says, ‘All you have to do is to decide how you will use the time that you’ve been given.’ This is how it is. A few months ago I met Brian Keenan. He was taken hostage in 1986 and kept in solitary confinement for four and half years, blindfold most of the time and much of it in chains. He went to depths of suffering. Like you he many times battled with hopelessness and the agony of doubting his capacity to survive. But he did, and I had the honour of sharing a meal with him and learning from him, just as I hope I will with you. I am sure that you must feel overwhelmed with the sense of losing your youth to a prison cell, but I for one can tell you that the richest, most wondrous, beautiful and meaningful years of my life have all come to me since my 50th birthday. The marriage I now have, my family, my work in the world, my morning ‘sweet spot’ prayers, my friendships, the taste of my food, my garden……..  So it has been for Brian and so it was for Viktor. Make a choice, my friend, make a choice to weave and stitch, and braid, the man you have always dreamed of being. Use this huge challenge to deepen. You have your imagination – this is a power of vast proportions. Come and join me in my ‘sweet spot’ each morning. I promise you, that until the day comes that we meet outside the walls of your prison, I will place a chair for you by my side each morning as I listen to the song of life that flows and ebbs around my Devon valley. Come sit with me, you are welcome. I will put my arm around your shoulders ad hold you close. If you weep I will hold you closer. If I weep I do not doubt that you will hold me. If we weep together the birds will sweep us up in their wild song and in time no doubt we will be comforted.

Dear friend, Asher, you are not forgotten. Your seat will be next to mine each morning, and as the minutes pass I will speak to the wind and the birds and trees, and they will pass on the word via their relatives, and at some point you will receive a sign and know that you are held in a circle of love and hope and compassion, for this is how things are and always will be.

From my heart to yours

Your friend

Mac