Hello, my name is Nick and this is my first blog for Walking Awake and I'm delighted to be sharing this venture with my lovely partner in life, Denise, aka 'the Queen of the Faeries'!
I love the work that Denise and I are developing together, in fact to refer to it as work is not quite right, it is a way of living and being that we have been moving towards for a long time, one which embraces the present moment in whatever way it arrives. Of course this is not new terrritory, many wise people both historical and contemporary advocate the present moment as the only thing we can truly know, and indeed the one 'truth' there is. Everything else being an idea, a concept, a doctrine or belief, fingers pointing at the moon, to use a Buddhist metaphor.
I am conscious however that 'living in the moment' can become a glib mantra and something we are more often than not unable to do, preoccupied as we are by thoughts of past and future, ruminating endlessly and unhelpfully about the random, often irrelevant subjects that the mind produces. I know this to be true as I spent much effort struggling to make real the skill that I had developed of talking about being fully present to life!
My career of thirty years was in the field of mental health and time and again over that period I witnessed how people's lives were blighted by an inability to differentiate between those thoughts we need to give time to and those which require letting go of, and the sooner the better. Knowing and doing are of course seldom the same thing and this is where a 'practice' or a discipline comes in, or perhaps a wonderful 'aha; or 'eureka' moment after which we simply 'see' differently knowing that we can never return to a former conceptual way of being.
It was in this light that Denise and I, who had been on our separate, but in some ways similar paths met and delighted in discovering we had a complementary way of understanding our journey in life. I had travelled my road into and out of organised religion and found realisation of a very simple, very contented way of living that requires no 'way', but rather an appropriation of what Krishnamurti meant when he referred to truth as being 'a pathless land', and Denise who through her connection to nature experienced the profound wisdom and healing that the natural world can bring us.
Together we are now leading pilgrimages, journeys taken to ancient and special places as we 'walk awake' seeking to be fully present, letting the natural world and its energy be our teacher, and learning from each other as in the spirit of celebration and fun we share our wonderful human connection. It would be a privilege to have you join us.