RESOURCES

I could go pull out old diaries and notebooks from the time and see what they remind me of. But I won’t. There is a twisted piece of cedar tree that pokes out of a cup on my desk along with various pens. It came from Death Valley with me to remind me of a luminous moment. Now it just has a pleasant quality in my hand, the ripples in the dry wood look like part of a tiny waterfall. It reminds me of how desperately I needed things to be intense and dramatic back then. The grandiosity of my heroic promises is the flavour that ripples my memory. It may not sound like it, but I’m fond of who I was then, even as I’m glad that things have moved on. Did I do it? Was it down to me that I left certain miseries behind? Was it a function of my intent? Or was it just luck and the passage of time, the kind of time that put the ripples into this thousand-year-old tree?

What took me to the desert to fast with you all? A desire for something real. I was following a thread, a red thread, that was more somatic than made of words. Something I could trust was beyond me and anything I could ever know. I came across this enigmatic saying of Heraclitus, the ancient Greek poet, the other day that seems to pay homage to the greatest of mysteries:

“The awake share a world in common, but those that sleep turn aside into worlds of their own.”

What I call something real is another way of describing that world we share when we waken from our solitary slumbers. Of course, it is a more-than-human world. This is my real memory of time with the School of Lost Borders: sitting in circle of beloved faces, fingering a pebble next to my seat as the wind invites me to listen harder for what might be there. And for all my words, my prayers, my ceremonies, it is just that circle of bodies against the horizon in all directions, and to know that I had found good company in the world we share in common. That is what I carry with me in my bones, even when I’m alone walking in the Cotswolds where I live. Again and again, I drop out of my own sleepy little private world, and find myself in the substantial presence of this common world we share.

I used to angst about doing enough, measuring up and all the rest. Slowly being has overtaken doing, like the tortoise and the hare. Here I am with my little family, the children go to school, we have birthday parties, I take care of business, fix punctures in the car tires. I love to read about politics and history; I’m a scholar through and through. But when I’ve thought enough, I go out in the rain, dressed as needed, my revolutionary gesture is to inhabit the common world we share.

Stephen Bendixson

From originally fasting out with Win in the 1990s’ and taking part in the month long in the mid noughties