Shifting out of my body as I died in July 2020 and dispassionately observing the process and then coming back was a game changer. Nothing in my life can ever be the same again, not least in discovering that the depression I had lived with all my life has gone, healed over like an old wound. I can sense where it once was, but it has closed and all I am left with is a slightly rough, unpainted patch which serves only as a reminder of what once was, but that is by no means the biggest deal or change.
I am now constantly aware of nature, not just the flora and fauna and the geography and structure of earth and rocks of the world we live in, but a communion that stretches back billions of years, it’s an achingly beautiful communication that defies my senses. I am too brief a visitor in nature to grasp its true depths and the living energy that contains the evolution of everything.
My family and friends are probably a little tired of me saying, “Something’s going on.” I can sense something just beyond my reach, a music perhaps that tickles my ears but I cannot make out the melody. I know it only because I am captivated by it and am unable to ignore it. What I can say is that it is something indescribably wonderful, something a thousand glorious sunsets can only hint at, but with the same sense of awe, beauty and wonder.
I am attempting to write about it because my whole being yearns towards it. I want to cast myself into it and immerse myself in its vitality and energy.
Have you ever followed the progress of spring across the land? In the UK it begins in southern Cornwall and over a period of three weeks progresses northwards across Britain as all of nature awakens from its winter hibernation. And therein lies natures secret world, winter is akin to our sleep because it is far from lifeless, it’s still alive, but its energy is doing something else, we may not be able to see it, but something is going on constantly. Something which literally bursts forth in spring.
Something I am trying to grasp is hinted at by my inability to engage in political discourse any more and the reason lies in nature. Nature is a doer, only us humans can engage in endless words and conjecture, whilst doing nothing. You know, those conversations when we put the world to rights, when all we’re doing is having a good time talking about it. There is a perfectly good reason why the establishment took down Jeremy Corbyn. He’s a doer. Someone said to me that they destroyed him when they did nothing of the sort. What he was doing before he became leader of Labour, is what he did as leader of Labour and continues to do now that they’ve thrown him out of Labour. He’s a gardener, and his popularity was and is as a doer and the last thing the establishment wants is for ordinary people to be motivated and energised and start doing anything that isn’t just paid work. Corbyn gets it and the English establishment rose up against him in a hate campaign that beggared belief. meanwhile the true measure of the man is that he’s still walking the same walk, all they did was prevent him from becoming Prime Minister. His place in history is assured as the best Prime Minister we never had and whether the real Corbyn story will ever be told remains to be seen.
I have included what is certainly a controversial paragraph because nature is not a passive player in life, it’s a catalyst which exemplifies doing: actions not words. Even the sounds of nature are as a result of it’s activity. Let me put that another way for humanity: words without action are just noise. We are natural creatures and to be well and to flourish we need to be engaged and active. Most depression is the result of suppression and oppression and (in my experience) repressed anger.
For many years I was a canoeist and a river leader on white water trips. My wife once said to me that she wished I’d go away every weekend because I came back shining. I have never, ever, been depressed in a canoe, but I lacked the understanding to get it.
Coming back from the dead has heralded a new chapter in my life, one that I am growing into, the changes going on in me are active in my desire to engage with the unknown, to throw myself uncaring into the river of life. I don’t know where it’s going, but every atom of my body and every impulse in my mind desires to immerse myself in it and experience it and it is natures energy that’s driving it, to which I am more connected than ever before. Something is going on, I don’t know what it is but it is wonderful. Knowing doesn’t really matter, making, doing and living and being is what truly matters.
Keith Lindsay-Cameron aka KOG. 09 May 2021.
Conspiracy of Kindness 