I HAIL THE IMAGINAL - AND TRY TO ANSWER THE QUESTION OF WHY EVEN BOTHER WITH NON ORDINARY REALITY

 

 I was asked recently, why bother at all with Non Ordinary Reality? Ordinary Reality is wonderful. It is all we need. And it needs our help. 

I have muddled around with an answer. It is a good question, because it bypasses the obvious. The people I do Shamanic things with, understand about Non Ordinary Reality, but their understanding is not automatic. Many of us don't share it. Many of us are empiricists. They would state that is not just that NOR is not to be bothered with, but that it doesn't exist. 

Yes, OR is wonderful, or to be more explicit, the Middle World is wonderful. It includes all the things we think we know, all the deep lessons of science, all that we perceive with our senses. It is beautiful and terrible and subjective and real. And it does need our help; climate change catastrophe is upon us and to do anything at all about it we need a shared understanding and a will to act and that all has to be grounded in OR to mean anything. It is clearly not enough to float around in alternative realities grooving to the spacey vibes of the cosmos right now. 

So here are my arguments, and I admit their philosophical weaknesses. Shamanism, as a way of exploring NOR, is experiential and experimental rather than theoretical, so the theory is weak in comparison. Or maybe not weak so much as diverse, culturally informed, and personal. 

My first argument is from history. Of course arguments from history tend to have problems with the logic, but I think I can get away with this because there is so much history. I reiterate, for ninety percent of our human history we were animists. We saw the world as alive, people with non-human entities, and we were more naturally able to access this aliveness by experiencing NOR. I have written before about how animism has been normative, and how this aliveness gradually receded from our consciousness over the last thousand years or so, yet has remained just under the surface. 

For ninety percent of our history, we thought that NOR was real. 

I know that for some people the acknowledgement of empiricism has been liberating, but mostly what they mean by that is atheism. They have found it personally liberating to not have to believe in God any more, with all the baggage that entails. They are free from the psychological gymnastics they have to undertake to believe in things that they just can't, and from the guilt and fear and so on. These are important experiences, but they have nothing to do with the existence or otherwise of NOR. 

I have asked in groups, has anyone here ever experienced Non Ordinary Reality? A few tentative hands would go up. I would ask, really? Have you ever had a dream? Have you ever had a daydream? Have you ever taken alcohol or other drugs? Have you ever  had a mystical experience? Have you ever had a premonition or a Near Death Experience or seen a ghost or had any experience of the numinous? Almost all hands go up, and people nod and smile. NOR is not that hard to find. We all of us have the background for an exploration of NOR. Some of us wander around in it all the time, but without awareness or will or purpose.

The question then becomes, but is it real, or is it your imagination. Well, yes. See the paragraph above. Sigh. 

Holy the imagination. Holy the impulses of the brain. Holy the cave of the skull and the light that fills it. Holy the silky tide of spinal fluid, and the rainbow of chemicals, and the fire of electricity. Holy the physical heft of it - the surge of oxytocin, the hairs on the back of the neck rising, the hands uplifted. I cast my eyes to the hills, the real hills, and all of this happens in that holy cave of the my skull. Holy all of it. No less holy than angels is our experience of them. You may even say we make them holy. We sanctify the world and it sanctifies us right back. There may be nothing else. 

Having said all that, there is however an aspect of will when it comes to navigating in NOR. I think I can make a distinction between willed imagination and unbidden experience that is bigger than the usual state of consciousness. You will know the shift. You lie there thinking about journeying, propelling yourself around in your mind, asking yourself questions, willing 'something to happen'. Or you dance and dance and shake the rattle and drink a heap of vodka and you think you see something out of the corner of your eye, but in the end it is nothing, you are just making it up. Often it is like, I thought I experienced something, but I didn't. I was just making it up. Then you feel the shift, or something like taking off and leaving your will behind. Once you have left your will behind, the opportunity is there for helping spirits to come in and guide you. You are now tapped into power beyond yourself. You still have some will, in that you can make choices and ask questions and so on. But the more you are in there, the deeper the trance, the less will is possible. Working with will is a useful skill.

Henry Corbin, Islamic scholar, uses the word imaginal. Poet Gerard Manly Hopkins uses the word inscape. These are attempts to describe a state of enfolding realities within the human brain. I want to find a term that is not metaphor but not equivalence. I don't actually mind the resulting lacuna. No words work here, and yet we have written millions.

Now I need to address the other part of the question - that Ordinary Reality, by which I mean here the material world, needs our help. Help needs to be grounded in OR. 

Why we journey is traditionally to help in OR. Shamans journeyed to heal people, find scarce resources, and guide communities. I return to the example of Black Elk of the Lakota. Black Elk had a mysterious illness as a child and he lingered in a coma for many days. In that coma, he experienced a vision. Much later, when the Lakota were under existential threat from the white invaders, he spoke of his vision. It was a highly elaborate vision, and the people enacted it faithfully over several days, a whole community event. I can't imagine that happening in my society. For a start, nobody would trust a vision, or the person who had the vision, that much, and it they did it would be a worry because that person would probably be running a cult. There is little space for true community NOR vision in this world of cynicism and grift. But think of the possibility for genuine consultation and change. I can imagine it. Black Elk had proven himself in battle and daily life before he was able to tell his vision. His vision nearly cost him his life. He had to be worthy even to talk about it. His shamanic abilities needed to be tested and publicly acknowledged, and they were by no means infallible or beyond debate. I don't want to overstate this, but I can see the shamanic vision as a tool for community decision making and whole community involvement in rituals which then enhance the experiences of NOR for everyone. As I have said before, it is the job of the Shaman to turn into the crab or the bear or the ancestor, and it is our job to see the crab or the bear or the ancestor. NOR is for everyone.

In neo-Shamanism of various sorts, or Core Shamanism, journeying in NOR is used primarily for personal spiritual development. I have my serious doubts about the endless search for personal growth, or the endless growth, or the endless bloody endlessness of it all which can result in as much guilt and powerlessness as traditional religion. However, wise guidance from helping spirits you trust in the Upper or Lower Worlds is a good thing. It is a way of getting information and advice you would not otherwise have access to. It can also be healing and soothing and fun. The helping spirits I work with have very rudimentary senses of humour, for example. I am refreshed by their silliness. 

Working in NOR with an animistic framework can impart a respect and love for the natural world. You realize you are not just part of it, but entangled in it, in and out of different realities. Here is where the boundaries between realities become porous for us. The mountain is holy in all realities. It is holy because it has always been so. It is holy because it is beautiful and treacherous and clearly a person. It is holy because it is a keeper of secret wisdom. And so on. The shamanic view starts and ends with this world, the natural world, the real ordinary world, wherever it may go during the journey. 

None of this obliges us to do the right thing for the planet or be better people. We are still subject to ideology and cultural bias and our own psychological strengths and problems. I suppose I could give thanks to my Power Animals in a nature ritual and then go home and eat a huge steak packaged in a hundred years of plastic. I could doom myself to thoughts and prayers. Experiences in NOR need to feed back into OR. They are likely to sensitize us to the natural world, our actual world, and give us context and a bigger picture. Balanced with activism and a healthy ethical system good moral judgment, that is. 

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The photo is of  the entrance to Te Puna o Riuwaka, also known as the Riwaka Resurgence.

 

THE BEST DAY OF THE YEAR: I HAIL THE WOOD PILE!

The Wood arrived yesterday. Wood Day is the best day of the year and I am always excited beyond reason. Here it is in its raw form, before being stacked and the ritual made for it. The Wood comes each year to warm us and light us. I love the Wood very much. It smells of boreal forests, of ancestry. Stacking it makes the holy Wood Pile. We approach the Wood Pile with offerings of Wood, giving itself to itself. Each Wood has made so many journeys just to get to the Pile. When I handle the Wood, I trace it back from tree to seed to water. It is all there in my hands, so that stacking is an act of reverence and memorial.

The arrival of the Wood is an early hint that Summer will be over soon. Along with bottling and preserving and Winter planting. Thus the world turns, and sometimes even we notice.

It is also a chance to consider the concept of enough. Having enough for Winter was surely a preoccupation for many of my ancestors. Enough warmth, enough food, enough company. All the Winter festivals are doubly precious because they affirm that there is enough. Now our preoccupation with enough-ness is way out of whack. There is never enough for the world in this stage of terminal capitalism. Planning for scarcity, real scarcity, is something we may have to learn again.

 Here is the Wood Pile half stacked. Gentle sparks of light filter through the tarp, its dappled irregularities a complex wonder. Holy the light! Holy as it speaks of its source! Holy as it enters the cave of my skull! All is holy today. 

Here is the ritual to welcome the Wood into the Wood Pile. And to bless the Wood Pile. This is a Cernunnos ritual of sorts, for himself is of the northern forest and also is for prosperity.I hail and thank Cernunnos. I hail the Wood Pile, its mites and wights, and the Clan of Pholcidae who are welcome to come and live in it. I ask the Wood Pile to last all Winter and keep us warm and bright. The little drum, not the big one I use for journeying, sounds flat like step step step step step. There are grains and fruits and consecrated water. All is poured over the Pile and I leave. Salve!

This kind of ritual is close to prayer. Because I am asking the Wood Pile to do what it is going to do anyway, what it is there to do. We pray to God, if we pray to God,  to do what God is bound to do by God's nature. God is bound in this way to God's attributes in a way that we are not. I think there is some theology around this, and perhaps someone with some theological sophistication can tell me more. If there is some sort of Aristotelian grain, of right meaning or the right way to be, the Wood Pile knows it. It is the sentient guardian of our Winter, and it settles nicely into its destiny.

 

WHY DON'T YOU JUST PRAY TO GOD? SHAMANISM AND RELIGION

 There are many good reasons for praying to God, depending on how you perceive God of course. In my experience, the best and most pure reasons are praise and gratitude. Love for God is an upwelling of the soul, and prayer is one way to express it. 

I have not found that God will do things for me or give me advice. I know that many people do experience God in that way, and good for them. Clearly I have got a different God or a different relationship with God.

Shamanism works with helping spirits. One way of thinking about these helping spirits is as step down transformers. The Shaman works with power, here meaning a vital force that is more positive than just energy. Helping spirits moderate that power. Too much power is as unworkable as too little. If you think of the Divine as infinite power, helping spirits are almost literal step down transformers. 

Helping spirits can be deities. If you are a soft polytheist, those deities can show up in different religions or in pagan pantheons, or as local spirits. Some are more powerful than others, but that does not make them necessarily less amenable. In the Upper World especially, the Shaman is introduced to great figures from different religions as helping spirits. 

Shamanism is not a religion or a belief system. It is a practice. It is the practice of working with spirits to effect change, such as healing or divination. The Shaman travels in Non Ordinary Reality to do this. It is a social role for a practical purpose.The spiritual world view behind this is animism. Animism is not a religion. I will explain why I think this. 

Animism underlies much of the great religions. It is not a primitive form of those religions or a precursor to them. It is like the substrate. If religion is the carpet, animism is the underlay. It is our oldest spiritual practice and we were animists for 90 percent of our history. You can't say first we had animism and then we had religion, because animism is still there underneath the surface. You just don't see the underlay when you walk on the carpet. 

Animistic ideas leach into religious ones. All religions are syncretic. The gods of the old faith become the demons of the new. Sometimes they become the saints, or mythical heroes, or local nature spirits. I have written before about the Roman Catholic practice of using holy water to bless an item as if it is animate. Older and more complex forms of religion have animism shot through them like shimmers of light on silk. 

Religious ideas leach into animism.Shamanic practice is in part culturally influenced - in Non Ordinary Reality we experience what we are primed to experience, to some extent. I don't believe there is any 'pure' Shamanic experience, but in my culture we read and write and talk so much about everything it would be even more impossible to experience something that was not informed by previous understandings. Shamans work with the helping spirits of their religious cultures. They may identify with a religion and practice Shamanism alongside it, or they may practice something more obviously syncretic.

Modern Christianity in particular emphasizes belief. I am a little careful here because I suspect the original use of the word 'credere' meant something like 'you will understand it best once you have had a go at it'. Modern Christian conversion stories talk about belief as being an overwhelming certainty that does not rely on outside evidence.This is described as exhilarating and sustaining. One's experience is governed by belief. For animists, it seems to be the opposite. There is a very low standard of belief. It really matters little what you believe. What matters is what you experience in relationship. Noting is autochthonous. Experiences beget ideas and experiments in consciousness are looped back into praxis. Useful questions might be 'What does it do for you? How does it help the community? Where does it change you? How can this be supported?'

The idea of persons is helpful in animism. We are human persons, but there are non-human persons, other-than-human persons, and more-than-human persons. The only religions I know anything substantive about are Islam and Christianity (perhaps Judaism by extension). Both religions abound in persons that are not human. In Islam, we share the earth with various Jinns, angels and demons. Christianity gives us saints who may well have been seen as not human originally, as well as the usual angels and demons. Our ancestors are also once-were-human persons who crop up within religious culture even if not in the written canon. Ancestor veneration is important within the religions of Taoism and some Buddhism.

It would not surprise me if the great Manifestations of God, founding religious figures, did Shamanic things. I think of the miraculous Night Journey of the Prophet Muhammad, where in one night he rode a magical horse from Mecca to Jerusalem and then up into the heavens, and in graded levels of NOR he  met the previous Prophets. He took this journey at a time of great travail among the new community of Muslims, and while grieving the loss of his wife. On his return, he was able to describe things he could not have seen in Ordinary Reality. This sounds to me like an Upper World journey. I am not saying here that prophets such as Muhammad were just Shamans, only that they did things that seem to be Shamanic. 

Animism is not a religion because it is not systematic. It is informal and pluralistic. I was taught by the Foundation for Shamanic Studies that there are three worlds - Upper, Middle and Lower. For many animistic world views this is true, but not always. In Norse animism there are nominally nine worlds, but the relationship among these is expressed differently in different places. From the early modern period onwards, Europeans have loved taxonomies. Putting things in places is an aesthetic joy. But our sense of orderliness falls over when it comes to the many different expressions of animism. The worlds of spirits tumble over each other in an entanglement that just gets bigger and richer the more you explore them. I have experienced the three worlds, but not as a static, discrete system that I can easily describe. As Walt Whitman said 

 'Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)'

 It is a wonder that we can share language about these worlds, but they have enough in common that we can. The worlds of the Shaman are interactive with the Shamanic experience. You roll the carpet out in front of you as you go, while also being aware that thousands of practitioners have also rolled out their carpets. 

 

Further: Nordic Animism YouTube Channel is an interesting take. Thanks to Kevin Turner of FSS for the analogy of the step-down transformer. The Night Journey of Muhammad is attested in many hadith. When you read about it, you will find other examples within religion. 

 

 

 

 

WHY YOU SHOULD BE FARED WELL: YES, YOU NEED A FUNERAL (OR DO YOU?)

 People tell me they don't want a funeral. There are the rational reasons: that funerals are expensive, that they would rather leave money to their loved ones, that gatherings are a waste of resources and too difficult during these Covid times. There are the personal reasons: that no one would come, that their families are absent or would not want to take responsibility, that family gatherings end in fights, that it is too sad to think about. 

There are some answers to these issues that are more worldly, and some that aren't. 

Firstly, there is a whole movement towards taking control over the funeral process, including what to do with the body. Home funerals, straight-to-crem options, eco burials, are all options here in Aotearoa. The funeral industry looks like a juggernaut and its history implies a kind of cultural hegemony, but that is not necessarily true. You can build or pre-buy a coffin. You can have a body at home without embalming. You can transport a body. You can do the paperwork yourself. The advantage of having a funeral professional take over it all is that you don't have to do the work, and it is work. So DIY funerals are best for functioning families with time and some resources. Good funeral directors listen and understand that funerals are more personalized these days. 

It was a funeral director who explained to me that the opposite trend, towards no funeral, is not ideal for grieving. A funeral has a moment of realization in it, that the person is dead. That this is a farewell. This realization needs to happen at a social level. Regardless of how messy the family is, how fraught the grieving, how difficult the relationships, there still needs to be this social acknowledgement that the person is dead. Whether you do shots during the speeches or burnouts in the car park or play the whole of  Handel's Messiah is less important than that moment of truth. The rest of it is just how you get to that moment. 

I have said before that the time between the death and the faring well, however you do it, is a tender and liminal time. A limen is a threshold. The soul, or the part of it that leaves, is at the threshold. What we do and how we handle ourselves can have an effect on the soul. Because we are in a tender and liminal state too.

Martin Prechtel in his beautiful book 'The Smell of Rain on Dust' talks about death processes in Meso American societies. There is a river between the village of the living and the village of the dead. The soul crosses that river in a boat made of tears. It follows that the job of the living is to make the boat. They need to cry. What happens if the person who died was a asshole? They still need to cry. Because if the soul does not cross the river, they are stuck in the village of the living. Then they are suffering, and they make the living suffer too by haunting them. 

That liminal time between the death and the farewell is not safe. It depends on your view of death itself. In white North cultures we are trying to normalize death and lose our fear of it. We want to consider it a natural part of the order of things. Other cultures see death as an evil brought into the world, perhaps because of human sin. A bad or sudden death denotes serious wrongdoing. Death is never welcome. It must be treated directly and with bravery and care. There is a hint of this in the Bible. Humans were meant to live for ever but for the sin of Adam and Eve. 

To have a right relationship with the soul of the newly dead is not just about our own emotional passage. It is about the safe passage of the soul. The soul must be guided and even propitiated. As if it were dangerous, which it can be. 

In te ao Maori, death was not there at the beginning. Hine Titama, the goddess of the rainbow, discovered herself to be the product of incest. In her shame, she retreated to the underworld where she became Hine Nui Te Po, the great lady of the night. It was then that death came into the world, and it is Hine Nui Te Po's loving position to receive us all in time. The Maori tangi lasts for days, and is a major social event. For important people, there is often a fierce argument over the body and where it belongs. This indicates respect, but it is not just a token. It is a heated and painful exchange. The movie Waru (2017) has moving sequence where the two kuia from each side of the family argue over who should have the body of the boy Waru, who has died. The tangi is also not the last ceremony for the dead person. A year later, the unveiling of the grave takes place, where a veil is drawn over the grave stone.  This is a hint of a more traditional ceremony of disinterring and reburying the bones. 

https://www.nzfilm.co.nz/films/waru

In parts of Africa, much work must be done to ensure the respected person who has died goes to the land of the ancestors. In Ghana among the Ga people, 'fantasy coffins' are made to display the talents and interests of the dead person. An example might be a coffin in the shape of a Mercedes Benz for a taxi driver. The coffin is carried in a wild drunken procession by young men through the town, partly to give people a chance to say good bye, but partly to confuse the dead person so they can no longer find their way back to their house. Here is a common mix of respect, and sorrow, along with the concern that the soul must find its way to the ancestors and just as importantly, not come back. 

Back to the North society I am used to, we may not have the socially sanctioned belief that the soul is in need of help or that this tender time is dangerous, but we can consider the needs of our souls nevertheless. Anglo Saxon style funerals can be deeply connecting and emotionally satisfying. Even up into the early modern period, we took our deaths seriously. Here is the Lyke Wake Dirge, a truly scary dirge sung to the dead either during the wake,, or on the way to the graveyard,  in order to help the soul be received by Christ and go to heaven:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3JyVHOq7PQ

 Chances are they are not going to play the Lyke Wake Dirge at your funeral. Or run your coffin through the street. Or grieve openly for days. If the funeral you attend for the person you care about is not emotionally satisfying, or does not engage with that tender and dangerous liminality, do your own. Have an alt-funeral, even if you do it informally. Here we are:

A young man dies of cancer. His funeral is large, as they usually are for the young, and mostly the preserve of the family. Lots of aunts, lots of hugs, little cousins, sandwiches, the crematorium booked for an hour and the next funeral party waiting as everyone leaves. At the 'after party' some uncles get ridiculously drunk, and there are more little cousins twirling in their fairy dresses. It's a generic celebration. It could be anything. 

But it isn't.

Blessed reverence comes to his friends the next night. They meet up more or less accidentally. They light a fire on the beach where he used to surf. They smoke probably too much pot and cry more than they expect. They talk about him, only a little, but they feel his life as it streamed through their lives, and they feel it streaming still.

 

  The photos are from the book 'Soul of Africa: Magical Rites and Traditions' (1999) by Christoph, Muller and Muller. 

FARING WELL: BEING BORN INTO A SAD FAMILY

 

 

In 1968, two year old Jefferie Hill went missing while playing near a creek near his home. Distraught family members searched the creek, which was narrow and full of rubbish, because they were sure he had not been swept away. They believed he had been taken. He was never found, dead or alive.  

Radio New Zealand covered Jefferie’s story as one episode in a series call The Lost. 

https://www.radionz.co.nz/programmes/the-lost/story/2018622831/the-lost 

Jefferie’s family members were interviewed for this series and talked about how they had coped with this difficult and unresolved loss. I was most interested in the words of his younger sister Laura. A reverend had told Jefferie’s mother that in order to get over the loss of Jefferie, she should have another baby. So she did, and it was Laura. Laura talked about how if it had not been for Jefferie going missing, she would not exist. And she said this: 

‘I was born into a family of sad people’. 

I wondered what it is like being born into a family of sad people, so I asked my friend Anne Marie. 

Anne Marie had her first baby very young, a beautiful boy Callum. Circumstances were not ideal, but she was firercely proud of Callum and did all she could for him. Then one day she went in to check and Callum was dead.  

Anne Marie already had various authorities sniffing around in her life, and she was used to adversity. When she saw Callum, she just knew he was dead, there was no ‘denial stage’. She thought, very calmly, people will come, I had better clean the house. She cleaned the house, set out tea and biscuits, and rang the Police, and rang her mother, and settled down to wait, dry eyed and dissociated.  

Anne Marie drank her way through the next few so-called ‘stages of grief’. She was bored and tired all the time, slept a lot, played first person shooter all through the nights, thought about Callum all the time, without actually thinking at all. She would stand in the street in the middle of the night and shout Callum’s’s name. She would drive drunk to Calllum’s grave and lie there for hours. It was the wild party of despair, the frantic psychic search through all the dark and muddy fields of the soul.  

When she got pregnant again, she was at first indifferent, but love grew and Zoe was born. Zoe, like Laura, was born into a family of sad people. She was so loved. Unlike Callum, Zoe was bonny and big almost ridiculously bright and healthy. Anne Marie indulged her new daughter quite deliberately. Now married, and in stable accommodation, she knew Zoe both was, and was never, a replacement for Callum. Despite her robust nature, Zoe was born with a shadow on her, to a mother who still ran from time to time in those dark and muddy fields. She was born to a family of sad people.  

There is no tidy ending to Anne Marie’s grief. Anniversaries relating to Callum are still hard for her. Her marriage ended badly. Her husband took custody of Zoe, and then sent her to boarding school.  However, some years ago Anne Marie became an active Christian, and her faith community supported her grief in sober and caring ways. She told me that the funeral for Callum was terrible; it was tainted by family conflict and Anne Marie had no say over how it took place. It left her feeling more alone than ever. So her faith community created a new funeral for Callum. It was a traditional funeral with a eulogy and speeches and afternoon tea afterwards. This time, Anne Marie was able to express her grief safely among friends.  

Anne Marie is an experienced and sophisticated griever. She knows that grief is a part of her, and that there is no simple ‘getting over it’ with time. The emotional parts of our brains have no time frames – trigger us the right way and we are right back there, all over again. She told me about a poem she read once, and this is how she described it: 

There are people one this side of the shore, and the dead person is placed in a ship, and the ship sails to the other shore, where it is awaited by the community of the dead. The farther away the ship gets from us, on the living side, the closer it gets to the shore of the dead. Thus, the soul’s farewell by us of the living, gently passes her to the welcome of the dead.  She is always accompanied. * 

 

*Here is a link to the poem. 

https://allpoetry.com/gone-from-my-sight 

FARING WELL: PART TWO: ROCKET LAUNCHER

 

This is the second in a series of posts called 'Faring Well', about some special ways of farewelling the dead, and about tender and liminal spaces. 

The Kauri Tree in the picture is unrelated, but represents respect for the stand out personage of Darren. 

Here is the story:

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My friend Lawrie had a misspent youth; in fact it was said to his face: ‘You’ve got a lot of teeth for a cheeky cunt’, and it was true. By the time I met him he had mellowed a lot, but he still had his rocket launcher.

One of nature’s engineers, Lawrie had gone to school to eat his lunch, but he had learned elsewhere by asking himself questions like: ‘What happens if I put that in there?’ He also liked things that exploded. He had a quality collection of weapons. So it was fairly understandable that he would build himself a rocket launcher out of bits and pieces of crap from hardware stores and people’s junk. He said he just wanted to see if he could do it, but I suspect his other motive was protecting his cannabis plantation. This was a serious piece of kit, I mean, a bring-down-a-helicopter piece of kit. Whenever Lawrie fired it, there was a Police investigation into the lights and bangs in the night sky. Lawrie leads a charmed life, that boy.  I am one of the few people to have seen the thing. It is made of plastic pipe and papier mache, would you believe, but its wiring is amazingly sophisticated.

Which brings me to Darren. Darren helped with the wiring. Darren was Lawrie’s mentor, and inspiration. Older, stocky, bearded, indestructible, a talented artist and a ferocious intellect. He was I guess a redneck environmentalist, a very local entity, who lived in a house he built himself in the deep countryside. I never met him. He died of cancer, and it was Lawrie’s great grief that he was not a part of that. Darren’s new partner had no time for Darren’s old crew. Lawrie was shut out.

Lawrie wanted to farewell Darren in his own way. He got the bros together and a party was held in the wilderness near Darren’s house. All day, while everyone else drank and smoked, Lawrie built the rockets, putting into each of the nine, the ashes of his friend and mentor. He had buried the hatchet with Darren’s partner. It took some negotiation and was good for both of them. I was invited to this party, and I knew no one except Lawrie himself. So I walked with the women down to the river. They talked about Darren. He was a man of influence. Everyone had a story, and it all went back to Darren’s wisdom, creativity and generosity. He was above all a teacher, of life and skills. The younger people all had learned from him a piece of practical wisdom, whether it be hunting or painting or the evils of Government intervention. He was truly missed. I say this without irony – we may never see his like again. Darren was a true rugged individualist and there is less and less space for such people.

That night, with friends and family gathered in the wilderness, Lawrie fired off all nine rockets, each containing Darren’s ashes. The sky lit up. There was even a sonic boom. Birds shrieked and flew. After the mighty sound receded, and the cheers died away, there was the sweetest silence. Lawrie then gave one of the briefest and most reverent eulogies I have heard. He said this:

‘Darren’s ashes will go into the river and the river will go into the sea’.

And so it was.