A rebel without a clue.

What is up ahead in 2023? Which pitfalls, snares and traps will pop out of the long grass to trip me up: there is never a time when obstructions, mines, floods and tempests don't occupy the same pathway of freedom from fear, want and guilt? *** January is here; a storm is blowing outside bringing wet weather, and I've reopened A Course in Miracles after having 2022 away from its 'easy' lessons... In May it will be the 10th anniversary of my discovery that there was another way. Apart from ACIM, the Camino became the main focus of my life - keeping me alive, as it has, these last ten years. In a blink of an eye I've turned 50! The midlife crisis that appeared in my life at the beginning of 2013, with its existential grist, has worn into my surfaces physical and mental, for fully 10 years, so that I feel I have become an entirely separate individual from the one in the past... Not everyone would probably agree, but I do feel absolutely different to the person who felt...

The final day prior to Christmas Day and I am alongside Archie on the sofa. He slept soundly once we returned from Leeds around 5pm. We caught the bus around 1pm towards Oakwood, got off the stop prior to the junction and popped into Salt and The Melbourne, but, because Preston was closed until 3, I didn't know what to do really? Come back to Wetherby, stick about in Oakwood or catch a bus outside Preston down to Boar Lane and come back to Wetherby from there? We chose to go into Leeds, which was excellent except for two individuals who were definitely looking for conflict. The first person, in Whitelocks, I left to his politicising of music and took Archie to Friends of Ham, Bundobust and Tapped before coming back from outside on the X99. One man in Friends of Ham took a real dislike to Archie being there and literally balled at me and him to get away from him: the whole bar literally turned on him and defended Archie and me... We won't be venturing there again anyway... He...