A rebel without a clue.

We are heading towards spring, in a stuttering fashion, with some cool days - a bitter northern wind and consistent showers yesterday and Saturday put me off heading to the allotment, and today mum has a date - first for ages as I think she's getting lonelier as she approaches 80? Her friendships seem to be thinning out? As a perennial loner I've never really been concerned about being on my own most of the time. In my youth I couldn't understand why I was always left to oneside, picked last(or not at all) and never asked for my feelings, opinions or justifications ... ... I've had little to report for the preceding couple of wintry months ... Now, as we approach Spring, I had a morning where I just couldn't keep killing myself slowly - I have realised, since whatever broke in my mind, quite apart from what's happening in the body, that for the preceding 10 years I've been a slow death - a suicide through wanton destruction of being. How foolish I have been?...

Why am I pissed off already this morning? Feelings of meaninglessness linger everywhere. Even, comfortable as I am with Lola tucked between my knees and thighs, breathing deeply, after her breakfast, there is something floating in my head which is making me feel rotten and beyond redemption. But this cannot be true, can it? There is always another way, and it is the right way out of this maze, in which I keep turning further and further into confusion, because I do have a choice between the Ego and the Holy Spirit - free will to choose a single point to save me from myself... Last night I didn't get drunk, I retired to read a third chapter of the historical fiction The Pillars of the Earth that my friend David gave me to read, and slept pretty well when Lola had stopped cleaning herself, in her bed, alongside me in my old bedroom at my mother's and didn't wake up fully until 7 am - which is a lay in for me! On the edge of my unconsciousness I was aware of the storm blowing...

Purposely I've given it a break. As I wrestle once more with A Course in Miracles, which I left alone for almost the entirety of 2022, to see what effect it had had on my being for the previous several years from 2013. And while battling demons, and failing, and getting filled up with a feeling of worthlessness, again by the end turning of the year I was left staring into a uncovered grave which I was sure I had, finally, covered, with me not buried within, but it yawns greedily once more. The Course will certainly be with me for the remainder of my mortal life, unless, of course, I truly become the individual it is pointing me to be? When I am in the pits of despair, screaming silently, the Course is the sound which cuts beyond the immaterial meaninglessness and reverberates to a clarity signalling a way better; there must be another way? And there genuinely is: the Truth is true and nothing else is. Yesterday I began considering the life inside a monastery as a potential goal onc...

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...

The things which don't exist until I step out of the flat's nighttime sleep into awakenedness: the long return to another reality. The neverending real blandness of the yo-yo ping-pong of getting my shit together for the trip to 42 Braine Road to take Lola for a couple of walks. *** Wednesday morning. Archie decided to sleep on his bed beside the unlit fire in the front room so I slept until 7 without any real distractions. We both needed a little extra sleep because on Monday evening his guts were churning and he was shaking his ears a little at the base of the bed. There was some tapping in the night, which I realised was rain on the velux windows at the back of the house, when I initially thought it was Archie coming up to the top floor. Yesterday I managed an hour at the allotment, the first visit since the icy frozen the week previous and my final walk in Spain of 2022 the ten days prior. Christmas gathers it's force with the hyper annoying ornamentation and awful over...

As I sit waiting in Gate B20 waiting for a call for the return to Manchester I am reflecting back on the 7 days of the Camino de Madrid and whether it did what I need from the Camino Experience and I think it did? Really I wanted to reach Valladolid on foot if I could in time, but the pressure on my foot seemed to be saying enough, as it came and went during most of the monotony that the Meseta was offering... I know the Meseta (the south area from the Camino del Sureste) is genuinely barren without the distraction of woods, rivers or hills of the likes leading up to the Sistema Central... so can cope with it. But the ongoing issue with my left foot is becoming more than an irritation. As I am on the usual NHS waiting list for a clinical assessment of the problem I guess next year I will restrict the distances I cover per day?