All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (36 page)

2012, then, is possibly already under way. Now back in London during one of the worst economic crises in living memory, I see the evidence daily. Banks are folding, house prices falling, unemployment at stratospheric levels. One half of society, it seems, is anxiously waiting for things to return to ‘normal’, so we can all carry on as happily as we did before. But another portion of society, I believe, is noticing the fork in the road where history has landed us. To take this road less travelled will entail a complete re-evaluation of the goals our culture encourages us to strive for. It will entail a conscious prioritising of the ‘inner’ rather than the ‘outer’ in our lives. It will entail immersing ourselves in the sacred again.

As for my own journey, well, it continues day by day. And perhaps, at last, that old restlessness is setting down. My central focus these days is on living in the present, and on the days when I manage to do that the numinous looms closely, glinting with the unknowable wonder of things. More and more I’m trying to encourage those activities in my life which
allow
for this state of being, and in that I’ve come back to beekeeping, and I find a new understanding of the stillness I once sensed in that ancient art.

Walking past a pet shop not long ago, I realised there was one final piece of the jigsaw still missing. I noticed two green parakeets through the glass, and I saw them trapped within a tiny cage, their once iridescent plumage now dulled through long confinement. Smiling to myself, I remembered how the Ladakhi oracle had once instructed me to find two such birds and free them. How could I have forgotten? Or perhaps, through some strange prescience, it was exactly these birds she had spoken of. Parakeets were now surviving happily in the English climate, I’d recently read, as one small benefit of global warming.

I went inside, and without a second thought, handed over the money for the two birds and their small metal cage. Then I walked to the nearest park, my heart pounding a little, and opened the tiny clasp that kept the door fastened. I looked about me, at this small well-tended square in north London, and for a moment felt myself in Ladakh again, Victorian houses replaced by jagged mountains.

The two birds peered through the open door. For a second they hesitated, not quite believing how far the horizon could extend. A second later, in a green blur of feathers, they were bounding upwards into the sky.

Further Reading

Abrams, David.
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World
. Pantheon Books, 1996.

Brunton, Paul.
A Search in Secret India
. Weiser Books, 1985.

Bucke, Richard Maurice.
Cosmic Consciousness: a Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind
. Book Jungle, 2007.

Cohen, S. S.
Guru Ramana: Memories and Notes
. Sri Ramanasramam Press, 2006.

Crick, Francis.
The Astonishing Hypothesis: the Scientific Search for the Soul
. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994.

Dawkins, Richard.
The God Delusion
. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006.

Devereux, Paul.
The Long Trip: the Prehistory of Psychedelia
. Penguin, 1997.

Easterbrook, Greg.
A Moment on the Earth: the Coming Age of Environmental Optimism
. Viking, 1995.

Eliade, Mircea.
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
. Princeton University Press, 2004.

Friedlander, Shems.
Rumi and the Whirling Dervishes
. Parabola Books, 2003.

Gebser, Jean.
The Ever Present Origin
. Ohio University Press, 1985.

Housden, Roger.
Travels Through Sacred India
. Thorsons, 1996.

James, William.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: a Study in Human Nature
. Modern Library, 1994.

Kakar, Sudhir.
Shamans, Mystics and Doctors: a Psychological Inquiry into India and its Healing Traditions
. University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Kipling, Rudyard.
Plain Tales from the Hills
. Penguin, 1991.

Kraepelin, Emile.
Readings in Cultural Psychiatry
. Continuum, 2000.

Lachman, Gary and Wilson, Colin.
A Secret History of Consciousness
. Lindisfarne Press, 2003.

Leavitt, John.
Poetry and Prophecy: the Anthropology of Inspiration
. University of Michigan Press, 1997.

McKenna, Terence.
Food of the Gods: the Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
. Bantam, 1993.

Maugham, W. Somerset.
The Razor’s Edge
. Vintage, 2003.

Mehra, Jagdish.
Albert Einstein’s Relations with Belgium: Including the Correspondence between Einstein and Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians, 1929 to 1955
. 1988.

Narby, Jeremy and Francis Huxley, eds.
Shamans through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge
. Tarcher, 2004.

Nebesky-Wojkowitz, René de.
Oracles and Demons of Tibet: the Cult and Iconography of the Tibetan Protective
. Oriental Book Store, 1990.

O’Brien, John Maxwell.
Alexander the Great: the Invisible Enemy
. Routledge, 1992.

O’Flaherty, W. D. ‘The Post-Vedic History of the Soma Plant’, in Robert Gordon Wasson, ed.
Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality
. 1968.

Oliver, Mary. ‘Cold Poem’,
American Primitive
. Little, Brown and Co., 1983.

de Purucker, G.
Fountain Source of Occultism
. Theosophical University Press, 1974.

Rumi, Mavlana Jalal-al-Din.
The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing
, translated Coleman Barks. HarperCollins, 2005.

Rumi, Mavlana Jalal-al-Din.
The Essential Rumi
, translated Coleman Barks. HarperCollins, 2009.

Russell, Jeffrey Burton and Douglas W. Lumsden.
A History of Medieval Christianity: Prophecy and Order
. Peter Lang, 2000.

Shah, Idries.
The Way of the Sufi
. Penguin, 1991.

Singh, Khushwant.
Delhi: a Novel
. Penguin, 2000.

Tagore, Rabindranath.
On the Edges of Time
. Greenwood Press, 1978.

Terzani, Tiziano.
Un altro giro di giostra
. Longanesi, 2004.

Twain, Mark.
Following the Equator
. Dover Publications, 1989.

Wilbert, Johannes.
Tobacco and Shamanism in South America
. Yale University Press, 1993.

Wilson, Colin.
Mysteries
. Hodder and Stoughton, 1980.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Peter Straus and Jennifer Hewson at RCW. To Helen Garnons Williams and Erica Jarnes at Bloomsbury for their brilliant editing and support. To Rosemary Davidson for picking up on the idea in the first place. To the Arts Council and the Royal Society of Literature for their invaluable funding. To the numerous kind people who helped me in India, Turkey and South America: Phil and Juliet at the incomparable Yoga Magic, my home away from home; Yogi Ajay Menon and family in Varanasi; all at the Oriental Guesthouse in Ladakh; Katie Silcox; Simon Hayes of Senderos and Kate Rupal; Prabir Ghosh and Sumitra in Calcutta; Dr Mahmud Erol Kilic; and many others . . . In the UK to my family for their unflagging patience and support, to George Festing likewise. A humble Namaste and a big hug to my wife Lucy for everything else and beyond.

a note on the author

Piers Moore Ede has worked as a farmer, boat driver, surfing instructor, poetry teacher and baker. He has travelled widely, and contributed to many literary, travel and environmental publications including the
Daily Telegraph
, the
Times Literary Supplement
,
Ecologist
,
Traveller
and
Earth Island Journal
. He is the author of
Honey and Dust
, winner of a D.H. Lawrence Prize for Travel Writing.

First published in Great Britain 2010

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