The rewards began to flow in…

You did not come into this world just to be blown about by the winds of change...

...pushed and pulled here and there like an oarless boat in a too-strong current. You came for a purpose. Many purposes, in fact; the possibilities of your choices are endless, and will lead you to the myriad destinations of multiple Universes.

But you ignore the instincts and moods of your heart, and follow the crowd, follow your friends, follow the advice of complete strangers at bus stops and of adverts on the TV...and one day you wake up and realise that you are 55 years old and time has passed you by and STILL you have not written that book, visited that country, bought a motorbike, climbed Everest…

It’s too late now, you tell yourself mournfully and prepare to slide back down onto the sofa and switch on the TV, discontent but comfortable as you watch the things you have dreamed of performed by others from the too-easy-comfort of your living room and wonder where the young man or woman who dreamed of these things has gone.

Stop right there!

Once upon a time, I was in a boring and very average marriage, and one morning I awoke at 6.45 am to the alarm to go to work and swung my legs out of bed and as I sat there, thinking about it, I realised that if I let this continue, I would be doing this for the rest of my life, getting up at 6.45, getting ready to go and sit in the office at a boring job. I was 34. I was not old, but neither was I a teenager anymore. If I did not do something now, I would be stuck in this life forever, one way or another, and end up being Mrs. Bored-Housewife, my ambitions no more than a part-time job instead of a full-time one, success for my husband and a better house in perhaps a suburb in Kent…

The path I struck out for very soon after this, that of travelling alone around Greece instead of taking a simple holiday, brought me in contact with different kinds of people.

I began to meet travellers who travelled because they could not accept that all life had to offer was sitting in an office wasting your life working for someone else and hoping to travel when you retire (when you are too old and decrepit) and knew there were other ways to live your life. I also came into contact for the first time with people on a spiritual path.

"In search of themselves".

This was first opened to me, I must admit, with the aid of some psychedelic substances in Goa, India. But then strange things began to happen in my life, and I could not call them Coincidences, for they were too obviously hell-bent on turning me away from my path of regular daily chaos, and along a completely different avenue.

Under the guise of falling in love, I met someone who guided me to explore the world of meditation and I began to delve deeply. I spent the next nineteen years in India, Nepal, and Thailand. I began to understand that if you step into the river of spiritual practice with full faith, it will carry you to your destination; you simply sit back, do your daily meditation practice as prescribed, and allow the Universal forces to orchestrate your life for you.

It is the DAILY meditation practice that is stressed here. Not just once or twice, or ON A COURSE, even my course, but keeping it up. Doing it daily. Without a break if you are tired, or not in the mood. You MUST keep at it.

I did, and things began to fall into place naturally. Events that concerned me, jobs that fitted me at the time, the right room, the right house, the right place to live...all began to fall into sequence as though Someone had orchestrated them. Even during the pandemic, I was comfortably settled in Brighton, I had a job, I got furlough, and then I got other jobs which were a RESULT of the pandemic directly providing me with income.

And I began to realise that Someone had. Someone...or something...the great unknown force that is behind our complete and perfect Universe...was listening to my daily-repeated mantras and had decided that I deserved a Gold Star now that I had proved myself to be fully dedicated to the path.

REVISITED.

EGYPT

Who are you, Ramses, and from where did you get such enormous confidence?

After the restrictions of the pandemic had eased, I began to travel again...

Now these travels took me back to a land I had explored briefly in 1993...the land of Egypt, from whence come some of the most incredible sights and wonders of the world...and also some of its strongest and most amazing characters.

Quite often a little man would appear at the entrance to a tomb, a secretive air about him, holding a couple of mirrors, which he would angle strategically to catch the sunlight. Sometimes they would show you a ‘secret’ mummy; once someone tried to sell us one!

The tombs were scattered here, there, and everywhere, and it was a village too, with people’s houses right next to each tomb, like it was their family vault or something!

We had to push our bicycles up the hill afterwards to visit the Valley of the Kings. A certain amount of money got you into several tombs, but we also managed to buy some tickets from some ‘students’, so we could enter quite a few more tombs; I think we did around twelve.

I could not get over the energy in these tombs, the darkness some of them had wished upon others, the hatred and contempt.

Cycling DOWN from the Valley of the Kings was unforgettable, just cruising down the long hill. I could feel undiscovered tombs in the sandstone of the hillside that bordered the path, and I knew that there was much, much more to be unearthed. And the Colossi of Memnon...who were they, and why, just sitting in a field like that, alone together, vast, incomprehensible…

On my return to Egypt in November on 2022, I did things differently. For a start, I was travelling alone. No husband to whine about it being too hot, his backpack was too heavy and why didn’t I want to spend my holiday by the pool…? This time I hired some people as guides and drivers, and off we went to see the Real Egypt.

The very first day, we went to Saqara, the very first pyramid, and also to Memphis. The latter had huge statues of Ramses, in various poses. His children in the statues were placed right down by his...well...groin, to make it obvious from where they originated.

He was everywhere in this small museum for his massive statue, he totally filled it, and in the pretty garden outside. There was another big statue of him out there, in a warrior pose, and he had even had his own face put on the Sphinx! Of all the pharaohs, he was the one obsessed with making his own image seen and known everywhere.

And you start to think...who IS this guy?

He popped up more as I continued on my explorations, now down to Luxor, where he was highly visible in the temples of Karnak and Luxor. Onwards I journeyed, now down to Aswan, home of several amazing sights. And then down to the place I had wanted to visit for thirty years, ever since I had read my Berlitz Guide to Egypt...the great temple of Abu Simbel, at the southernmost part of Egypt which was possible for a tourist to visit.

Unlike some people, who go all that way to see the temple and take their breakfast and supper back in their hotel in Aswan, I had decided to go for two nights, staying in a small Nubian hotel some thirty minutes’ walk from the site, or a five minute ride in what I can only describe as a Truk-truk. I choose the latter; they are run by cheeky young boys and are fun.

Off the Truk-truk, into the ticket office, passing a market of jolly sellers, on whom I try out my Arabic greetings. The long walk down around the rather daunting side of Lake Nasser, whose infinite, sparkling waters stretch off to Sudan…

And suddenly I am here. And he’s sitting right there, Ramses the Dude, smiling smugly at me, all four of him (well, three really, since one statue has the head removed) as though to say, “Well? Whatchya think? Don’t you think my temple is worth coming all this way to see? Don’t you think it’s the best one in all of Egypt?”

And...yes, Ramses, I have to say that I do.

There is nowhere quite like this one in all the world. Why he built it way down here I don’t know, but certainly the borders were different in those days, perhaps non-existent.

So much open space was available to build on, and it was right on the edge of the Nile until they had to move it, piece by painstaking piece, because Lake Nasser, arisen from their newly-made dam, threatened to flood the temple, which had anyway only been rediscovered in 1813, buried in sand for millennia.

Now it sits, or rather Ramses does, gazing down serenely on the huge lake, and the stream of visitors who daily make it so far just to see him.

And again I thought...who IS he, this Ramses? Who IS this guy, who fills a temple with all his own statues – he even has his own statue at his wife’s temple, although she is allowed a few of her herself inside. A long line of him also fills the main entry walk, which leads to...more of HIM, albeit alongside some gods…as a god himself!

In 1993 I had gone on a holiday to Luxor with the later-abandoned husband. He really did not want to cycle up the long road that terminated in the Valley of the Kings, past first of all the Tombs of the Nobles and various lords, but anyway, we did...

I noticed how much the ancient ones were extremely jealous of each other, especially of the Lords, less so of the great Pharaohs. They would scratch out the eyes, organs, food, money, everything to take them through to the Afterlife, from the paintings.