The madman is holy!

'Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!

The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!'

      - excerpt from 'Footnote to Howl'  BY ALLEN GINSBERG

There was a period of my life, I want to say early 20s, around that time, I was living in London, I had kicked off my bloodstained point shoes and left my Black-Swan-era with the Norwegian National Ballet, clutching onto the very few sane marbles I had left to my name, but feeling very free for the first time in my life (no joke),the self flagellation world of high level classical ballet will have to sit tight for now, although there’s much to say on the subject and how it informed the embodiment work I am so passionate about today,but to stay on track - I had run away to London and through an acting mentor I had worked and created with back home I had now found my new passion in theatre, and during my drama school years in England I went through a big transition from my early obsession with the existentialists writers like Beckett and Sartres (yes I was a depressed teenager), to discovering the Beatnik movement of Kerouac, Ginsberg and the rest. From the existential angst of the stunningly bleak meaninglessness of existence, to the ravenous wild hunger of the beatnik poets and “dharma bums” devouring the full spectrum of all and everything that can be sucked out of this overflowing human experience. I was floored by their lust for life and living and their uncompromised devouring of experiencing. Looking back, I think it must have been these guys who laid out the first initial cookie crumbs towards my pursuit of spiritual practice. I read Huxley’s “doors of perception” and it must have been through his retelling of his journey on mescaline that I was somehow introduced to plant medicine as a gateway to altered states of consciousness that later down the line prompted me to book a last minute ticket to Peru from a filmset in Cornwall, which spiraled me onto the path of true spiritual inquiry that I have stayed on ever since.

I’ll try to make it short this week, there’s a lot going on, and I punctured my tyre and instead of writing you this letter I spent my whole day dealing with that drama, and now it is closing in on 10pm at night - but what I do want to say… In short if I can, is that Allen Ginsberg knew. He was onto something. It is all holy. All of it. It is all so holy, so utterly drenched in reality’s creative juices, even the shit. There are infinite subtle layers of reality just waiting for us to open our senses to it all. Which doesn’t mean that it all feels good, or positive, or some nonsense like that. But reality is inherently holy. In all of its expressions. And when we can attune to that knowing, or that direct experience, is when we uncover the real spiritual gold. And as all the real deal masters would tell you, it is available in any and every moment. Right here in the mess of it all is holiness. As one of my teachers of non-duality loved to say - “This is as God as it gets”.

Of course we forget.

And so that is why we practice

- to remember.

xR