This is an occasional blog for occasional writings (‘Notes from a lummox from Limoux’ – or sometimes from an oik from Hawick). It is highly personal and makes no pretence to fix the world or analyse the state of knowledge of burning issues. Some of it is from old diaries. It covers diverse topics – a few of them are spirituality and spiritual practice, music, bread ovens and bread baking, bicycles, language, men, beauty, the land, Central Asia and the Great Steppe, poetry and stories, looking for and building a spiritual culture, the transformation of the climate crisis, psychotherapy, the quest for a meaningful occupation and the pursuit of a beloved who remains persistently hidden, even as they say he is everywhere in plain sight.

What should unite these diverse entries are some loosely connected themes, now overt and now implicit, of life and being and how we experience it (?them). I look at you and see myself in you: I see you as other, and relish that other, yet that other is somehow the secret to how I know myself. On blessed days there is a possibility, sometimes, that can border on a vision in which all life is suspended in the field of sheer Being and each one is a unique relationship to and name for that Being. Not that this is some cold abstraction or philosophical confection but rather the front end of our deepest longings and intuitions, and formed in love. And then the questions multiply and feed us: who is you, who is I, and where, and maybe, just maybe, why? And do we live in time or out of it, and what are the real dimensions of our experience?

The persons can become fluid: ‘he’ can be you, or him (or her), or my friend, or the Divine Presence, and sometimes it is left deliberately ambiguous. The same goes for the other pronouns – ‘she’, ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘you’ and ‘they’, and a special place goes to ‘Thou’.

‘Flummoxed’ is a light-hearted take on the notion of bewilderment – where reason fails and yet a certainty arises from a deeper place, seeing the truth in everything including opposites, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ alike, reasoned and intuited alike, old and new alike. I was flummoxed; to ‘be flummoxed’ was a process of being shaken down, releasing the dross of mental idling, until clarity called me by its name, then lost it again, then refound it, and on and on…

My name is Robin, I’m almost 60 and live between Scotland and France. Feel free to make comments in the spirit of conversation and exchange, as that otherness is what we all yearn for, the I-Thou spoken of by Martin Buber, even as it informs us of our intimate bond.