This site has now been retired. I've moved to my new site Silverknife, where you'll find new blog posts and all my latest projects and photos. These pages will remain for at least a while, as I know some of you are still looking through the archives, but I'm reposting my travel journals and many other articles on the new site. Come and check it out.
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Mark's Daily Weight Update: 93Kg.
A quick update to the Bunnython photos: This short video clip of carrot-related tomfoolery (4.7Mb). It captures most of the group quite nicely.
Another 11 hours of sleep last night, and I'm starting to feel considerably more alive and alert, if still a bit poisoned. The last week has considerably exceeded my usual comfort zones as far as alcohol consumption and general debauchery, and I've also been eating fairly badly and sleeping too little even before the weekend. The upshot is that I feel I've reached a low point in personal wellbeing - I feel genuinely polluted, can actually feel the toxins in my system. I also feel out of touch with my spiritual awareness and rather depressed and lost in my head.
This is not necessarily as bad or unpleasant a thing as it sounds. I believe that there should be some balance in everything, and that includes balancing sensible and healthy behaviour with occasional bursts of madness and darkness. It's one of the original principles of the pagan Yule festival and many others - the nights of Misrule when social and spiritual boundaries are transgressed under controlled circumstances. I've been feeling for some time that I needed a trip into the darkness (it was welling up all last week) if only so I could appreciate the light better when I returned, and I think I've fulfilled that need.
Now's the time for returning to the light and detoxifying, which I'm rather looking forward to as well. As I've mentioned before I'm going on the cabbage soup diet shortly, which is supposed to be good and detoxifying, but apart from that I'll be off the alcohol for at least a couple of weeks and otherwise watching my intake of chemicals and trying to focus on vegetables etc. Green tea is once again replacing coffee which was starting to creep back into my daily routine, and I'll be returning to my physical training with renewed enthusiasm.
To me, balance in life isn't a static thing (as it is sometimes portrayed particularly by organised religion), where fixed amounts of certain activities are acceptable and must be carefully monitored. Fundamentally it's like any biological system, a dynamic process governed by the laws of homeostasis. We swing towards one end of the scale, then we swing back, constantly moving around a midpoint but never necessarily settling there.
To find some mythical perfect point of balance and stop there would be to become totally static, a state we're only ever likely to achieve when we're dead, and definitely not something to aspire to. We need to swing back and forth, experiencing both ends of the scale from healthy to unhealthy, light to darkness, creative to destructive. The "fixed balance" view advocated by most major religions (and sadly many popular social theories) is based on fear, engendered by the belief that without rules there is no regulating mechanism. This is the belief that the scale doesn't swing naturally back toward the centre but is always drawn to the dark end.
From that point of view, of course, any swinging back and forth is seen not as healthy experimentation and learning but potentially fatal dallying with dangerous forces which will draw us in if we get too close. To me that's pretty sad, and unlikely to lead to a happy or fulfilled life. I think we need the odd trip into the darkness, letting loose all our deepest drives, revelling in a bit of destruction and madness. Without the darkness there can be no light, and without awareness of what lies on the other side there's no reason to live our lives by any principles at all.
Plus, a bit of darkness is usually a damn good time.
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