Alan Heeks, Author at Alan Heeks

Alan Heeks

Celebrating Celtic New Year

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Nov 082017

I’ve been exploring the meaning of the eight Celtic seasonal festivals for many years, and trying out different ways to celebrate them – often at Hazel Hill Wood. Early in this process, I stayed on the remote island of Inishmore on the west coast of Ireland, where the old Celtic seasonal traditions are still deeply honoured.

One thing I’ve learned is that each festival is a transitional period which extends for a couple of weeks each side of the core date. So if you’re reading this in mid-November, you’re not too late!

The word Samhain is pronounced sow’eine, and means the first day of November, celebrated by the ancient Celts as a festival marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. It’s best celebrated outdoors, in the dark, with a bonfire. You can give a stick or dying foliage into the fire to represent what you’re releasing with the end of the year.

Here are some insights on Samhain from Glennie Kindred’s book, see more in book blog:

“The veil between the seen world of matter and the unseen world of Spirit becomes thin, especially at dawn and dusk. This creates opportunities for us to slip through the fabric of space and time, beyond the limitations of our rational mind, and gain wisdom from within.”

This is the best time of year to honour the dead, and to open to guidance from them. Imagining your ancestral line going back for several generations can help.

Being the start of the Celtic year means that this is also a good season for dreaming and intentions: not to act on them, but to let them germinate and gather ripeness through the dark months of winter.

In her book, Glennie associates Samhain with the Yew Tree, the oldest living trees, “representing death and rebirth, transformation, access to the ancestors and the Otherworld.”

New trunks from beneath the root bole is a useful reminder about renewing from our roots.

From Krakow to Rome: the Tyrolean Way

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Oct 202017

By train through the Brenner Pass, and lots more!

Alan Heeks writes…

I suspect that most British train lovers, like me, mostly travel across Europe to and from London – radiating out from the Eurostar. Belatedly I’m realising that I’ve missed out on some great rail journeys that run across these radial routes from England.

The Brenner Pass

The Brenner Pass and Italian Tyrol are good example: I’ve wanted to see them for years, but they’re not on the way to anywhere from England. So I was excited recently when I realised I could go on from a steam train holiday in Poland to a pilgrimage in Italy. This blog covers the journey between the two: you can find other blogs about London to Krakow, and Steam Adventures in Poland and Slovakia, here…

By day, the journey between Krakow and Vienna is slow, and the landscapes pleasant but not exceptional. I saved time by using the Polish Railways sleeper, which was comfortable. From Vienna you can catch the impressive Railjet, OBB’s high-speed service. Instead of building a completely separate line, OBB have built a series of new high-speed stretches which connect back to the existing line for main stations. The only drawback is that much of the new lines is in tunnels or behind sound barriers, so you see less of the scenery.

To get into Italy via the Brenner Pass, you usually need to change trains in Innsbruck, and I recommend a couple of hours stopover here to saunter around the old town and take on refreshments. The town’s most famous landmark, the Goldenes Dachl (Golden Roof) is less than 15 minutes’ walk from the station. From here, my train was a big EC intercity from Munich to Venice – another route you’d rarely take from England.

If you’re wondering why you’ve heard of the Brenner Pass, the answer is probably historical. This is the lowest North – South pass through the Alps at 1370 metres, and it’s been important at least since Roman times. More recently, it was vital in Austria-Hungary’s efforts to maintain its territory south of the Alps, and they built the first trans-Alpine railway through Brenner between 1860 and 1867.

Many rail fans are probably connoisseurs of mountain routes, and I’d rate the Brenner route highly. As soon as the train leaves Innsbruck, it’s climbing steeply up a narrow gorge, through a series of tunnels, with an Alpine torrent far below. What adds to the drama is the autobahn: first seen spanning the gorge on an amazingly high viaduct, several hundred feet above the railway.

The autobahn reappears, now running high up on the other side of the gorge on a series of viaducts. The train keeps climbing steeply till it’s level with the road, which then goes way higher again. This time, the railway forms a big horseshoe up a side valley to gain altitude.

The drama of the pass is helped by glimpses of snow-capped peaks far above, and because the summit is not a tunnel, it’s the bleak frontier station of Brenner, where several freight trains of lorry trailers await the line.

View from the train on The Brenner Pass

For Brenner/Brennero South, all the signage is in Italian and German: this is the Italian Tyrol, formerly the Sudtirol, probably Austria’s most painful territory loss (along with Trieste, her outlet to the sea).

The Tyrol region straddles the Alps, and for centuries has drawn cultural influences from the North and South. Like other regions of Europe (e.g. Galicia, now in southern Poland), Tyrol has lurched between eras of autonomy and frequent foreign domination. The Tyroleans fought hard for their independence, notably against Napoleon, whose armies they defeated twice through a mix of bravery, bluff, and man-made avalanches.

The main town in Sudtirol is Bozen/Bolzano, so delightful and interesting it gets its own blog. For many miles south from Bolzano, the train follows the River Isarco, which combines a wide flat valley full of vineyards with magnificent, high, semi-wooded cliffs on each side.

Beyond Trento, the train is on the plains around the River Po, and the landscape is nondescript as far as Bologna.

From here, the trains offer main interest. The high-speed Frecciarossa (Red Arrow) of Trenitalia is the rail equivalent of Alfa Romeo, in style, speed, and that luscious Italian racing red. Its private sector competitor, Italo, has chosen tasteful crimson lake, á la Midland Railway: it’s less expensive but less punctual.
Between Florence and Rome, you’ll get glimpses of fine countryside and distant wooded mountains, but less than you might hope, as much of the new high-speed track is in tunnels. However, Rome awaits, with its ruins, craft beers and gelato!

Practical tips
• It seems impossible to book tickets online with OBB (Austrian Railways) from outside Austria, I booked by phone with Deutsche Bahn in London, who are a good option for most European journeys.
• Through the Brenner Pass, the best views are mostly on the right side of the train.
• For trains in Italy, I find www.trenitalia.com quite easy to use. On Frecciarossa, you can get good deals if you book well ahead, and it’s often little extra to upgrade above Standard Class.

Bello Bolzano – Schöne Bozen: Cross-cultural delights of Austrian Italy

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Oct 182017

Alan Heeks writes…

I’ve been keen to visit Bolzano for many years: perhaps because of Sudtirol’s cross-cultural history, perhaps because I have a friend whose German-speaking mother emigrated to England from here. Anyway, my first visit delighted me: Bolzano has charm, history, and lots more.

Bolzano streets

Bolzano’s location is magnificent: in a deep Alpine valley, with mountains all around on the skyline, and cable cars that start near the town centre. It’s one of the most bicycle-friendly places I’ve seen, with dedicated cycle trails, and most of the central area car-free.

There are many houses and civic buildings which date from the Austria-Hungarian Empire, and give the town an elegance and impressiveness which compare with more famous old Italian cities, but differ in style. Here, all the street names, shops and other signage are in both languages.

It was agreeably confusing to be in a different version of Italy, where everyone speaks Italian and German, though I heard more Italian spoken generally. I was unsure which language to use, but since my basic German is better than my improvised Italian, I ended up speaking German everywhere.

The cuisine, as you might guess, is very cross-cultural. Along with all the Italian usual suspects, there were Weinstube, and restaurants serving goulash, dumplings and sauerkraut. Both Austria and Italy have a strong coffee and pavement café culture, and with all the quaint pedestrian streets and squares, you can lounge with your kaffe to your heart’s content.

Otzi man

Dance and hug for spiritual wellbeing

Inspirations Comments Off

Oct 152017

I’ve just returned from a week at the Unicorn Dance Spirit Camp. I was co-leading sessions called Nourishing the Heart, which were a great experience of how to raise spiritual wellbeing.

A focus of the whole camp is Dances of Universal Peace: these are akin to circle dances, but the dancers are singing and moving to prayers or devotional phrases, with live music. This may sound strange, but over many years I’ve found that dance of this kind is a powerful way to release your stress and find your joy. It’s also a great inter-faith process, as these dances use prayers from many spiritual traditions.

In recent years I’ve evolved sessions that combine these dances with a range of practices and processes to help people deepen their spiritual wellbeing. Hugs and supportive touch are a powerful part of this: for example, inviting a group to sit back to back in pairs to feel supported in facing their fears.

In one exercise, I invited people to pair up, with one person supporting the other by kneeling behind them and gently holding their shoulders. We used a meditation with sound mantras to help people become more centred amid too much uncertainty. The feedback was that this simple physical touch had helped the process hugely.

These sessions were my first time of exploring Thomas Berry’s teachings with a group, and it was very well received. As one participant said, “you provided a safe, gentle process to face my worries about the state of the world, and find hope.”

The Unicorn camp has provided valuable experience which will shape the Dare to Imagine workshop in October. This will probably include a couple of Dances of Universal Peace, and several hugging opportunities!

Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain

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Sep 172017

Thomas Mann is an author who deserves to be taken seriously. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 and is one of Germany’s greatest twentieth-century writers. You may know him through the beautiful film of his novel, Death in Venice.

However, The Magic Mountain is not an easy read. It’s over 700 pages long, and not a lot happens. You feel that Mann is forcing his readers to work out meanings, and find their own motivation to keep reading.

The whole novel is set in a Swiss sanatorium, in the years leading up to 1914. The central figure is more anti-hero than hero: Hans Castorp is a young man from Hamburg who visits for three weeks, but stays for seven years.

The sanatorium is a weird, self-absorbed world, with strange patients from all over Europe. They are preoccupied with their own gossip, flirtations, and novelties. Slowly we realise that Mann sees all this as typifying the state of Europe before the Great War – he writes of “something uncanny about the world and life,…as if a demon had seized power…The demon’s name was Stupor.”

Another big theme in the book is time. The book itself plays with time: the first three weeks of the story take many chapters, while later, a year can pass in a page. Mann explores different ways we experience time, and aims for us to experience them through the book. For example, he describes waiting as like gluttony, “because it devours quantities of time.”

The Magic Mountain’s complexity lies not in its storyline, but in the layers of allusion and allegory beneath the somewhat bland surface of the plot. These layers are hard for a contemporary UK reader to access. Some characters are modelled on Mann’s 1920’s German contemporaries. And his ideas draw on many other German sources, such as Heidegger and Goethe.

The image of The Magic Mountain itself is another example: it has echoes of a German archetype, the Venus Mountain, also found in Wagner: a “hellish paradise,” a peak of abandon where all sense of time is lost.
The layers and allusions go on and on: Greek myth and archetypes are another source. It’s a deep, intelligent book, but it demands a lot form its reader.

This Side of Paradise, Scott Fitzgerald.

Inspirations Comments Off

Aug 102017

American dreams in the mists of time

Our hero is Amory Blaine: handsome yet uncertain, desperate to explore life to the full. His life blossoms at Princeton: he loves the beauty of the place, the camaraderie, the magic of staying out all night, singing with “dreaming towers.” But the book plunges on beyond the dream.

The real richness and poignancy of this book is in the unravelling. Amory flunks exams, fails in love, and all his personal dreams turn to mist. Alongside this, we see the magic of Princeton evaporate into snobbery, cliques, and then the crunching impact of America joining the First World War.

This book is a valuable guide to the story of the American Dream: the intense magnetism of riches with style, and its repeated puncturing. The book leads us to the 1920’s, when the young generation had “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken,” and the general response was to fight even harder for money and success.

If we relate this to American politics, the big support for both extremes, Trump and Sanders, shows us that most American’s feel bitterly excluded from the money and success that they’re still programmed to yearn for.

Getting happy about President Trump

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Jul 062017

“We’ve got to stop acting out hate” Charles Eisenstein

A recent article by the young American writer Charles Eisenstein offers the best insight I’ve found into the upside of the Trump era. For a start, he points out that no one can pretend anymore that the status quo is basically intact.
This period of intensifying disorder creates space for extremism, but Eisenstein sees it also as a space “to introduce a different kind of force to animate the structures that might appear after the old ones crumble. …Let’s start with empathy…the understanding that we are all in this together.”

Charles Eisenstein’s article appeared in the latest issue of Positive News; to read it follow this link…

He comments that he sees as much hate in the liberal media as on the right wing, “it is just better disguised”. He gently points out that such hate arises from fear, uncertainty, grief for losses, which are too painful for most of us to tolerate.

It’s not easy to face the implications of his repeated point that “we are all in this together”: meaning that the Liberals, the Radicals, the Socialists, are all in this together with the lost folk and the right wing. We need the courage and compassion to talk to each other, and confront each other too.

You may also be interested in my Natural Happiness blogs and videos about President Trump;

DONALD TRUMP’S GREATEST BITS
Exclusive Donald Trump video cast on gardening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6YJT8tbdyw

A heavenly satire about Donald Trump:
http://www.naturalhappiness.net/fun-blog/2017/1/9/donald-trump-and-the-second-coming

Some of the more perceptive responses from around the world to Donald Trump’s election victory:
http://www.naturalhappiness.net/resilience-blog/2016/12/7/push-back-walk-out-or-rant-responses-to-trumpiana

Football insights: does happiness create success? Learning from Leicester’s unlikely supremacy

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Apr 262017

Whether happiness and success are linked or opposites has been debated for centuries. In creative arts, misery seems more linked with genius. But football offers us a different view, at least this year.

For readers who think football’s a bore, I must say that I find it a rich source of insights and analogies for life generally. So bear with me for a few paragraphs.

In May 2015, Leicester City narrowly escaped relegation from the Premier League. Now, in April 2016, they look likely to be League Champions for this season. The turnaround has a lot to do with happiness. To show how unlikely this success is, Leicester spent much of the 2014/15 season in the relegation zone. They started the current season as favourites for relegation, with their manager favourite for first manager to be fired, and odds of 5000 to 1 on winning the League.

Most of Leicester’s players are unchanged from the struggles of the previous season – this is not a team with big ticket bought-in stars and massive egos to match. When Leicester appointed Claudio Ranieri as manager early in this season, many (including me) though they’d made a bad mistake. Ranieri is oldish, 64 years old, with a mediocre track record.

But the Ranieri we’ve seen this season is happy, sweet, even playful guy, who has clearly given his players permission to enjoy every match. They’re a team who just seem to be happy to play football, without the angst and pressure of big-name teams with big reputations to defend.

Technical stats suggest Leicester are not that great: for example, their pass accuracy at 70% is awful. Ranieri says, “The first thing I said to players is for them not to worry too much about tactics.” Clearly, spirit and fun count for more!

Even as the season nears its climax, and expectations are huge, the team seem to be playing to enjoy the moment, and Ranieri is staying pretty calm. In a recent interview on Match of the Day, he was asked “Do you feel it’s becoming a real possibility now?” He smiled, and said “What? Oh, you mean the championship?”

Perfection on rails: The VSOE British Pullman

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Jan 292017

The re-creation of the British Pullman is a classic British story of eccentric, visionary wealth allied to traditional craftsmanship. James Sherwood rescued carriages from weird locations and states of disarray. Bob Dunn, whose grandfather made marquetry for the original cars, was one of a host of dedicated restorers.

Now, for a princely sum, you can get a princely ride on the British Pullman: most often, a day outing from London. On June 7, I treated my mother and me to a trip on this palatial train, on a re-run of one of the Classic Pullman trips: the Bournemouth Belle.

The interior of the Phoenix carriage

When I was born, my family lived in a rented flat in Wyndham Road, near Bournemouth Station. My mother has often told me how she’d lift me up at the kitchen window to see the Bournemouth Belle go by. Later, when I moved to Reading, we’d regularly find ourselves peering longingly into those fairytale Pullman cars from our second-class compartment at Southampton Central Station, on our way to see family in Bournemouth.

So when I was looking for a really special gift for a big birthday, the Bournemouth Belle was ideal. And everything about the trip was truly perfection on rails: the Pullman cars are works of art, down to the mosaics in the toilets; the food and drink were sumptuous; and the service was both friendly and impeccable.

Alan and his mother in front of the Phoenix carriage

Our itinerary included three hours of free time in Bournemouth, so we had a delightful nostalgia binge, revisiting Wyndham Road and other favourite spots from my childhood, and my mother’s.
The Pullman carriages are so special that you receive a colour booklet with a whole page on each one’s history. Ours was Phoenix, who started life in 1927 as Rainbow, and was destroyed by fire in 1936. She was rebuilt in 1952 and used on the Golden Arrow, carrying such celebrities as Sophia Loren and General de Gaulle.

This might be the trip of a lifetime for you, as it was for me: it’s totally worth taking!

Donald Trump and the Second Coming

General Comments Off

Jan 102017

This guest blog was written by Maria Trap, and is reproduced with her permission.

by Matt Wuerker, Politico

After more than 2000 years since the birth of his son God felt that it was more than time to stage the second coming. He felt it was actually getting a bit late. Mankind was screwing up pretty bad. But, who was going to pay attention in a world full of social media, plentiful news sources, a whole range of organized religions as well as more loosely defined spiritual practices and teachers. Who would pay attention if his son would come back and add his message to the whole variety of truths that was being presented?

God thought about it, observed what was going on on Earth, saw what could potentially happen with the American elections and came up with this brilliant idea: Instead of sending Jesus again, he decided to bet on a candidate for the presidency. Donald Trump, with his emphasis on me-me-first, money, more money, his tendency to lie, cheat and always blame someone else, his addiction to surround himself with beautiful women and shiny (preferably golden) things AND his ability to get EVERYONE’S attention, was the perfect man for the assignment.

The scenario was this: Donald would be put into the most powerful office on earth by enough people who would see him as the saviour of their country. The far majority of people around the world would see him not just as a deplorable person and a bad example for their children, but also as a destroyer of good and civilized things, a great danger for the world’s future and an ignitor of hate rather than love. Many, many people would feel confronted and wake up to the fact that they would have to reach inside themselves to touch their core values, their love and compassion and bring these into the world. That they would have to stand strong. That they would have to work together with others who were trying to do the same thing in their own way. That they could not take anything for granted anymore….

“Perfect”, God said, “Trump will get our part of the job done. You don’t have to go there anymore, Jesus. Let’s just go to the table, enjoy our Christmas dinner and see how things unfold.”

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