Here I sit now, on the 12 o'clock out of Paddington (London), one winter's day, heading west to Angel Mountain, which overlooks a rugged and magnificent portion of Welsh coastline, where (my mates) Jeb and Mike have lived on a farm self-sufficiently and organically (without being at all weird) for sixteen years now, pretty much as far into the blustery, enchanted middle of nowhere as you can get on these islands, watching patiently from magisterial heights over the stormy, sombre and definitely no-messing-about Irish Sea.
I am about to sequester myself by kind invitation, in a totally silent (other than the sound of wind and rain), hydroelectric powered, spartanly furnished old stone barn for a round of intensive creative isolation – (to write you this book).
So if at any point the words grow dim on the page, it'll be the fluctuating voltage. On the other hand, any great uprushes of inspiration occurring randomly as you read will most likely be from power surges. It all depends on the flow of the stream whose source is a healing spring a few hundred yards away right here on Angel Mountain. (No kidding.)
The sheer exuberance from the relief at having left London means I can hardly contain myself; liberated at last from the dubious luxury of fancy hotels, business class travel (late trains), broadband revolution and three hundred e-mails a day, meetings for plotting and planning, TV shows, quirky radio appearances, recording studios, gigs, promotional events, talks, writing copy on the run, phone calls and, of course, text messages.
I am, in other words, all yours.
But are you?
All yours I mean.
Or do you live to a greater or lesser extent in reaction to others? Are you, for example (perhaps unconsciously) still attempting to please your parents, your children, your lovers, your friends, your boss, your colleagues, your teachers (and all the other children in the playground) – the perceived general public at large, in other words?
Are you a slave to other people's ideas? Or are you free?
Don't feel obliged to answer at once.
Freedom's a complex issue – one where there is no clear black or white but many shades of both.
Strangely enough, and I only realised it just now, this whole writing malarkey started off for me twelve years ago, the last time I was on Angel Mountain. Friend, father figure and mentor RD Laing had just died of a heart attack playing tennis in St Tropez and Jeb's farm (her having been one of Laing's closest friends and mine), seemed the perfect place to go and cry for a few days.
In between sobbing (and laughing, as you do), during those intervals when my diaphragm was resting, I'd waft off to the barn and, by the light of an old oil light, write. (Mike hadn't yet sorted the hydroelectric at that time – it was still one of those huge future projects he'd get round to one day). I wrote for hours and hours – reams and reams of outpoured free-flow consciousness that transpired to be a personal prophecy of how my life would turn out. But the content wasn't as important as establishing a relationship between the will to write and words on page, which (surprisingly) over time developed enough that here you now sit (or stand if, say, on a crowded tube) with me about to help you liberate yourself with these very words.
(Which leads me to say), it's an amazing thing this life when you stop resisting it, when you relax your body and mind - in this particular moment, for example - let go of trying to control the results of your actions, allow things to unfold as they will and be willing to fill each moment that arises out of the nothingness with the absolute totality of yourself. Give it some welly (so to speak), before it disappears into the nothingness again.
But, most importantly, when you decide to trust this reality with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind, you notice serenely over time (because it does take time), that all you've wished for, done affirmations about, visualised and longed for all the while actually does come true.
It's a kind universe we inhabit. See that and it will be so. See it hostile and it will be. The entire quality of your experience while you're here is purely a matter of choice. Sure there's pain and suffering beyond belief. It's happening right now even while you're reading this, perhaps even in you – that's why I'm writing to you in the first place – but the more liberated you allow yourself to become, the more you'll find yourself doing to help alleviate that.
You won't help yourself or anybody else by being a miserable son of a bitch. No matter how great the pain around you: you have to remain cheerful! Not cheerful about the pain – pain hurts – but cheerful just about being alive to witness the drama of it all. Those suffering around you prefer to resonate with your joy rather than your sorrow – it makes them feel better. You could almost consider it a duty to access joy and train yourself to keep accessing it from now on, if only for the sake of good art.
True, it takes courage to be cheerful and it takes balls to be free, but you weren't ‘put' on this planet whizzing round the infinite universe at 66,000 miles per hour while simultaneously rotating on its own axis at 1,000 miles per hour, to be a lily-livered slave, so courage is something well worth developing to the utmost.
I can help you reinforce that for yourself immediately, if you like. Just say, ‘I have courage!’
You think there's something funny about that? You think there's something silly about giving yourself that kind of talking to? There isn't. A good rah rah session (at least) once a day is, in fact, imperative if you wish to free yourself of the shackles of generations of pain and delusion that otherwise hinder you from full expression of self and enjoyment of life. So say it, go on,
‘I have courage! I have courage enough to grab this adventure by the scruff of the neck, live it to the full and be cheerful no matter what, from now on!'
I'd call you myself to acknowledge you for saying that, but now I'm here it turns out I have no signal whatsoever on my mobile (so far from ‘civilization' am I), the land line phone is too many muddy footsteps away in the farmhouse and I'm simply not inclined to walk up there right now. In any case, I don't know your number and it would probably be going too far in this relationship at such an early stage of knowing you. But imagine I just have and let yourself be warmed from head to toe by the sound of it.
From Liberation, copyright 2002 by Barefoot Doctor (Stephen Russell), published in the UK by Thorsons.
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