The Shamanic astral temple adventure

So, I put my all weather jacket on, chunky hiking boots, had my corned beef sarnies, note book, pen, camera and folding multi-tool packed in my little black rucksack, and like Huck Finn, lit out for the territory.
The multi-tool by the way is a nod to Ray Mears and Edmund Hilary – If I get stranded out here in ‘the wilderness’ (3 miles from the Co-op superstore) and have to slay an animal or cut off my own leg to survive…I’m prepared!
(Plus the penknife thing makes me feel all manly and primitive – like a more sophisticated Neanderthal…?)

There’s a particularly beautiful walk called the ‘Staffordshire way’ that runs through my village and snakes its way through the heavily wooded countryside and nearby villages that has been one of the little (and free) highlights of my life for a number of years.

As soon as I slip past the church on the hill and climb that first gnarled stile I feel a whoosh, like a collapse of all the tension in my body, indeed my physical self loses its edges and I can sense the dissolution of the egoic ‘ME’. Like ice being exposed to a huge instant flame I melt into the landscape, I become fluid again.
The countryside is looking after me, it knows me more than I know myself, it is benevolent and maternal. I am home again.

Once I have left my village behind, I feel like I can walk forever, this is me, this is who I am: the stuff I can carry and an open receptive mind, a generous mind that wants to give as well as receive.
Time itself seems to become amorphous and without context and delineation too. I feel that all times co-exist on my walk. I sense crowds of ghosts blowing in my ear, sitting in trees, sniggering behind hedgerows…I think I catch another face staring with me into a stagnant pool hidden away in a tiny copse of trees.
Trick of the light or a deeper reality?

Nature is so busy, always chattering, pottering about, preoccupied with its infinite tasks and passions - a trillion births, lives and deaths played out in the blink of this human eye. At times like this I reflect on Relativity, the speed of light, observer dependent time dilation and compaction, the microcosm and the macrocosm…what does it all mean, this democracy of scale?
Its poetry really, its just layers of metaphors to enable a brief foothold, all we ever get is glimpses of the infinite with science and nature.

But on this particular walk something even more profound and beautiful happened.
As I strolled through my bucolic idyll I noticed an odd structure through the trees. At first I thought it was a lump of windfall from the surrounding trees, but on closer inspection it appeared to be some kind of primitive hut! As can be seen from the pic, it was a tiny narrow space, tall enough to stand up in or sit down at a push, built onto an existing stunted tree with branches, twigs, turf and stones.

Wow! My cynical urban mind said, ‘its just kids messing about, looks cool though’, my cosmic esoteric consciousness screamed, ‘It’s a bloody cosmic portal for the teleportation of Shamen’s to parallel universes, what a jammy bastard I am!’
Believe me, in the imagination stakes I’m in the Premier league.

After breathlessly taking copious amounts of pictures, I steeled myself and entered the temple, I had to know what it felt like inside. I suspected some kind of Tardis experience, to be suddenly confronted by the inside of a spaceship, or like Mr Ben, another historical era maybe.

So there I was, stooped and motionless in that tiny space. I could feel the big round grey stones that had been packed into the floor pressing unevenly on the soles of my boots. I waited, I listened, I tried to turn on, tune in and drop out.
…NOTHING, just the static of the wind and the sound of my own breathing.

I suddenly realised what a complete psychedelic twat I must look to any passing rambler or snooping farmer. I swear I heard the laughter of children somewhere as I nervously slithered out of that ‘thing’…or maybe it was faeries giggling.

Later as I was sitting on my usual poetic perch at the culmination of my journey, I scribbled in my notebook: ‘Must remember to consult astrological charts and Pagan texts for most propitious alignments for astral travel’.
Of course it didn’t work today, Mercury was in retrograde and I wasn’t properly psychically charged, I’ll try again on Thursday after Neighbors.

Alas, on my return, the temple/space chariot had been dismembered; either by the wind or the hand of man, who knows, but I suspect the latter, as amongst the ruins lay a squashed Coke can and a Curly-Wurly wrapper…although, no, lets not go there eh.

Anyway, if it was kids who built it, I believe they were unconsciously enacting a hidden instruction planted in their DNA by an ancient Alien intelligence.