Lent 2026: day 46 – approaching journey's end

Easter Saturday, the final day of Lent. Tomorrow, Easter Sunday. A day that celebrates the triumph of life over death (much as Christmas celebrates the triumph of light over darkness).  But that post is for tomorrow. Today, a short summing up of the past 46 days since Shrove Tuesday...

From the point of view of Giving Things Up, this year has been a total breeze. It gets easier with every passing year. Indeed, as ultimately happened last Easter, I won't end up staying awake to midnight just so that I can enjoy my first alcoholic drink in six and half weeks. Rather, I will wait until the Easter Sunday breakfast (brunch more like, timing-wise). The IPA's in the fridge. I continue to do as I have been doing these past few weeks – going to bed early (10pm – or 9pm winter-time according to my body clock) and waking up before sunrise.

Going without alcohol or meat for 46 days was no problem. The temptation to crack open a cold beer at the end of a long day spent lopping trees in the garden was there, but easy to overcome. Not eating meat? Not a challenge at all. The year round, I tend to keep meat-eating for special occasions. However, I doubt that I could go vegan; fish and dairy (cheese and natural yogurt) are dietary staples when it comes to protein intake. There have been no salt snacks, no fast food. And of course no confectionery, no cakes, biscuits, desserts (other than fruit and nuts in yogurt) nor fizzy sugary drinks, but these are absent from my diet the year round. Caffeine, like fish and diary, I have no intention of giving up for Lent; I merely limit myself to one strong cup of coffee a day before breakfast, again the year round (barring social occasions).

Exercise – I missed four days' worth after twanging some back muscles (I overdid it with the scything and raking in the garden one weekend), but have recovered and have stepped up the regime to get back to my average targets. Walking is nicely ahead of all previous years (over 13,000 paces a day every day since the New Year).

The will required to do something is greater than the will required not to do something. Getting down to write a Lenten blog post every day for 46 days was not easy, especially as I had decided not to simply use AI to consolidate, summarise and re-order old material. I wanted each day's post to be the result of my thoughts, insights and intuitions as they came to me. Let the Holy Spirit talk through me! And I managed, for the seventh year in a row (although last year's hospital stay meant I missed a total of ten posts from the 2025 series).

The essential question is what have I learnt? How far have I advanced in my spiritual quest? 

It is too early to say. The big new insights arrive later. They come unbidden; they help shape my thinking. Looking back over my past Lenten posts is helpful; each year's Lent is a spiritual milepost along my life. I can see how my thinking has sharpened, acquired definition and nuance, and how my faith has deepened. The role of experience-driven intuition is crucial in diluting doubt; the physicalist world view, where everything is matter and death is the end now fails to have any traction in my mind. 

The devil is doubt; doubt is materialism (it's all matter, including your awareness, all extinguished at death); materialism is indeed the devil; matter decays, washed away by entropy. Consciousness survives entropy (you may be frailer than you were a few decades ago, but your consciousness, your awareness of qualia, is just as clear and crisp as when you were small).

Lent stands in many ways as a material as well as spiritual practice. Giving things up makes you stronger in the material world. Lent is good for the body and good for the soul.

Lent 2025: day 46
Lent's end – but really?

Lent 2024: day 46 
Why do we exist? Why does anything exist?

Lent 2023: day 46
The summary, finale

Lent 2022: day 46
Easter Everywhere, but not Ukraine

Lent 2021: day 46
The summing up

Lent 2020: day 46
Nor followers, nor leaders; one's own way to God

Lent 2026: day 45 – suffering and death

Good Friday; whether you're a practicing Christian or not, this is a moment to contemplate Christ's suffering on the cross. A historical fact, one that even the atheist sceptical debunkers among historians cannot easily deny.  Whatever you believe happened after the Crucifixion, and whether or not you believe that Jesus Christ was God, it remains an undeniable fact that the historical figure of Christ had a transformational effect on Western civilisation. 

His teachings resulted in an entirely new ethos – getting on with your fellow human beings, whoever they are, wherever they're from. This contrasted with the previous Graeco-Roman ethos that the strong take what they can, while the weak suffer what they must. And God the Father of whom Christ spoke was a merciful and loving God, not at all like the Old Testament God, ever quick to anger and to smite sinners.

Christ's death on the cross was profoundly symbolic for all those who witnessed it or heard of it from first-hand witnesses. The immediate local impact was sufficiently powerful to spread a new spiritual movement across the Mediterranean basin, kick-starting a new global religion, broad in its appeal and inclusive it its reach. Christianity offered new hope and a new perspective to assuage earthly suffering. 

The quality of human life was vastly worse two millennia ago than it is today; disease and injustice making life hard to bear. Short, nasty and brutish. And so a universal message of salvation, of a kingdom 'not of this earth' would have been appealing. 

Life today is certainly easier than it was, but it is not without suffering, and that suffering is not evenly distributed among us eight billion humans. Watching your child die from malnutrition brought on by natural disaster or war must be the most intense emotional pain imaginable. How can your consciousness strive for some elevated experience when you are suffering?

Is God indifferent to human suffering? Here I'd pick up on the point I have made before; I do not believe in God is a person, nor on God as omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, and certainly not one that intervenes in individuals' lives. If you see God as a purpose, a direction, a journey – a work-in-progress – you can accept an imperfect Universe. One filled with suffering and death, but one that is constantly improving, one with a telos – an end-point, a goal.

Given the undeniable historicity of Christ, why do so many people turn their back on His message? Lack of curiosity, I think. You don't need to buy into the whole doctrine. For me the important thing is to look at what all religions have in common with one other, rather than on what divides them. Humans have an innate urge to seek the Divine light.

Death is only the end if you see consciousness as something locked in the skull, a purely biological epiphenomenon, the emergent result of evolution. 

Easter is the triumph of life over death. Whether you see that as literal (Christ's Resurrection), metaphoric or metaphysical – that is entirely up to you.

Lent 2024: day 45
Asceticism and happiness

Lent 2023, day 45
The Summary, Pt I

Lent 2022: day 45
What is the point of it all?

Lent 2021: day 45
Mindfulness vs Materialism

Lent 2020: day 45
Unconsummated memories

Lent 2026: day 44 – the importance of nuance

Our brains are wired to seek certainty. Evolution takes no prisoners – that's either a sabre-tooth tiger waiting to pounce on you from that outcrop, or it isn't. Life has become vastly more complex ever since. As we struggle to understand reality, we need to ask: how do we do so? Assuming of course we have enough curiosity; some folk simply ask why bother?

An intellectual framework. Do we need one? Or just take asking those questions one at a time, as they come? Here's a start. Ontology – the 'what we know', and epistemology – the 'how we know it'.  Epistemology? Heuristics is many people's epistemology. Making macro-level deductions from observed patterns. "He's a bad 'un, and that one's also troublemaker. They're both immigrants, therefore by deduction, all immigrants are bad and immigration should therefore be stopped." Bayesian inference – your epistemic confidence rises with frequency of observation. "Trump has lied yet again – I can now confidently assert that he's a liar."

And then there's the question of lumpers or splitters. Are we trying to divide and subdivide aspects of reality into ever-smaller discreet units (splitters)? Or are we trying to manage complexity by grouping commonalities into larger categories for easier assimilation (lumpers)? Or both? Or neither?

But when it comes to spiritual questions, we find ourselves wrestling with inchoate intellectual structures, rather than material quantities. Our intellectual framework has no empirical evidence to go on. A divine presence ordering the Universe? Where's the scientific proof? Life after death? I know many people who have died, none have returned from the dead. 

Our certainty-seeking brains look for tidy answers. Solutions rather problems that further investigation. Close the door to that question, declare it solved and move on to the next one, rather than living in a world of ongoing uncertainty. Nuance is uncomfortable.  It often requires finding balance between the objective and subjective; holding two seemingly contradictory views at the same time. So it is important to be able to feel comfortable with uncertainty while engaged in the quest for answers. Leaving things to fate, submitting to the flow; like a gibbon flying through the air before grasping the next branch, trusting that the next insight, the next incontrovertible fact, will be solid enough to support you on your further quest. 

Your personal ontology is the result of the interface between intellect and intuition; a blend of what you have worked out vs. what has come to you; what you have read vs. what you have experienced.

On the face of it, there seems to be no room for nuance in binary questions such as "Is there a God?" or "is there life after death?" The first one suggests a yes-no answer, rather than a challenge to define 'God'. Similarly 'life after death'. Is this even the right question? 'Does consciousness survive the death of its erstwhile biological container?' is a more nuanced framing.

Ultimately, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and the like are futile questions; approaching theology and metaphysics through logic, using deduction and inference is a dead end. Answers that satisfy you, subjectively, that do not need external validation, they come from personal experience. From insights, but above all from intuition.

Feel comfortable in uncertainty.

Lent 2026: day 44
Kicks, thrills, fun, pleasure – and joy

Lent 2024: day 44
Spirituality and the Dream World

Lent 2023, day 44
The Purpose

Lent 2022: day 44
Habit, discipline or obsession

Lent 2021: Day 44
Life after life after life after life

Lent 2020: Day 44
A myriad paths to God

Lent 2026: day 43 – the interface between material wellbeing and soul

The goal of technology should be to give us time to pursue what really matters. Enough surplus resources – food, clothing, shelter, energy and information – to ensure that life's not a struggle, enough so everyone has enough to live life without suffering discomfort. And to have enough free time to enjoy life. 

But we humans are flawed, flawed in so many ways. Some people want more and more and more. More money, money to spend in ways that screws our planet with their wanton consumerism. Others want money without having to put in the work. Crime or welfare. Not contributing to society, subtracting rather than adding value to society. The feeling of being entitled to something – to anything – because it is owed to me. Why? By whom? For some historic slight or injustice? Because of accident of birth? Societies with the right mindset, which I define as 'getting on with it', show year-on-year, decade-on-decade progress. But again, societies should not believe they are simply entitled to progress. It can stall (Japan in the 1990s, the UK since Brexit) or go backwards (large chunks of the Middle East).

Optimising society means focusing on better health outcomes and better education that leads to less egregious behaviour, leading to fewer resources being spent on security. Optimising the way we use natural resources, from food to energy, to recycling. Science and technology helps us do that, but it is like squeezing a ball of plasticine in your hand; as it compresses, some of it squishes through between your fingers. Unintended consequences creating new problems to resolve. The motor-car? Pollution, congestion, road deaths. Nuclear physics? Nuclear proliferation. The internet? Doom-scrolling. 

The notion of teleology should be more widely applied to our human lives, not only in the context of metaphysics. The notion of end-cause, purpose, that which we are aiming for, is not really discussed in the media. What is the purpose of eight billion human lives? Nothing more than survival and procreation? And having fun along the way? Nothing more than biology? 

Surely our purpose is creativity. We are born with the urge to create, beautiful things and ideas – and art and music. Once we have eliminated discomfort on our lives, we can focus on aesthetics. Guided not by external validation, but by what truly resonates with our own personal sense of taste. [In my case, this is informed by a preference for mid-century modern Americana; familiar and comforting.] We are also born curious; we seek to understand the world around us down to the very quintessence of matter, and up to the heavens, infinite and eternal. This, I believe, is why we live; to discover, to create, to invent. Ironing out discomfort from our lives while we are at it. Improving, generation by generation, the quality of human life.

Once upon a time (until 2016), I believed that humanity's arc was generally upward; that today is better than yesterday, and that tomorrow will be even better than today. The future will be rosier still. Generally upward, but with two steps forward and one step back. History was meant to have ended in 1991, with the collapse of communism and a stable world order based on democracy and free markets reigning forever more. But this optimism overlooked the existence of psychopathic ideologies and psychopathic individuals, as well as the reality that societies include sizeable numbers of liars, simpletons and egregiously avaricious persons whose actions screw it up for everyone.

We are flawed as individuals. We have our good sides and our bad sides; our immediate purpose as a society should to be continue squeezing out the bad, from our politics and from our streets. But defining 'bad' comes with its own set of problems. Religions evolved to maintain social control, but if those controlling religions are themselves flawed, this fails. Religion in the service of the state, telling Plato's 'noble lie' to keep people aligned with their state's best interests, is not the answer. Rather, it is an acceptance, an understanding, in the minds of the bulk of the population, that it's in everyone's best interest to behave in win-win mode, rather than being adversarial or transactional in your everyday dealings with fellow citizens, businesses and the state. Cooperation within a competitive market has brought bountiful benefits to mankind that individual endeavour never could have managed. 

Whilst I am not decrying the personal ethics of atheists (especially humanists), I do see that having a spiritual outlook on life does lead to self-improvement and higher state of consciousness.By living life in comfort rather than aiming to live in luxury, by dialling down material desires (new car, exotic holiday, shopping trips etc) we end up less worried about our financial state and more able to savour the simple joys that life has to offer.

Lent 2024: day 43
More questions than answers (Pt IV)

Lent 2023, day 43

Wayside shrines

Lent 2022: day 43

Spirit of Place and Metaphysics

Lent 2021: day 43

Doubt and Curiosity

Lent 2020: day 43

Quartodecimalism, or the fixing of the date of Easter

Lent 2026: day 42 – dreams, coincidences and destiny

In the annex part of the building, the big table awaits delegates for the sit-down dinner that formally ends the two-day linguistics conference. Outside, it's already dark. In the main ballroom, people are mixing in small groups, chatting, champagne flutes in hand, waiting for the signal to take their seats. Everyone's in business attire. I walk across from the ballroom, into the annex, which is still mostly empty. But I see one person already seated, his back to the table, head in hands. He's not wearing a suit, but a dark-grey woollen jumper. I recognise him. It's Rysiek. But Rysiek's dead. He died in December 2023. I walk over to him and put my hand on his shoulder. Telepathically, I express my sadness at his passing. He raises his head, looks at me and stands up. We hug. I wake up from my dream with a start. He has just imparted to me the name of the next boy from our West London Polish scout troop and Polish Saturday school who is soon to die...

Do I believe in prophetic dreams? Not really. I can be persuaded by empirical evidence – but I've not really had any that I can correlate to a future event about which I dreamt. But are prophetic dreams not more similar in nature and mechanism to contemplated synchronicities – those meaningful coincidences that lead you to think about some possible misfortune which is then prevented? 

Yes – this is more like it. Collapsing the wave function. With consciousness. The person whose name came to me in my dream this morning will not die anytime soon, because I have considered that possibility happening. By narrowing down a range of possibilities, I have precluded an event from occurring by the simple act of awareness that it may happen.

Preventing the inevitable by thought: is this at all possible? How about a more nuanced approach – not so much preventing but postponing the inevitable, mitigating its effects, reducing the impact of the inevitable? This, I believe, applies to completely unexpected, out-of-the-blue occurrences. We were all expecting the Iran war to kick off – the roots were too deep for it not to have happened. It was just a question of when. The same goes for Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But how about the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 that killed 227,000 people? Could it have been forestalled, postponed or its effects mitigated by consciousness? By merely considering its possibility?

But what about (divine) purpose? The continued presence of latent chaos on earth, inherent in nature, between nations, and the small-scale chaos that can randomly befall any of us in our day-to-day lives?

Ultimately, we are here to learn, to develop, to elevate our consciousness through facing challenges such as illness, bereavement or war. I prefer the word 'challenged' to the word 'suffering', 'trial' to 'ordeal'. That we may overcome, elevated. And, having learned, moved on, out of one biological container to another, our consciousness having evolved a notch or two.

Six weeks of Lent have elapsed. Tomorrow I shall begin summarising this year's Lenten journey.

Lent 2025: day 42
Accident of birth

Lent 2024: day 42
More questions than answers (Pt III)

Lent 2023, day 42
Where did religions come from?

Lent 2022: day 42
A Future Like This

Lent 2021: day 42
Actively seeking Understanding

Lent 2020: day 42
From Zero to One

Lent 2026: day 41 – in touch with the intangible

Early morning walks on an empty stomach (but after a strong black coffee, no sugar), are for me among those moments of repeatable joy, especially when the sun is shining through. There's a buzz in my head, a slight giddiness, not at all unpleasant, a mildly altered state. Walking through the forest, catching sight of a hare or deer, absence of traffic or indeed anybody, awareness of the seasons, a connection with nature. Gratitude; connectedness; a grounding in base reality, touching the sense of life.

Who or what is God? Certainly, God is not a person. God is by nature indefinable to our human minds. We are not to fully know God until the moment of ultimate unity.

As I walk this morning, I find myself considering a test for the ego: would you wish another incarnation as a human, or would you rather rush through to that ultimate union with Brahman, with The One, with God? 

To be honest, I feel I'd like another crack at life as a human (though next time with more wisdom, resulting from spiritual evolution). I'd like to carry on with and within the cycle of samsara (birth, death, and rebirth). For the sake of curiosity. Knowing that within one lifetime, there can never be closure.

No rush, just a slow, patient, continuous improvement based on series of learnings, reaching higher and higher levels of metaphysical insight. Life after life after life. In tangible, physical, biological form. Consciously guided wetware.

Does this suggest that my ego, far from being switched off or even dimmed, is still interested in manifesting itself in future bodies? Reluctantly, I have to answer 'yes'.

Do I need another adventure, or do I just want one? What do I wish for my next incarnation? This is where the narrative arc of the ego needs to align with the Purpose of the Cosmos for optimal results. The best answer is: "I wish to continue learning, to continue in spiritual growth, and to receive with simplicity whatever biology I am born into."

And here I return to a fundamental thought I've often harboured since youth: had my parents not met, my consciousness would still be here, on earth, in biological form – just not the biological form that I currently inhabit. Everything that I'd have in common with that hypothetical person, essentially awareness, metaphysical will, and those qualia memories – familiar flashes of exomnesia harking back to a previous existence – is rooted in consciousness. Everything that's different – DNA, upbringing, environment – is rooted in biology. 

The intangible, the ineffable, feels so far off, but I do believe that spiritual evolution brings us closer to at least having some vague idea of life is for, why something exists rather than nothing, the true nature of reality – and the true nature of God,

Lent 2024: day 41
More Questions than Answers (Pt II)

Lent 2023, day 41
The End of Times

Lent 2022: day 41
A Better Future

Lent 2021: day 41
The Holiest of Holies

Lent 2026: day 40 – is God is knowable or unknowable?

 For Marek

What can we say of God with certainty? That God is good, that God is love? Or, that because of God's ineffable nature, and because of the limitations of human reasoning and language, God is entirely unknowable? We humans seem destined never to understand God through our human reason, through logic, through scientific method. The metaphysical lies forever beyond our grasp.

What, though, of our physical world? Will we even get to understand that? This is has been the pursuit of science since the late 17th century. Since then, mankind has built up an ever-more complete grasp of the immutable laws that govern everything from the inner workings of an atom to an expanding Cosmos full of galaxies, and on the basis of that knowledge, had developed technologies that have vastly improved the quality of our lives.

While our scientific knowledge has grown exponentially, we are still a long way off from knowing it all.

In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking posits three possibilities for a grand unified theory of everything that will satisfy our ultimate curiosity about the Universe:

1. There is a theory of everything “which we will someday discover”.

2. There is no theory of everything, “just an infinite sequence of theories” that describe reality with ever-greater degrees of accuracy, but never ultimately ties up all the loose ends, much like Zeno's paradox of only ever getting halfway to your destination.

3. There is no theory of everything – “events cannot be predicted beyond a certain extent”. Hawking stops himself from going further and stating the possibility that the Universe might be fundamentally unknowable.

So I would add a fourth possibility: it is not for us, Homo sapiens, to ever come up with a workable theory of everything. Our brains are just too puny to get to grips with the complexity of an unfolding Universe. Not only is the metaphysical beyond our grasp, but the physical is too. Maybe Homo superior will get there, maybe not.

All that is certain to us is conscious experience and our intuitions relating from that experience. Gnosis. Knowledge through experience rather than knowledge through learning. The one thing I do know for sure is that I am conscious. Indeed, I am conscious of being conscious. This is the fundamental base substrate of my subjective reality. Aware of being aware, I am! 

"Are you a Trinitarian or a Unitarian?" "Do you believe in Transubstantiation or  Consubstantiation?" Thousands perished for replying with the 'wrong' answer. But ultimately, do nuances of dogma matter at all?  Does God even care what we understand God to be?

This is why I find religious fundamentalism of all sorts intolerable; fundamentalists proclaim certainty of that which by definition is unknowable. Divine inspiration can only take us so far. We can merely be aware that those who seek God are on a quest for knowledge that is ultimately doomed never to succeed. In this lifetime.

"Jesus said : "Let him who seeks cease not seeking until he finds"." – From the [Gnostic] Gospel of Thomas, 1:2.

Lent 2025: day 40
The nature of the past

Lent 2024: day 40
More questions than answers (Pt I)

Lent 2024, Day 40
How we lead our lives

Lent 2022: Day 40
Fasting and Temptation

Lent 2021: Day 40
Medicine, Mindfulness and Miracles

Lent 2020: Day 40
Coercion, Persuasion, Conversion and Faith

Lent 2026: day 39 – on Original Sin

What is Original Sin? To many, it's become some old dogma cooked up by early Christian theologians to justify the whole schtick about why mankind needs salvation. 

In my personal theology, I consider original sin not in terms of vague inherited guilt, nor as an primordial act of disobedience, but as something far more immediate and recognisable. 

I take original sin to be anger.

Classical theology, rooted in the Augustinian tradition, frames original sin as 'disordered will' – the conscious turning away from the good towards the self. My lived experience suggests something else, something more visceral. The disorder does not present itself as 'will'. It is a reaction to external stimulus, instantaneous override of good judgment and the ability to calculate long-term consequences.

By 'anger' I mean that hair-trigger orientation that reacts before it understands. Losing one's temper, when instinct overpowers intellect, and 'flight or fight' kicks in. The collapse of the wave function into 'I' vs 'Adversary'. [If you need a frame of reference here, think road-rage. Google Gemini image]

Anger inhabits a space that is biological, moral and existential. It is innate. It is triggered by perceived threat. It carries with it an implicit judgment – this should not be happening! I am right! The moron driver of the black SUV is clearly in the wrong! And anger compels immediate action, from incoherent shouting to drawing a .38 revolver. In an instant, anger simplifies the world into opponent and self, wrong and right, offence and response.

Anger is not just one sin among many. It is baked into the operating system. Once anger is engaged, perception narrows, ambiguity collapses, and the other becomes the foe. Time shortens – there's no 'cooling-off period', no 'counting to ten', no space for reflection, only reaction. Lashing out. The self consolidates, defined by nothing else than what it is resisting. Anger is already a form of violence, even before any violent action – or even in the absence of violent action.

The Old Testament is full of references to a wrathful Lord. [This supports my contention – and that of the Gnostics – that the Old Testament God was an imposter, the Demiurge, the creator of the material world, and nothing to do with the almighty God of Love as preached by Jesus.] However, the New Testament rarely mentions anger. A rare reference: the Epistle of James 1:19-20: "Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God". All four Gospels tell of Jesus's Cleansing of the Temple, but in none of the four accounts does Jesus display any outright anger at the moneychangers, other than possibly overturning their tables (mentioned in Matthew 21:12 and Mark 11:15).

Anger always requires a trigger; it does not arise out of nothing. Anger is where the system 'kicks off' into an altered state. From the neurocognitive perspective, anger is immediate, subcortical and energetically mobilising. While the idea of the 'reptile brain' (a reptilian complex at the heart of the brain, surrounded by paleomammalian and neomammalian layers) has long been disproved, there is a grain of truth here. Bypassing deliberation, anger is evolutionarily useful in a threat-filled environment, but maladaptive in a world of complex social relations. In theological language, one might say that our base nature is not evil, but misaligned – optimised for an environment that we are no longer living in.

The implications of this maladaptation is important. Original Sin here is not primarily rule-breaking or rejecting God. It is misperception under the influence of anger, a form of behaviour caused by loss of self-control. Ethics becomes less about compliance and more about the discipline of not allowing reptilian first reaction to define our reality. Also of huge importance is the speed with which we can right ourselves after being hit by a wave of anger, how quickly our consciousness, our intuition and our intellect can return once more to dominate our behaviour.

'Salvation' in the context of anger is that recovery of self (literally, "I was beside myself with anger"). Loss of control is temporary; the mind returns to the space between stimulus and response.

'Sin' in the context of anger is no longer a static condition, but a feedback loop. Anger generates anger. Reaction provokes reaction. Strike calls for counter-strike! Yet response to egregious behaviour directed against one should always be appropriate and proportionate to the infraction, and that calls for analysis, not mindless lashing out. Ultimately, anger can be mollified, its causes mitigated (like, drive less, avoid cities and motorways), but the trigger mechanism is always there, in your head.

AFTERTHOUGHT: After writing the above, I went for a walk. In the other part of Jakubowizna, a large aggressive dog suddenly started barking at me from behind a wooden fence, at a distance of about  a metre and half. My instant response was to shout a stream of obscene Polish words at the hound. Fortunately, there was no one in the front garden to witness this and to think me mad. A few paces further along the pavement, I had returned to my usual disposition, albeit shaken up a bit.

Lent 2024: day 39 
The Magic Power of Gratitude

Lent 2023, day 39
Peace of Mind

Lent 2022: day 39
Animal spirits, animal consciousness

Lent 2021: day 39
Praise the Sun God

Lent 2020: day 39
Don't let misfortune catch you unaware!