Dear ,
I hope all is well with you and that you’ve enjoyed the end of the summer. Here in the UK, the summer has lasted longer
than usual, which has been nice. Recently we put a bird feeder in our garden, and it’s been wonderful to watch the robins and sparrows flying around - and also to watch the amazing contortions of squirrels trying to reach the bird food. What we didn’t take account of though was how the increased number of birds would impact on Mitzi, our cat.
One morning last week, Mitzi mauled a beautiful robin in
the garden. The bird was hobbling, its wings seemed all enmeshed in its feet, and it couldn't fly, so we phoned our local vet, and they said they would take a look and give it free treatment if needed. So we put the robin in Mitzi's cat box (ironically), the vet examined him/her and said there was no sign of serious injury. He said it was probably just traumatised and shocked, but that it would be fine to let it free. They suggested I let it go free in a nearby park but I said, "No, I'll take it
back to our garden - best to put it in its home environment." I took him/her home, and as soon as it flew out of the box, another robin flew down from the tree to meet it, as if it had been waiting all that time. They hopped across the garden together for a few metres and then flew off together, chirping away, like two lovers who had been reunited. It was so beautiful!
And now we’ve fitted Mitzi a collar and
bell, so that the robins will have advance warning of her approach.
Events in the US
I’m really looking forward to my trip to the US next week. It will be my first time on the west coast
- I’ll be staying in the LA area for five days. Next Wednesday (28th September) I’m giving a talk at the Mystic Journey bookshop in Venice. It would be great to see some of you there, if you live in the area! Let me know if you can make it. Further details here: http://mysticjourneybookstore.com/event-detail/?id=152616
Then I’m travelling on to the Eckhart Tolle Foundation conference in Huntington Beach. In case you don’t know, Eckhart is starting a charitable foundation, and this is its inaugural event. I’m speaking on Friday evening, at around 8 pm. You can watch a free live stream of the conference by registering here: https://www.eckharttollefoundation.com/live-stream/ Spanish Edition of The Fall
My book The Fall is the one I receive most feedback about - even though it was originally
published 11 years ago, I still get regular e-mails from people telling me how deeply it has affected them, and that it has changed the way they see the world. A new Spanish edition of the book is just about to be published, and I was asked to write a foreword for it. The Fall is largely a book about anthropology and archaeology, and I did a massive amount of research in those areas. But since the book's publication 11 years ago, I haven't kept up with developments, as I've been mainly
focusing on psychology and spirituality. So before writing the foreword I decided to look into anthropology again, and I was really heartened by what I found. I discovered that over the last few years, a lot of research has been published backing up my theories in the Fall. It's now the consensus view that warfare is a recent development in history, and that prehistoric human beings (up to around 6000 years ago) were peaceful. It's now widely accepted that hunter-gatherers groups are (and were)
egalitarian, and that women had equal status to men. This wasn't at all the case when I originally wrote the Fall - it was a bit crankish to suggest these things. But it seems that the dominance of the 'selfish gene' view of human nature is fading away. There has been a kind of paradigm shift in our view of early human beings. So great news! Here’s the cover of the Spanish edition by the way: The Leap That brings me to The Leap,
which is (as the title suggests) a sort of sequel to The Fall. The book is going through production now - it’s just about to be copy-edited, which means being checked for punctuation and spelling mistakes and so forth. It’s already available for pre-sale on amazon, although it won’t be printed until the end of the year. Eckhart Tolle has promised to write the foreword to the book - it will be interesting to see what he says!
That’s all for now. But let me leave you with this
reminder:
All best wishes and blessings, Steve |
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