Andrew John and Eleni Clarke hosted us at their idyllic property called Borde Hill Gardens in Sussex for a gourmet lunch and tour of the gardens. They’ve upgraded the place, creating a skylit restaurant, a café, and organic gardens that supply the restaurant. All the flowers in the gardens are edible, and garnished our food and drinks. What a service to create an Eden like this and share it with the world. Adjacent to the gardens is a manor that dates back to the 16th century.
Sussex is every book you ever read about the English countryside when you were a child. Visiting there is a chance to live in the pages of Winnie the Pooh or The Wind in the Willows. In my experience devas—the nature spirits that care for the world of the earth, plants and animals—have personalities that bear some similarities to human personalities, and the devas in Sussex are some of the softest, sweetest, most comforting devic beings that I’ve known. Some devas are wilder than others, and these seem to me to be tame and quite OK with the human realm. I felt them all over Borde Hill.
The devas are what I was tuning into as a child on the day of a freak April snowstorm in the Hudson River valley in upstate New York, when I stayed in bed all morning lost in the dreamy yet earthy world of The Wind in the Willows, playing in the long grass, hills and streams with Mole, Rat, Mr. Toad and Mr. Badger—and the fallen adult world of time, money, tribulation and treachery ceased to exist.
We took a train to Haywards Heath, and then a short drive to Borde Hill. It was Jsu Garcia’s birthday, and he called in the Light and was presented with a candled birthday dessert. We walked all over the large property. It was a flawless day. I don’t think God made a single mistake that day. Maybe there could have been fewer clouds but the air was moist and delicious.
For more information on devas you can listen to John-Roger’s seminar, “Working with the Devic Kingdom” at
https://www.msia.org/app/twi/watch?v=92Ga0zMXqlAU
My theory has always been that England is like a portal through which people incarnate directly from the devic kingdom. They take such good care of nature. What major city other than London has such magnificent trees all over the streets? What other country has created such great absurdist humor like Monty Python or The Mighty Boosh or the Goon Show, which are like deva’s-eye-views of the ridiculousness of human concerns from a perspective that is so clearly foreign? And then there’s all the nature poetry, and the politeness, and the small, awkward gap between the physical body and the world of violence—a gap that you don’t see in most other cultures, where violence usually sits like a watchful bird of prey in the unconscious.
“Mind the gap” is constantly repeated in the incomprehensibly clean subway called the Underground, as though these devic people are continually reminding themselves of this gap in the unconscious, reinforcing it, encouraging the threat of violence to retreat behind toothy smiles that have the tentativeness of someone who’s not quite sure how to communicate in a language where the possibility of conflict is an unfamiliar beast that must be kept leashed.
Who else but a deva would create a bizarre impotent monarchy that’s more like an eccentric uncle or aunt than a dictator, and fashion a wildly popular world of ritual around this nonentity whose main weapon is cuteness and whose guards wear gigantic tall furry hats? Who else would create a meal between lunch and dinner and call it “teatime” and eat funny miniature sandwiches and desserts in a shiny tiered vertical merry-go-round? (Maybe those vertical tea servers are stored under the tall furry hats?) Who else but devas would create a band like the Beatles, who regularly took a left turn at rock and roll and careened into fantasy and children’s songs, and then just as suddenly reverted to rock, and then turned around again and dressed in brightly colored silk mock-military suits and dissolved into even higher flights of fancy? Who else but devas could have created the works of Lewis Carroll?
By the way, I’m changing my name to Haywards Heath, and am going back to Sussex later this week. I may not be coming back to the U.S. I’ll be living on edible flowers from the Borde Hill garden. You can find me at either Rat or Mole’s house. They don’t have email yet but they say you can write me at the address, “The Rock in the Stream.”
