We had returned to the Barn, damp and bedraggled, for a final coffee before hitting the road. The meeting had gone well and we had done what we had set out to do… created a vessel for the talk we will be giving next Thursday in Glastonbury on the Architecture of the Soul. Possibly not the easiest subject to approach when everyone has their own, and very personal view on the subject, but then there is that old adage about ‘fools rushing in’… and it was Steve’s idea.

Now, of course, we had to find a way to make it work and that was why scrawled notes had covered the tables over lunch, and why some rather startled people had walked into one of the tower rooms of a castle ruin to find three supposedly grown adults making odd, ritualistic gestures in the rain. Ah well, no doubt stranger things have happened there.

We had met at Rivington, a place close to Steve’s heart, and after we had reached consensus on what we would be doing and how, we had gone for a walk in the woods. The rain had eased to a light drizzle and although the circular tower of the castle stands open to the sky it provided a perfect setting to see if what we had in mind would work. A few people tried to wander in to the small, space but to a man they had that odd gleam in their eye as they backed away. To be fair, it must have looked a tad strange and unreal.

Then again, so does the castle. It is set in green woodland and overlooked by Rivington Pike. At first glance it would appear to be an ancient ruin, but closer inspection reveals its secret. It is a fake; a replica… a hollow shell built as a protestation by Lord Leverhulme. It has all the appearance of a castle… fireplaces, stairs, turrets and narrow passageways. It is hewn of great blocks of blackened stone. Yet none of it was ever designed to be functional. It is not real. It has form… but no soul. It is, and has always been, a lifeless simulacrum… a golem. Something that has never been animated by life.

It struck me as a fair symbol for what we were doing, really, with our exploration of the soul. The body itself is only an empty shell when there is no life in it. It may look perfect and have the appearance of a functional thing, but it needs that animating principle, that unquantifiable, indefinable thing we call ‘life’ before it can function in the world. Yet life, in order to truly be, is more than just a force that animates the body… that would make us little more than automata ourselves. It is that strange alchemy of heart and mind that makes us into individuals and, something else…perhaps the soul, however you define it, that lifts us beyond a state of mechanical movement and reactive emotions and makes each of us something truly alive and unique, lit with the fires of Life.

I was pondering that as we walked back to the Barn for that final coffee; even the landscape of Lever Park is an odd mixture of nature and artifice; constructed with love by its late owner in a place that had meant something very personal to him, yet now the last traces of the ballroom stand open to the winds, the tower is closed and the gardens overgrown. All that he sought to create, moulding the land to the image of his desire, is being taken back by nature, though the changes remain, echoes of a man in the landscape. That too seemed apt as we continue our own personal journeys, learning to release the desires of the ego and simply be… changed, not unmarked, by the experiences of life, yet allowing our true inner nature to take back the illusions of self we have built over our lifetimes.

There is a joy in that, like the discovery of a secret garden on a hillside that has melded and mellowed into its rightful place, a symbiosis of sorts. And it was with laughter that we sat at the table with our coffee, a lightness of being that comes with Work well done. I turned away from the fan that was blasting dry air into my eyes, and my companions, laughing, also turned away… pointedly and with great deliberation moving their chairs, ’stopping the world’ by changing the expected to the unexpected in one fell swoop. I am used to their misbehaviour and simply grabbed the camera. Laughter is not a bad way to end a meeting.