Thoughts for a New Year - part 1

It's funny how over the years I have found long train journeys highly conducive to creativity, whether it be writing songs (I wrote 2 in one train journey across France about 8 years ago) or writing spiritual reflections. An example of the latter form of creativity occurred yesterday when I was getting the train from Châteaulin, Finistère (on the extreme west coast of Brittany in west France - think the French Cornwall) to Paris (more about why in a later post). As long as I don't fall asleep for the duration, such journeys provide me with time to think, reflect, read, maybe watch a film on my laptop... and do something I have always enjoyed doing: making links between things - between, for example, a passage in a book I am reading and a theme that is dealt with in a film I have seen, or a song lyric, or an event in my own life, and from this more or less spontaneous integration of ideas from different sources then come up with something of my own. In this case it was a very personal spiritual reflection that I wrote without stopping on my way to Paris, during a pause in reading Paulo Cuelho's book "The Zahir" (not a great book as such, but certainly an interesting and meaningful one for me in my life at present). The ideas expressed in the book helped to crystalise in me ideas and experiences which I have been carrying within me for some time relating to the search for self-kowledge, God's will vs. my will and the ideas of freewill and determinism (in other words whether or not everything we do is pre-determined by such factors as our genes and the experiences of our parents and ancestors, our environment, the will of God... and whether or not we can be said to be in any way truly free).

At such times as that which I experienced on yesterday's train (forgive me for sounding pretentious) it is almost as if I feel the whole of creation speaking to me and urging me to give form to something as yet without form but nonetheless present in the world around me. I listened to music on my headphones as I wrote and occasionally glanced out of the train window at the snow-covered countryside and blue sky and I felt somehow in tune, in harmony with it all. This does not mean that what I wrote has any worth for anyone other than myself, but I am nonetheless going to put it here on my blog just in case. It certainly has meaning for me and may just do so for a few other people.

Anyway, I will put it on here in the next few days.

Over and out!