Of Slugs and Saints

An announcement

‘Look at that sunrise. Wow, man. I’m just going to chill here for hours.’

Monday Morning Wellness Clinic, with Dr Charles Bukowski:

Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you’re gonna lose everything. Whether you’re an actor, anything, a housewife - there has to be great pauses between highs where you do nothing at all. You just lay on the bed and stare at the ceiling. This is very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That’s why they’re all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful.

So, yeah, leisure. And I don’t mean having profound thoughts. I mean having no thoughts of progress, without any self-thoughts of trying to further yourself. Just like a slug. It’s beautiful.

There will be times in your life when the collected wisdom of the Very Serious Philosophers, all the great books you have read and meant to read, and all the delicately-constructed intellectual Babels you have piled up for decades will avail you precisely bugger all. At such times, an alcoholic bum genius may be the man you need to listen to.

At such times, you just need to stop.

This is one of those times.

My friends, I am officially burnt out, and I am hereby publicly admitting it.

Regular readers may know that my health has been very on-and-off for a year or so. Having gone nineteen-to-the-dozen with every aspect of my life for four decades, I have in the last year been knocked flat on my back several times. The last and final time occurred during my recent tour of America, and I have not recovered. I kept thinking I had, or would. After all, I still had things to do. A book tour of the UK, for starters. I had to keep going at least until this was done. And I have another book to write, with a looming deadline. And a family to feed. And a workshop roof to repair, and logs to cut and split, and and ….

Then, last Thursday, I was booked to do a very low-key event at a bookshop in Galway. My head was a balloon of fog and my body was wobbling all over the place, but I still went along. You have to do your duty, see?

This was a mistake from which I have still not recovered. It knocked me on my back again for three days, and I am still operating like an almost entirely-drained battery. I have been forced to finally accept what has been creeping up on my, louder and louder, for months and months:

It’s time to stop. Right now.

I have no choice in the matter. My head and body have gone on strike. They are all over the place. They are simply refusing to work when I tell them to. Even writing these sentences is taking it out of them. Like exhausted mules, they are sitting down in the middle of the track, and they won’t get up however much I whip them.

The mules will survive, I think. They’re not at death’s door quite yet. They can be rejuvenated, but they are going to need plenty of hay and water and, most of all, rest to get them back into shape. They will need to sit in the garden and stare vacantly at the shrouded winter sun, with no thought for anything at all.

I’m writing this to explain that I need this period now. And so I have decided (or rather, my body has decided for me) to take a sabbatical until the new year. I am taking two months off from all and any work, to allow my body, mind and soul to recuperate. This means that I have had to cancel my forthcoming speaking tour of the UK. I apologise if you had been planning to come along, but it’s simply not an option for me right now.

What does this mean for the Abbey of Misrule? It means that there will be no new writing appearing here until 2026. The one exception will be our monthly salons, which I will continue to open up. I enjoy reading these, and hearing from you all, and they don’t take great effort. But nothing else will appear here until next year.

If you are a paid subscriber, and quite reasonably don’t want to pay for nothing for months, your options are simple. Monthly paid subscribers can simply unsubscribe now. If you stay on the free list, you will hear from me again when I am up and running. Annual paid subscribers, if they feel their sub is no longer worth what they paid, can simply reply to this email with a request for a pro rata refund. Just write ‘refund’ in the subject line, and I will make that happen with no questions asked.

In the new year I’ll see how I am feeling, and will update all my readers as to my plans. There is plenty I still want to write about on the Abbey. More wild saints. A return to our Sunday Pilgrimages, and a return, too, for the Scriptorium book club. Other things, too, are brewing away under the dark soil. But there is no point in me attempting any of them until the energy and the inspiration return. I have drained myself over a long period, and now I need to be refilled. This is not something I can do on my own. The world needs to refill me at its own pace; to put me back into whatever shape it needs me to be. Maybe the shape will be different: we’ll see. But whatever comes, it requires me to lie fallow for a while.

Illness is no fun, but it is a lesson. I feel I have been smacked down to teach me a few things, and I think I already have an idea what some of them might be. St Porphyrios, the modern Orthodox saint with whom I have perhaps the closest relationship, spoke often about this kind of thing. In later life, he was struck down with a series of terrible maladies, from cancer to blindness to kidney disease, but each for him was an opportunity to deepen his spiritual life. ‘I thank God for granting me many illnesses,’ he once said. ‘I often say to Him, “my Christ, your love knows no limits!”’

This kind of talk makes little sense to most of us in this culture, obsessed as we are with our health and longevity, but there is an ancient Christian rationale to it. To suffer bodily sickness, the saint explained, simply provided more opportunity to ‘pray, taking up the cross of Christ with repentance.’ The aim of the Christian, after all, is to practice humility. This sounds nice on the surface, but in order to be humble, you first have to be humiliated, and none of us wants that part. Illness, though, is humiliating, especially if you are used to being in control, to striding the world making statements, to being able to do all the things you want. Suddenly, instead of all that, you are lying about unable to do anything at all. You have been made weak and small.

What do you do then? ‘My illness,’ said the saint, ‘is a special favour from God, who is inviting me to enter into the mystery of His love, and to try to respond with His own grace.’ Not, he was clear, that this made him anything special: quite the opposite, he said. It made him very small and unworthy of much at all. Nothing could happen to him at all without God’s grace. St Porphyrios didn’t believe himself worthy even of the terrible illnesses he had been afflicted with, but he did his best with what they gave him an opportunity to do. ‘I do not pray for God to make me well,’ he said. ‘I pray for Him to make me good.’

Not that I’m comparing myself to St Porphyrios, you understand. I haven’t even learned how to be a slug, let alone a saint. But these are the ways in which we learn, aren’t they? From setbacks and from saints.

Blessings to you all for the coming season. I’ll see you on the other side.

Paul