Dowsers' delight?

A fun weekend at the British Society of Dowsers‘ conference. About 150 people there. I ran two workshops (on my use of the traditional Cretan-style labyrinth as a metaphor of the skills-learning process) and did a keynote presentation (on the role of theory in dowsing), plus innumerable fairly intense conversations, hence pretty much exhausted by the time I got home. 🙂

Good to see there’s far less ‘newage’ in the field these days (‘newage’? – the correct pronunciation for far too much so-called ‘New Age’ guff, it rhymes with ‘sewage’, the discarded remnant of what was once nutritious… ::wrygrin:: ). Far less of the gosh-wow ‘earth-energies’ delusions, and far more of real people doing real concrete work, such as the Village Water crew doing well-finding in India and Africa, and a new manual on survey techniques for dowsing in support of physical archaeology.

Kind of scary at times, though. I did my best-known book on dowsing more than thirty years ago, and haven’t really contributed to the field at all for the last twenty, so I’d rather expected that people would have forgotten me by now. Far from it – yikes! A fair number of people seemed to think of me as some kind of ‘star’ – I think I’ve managed to dispel that particular delusion, at least… 🙂 – whilst several said they’d wanted to meet me for decades. One even told me that he’d used my long-out-of-print Needles of Stone as his example of “a book that changed my life” for a radio-programme on that theme; very kindly, he even gave me a tape of the programme.

Hence scary, because it really brings home the responsibility of authors for their impact on others; scary too because I just wasn’t – and still am not – equipped to cope with that kind of attention. I’m a very ordinary bloke who has the misfortune to tend to see things somewhat differently from others: I don’t enjoy either being put up on some kind of bizarre pedestal for that mistake, or – worse, and far more common for me – being used as some kind of metaphoric or even literal punchbag when others get upset at my ‘heresies’. I’m sorry: I do seem to see things differently than most, and no amount of telling myself otherwise, or trying to force myself to hide from that fact, seems to be able to stop it happening to me and around me. Most of the time it ain’t fun; just nice to be in a place where it was fun for a change!