Living in Glastonbury is rarely an ordinary decision. There are places you arrive at by chance. And others you keep returning to, again and again, without really understanding why. Glastonbury is one of those places.
I’ve lost count of how many times I wanted to leave. One hundred and twenty-two, perhaps. Every ordeal became another reason to pack my bags : a painful separation, a serious illness, Brexit, then two years of isolation during the pandemic — two years unable to hold my mother’s hand as she neared the end of her life. Almost all of my friends eventually left. And yet, here I am.
So why ?
2012. A door opens.
After a near-death experience, something shifted in the way I perceived the world. An inner door reopened. Intuitions, messages, presences. Among them, a figure who kept returning — a guide I came to call Chananda (pronounced Kananda), a former disciple of the Buddha and guide of the White Brotherhood.
It was he who whispered to me, somewhere between 2013 and 2014, that the place where I would establish my temple would be Glastonbury — the most alchemical city in the world.
At the time, I had no temple to establish, and perhaps something else entirely to figure out.
Living in Glastonbury remue — it stirs you.
What nobody tells newcomers is that Glastonbury is not an ordinary town where you simply come to settle. It is a place that acts. That accelerates. That reveals.
Everything you carry within — unhealed wounds, unanswered questions, contradictions you keep postponing — rises to the surface, often faster than you’d have wished. Many people arrive here carried by an impulse, an intuition, a calling. And many leave, sometimes exhausted, sometimes overwhelmed by what the place has brought to light in them.
This isn’t magic in the folkloric sense. It’s simply what happens when you live for a long time in a place steeped in such dense history, on lands that generations of pilgrims have crossed in search of something essential. Something eventually rubs off.
Glastonbury stirred me deeply. It tested everything I thought I knew about myself. My separation, my illness, the isolation — all of it happened here, amplified by that particular silence the town imposes on those who refuse to lie to themselves.
Perhaps that’s why so many people end up leaving. Not because Glastonbury rejected them, but because they weren’t yet ready for what it had to show them.
I stayed. Not out of courage. Out of an inability to leave for the right reasons.
And today, I understand that was exactly right.
The wrong reasons to leave.
What I came to understand over time is that all my urges to leave never came from the heart. Leave to avoid facing the grief of my separation. Leave to simplify logistics after Brexit. Leave to feel less alone if another crisis arrived. Leave to stop enduring.
None of those reasons came from the heart. They came from fear, or something close to it.
And Glastonbury waited.
The temple, at last — why I stayed in Glastonbury.
Today, I have found the space I had been searching for over many years — an ancient barn steeped in history, a few dozen minutes from Glastonbury in Chesterblade Hills, along one of the natural energy lines the ancient Celts knew well. It is not a home. It is not an office. It is a perfumery workshop, a laboratory, a place for encounters and transmission.
A temple, in the most concrete sense of the word.
Pilgrim of the Earth, always.
Ten years ago, I gave myself a name : Pilgrim of the Earth. That soul hasn’t changed. Every territory where I set down my bag seems to recognize me. Celtic lands with their shifting skies, countries where nature still speaks louder than people, ancient cities where the stones hold memory — everywhere, something tells me : you are at home here.
This is not wandering. It is a way of being in the world. The pilgrim does not flee — he breathes. He nourishes himself on every place passed through, every encounter, every landscape that resonates within him like a true note.
But I have come to understand that the pilgrim needs a kilometre zero. A point of anchorage from which he departs, and to which he returns.
That place is here. Not to live here enclosed, but to create, to share, to welcome those who come searching for something they do not yet know how to name.
Glastonbury has never let me leave.
Perhaps because the time was not right. Perhaps because the temple was not yet ready.
It is now.
https://shorturl.fm/bLeb5