12 days of Christmas? Really?

Is there any connection, do you think, between the way in our culture there is so much commercial activity - advertising about Christmas so ridiculously far in advance - and the way people pack Christmas away so soon after the 25th? Are we a bit weary of the idea by the day after Boxing Day?

 

Chuck away the wrappings, ditch the tree, bin the the turkey bones (never did make that stock...) and get ready for a knees-up on New Year's Eve - or an evening of pre-recorded TV programmes, e.g. Jools H urging us to enjoy ourselves.

But Christmas has, we're led to believe by an old song, twelve days to it, culminating in Twelfth Night, the eve of Epiphany for Christians, which was the day the three kings visited the baby Jesus. All of these twelve days made up Christmastide.


In "Village Christmas," a delightful if idealised evocation, Laurie Lee makes it plain that, when he was a lad, nothing much happened until the night before Christmas Eve, when everyone swung into action. But then his childhood Cotswold Christmas was all very local - no-one driving hundreds of miles on waterlogged roads to see family!

 OK, we're not any longer, despite Mr Cameron's remarks, a majority Christian country, according to assorted opinion polls. But we seem to have swapped a lovely idea - that there are twelves days of Christmas - with an almost hysterically commercial build-up weeks before The Day, and then a flat few days until the next year starts.

Twelfth Night was, in Tudor and Elizabethan times, a right old party, overseen by the Lord of Misrule. The usual order of things was re-established at midnight. Shakespeare wrote one of his greatest comedies for Twelfth Night at court. 

Happily, there are still some madnesses around on Twelfth Night, some with quite possibly pre-Christian roots. People go wassailing around then, and mummers do their extraordinary stuff to increasingly enthusiastic crowds.

 
 We can't turn the clock back. But in our house decorations will stay up and candles (or their electric replacements) will stay lit until Twelfth Night. And who knows, we may even have a drink or three on the 5th.

Wassail!

 

Gold, and Christmas ships

 The old (c. 17th century) carol "I Saw Three Ships" has Jesus and his mother in them, sailing into Bethlehem. As Wikipedia points out somewhat prissily, it's 20 miles from Bethlehem to the nearest large body of water - and that's the Dead Sea... So it's all impossible, I hear you snort - which is part of what makes it so stimulatingly mysterious.

 The Sunday Times ran a competition in 1940 for a new carol; this brilliant reworking of the Christmas Day ships motif was the entry from a Mrs Addington: 

I saw a ship, a little ship 
sail like the crescent moon
And at the helm there sat a girl 
singing a cradle tune
 
But though she lulled a tiny child 
great was her majesty
And all the flowers and all the stars 
were not as fair as she
 
O keep your grimness and your gold 
for right across the sky
We’ll sail until we reach the land, 
she, the child, and I.
 
For wealth is dry and men must die 
but still our day is dawning
I saw a ship come sailing by 
on Christmas day in the morning.


It's like a visionary painting, isn't it? Jesus and his mother aren't even named. It's a song of hope, with a clear message: it's not grimness and gold that'll help us sail across the sky, but a visionary hope symbolised by Christmas (whatever you do/not believe.) 

It's so gentle, but it's also tough-minded. "Men must die;" no matter how much we order from Amazon, no matter how many adverts scream at us from our exhausting TV sets, we're mortal, and wealth, on its own, is dry. Isn't it, Mr Osborne?

We have to believe our day is dawning. Perhaps it's easier to do so at Christmas. 

I wish you not just a merry but a Happy Christmas.

sadness and joy at Christmas

I'm helping with a funeral early next week, just a very few days before Christmas. The family are a bit torn - the man loved Christmas, and liked nothing better than to sing his way through it with a glass in his hand and his family around him. So they feel they should set out to enjoy Christmas in the same spirit. But they feel very sad.

Maybe as we get older, there tends to be more sadness mixed in with seasonal festivities, or at least, more thoughtful acknowledgement of those who are no longer with us. This isn't some sort of gloomy killjoy reaction to the relentless commercial trumpetings and media bollocks at this time of year. We are not simple creatures, and we can celebrate and be sad, miss someone and laugh at our shared memories of them, all at the same time.

Some families do the "empty chair" thing, either because they want to feel s/he is still with them, or just to acknowledge and remember. Sometimes people raise a glass. Sometimes they may just look back and talk about past Christmases.

In any case, I think it's unwise to pretend that sadness within us can't also be part of Christmas celebrations, part of the beauty of a true Christmas spirit, whatever you do or don't believe actually happened a couple of millenia ago in Palestine.

The year turns, the years turn; we lose and we gain; we celebrate and we remember.

Bring Christmas Life

Bring in a tree, a young Norwegian spruce,
Bring hyacinths that rooted in the cold.
Bring winter jasmine as its buds unfold -
Bring the Christmas life into this house.

Bring red and green and gold, bring things that shine,
Bring candlesticks and music, food and wine.
Bring in your memories of Christmas past.
Bring in your tears for all that you have lost.

Bring in the shepherd boy, the ox and ass,
Bring in the stillness of an icy night,
Bring in the birth, of hope and love and light.
Bring the Christmas life into this house.
                                                                           Wendy Cope

floods and our own natures

If I lived in Cockermouth, I'd not want lectures about the follies of building on a flood-plain, which may indeed be folly, but the town wasn't built on such a daft place. It had the misfortune to grow around the confluence of two rivers, and has suffered in recent years from floods caused by what were up to now truly exceptional rainfall levels.

The river, TS Eliot tells us, is a strong brown god; it is a problem to solve for the builders of bridges, or merely a useful way of transporting goods, but "sullen and intractable, untrustworthy," "waiting, watching and waiting." And he also tells us that "his rhythm" is part of our lives, part of us, present "in the nursery bedroom" and other domestic places.

He's reminding us, perhaps, that we are part of the same natural forces and processes that make the rivers flow - and flood in rage sometimes. Bit like Dylan Thomas with his "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, drives my green age."  

This correlation between natural powers and what we are suggests that there are within each of us sullen, intractable, untrustworthy forces - the potential to rage and flood, as well as burst through in green springtime. 

It seems to me that it is when we don't acknowledge, understand and to some degree accept these forces within us, as opposed to ignoring or trying to repress them - or projecting them onto people around us - that is when we rage and flood and generally bust things up. 

Water will find its own level, the lowest channel it can; it works round things when it can.

But when it can't.... 

The weather and the temple - actualities rather than preconceptions (Swarthmoor 7)

En route to Swarthmoor by train, I was looking forward to crossing the top end of Morecambe Bay for the first time - great views across the sands, that's what I expected.

The above is what I got. So I was disappointed at first, grumping up with thoughts like"what do you expect, it's November in the North-West of England." So not only was the weather letting me down, it was my fault for not expecting it. Harrrrumph!

Well, in a way, it was my fault. I realised this when I stopped being grumpy and simply looked at what was there. The mindfulness thing seeped back in: being with it, bringing my thoughts back from what it could have been like, or what it might be like on the way home (pretty much the same, as it turned out..) 

The place and the weather were unique - not because I hadn't been there before, but because every moment in every place is unique.

I began to enjoy it for what it was.

(I'd hardly expect some poor soul with a flooded home in Carlisle or Cockermouth this week to feel the same, but then they've got more to do than sit looking at the weather!) 

Similarly with a Buddhist temple we visited briefly from the retreat. Conishead Priory. I suppose I thought of something like a cool, peaceful little meditation hall, minimal furniture, plain, even a little pleasantly austere. Instead:

Huge, gaudy - like a comparison between a Catholic cathedral in  Spain, and a simple whitewashed CofE parish church in England. Their Buddhism is derived from Tibetan Mahayana sources. It looked to me much more like a religion than the Zen approach. Lots of

this sort of thing. But we sat and meditated with a pleasant monk with a rather charmingly diffident way of talking; it was very quiet, very calm in there. Comparisons and expectations fell away. It was good to be in the moment, and it was a helpful experience. Maybe I'm an eumenical mindfulness practitioner? I'll have to think about that. Or maybe I won't bother with conceptualising and comparing, maybe I'll just - meditate...

"Mysticism" and Einstein - Swarthmoor

I'm a bit off the terms "mysticism" and "mystical;" for me, they are a bit care-worn. They are usually applied, it seems, to writings that are seen as apart from the common herd, aimed at a spiritual elite, those wise enough to receive secret knowledge.

Or else things "mystical" and "magical" are simply used as design motifs to sell stuff.

I'm more interested in writings that try the difficult - ultimately impossible - task of expressing in words an ultimate reality that is above, or beyond, words. A state of mind, a state of being, that is not to be achieved through rational concepts or ordinarily descriptive language. The writers of these texts are often called "mystics."

We had plenty of really valuable examples of such texts on the Swarthmoor retreat - usually described as mystical, but arguably, intensely practical. They added, and continue to add, a lot to my contemplations.

Here's a vision of an ultimate reality from a mighty genius who can see the immediate practical consequences of living by that vision. Not a "mystic," but a scientist.


"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space.

He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. 

This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
                                                                      Albert Einstein

Bert, you little beauty!

Words out of and into silences - Swarthmoor 5

I liked the relative wordiness of the Quakers at Swarthmoor, the readings they pointed us to, the speech out of silence. I think my meditation was enriched by contemplations springing from those activities - though contemplation is a very different state of mind and being than meditation, of course. 

On a mindfulness retreat you are very likely to have poems read before or after meditation that may help you into a meditation-friendly state, or they may illuminate an intention for a meditation - such as compassion, "loving-kindness." But mindfulness gatherings are perhaps less wordy.

It's not that one is better than the other, it's rather that, for me, reading stuff about being in communion with profundity, with now, with... it's deeply rewarding, and complements the hours of silent sitting meditation, zazen. It gives the meditating a context, it fuels it -  perhaps not so much during meditation, it's rather when I'm not meditating that such reading  helps me to sustain and revisit what I find when I am meditating.

I think what I'm trying to say is that reading and contemplation enrich meditation, that mindfulness also uses words, but that the Quakers at Swarthmoor used words more, and that seems to have set a new balance for me.

So we need the silence Rumi advises, and we need to feed and mulch the silence with good words.

If you've struggled through this fumbling post, you deserve a poem or two. Here's a poem that would, I think, bear more than one visit for Quakers and Buddhists, since it's about the wordless transmission of an inner light, the shared self that bypasses social context. It's about what we might expect in a poem, and what we actually find in this poem, by Mary Oliver: 

"Singapore."

In Singapore, in the airport,
A darkness was ripped from my eyes.
In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open.
A woman knelt there, washing something in the white bowl.

Disgust argued in my stomach
and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket.

A poem should always have birds in it.
Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings.
Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.
A waterfall, or if that’s not possible, a fountain rising and falling.
A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

When the woman turned I could not answer her face.
Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together,
and neither could win.
She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this?
Everybody needs a job.

Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.
But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor,
which is dull enough.
She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big as hubcaps,
with a blue rag.
Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing.
She does not work slowly, nor quickly, like a river.
Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.

I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life.
And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop and
fly down to the river.

This probably won’t happen.
But maybe it will.

If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

Of course, it isn’t.

Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only
the light that can shine out of a life. I mean
the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,
The way her smile was only for my sake; I mean
the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.

Communion with the spirit - what spirit? Swarthmoor 4

There may not be much to be gained from banging away rationally and conceptually at some of these terms, but let's have a try (again...)

If a Quaker says she is waiting for the Spirit to move her to speak, to find some ministry for the Meeting, I take that to have some relationship to a sense of God, of a power beyond human dimensions. Possibly but not necessarily to a supernatural entity. 

Her own feeling may simply be of something greater than we can know, of something within each of us, of...well, perhaps it's better left as a general term covering an intense communication with, er...

OED:  "Spiritual: having a relationship based on a profound level of mental or emotional communion." Whatever the relationship might be, and with whoever or whatever the communion might take place, I can run with that. 

If a Benedictine monk talks about his spiritual path, he'll mean something very different to what my Buddhist friend may mean when she talks about her spiritual path. But both of them seek some profound significance, something beyond the usual intellectual and emotional framework of our lives.

Spirit: (OED) "the non-physical part of a person which is the seat of emotions and character; the soul." I can't see that there is a non-physical part of a person, in the sense of a supernatural entity, and the word "soul" is the problem here, because for me it relates back to the fairly traditional and conventional Christianity of my school days. But there may be a universal common self, the Light within us that we all have, a self below and beyond the ego.

When Gautama Buddha was close to death, he didn't tell his followers to believe in him and he would lead them to the Father, so they would be saved. He simply said that each of them had to light his own lamp. 

That individual light may relate to a "spiritual path" that could chime with Quakers and Buddhists.

But the Tao Te Ching reminds us right at the start that

"A way that can be walked
is not The Way
A name that can be named
is not The Name.

Tao is both Named and Nameless."

To reach a profound sense of communion beyond the ego, we have to break through the frame of either/or, of comparisons and polarities, of conceptual analyses. I think that's valid whatever your "spiritual path." There's only so much we can do with ordinary speech and writing. The rest, the other,  may involve being in silence for a while.

Different silences - Swarthmoor 3

You can't really meditate during a Quaker silent meeting, for one obvious reason - at any point, usually well into it, someone may stand up, break the silence and start speaking, as in the above (not taken at Swarthmoor.) 

They may well be saying things you want to listen to and consider; you wouldn't want to treat what is said merely as sounds, ignoring the meaning of the words because they might lead you away from the present moment.

As I understand it, Quakers are waiting for some communion with the Spirit - holy as in up there, or holy as within oneself. Meditators may be waiting, not for anything, just waiting on the irreducible, momentary present, which vanishes as it arrives. But they are almost certainly not waiting for speech.

(Later for "the spirit")

I was glad at some of the heartfelt and rewarding things that were sometimes said during the silent meeting, and I spoke myself. There is a certain pressure and presence in the silence (all those benevolent people) which makes it significant and powerful when it is broken.  

So for a newcomer attending a silent gathering, it's probably best not to grumble about the weather or the traffic...these words really matter, and they tend to be pulled up from deep within. No wonder they all started trembling (quaking) when they got going in the 1660s!

I like the Quaker idea of ministry. Not, of course, by a Minister, but in the sense that when the spirit moves us  we are able to minister to each other - in the broader sense: "To attend to the needs of someone" (OED.) 

The idea, as I understand it, is that out of a profound contemplative silence, people are moved to attend to the needs of those present, without knowing in advance what those needs might be, and without people in the gathering knowing what their need might be. It seems spontaneous, potentially rewarding, and democratic.

 Meditation is, of course, very different. The intense inwardness of meditation neither wants nor needs verbal expression - in fact, moving away from verbal statements, aloud or in your head, is a big part of it. To return time and again to a wordless present, most often by using the breath and anchoring the body- conceptual thoughts may arise, may be useful, but they aren't the focus. 

"Truth is a matter of direct apprehension, you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it," wrote Lawrence Durrell- no Zen master he, yet he does seem to have landed on a useful statement about meditation.

So however profound the silence and moving the spoken words may be, a Quaker Meeting for Worship is no place for a meditation and a Buddhist-derived meditation is no place for Quaker ministry. Yet the two paths have much to give each other; some overlap perhaps, and in any case, certainly alongside each other. 

 

Sorting out some words, "God" and others - Swarthmoor 2

Acknowledging that we were from differing backgrounds and to some degree different belief systems (two of us weren't Quakers), the tutors used an excellent exercise early on. We were asked to identify terms that gave us trouble when people discuss their beliefs. "Lord," for example, is famously difficult for some feminist believers in God. We were also asked to suggest terms we felt more comfortable with when dealing with, er, well, you know - the Big Supreme Idea thing. 

 I'm well past the stage at which people talking about God troubles me, in a general way. I think I also grasp the idea that God can be a metaphor for something other than the sort of God I believed in for a while in early adolescence (that's not a sneer, just a fact.) 

But if I'm in discussions in which "God" is used a lot, it does rather push me back out of it, because behind the word still sits an anthropomorphised image like the chap above. I have no connection with him.

 Gods can be believed in as actual entities in a supernatural world, or symbols of universal forces, or...I don't know, maybe there is a god called Ganesh with an elephant's head somewhere up there, but it seems, to my efforts at rational thought, and it feels, to my emotions and intuitions, unlikely.

We discussed the concept of a Spirit, the dove descending in Christian iconography, which could never be more than a symbol to me - and that is not necessarily to devalue it. 

 We talked about prayer. That's a problematical term for me, if it means talking to God.  What God? Why doesn't he answer, when it's obviously a prayer for the general good? You'll be familiar with this feeling:

 to which believers have many answers, I know, but they tend not to work for me.

However, I felt happy with the idea of an inner light, with waiting in silence for a presence, a feeling of connection with the total isness of everything, the universe, It - a reality beyond words and concepts.

This post isn't about beliefs, mine or anyone else's, it's about belief terms.  We sorted out the ones that might get in the way of our discussions and silent explorations, and the ones that wouldn't. That was really helpful, for someone amongst believers who, by and large, shared beliefs I don't have. 

What are we retreating from on a retreat? Swarthmoor and me.

A friend of mine commented, when she heard I was going on a more-or-less silent retreat, that it was curious how the term "retreat" suggests something at the edge of our lives, whereas in fact it tends to put us at the centre of things. Nicely put.

A regular columnist in the Saturday Guardian wrote recently that going on retreat was part of a trend for people in flight from the realities of modern life. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, I'd say, if that's what you need, but for once he's writing nonsense.  A retreat I was recently part of was certainly a quiet time apart from usual preoccupations, but Quakers are well-known for their social activism, and I felt there was nothing about the retreat that was escapist.

My four-day retreat at Swarthmoor Hall near Ulverston in Cumbria is already being used by this collection of processes and awarenesses known as "me" to refocus aspects of my life and to work on how I relate to others.

 So I'm going to do a number of posts on Stuff from the retreat.

Briefly, Swarthmoor is pretty much where the Quakers started. It is an historic and lovely old place, easy to reach (10 minute walk from the station) yet very peaceful.  The accommodation was excellent, and we were well cared for. 

The retreat was called "Being in Silence" and it was run by two Quakers. I'm not a Quaker, though after this all I might drop by a meeting or two and see what's on, but I do value silence, and I meditate in silence fairly frequently. Quakers are technicians of silence, experts at it - well, certainly at some aspects of it. I thought it would be worthwhile to join them, and so it was.

Total silence quickly becomes utterly terrifying, I'm sure. There was input from the two tutors. We had the wind, the birds, the rain.... occasionally we had a little music to direct or focus our thoughts,

The silence was entered and emerged from quite gradually and we had an opportunity to go for guidance and discussion with each of the two tutors once during the three quiet days.

We had the customary Quaker silent meeting, in which people sit in silence and wait; when/if the spirit moves them (interpret "spirit" as you will) they speak. There were sessions with tutor input and/or written stimulus material, followed by silent time.  Before and after the silent days there was discussion.

We were urged not to read anything lengthy or distracting, but there were plenty of interesting books and pamphlets to use, and thought-provoking materials from the tutors; we also had a session or two using visual stimulus - a lot of very varied postcards. We were introduced to a walking mindfulness meditation, and they have a labyrinth in their delightful garden.

We met much of the time in a very pleasant conference room.

 Since I like meditating with others, it was good to drop by the room during unstructured time, and find a few people there I could join, sitting in silence. Meditating? Praying? Contemplating? I didn't know, of course, but it was companionable. 

We did some writing - journaling is the jargon term, I learned. I hadn't expected that, and too much of it would, I feel, disrupt a pattern of silent meditations, but I found myself writing quite a lot; I enjoyed it, and it was useful. It seems the Quakers - these ones, at least - value individual creativity and self-expression.

We had a couple of hours each afternoon to walk, think, write, as we wished, but not to talk. The Quakers are hardly spiritual fascists, so the silence rule didn't feel severe or punitive in any sense.

I went because I wanted a period of silence with plenty of meditation, and I was curious to see if there were overlaps, comparisons and contrasts to be made in the quality and uses of silence coming from Quaker and Buddhist/mindfulness traditions. I think a Quaker might say I was seeking the Light, the Spirit. And that's what I'll write about next.

The weather was rough - wild and splendid. That helped.

It appears I'm 70

"It appears," not because I refuse to accept it, but because the whole idea of "being" 70 seems indistinct, somehow. It's a bit like the way people talk about "the 1960s" or "the 1970s." As if a decade was homogenous, consistent, had a reliable bundle of meanings shared by all. For example, the 1970s are often described as a chaotic and frequently depressing time. Well, that depends what you were doing, I guess. Our children were born in the 1970s; life was hard work but, over all, pretty wonderful.

So being 70 is a unique state for each individual - I trust no generalisations. 70 is an abstraction. I feel pretty much as I did three weeks ago. Nothing much has changed. 

But it is changing, of course. We're sliding from autumn into winter this week. I'm moving into old age proper. Please don't call me a senior citizen, or an older person. I'm an old man, and I'm pretty pleased about that. Too many of my contemporaries will never be old men or women.

As an abstraction, 70 is quite useful. It is helping me concentrate on how I want to live for the rest of my life - which might be for five minutes, six months, seven years, who knows? It is helping me distinguish between the things that are worth pursuing, and the things I need to let go of. 

I shan't climb Annapurna, or even the very high passes around it, but I can still give Moel Siabod or the Old Man of Coniston a go from time to time.This isn't just a matter of fitness and bodily strength - it's also about how I think it best to spend my time and energies. And money, of course.

Carpe diem; usually translated from Horace as "sieze the day," but apparently it's closer to "pluck the day" (like fruit) "whilst it is ripe, don't trust the future."

It's my old theme of living in the moment, as opposed to living for the moment. The latter can suggest a frantic and ultimately self-defeating hedonism (at least, I'm told it's self-defeating...) whereas living in the moment, for at least part of the time, is a great help with getting older and coming to terms with mortality.

That is what the water tells me, even on a very ordinary grey day, if I give it half a chance, as it goes about its business of uncountably complex interactions of form, matter and energy - as it is, changing ceaselessly, itself in every moment, entirely present.

Sad music is good for us

I've just had one of those jaw-dropping "of course" moments.
"Sad Music," one of the "The Why Factor" little 15-minute BBC Radio 4 programmes, explains a little of how people create sad musical structures, and demonstrates by analysing the Top 50 in the USA since 1965 that it seems to be getting more popular (songs in minor vs major keys.)

It then asks "Why?" Don't we want to be cheered up?

A neuro something-or-other-very-clever explained that when we are sad, if we are sad enough, we release a hormone into the blood stream that is the same as the hormone released by breast-feeding women. Prolactose, I think it was called.

It comforts us. It doesn't cheer us up, it simply works as a comfort blanket.

So sad music isn't usually depressing, it is comforting, even if it makes us cry. We need it sometimes.

He also said that when we are truly sad (not depressed) we are at our most realistic in our view of the world, and of ourselves.

More good, sad music at funerals, please. Barber's Adagio is going to be a lot more use in grieving than, with respect, Neil Diamond or Status Quo. Those may have been "his favourites," but that won't help the mourners. But James Taylor's "Riding on a Railroad." Or "Slip Sliding Away" by Paul Simon, or "Spiegel im Spiegel" by Arvo Pärt or...(huge list.)

Or Threnody, of course, for live a capella voices. 

Here's the programme:

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06n6fj0

mortality and the turning seasons

There can be a frisson of melancholy as autumn turns towards winter, especially after such a wonderful late September as we have just had. One of these photos was taken in late May and one on October the first. The October day had a delighftful chill to it towards evening, but otherwise the two days had a similar feel.

One is a beach on Pen Llyn, the other on Ynys Môn; I'll leave anyone who knows North Wales to work out which is which, and which is when.

Watching the subtle delight of autumn colours emerging day by day might remind me of time's wingéd chariot; however golden the autumn of my life may feel, it's still my autumn.

In truth, I don't often feel melancholy about autumn; that's not to claim any great effort of will or general self-bracing. I am hopelessly addicted to the cycle of the seasons. I once lived in a place with no real seasons, and I didn't like that aspect of the place. It felt wrong.

I love the process of seasonal change, and being in amongst it all.  Feeling the low vibrations of the turning wheel makes me belong, whether it's on a beach, or in the garden, where colour continues right on into autumn, against the backdrop of the changes in the hedgerows and trees all around us.

And if I'm lucky enough to have a few quiet minutes on a Llyn cliff-top, to hear the sea below, then I am in the moment, able to accept the turning of the years. 

I have been fortunate, come what may.

Cliff-Top Space

I wonder if you too get an almost inexpressible feeling on a grassy cliff-top looking out and down across the sea, hearing the stiff breeze in your ears and the sound of the sea way below you? It's a particular state of mind - state of being, I'd say.

I guess it relates to the great and empty space before you, the absence of other people. It's very beautiful - but what does that mean?

It brings on that mental state of being right in the present,  of being in unity with... It all. A state that can't be willed; it's there all the time. The sea, the breeze, the grasses and wild-flowers, the space and distance - they absorb the stuff that usually gets between It and me.

(A mobile phone video is a pretty feeble reminder, but it's better than nothing. And in human terms, nothing is what happens in this little clip, which is rather the point.)

Time and Growing Children

It's a commonplace amongst families that the time of a child's growing-up seems to have passed so quickly, once they are young adults, even though it can seem to last for ages during their childhood.

So we want to preserve their appearance, their delightful sayings, their innocent essence. We click away with our cameras and videos, and we store hundreds and hundreds of photos.

Parents often say with regret that they want to preserve their delight at childish utterances, facial expressions, happy days. "The time is passing," we say, "I don't want it to go," even though we know we will value their growing whilst it happens, at every stage. We can't, and we wouldn't want, to freeze time as in a photo. We know really that life is growth and change.

We know in our hearts that however many photos we take, this preservation can't actually be done. It is wonderful to have some photos to look back on as we grow older. But we are looking at them in the present moment every time we do so, and re-constructing our memories even whilst we "revisit" them. (Memory is not a static set of files waiting to be revisited, the neuroscientists tell us.) 

It is their transience that makes childhoodisms so uniquely delightful, and I think in our hearts we know this, as we focus, for example, on a grandson opening a birthday card. I still quote childhood sayings from our daughters. Here are a few recent Leoisms:

(to his brother): "Your feet smell of stink." 
(to his grandfather, first thing in the morning) "Where have your eyes gone Grandpa?"
(and my favourite, on a walk which was clearly a bit too long for him): "I've runned out of strong."

We treasure such, we carry them forward down the years for all our family - and it's their transience that makes us treasure them.

 

Loving-kindness meditation?

One of the things that mindfulness meditation carried across into the West from Buddhist practices is a concentration on loving-kindness, on compassion.

I had a bit of a problem with meditating specifically on loving-kindness, right from the start. I felt I couldn't aim a meditation at it, it seemed too deliberate, somehow. This was especially true when we were asked to think of someone with whom we had fallen out, or someone we didn't like now and never had.

I was greatly relieved to read stuff by a teacher of meditation who ackowledges the difficulty of thinking compassionate thoughts about someone we don't like, and offers a much more productive route. 

This isn't (just) me being old and cynical. Any increase in compassion from me towards fellow-creatures arises as a by-product of meditating, I'm sure of that. It's not been as a direct result of meditating on loving-kindness per se.

Ezra Bayda 

is the author of a book that I greatly value: "Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life."

(If you don't like the "idea" of Zen, worry not - he hardly mentions Zen or Buddhism in general.)

He wants to fuse meditate with the rest of our lives. It's not always a comfortable thing, because it involves much examination of our thoughts about the self - rigorous if followed, and very helpful too. But the last part of the book is about loving-kindness meditations that just might work, even for me. 

And that's because he is entirely alert to the dangers of pasting "may I feel compassionate towards X" on top of actual feelings such as "who I actually think is a bit of a shit." 

I'm not going to stop thinking he's a bit of a shit because for a few meditating minutes I am trying to think differently about him, and extend something as abstract as "loving-kindness." I don't have much kindness for him at present; I might one day, but it'll be a long road. This book is, for me, that road.

Bayda works you towards a point where you might actually be able to extend the range of kindness that you feel, firstly towards yourself and then growing carefully from that, towards someone dear to you, and then to some more people. 

Perhaps even one day, to that shit X! That would be good, because such negative thoughts and feelings are, after all, ultimately self-defeating. It's surely better for each of us and all of us to feel an informed and unsentimental compassion when we can, instead of revisiting hurts and anger.

The Crowded Self

(An exploratory sort of post -  thinking aloud, if you'll pardon me.)

Here's AL Kennedy reminding us wittily that each of us is a plurality, not a single thing. To function in society I need to feel I is one thing. I knows that I changes over time - the wrinkles, the memories of playing squash a long time ago - but I is still one I, separate from you and everything Other, I seem to need to believe.

But I is seethingly multiple. 
 
The world moves through I each second, and I responds in ways the busy conscious self often hardly notices. Self often rides rough-shod over these responses, signals, changes, and doing so can make I ill.

The illusion of an entirely separate self, fortress I, seems to this I to be fundamentally mistaken and potentially dangerous. I needs to belong, to relate, to feel part of all Other. That is the only way to be a true individual - not to believe I is one.

That realisation - living in that understanding - doesn't make I weak. It feels very free, sometimes scary, and sometimes difficult because of how we live and how we grew up (or not.)

So thanks ALK for further understandings of what I is, and is not.

Another prompt and revelation from the Eden Project, a place that feeds.

I and the rest of the world is the same stuff, although I is in a particular formation, a unique events sequence.  I is not what I needs to think I is most of the time, but "you must have to see clear sometimes." This I needs to meditate to find that clarity for a little while.

Eden Domes, The Whole Earth Catalogue - new times and the old days

The Biomes at the Eden Project are, as far as I can see, particularly sophisticated geodesic domes. They are structured in hexagrams  without the six component triangles typical of geodesic domes, but it's surely the same principle.

Geodesic domes - that's a big topic, but as far as I remember, the point was that the struts provided the strength, and you could cover a dome with whatever you wanted. You can make a curved structure  with straight lines.

Memory comes into it, because during a formative period of my life, (1965-71) they were a big deal and a new hope. They were and are lovely to look at, they can be built very cheaply, and they looked like a future. 

They weren't a future, for most domestic use. Whatever their other advantages, it was difficult to create effective internal partitions, and unless they were better-made than most DIYers could easily manage, they were prone to leaks. Can you imagine trying to get planning permission for a three-bedroom dome in Cheadlehume or Surbiton? 

 They are perhaps better-suited to large, spectacular structures - or expensive exclusive modern domestic architecture, which was not what we hoped in 1968.

But they helped forward visions of different ways of living, ways that were kinder to the environment. They were structures that helped people feel they were moving closer to their earth.

Drop City, in Colorado, was early in the building of domestic domes out of scrap materials such as old car panels (particularly poignant, given the appalling effect of our cars on the environment.) It was also an idealistic effort to live communally and as such, it didn't last too long. But I think, looking back now, we should salute the courage and creativity of those people trying to avoid the widespread and rampant consumerism that....consumes us.

Here are the guys at Drop City putting their homes together:

  I'm sure the sunshine helped...

For more on Drop City from a 2012 perspective:
 https://citythreepointzero.wordpress.com/tag/drop-city/

 Key publications from The Old Days:

and Domebook:

Domebook and Drop City are the past; it's thrilling to see Buckminster Fuller's big idea carrying forward from Drop City to the Eden Project. Hopeful visions, both.

What the Eden Project tropical waterfall says

(sorry - title's a bit forced; I needn't need to meditate or sit by the waterfall, what follows hit me from the start of a five-hour family visit.)

It's a no doubt irritating habit of mine to enthuse madly about things the people I'm talking/writing to probably already know about. But what the hell - have you been to the Eden project, just outside St Austell, in Cornwall?

A familiar image, perhaps. The meaning of the Project, what it can, in the best of all ways (immersion) teach us is valuable beyond price. 

Of course it's expensive - look at the scale and complexity of the whole thing! It's excellent value for money, though. And the kids loved it.

At the social level, it shows what can be done with a truly creative vision, given guts, energy and good team-work - and of course, brilliant fund-raising and planning. In those aspects alone, it is a truly heartwarming and encouraging place. It's brought a lot of employment and money into an area that badly needed both.

Did you ever visit the old disused claypits in the area pre-Project? Fascinating, but - yuk. This is what Eden looked like before they got going.

 It's not just the chance to explore and learn about the plants of medditeranean and tropical regions inside the mighty Biomes. I came away with a much stronger sense of the interrelatedness of organic and non-organic things - life-forms and environments.

eg this:

 The Seed. A huge solid (Cornish granite) sculpture which you are invited to contemplate quietly - it's set a little apart in its own space. It represents all seeds, and more - some deep structures. 

You'll recognise the patterning from things such as a sunflower seed-head. The sculptor worked up a groundplan plan of 2000 circles according to Fibonacci numbers onto a graceful curved cone. According to Wikipedia, "(Fibonacci sequences) also appear in biological settings,^[9] such as branching in trees, phyllotaxis (the arrangement of leaves on a stem), the fruit sprouts of a pineapple,^[10] the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern and the arrangement of a pine cone's bracts."

One of the signatures of the underlying unities of life, and of abstract human thought. Fibonacci sequences are, apparently, closely linked to the Golden Mean, that ancient guide to satisying proportionality in works of art.

What the Project tells us - no, what it makes us feel as well as think - is that we are entirely linked to the rest of the living and non-living world, and we are the first creatures to be able to conceptualise that underlying unity abstract thought and in works of art. So, er - let's not blow it.

BTW, outside the Domes there are some amusing and thought-provoking displays. It does this without being too preachy. Here's the Junk Monster - made up with what each of us will throw away in a lifetime, in the way of appliances and IT stuff:

And there's some lovely planting, to satisfy inquisitive gardeners even on a grey, showery day:

We live in a wordworld of exaggerated and trivial superlatives, but even that won't stop me saying that the Eden Project is amazing 
(OED "causing great surprise or wonder; astonishing" - so, not just "great fun" or even "cool....")

I'm proud of what they've achieved, and I'm not even Cornish!

Ultimate, absolute reality and Bernard Williams

In a review of a book of essays by the philosopher Bernard Williams (London Review of Books 2nd July 2015)  I came across this:

"The pieces are informed by two general arguments in his philosophy. One is for the possibility of what he called an 'absolute knowledge' of the world that is 'to the largest possible extent independent of the local perspectives or idiosyncrasies of inquirers - the kind of knowledge to which scientists aspire."

The little I know of this area of science suggests that when you observe something you change it - that is, "reality" and the observer are contingent upon each other. Isn't that one of the things the theory of relativity tells us? (I'm open to offers of help at this point...)

That being so, I can only see one way of knowing the universe free of my idiosyncrasies and local perspectives, of being IN the world. That doesn't involve observing it, in any scientific sense (tremendously valuable though that is.) Nor does it involve verbal analysis (ditto).

We can get moments of such "independent" being in the world when we meditate (you could see that coming, couldn't you?) It's a state of being that is often called "mystical." Not a term I like much, because it can suggest mystifying, making something obscure and remote. But so-called "mystics" have written about it - in so far as it can be written about.

The presentmomentness of being IN the world, OF the universe and not separate from it, is an absolute knowledge, or rather an absolute state of being, I guess, and it is independent of our local perspectives or idiosyncrasies. It must be, because writers from very different cultures try to say the same sort of things about it.

I still like most one of the most ancient statements; it admits defeat as soon as it has started: "The way that can be spoken of is not the perfect way." But I also like Angharad Price's "tranquillity," her "transparency between myself and the world" (my post about her book, June 3rd.)

I expect Bernard Williams, a powerful writer and speaker, a great moral philosopher, would tear into all of the above - he was known for being a bit sharp-tongued and sharp-penned - but I'm sticking with it. Meditation can get us there. Scientific or verbal enquiry and analysis, on their own, wonderful as they are - don't.

 Bernard Williams:

 Lao Tse (possibly...if he existed...if he wrote "Tao Te Ching...):