Showing posts with label Family History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Family History. Show all posts
Thursday, 3 February 2011
Wednesday, 22 September 2010
Thursday, 15 April 2010
Friday, 5 February 2010
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
736 - Cafe Culture, Dance City, Newcastle
Very interesting talk at last night's Cafe Culture event, about reinvigorating society's commitment to informal education - the sort you might find in an evening class or a youth club, or simply from the guitarist you know down the street.
Chiefly memorable for me because:
1. I walked into a granite seat on the way to the meeting.
2. I grabbed a seat with no legroom or place for my oversized coat and scarf, which I shoved down the coat sleeve.
3. I bought an expensive latte and then knocked it all over the floor (see above).
4. I was joined on the row by four women who bridled when I tried to smile and make eye contact.
5. I found the handkerchief I had beautifully ensured would be in my coat pocket on the bedside cabinet, instead, when I got home, my nose having dripped through the meeting.
6. I left the meeting at the interval, not before trying to shove my arm down the sleeve with the scarf in it, and getting stuck half way, and pulling the scarf out the other end like a magician doing a rubbish trick.
If I'd stayed, maybe I'd have suggested there might be mileage in exploring the way social networks can co-ordinate informal learning, especially because my old class at primary school is getting in touch with one another, and I'm finding all kinds of things out about where they are now. It'd be great, starting from a shared educational experience, to explore the areas of life we feel we missed at eleven, and fill them in. Great research project for an educationalist. One of my fellow pupils, for example, was the son of an avante-garde proto-punk jazz musician. If I'd known such people existed then...?
Wednesday, 13 January 2010
743 - Due South: St Peter's Church, Oundle, 1/3
First of three photos from Oundle, at Christmas. Three and a half hours south, by Metro, train and car-lift.
Friday, 27 November 2009
755 - Cats, Pigeons and Christmas Get-Togethers
A paragraph from the excellent and provocative book Spent by Geoffrey Miller, applying kin selection to family parties and the like:
As a recipient of profoundly average-sized caches of cookies I find this oddly comforting. It gives me a positive handle on all the tugs and torsions I've resented myself for feeling, whenever I've been at festive gatherings in the past.
This year, grasping at what is going on, Christmas is going to be fun!
Thus, the healthiest, most attractive individuals in an extended-family clan tend to elicit the greatest attention and fondness from their relatives. They get more cookies from grandmothers and more job offers from uncles. From this viewpoint, family reunions can be seen as periodic rituals for mutual quality displays among genetic relatives: each individual tries to display his or her physical and mental traits in the best possible light to potential familial benefactors, and at the same time tries to assess which relatives are worthy of receiving his or her generosity. Poor families may have public-park barbecues while rich families congregate at estates in Kennebunkport or Balmoral, but in each case, similar social functions are served. Privileges, hopes, expectations, and resources are redistributed according to quality inspections of newborns, marital-prospect assessments of juveniles, and longevity assessments of the elderly. We all want to look worthy to our relatives, to the extent that they can do anything for us.
(p. 101)
As a recipient of profoundly average-sized caches of cookies I find this oddly comforting. It gives me a positive handle on all the tugs and torsions I've resented myself for feeling, whenever I've been at festive gatherings in the past.
This year, grasping at what is going on, Christmas is going to be fun!
Friday, 9 October 2009
774 - That Game Of Scrabble
I've a couple of big pictures on the go, so a good chance to show you some earlier work.
This is the second of two pictures based around the eroticism (9 letter word - 13 points + 50 bonus) of Scrabble...
Monday, 14 September 2009
785 - Transition Towns Revisited
[The blog's heading for a year old, so I'm getting all Janus-headed. The 'J' is of course kind of important here.]
So 201 posts ago I was pondering about Transition Towns. Could Whitley Bay become one? They're communities (towns, villages, cities, even an island or two) who come together to start addressing our long-term addiction to oil. Norwich is one, Totnes another. In fact, Totnes is where it started. Their latest initiative is an 'Energy Descent Plan', by which they'll coordinate their drop in energy usage over the next twenty or so years, so that, for example, energy shortages and oil price spikes don't spring any nasty surprises on them.
As the joint-owner of a patch of concrete, I'm particularly inspired by land-share schemes, whereby people who are not cultivating their gardens allow others without garden space to tend it for them, and the produce from the land is split. There are as many ideas as there are people creatively involved. Lewes, in the South East, developed its own currency, to encourage people to keep their money local (Whitley Bay Chamber of Trade please take note!). And best of all, though individuals retain their political convictions, the movement itself is deliberately non-partisan.
Who's organising this? Although increasingly councils have been getting involved (Lewes, Norwich and the towns around North Norfolk, for example), the impetus has always been bottom-up. Individuals getting together. Last Wednesday the local Transition groups hosted a meeting at the Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle, where a documentary about the movement was shown. I learned there that North Tyneside is in the process of forming its own group.
If you are interested, you could join the Transition Towns WIKI, which is what I'm off to do right now.
So 201 posts ago I was pondering about Transition Towns. Could Whitley Bay become one? They're communities (towns, villages, cities, even an island or two) who come together to start addressing our long-term addiction to oil. Norwich is one, Totnes another. In fact, Totnes is where it started. Their latest initiative is an 'Energy Descent Plan', by which they'll coordinate their drop in energy usage over the next twenty or so years, so that, for example, energy shortages and oil price spikes don't spring any nasty surprises on them.
As the joint-owner of a patch of concrete, I'm particularly inspired by land-share schemes, whereby people who are not cultivating their gardens allow others without garden space to tend it for them, and the produce from the land is split. There are as many ideas as there are people creatively involved. Lewes, in the South East, developed its own currency, to encourage people to keep their money local (Whitley Bay Chamber of Trade please take note!). And best of all, though individuals retain their political convictions, the movement itself is deliberately non-partisan.
Who's organising this? Although increasingly councils have been getting involved (Lewes, Norwich and the towns around North Norfolk, for example), the impetus has always been bottom-up. Individuals getting together. Last Wednesday the local Transition groups hosted a meeting at the Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle, where a documentary about the movement was shown. I learned there that North Tyneside is in the process of forming its own group.
If you are interested, you could join the Transition Towns WIKI, which is what I'm off to do right now.
Monday, 24 August 2009
791 - Fish Legs
One of five fish I've drawn for my friend Marianne, who is putting together a book of children's poetry on Lulu (or similar).
The poem this illustrates, about creepy fish running on land, has a pleasingly shivery Southern Gothic feel.
I drew the fish on holiday with my in-laws. My four-year-old nephew was amazed I took so long on something so small. He decided to draw a fish with legs too, and filled it up with dots, but as he explained to me, it was at least four times as big, and took much, much less time to complete!
Friday, 3 July 2009
804 - Grandaddery
A thought which has been loitering for a while:
If we become fertile mid-teens, for most of our species' history this is the time that we'll have started having children.
That means that by the time we are mid-thirties, for most of our species' history, our children will have begun raising their own kids, and we will be starting to fulfil the role of grandparents.
The most well-adjusted child would presumably be the one whose parents, and also whose grandparents, were committed to its welfare. A stable lineage would therefore be more likely to evolve than an unstable one.
The physiology and, as a consequence, psychology behind good grandparenting would over time evolve.
Just as we prepare to become parents as teenagers, we prepare to become grandparents in our thirties. This is also the time that boys in Africa become fully grown men, and people in the West undergo career changes and feel the pressures associated with a midlife crisis.
What if the mid-life crisis is about equipping us to become Grandparents, to the tribe, if not to individual children? A forced change in perspective, away from the direct learning of childhood and early adulthood, towards a frame of mind where what has been learnt is now to be shared with younger generations. If this role was fostered in society, a kind of informal eldership, from mid-thirties onwards, would the impact of middle-age be smoothed away?
If it's natural, my guess is it is happening anyway, and the evidence is probably there in pop culture and stories.
If we become fertile mid-teens, for most of our species' history this is the time that we'll have started having children.
That means that by the time we are mid-thirties, for most of our species' history, our children will have begun raising their own kids, and we will be starting to fulfil the role of grandparents.
The most well-adjusted child would presumably be the one whose parents, and also whose grandparents, were committed to its welfare. A stable lineage would therefore be more likely to evolve than an unstable one.
The physiology and, as a consequence, psychology behind good grandparenting would over time evolve.
Just as we prepare to become parents as teenagers, we prepare to become grandparents in our thirties. This is also the time that boys in Africa become fully grown men, and people in the West undergo career changes and feel the pressures associated with a midlife crisis.
What if the mid-life crisis is about equipping us to become Grandparents, to the tribe, if not to individual children? A forced change in perspective, away from the direct learning of childhood and early adulthood, towards a frame of mind where what has been learnt is now to be shared with younger generations. If this role was fostered in society, a kind of informal eldership, from mid-thirties onwards, would the impact of middle-age be smoothed away?
If it's natural, my guess is it is happening anyway, and the evidence is probably there in pop culture and stories.
Thursday, 28 May 2009
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
862 - Trickster
I knew that mini-library I've built would come in handy!
Trickster Makes The World is a book by Lewis Hyde (this edition Canongate, 2008), in which he documents and dissects Trickster myths from around the world. Trickster could be a coyote, or a rabbit, or raven, or the nearly-god Hermes, but one thing for sure, he (in the stories it's almost invariably a he) is very, very human!
Trickster is a boundary-crosser, who defines the boundaries that exist by the act of crossing them. He's basically out for what he can get, and grows nimble in the act of getting it, and of not, in the process, getting got by others. Coyote's after food, and escape. Hermes is after godhood, and immortality. Lewis makes the point that the transactions by which trickster progresses (or not) are the same acutely observed psychological tricks by which we make our own way in the world. Out of them is spun the culture that we pass on to the next generation. Being human is about accepting that we are tricksters, even when what we are trying to escape is our tricksterhood.
Immediately, for me, trickster resonates with my own journey. That's the one through religious fundamentalism as a young man, through a consequent fundamentalist rejection of fundamentalism, finally to a shamanic rebirth acknowledging both extremes, but happiest dancing nimbly on the boundary.
On that boundary, a new culture is created.
Here are the parallels: coyote (for example) seeks meat, and at the point of getting it, the point of getting snagged in the trap that lies beneath, leaps back, scratched. But now he's hurt and hungry. He's learnt not to trust his instincts, but not yet to catch the meat which will give him the strength to heal. So he tries another tack. He notes the fly, light enough to land without setting the trap off, and he observes he is getting thinner by the hour. Perhaps if he waits long enough, cunningly, he'll get so thin the food will be his for the taking. But as he thins, his strength ebbs, till, too light to pounce, too heavy to fly, he is caught out a second time. But here's where the world steps in. Brother mouse, or fly, or whoever, at coyote's point of weakness, is able and willing to lift the food from the trap and give it to him. Coyote learns a lesson about the kindness of the world at the same time as he learns his limitations.
And here's me, seeking adulthood, and at the point of achieving it (a career and, more than that, home in the Church), leaping back as I realise the cost is the loss of my a-religious childhood. I'm scratched, as deep as I know, and I've lost my sense of self. So I wait, getting thinner all the time, as the rest of my peers take what they need, and though I try to emulate them, creating the shell of a successful life out of the childhood I have been given, I can never quite generate the sense of adulthood I need. I'm too light. I'm too heavy. But here's where the world steps in. At my point of weakness, asleep one night, I am woken by... what? Love, that's all, given to me by... well, in the end, both by the world I found in church, and the world I knew outside. The meat and the not-meat together, filling that sense of identity up, with what was there all along.
So I'm a trickster, wise that I'll always be a trickster. I'll never be more (or less) than I am, nor do I want to be. But I can now take my part in creating whatever new culture I, my peers, and those that come after, can best use to survive a little longer. What I've learnt is that the natural world is drenched with love, but so is the cultural world. The two interact, tango together, and in the sphere of my own identity, at least, I can set myself dancing howsoever I please.
Trickster Makes The World is a book by Lewis Hyde (this edition Canongate, 2008), in which he documents and dissects Trickster myths from around the world. Trickster could be a coyote, or a rabbit, or raven, or the nearly-god Hermes, but one thing for sure, he (in the stories it's almost invariably a he) is very, very human!
Trickster is a boundary-crosser, who defines the boundaries that exist by the act of crossing them. He's basically out for what he can get, and grows nimble in the act of getting it, and of not, in the process, getting got by others. Coyote's after food, and escape. Hermes is after godhood, and immortality. Lewis makes the point that the transactions by which trickster progresses (or not) are the same acutely observed psychological tricks by which we make our own way in the world. Out of them is spun the culture that we pass on to the next generation. Being human is about accepting that we are tricksters, even when what we are trying to escape is our tricksterhood.
Immediately, for me, trickster resonates with my own journey. That's the one through religious fundamentalism as a young man, through a consequent fundamentalist rejection of fundamentalism, finally to a shamanic rebirth acknowledging both extremes, but happiest dancing nimbly on the boundary.
On that boundary, a new culture is created.
Here are the parallels: coyote (for example) seeks meat, and at the point of getting it, the point of getting snagged in the trap that lies beneath, leaps back, scratched. But now he's hurt and hungry. He's learnt not to trust his instincts, but not yet to catch the meat which will give him the strength to heal. So he tries another tack. He notes the fly, light enough to land without setting the trap off, and he observes he is getting thinner by the hour. Perhaps if he waits long enough, cunningly, he'll get so thin the food will be his for the taking. But as he thins, his strength ebbs, till, too light to pounce, too heavy to fly, he is caught out a second time. But here's where the world steps in. Brother mouse, or fly, or whoever, at coyote's point of weakness, is able and willing to lift the food from the trap and give it to him. Coyote learns a lesson about the kindness of the world at the same time as he learns his limitations.
And here's me, seeking adulthood, and at the point of achieving it (a career and, more than that, home in the Church), leaping back as I realise the cost is the loss of my a-religious childhood. I'm scratched, as deep as I know, and I've lost my sense of self. So I wait, getting thinner all the time, as the rest of my peers take what they need, and though I try to emulate them, creating the shell of a successful life out of the childhood I have been given, I can never quite generate the sense of adulthood I need. I'm too light. I'm too heavy. But here's where the world steps in. At my point of weakness, asleep one night, I am woken by... what? Love, that's all, given to me by... well, in the end, both by the world I found in church, and the world I knew outside. The meat and the not-meat together, filling that sense of identity up, with what was there all along.
So I'm a trickster, wise that I'll always be a trickster. I'll never be more (or less) than I am, nor do I want to be. But I can now take my part in creating whatever new culture I, my peers, and those that come after, can best use to survive a little longer. What I've learnt is that the natural world is drenched with love, but so is the cultural world. The two interact, tango together, and in the sphere of my own identity, at least, I can set myself dancing howsoever I please.
Monday, 23 February 2009
900 - In Which I Go All Mulder (3)
Some odd events to do with prayer and intention.
Starting with a qualified apology about the religious language, in case it sounds freaky, or presumptious, or out of place. In what I'm about to write, I'm not out to persuade, and the language I used at the time I'm repeating here because I used it at the time. I talk about prayer, and especially the verbal kind (evangelical Christians call it 'intercession'), but aspects of it'll sound familiar, perhaps, to people from other spiritual traditions, like Wicca and Buddhism, where maybe it is referred to as something else.
And there may be a Black Swan explanation of it all which does not require anything other than coincidence and the laws of nature. But I'm not here trying to unpick subjective elements from objective ones. This is partly because the very reason I've experienced some of the things I have is because I motivated myself to go about engaging with them the way I did, a phenomenon that cannot help but be both subjective and objective. More subtle analysis can (and will!) follow in later posts.
Here's what happened, anyway.
After the shower experience that had pitched me into questioning reality, and, perhaps because it was to hand, after I had immersed myself into the evangelical Christianity that offered to mediate it for me, I realised pretty soon that this was a hook, line and sinker gig.
I began to seek out books and experiences which would demonstrate to me, to others, to the God that I had committed myself to, that I was in it for the long haul. I found myself exploring prayer, which I have come to understand as engagement at its deepest level with the reality we can reach out and touch, in such a way, perhaps, that that reality is affected by our actions.
Four uncanny events, on each occasion I ventured to the edge of my inhibitions, encouraged me to believe this.
First, at Uni, emboldened (though not beyond the point of uncertainty) by stories of men and women asking God to intervene in the world, on my own one night I prayed the first thing that came into my head. A kind of bargain - give me something to pray and I will say it (give me something important to pray, God, and you'll get what you want). What I would get was the validation that my prayer was worthwhile. The risk, of course, was that I would say something stupid. Tentatively, with as much conviction as I could muster, I opened my mouth, and without preparing the words, found myself saying 'I pray for the victims of the train crash'. Single sentence. I rolled over and went to sleep. I woke up to catch late night radio news of a train crash in Europe. Only two dead, though many injured.
Then, as a passenger on a car journey past the Chichester Sainsbury's in 1993, I sensed some kind of weight, a gathering of - what? intention? in the atmosphere around the place. Although I understood I could articulate a prayer, nervously I didn't. I'd been shocked by my experience of the train-crash prayer. Within a day or two, though without injury to anyone, the supermarket had burned down.
Third, in Bognor, summer 1994, I bought tickets to travel for a fortnight's break from L'Arche. By this stage, much of my interior life was caught up in a process of negotiation and imaginative acts of life rehearsal, in the light of theology and the God that that theology argued for. On the way to Bognor station I felt the same sense of weight. Whatever it was, it led me to break my revery and, choosing words a bit more carefully than before, to pray (and forgive the stiltedness!) "Lord, if the IRA are to bomb this town, at least let it be for a good purpose." Whilst I was away, this happened. It was the last IRA bomb found in mainland Britain. The shock of an IRA blast in a small seaside town, in which, amazingly, no-one was hurt, and the resilient response of the town, led directly to the IRA abandoning these tactics.
How to make sense of this? How to make sense of this when you are, of your own volition, within a church community that encourages the belief in effective prayer? When these events, though rare, maintain an internal consistency? When you are aware that any attempt to explore these things in public debate risks notoriety and misconstrual? Was the prayer effective? Who knows, objectively? What sense do you make of the not knowing?
When I left Church, in those magical weeks of grief, midsummer 1995, I was in great panic that the devil had some grip on me. A door-slam at midnight and I'd be sure I was being watched. It was as if I was operating at an acute spiritual pitch, and conspiracies that others had told me of in my church years rang horribly true. Though on the edge of madness, I was steered from it by the visit of an local crisis team, who interviewed me, and assured me that, though I wasn't insane, carry on as I was doing and I might end up so. I'd scared myself towards the release of disassociation, but the crisis team scared me back, so that I was like a rabbit zig-zagging.
On the last occasion I want to speak of, I was sat in one half of the kitchen, my mother preparing lunch at the other end. I was half aware of the door of the washing machine, open and empty. If I was damned, there'd be nothing to stop the world unravelling around me. I could be pulled every which way. I started to sense a build-up of intention, which focussed itself, as I focussed in, on the washing machine door. The windows were closed. The air was stuffy, absolutely still, and my senses were alert. If I was a puppet, the devil, anything, could have me nudge that door by thinking of it, and it would move. And you've guessed it: as I engaged, gave myself up to, the world around me and the door, the door moved. No more than a millimetre. Scalded again, I leapt away.
I list these experiences, and these, and these, to make the point that there is a state of being where positivism - an understandable trust in the material world - becomes uncertain. I don't want to go further than that, not here, and probably - given the choices I've made, and the fulfilment I find precisely in the openness of uncertainty - not ever. Unlike Fox Mulder, I'm no longer in pursuit of a truth that is out there. Nor do I believe the truth is purely subjective, within. I won't cart my own load of dogma onto your patch, and just dump it there.
Though I do want to tease at these events in future posts, and one or two others like them, and especially to begin to ask whether they can be shared in any meaningful way, as a church or coven might, or a covey of storytellers. The possibility is there. That's all, right now, I believe I'm confident to say.
Starting with a qualified apology about the religious language, in case it sounds freaky, or presumptious, or out of place. In what I'm about to write, I'm not out to persuade, and the language I used at the time I'm repeating here because I used it at the time. I talk about prayer, and especially the verbal kind (evangelical Christians call it 'intercession'), but aspects of it'll sound familiar, perhaps, to people from other spiritual traditions, like Wicca and Buddhism, where maybe it is referred to as something else.
And there may be a Black Swan explanation of it all which does not require anything other than coincidence and the laws of nature. But I'm not here trying to unpick subjective elements from objective ones. This is partly because the very reason I've experienced some of the things I have is because I motivated myself to go about engaging with them the way I did, a phenomenon that cannot help but be both subjective and objective. More subtle analysis can (and will!) follow in later posts.
Here's what happened, anyway.
After the shower experience that had pitched me into questioning reality, and, perhaps because it was to hand, after I had immersed myself into the evangelical Christianity that offered to mediate it for me, I realised pretty soon that this was a hook, line and sinker gig.
I began to seek out books and experiences which would demonstrate to me, to others, to the God that I had committed myself to, that I was in it for the long haul. I found myself exploring prayer, which I have come to understand as engagement at its deepest level with the reality we can reach out and touch, in such a way, perhaps, that that reality is affected by our actions.
Four uncanny events, on each occasion I ventured to the edge of my inhibitions, encouraged me to believe this.
First, at Uni, emboldened (though not beyond the point of uncertainty) by stories of men and women asking God to intervene in the world, on my own one night I prayed the first thing that came into my head. A kind of bargain - give me something to pray and I will say it (give me something important to pray, God, and you'll get what you want). What I would get was the validation that my prayer was worthwhile. The risk, of course, was that I would say something stupid. Tentatively, with as much conviction as I could muster, I opened my mouth, and without preparing the words, found myself saying 'I pray for the victims of the train crash'. Single sentence. I rolled over and went to sleep. I woke up to catch late night radio news of a train crash in Europe. Only two dead, though many injured.
Then, as a passenger on a car journey past the Chichester Sainsbury's in 1993, I sensed some kind of weight, a gathering of - what? intention? in the atmosphere around the place. Although I understood I could articulate a prayer, nervously I didn't. I'd been shocked by my experience of the train-crash prayer. Within a day or two, though without injury to anyone, the supermarket had burned down.
Third, in Bognor, summer 1994, I bought tickets to travel for a fortnight's break from L'Arche. By this stage, much of my interior life was caught up in a process of negotiation and imaginative acts of life rehearsal, in the light of theology and the God that that theology argued for. On the way to Bognor station I felt the same sense of weight. Whatever it was, it led me to break my revery and, choosing words a bit more carefully than before, to pray (and forgive the stiltedness!) "Lord, if the IRA are to bomb this town, at least let it be for a good purpose." Whilst I was away, this happened. It was the last IRA bomb found in mainland Britain. The shock of an IRA blast in a small seaside town, in which, amazingly, no-one was hurt, and the resilient response of the town, led directly to the IRA abandoning these tactics.
How to make sense of this? How to make sense of this when you are, of your own volition, within a church community that encourages the belief in effective prayer? When these events, though rare, maintain an internal consistency? When you are aware that any attempt to explore these things in public debate risks notoriety and misconstrual? Was the prayer effective? Who knows, objectively? What sense do you make of the not knowing?
When I left Church, in those magical weeks of grief, midsummer 1995, I was in great panic that the devil had some grip on me. A door-slam at midnight and I'd be sure I was being watched. It was as if I was operating at an acute spiritual pitch, and conspiracies that others had told me of in my church years rang horribly true. Though on the edge of madness, I was steered from it by the visit of an local crisis team, who interviewed me, and assured me that, though I wasn't insane, carry on as I was doing and I might end up so. I'd scared myself towards the release of disassociation, but the crisis team scared me back, so that I was like a rabbit zig-zagging.
On the last occasion I want to speak of, I was sat in one half of the kitchen, my mother preparing lunch at the other end. I was half aware of the door of the washing machine, open and empty. If I was damned, there'd be nothing to stop the world unravelling around me. I could be pulled every which way. I started to sense a build-up of intention, which focussed itself, as I focussed in, on the washing machine door. The windows were closed. The air was stuffy, absolutely still, and my senses were alert. If I was a puppet, the devil, anything, could have me nudge that door by thinking of it, and it would move. And you've guessed it: as I engaged, gave myself up to, the world around me and the door, the door moved. No more than a millimetre. Scalded again, I leapt away.
I list these experiences, and these, and these, to make the point that there is a state of being where positivism - an understandable trust in the material world - becomes uncertain. I don't want to go further than that, not here, and probably - given the choices I've made, and the fulfilment I find precisely in the openness of uncertainty - not ever. Unlike Fox Mulder, I'm no longer in pursuit of a truth that is out there. Nor do I believe the truth is purely subjective, within. I won't cart my own load of dogma onto your patch, and just dump it there.
Though I do want to tease at these events in future posts, and one or two others like them, and especially to begin to ask whether they can be shared in any meaningful way, as a church or coven might, or a covey of storytellers. The possibility is there. That's all, right now, I believe I'm confident to say.
Friday, 20 February 2009
902 - In Which I Go All Mulder (2)
A handful of dreams, the common denominator being that they seem to involve experiences of the future.
Perhaps these fall into the category of random coincidences. Or perhaps both dreams and subsequent events are part of a single delusion. Maybe there is a conspiracy of friends (or aliens) planting ideas and 'arranging' events - as someone once suggested to me on Richard Dawkin's site - so that I'm caught in a kind of human or suprahuman Truman Show (I desperately hope not! Far too much effort...). Maybe I'm in a two-way (though feels pretty one way) conversation with a God with a penchant for plot-spoilers. Or maybe (seriously) there's something about consciousness and the nature of reality that gives everyone unity across their lifetime - some personal, or even interpersonal, vantage point, accessible in dreams, in which content from past, present and future intermingles.
See what you think.
In the dream from my childhood I return to, I stand this side of a vast river, which itself sweeps across shelves of rock, and is edged on the far side by mile-high cliffs. A strong wind picks up and carries the water flow, driving it faster, if this were possible. There's a sense, which I had the day I dreamt it, that the other side of the river is beyond this life, and for another time.
Then, at university, caught in the expectation that a Christian God brings truth in dreams, I decided, in 1992, to talk about a couple to friends, when they seemed particularly sharp (the dreams, though the friends were, too, of course...) and when I had nothing else to say. The two I spoke about were, first, of a print of a portrait of the queen - this one, I think - in a student common room, with a presentation label beneath it from a particular reverend gentleman; second, of two trees - one a mural dessed in handprint leaves, and the other, small, of fir-cones stacked three or four high, tied with red ribbons, and held stable by an arrangement of wooden struts which criss-crossed one another at the tree's base. The handprints and the ribbons had names written on them.
What was remarkable was that, on each of the two occasions, subsequently, that I spent a night in communities I had never been to before, expressly to determine whether I might join them for a while, I found these objects where I was staying. The portrait was hidden at the back of a wardrobe in the disused former student's room I was given prior to an admissions interview at St John's College, Nottingham, in 1994. When I turned it around, I found on the back a label, with presentation details and the name of the donor written on it. The tree mural and the fir-cones were both used by L'Arche Zacchaeus, a house in Bognor Regis, to symbolize, firstly, all the current and former members of the whole L'Arche Bognor community, and secondly, specifically, those of the members in the house where I was staying, current in the summer of 1992.
Finding these objects, in the context of a religious decision-making process, was, on both occasions, uncanny, but it seemed sensible for me to take them to mean that, whatever decision I made about whether to join the communities or not, I was at least, at point of decision, at the 'right' place. And on both occasions, subsequently, I chose to join the communities.
I didn't always tell my dreams to others. One freaky dream, which unrolled just as I dreamt it, was of a young male stranger, arms swinging, who walked up to me on Barnet High Street, thumped me on my arm, said something like 'You're one of us now', and walked on. This chilled me. I had just walked away from Church. It was 1995. I was in something of a trance-like state as I searched for some sense of normality in the weeks following that decision. Joan Didion, I think, captures the state beautifully in the title of her book, on grieving, 'The Year of Magical Thinking': I was thinking magically. Then this event - dreamt of, again, a long time previously - manifested itself like a moment of real and fearful magic, out of the blue in broad daylight. After years of evangelical thinking, it seemed to me that the young man, in some form of insanity, was mouthpiecing demonic voices to me, pressing the consequences of my decision to walk away from Church upon me. And I kept walking.
And finally an inconsequential dream, of Doctor Who books in a newsagent, glossy covered, in sharp focus. Doctor Who was a childhood hero and I'd collected all the Target books as a boy. This was in the early 90s, after the series had been discontinued, and the stories were no longer fresh in my mind. Again, in the weeks after leaving Church, I came across a run of these books - new ones, freshly covered, written by fans perpetuating the myth, and looking just as I had dreamt them. Kind of embarrassed, I didn't know what to make of such a dream, though perhaps, now that the series is continued again, and my passion for narrative and deliberate myth-making awakened, the story's power to inspire, and the nature of the Doctor as a strange embodiment of kindness and infinite possibility, gives this experience of dream and twinned event greater resonance. Dunno. ;)
Actually there was another dream, I think - though because I spoke to no-one about it I am less sure - more recently, of a trip to a mattress factory and a high building with tropical plants growing up its centre. Of me and E and peacocks amongst the plants. On our trip to Majorca last year we stayed in this building - a hotel - and were invited as part of the holiday package to just such a factory. This time, trusting that there was no right or wrong decision a God might be asking me to make, and not unduly concerned I'd be missing a demonstration of mattress-construction, I decided not to talk E onto the trip. Instead we walked to a high promitory, overlooking the resort, and I read Marina Warner on Signs and Wonders as E slept in my lap.
Perhaps these fall into the category of random coincidences. Or perhaps both dreams and subsequent events are part of a single delusion. Maybe there is a conspiracy of friends (or aliens) planting ideas and 'arranging' events - as someone once suggested to me on Richard Dawkin's site - so that I'm caught in a kind of human or suprahuman Truman Show (I desperately hope not! Far too much effort...). Maybe I'm in a two-way (though feels pretty one way) conversation with a God with a penchant for plot-spoilers. Or maybe (seriously) there's something about consciousness and the nature of reality that gives everyone unity across their lifetime - some personal, or even interpersonal, vantage point, accessible in dreams, in which content from past, present and future intermingles.
See what you think.
In the dream from my childhood I return to, I stand this side of a vast river, which itself sweeps across shelves of rock, and is edged on the far side by mile-high cliffs. A strong wind picks up and carries the water flow, driving it faster, if this were possible. There's a sense, which I had the day I dreamt it, that the other side of the river is beyond this life, and for another time.
Then, at university, caught in the expectation that a Christian God brings truth in dreams, I decided, in 1992, to talk about a couple to friends, when they seemed particularly sharp (the dreams, though the friends were, too, of course...) and when I had nothing else to say. The two I spoke about were, first, of a print of a portrait of the queen - this one, I think - in a student common room, with a presentation label beneath it from a particular reverend gentleman; second, of two trees - one a mural dessed in handprint leaves, and the other, small, of fir-cones stacked three or four high, tied with red ribbons, and held stable by an arrangement of wooden struts which criss-crossed one another at the tree's base. The handprints and the ribbons had names written on them.
What was remarkable was that, on each of the two occasions, subsequently, that I spent a night in communities I had never been to before, expressly to determine whether I might join them for a while, I found these objects where I was staying. The portrait was hidden at the back of a wardrobe in the disused former student's room I was given prior to an admissions interview at St John's College, Nottingham, in 1994. When I turned it around, I found on the back a label, with presentation details and the name of the donor written on it. The tree mural and the fir-cones were both used by L'Arche Zacchaeus, a house in Bognor Regis, to symbolize, firstly, all the current and former members of the whole L'Arche Bognor community, and secondly, specifically, those of the members in the house where I was staying, current in the summer of 1992.
Finding these objects, in the context of a religious decision-making process, was, on both occasions, uncanny, but it seemed sensible for me to take them to mean that, whatever decision I made about whether to join the communities or not, I was at least, at point of decision, at the 'right' place. And on both occasions, subsequently, I chose to join the communities.
I didn't always tell my dreams to others. One freaky dream, which unrolled just as I dreamt it, was of a young male stranger, arms swinging, who walked up to me on Barnet High Street, thumped me on my arm, said something like 'You're one of us now', and walked on. This chilled me. I had just walked away from Church. It was 1995. I was in something of a trance-like state as I searched for some sense of normality in the weeks following that decision. Joan Didion, I think, captures the state beautifully in the title of her book, on grieving, 'The Year of Magical Thinking': I was thinking magically. Then this event - dreamt of, again, a long time previously - manifested itself like a moment of real and fearful magic, out of the blue in broad daylight. After years of evangelical thinking, it seemed to me that the young man, in some form of insanity, was mouthpiecing demonic voices to me, pressing the consequences of my decision to walk away from Church upon me. And I kept walking.
And finally an inconsequential dream, of Doctor Who books in a newsagent, glossy covered, in sharp focus. Doctor Who was a childhood hero and I'd collected all the Target books as a boy. This was in the early 90s, after the series had been discontinued, and the stories were no longer fresh in my mind. Again, in the weeks after leaving Church, I came across a run of these books - new ones, freshly covered, written by fans perpetuating the myth, and looking just as I had dreamt them. Kind of embarrassed, I didn't know what to make of such a dream, though perhaps, now that the series is continued again, and my passion for narrative and deliberate myth-making awakened, the story's power to inspire, and the nature of the Doctor as a strange embodiment of kindness and infinite possibility, gives this experience of dream and twinned event greater resonance. Dunno. ;)
Actually there was another dream, I think - though because I spoke to no-one about it I am less sure - more recently, of a trip to a mattress factory and a high building with tropical plants growing up its centre. Of me and E and peacocks amongst the plants. On our trip to Majorca last year we stayed in this building - a hotel - and were invited as part of the holiday package to just such a factory. This time, trusting that there was no right or wrong decision a God might be asking me to make, and not unduly concerned I'd be missing a demonstration of mattress-construction, I decided not to talk E onto the trip. Instead we walked to a high promitory, overlooking the resort, and I read Marina Warner on Signs and Wonders as E slept in my lap.
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
903 - In Which I Go All Mulder (1)
As promised, the first of three posts documenting a bunch of weird stuff. This time, a bit of history, including a couple of 'conversion' experiences. Next time, a handful of dreams. Finally, some odd moments to do with intention and prayer.
Readers who know me well will know that after a pretty average child and teenagehood I did a slightly less average (if still, I have to admit, fairly cliche-ed) thing and, at York University, in my first term, threw myself into the pursuit of Christianity. I'd sat in a student kitchen, listening to a Christian Union girl tell us her life story, and a day or so following, had taken a shower during which, looking upwards, I'd experienced something like light breaking into my head and body. The sense that the limits by which I had defined reality up until then had been fractured, was so powerful to me, subjectively, that I sought out the God crowd in an effort, as much as anything, to get back on an even keel.
Over the next six years I pretty much immersed myself in Christianity, proceeding, from active involvement in the Christian Union, to a first year after my English degree in a Catholic religious community with people with learning difficulties; a second attached to a charismatic Baptist church, and a third at an Anglican training college. On the last day at the college, the 'loose canon' tutor who had welcomed me in, and who I respected (and still respect) deeply, looked me in the eye, with my parents present, and told me that one day I would be a vicar.
Immediately after which, back with my parents, I walked from church, from Christianity, the whole kit and caboodle, and spent the next eight years walking. Periodically I would be overwhelmed with a sense of guilt, loss, and fear, which I learnt to deal with by distracting myself, sleeping it off, or allowing my girlfriend, who became my wife, to talk me back down (or up) to earth.
Then, at Christmas 2003, having redefined myself as a librarian and illustrator, I found myself again at my parents' house, with my wife away on the other side of the world. I'd travelled earlier in the day by train and (it doesn't matter about the details) when I went to bed that night I was despairing. I remember pulling the duvet up to my nose and simply lying, no more emotional or intellectual fight in me.
At 3.00am that morning I woke to the sense that I was surrounded and permeated by Love. Here's the part of the story where a Christian might say 'God called me back' or 'I decided to return to the Church'. But I had no sense of demand, simply an impression that whatever could enter my despair and lift it so fully had to be Love, had to be natural; that if there was a God, and God was promising anything other than this, I didn't really want or need it. What I found, what I still find, is the mental, emotional, bodily, spiritual space, proactively, to explore being me, alone and in relationship with wife, family, friends, and all the rest.
I bargained a little, that night. Using the old evangelical language - with which, suddenly, I was at ease, even as I left it behind - I found I could talk the Christian talk; at the same time I had new words, a love of science and cultural analysis, which had given me a home outside this subculture. I decided I'd take the risk that, since it obviously had no problem with my despair, Love would stick with me, and, as I'd survived pretty well for eight years outside institutional religion, would never submerge myself in it again. At the very least, it would freak my wife out. I knew I could go back - if I felt the call, I would - but what a fantastic adventure, instead, to take a chance on something new.
I've read widely since, and more and more I meet people, often from a church background, who are making similar journeys to me. It all seems to tie in with the growth of globalisation, social networking sites, an appreciation of emergent theory, organising without organisation, non-hierarchical thinking. And as well as being very new, very postmodern, these ideas are also pre-Christian, pre-agriculture even: very, very old indeed. There is continuity, and security in them, as well as revolution.
I'd claim the title of vicar for myself, if I didn't prefer the term storymaker. Eight years out of church has been my training and I really, really don't feel the need to jump any more professional hoops. But I remain engaged with Christianity, especially to support those who are uncomfortable within it, or who, having been faced with similar decisions to me, have decided to remain in or return to it.
Readers who know me well will know that after a pretty average child and teenagehood I did a slightly less average (if still, I have to admit, fairly cliche-ed) thing and, at York University, in my first term, threw myself into the pursuit of Christianity. I'd sat in a student kitchen, listening to a Christian Union girl tell us her life story, and a day or so following, had taken a shower during which, looking upwards, I'd experienced something like light breaking into my head and body. The sense that the limits by which I had defined reality up until then had been fractured, was so powerful to me, subjectively, that I sought out the God crowd in an effort, as much as anything, to get back on an even keel.
Over the next six years I pretty much immersed myself in Christianity, proceeding, from active involvement in the Christian Union, to a first year after my English degree in a Catholic religious community with people with learning difficulties; a second attached to a charismatic Baptist church, and a third at an Anglican training college. On the last day at the college, the 'loose canon' tutor who had welcomed me in, and who I respected (and still respect) deeply, looked me in the eye, with my parents present, and told me that one day I would be a vicar.
Immediately after which, back with my parents, I walked from church, from Christianity, the whole kit and caboodle, and spent the next eight years walking. Periodically I would be overwhelmed with a sense of guilt, loss, and fear, which I learnt to deal with by distracting myself, sleeping it off, or allowing my girlfriend, who became my wife, to talk me back down (or up) to earth.
Then, at Christmas 2003, having redefined myself as a librarian and illustrator, I found myself again at my parents' house, with my wife away on the other side of the world. I'd travelled earlier in the day by train and (it doesn't matter about the details) when I went to bed that night I was despairing. I remember pulling the duvet up to my nose and simply lying, no more emotional or intellectual fight in me.
At 3.00am that morning I woke to the sense that I was surrounded and permeated by Love. Here's the part of the story where a Christian might say 'God called me back' or 'I decided to return to the Church'. But I had no sense of demand, simply an impression that whatever could enter my despair and lift it so fully had to be Love, had to be natural; that if there was a God, and God was promising anything other than this, I didn't really want or need it. What I found, what I still find, is the mental, emotional, bodily, spiritual space, proactively, to explore being me, alone and in relationship with wife, family, friends, and all the rest.
I bargained a little, that night. Using the old evangelical language - with which, suddenly, I was at ease, even as I left it behind - I found I could talk the Christian talk; at the same time I had new words, a love of science and cultural analysis, which had given me a home outside this subculture. I decided I'd take the risk that, since it obviously had no problem with my despair, Love would stick with me, and, as I'd survived pretty well for eight years outside institutional religion, would never submerge myself in it again. At the very least, it would freak my wife out. I knew I could go back - if I felt the call, I would - but what a fantastic adventure, instead, to take a chance on something new.
I've read widely since, and more and more I meet people, often from a church background, who are making similar journeys to me. It all seems to tie in with the growth of globalisation, social networking sites, an appreciation of emergent theory, organising without organisation, non-hierarchical thinking. And as well as being very new, very postmodern, these ideas are also pre-Christian, pre-agriculture even: very, very old indeed. There is continuity, and security in them, as well as revolution.
I'd claim the title of vicar for myself, if I didn't prefer the term storymaker. Eight years out of church has been my training and I really, really don't feel the need to jump any more professional hoops. But I remain engaged with Christianity, especially to support those who are uncomfortable within it, or who, having been faced with similar decisions to me, have decided to remain in or return to it.
Thursday, 12 February 2009
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
909 - Er...
Yesterday I wrote:
...which, on reflection, would be an utterly boring thing to do on one's birthday or wedding anniversary.
:)
Tomorrow (which is my 38th Birthday - and seventh wedding anniversary) I'm going to map my own meaning-making journey onto this synopsis.
...which, on reflection, would be an utterly boring thing to do on one's birthday or wedding anniversary.
:)
Tuesday, 10 February 2009
910 - A Narrative Life (General)
Quote from i.d.: the quest for identity in the 21st century, by Susan Greenfield:
Susan Greenfield researches Alzheimers disease and the physical basis of consciousness at Oxford University. She's also director of the Royal Institution. So she knows what she's talking about.
I like this quote because it describes our lives in terms of their development as meaning-making (for which, read story-making) machines. Tomorrow (which is my 38th Birthday - and seventh wedding anniversary) I'm going to map my own meaning-making journey onto this synopsis. Finally I might have a go, in a couple of days, at mapping Whitley's meaning-making in the same way.
It's almost as though the period of excessive plasticity in childhood is a one-way street: there is huge potential for anything and everything to leave its mark, almost literally, on the brain. As the brain matures, however, we start to evaluate the world in terms of what has gone before: now there is a two-way street between the outside and our personal memories. Many of the haphazard experiences, the deluge of disconnected events that were the hallmark of our early years, are 'forgotten' as the synapses that subserved them are pruned away in favour of a clear, connected, conceptual framework for how we see ourselves, the rest of the world and our life story as a 'connected chain': a narrative. But an increasingly prevalent tragedy [Alzheimers disease] is that this sequence of events can be thrown into reverse gear.
Susan Greenfield researches Alzheimers disease and the physical basis of consciousness at Oxford University. She's also director of the Royal Institution. So she knows what she's talking about.
I like this quote because it describes our lives in terms of their development as meaning-making (for which, read story-making) machines. Tomorrow (which is my 38th Birthday - and seventh wedding anniversary) I'm going to map my own meaning-making journey onto this synopsis. Finally I might have a go, in a couple of days, at mapping Whitley's meaning-making in the same way.
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