Watership Lock-Down
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Monthly Archives: April 2020
Leadership
Our Queen, amazing that she gave a broadcast in 1940 the children evacuated from London bombing – and some would have been listening to her speaking to them 80 years later.
“I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service” – Princess Elizabeth, 1947.
Sitting By The Well (Chapter 1)
Marion Woodman discusses soul, water, flow and the feminine. First of 12 short talks that my daughter introduced us to. Transformational for me anyway, (oh – and inspiring, and hopeful, and revealing …).
I’d really love any thoughts or comments..
To listen click here … sitting by the well ch 1 soul and water
The world’s a-quiver
Wikipedia: Brownian motion is the random motion of particles suspended in a liquid or a gas
TS Eliot The Dry Salvages: “I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable”
For reading click here … Brownian motion
This life is like a river
A silver shiver this life
A gurgling-guddling quick’ning sliver
Wrangling-tangle of strife
All we be is water-taught
Aught but water our withal
Our tumbling jumbling ripple of thought
Pride before a waterfall
Strong brown God is the river
Reiver of sods and odds thrown
Our brownian drownian motion a-quiver
Deep pooled in tides of its own
Our day is like a lifetime
Wild thyme and strawberry day
But frighteningly nightly tight-coiling the lifeline
Which runs through death and decay
Well the still point of the world
Whirled without end to be well
For waving and curling dimensions unfurled
Love which is ocean’s salt swell
The Old Possums’s Book of Practical Cats by TS Eliot
Originally written for the authors godchildren, it is of course famous as the West End and Broadway musical composed by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and …
20+ Best James Henry Leigh Hunt poems
James Henry Leigh Hunt, best known as Leigh Hunt, was an English critic, essayist and poet. Hunt co-founded The Examiner, a leading intellectual …
Watercolor sketch 15
Artist: Alex Markovich. Kursk Oblast, Russia. January 2020.
Touching the Flow
I’m bumbling bee not its sting
Flight of the gull not its wing
Not noun or thing-y at all
‘Cos I’m the bounce of a ball
Hop of a bird and its call
The verb, I am is to be
Container containing set free
Strong brown god striving to sea
For reading click here … touching the flow
All is not as it seems. Physics and Philosophy are pointing us to integration rather than differentiation. To wholeness rather than fragmentation.
The Nobel prize physicist David Bohm proposed that language is reshaped to focus on verbs, rather than nouns (subjects & objects). He calls this a “rheomode”, reflecting a reality of flow, of movement. He also picks up the insight of existential philosopher Martin Buber that we are the sum of our relationships – each to each.
And it’s relationship of waves not matter. In recent work Milo Wolff has shown that when thought of as intersecting standing waves, then reality can be described by simple equations. It is no longer necessary to invent a veritable zoo of exotic particles – and “dark” matter and energy. Wolff’s work is not new, but based on work by Maxwell, Schrodinger and Einstein.
Our watchwords, or better – watching words – and focus is shifting..
From nouns – to verbs..From quanta – to waves..From individuals – to connections..From fragmentation – to wholeness
.. or as Teilhard de Chardin would say – to the Omega Point – where humanity awakens to the reality of the whole, love.
Interview with Chris Nicholas
Quote
Fern Hill
Dylan Thomas
.. click here to hear reading fern hill
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
The poem starts as a straightforward evocation of his childhood visits to his Aunt Annie’s farm:
In the middle section, the idyllic scene is expanded upon, reinforced by the lilting rhythm of the poem, the dreamlike, pastoralmetaphors and allusion to Eden.
By the end, the poet’s older voice has taken over, mourning his lost youth with echoes of the opening:
The poem uses internal half rhyme and full rhyme as well as end rhyme. Thomas was very conscious of the effect of spoken or intoned verse and explored the potentialities of sound and rhythm, in a manner reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He always denied having conscious knowledge of Welsh, but “his lines chime with internal consonantal correspondence..”