Reactions, please (errr... to the x number of people who actually read this stuff; where x < 3):
Obama's chief of staff.

Zionist corrupt fatcat
OR
Inspired choice.

Myth, Lies and creation.

"But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.
No, said Tolkien, they are not.
You call a tree, he said, and you tink more of the word. But it was not a 'tree' until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it just a ball of matter moving on mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.
We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to that state of perfection that he knew... Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil."


--
A conversation between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, recounted in
Humphrey Carpenter,
J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

Will not apologise for the pain.

Everything around here makes me sad.

Everything around here's part of the dreams that we had. That will never be the way we wanted them to be... We dreamed of the future...
All the beautiful dreams..
I can see... this is only a dream.
Come on and wake up with me. Hey come on, and wake up with me. Hey come on and wake up with me.
Everything around is so beautiful.
Everything is a part of the dreams we will paint. That will never look the way we thought that they would look when we began to step into the future... It don't look too good right now, but I know, you're a wonderful painter, you're a master with your colours, as mine get fainter... there will always be an afterglow of a beautiful dream that will never be the way that we dreamed it to be, but hey, c'mon and wake up with me, hey come on and wake up with me, hey come on and wake up with me... for more beautiful dreams.

Jolie Holland. The Future.

Ich bin ein Berliner

A wonderful speech! In better words than I could ever muster, here IS the pattern that connects. The only important one - Ich bin ein Berliner!

retrospectively, i can write an ad...

From the other side of singledom:

Wanted:
One man.
Essentials:
Strong, beautiful hands. Cheekbones. The kissing kind. Loves parks, sunsets, cats and books. Must have insatiable curiosity and lust for life.
Must be dizzyingly, madly, hopelessly beautiful to me even in the middle of a fight. (This will be tested many, many times. Final contract subject to success in these tests.)
Must play the mandolin. Must invent a language or show marked potential for such invention.

Quiet, polite, gentle, sexy as can be.

Only men with above-mentioned qualities need apply.

Back Home.

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you,
not knowing
how blind that I was

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere
They're in each other all along.

-- Rumi

Citius, Altius, Fortius

Open Letter / Self-Righteous, Heartfelt Gibberish

To Respected God-Knows-Who;
Most of whom do not know anything about the creature I am crafting myself into.
Dear Madams, Sirs, Fuckwits and Friends, Greetings.

To you who do not stop to think,
Or stop to wonder, once you do,
At all the beauty, joy and truth that could be, but isn’t:
I pity you.

For those of you who would rather rail about poverty and ‘ignorance’, drought and flood
But do not feel it in your blood
To those who speak of how senseless the world has become
But would, if offered the chance to change it, turn and run.
Or simply look away and lie:
"I can’t do anything about it"
Stay at home, please,
Curl up and die.

When my time comes,
And I’m sure it will,
I do not want to lie there and think
That your lack of curiosity, imagination, pain and hope
Stopped me from taking a long, deep drink
Out of every pool of broken dreams
That I can could press to my lips
And heal with a kiss.

When my time comes, I want to be disappointed.
For it will mean that I have hoped till the last.
Exhausted,
For it will mean that I have bled.
Content.
For it will mean that I have mingled with every kind of wind and rain, every storm, every rainbow.

_________________________________
I don’t want to hear anymore that I take the world too seriously. I don’t want to hear anymore that I have ceased to find joy in tiny places, in old and familiar things. It is precisely the opposite. My joys are starting to come from a different place. My sadnesses from a different place. And you can stand in front of my view for as long as you want, but until you see it from my eyes, you will never see why when I listen to some of the things you say, and twist with pain inside.

Later

The true picture emerges. In between all the wonderful recollecting of Scotland, my body was apparently beseiged by a force of spiky, green and inherently evil viruses. How they breached my immaculate immune system, I cannot immediately say. Perhaps it was the fact that I was walking around London the day before yesterday wearing a cotton dress and my winter coat was unbuttoned? I dunno!
Anyway, I felt mildly, even pleasantly lazy this morning and decided to stay at home tucked up in bed.
Several hours later, I look up from my dream of Edinburgh, to find my nose has been blocked by the bastards, and they are slowly driving cold steel swords through the muscles of my legs, back, arms and shoulders. They have strapped up my head so that it feels like it will soon implode, and they've put something in my eyes that makes everything look very swimmy if I change my focus.
This is the second time in the past two months that I have encountered this marauding, pillaging, stinking, evil, godless army, and both times I have felt utterly god forsaken and cast aside by the saints Comfort, Peace, Calm and Productivity.
I would rouse myself, under better conditions, and say ohfuckit, let's fight them off! Pour ginger tea on top of them! Stab them with Vitamin C! Boil them in hot salt gargles. And then rest, knowing that victory is close at hand.
Currently though, all I am doing is lying in bed and groaning. I wish I was doing exactly the same, but under a vastly different set of circumstances.
Bah. Humbug.
If anyone out there has survived a similar set of circumstances, kindly let me know how you did in the bastards.

Edinburgh

My memory of Edinburgh has suddenly been revived. Here is a list of the ones that have burned themselves into me.
Climbing onto the top of Calton Hill and sitting on a stone bench. The sunshine, filtered through the crystal air, that unbelievable light, that unbelievable cold wind. The brown and grey hills looking wildly and darkly at the horizon, where the sea shone aquamarine at the Firth of Forth. Faraway, faraway. Everywhere along the hillside, stone buildings crumbling, crumbling, and winding stairs, grey, stone, winding, winding, snakelike, carrying you from the city to the sky.

Princes Street in the morning sunshine. The memorial of Sir Walter Scott, with his statuesque face looking down at passersby.

Stone turrets everywhere, guilded with golden sun, blackened in places by Time, and topped with high, proud flags, flying in the wind. The whole thing ringed with those proud browngrey hills.

Winding stone streets. Stairways snaking through covered dark alleyways. The perfect place to steal a dark kiss with an electric stranger, covered within the dark corners of this darkly luminescent city. Stone everywhere, moss dripping emerald in thick, damp veins through it. The wind singing along the narrow streets and up the narrow stairs, and high above it all, the seablue sky peppered with gulls.

Down the steps from Princes Street next to Princes Street Mall, when you turn to the left, there's a tiny sandwich place tucked into the stone. It's warm and filled with orange light, like the insides of a witches cave when the cauldron is good. Good witches. They made us a sandwich - a huge love affair of crusty bread coddled with warm butter and bacon. Gorgeous.

Bagpipes. If the light is pure because it filtered through that air, music is even purer. High notes of bagpipe song. I stopped on the bridge just outside the Scottish National Gallery and watched and watched the horizon, the bridges, the Firth, the piper, the light. And listened and listened and thought, in that moment, I found Middle Earth. Transported, transfixed, I could have stood there forever.
Later, Mark and I stood amongst a crowd who'd gathered around a piper accompanied by two men playing African drums. Scottish songs, but set to bagpipes and African drums! It worked! The sunlight made the whole world golden. I looked up at Mark and he looked like a prince. I danced. In the street. And I wasn't the only one.

The green lawns full of benches just behind Sir Walter's statue. Where I sat alone and smoked a cigarette and ate a hotdog and shut my eyes, bathing in the thrill of being in this place.

I could go on and on. I could go back again and again.

Is this the right decision?

I will not be watching the Olympics.
Forget the whys and why-nots. I might still change my mind.

For now, the one thing that will not change is the sadness I feel. My memories of the Olympics are painted in colours of warmth and love; when I was a child, and we didn't have a TV, my parents would rent a set just in time for the Games. I would sit in between them late into the light in a warm, golden room, and we would marvel at records being broken, hopes being broken, hopes being surpassed. We would ride on the ecstasy of it all, the drama of it. That was what the Olympics were to me then - just human drama, the best kind of display of emotion, power and desire.

Then, a few years later, we went for my first holiday in Europe. We made a trip to Olympia to the site of the original stadium. All the youngish people in the group were persuaded to take part in a friendly, symbolic race. The winner got a wreath of olive leaves, woven then and there by the tour guide. I came third. I ran as fast as I've ever run. I ran in Olympia!

None of that drama, emotion, or joy, will eclipse the horror I feel when I remember that the torch has passed through lands covered in blood. The runners have gone through landscapes of misery, fear, death, torture, deceit, where what I thought was the greatest human drama has given way to the greatest of human suffering. I will not name the lands here. Each country has had it's share and some of them are still in the middle of it while this torch passes through them.
The whole world becomes united by the flame, but the whole world is falling apart and we know it.
I will have to find that joy somewhere else, it is not here anymore.
Sad.
One more day, one more step towards the darkness.

Eureka!

I have it! I have it!
No, not the dratted social capital questionnaire that I have been trying for weeks now to get around to writing. No, it is not the goal that I have trapped underneath triumphant fingers, flying over my keyboard.
It is the reason why I may be incapable of getting an intuitive grasp of social capital research.
The reason is this:
I am not a socialised person. Not one for mutually benefical collective action. Given the choice, I will spend hours alone, with my head pressed to a problem, trying to figure it out. If someone needs help, I will provide it. I would rather die than ask for real help when I really need it ('Please can I vent over email today' does not count.)
My general stock of trust, solidarity, cooperative behaviour and social networks is suspended listlessly just below the 'average' watermark.
To sum up:
I might never do the kind of incisive PhD that requires the subject matter to have gotten under my skin and into my cells.

So then?
So what?

One Step Closer - U2

I'm 'round the corner from anything that's real
I'm across the road from hope
I'm under a bridge in a rip tide
That's taken everything I call my own

(whisper, whisper, in a way only Bono can know)
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
Knowing, knowing

I'm on an island at a busy intersection
I can't go forward, I can't turn back
Can't see the future
It's getting away from me
I just watch the tail lights glowing

One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
Knowing, knowing

I'm hanging out to dry
With my old clothes
Finger still red with the prick of an old rose
Well the heart that hurts
Is a heart that beats
Can you hear the drummer slowing?

One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
To knowing, to knowing, to knowing

Schumacher College London Seminar

These are the notes I took at the a Seminar on Sustainability organised by Schumacher College, Devon, in London.
Personal impressions to follow in subsequent post. For now, here's the notes.

On the meaning of the term 'sustainable development':

* Yes, it has been hijacked by thousands of different, sometimes even contradictory uses. No, we do not need to abandon it altogether. To do so would be to be held hostage to these contradictory meanings which have gradually become hostage to it.

* We view 'sustainability' as living without hindering Earth's ongoing evolutionary processes. This means reducing our tread on the land to the barest minimum. Generally, living within our means. Gaining the same amount of - or more - fullfillment from each other, our communities, our surroundings, as we currently seem to gain from objects, cash transactions and material flows. This does not mean that we completely de-materialize our lifestyles. This would be the opposite extreme and not desirable or effective in the long term. It means that we begin to develop our crippled, latent sense of place, love of place, a recognition of the Earth's sentience and soulfullness. It means that we should switch from our current trajectory of economic growth - one based on scarcity, exponentially increasing demand, and individualism, to one based on cooperation, a sense of community, creativity, and abundance.

* The most urgent task in this endeavor is recovering lives of meaning. This is largely the task of a vastly reformed education system.

* How do you reconcile the personal with the political?

There is no distinction!

The way we come to this conclusion is by observing the process our students at Schumacher College go through.

First, they uncover their personal sense of connection with the Earth. Their personal sense of it, their embeddeness within it. In a tangible, physical way. Then, inevitably, they examine how their current lives 'fit' within this alternative perspective. This does not imply an automatic 'shift' to that perspective - but inevitably, the feeling of connection, embeddeness, and love of place tends to create a strong bond to this 'other way of seeing' oneself - as part of something greater, vaster, intelligent and loving. The process of examining how one lives one's life is often painful, long drawn out and uncomfortable. Everyday actions that one normally takes for granted begin to appear misguided. If the person then takes the decision to create alternatives to these unsustainable actions - to change their behaviour, to not blindly be part of something because 'everybody else does it too', this is the beginning of political action. His sense of right and wrong begins to become conscious. His actions begin to be motivated by a sense of love, rather than unexamined habit. And once on this path, the individual becomes an unstoppable force.

On development - Vandana Shiva and Gustavo Esteva:

* Three false assumptions regarding 'development' dominate current thinking:

1. Financial transactions indicate economic development. Low financial transactions - or an absence of financial transactions - denotes an undeveloped or underdeveloped society.

2. The 'developing countries' are intrinsically backward. They therefore need external help - and a 'push from the outside' if they are to overcome their present state.

3. The powerful have a right to design the lives of the weak.

* Living within local means is an effective antidote to globalisation. While not everything can be sourced locally, it is enough to stipulate that whatever can be sourced locally is given preference to that which comes from far away. Localization is also an antidote to localism. Today, we observe that the more globalized your economy, the more parochial your consciousness becomes. We want to localize the flows of environmental goods and services - and globalize consciousness and solidarity.

On agriculture and GM crops - Vandana Shiva and Gustavo Esteva:

* Remember that GM does not create traits. It simply relocates them.

* Flood, drought and salt resistant varieties already exist - their use has been pushed to the margins, their availability has been commercialized. To the detriment of both societies which were once empowered holders of local knowledge, adept at selective breeding and active monitering, as well as the environment. Typically, when one of the two loses out, so does the other. What is socially unjust is inevitably environmentally unjust, somewhere or the other.

* Seeds need to be brought back into the commons.

On environmental education - David Orr and Karen Blincoe:

What does environmental education need to impart?

- Above all, a love for the planet. This is a basic starting point, from which all other education must flow.

- Second, we need to give students the practical skills to deal with the upcomming period of transition.

- Third, we need to devise a list of what analytical skills they might need.

Above all, though, they will need a sense of hope. Optimism is essentially a prediction. There is no reason to look at the current data and be optimistic. There is, however, every reason to be hopeful. But hope in this case is a verb with it's sleeves rolled up. In the end, it is hopeful people who will save the world. It is not optimists, and it is certainly not pessimists who will do this.

We fail our students by not showing them their individual potential as human beings. If education can show people their own uniqueness and then highlight where they fit into the larger scheme of things, it can produce purposeful, directed and positive human beings. Show them that they are already complete! Lacking in nothing! Full of creative, unique potential. And then teach them how to recognize, develop, and love themselves for it. Teach them how to go out and be forces in the world. Passive education - listening, note-taking, reading and writing exams deadens their sense of active potential, delays it, numbs it.

What advice do you have for students within the current system?

- Use the system. Don't let the system use you. Don't become a product.

- Find out what you need to know - and then go after it and learn it.

- Don't become a technician, learning processes. Learn something deeper!

- Have fun! Do other things. Be brave. Start something of your own.

For every act of specilization, we need an act of synthesis. Rigour in lateral, connective, 'pattern' thinking is a key skill to develop.

_______________________________________
For A.

I saw some beautiful images today...

Earth at work, Earth at play,
and thought at the end of it all
(just before: God I'd better get back to work!)
that we are all dying slowly, We are all dying fast.
What does anything matter after all?

Friends. When I had none, I was always complaining, always lonely. Or so I thought. Now I have some; still complaining, still lonely. Could it be true, what I read ages ago? At the heart of all loneliness is a deep and unfulfilled desire for union with one's own lost self.'
Could that be why we pick friends, lovers, lives, books that seem to be other versions of ourself?
And is that why I feel alone? - Because mine are all different, different, different?

my articles are in front of me because somewhere, a tree has died.
a tree lives somewhere because i have not yet pressed print.

either as a tree or as a page, the thing screams 'Life!!'
but as a tree, it screams it so much louder.
and yet, we know only our own language, and so we must cut down the tree and translate it's message into grossly simplied code that in the end, points us in exactly the same direction: towards the forest.

Insight Vs. Compromise

You decide.

The thought that is to be judged is as follows:

Why have I tied myself to the idea that there is only one path to one destiny that I have to find if I am to find happiness?

What a limiting, scary, unimaginative, faithless idea!
Ridiculous.
I need to change it, pronto.

25 years old, and this is the only mathematics I know how to prove (to a highly exclusive audience of one):

The perfect sum -

1 + 1 = ∞

Once in a while - Madeleine Peyroux

From bad luck
I'm walking away
I'm not getting stuck
I'm not gonna stay
To good things
I'm moving ahead
I'm tired of dying
I'm living instead

Once in a while I'll wake up
Wondering why we gave up
But once in a while
Comes and it fades away

The sun's up and lighting the sky
I never could see it
It just passed me by
Good things keep moving along
I'm not looking backward
For something that's gone

Once in a while I'll wake up
Wondering why we gave up
But once and a while
Comes and fades away

I don't know what love is
I'm selfish and lazy
And when I get scared
I can act like I'm crazy

When I think of your kisses
I'm still gonna smile
I'm still gonna miss you
Once in a while
Once in a while

Once in a while I'll wake up
Wondering why we gave up
But once in a while
Comes and it fades away

Good things keep moving ahead
I'm tired of dying
I'm living instead.

---

Amen.

The Pattern That Connects

It was a terrible idea, wasn't it, to try and explain the whole universe in a blog?
I can't even keep my world well ordered, and I want to tie together all of creation?

Ambitious, presumptious, arrogant little sparkplug.

Valentines Day

He buys me presents, and writes me a card.
I have never received either on Valentines day.

I get him a bottle of Disaronno.

We kiss.

Firsts, firsts.

---

And on another, completely different note, cliche as it might sound: I am now entirely and totally in love with Sailing to Philadelphia. It tugs at something inside me and I can't help but turn and look.

Ghosts

and my attempt to lay them to rest...

----
Here's what I did:
I wished for it.
I started it,
I ended it,
I WORKED at it,
I wrote: the emails, the texts, the loveletters.

But it was not meant to be.
The death sentence was on my birth certificate.

And no one can fight either.

And does everything always have to be such a struggle? Always?
I got tired. Deathly tired. So I quit.
Did he take over then, stay when I told him to go?
No.
And so -
Nearly three years since that tortured phonecall longdistance, and many many long nights later, it's over.

Finished.
If I have made the right decision, God, keep we walking forwards.
If it's the wrong one, God, forgive me, and keep me walking forwards.
----

Peace.

Come on. Peace.
----

A shameful dirty secret:
I have stolen one item of clothing from the launderette.
(No, I am not saying what it was)

In my defense;
It was lying on the floor, unclaimed.
Perhaps it was a relic from a break up or a death or a failure or a forgetfulness or perhaps it was just unloved.
Perhaps she didn't notice it was missing until well after she went to her room and unpacked her laundry bag (which, for students, can be anything from a couple of hours to a couple of months after doing the actual laundry).
Either way, I decided that she did not care to have it back.

Also in my defense -
It was a one off, on impulse.

I have been stolen from thrice, and I went to reclaim my dropped items within 30 minutes each time, but they were gone.

You give a little, you take a little.
Sue me.

Two ideas I used to love as a child, but haven't about that much until now;
------

We are dreaming, and soon we will wake up. And the most real-seeming things will vanish and dissolve.

---

God exists. Or many Gods.
And we live in one tiny insignificant corner of some tiny insignificant part of their world. A breeze blows through their window, and our universe implodes. We have no time to think but if we could, we would be shocked at the scale of the catastrophe.
At other times, maybe a dust particle in their room shifts positition and a falling comet changes course and a tiny green planet breathes a sigh of relief, shocked at the scale of the blessing they've been granted.
The Gods, in the meanwhile, continue living their own lives. They don't know about us, and if they did they would be unimpressed. They do things on a bigger scale up there.
---

Both not so original, I know. But both would make me smile.

I believe!
I believe!
I B.E..L.I.E.V.E. and I talk to him or It or Her or them all. the. time.
When I see stars. When I see mist. When I see rain. When I see my father. When I am kissing. When I want to be kissing, and can't. When I'm lonely. When I read. When I am silent. When I am dancing. When I see a lover. When I want a lover.

All. The. Time.

I believe!
So what?

Nonsense, don't bother

If at the end of my life, I am in a room exactly like this, will it be so bad?
(This is a superficial thought, I am not existentially alarmed about being alone, I know there are bigger problems in the world than my patheticness, don't worry.)

This what my moment looks like:
A warm pink light in my room. A fat grey cat. Posters on the wall. I'm alright, I'm alright, I've been lonely before. There are stars liting up the sky outside. I have to go out for a smoke, and who's going to stop me?! I'm alright, I'm alright, I've been lonely before...
Will it be so bad, if it's exactly like this?
No, not so bad at all.
Not so bad at all.
I'm alright, I'm alright, I've been lonely before.

--
Italicised = I'm alright by Madeline Peyroux. Have a listen, she's wonderful.

Who is the great love of my life?
Let's face it, darling.
It's Just Me.

--

Of all the loves past and future, not one has gone as deep as my own desire to fly. And only I can do that.
Friends and lovers and great loves and small; None of them can do more than present cliffs high enough to leap from. The greater the love, the higher the ledge from which to leap.
Who, though, will force me to fall and fly?
Only me.

There. is. no. greater. love. than my own pact with myself: Keep climbing, keep falling, keep on flying.
I minister that.
Who can heal me through the exquisite pain of crashing against rocks and realizing: I don't have to do this, I have wings.
Me. I do that.

Thank goodness.

Decisions, Decisions.

Is the act of having children an expression of radical hope?
And therefore, if I decide not to...
What am I saying about my views on life? On possibility?

- I am a hopeful, positive person.
- I don't think we're going to make it.
- At a fundamental level, I don't think we've figured out how best to be the best humans we can be.

This moment in time feels to me like the farewell party. Joyous, (for those who will make the last exit), filled with light and colour and sound and chaos... because we won't be here tomorrow to look each other in the eye... so we might as well go crazy. Fuck around with all manner of strangeness.

I'm not going to bring any children into this mess.