I am not a believer but I love a good sing-along carol service by candlelight with all the traditional carols and hymns, a local schoolboy doing his solo out of tune and readings from the King James version of the Bible. This year we once again gathered in our tiny medieval village church and as we launched into ‘See Amid the Winter’s Snow’ the vicar Fiona suddenly pointed to the windows where the first white flakes of snow were beginning to fall outside….and then magically stopped as the service ended. I was reminded of that Thomas Hardy poem about the old legend that at 12 midnight on Christmas Eve all the oxen fall to their knees.
“So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel
“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so”
That yearning for simple faith in the midst of a vulgar festival of consumption is surely common enough, even if by Boxing Day reality has set in.
Westminster seems a million miles away and you might think that for two weeks we don’t have to think of amendments, debates, statements or order papers. But we know what’s coming up immediately after recess and I’ve already started to think about the final Report Stages of the Welfare Reform Bill and the Health and Social Care Bills. Time now to review the Committee debates and consider what areas to press on, what to abandon and decide what is likely to be in the long term best interests of us all. This last few months has been harder for me than previous years in the Lords; I’ve espoused unpopular causes because I believed in them as a better thing to do than the alternative. Next year I may need a sabbatical to recharge my depleted batteries.
And a Happy New Year to you too!
Baroness Murphy,
I have been reading you for a good number of years now. I venture to suggest something about yourself. There are varied kinds of anthropology in the broadest sense much as theology varies. I would venture to say that whatever your ideological attachments, deductive conclusions and presumptions may be there is at least a part of you that is not only Christian in some sense but has a Christian faith. I do not argue it is enough and would surely try to convert you if we had long enough together in the right conditions but neither is it nothing. The affections and imagination are very important parts of who we are. Happy Fifth Day of Christmas — Boxing Day be damned…
Nicely sketched –
“a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” ?
Merci
D’accord –
“Mindfulness – a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world” by Mark Williams & Danny Penman (Piatkus GB 2011 6th reprint; Amaz. about £12)) comes highly recommended;
and its included CD’s eight (8) meditations are so trouble-free, and transcending of their academic “School’s” mere claim to being a cognitive advance,
that I am finding it a very pleasant, as well a self-work-amazingly-effective (& effectivising) half-hour well spent (and now and then well slept !)
and already-down-chunked into an equally effectivising mere “1-minute” “3-minute” “5 to 10 minutes ‘Raisin’ meditation” (you actually get to be slowly sucking a raisin);
and a special white box on “How to double your life-expectancy”.
Don’t be ‘fooled’ by the term “meditation”;
these guidelines are much better than that;
Professor Mark Williams combines for you “aware-rest” with “not trying to change anything – just becoming aware of whatever is, in yourself, moment to moment”;
and as Kabat Zinn says in the Foreword,
“to be effective, mindfulness requires an embodied engagement on (your) part” .
“May you be at ease” …
———-
May I wish you all the seasons presence;
and if I may,
“may I and all my ‘we’ be well”
I just condemned the Baroness in a private post yo a Gestalt therapist, for probably not being interested in Gestalt therapy…….dot dot!
Thomas Hardy has a lot to answer for. I was reading an article about Egden Heath in the middle of which I live, (with a little bit of poetic licence, of which the poet and the article writer,would surely approve)and it was written by an ethnic Hawaian about international politics!
My! How the word travels! I prefer the Dorset dialect poet, Thomas Barnes, myself, whose diction I am as a linguist well able to imitate (I am sure I have related here before)but, in recent years, the tongue twisting earbending mutations of Welsh, sold by one Bedd Gelert, have caught me in their magic trance!
My song at the moment is limited to my own company and the recorded tunes of Monks and Katherine Jenkins, separately, enough of a seasonal feast for any man or… oxen.
Seasonal greetings to all,To MJSD especially, and perhaps meet up in the new year, one, no two, other old friends in particular, who write here;
Not to exclude the ‘Ull prof for his articulate banter either.
Thomas Hardy …….international politics!
Tess and her bonds with nature being a prime example of Jus solis/Jus sanguinis which Frank and Senex were discussing on another thread.
A good new year resolution thought for me.
‘Nothing is worth more than this day’
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Happy New Year!
Thanks for those kind words. Milesjsd, I think I’ll try that raisin meditation.
The tower of that church is most unusual, Anglo-Saxon surely, not Norman.
The nave is more modern perhaps.
Gareth Howell, Round Towered Churches are a feature of East Anglia and fall into three groups, pre-Norman, Norman and post Norman. You are right that this one has Saxon elements. The church is thought to date from Saxon times: it has fragments of Saxon limestone work at the NW angle of the nave whilst the lower courses of the tower, of local flint, are also Saxon. It is thought that the use of flint dictated the tower’s shape. Opinions vary as to whether the main part of the tower is Norman or 14th century, with a later top. Putlog holes, which supported scaffolding, are visible. Marks on the tower indicate that the nave was once thatched. There is a ground floor lancet window in its west wall and four small slit windows at belfry level, all thought to be 14th century. The nave and the chancel, both thought to be 13th century were altered probably in medieval times. Fortunately the Victorians did not decide to do too much ‘improvement’ as they did at many other local round towered churches.
There is a Round Tower Church Society in East Anglia which arranges visits to all these wonderful places. A good website is http://www.roundtowers.org.uk/history.html and from there you can reach lots of web sites which show more examples.
Interesting! You don’t see them at all in the West country. All rectangular round here.
I am digging my garden out by hand “organically” as my farmer neighbour says with a large guffaw, and I want to use everything I can which is already in the garden; A thermo-isophon soil heating system foir a greenhouse using an existing, but disused, septic tank chamber; an uncovered well, and an 18thC heap lime kiln.
Yet more intrinsic still is the quantity of flints that I could “knap” in order to create rectilinear concrete/flint brik sections as created by Charles Church, the NEW knapped flint specialist house builder.
They have certainly got a quarry and a mechanical system of knapping bu the people who built those churches did so with the materials at the very closest hand.
Right there in front of them; knap ’em and mortar them, and build it.
Mortaring is a Roman skill and near every church, built in such a way, would the chalk supply be, to mix for mortar, a long since disappeared chalk pit.
Local materials of the nth degree!
A little bit like the hermits who built themselves IN to a building, never to emerge
except for their hands, out of hand holes, to beg for food and water; an act apparently of humility.
Funny people these Christians!
GH, we are big into chalk in East Anglia too…see http://www.geo-east.org.uk/special_projects/eco_culture.htm
and I quite like some of the Gestalt therapy theory….
‘Wholism’ appears to be a common desire here;
but “centricity” may become the insidious-disrupter betwixt each;
even within Gestalt, according to Wikipedia Gestalt theory, and psychology, and possibly within G.therapy too (but the latter is seen as somewhat removed from the two former)
there is an obvious ‘divide’ between the Objective & Micro-Psychological on the one hand and the Subjective & Molecular-Psychological on the other.
(Macro-Psychological effects would probably fall under the ‘Social-Psychology’ faculty, which is an oxymoronical-blur, and leads me to question a real-life serious Booby-Trap, generally wielded by Prosecutors and the Police in Britain, against witnesses and courtroom evidence under their (confused, confusing and competitively-professionally-hidden) definition of the term “perception”.
I mean, if the Judiciary entrenches “perception” as indicating “figment-of-imagination”, “error-in-interpretation”
where do we stand with our Life-Essential perceptions and “percepts” as defined not only by Gestalt theorists and therapists but by all other clear-and-clean mind-functioning people ?
Anyone who is utilising the simple self-awarenessing ‘mindfulness “meditations”‘ touched on above will surely have already encountered the endless and ever-subtly-different ‘self-sensations’ or ‘inner-perceptions’, occasionally accompanied by ‘objective-imagery’ i.e. from or of the external-world as if from a fleeting ‘dream’ coming from some other lifeplace, workplace, or socialplace. Even today many of us would never picture or imagine the tens-of-thousands and Armadas of steel-ships, wanted on The Sea, to be continuously ploughing deep through thousands of miles of rough Ocean waters, carrying Coal, Spices, Cheap-Tin-Trays, 24/7/52/10years/Forever, on a daily basis and whilst we sleep.
With the Global-Owners-and-Economists faulty-formula requiring Two(2) Earthsworth of Resources on the left-hand-side of their Equation to support us 7-billion-Humans on the right-hand-side, one has to start researching how selected technological advances could be married to such Local-Micro-Economic-Resources situations as Baroness Murphy’s building-beautifully-in-the-round, and Gareth Howell’s gardening-sustainworthily.
I wonder if Maude Elwes’s chosen quotation “Nothing is worth more than this day” might survive gestalt analysis as a multistable-perception, and move on to pair with “Live each day as if it were your last”, or become flexible as “One hour at a time, sweet Jesus, That’s all I’m asking from You”;
or take an honourable place within the Edward de Bono Thinking-Teaching Percept of “the messy business of possibility (hypothesis etcetera)” (ISBN9780091910488 page 7) that is part of the heart of human-creativity thinking.
————-
Maybe this is all loose fluff;
yet it seems to me be ‘silently praying’
as if along with Thomas A’Beckett as the monarch’s armoured knights’swords plunged towards him during his last holy service in Canterbury Cathedral.
(“) O God, help us to live this New Year in the right way,
and this time for the right Reason (“).
==============================
The whole point of Gestalt and other musically based therapies is to avoid precisely the kind of mindless jabber that MJSD comes out with so often.
I was looking through the Body,mind spirit websites the other day, and came across one or two delightful university trained (Leeds) music therapists, one of whom describes herself as an “anarchist woman nuisance”
but loves to sing and Heal with her singing as well. She calls her music her “medicine”.
She avoids saying that she is a music therapist as such, couching her Spiel in far more day to day language, which can only be good.
I’m sure she won’t mind my putting her website here (except for the anarchy, which mentors plentiful song no doubt!)
http://www.therosewindow.org/
Gareth Howell, like many ‘Clash’-based would-be thinkers*, again makes the fundamental mistake of attacking-the-person instead of comprehending and tackling the problem and points within and relevantly around it.
(* see Dr Edward de Bono’s “Thinking Course” (BBC 6th imp.2010) pages 51, 77. A very useful little book for clearing away conflations, confusions, and mis/dis-informations of mind).
I trust that when Mr Howell attempted to rocket himself immediately to a winning upper position by dismissing and destroying Miles JSD’s submissions as (“)mindless jabber that MJSD ‘comes out with’ ‘so often'(“)
and by using both ad verecundiam fallacy and a factual-falsehood in that attempt, his intention was not to include the expertise-authors I put forward, currently such as
de Bono, Tindale, Gordon, and Williams, as being ‘mindless jabberers’ ?
—————
Gareth, Gestalt is NOT a “music based therapy”
if you had grasped what I submitted you would have seen that neither is “gestalt therapy” (Perls, et al) a fully accepted member of the Gestalt-Thinking Core.
(Try en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt for an all round and in depth run of information ).
Neither is either Gestalt or ‘gestalt therapy’ a means of “avoiding (mindless jabber)”, since both Gestalt phi;osophy, psychology and ‘therapy’ each contain some of the very same Holistic aspirations, and individually-creative-intelligence support, as the other expertise sources I am putting forward.
———
As for your nonetheless possibly-diligent research, on the internet’s body-mind-spirit websites, and your finding of a UK Leeds university-trained music-therapist who claims to ‘Heal’, let me offer two little elements of possible clarification value
(1) When cornered in his African Mission by a rich woman who had trekked across the world to personally-obtain the ‘secret of healing’ that some respected magazine had reported Dr Schweitzer had unique possession of, Albert simply agreed to accept the Lady’s generous donation and give her this ‘secret’:
“No -one, and no doctor, ever healed anybody”.
Seeing her deep disappointment and confusion, he leaned forward and gently said
“All any-one can ever do, is to help persons to heal their own selves”.
So we could conclude that any-one claiming to be a ‘Healer’ is a fraud, charlatan, or ‘quack’ –
and incidentally that they are probably also ‘guilty’ of iatrogenic injury to the first-person claimed to be being-healed by the second-person ‘healer’, even if ‘healing’ actually happens, because a falsehood has been ‘sown’ in that first-person’s body-mind-spirit by that second-person.
(2) In terms of evolutionary, civilisational- and individual human development time-frames,
Body-Movement is both the primary need and the therapeutic base,
after which have come Music, and other faculties the most recent ‘king-of-the-castle’ amongst which still appears to be ‘the Talking Psychotherapies”
(my NB would be “Without having first a sound and healthy Somatic base, don’t expect much real help from the Psycho-base).
———
‘Music-wise’ nonetheless I would agree with Gareth should he find Dr Albert Schweitzer’s rendering of JS Bach’s organ works to catalyse one’s ‘self-healing-experience’; especially the deeply refined “O Mensch, Bewein’ Dein Sinde Gross”.
——————————
And this would then all fit comfortably under the spirit, and good-communication-cum-honest-argumentation principle of “Charity towards good-intention” that I believe Baroness Murphy was intending to convey as an intrinsic part of this her “Happy New Year” message.