Grandparents rather out of place in this modern setting

The neonatal unit at Addenbrookes hospital is rather like a space station, the incubators look just like teeny spacecraft parked in a row waiting for teeny spacemen to come and get in.  And the teeny babies who get to spend their first rather too early weeks there are all legs and arms which wave from time to time just to show they are in there doing their bit for growing.  Nothing on but a nappy and occasionally a hat to keep their heads warm and to make a slight bow to fashion, they make small but just noticeable movements.  

The nurses and doctors and the mums and dads all know what they are doing when they look after these teeny tiny babies in the spaceship incubators and somehow they seem to be dressed just right.  They all seem to be in pyjamas!  

Maybe this is why Grandpa in his country green rather tweedy outfit with country going crocs looks and feels a little out of place.  He, like me, wonders if you have to get the babies out of the holes on the side because it seems to be the only way out but then suddenly at the push of a button, the top of the spacecraft lifts up by itself and the teeny tiny space baby is lifted out all attached to the home station with tiny thin wires and an air pipe.  Really she is just like a spaceman making a first step on the moon, all surprised by the light and the new gravity of the situation.  

When we visit, the new mum says to Grandpa, "would you like to put your hands in and just hold the tiny baby in the comfort position?"  Mmmmmhhhh says he, a bit uncertain and pushes his hands through the holes in the side of spaceship.   Having been shown how to do it, he lays one huge hand gently on her head and cups the other one round her teeny bottom and long spidery legs.  He says "now look here baby ours, we are praying for you and you must get bigger and stronger and then we will bring you home."  We know that as she is the smallest person in the family, she will be able to find the best hiding places in the house and that her cousins will find it hard to find where she is because she will be able to get into the smallest places and they may not be able to follow her in.

Everyone, young and old are hanging on for dear life

teeny tiny  baby hangs on for dear life

You have heard the expression hanging on for dear life haven't you?  Well it takes on a really important meaning when you see it happening because most of the time I realise we are so self absorbed that we don't even notice that so many people are just hanging on right there, hanging on for the dearness of life.  When you spend a bit of time in a hospital, you see all the different players in the hospital drama, there are the nurses and the technicians, the doctors and the patients, the different kinds of doctors and the different kinds of patients.  Some patients are on their way out to have a jolly New Year, some are on their way out but to something not considered quite so jolly.  All of them are hanging on for dear life because life is dear.  If you are moved by this little picture of the teeny tiny baby holding on to its mothers finger, then you know how dear it is.  The baby hangs on to the mother for dear life, the mother holds on to the baby for dear life.  The dearness of life is unmissable in a hospital and you notice the things which make the difference.  You notice how transformative care is when it is beautiful, you notice because that care is total, there is nobody seeking recognition or glory from caring, they are just getting on with it because care is needed.  You notice too when care is not so good, when it is withheld because a carer is preoccupied with their own stuff.  You notice everything because you are so grateful for the care being given and you notice how bravely people are coping with the difficulties coming their way and you know why it is.  It is because they are hanging on for the dearness of life. 

a teeny tiny Christmas child, a new daughter, neice, grand daughter and cousin.

In our family, we have just had a teeny tiny baby, arrived 2 months early and 2 days before Christmas. So tiny, she looks like a miniature doll but perfect, every finger and toe there, small neat ears, every limb beautifully formed, so perfect that I am blown away.

Holding on to my mummy's finger or is it Dad's?

So, small granddaughter, what do I wish for you and your other girl cousins? Of course I wish you all the things that every girl wants to make her life easy; friends, beauty, enough food and I hate to say money because it is a stark and rather hard word but I hope you don't have to worry about your everyday needs. But most of all I hope that you will be kind.  I am sure you will be kind because you have arrived on a wave of kindness and goodwill from your parents, your grandparents, your uncles and aunts, the old (sorry Prof, young but old in wisdom) Prof, the nurses and monitor monitors and shortly all your cousins who will sweep you up into their play and pass on all their clothes to you.

Kindness is natural to everyone and just means that you realise that everyone and everything is of the same kind as you and needs to be treated as you would wish to be treated yourself or wish others you love to be treated.

And I wish you luck because it helps but you seem to have a measure of it because everyone is looking out for you now.  And I wish much of the same to your boy cousins but maybe with a few more challenges to bring out their fine fine qualities of courage and generosity.

Once in a while, meditation really delivers!

look out and see the same beauty

40 plus years of meditation, mostly twice a day or do I lie, perhaps it is easier nowadays when we are retired but twice a day for half an hour by intention undertaken for 40 plus years, that's what has taken place which means that in minutes I have meditated for about 40x2x365x30mins . My phone calculator says that is 1,876,000 minutes.  Actually, strike off quite a lot for shortened meditations when the family were younger, and quite a few minutes for just not quite making it to the 30 minutes.  Then, all of a sudden for no deserved reason, meditation takes on a new beauty and I can say for sure that it is undeserved because it is so surprising and unimaginably marvellous to find that the end of meditation is peace, the end of meditation is HUGE, not a tiny little speck of stillness but a complete and total eternity and there am I, not as just a small individual but as as the same consciousness as the huge universal space I am in.  What is granted in that vision is a certainty that there is consciousness and I am that and I am limitless.  Of course, that is a glimpse in a million meditations but it is enough to make sure I keep the practice going even if I don't arrive at that place again because I know it is there and I know that it is there for anyone, anyone who needs it enough to give it a try.  There is a result too, and this is it; when you come out of that reality, everything which is beautiful is beautiful because of it and your breath is quite taken away.  You also know that beauty is the reality and anything which isn't beautiful is just beauty covered and that every ugly thing, every ugly action, every disaster will be reabsorbed into that space and all will eventually be well for all.

Go on, believe it if you meditate because it is your very own reality and it is worth keeping going.

Do you know where you will go when you die Granny?

A smart 7 year old girl asked her Granny where she would go when she died.  Heaven said my friend, the Granny being questioned, thinking that would do the trick but it didn't.  How do you get there asked the child?  Well, said the Granny, I am not sure.  "Oh never mind" said the child, "I'll google it for you!"

Of course google maps are marvellous but when I google Heaven there isn't all that much to help.

Well first of all, what comes up in response to the question is Heaven in Camden Town.  Ah ha, I look closer and find that heaven is masquerading as a Dry Cleaner. In Newmarket, Heaven is a Pizza parlour!  In Villiers Street in London, it is a nightclub!   Put in heaven USA and there are numerous different mentions but none of them look as if they are expecting the souls of the departed!

Minecraft's vision of heaven but no map. 

So, here I am imagining myself as 8 year old girl with my whole self bent on discovering the way to heaven via Google.  I google how to get to heaven and up come lots more answers, everyone seems to have an answer, Christians, Muslims, and would you believe it, Minecraft.  Go to google, the all knowing and put in Heaven and Minecraft and then try the images.  Here is the image but there aren't any instructions for how to get there.  No one is really positive about how to get there, clearly they are all just guessing,  The Minecraft  heaven doesn't really look like a place for Grannies does it?

Christmas thoughts and prodigal pie

Christmas tree up with new Led lights

The tree is up and the good old decorations are on it.  Lots of old friends hanging up again but with one change!  Led light candles which you can turn on with a remote switch twinkle until I press the off button on my way to bed. No more wires taped down with sellotape to stop Grandpa tripping as he climbs up the stairs.  This is not the only change but it is perhaps one of the better ones.  The other changes are most apparent as we write our merry Christmas cards and going through the address book see how many mates are dropping off the perch.  It used to be change of addresses added in as they downsized once the children had left home but now the downsize is disappearance.  But in their place, their children who we knew as tiny babies, nappied newborns, tentative toddlers and tiresome teenagers have stepped into their/our places and now take responsibility for banks and airlines and properties and security, for the nation’s health and education;  they are the mums and dads of today and good on them say I.  That feels right and a proper evolution like led lights, it makes sense. 

We are still here!  We have a mixture of Christmas past and present and in the imminent arrival of a new baby in the family, we have the future.  We have the tree and the lights and we will keep in contact with the family who are abroad.   We will have the same Christmas holiday menus, the fridge is already overstuffed, we will break open the best of drinks and toast the Queen and have lunch when she has given her 90^th year Christmas message. Grandpa will fall asleep in front of the telly, some of us will struggle with a 750 piece puzzle and just in case the prodigal boy comes home there is a fish pie in the freezer and a new bottle of tomato ketchup.

The oldest Christmas angel made by Joan Evans 40 years ago

tempura sprouts! Suffolk's answer to haute cuisine

Only in deepest Suffolk would you get a tempura sprout and a battered tempura parsnip!  Grandpa and I arrived for a couple of days in Suffolk but the food we had packed got stuck at Addenbrookes so we took the torch and walked across the dark and misty churchyard to the recently refurbished village pub.  I wondered as we walked across it if any old friends buried here would be making a misty appearance but they didn't and anyway, those good souls buried here would only make a  benevolent and kindly mist.  I wondered what they would make of the renewed village pub which looks as good as the best of gastropubs all painted with Farrow and Ball and lovely wood burning stoves and exposed beams.  It being Monday, the landlord wasn't expecting any hungry gastronomes let alone any foodless friends.  He was only expecting the Parish Council to call for a beer after their meeting.   But not phased at all, he handed us the menu which is quite an ambitious foodie one.  I picked the tempura vegetables, Grandpa the soup and fish and chips.  The dear battered vegetables arrived looking as Japanese as can be with a proper little bowl of soy sauce.  However their shapes were a bit of a giveaway, three round slightly green ones on a stick particularly un Japanese.  You will be longing to know what they all were.  Well, first there were the three sprouts which had already been cooked and then tempuraed.  Then a ready cooked carrot and a parsnip,  and finally two little cloud shaped babes which were cooked cauliflower and broccoli in white sauce which had also been tempuraed.  I ate them all up basically because I like batter and soy sauce and the landlord was such a cheerful hopeful person.  I don't think that the Japanese will be wanting to copy this very English version of their delicate dish do you?

We watched the documentary of Prince Phillip and felt a swelling of national pride.  I expect he would have laughed at the modest country sprout being elevated to gastropub starter.  We slept like babies in the most comfortable bed we have ever owned and then take the dogs out over the sandy Suffolk soil to see what there is to be seen! and maybe chased!

You have to be fit to climb Mount Sinai

St catherine's monastery, an ark in the wilderness
Father Justin, librarian's talk

In the spring Grandpa and I are going to climb Mount Sinai!  This is not only a spiritually high spot but a physically challenging climb.  We may go half way by camel but I am not sure that camel riding is Grandpa's bag.  In order to get fit for this, I need to do more than potter around with the dogs and the hens, I need to lose about a quarter of my body weight and start a fitness regime.  But oh, hey ho, it's Christmas next so the weight will have to wait around.  That will give me 6 weeks of dieting which I hate but if we do it together, Grandpa has the staying power for dieting.  In fact he has remarkable discipline when it comes to anything he sets his mind to doing so I think he will be up Mount Sinai like a gazelle and I will trundle along behind him.

Christ Pantocrator, 4th Century icon, He looks so alive

We are going with Father Laurence Freeman and friends on an adventure and retreat to St Catherine's Monastery which is built on the site of the Burning Bush where Moses met God in fiery form.  The bush is still there!  Also still there are the icons which show over and over again the stories of God and man, God and Mary the mother of Christ, John the Baptist, the Apostles, the Saints and all manner of ancient and extraordinary stories imbued with the total devotion of the icon painters who really stood between the painting and the transcendent inner vision which had been granted to them.  

Do you want to come too?  If you do, just get in touch with Fay at Wind, Sand and Stars, there are still a few spaces.  And there is still time to lose those extra pounds beforehand.

Did the prodigal son have a mother and if so how did she cope

Messing about with the pigs

In the story of the prodigal son which is most likely an analogy for our own soul and its foolish wandering, the figures who feature in the story are all boys!  The Father and his two sons are there but there is no mention of the mother.  I am not so bold as to think that this is a mistake especially as it is an analogy as well as being in the Bible but I have been thinking about what role the mother might have played.  Do you think that she kept saying to the Father, "why don't you just call him and see if he's alright?" and the Father replying that it was best to let nature take its course and that he would come back in good time for Christmas...or sometime.   Do you think that she worried about him even more than the rest of the family?  That other brother was at home and clearly very dutiful and now had the house all to himself and his mother's attention.  She probably ironed his clothes and made his meals all the time her other son was drifting slowly downwards towards the pig farm.  Do you think she had perhaps always worried about him and even more so when he came and asked for his portion of cash because she knew he had a weakness for the more extreme?  Do you think that once he had gone and he never got in touch, that she woke up early and worried about him?  I do.

I think that she dreamt that he had run out of all he had gone with,  I think she dreamt that he was on his uppers and was reduced to being a waged slave on a pig farm.  I think she hoped he would come home even if he was a mess.  And then of course, he returned and the Father, who had always known that he would come, opened his arms and held a banquet.   I think she cooked it!  She thought about what his favourite meal would be...... fish pie and tomato ketchup and ice cream and while the Father was busy killing the fatted calf and placating the other son who was so miffed, she just put on her apron and started to smile again.   She knew he liked her cooking best.

Fantastic Beasts make this old Granny cry for joy

Have you seen the new film, Fantastic Beasts and Where to find them?   If not, go quickly because you will be enthralled and amused and you will gasp a bit here and there and maybe shed the occasional tear and you won't want to miss it.  It was lucky I had 3D glasses on because no-one could see this fairly respectable Granny crying in St Neots new Cineworld over digitally created beasts.  I thought about the cleverness of J K Rowling, the cleverness of the digital artists, the brilliance of the actors, but most of all I thought about the amazing creative power of people who just dig into their selves and produce extraordinary things.  I also thought that most of the brilliant things which are created by people, however marvellous they are, must be based on what we have in nature but have got so used to that we forget to gasp and smile and then feel for them.  It often takes a film or a book or something recreated by creative people to wake us up to what is really around us.  Once we get our eye on the wonder, then we move in a different world.  We move from the world of the dull senses, transcend its dullness and everything becomes bright.  That is why on Wednesday morning at St Martin-in-the-Fields, there won't be fantastical beasts exactly but what you will hear about will make the world which is bright and fresh and wonderful, a little nearer.  Come along and listen to Neville Hodgkinson, Lama Zangmo, Ian Mason and Father Laurence Freeman or tune in via the live stream from  www.justthisday.org.  It starts at 9.30 in the morning. 

Can you meditate once you are In the Pipeline

Click and Connect

Once you are in the Pipeline, there is no going back.  Most of the time we don't realise we are in any pipeline, we think we are doing just what we want when we want to but when there is any event lying in the future, it suddenly becomes clear that we are being propelled towards it and turning back isn't an option.  So, here I am 5 days to Just this Day's central event in London with very little idea of how it will go and who will come, who will want sandwiches, where the microphone goes, will the speakers get there and what if one of them is ill.  As well as this, Just this Day in now in the St Martin-in-the-Fields Parish Pipeline, the weekly newsletter so they are clearly expecting US.  Then there are the things which can't be seen like the weather and other things totally out of my control.   I really hope that YOU, whoever you are and wherever you are will click on the sparkly globe on the right and connect with us at 9.30 am BST.  You will be joining Father Laurence Freeman, the other speakers and me in a meditation which he will lead us gently into.  This is the really really big test of faith for an organiser!!! To let go of organising during meditation and just stop.  If I can manage to stop my busy thinking mind then, it may hep you to stop too.  Go on, try it, it may be more well worth while than we know to connect our quiet true selves.  

St Martin-in-the-Fields beautiful interior where you can be wherever you are.

 

Why this is the perfect prayer

All the children have grown and flown and their world is new.  Grandpa and I look on with a mixture of admiration and alarm.  So many belief systems have changed but we still feel that there is an unchanging source of truth and it can be tapped into.  We have come to the conclusion that the Lord's Prayer is about as perfect as it gets.  It gives the feeling of a benevolent presence in a universal Father when it says Our Father.  It gives a feel of a greater space than the one we live in when it talks about the Father in heaven.  We might hope for heaven to be right now and we ask for it to be right now here as it is in the perfect world.  We accept that everything we eat has a source in the request that God give us our daily bread.  The prayer  goes straight for fairness in the subject of forgiveness.  Forgiving OUR trespass, our falling away from our best selves is only to be found by forgiving people we think might have trespassed against us.  And then we ask to be delivered from evil.  That's an everyday ask, we drive on roads, we travel around the world, we swim in the sea, we fly in the air and all those places have an evil about them.  No one can say that there isn't a possibility of things going wrong in every place.  Finally we say its over to you when we say for THINE is the kingdom, the power and the glory.  So over to the real Director of operations.
This is a prayer that we could all say and teach and repeat.

the Lord's Prayer

owning nothing not even your clothes could make you happy?

A face shining like this is clear evidence that the person inside it is happy!

Most of each day is spent looking after possessions isn't it?  We got that body out of bed, wash it, feed it and then set about thinking about what job it will do today and what it might need not only today but in the days ahead.  It requires a car to get it to the shops of course and a house to put the acquisitions in and a fridge to fill with food before the mouth gets to work on it!  Your life (my life too) is mostly predicated on the idea that my body is the reality and the spirit is an optional extra.  Not so my heroine of today whose example inspires confidence that the spiritual life is worth the effort

I want to introduce you to Lama Zangmo whose focus is on that spiritual life,  She said recently that "when you go deeply on a spiritual path, your values change. You don’t focus your whole life on having a job so you can make money to pay for all your material possessions, that's not your focus in life." 

She is an example of the happiness that can be felt in this way of life, she just exudes a deeply satisfied sense of joy.  The most interesting thing about meeting her is that you wouldn't feel she lacked anything because of her simple approach to life.  For her discipline isn't harsh, it is a way of life which repays what might seem to us to be a sacrifice.

Why don't you meet her too?  She will be a speaker at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 23rd for Just this Day or click on the sparkly globe on the home page at 9.30 and join many of us there via the live stream.

My next hero, Neville the writer and meditator.

Neville Hodgkinson

The kitchen for 20,000 people

Here is a handsome hero, his name is Neville Hodgkinson and he is a meditator with special heroic qualities.  He is my friend and he is one of my heroes. He is a hero because he follows a system of meditation which means he gets up early and meditates probably at 4.00 am each day!  We grandparent household meditators manage twice a day most days but it isn't that early. Examples like Neville and Father Laurence and others who rise early and meditate daily do it not just for themselves but for the welfare of the world.  Neville's spiritual family are the Brahma Kumaris, a group formed in the 1930s in Hyderabad.  They formed round a man named Dada Lekhraj, a man who had a vision of the world entering dark and troubled times.  He brought together and inspired a group of young people, teaching them, passing on his received knowledge.  He sent them out into the world rather as Jesus sent his disciples out to hear a message of salvation, a message that the truth of each person was that they really were a pure soul and not a body and that truth could be realised through meditation and discipline.  At that time there were only a few 100 and many were young women.  Now there are many Brahma Kumaris centres round the world and  at their main centre in Abu Road at the foot of Mount Abu, they can feed 20,000 people 3 times a day!  I have seen it with my own eyes.  When the group arrived in England they were very few and met in different people's houses.  Neville, who had a successful career as a journalist with science as his particular subject felt a calling as he walked away from a talk at Westminster Abbey.  

He says: "The catalyst was a vision: a golden-red light that opened out like a flower from the centre of my forehead. It happened during a few minutes of silence, following a chant by devotees of an Indian swami. He and a leading Anglican churchman had been taking part in a press conference in London, speaking about the soul. I was working at the time as medical and science correspondent of a leading UK newspaper, and a doctor friend had invited me. The conversation seemed to trigger some deep memory inside me....(click here to read more). 

He knew from then that he really was a soul, not just a man and a journalist with a good job and a family.  He followed that calling and joined the emerging group of Brahma Kumaris, becoming vegetarian and taking on the disciplines of a surrendered life.  You are lucky if you meet him and you can! Come along to St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 23rd, that's just 10 days away.  His story, which seems so other worldly in some ways, is what has made him such a good example for meditation.  We need these heroic and spiritual qualities to shine out in a person to help us determine that the transcendent reality which they aim to make real for themselves and others really is worth the effort. 

The hall at Abu Road which fits 40,000 followers and meditators all grown from one man's vision 

Father Laurence Freeman OSB. A hero.

Father Laurence Freeman, a hero for meditation

the globe on the home page

I was lucky to have a meeting with Father Laurence Freeman OSB this week. Ever kind and gracious, he appears to have all the time in the world for you although his inner clock is tuned in to his watch for midday prayers and meditation. The mark of this man is his inner immobility which communicates itself to you and invites you to consider the world more still than moving.  And as he travels the world, Venezuela, Ireland, Australia just in the last few weeks, meetings with trustees, with bankers, with doctors and so kindly with me too, he needs to have an inner immobility otherwise he would be walking jet lag!  The World Community of Christian Meditation which he leads has bought a chateau in Bonnevaux, France which will give them a centre to bring the mission of meditation for all, to reality.  I like the fact that its name already has Bonne in it, and then Va ux which means place or spot.  So already this is a good place.  You can read about it from their website and even donate towards its renovation.  If you come to ST Martin-in-the-Fields on November 23rd or you click on the sparkly globe on the just this day website you can meditate with him and then hear him speak about transcendence.  You will experience transcendence of its own kind when you do that.  You will be transcending the normal Wednesday experience, you will be transcending place and time because you might be watching in Australia in the evening and we are there in the morning but most important you will be listening with us to a FREE MAN by name and by calling.  He is calling us to be Free in the name of Christ whose message has always seemed to me to be saying Come to me and be free of all your troubles, be free of concerns for the things of this world, they will look after themselves, be free of the opinions of others, be free of feeling a success or a failure and above all be free to be yourself, just as you are.

Ganesha in OUR summer house

I wouldn't say that he has replaced the Buddha, rather that he is now occupying the place that the Buddha sat when he resided in our summer house before he went to Singapore to keep Grace company.  Once he had gone, we found we rather missed having him in place when we meditated and were surprised when we saw him in Singapore at just how still he is.   You will remember that he was found at a Red Cross bric a brac sale and had probably been consigned to being sold because the family whose father or mother had perhaps owned him, didn't really get his significance.  This happens a lot so we found we didn't need to look any further for a new inspiration than to go to the local auction house where house after house is cleared by relatives who don't want the old stuff which they probably found when they inherited their parents or uncle's house.  You see lots of these beautiful and significant pieces were brought back by men and women who lived in India and China and who understood and loved the culture as well as the actual carvings.  

We found our new carved ivory companion God, Ganesha in Cheffins sale room in Cambridge.  He is quite small and was a bit grubby until I gently cleaned him up with a toothbrush.  In Hindu and Buddhist religion he is worshipped as a top God.   He bestows wisdom and removes obstacles and he is well worth having as a friend.   This is one of the stories of his birth.  The goddess, his mother, Parvati, created him.  They say that she literally made him out of the earth at the bottom of her bath.  Goddesses can do this kind of thing.  I think he must have been fully formed because she immediately gave him the job of guarding her bathroom door.  When her husband, Shiva came back and found a stranger guarding the door, he struck off Ganesha's head.  "Oh" Parvati cried..."that's our boy"!   Siva sent his troops out to find the head of a sleeping being and they found an elephant whose head was summarily removed and brought in to replace the boy's head.  A very early transplant story but nobody knows what happened to the elephant.  Ganesha was restored to life by Siva and made the leader of troops.  He was also given the boon that people would worship him and call on him for help before undertaking any venture.  There are many other stories of him which I will tell you another time but for the moment, we are getting to know him and will be asking him for lots of help in the future.  

Those genes you have aren't just yours!

That face keeps coming back!

love of crisps

new forms meet old very old ones

three generations loving the 2 Ronnies

With everything, the new seems to replace the old but I begin to see that what it does is just reinvent the old, it takes the old, dusts it down and represents it in an acceptable way.  After all, nothing lasts any longer than it is meant to.  Take your skin, or certainly take mine, it certainly doesn't look like it did once upon a time!  My hair which was brown is grey and that is just a person.  Look around and nature is all of a change and so are the buildings round us.  Down come the old ones and up go the new.  Some old ones get renovated but everything and everybody has a measure of life.  Grandpa's face came from a long line of lookalikes!  And they go on....and on...  AND ON!Visiting family in their abroad homes shows the way that time creates children and parents, time itself pulls us along and doesn't allow too much looking back.  It moves us along, making new shapes on old patterns, giving new expressions to old DNA as well as making new buildings behind the old harbour.  Should we mind?  certainly not because although our bodies and some of our thinking is the past, we are also the future.  See how often this face has been handed out! 

Old skills continue to play out

No such place as heaven? is it a question or is it a statement?

She, in Singapore, just turned 7, says that there is no such place as heaven.  He, in Jakarta, just turned 7, asks if there is such a place as heaven.  Me, recently turned well up the 60's (and that says the Jakarta boy, is pretty close to 100!) is put to the test because I don't think you can get to heaven by any physical route.  No aeroplane will take you, no train, no bus and certainly not on your old feet and yet I don't think that this 60 to 100 year span of time here is the whole story.  So, Archie and Grace in your respective places, this is the best I can do to answer your question or refute your statement about heaven and what or where it is.

Grown ups say that someone has gone to heaven when they die and yet there is no evidence that they are somewhere real, so where are they?.  After all, they certainly haven't taken their bodies with them so what has gone and where might it be? 

new baby, old soul?

 I think you have to go back to thinking about where anyone came from even before a baby was in its mothers tummy.   That was just where it grew from a single cell to a very complex and defined individual looking a bit like Auntie so and so and a bit like Great Grandpa, with hair colour like Dad, and a mouth like Mum.  This baby which we are about to call by some very nice name like Albert or Albertine, Clement or Clementine is a beautifully blended small person which has various interesting things about it which we are going to call its character.  It may be sweet tempered or cross, serious or a joker, a saint or a sinner, perhaps it will be athletic or academic or neither, what is for sure is that it will have its marks and tendencies with which it has to make its way in the world.  Some of these babies will have very defined talents some people say they have done whatever they are good at before.  Some mathematicians are just way ahead of others, some piano players, some violinists, some artists or poets.  They arrive and get off to a head start in their own special field.  And it may not have anything to do with its parents or grandparents or other relations.  It may but it may not so where did it come from?  Why do we call some people old souls if they show a particular wisdom.  

Some very wise people who have studied these things say that the soul when it leaves a body goes to the place it has earned a right to be.  If it has been a good soul, it spends time with other good souls, if bad, with other bad ones;  a bit like being at either a very good party with kind friends or finding yourself in prison with some bad ones.  This could be called being in heaven or hell and doesn't seem to need a body.  Then after passing time in the place it is, they say that the time comes when it has to move on.  Each soul looks down and with all that it had learned and all that it still has about it, it chooses to be born in the very best place to continue developing its particular skill or talent but more important it gets a chance to meet the things which it needs to meet to make progress by perhaps righting some wrongs done the last time round.  These wise people say that one day, the soul may give up all its baggage and be free from being sent back and back to the world.  That pure soul will go straight back to its source which some call God and some call its Father and that soul will unite totally with its Father.  That pure soul doesn't have to return unless everything on earth is going particularly badly when it may come back just to help all the people who have forgotten that they have a Father both in heaven and above heaven whose nature is pure consciousness.

If that sounds too complicated, I'll read a bit more and try again when you ask me again.  One thing I am sure of is that nothing goes unnoticed and that goodness always goes to goodness.  And because your real nature is pure goodness absolutely nothing can possibly go wrong for you.

Singapore travel, Grandpa passes the test!

Happy in every place!

I have heard that there is a vast capital of consciousness built up by meditators over the years and that when you need to tap into it perhaps because your own practice is dipping a bit, it is an ever generous provider.  So, every day, just like saving your pennies, when you meditate, you add a little to the pile. You are banking with the best bank of all and your pin number is secure because it is in your own mind, a mantra or particular visualisation.  No hacker can get at that. Let's say that your tradition is your bank manager and occasionally you have to visit the bank manager to arrange a loan.  

Grandpa is a very disciplined meditator especially in his own home.  He sticks to the prescribed half hour to the last second, so much so that the dogs also know exactly when to move from their own somnolent positions in the meditation hut and expect a walk.  Me, I am a bit restless at 25 minutes and if it wasn't for him, I might jump out of my seat and set off on my own daily round.  

At home ABROAD!

However, Grandpa is not, or perhaps I should say was not a great traveller; he searches around his waistcoat and coat pockets often to make sure that he has everything in order; passports, tickets, boarding passes, glasses and reams of paper which have been printed off with all the terms and conditions of each airline held together with a bulldog clip.  He checks his watch, the departure boards and his wife's whereabouts frequently to be sure that the aeroplane (in whose timings he has very little confidence) is listed and then we are off to the boarding gate as soon as it is announced.  No hanging about the pret-a-manger, W.H Smith and Jo Malone area, we are going to be sat by the gate watching and checking those pockets and making sure that the air hostess is in place before any other travellers.

So, travelling and keeping the calm built up in the meditation hut is always a test for him but oh readers and relations, I can announce with joy that travelling from Heathrow to Singapore and then  from Singapore to a small island 3 different methods of transport away, and then back again has been a seamless joy to me as his companion.  If you had ever thought that it was impossible to change the wiring which seems operate as soon as any identity is activated, I can confidently say that meditation and all its ancient stillness is the best bank in town.    One more travel today to Jakarta and instead of checking his watch, he is sitting peacefully on the balcony reading a book listening to the thunder of a short Singapore tropical storm rolling round the skies.  

Airports no longer trouble him! Meditation calms the most built-in agitation.

The buddha from the bric a brac reminds me

Lama Zangmo

buddha now in Singapore

www.justthisday.org

Discombobulated by travelling from London to Singapore, Singapore to Bintan, Bintan to tropical paradise, I find meditation disappears even though I think about it.  However, returning to Singapore with the granddaughters, I find that the Buddha from the bric a brac sale who came with Grace to Singapore after last summer is sitting on the bedside table. Amongst all the wonderful possibilities, the dim sum, the swimming pool, the botanic gardens and the timeless nature of being on holiday, the feeling I really couldn't miss and which was coming from him was an invitation, a coming home to myself.  Suddenly meditation wasn't a far away thing, it became easy again.  Originally bought  in a village bric a brac sale I now wonder if he came from somewhere much more important and that was what gave him that special quality of stillness.  His name, the Buddha is akin to the word Buddhi,  an ancient Indian name for your intelligent being, the place where you know what really is and can discard the things which pass one by one as objects to enjoy.   He seems to fill your whole heart space when you allow him in.  The lady on the right is Lama Zangmo, she has made becoming her Buddha like self, her whole life and you can see how the light streams out of her eyes and her smile.  A bit more of this may make the same thing happen to all of us.  You can meet Lama Zangmo on November 23rd either by coming to St Martin-in-the-Fields in the morning or by clicking on the sparkly globe on the www.justthisday.org website and joining from wherever you are in the world.  Go on, you know it must be worth it!

St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, London, you can join in wherever you are.

A test for Grandpa?

This could be us!!!

A patient man?

We are in a queue for travel to the Far East.  This is a test for Grandpa mostly because waiting is not his bag!!! Some of you who know him will be conjuring up pictures of him at airports in the past.   I say that this is a test for his years of meditation.  Of course meditation isn't just to get you through Heathrow with a beatific smile on your face.  It is an aid to combatting the tendencies to negative emotions which you seem to come into life with, it helps to clean up the neural pathways and this is where science and spirituality agree.  Grandpa isn't that interested in his neural pathways, he quite likes them I think, he enjoys the challenge of a traffic jam or a cold call on the telephone. He likes the drama of enacting the part of a gangster chase.  He is a really disciplined meditator, 30 minutes twice a day and never a minute short.  His interest in meditation is as a way of understanding that he isn't the drama, not the gangster or the Grandpa, he is just the director consciousness behind it.  My test is letting him  play all the Grandpa games without rising to the bait of his more dramatic confrontations with people doing their best to carry out the rules!!!  Our meditation isn't, I suspect going to change that drama but I hope it will come to our aid today as we hang about Heathrow waiting to be called.  Watch this space though to find out where we are going and who we are going to see!

taking the medicine as prescribed

It is the easiest thing in the world to take medicine when you need it; when you are feeling poorly and your appetite for everything else has gone.  Then you are so grateful for the way back to health that you swallow antibiotics, anti-emetics, anti-inflammatories, anti this and anti that.  The same thing with meditation, you are very grateful for it but until the habit is firmly established, you can easily fall away from a twice daily practice.  The other thing is that once you have missed one meditation for some very good reason; a visiting aunt or an urgent call or you have been somewhere you just don't seem to be able to make the move to a meditation seat, then it is much harder to get back to it and much harder to do the whole half hour.  This has given me cause for thought especially as I think what other things in my life I seldom miss.  A morning cup of tea or lunch for instance, a riveting programme on the telly or the radio (not the Archers, you can catch up on that!) and the irresistible call of cheerful voices in another room just asking to be joined with.   The pull of meditation is there but you have to develop a taste for it above all other temptations because reasonably one day the other things won't have the same hold over you and you will want to be able to naturally move into the space which meditation provides.  The speakers at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 23rd are there to show how it is possible to establish and unshakeable practice of meditation.  You can listen directly by coming to St Martin in Trafalgar Square, London or you can tune in via the www.justthisday.org website by clicking on the sparkly globe.  It will be worth it I can promise you.

Give us this day our daily marmite. A Meditation.

Crumpets without marmite, Julie Fleming-Williams

What do you think is missing from this picture on the left?  It is by my good friend Julie Fleming-Williams who paints a mean steaming picture of our favourite mealtime comforts.  I have a picture on my wall of one of her pictures which has a pot of marmite alongside a boiled egg and toast fingers.  In the picture of crumpets there is no marmite and as of today, marmite has been taken off the shelves of one of the nation's supermarkets.  Don't they realise that marmite isn't a product to be messed about with, it's our British birthright; almost every British child has been weaned from mother's milk to Marmite via a couple of mashed bananas.  Marmite should be given free as part of our heritage.  What I love about watching marmite eating in my house is how many different ways there are of having marmite.  Grandpa puts it on as thick as marmalade and we all groan and say how can you eat marmite like that with which he responds by actually having a spoonful, straight into his mouth just to show what it means to him.  My Grandfather used to have a spoonful of marmite in boiling water with a slug of sherry for elevenses.  My son butters his toast right up to the edges and does the same with marmite.  I just put lots of butter, preferably unsalted onto hot toast so that it melts in and then a thin layer of marmite.  Sometimes I put more butter on the top of that.   

The pot that transcends taste!

Marmite has enticed the sick  back to appetite and health, it has I'm sure got a place at Buckingham Palace on the Royal tea table as well as down below in the staff quarters.  It is meat to a vegetarian, and vegetable to a meat eater.  It is a leveller, a social leveller and a leveller of people with different diets.  It is like meditation, anyone can do it even if they do have their different methods of realising how delicious it is.  And of course there are a few people, (to  be pitied in my view!) who don't like marmite at all. Imagine what the world will do without marmite being readily accessible and canvas for change.

Wherever you are, you can join this meditation and perhaps make a difference

www.justthisday.org

I sometimes wonder how it happened that Just this Day slipped unnoticed into my mind and came to exist and take over the kitchen table for a couple of months before it happens.  But that was what did happen, one moment I was reading about meditation helping people at a much more profound level than anything we could do in the physical realm and the next moment I was walking past St Martin-in-the-Fields when I heard myself say...This is where we should do it.  One thing led to another and meetings with surprising people took place.  I expected at every moment that someone would say it was a mad idea but they didn't!  What they said was oh yes, come in and you can do it and we will help.  So, 9 years on and we have a great programme to bring people from different groupings together to meditate, to hear about meditation as a way of transcending our differences and to maybe make a small or large difference somewhere in the transcendent space.  I like to imagine all that good will going upwards rather like inverting a drop of red colour in clear water but it going upwards and spreading out and maybe just stopping one person from hitting another, help another person move towards a kind way of treating someone they wouldn't normally treat well and maybe maybe maybe open a tyrant's heart even just a crack to allow something better to happen.  I have heard it on good authority that meditating creates an auspicious energy which people in need can tap into and I believe that to be true.

www.smitf.org

The speakers this year personify good will.  Father Laurence Freeman, Neville Hodgkinson and Lama Gelongma Zangmo.  Each one has given much of their life to help others.  Each one has a core practice of  meditation and each one of them help others to meditate.   And even if it isn't possible for a person to learn to meditate, somehow the meditation and goodwill of these truly disciplined practitioners can change lives.  If you know any one of them, you know what I mean but if not, here is a chance to meet three remarkable people and hear them talk about the transcendental possibilities which meditation offers.  Come and join us wherever you are, go to the www.justthisday website on November 23rd and click on the sparkly globe you see above and you will be with us even if you live in the furthest part of the world

So, every year since the start, on we go and The Just this Day Newsletter was sent out today!!! Yippee for Mad Mimi which is the engine which does the sending and yippee for me that we are only one newsletter away from Just this Day itself.    Click here to read the newsletter.  Then register for the day at St Martin or get in contact and let me know what you are doing via the www.justthisday.org website and if you want it advertised on the website.