Birthday blog for Bastian

3 days after George, 2 after Sophie, it's Sebastian Oliver Arthur's birthday and Dr Mike's birthday and they are it today!    So many birthdays to remember! and 2 of them so far away.  Dr Mike will get his present tonight when I see him but Sebastian's present will come to Dubai later.  However, here is a photograph of your present Bastian!

 These are pyjamas with soldiers on them.  The legs are very very long so it doesn't matter if they don't get to you for a bit because they will go on fitting you for ages.  I wanted to get you a hen or a puppy but Dubai is so far and so hot that hens and puppies are better waiting for you here with Grandpa and I.
Anyone wondering how I am going to get from pyjamas and birthdays to meditation can stop wondering now!  Pyjamas are what you wear in bed, but you don't sit in bed all night admiring your pyjamas do you, even if they have soldiers and are as smart as smart.  You snuggle down and shut your eyes and before you know where you are, you are asleep and the next thing you know it's morning.  You feel rested.  Well, you know that Grandpa and I go out to our summer house and meditate each day, this is a different kind of rest, its a rest but you are awake, you just stay quietly there listening to a single sound and trying not to think about other things.  The dogs come and lie quietly too, they know they have to stay quite quiet for half an hour before Grandpa takes them for a walk.  As soon as we move at the end, they spring up all ready for the day.  As soon as we have finished, we are much springier too for the day!  Happy Birthday Bastian and Dr Mike
 See how big Butty the dog is and how much Grandpa loves him now!

Meditation banishes tiredness!

In yesterday's Times weekend section, there is a picture of poor tired young woman with her head fallen into a large cake.  This is meant to show that young people are sooooo tired they can't enjoy themselves and the article goes on to say that people are finding that they can't switch off.  Their lives are so conditioned by their work and the constant stream of e stuff that they are suffering symptoms of stress.  Saddest of all, they are just not happy.
There are all sorts of good suggestions to rectify this unnatural and sorry situation, minerals and vitamins and diet and exercise but this gimlet eye spotted this little beauty.
RESEARCH SHOWS MEDITATION AND THE CURRENT BUZZWORD "MINDFULNESS" ------ LEARNING TO LIVE IN THE MOMENT TO QUIET THE MIND CAN HELP US FEEL MORE RESTED.  EVEN TEN MINUTES MEDITATION A DY CN MAKE A DIFFERENCE.   IN FACT, RESEARCH SUGGESTS THAT THE QUALITY OF REST YOUR BODY GETS FROM 10 MINUTES MEDITATION FIRST THING IN THE MORNING IS BETTER THAN IN THE FINAL PHASE OF SLEEP.
The kindly grandmother is not about to say "BUT DIDN'T I TELL YOU THAT!" but hey didn't I tell you that.  This wonderful image of Apollo below has lasted over 8 thousand years, buried in a pit for a few thousand years and still beautiful. He is telling you the same thousand year old truth, get meditating and you will feel young.

Cobwebs, spiders and Church

Because there is a wedding in the Church this weekend, we give it a particular clean, after all, this is a special day, there are flowers and the smell of polish.  My job is cobwebs which you don't notice until you start to look.  Even the stain glass windows have an almost unseen web across them and looking up in the porch, it looks like spider city.  Under my breath, I tell all the Church spiders there time is up for the moment and with brush and hoover, there old lacy homes are banished.  I don't think they have had to think about respinning for years.
This is not a blog about the making of a domestic goddess, it is about meditation and the spiders have spun their way in there because meditation gives you a meditative perspective on things.  The first thought was that you think things are fine just the way they are until you look and once you look you have a chance to either leave them the way they are or change them.  You sometimes need a reason to change them, so weddings are special and good will is about, you want to make everything as good as it can be for the bride and her groom, after all, you may have had a wedding or you may have a son or daughter getting married and you may have appreciated the care taken by friends and family to make things beautiful.  Once you get your eye on the workings of the cobwebby old mind, and the possible need to discard some of the webs plus the spiders who are better outside, meditation helps.   Every time you see a movement, you dissolve it and sometimes this is easy and sometimes it is cobweb after cobweb.
Of course it is all worth it when the bride and groom come into the Church and the light streams through the newly cleaned stain glass, and meditation is worth it when you begin to lighten up and realise that happiness is much much preferable to anxiety and depression, you open your eyes after meditating and the world looks beautiful.
Below is the  back of St Martin-in-the-Fields with people walking a labyrinth in 2011, you get the Church and the walking meditation all in one picture.  When you come to St Martin on November 20th, you will get the chance to meditate right inside the Church with Father Laurence Freeman and hundreds of other people.  Make sure it is in your diary.

For One who has a birthday, a meditation on being ONE

For this special ONE whose name means wisdom, here is a birthday blog, a meditation on being One!  You may say, 'but I am twelve today, ONE was years ago' but hey, look at these few photographs, it is the same ONE looking out of all of them, ONE smaller, ONE more grown up, ONE being a sister, ONE and  being a bridesmaid!  You have always been the same ONE since the day you were born.  In our family there are other ONEs too, see the photo of Mary's wedding,

ONE of them has a birthday tomorrow and ONE two days later.  You have friends, new friends and old friends, but each ONE is ONE friend.  I have friends, now I am getting a bit older, there are ONES who are getting older too, but each ONE, like you is ONE person just getting older.  In our family, there is ONE who is in Singapore, ONE who is in Dubai, ONE who is teaching, ONE who works in a hospital, ONE who is walking the dogs, ONE who is about to start cooking, ONE more in an office, ONE going running, ONE on the telephone and ONE who has got a secret!  Each ONE is feeling something different, ONE is happy, ONE is not, ONE is busy, ONE is worried, ONE is asleep, ONE is dreaming and ONE is thinking about birthdays, YOU.  My special birthday present to you is to whisper the ONE sound to you so that you use your wisdom name to begin to see that the ONE you are is the same ONE becoming all these people and things and is the ONE thing which never changes however big or small you get.  Happy Birthday Sophie.

Meditation is attention and more, it works.

My meditating friend missed the first train at King's Cross because she was getting her senior railcard, she is a Granny too, then, whilst waiting for train two to come to visit us, took out her sketchbook and started drawing people.....and missed the next two trains.  This is a high level of attention! and my admiration for her rises and rises.  To be able to give that level of attention is as meditation should be, in meditation, you shouldn't be distracted by the people walking by, the ideas floating in the mind, you should be like the artist.
When she did arrive, we went to Houghton Hall to see the house and exhibition of pictures recently returned from St Petersburg to hang where they had once been.  The house had belonged to Robert Walpole who had definately given his attention to being successful and becoming very very rich and powerful.  He built the house and laid out the grounds and collected the pictures.   All of these things are still there which shows that the power of attention works!
The exhibition is on until November 24th and they won't turn anyone away so you can go too.

What about suffering and meditation

The question of suffering is a difficult one.  If you are hale and hearty and happy and a friend of yours is ill or deeply sad or having a horrible operation, trying to offer words of wisdom about meditation isn't really going to sound genuine.  It seems that in order to understand suffering and to offer anything useful, it has to be shown that the thing which you offer works.  When Rev Alice asked what the ..... would Jesus do on her fabulous car sticker, it really made for thinking about this so here is where this blogger has got to.  What Jesus did and what others who point to a freedom beyond the world was to suffer publicly and horribly and then die and get wrapped in grave clothes and put in a tomb with a huge great stone in front of it.  And then the next day, he was up and about 'His Father's business'.  We intone these words with gravitas and they are the cornerstone of the Christian faith but what are they saying to us.  In case you think that this is just a Christian message, look into our own times, see how the Dalai Lama, thrown out of Tibet, watching the slaughter and dismay of his flock, reinvigorating the whole message of Buddhism by getting through it.  Amongst the Indian sages, Ramakrishna in the early part of the last century, had throat cancer and everything that went with it and seemed to show that the suffering part was only part of the whole story.  Are all these people saying that there is a part which doesn't suffer but that connecting with its reality is important.  Jesus practiced for 40 days, imagine that, no food, no drink and no company and not using any power to relieve the conditions.  This is so much part of this particular story which ends again with showing that He was still around even after everything to crush him out of existence had been done.  I think that this is what he was showing and what the Dalai Lama is showing us, that there is more to suffering than endings, there are new beginnings if we choose them.  In the little half hour meditation which isn't much, at least we get a chance to practice being without the things which seem so important in the rest of our life and practice might make perfect if you keep at it.

plums, friendship, meditation and funeral music.

I am sitting at the kitchen table, sun streaming in, dogs lying on the bench and my husband and an old friend kindly peeling and cutting up fruit for preserving.  The conversation is not about fruit, it is good old gossip and better still is covering the music we would all like to have at our funerals.  Both of those pictured plus the dog are practiced morning meditators and this conversation is taking place with enormous good humour and witty wisdom.  These two have worked together  in all sorts of ways, always with the same humour, they have fund raised together, sat on committees together, shared stories together but as far as I know this is the first time we have all sat down and planned the music for our funerals.  He thinks that he would like the death march from Handel's Saul but thinks that it might be a bit too grand, she says Zadok the Priest, and me, I think I would like to have the Pacobel Canon because even people who don't really care would weep just because of the music!  And I would like everyone to sit very very still for just ten minutes and know that every empty space is not full of nothing, it is just a total fulness.  The I that is gone will make room for the space that I have taken up.  Then I suggest a jolly good tea!
Oh yes and someone will have to look after the dogs.

The Common Good according to....

You never know what thought will top the bill each day or each week but today, what has got the cogs of this mind going, is the idea of the Common Good.  It would be very odd for someone to want NO good for themselves and quite unusual for them not to want it for their family or those who they think are part of their circle.  Politicians, philosophers and religious leaders have the idea in their thinking and good on them, it is a common idea that we want the good for others but what is uncommon is to want people to have the same amount of good that we enjoy.  Go on, dare to think about the way you want to parcel out the good you  might have, isn't it first to those I like, then those I should like but nothing for those I want nothing to do with.  And that must be because of who you/I think I am.
Philosophy is an ace here because it doesn't let you rest with yesterday's thinking, it forces forward the ideas that have governed your mind so you can find out if they really hold up to the light.   Many of them just don't, most of them are about what you think you are in relation to what you think that other person is and these ideas govern how you parcel out the good that you have and are.
When you meet someone who is free of ideas about you, is like a child perhaps but not childish, is open to like and share with you, it is a treat, and more, it frees you to like them really because you like yourself.  If someone is patronising and makes you feel less than you would like to be, it is a real turn off but if they look you in the eye, give you a smile, you are going to be off towards the common good.
Apparently, according to Clifford Longley on BBC Thought for the Day, the common good is according to Christians, Muslims, Jews, Politicians, Plato, Aristotle and you will hear about it from every politician in the conference season. You can listen again although I don't thinkJust hold it up to the light and see if it has anyone excluded from it and then please, whoever you are, include them in this terrific GREAT IDEA.

Meditation and Reflection for the weekend

The rest of the weekend I am at Waterperry House  which is quite near and  is almost a twin of Nuneham Courtney which I visited yesterday, the house is not only similar in its position on the River Thames near Oxford and with the same elegant architecture but it is also a retreat and study centre.  It is  a large country house, set in 83 acres of its own grounds surrounded by farmland which belongs to the  School of Economic Science. and just a few miles east of Oxford.  I am lucky to spend three weekends  and a couple of full weeks a year here.  This is where I was introduced to meditation, to studying the truths contained in Judaeo-Christian and Eastern Scriptures, to Shakespeare and more recently to Plato and Plotinus.   The great thing is being with people who are also interested in seeing beyond the finite shapes and expressions of the world, seeing if what all the scriptures say, that there is a single total unmoving Being in which all the lives take place, is true. 
Meditation gradually moves the understanding towards a sense of this fullness of Being, I couldn't say how or why but it does almost take you by the hand and let you dissolve the emotions and impediments which block the vision normally.  Even a little of its practice can give a taste of this and I can highly recommend it.
Being here is also very good fun and the food is delicious, see below for satisfied customers!

BK visit a better option than any Martini

Blogged off early to Oxfordshire and collected a friend and went off to visit the Brahma Kumaris Retreat Centre at Nuneham Courtney.  It was a truly lovely visit, yes the weather was lovely and the coffee was good but the BK's, as mentioned before are the epitome of loveliness in that they welcome you with such open smiles that makes you immediately feel that you have met a real friend.  These are not smiles which mask any other emotion, they are not put on, these are smiles which are warm and welcome you right into the heart of the other person.  It comes as no surprise to read what they know about smiling.   They know and practice happiness because real happiness shows on your face.  And that happiness will be from the source of that thing which makes you happy and if the source of your happiness is divine, then the person in front of you will meet the Father who you love and who loves everyone.  And this is true, every small action, from the look in the eye to the gift of hospitality, to the smile on the face and then to the sweeties made with love, all carry the essence of their devotion.
This devotion is magnified through their practice of meditation.  It should also be mentioned that their spiritual leader, Dadi Janki is 95! still travelling round the world, giving meetings and supporting literally thousands of people in the Brahma Kumari family.  Further evidence that meditation keeps you young, the youngsters in the BK's say it is hard to keep up with her.
Thought for the day, with meditation, there is no need for martini! but it was made and given with such a kind heart yesterday, that it carried something more that lemon zest, that martini went both to the head and to the heart.

Meditation, then a Martini,

It was a busy day finishing with walking two dogs round an old Roman Fort and completing all sorts of bits of communication, not all easy.  The blogger's husband, let's call him Grandpa, was very cross about the length of time it was taking the blogger to extricate herself from blogging etc: and so when walking those lucky dogs, he was asked what he felt had been the main bonus for the blogger of being married to him.  Well, he said, never stuck for the  bon mot, it gives you a chance to learn something everyday!  Quick as anything, the blogger replied, of course, patience!
So, back home and there is a weekend away approaching and we start to pack all the things we need before meditating.  Then he, the blogger's husband, says, "try this Martini", so the blogger does and then we have supper, watch the news and collapse into bed. 
One day, martini will be a thing of the past, but from time to time, after a busy day, a martini, carefully prepared with little bits of lemon zest in the bottom, provides a very good relaxing additon to meditation!

Grannies meditate and look what else they can do!

Who wouldn't want a Granny who could do this! Well a vegetarian grandchild might think twice but this Granny will cook vegetables in a highly satisfactory way plus she meditates.  Despite pouring rain and incoming guests, this Granny trudges out to the summer house with the Buddha sitting tight and meditates with her regular meditating relative! 

The guests came to discuss the East Anglian Air Ambulance charity, an ace charity which airlifts people speedily from accidents in the area and saves lives which would otherwise be in jeopardy owing to traffic jams on the A14, speed bumps in all sorts of places and little windy roads in East Anglia.  The striking thing is the good will which brings these amazing charities into being, sustains them and develops them.  There is this fund of goodwill to others which means people connect with the need to alleviate suffering and save life.  The goodwill has always been there, it passes from one generation to another seamlessly, the Grannies and Grandpas saving up for their grandchildren, making sacrifices in terms of time and cash too probably, trying to keep the better things to pass on and above all being interested in the evolution of the good.  Meditation should help develop this goodwill  muscle because it allows the wretched ego to subside and a consideration of what people suffer to take place and a gratitude for all the good things.  This blogger is very grateful to Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall for the recipe for game terrine because she was in despair when faced with 4 old birds which had been lovingly plucked and drawn by her husband who you will know by now if you read this blog.

Its the rain! perhaps!

In this house, the autumn has seeped into our grandparental veins, or is that just an excuse.  It is cold and damp and my newspaper says that almost three quarters of those of suffering from stiff joints say it's the weather and four in ten of us say we consider leaving the country because of it.  A poll has been conducted to find this out but maybe it didn't take into account yesterday's reported research into the way to feel young, diet exercise and meditation remember!
So, creaking out of bed to the ancient electric fire and then creeping back until the fire warms the room up, this grannyblogger thinks that getting up in the cold wet weather is a creaky old business but that getting going is a great thing and making sure you meditate even if you would rather sit over a cup of tea with the newspaper makes having the tea and reading the newspaper afterwards even more attractive.
The more serious autumn thought is realising that there is an end to every experience, waking up beside the Grandpa every morning for 45 years fools you into thinking its for ever, but as sure as it had a beginning, it will have an end and realising that makes a difference to feeling irritated by small and insignificant things and rather more aware of how many things he does to make the blogger's life easy.

Daily Express homes in on meditation to keep you young.

On the front page of the Daily Express you will see this headline. SECRET OF HOW TO LIVE LONGER.  Experts have found that the key to a longer life is to switch to a low-fat vegetarian diet, take regular exercise and even do some meditation.  The simple lifestyle changes, they found, can help to reverse the ageing process.
It is, says the Professor from the University of California all down to work on our telomeres, such a new word to me and to the computer that it keeps wanting to change the word to telomeres.  Anyway, a telerome us a microscopic cap in our DNA which prevents cells from becoming damaged.  These newly named caps, the telecoms, shorten as we age and this leaves us open to disease, dementia and age related conditions.  However, if we change our life style, our telomeres will lengthen and become protectors again.  So, get going on telomere lengthening straightaway if you haven't already started.  And of course, the younger you start the better.  As women are having babies later and having to go out to work and often leave these babies with the Grannies, it will be very important for Grannies to have good telomeres so they can keep going.
This blogger can now say with confidence that meditation helps Grannies grow younger, which will help everybody else and that if you aren't a Granny yet, you will find meditation keeps you younger, and if you are a grandchild, get that Granny meditating because you will need her to be able to run after you down to the sea, or climb up the climbing frame to get you when you are stuck or just be there to give a helping hand if you fall asleep in Singapore!

So sorry Simon! and other Facebook persons

When I met Simon last night, he said that he kept getting Facebook messages about the blog.  This blogger humbly apologises for what might seem overkill but hopes to persuade you and yours, your friends, family and anyone else who might be interested that hearing about and learning to meditate is a good thing.  Good for you, good for them and good for anyone who isn't faint hearted about keeping going.  The blog has an aim! which is to take an honest look at meditation, demystify some of it, put it up to the light of experience and invite people to join in wherever they are on November 20th!  And of course to come in droves to St Martin-in-the-Fields to hear 4 marvellous speakers and to bask in the remarkable space that the Discantvs Choir and Nikki Slade will create with music. And then to join a meditation led by Father Laurence Freeman of the World Community for Christian Meditation.  In addition, there will be Sylvia Leiserach who is one of this blogger's best and oldest friends and happens to be a meditator of many years, there will be Donald Lambie, one of the most disciplined men ever, and Richard Burnett, co founder of Mindfulness in Schools who uses meditation as an aid to mindfulness.  This is a great line up and isn't just for Grannies although they and the Grandpas are always welcome, this is for people of all ages who might enjoy hearing and experiencing stillness through meditation midweek and mid city.  Come along do and bring your friends. You never know, it might change someone's life for the better, it certainly can't change it for the worse!

Grannies go to the Apple Store

The staff in the Apple Store don't speak the same language as people my age.  There was a older woman with an i pad marching up the Apple store in Cambridge this morning shaking the i pad at the staff and this blogger knew why.  This little Mac Book which is what the blog happens on and where all the photographs are was stored is sick.  The staff at the Apple Store probably see lots of us older people who don't know how to back up or do anything much more than send an e mail to a grandchild.  We are those who get photographs and documents and just keep on saving them and saving them until the memory is stuffed full of bytes of some sort of other.  Those boys who speak so fast and know just how your computer works see us coming and just what we are going to be sold.  This blogger went away with a rather beautiful looking hard drive which will, once I have learnt how to drag those photographs from the mac book to the hard drive, mean that the indigestion suffered by the poor thing will get better.
You need to meditate to clear your mind sufficiently to get round a gigabyte but I  bet those boys at the Apple Store who are so clever need to meditate too, because as far as I know, you can't get that through technology.  You can only learn about it.
Apologies to any Grandparents who are better at computer science than this blogger suggests, the one that I live with is right in the camp of shouting at his poor little innocent i pad as if it could hear.

Can you tell a Meditator?

When reviewing the photograph of blogger, husband and dogs, it occurred to this blogger that maybe to the untrained eye, we don't look as if we meditate!  But then, the eye doesn't really see beyond the form and it takes a determined mind to see behind the apparent.  Maybe that is why so many religious communities and denominations wear particular colours and clothes, so that the untrained eye can transmit likeness to the mind which stores away the information.
So, what can we say we do actually see when we see a person, a person in tweed, or in orange robes, or in black clothes and dog collar, or glorious purple Bishop's robes, reddish ochre Buddhist robes, Sikh Turbans, saris and spots in the middle of the forehead, or the wonderful BK's in white.  We see a person in the above mentioned outfits and we deduce something extra about them.  This blogger thinks that it might be good to go back to the basic fact that each person is just one person and that it that oneness which is the one certain fact about them which can't be argued with, the eye sees one and the mind sees one.  It should perhaps stay like that.
This blogger thinks that meditating on the one would make the difference especially if you begin to think that maybe that person striding along with dogs is as one as you! And so is the dog one.

One Dog

The Importance of Words

Once, some years ago,when this blogger said to her husband that she felt a bit depressed, he said, (now wait for this!) "Do you know what they did to women like you in the olden days?  they took them outside and beat them!
There was a moment when the blogger's mind filled with alternatives, suicide? fury? or and luckily this won, laughter.  He had completely blown the depression out of the water.  Admittedly it couldn't have been too severe, clearly depression when it totally takes over is pathological and then beating or joking are unlikely to do the business.  Also, it is going to depend who says things like this and to who, words are not dead, they have power to change things and explain them too.  It was because he knew me and I knew him that I could understand what he was trying to do. See below to check that we are still happily together and unbeaten!

Listening to Saturday Live this morning, there is a brilliant piece on words and history.  Click this link to hear it and/or if you have time at 13.45 pm every day this week  on Radio Four, there is a History of Words and you will hear about Socrates and Diotema speaking about Love.

Pope Francis and Richard Dawkins and the Dalai Lama all in one blog

Yesterday's Times yielded two interesting takes on atheism.  First, Richard Dawkins, at an event marking the pubication of his book with the marvellous title, An Appetite for Wonder, suggested that atheists were winning the war against religion and that his enthusiasm for science was one of the things which defined him.  He said too that he would like his legacy to consist of being a "lover of truth".  Turn to page 31 in the same paper, where there is a report on Pope Francis who says in an article responding to a journalist from the left wing newspaper La Republica who says he doesn't believe in God that "The question for people who do not believe in God is to listen to their consciences.  For those without faith, sin is going against your conscience.  Listening to it and obeying it means making up one's mind about what is good and evil and that there is no sin in the state of non-belief.

It seemed to me that these two men are both searching for ways of making us think about our human beingness, and that both religion and science point to a process of becoming, a constant wonderful explosion of extra-ordariness and that being full of wonder whether or not you call this God's world or a world of scientific process, brings you to your knees with the sheer scale and detail of it.
Reading from the Dalai Lama this morning, he suggests that after a formal meditation, a next step is to just consider the wonder of our lives and how we are fed, watered, washed, clothed, and how many people we should be thankful for.  He also suggests that we should be thankful for those who we don't agree with or those who upset our beliefs because they make us think.  So all round, there are so many people and things to wonder at.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HE2mc3eJqY

Meditate to keep young or just to keep sane! autumn is here

You can feel it in the air, autumn in all its drippy cool.  And you can feel it in yourself, suddenly the promise of the year is over and you wonder what you will be doing next, so many summer plans and activities are over.  This blogger saw the signs of low spirits starting yesterday and coinciding almost exactly with the first leaves turning brown.  Also, an idleness creeping in, a little later rising, tea in bed, dogs out a bit later, meditation a bit later.  But, and here is the turning point, there is such a lot of work to be done in the garden and all the winter activities are just starting so... first, MESSAGE TO SELF, Get working, barrowloads of weeds and cutting back to be done.  Get up! on time, don't be fooled by the darker mornings and the mist which covers the sun, Get smart and Get going!  On with the rejuvenating cream, (thanks Fresia), in with the rollers! out with emery board and Get out!  But before getting out, go inwards and particularly don't be fooled there by any negative thoughts about yourself or anybody else, just keep your beautiful and neutral mantra as the centre of your attention as much as you can, and stay young at heart and keep sane at the same time.
Crossing my fingers for all of us!

About Time, the film and meditation?

Logged off blogging and went to About Time at the Cinema.  There is nothing better than a profound message in an easily digestible package and that is what About Time is.  Having heard Richard Curtis on the radio say that this might be his last film, it struck this blogger that it would be a pretty good last film to have put on.  It isn't sugar coated, more emotionally pleasing, it ticks the boxes.  The hero is kind and not immediately portrayed as Mr Universe, the heroine twinkles and could be your daughter, the Dad is Bill Nighy, no need to say more, the setting Cornwall, all blue sea and agapanthus and the family, loving, intelligent and wacky.  Move to the story, the men in this film can do a little mild Time Travelling, but being kindly, they don't go and make a fortune but they gently explore how to be more loving.  And more loving and kind in an every day sort of way.  And it does make you think what would you do if you could go back and undo every unkind word or thought you had had and smooth over the difficult parts of people's lives.  The really clever thing though is the one miracle that is nearly performed which would wave a wand over the sister's life, can't go through because too much hangs on it but it forces her to make her own changes and once she has made up her mind to do that, the time travelling brother gives her a small hand.
You can't see anything about meditation in here so far can you?  Well, meditating on the passing show of life and wondering if there is anything you could do  better doesn't need time travel, it just needs you to see it and then cross the barrier you have erected to keep yourself in your own self-righteous limit and try again.
The other thing the film shows is how we have and need to have ideals, we need ideals of Dads who are kind, of families that look after one another and the ideal of simple pleasures for children is one that this Granny blogger really likes.  See here the triumph of this summer, a den made outside by grandchildren, all out of their own heads.  It is so clever that even though I can't get into it by dint of size, I absolutely can't take it down and use it for firewood, it will have to disintegrate on its own and then be remade next year.  Well done Max! and Nutty.

A "Moving on" Meditation

The horrid older hens have been trying to oust the broody one and if ever she gets off her cosy little nest, they get in there and lay their own eggs and trample around the whole area.  No idea why, but that's what they do.  Today, feeling for her plight, this meditating blogging tweeting grandmother moved every bit of stuff in the old shed and hauled the safe hen coop over and shifted the ginger broody, her nest and her babies into safety.  Oh how funny to feel so connected to the motherness of the broody hen!
For the bloggers own brood, much meditation on how love works and how to let love do its own thing.  We had 3 out of 6 of the brood here for supper before one flies back to Singapore and the others go back to their own houses and families and jobs.  This blogger is aware of the apparent loss of their physical persons but realises that if they did all come home, it wouldn't work beyond a few weeks before nature reasserted itself and forced everyone to fend for themselves, the mother and grandmother just wouldn't be able to cope so never mind how much she loves them, the only way she could keep them for herself would be to eat them!!!
Rev Alice of the recent blog leant on her pulpit and unravelled the curious saying of Jesus that to become a disciple would mean hating every other thing.  This is a bit of a mystery and about as unattractive as eating your own children in order to keep them with you. She said that she felt that it was just a way of exaggerating, which is the way Jews tell stories, but it was about the need to be within yourself and not to rely on the love of others.  This blogger paraphrases so as not to go on too long.  Of course every mother/child relationship is full of love but it has a limit in terms of time and to keep the love alive, you have to keep moving on and allowing everything to be itself and complete to itself, not to have things rely on you or you on them beyond the need to work with nature to feed the returning children and iron their shirts and wave them off and protect the broody hen from the other silly fowls.

Why Meditation, Why Grannies. Why gets an answer!

To get down to the why of the blog and the why of Grannies needing to meditate is to face the fact that we are here to search for the way onward.  It isn't rocket science to see that once you are in the Granny zone, you are on a distinctly new chapter of your life and it isn't the first one.  The parts you have played, the being mothered and fathered, the mothering you have done, the grand mothering are all limited and some of them are probably over or nearly over.  Grandparents tend to be orphans!  So, this blogger who has been on the search for the why of life for ages begins to sense a little more urgency to the search!
Meditation helps, it isn't the whole thing for me, but it helps a lot in the search.  The other part of the search, it seems, is that if you ask questions and genuinely want the answers, the answers will come by surprising routes.
If you have followed this blog, you will have seen that whilst wondering about what a wise man would think when at Heathrow Terminal 5 earlier in the summer, this blogger read about the Cambridgeshire vicar who had been in the news wondering WTFWJD. (What the f... would Jesus DO). She sounded such a good sort that when I woke up yesterday morning I decided to definitely go searching for what Jesus would think this Sunday morning in Fulbourn, Cambridgeshire.
It was well worth the search;  for some reason, the words as spoken on that Sunday in that place, really were true.  They struck a chord which was waiting to be struck.  Jesus really did exist and because what he said and left behind still is true, if the words are spoken and listened to, they go to the part which is waiting to hear them.  Fascinated always by the concept Jesus leaves us with
- that when two or three are gathered together in His name, He is there among them, and having dipped into Plotinus in the summer who talks in riddles about the One, it seemed that this saying was true.  We were gathered, we were many but each one was concentrated on the One which was being expressed through words and it worked.
Perhaps meditating beforehand helped but Rev Alice Goodman in a wonderfully warm and human way, brought understanding to this searcher who once was a child but is now an orphan! was/is a mother and is now a grandmother! Just one person in all those many roles, now there's a riddle.

tweeting and blogging is one thing, meditation another

Tweeting and blogging about meditation is one thing but I have made a promise to make sure I meditate without fail before tweeting and blogging and trying to tell anyone else to do it.  And also to avoid having mental tweeting or blogging during meditation and to just get back on track with meditating.  The interesting thing about really trying to stick to this inner promise is seeing how the mind works and how it has layers of thinking.  So you are there with your mantra and it is  repeating in a clear realm like a clear layer of water and when the little thoughts, the tweets or blogs or in this blogger's case, ideas about lunch! or occasionally something more profound, come along, they sort of float over the top.  They could completely trap you but they just drift pass harmlessly.  Meditation is something else altogether and it undoes mechanical thinking;

Rev Alice Goodman

 that thinking which is really rather mechanical, giving either pleasure, as in the excellent lunch idea, or anxiety, as in when you are trying to imagine yourself taking 27 awkward teenagers through Pride and Prejudice on a Monday morning.
So I can put my hand on my heart and say that I meditated this morning for a full half hour and it was good and now I can think and plan and cook and take myself off to Fulbourn to hear Rev Alice Goodman preach which may be very interesting.

Waterperry and Bernard Saunders

Returning to Waterperry at the end of the summer to help with a changeover at the house, the striking thing is the steady witness the house bears to human beings who strive to be fully themselves.  Here are men and women from all over the world who have spent a fortnight here studying and meditating and whose aim is to find a best way to offer ancient wisdom in an easy and accessible way to people who want to know.
The house itself draws people to it;

Waterperry House

 maybe it is the stillness built up over the years it has been used as a centre for study and meditation, maybe it was there before, with its little medieval Church tucked alongside, but you can feel it drawing you inwards.  Here are heroes and heroines, those men and women mentioned beforehand as well as those who look after the house.  Central hero today is Bernard Saunders whose vision for Waterperry is a main reason for it being what it is and whose vision for Meditation as the way to connect with the source of all life has helped so many of us.

Great Grandmothers meditate too

She is 94 and a great grandmother.  Life now is limited by movement, memory and every other thing which comes with grand old age.  Always elegant during her life, I don't know if Velcro has come into play but she would manage Velcro with style, she just would.  Her daughter, my friend, told me yesterday that despite the creeping effects of time, her mother says every morning to herself, la vie est belle!  And this stuck in the blogger's mind as true.  So today I have this running in mind and everything gets the blessing of that sentence and instead of the blogger's mind filling with extraneous bits and pieces, nothing to do with what is going on, every little thing gets a chance to  be really felt, really tasted and really considered.  The great good fortune of health and ability to enjoy beauty and life is suddenly catapulted into memory and huge gratitude comes for just being alive.  Even my husband has been sprinkled with magic today and the dogs and hens are given extra rations and extra pats.

And you can see from the picture above that the feeling of la belle vie is spreading from the grandmother to the great grandchild and just looking at it, you are feeling la vie est belle wherever you are.  You can start just by joining in with that delicious and infectious smile.  Thanks to that photographer for letting us into the secret.

Grannies loose on the internet!

Two Grannies

family matters

this was when I got married!

One of Martha Lane Fox's great achievements has  been to champion the cause of Grannies, or not just Grannies, but the generation before the internet, getting on to the internet.  This Granny blogger is now roaring about it spreading the word about meditation but there are dangers!! From the blogosphere to twitter sphere to Facebook, I have tried every which way to promote the idea that meditation works and is not too difficult if you want to try it; however, trying to update my profile on Facebook, I pressed a heart which I thought just sid that my status was a married one
 and then before you could say watch out, the news went out that I had just got married and would I like to upload a photograph!  Certainly not! but how to undo it and to undo the fact that it now says I live in Sydney.  Oh Martha, what have you done letting us out of our quiet reflective meditative Grandmotherly place to gallop about wildly in cyberspace.
We worry about the young getting into trouble on the internet but the young should be worrying about what we get up to.
Back in your meditation box Granny!

Martha Lane Fox and Philosophy on Woman's Hour

Martha Lane Fox

Yesterday on the radio Martha Lane Fox was being interviewed.  Hers is a remarkable story of courage  of clarity of thinking.  This blogger who is interested in the way the mind and body can be observed especially liked her description of the old English or was it British virtue of denial.  In her case, this meant she worked both with and independently of the pains in the body, not allowing them to rule her real life.  I hope I have got this right Martha, but you are now on my list of heroines.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039cbss. You will also hear about female philosophers being sexually harassed in universities.  What a pity that philosophy should be allowed to be dragged into trouble through academia, when it is the most wonderful subject for anyone who wants to examine life. Of course, philosophically-minded Grannies are unlikely to be the subject of sexual harassment which is an advantage to Granniedom but we would like young women to be allowed the same freedom through philosophy and send best wishes to the two splendid lady philosophy professors who are out there holding up a banner for wisdom.
So, more heroes and heroines; Martha Lane Fox, Heidegger, Plato and Plotinus for today.

Optimistic Granny

Dalai Lama in 2007 in Amritsar

A cause for optimism when we really need to hear and act on positive thinking.  This blogger is a tweeter and amongst the tweets I follow I found a link to this.  As the tweeter tweeted, the Dalai Lama, great big hero of blogger in question, says the future of the world relies on women,  He is not alone, a great teacher of the Vedic Tradition who inspired me, said that if women of the world held hands (I think he meant metaphorically) it would make the difference. So check this out before too long and see if you agree? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxgTsyL4y0E  Come on Grannies, now we have time to meditate and time to observe, we can make the difference, really we can.

Confessions up! blogger confesses to being a fan

In today's newspapers which this  blogger scans daily, Canon Anthony McBride, Dean of Salford said in relation to the report that confessions are up 65% in Catholic Cathedrals, that "a positive experience of talking about yourself with somebody and bringing God into the equation is found to be helpful to a lot of people".
This raises the blogger's spirits, makes the blogger optimistic because it shows that despite having access to every sort of device which we think connects us to each other and to information, we really have a heartfelt need to get straight with ourselves.  Although not a Roman Catholic, the idea of going into one of those velvet curtained boxes in a quiet Church with a kindly priest listening to the dreadful mistakes I have made is rather attractive but I am hoping that turning to that same presence in meditation.  Well aware of all the human errors made, I am given a chance of renewal of spirit and a space to face up to those grisly bothersome niggling tiresome faults in my individual thinking.  I hope that each day I try to be a bit better because of meditation and not just expect that everything and everyone around me gets better!
This blogger is already a fan of Pope Francis as well as the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Father Laurence Freeman, Rev Alice Goodman, Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, Father Rob Marshall, Laura Hyde, Catherine Thomlinson,Valery Rees, Donald Lambie, Richard Burnett and Sylvia Leiserach.  Four of these will be at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 20th so you can become a fan too.

For Digital Detox, Meditation twice a day

There has been a great deal of interest/concern/uncertainty about the digital world which is now almost everybody's domain.  There is a campaign https://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/digitaldetox to help people who might be addicted to the digital world to take a week off and of course that isn't a bad idea, taking a week off anything which has become compelling is helpful.  There is evidence that taking a week off from your children and letting Granny look after them is beneficial to parents!

When the parents get back from the holiday, they are totally in love with their children again and hopefully with one another.
Meditation gives you a break and also allows you to see the compelling nature of the ideas which come roaring into life as you aim for peace and quiet.  You begin to see that you are free however much they roar at you for attention, you just keep going back to base, to your mantra, to your prayer word, again and again and again.  Then you come out and the toxic nature of the things which grip are in perspective.  Like your children after a week away, they are adorable and manageable again, your ideas and your digital world are there to be useful, to be creative and not to rule you.

Girls starting school

This girl starts school shortly, she is 4 and she has a large uniform with new name tapes.  Now she is 4 she says she doesn't mind tadpoles anymore!  YOU are a bit older than 4 and you are about to start a new career as a teacher!  WOW, that is something.  I know that you are more nervous than Grace, it is no mean thing going into a classroom of up to 30 girls aged 14 or 15 and not being nervous.
It is a bit too easy to just suggest meditation will help, I can't do more than suggest it but I can try to give a reason.  There is something that happens, some connection to a bigger, wider, more profound source which takes place when you turn inward.  If you just turned inward to thoughts, you would get thinking done, but if you turn and open to a still presence, using your mantra or a prayer, you are saying that you hope for help, you are admitting your own vulnerability.  You will put in all the effort to be a good teacher, that is in your nature, you will prepare and be ready for whatever comes, so I can only encourage you from my place of retirement to make that extra effort, take that little extra time each day to be still.  All the girls in your care will be, like Grace, nervously waiting for school but really they will want to be taught and to be liked.  Good luck old fruit! We will be thinking of you.