What is in your suitcase? why not put it down!

My attention was caught today by the image of a small girl sent from Austria to escape war arriving in England with one small suitcase, a good coat and a pair of good boots.  That case contained all she had.  I wondered what I would have in my suitcase if I had to leave everything behind.  It made me think about not just the physical things but the attachments, the ideas and emotions which seem to be what I am.  These ideas aren't outside, they are ideas which have taken such strong root that it is hard to see without them.  We assume we are that person with those needs and it is like an addiction, it consumes all the energy.  The suitcase is then firmly bonded to my person and putting it down is the last thing I want to do.

Have you ever been totally consumed by an idea, say of being in love with a particular person?  Have you ever been consumed by jealousy?  by anger? by curiosity or even by the feeling of having to do something, have something, eat something, drink something, or be something to make you complete.  Have you ever felt that you needed to be busy or the be with another person?  Especially now I am a Granny I am aware of the times when there isn't so much happening, no family piling in to the kitchen for tea, no job to go to, and just the Grandpa and me wondering what is on telly tonight!   But then there is meditation where all the ideas which form the suitcase of belongings get put down for half an hour.  Meditation helps dissolve the burdens we carry.   Meditation is the best practice for the moment when we do have to leave everything and put the suitcase down whether we want to or not and it allows us to stop worrying if the suitcase is lost in transit.  After all, who would really want to go anywhere with a suitcase to carry, it would just cramp our style.  So why not put down your suitcase of stuff, find a place to meditate and a person who can teach you how and take the time to sort out and discard the thoughts you don't need.

A Meditation on Holocaust Day

Gena Turgel

Imagine, today up your road march soldiers who are from your own country, they have been to school with your children, they speak exactly the same language.  They have already made you and your Jewish people live in a ghetto, all of you together, leaving your comfortable middle class life, your pictures, your kitchen, your table, your garden and herded you together.  Today though they order your out of the ghetto and herd you and your children to the station.  This time there are no seats in the carriages, these are cattle trucks but for people.  You are still together though, you hope that you are going to another ghetto but that you will still be together.  

We know now that these Jewish families didn't stay together, they were split up, divided, stripped, gassed, hung and tortured.  Some survived, their stories survived but it is too easy to read them as if they were history, as if they happened when people weren't as civilised as we are.  We have seen the films, we have felt sorry and maybe lucky that it didn't happen to our family but we seldom hear that story and know that it happened. In the newspaper today, Gena Turgel, the only one of 9 children to survive says: "My story is of one survivor but maybe that was why I was spared so my testimony bears witness to the murder of six million others.  They were real people: mothers, fathers, children, doctors, teachers.  They used to laugh like we laugh and cry like we cry, but now they scream in silence.

I read this and cry; I seldom cry, too old perhaps but this story isn't just a story, it happened and it was a terrible thing.  Let us not allow terrible things to happen, even the smallest terrible thing distorts our humanity and we are responsible because we are human.  She lights a candle on Holocaust Day, we lit one when we meditated this morning and we will again and we will join in the remembrance.

Things are not what they seem!

Who am I to judge?

who are you not to be judged

It is because nothing is quite as it seems that meditation is such a must.  Imagine that you were any of the people on this page, your public image and who you are would be miles apart from one another. But supposing you really thought you were the President of France and that people knew you as just that, your failings would be hard to face up to.  You would need to find somewhere to just be your self, to be neither a celebrity or just a stupid plonker!

I hope that the Pope was making just this suggestion to Francois when they met yesterday.   After saying that they shared a patron Saint, He might have said pourquoi ne meditatez vous?,(Why don't you meditate?) after all, you are a secularist! and mon Fils, (my son), croyez moi, (believe me), les femmes resemblent les anges, (look like angels) but it is easier to live with une vraie ange, (a real angel) than one of these tricksy ones you have fallen in with.  And this is pourquoi, (why);  vous ne savez jamais qu'est ce qu'elles vraiment pensent. (what they really think!)  But for certain, they know what you are thinking.  (Another stupid plonker!)

What you really should have gone for is a good wife sans trop ambition (without too much ambition).  Mon fils, (my son) it isn't trop tard, (too late).  Find someone like Mademoiselle Goldie Hawn, (Twiggy) who, over coffee and pastries told the delegates at Davos just how le meditation (meditation) and mindfulness would help them to cope in the monde politique (hectic world of politics, power and finance).  

Where do you go when you die and how do you get there?

Gaze of Silence Paul Klee

 Rev Alice Goodman

One small boy asks his mother a question and then they both put the question to Rev Alice Goodman.  We are standing there and we wonder how she will answer this!  How would you?  If you haven't a quick answer here is my best attempt at recording what she said: " When you die, you go to God and that is happiness, total happiness, no crying, no unhappiness just happiness, and the way we know about this is from Jesus who was the only one who came from there to tell us.  Small boy listens with full attention and she proceeds with the question of how you get there by believing that is true.  Small boy totally satisfied for the moment and we are too.  Are you?  

Algie 

The other remarkable thing about this lady vicar is the way she looks at children and the way they are completely transfixed by the attention given, there is nothing which comes between the child and her, nothing between the child and attention.  Is the attention the same as God? Is the attention the link between the source of the attention and the one who receives it?  You can find Rev Alice at St Vigor's Church, Fulbourn, Cambridgeshire where there is a good Sunday School for children and a vicar who gives them full attention when they are in front of her.  If you would like your children to hear the stories from the Bible and you live near by, take them along, you and they will be properly received. She reminds us that in Psalm 36, psalms of David sung by Jesus, that all animals get there too.  Yippee for Algie and Muffin and Butty!  I don't know about the hens though.

Muffin

Butty

A little meditation Monsieur President perhaps H M might say

What has he been up to

Boris? or Francois?

The result of the name choosing for the cockerel or coq is Boris!  It is because of that mop of fair hair as well as his way with the women which is of course hearsay.   The original cockerel is called Sarko, named at the height of Nicolas Sarkozy's time in and out of the Elysee Palace and others.  If only the news had broken earlier, Boris could have been named Francois for the beleaguered President of France, Francois Hollande and the pair of them could be strutting round the garden having their wicked way with the girls, aka, the hens
What is clear about my pair of coqs is that they can't think of anything else but sex and food. Whole days go by with chasing, succeeding, failing, eating, chasing, succeeding, failing and eating, these two wouldn't have the time to consider tax and welfare, immigration and trips to the White House even if they had brains which they don't.   So if I was French I would be worried that my President didn't really have his mind on the job he was meant to be doing for all the millions of French people who rely on him because he has his mind on another job.

Pleased as Punch

C'est moi! another job!

I think that Francois Hollande, Valerie Trierweiler, Mlle Gayet and all the others over-occupied with sex would find that a little meditation would help!  It would bring a little peace to the poor overheated and over used parts and hearts and give confidence to the French that THEY could rest in their beds secure in the knowledge that the country was being well and carefully looked after because Monsieur le  President was also resting in HIS own bed, son meme lit!  

So anyone out there who has access to the Elysee Palace and the ear of the President and who believes meditation would help Monsieur, pop in and make the suggestion.  The rest of us wait to hear with eager anticipation if he has taken the advice even if we aren't very optimistic.  I expect Her Majesty who said much the same in her Christmas Message about pausing for reflection and meditating, could give Francois some tips for pausing and reflecting if she goes to France while he is still President and still living in the Palace.  Good luck to her say I.  Read what Michael Deacon says http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/francois-hollande/10573002/Sketch-Francois-Hollande-et-son-alleged-bit-sur-le-side.html

the Paul Klee exhibition has something to say

The Equilibist, Paul Klee

We went to the Paul Klee exhibition yesterday and I can highly commend it if you are interested in Paul Klee or even if you aren't yet but might be interested after you read this!  I hadn't ever trodden across the millennium bridge or been to the Tate Modern and neither had I ever really considered the work of this painter, I thought he was too cerebral for a Granny like me.  There is a quote which appears as part of the title of the exhibition from Marcel Duchamp who said that "Art-making is making the invisible visible" and after a while of peering at pictures wondering how to make sense of them, this picture really helped me to see what was being made visible.  It is called the Equilibrist and on the surface it is a few lines and circles on a dark background, quite childlike in a way but you can see that these lines and circles aren't really childish, they have put there with great care.   So you look a bit harder or you allow the picture to look at you may suddenly see that it is full of presence and that the lines and circles are just the lightest outline of something which looks at you.  You might find that you become still and balanced and after all that trudging about you might feel rested, I did.  

(Seventh-century icon of Santa Maria Nova, Rome, 
from Sister Wendy Beckett’s Encounters with God:
In Quest of the Ancient Icons of Mary)

And then when I came home I looked at Sister Wendy Beckett's book Encounters with God: In Quest of the Ancient Icons of Mary and found a remarkable similarity in this picture below, a seventh century icon of the Virgin Mary and the Klee picture The Equilibrist.  It looks at you in the same way, it draws you in to the presence which is both behind it and that from which it comes.  It reminds me of the way the Equilibrist had touched me and made me think how easy it is to walk quickly past a picture or anything at all; a tree, a person or a landscape and to only see the colour and the form.  But being a Granny gives you time to stay and examine both pictures and things and as they kindly put seats in the rooms of exhibitions spaces it means you can sit down.  This is a distinct advantage of being a Granny, you can sit in exhibitions and you aren't so driven to do things, you can go slowly and wonder a bit at the things you have taken at face value and not really pondered at all.  

I saw it with my own eyes!

maybe this is him

It is called an Epiphany moment when something that seemed ordinary suddenly seems extraordinary and in the Church calendar it comes in the dark month after Christmas.  In the Bible, Jesus is taken for baptism to the temple and Simeon, the aged priest sees the glory of God in the baby.  He then says those wonderful words….Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to Thy word for my eyes have seen Thy salvation which thou hast prepared before the face of all people….. Simeon knows that it is a revelation and that this is the one  he has been waiting to see, has been hanging on in the temple to see.

And this is him

This is him

So it is the right time of year for an epiphany moment and though a bit more humdrum than Simeon's I had one.  Our Christmas was a great deal more comfortable than spending the night in a stable, we were in Dubai and it was easy and full of lovely things, the only blight was that he, my life partner, husband, Richard was struck by illness, not stay in your bed all the time illness but debilitating.  We came back and it went on so we weren't really having the best of times.  He gets tired and so the mornings are a bit slower.  I left him to get up slowly one morning and went up later to see if he was alright and found him meditating.  Instead of finding the person I expected, the character which is so familiar, I saw something different.  Yes, it was him, in his good old fleece and crocs sitting in his usual chair by the window but there was no sign of the character, just a great beauty and peace could be felt.  This was an Epiphany moment for me but just in case you wonder where the well known Grandpa, dog walker, log splitter, lover of debate not to mention a good old argument is, here are photographs which shows that epiphany or not, the character is still doing its particular thing!

Meditation in 10 minutes, does that make you jealous!

I read about Andy Puddicombe's headspace description of meditation.  He makes meditation simple and available, offers it as something you can do walking, sitting and even jogging!  But he did learn it the hard way, up to 18 hours of meditation in monasteries in Nepal and an interest in meditation from his youth which must have been there for a reason.  If you are an old meditator, one, like me who tries for the twice daily half hour mantra meditation what is your reaction to reading this Times offer that 10 minutes meditation a day will make you calm.  There are two reactions and the first is the least attractive, it is the one that says "hey, REAL meditation is formal, it is a spiritual practice and it is what I have done for 40 years boy meditator!"   But then if I have meditated for 40 years, give or take a lapse or a baby, what has it been for?  If it has been to elevate my thinking from selfishness and the less attractive traits which exist in being a person, then surely I want the good for all.  The prayer of the wise is that All should be happy, All should be without disease and None be in misery of any kind and if 10 minutes meditation makes this happen, it must be good.  So well done Andy Puddicombe

Someone you love is someone you want to be close to

What this good Pope does is allow people to be open and free because he recognises that wonderful spirit which is what each person really is.  And smiling helps!!! and here is someone who doesn't stop smiling.  And it helps to live a good life, and here is someone who lives a simple life, doesn't wear his  position as Pope, just happens to be the Pope at this moment but a Pope who loves people.  I don't know what the Pope prays about or how he spends the time when he isn't being public Pope but I am sure that he doesn't sit twiddling his thumbs.  But what I love about the sense of him is that he doesn't seem to exude criticism of people like me who might be twiddling their thumbs, he attracts us towards him with whatever it is that makes him smile and it makes me think that if he was part of the welcoming committee in the land of after this life, I would be looking forward to being welcomed and it would be worth making sure, as sure as you can be, that where he is the direction you want to go in.

In the pub! says Archbishop and Socrates might meet you there

The Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, suggested that a good vicar might go into the pub to engage with people about the things that matter.  In Peterborough, which is up the A1 and an expanding town, Michael Reid takes philosophy into the pub.  It is engaging, it is illuminating, it is open to everyone and gives everyone a chance to be a philosopher.  What I most liked from my corner was seeing people who I had initially thought to be people in the pub turn into philosophers.  It is suddenly as clear as clear that we are all philosophers and some of us do philosophy best in the pub.  Thanks Michael for a most enlightening evening, I give it five stars and will definitely come again.  Will I see you there? or will you start philosophy in your own pub?  Of course, in addition you can enrol in a course in philosophy in both Cambridge or Peterborough by going to http://www.cbphilosophy.org.

lost inspiration, feel old? watch this and feel better

Dadi Janki

Pope Francis

Here is a link to a remarkable video of a remarkable 96 year old.  If you feel low or old or sick or alone, watching it will make you feel different.  It may not be entirely your bag to step into a world where spirituality is the norm, for most of us spiritual expression is reserved for Church or Temple or Synagogue, however, you can't help being carried along by this human story and by this human being. The film is about Dadi Janki, the leader of the Christmas Lights, aka as the Brahma Kumaris who in my experience are the same inside and out and who I deeply deeply respect and admire.  Archbishop Welby made Pope Francis his man of the year, I make Dadi my woman of the year.  Who is your person of the year?