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.