If He came today, who would He be

We have been told that He will come again to put the things which have slipped into poor condition back in order.  I am given to wondering how he would come back.  I think he could do well to think about becoming a Harry Potter model because Harry Potter has somehow gained admittance to our thinking as someone half human and half supernatural.  Harry, though a fictional character, has supernatural powers and magic and we have accepted him as a natural hero.  I know this is true because while planning for my grandchildren's summer holiday I am looking for tickets for my grandsons to see the Harry Potter play, the Cursed Child in the summer.  My daughter is as wedded to the story of Harry as her brother is to Star Wars.  So I am given to wondering if someone who could excite the interest of young people while maintaining a serious understanding of the difference between good and bad and be prepared to fight to re-establish goodness might be just the ticket for these times.

I hope that he might help us to remember these tips for living, two of which are quite easy, two of which are very very difficult.  These are the four of them.

1. To friends, be friendly. (not so difficult)

2. To all those in need show compassion. (natural but fairly easy)

3. To those who succeed, delight in their success.(not so easy but common sense.)

4. When faced with those who hate you, show equanimity.  (This is the real work).

So when YOU come back to help us, help us with this one please.

Have YOU worked out who YOU are?

Have you worked out who YOU are?  Here are some clues which may help by eliminating who you aren't!
Are YOU always skiing?
Are YOU always playing golf?
Are YOU always doing yoga?
Are YOU always looking after your baby?
Are YOU always in a house? an apartment? a train? an aeroplane?
Are YOU always working in an office? driving a car?  Are you always going on holiday, eating continuously, always drinking, spending all the time dancing, meditating, sewing, sleeping or sailing a boat?
YOU aren't just that are YOU? and yet YOU do do those things don't YOU?
So, you aren't only a skier, an eater, a golfer, a yoga practitioner, a mum or dad, a banker, a property owner or dweller, a flyer, a driver, an holiday maker, an eater of food, a drinker of beverages, a dancer, a meditator, a seamstress or tailor, a sleeper or sailor, at least YOU aren't just that are YOU?
So, what are YOU?  YOU who I love so much your name is tattoed on my heart.
YOU are the one who just plays at all these things.  YOU ski through skiers, dance through dancers, ,  meditate with meditators, travel with travellers and sail with sailors.  YOU are both none of them and yet all of them, YOU are the untouchable beloved within each of these people and it is for YOU that the son is loved, the daughter is loved, the husband, the wife, the mother and father, the teacher and the friend is loved and is loving.  YOU are that person in the heart of each person and that is why I love YOU most of all.

Who do I write it for? I write it for YOU of course

Do you wonder who I write this blog for?  I write it for YOU of course.  I write it for YOU who are  far away just in case YOU might need to know that I am always thinking of YOU and yours.  YOU aren't really so far off though because when I write the blog, YOU are right there in the centre of my thinking, right there in my sight, I can see YOU there better than on Facebook or on WhatsApp or Instagram because I have YOUR name tattooed on my heart.   (I thought about the word tattoo and wondered if I should have put written on my heart but then it struck me that writing might come off or be changed but I have always heard that tattoos are there for life).  I know that sometimes YOU are up a mountain, sometimes YOU are on the sea or river, sometimes YOU are driving along in the weather of the place YOU are, sometimes YOU are with family and friends and sometimes YOU are alone.  The days go past and we appear to be the same people, getting up, doing stuff, eating and drinking and Grandpa and I will be meditating.  But for us now it is more Badedas and ibuprofen after gardening, less wondering which restaurant we will visit, more nodding off in front of the telly, less concern with things of the everyday.  Now not so sharp of hearing, wearing our spectacles on the top of our heads or tucked into the jumper, our friends not so much dropping in as dropping off the perch, visits to the GP and advice now given by those who we once advised, life is changing and the really important things come to the fore.  That is just the way life goes and YOU, so far away and doing well, we miss YOU and look forward to seeing you when you come home.

What did I do to deserve this?

Today's thinking is full of blame and it is jolly easy to buy into that.  Complaining is so easy!  You just have to find a few things that have gone wrong, you had the wrong parent, you went to the wrong school, you married the wrong person, the government are rubbish and altogether you have had bad luck all along.  I can dig away and find a few nuggets to pull out and make dance before my inner eye if I want to be cast down and feel as if I have been swimming in a pool of bad luck!   If I tell myself the stories of bad luck or tell them to others, there has to be a response and the desired response is sympathy, a shaking of the head and sharing of misery and the effect of that is not good, not good at all.  What does it bring with it?  If you feel sorry for yourself you find you have to make amends to help yourself feel better and what better way to do that than opening a bottle of wine, dipping your hand into a box of chocolates or buying yourself a new pair of shoes/a dress/a new house/a holiday.  It can persuade you to change things, to change your husband, your car, your friendships because after all they don't really understand how simply awful your life is!  Does this ring a bell for you?  And more important do these changes produce the lasting relief you hoped for?  Certainly there is mostly regret at the chocolate and alcohol soothing because you just put on extra pounds!

Monk on mobile phone!

One of the things which can pull you out of this popular thinking and it takes a real effort to shift your thinking especially when so much of your apparent identity is riding on it, is to meet someone else who just doesn't carry that burden and to find that they are happy and free and don't need to escape from any past, real or imagined.  I found that the monks at St Catherine's Monastery woke me up to the silliness of complaint and more to the joy and wonder to be found in simple things and it made looking around at what there is around a different experience.  I think to myself what did I ever do to deserve the way daffodils grow, dogs love their masters, that there is sun and rain and spring brings great bursts of growth.  What did I do to deserve good health, a family, a comfortable bed, the kindness of a good night's sleep, friends who don't fail me, to live in a peaceful country where there are laws to make things work for people.  Did I do anything about building the Churches, the Cathedrals, the temples, the Monasteries, the hospitals or the schools?  Of course not, so perhaps instead of complaining about anything I don't like about them or about the people who have built and maintained and taught and nursed and healed in them, I should be thinking about how to help them.

These two are friends as well as Monks.

These monks who live in Sinai, they don't appear to complain, they just keep the gateway to heaven open by saying prayers, lighting lamps, intoning the psalms and not many chocolates I don't think. Anyway I didn't see any chocolate wrappers sticking out of their habits! And being there in the monastery guesthouse made me appreciate the simple clean air, the blue blue sky, the almond blossom and also how unusual it is to see those things when most of the time, I am immersed in a world constructed by me.  If you want to read more about the monks of St Catherine, click on the picture of these two.

Almond blossom in the garden of the Monastery

A Mother's day Meditation

Mother's Day has history.  In the days when young girls were in service in big houses, they were given a cake and a day off to go and visit their mothers for the day.  It has another bit of history which is that it is about 9 months before Christmas and therefore it connects to that particular and special birth and to that particular and special mother.

My recollection of seeing my first child and experiencing the immediate love for that particular child was knowing that every mother felt this love for her child, it was as natural as spring coming every year.  Watching a daughter become a mother, you see the whole of love in action possessing those joined together by nature completely.

love is freely available and plentiful as oxygen.

Mum's get recognition and thanks for being Mums on Mother's Day but perhaps we Mums should be thinking of the gift of love we felt when we became mothers and how huge that love is and that we tap into it, we don't own it.  Here is a poem from one of Alexander McCall Smith's characters as a Mothers Day gift to my children and any other person reading this today.  This is from The Revolving Door of Life (the 44 Scotland Street Series) and it is the second verse of  the painter, Angus Lordie's poem at the end of

the book.   It is also a thank you to all those who have loved enough to work in the National Health Service to do all they can to bring well-being to people.  Of course particularly this week, the response of the doctors and medical staff from St Thomas's Hospital and in our case, those who have looked after my own Mary and her baby for so many months, in and out of the spaceship and now home and healthy.

The remarkable thing about love

Is that it is freely available,

Is as plentiful oxygen

Is as joyous as a burn in spate

And need never run out

And yet for all its plenitude

We ration it so strictly and forget

Its curative properties, its subtle 

Ability to make the soul-injured

Whole again, to make the lonely

Somehow assured that their solitude

Will not last forever; its promise

That if we open our heart

It is joy and resolution

   That will march triumphant

     Through the gates we create.

Everything has its uses

Lama Zangmo

If you heard Lama Zangmo last November  spelling out the 4 noble truths of Buddhism, you would have heard her talk about the first noble Truth which the Buddha discovered.  This is the Truth of waking up to the pain or misery which accompanies life.  This realisation, she said was the start of developing compassion.  This has to be tested, you have to test it yourself to find out if it is valid. Luckily most of us find it out slowly because life also offers us a taste of bliss and a glimpse of heaven.  Somehow when you begin to see the double nature of life you then have to work out a way of negotiating this apparent contradiction  of it being able to give bliss  but in the same measure to be  full of pain and misery.  You have to sort this contradiction out and  and make it as good as you can.  If you click on her name, you will hear her lay this out simply and happily.  You can see that whatever she has realised, it has given her a great happiness which shines out from her face.   So, what has she taught me or in what way has what she said made sense of whatever pain might hove into my life?  This is a work in progress because it goes against the grain not to complain of any pain we might feel.  This is what I have found to be most helpful when I am stuck.  I have to take a good look at the pain, hold it right up to the light and then think about another person's difficulty and say to myself, is this pain that they have worse than mine and I can say for absolute certainty that I mostly find their pain is most likely much worse than mine.  What the whole exercise does is to sharpen you up and make you realise how many very courageous people there are out there and what they can teach you. Make your OUCH into something beautiful, it may take time but it will be worth it. You see it in her face and maybe one day in mine and one day in yours.

Plato comes back in time for new babies

Blissful baby smiling

I have no real right or qualification to talk about meditation and philosophy as a chicken-keeping, dog-walking, sometime parent and grandparent, not having had a job of paid work since I started in this domestic state, with no degree in philosophy and the only degree I do have, a poor one in English.   And yet about 50 years ago I woke up to two things.  First, that life, although giving many moments of happiness, is full of suffering and as life progresses along, this becomes clearer and clearer.  Walking along the street of any small town, you see it, old people suffering from the ailments of the old, young from all sorts of other things. Visiting people in hospital, it is writ even larger, joy and suffering are there hand in hand.  When I was a new mother  I met a woman who became my great friend I was struck by her beautiful way with children and her calmness. Luckily she was a neighbour with children the same age as min and it is no exaggeration to say that she woke something indefinable up in me, she woke my innermost person.  And we also had a determined and extraordinary vicar in our local Church, determined that we should wake up to what he had to offer through his own faith.   I hadn't met people who were motivated in any sort of spiritual way.  I still have a lot of waking up to do but in that beginning of waking up, I knew that there was a truth and many people had found it, great and amazing people but ordinary and determined people so there might be a chance for me.  Now, I have been writing a lot about babies and clearly I have been spending a lot of time around one new tiny one which has given me a chance to observe babies closely. It is clear that babies live in two worlds, the world they have come from and the world they have arrived in.  The world they came from is maybe what we call heaven, it is that heavenly blissfulness that babies bring which make us fall in love, a purity which we can't resist.  But they have come into this world and to keep that vision alive is much more of a challenge.  But you see, I didn't deserve it but see what happened to me and what might happen to anyone.

Bettany Hughes and Socrates

I followed my new friend into a School of Philosophy.  I didn't really get a lot of it but I knew I liked being there, I liked the people and felt strangely at home.  The years passed, all of nearly 50 and during that time gradually gradually I began to wake up.  I met people who had studied ancient philosophy, I started to meditate, I discovered that whatever God was, he or she had sent person after person into the world to make this Truth known.  One of them was Socrates and he is getting really popular again. Have you listened to or heard of Bettany Hughes  or maybe watched her on BBC 4 recently presenting Genius of the Ancient World talking about Socrates?  And of course it was Plato who wrote down what Socrates did and what he meant.  Socrates brought philosophy at its highest level into an Athens which was degenerating.  The Athenians, being threatened, put him to death but Plato  made him live just as Bettany Hughes makes him live for us.  She has said that if she had her way "there would be a philosopher sitting round the table on every committee and in every boardroom,only then, as well as discussing the what and the how, would there be someone to ask the why? Why are we doing this? Is it for the common good?" I think she is right and my goodness we need one  or two  now.