Thoughts of Others on Social Distancing and Lockdown

Social Distancing

“And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. They listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.

"And the people healed and in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.

"And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed."

~Kitty O'Meara

Lockdown

Yes, there is fear.
Yes, there is isolation.
Yes, there is panic buying.
Yes, there is sickness.
Yes, there is even death.
But,
They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise
You can hear the birds again.
They say that after just a few weeks of quiet
The sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear
They say that in the streets of Assisi
People are singing to each other across the empty squares, keeping their windows open so that those who are alone may hear the sounds of family around them.
They say that a hotel in the West of Ireland is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound.
Today a young woman I know is busy spreading fliers with her number through the neighbourhood that the elders may have someone to call on.
Today Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Temples are preparing to welcome and shelter the homeless, the sick, the weary.
All over the world people are slowing down and reflecting.
All over the world people are looking at their neighbours in a new way.
All over the world, people are waking up to a new reality
To how big we really are.
To how little control we really have.
To what really matters.To Love.
So we pray and we remember that
Yes there is fear.
But there does not have to be hate.
Yes there is isolation.
But there does not have to be loneliness.
Yes there is panic buying.
But there does not have to be meanness.
Yes there is sickness.
But there does not have to be disease of the soul
Yes there is even death.
But there can always be a rebirth of love.
Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.
Today, breathe. 
Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic
The birds are singing again,
The sky is clearing,
Spring is coming,
And we are always encompassed by Love.
Open the windows of your soul
And though you may not be able to touch across the empty square,
Sing.

By Fr Richard Hendrick, IrelandMarch 13 2020

"What is the Corona/Covid-19 Virus Really Teaching us?

I’m a strong believer that there is a spiritual purpose behind everything that happens, whether that is what we perceive as being good or being bad.

As I meditate upon this, I want to share with you what I feel the Corona/Covid-19 virus is really doing to us:

1) It is reminding us that we are all equal, regardless of our culture, religion, occupation, financial situation or how famous we are. This disease treats us all equally, perhaps we should to. If you don’t believe me, just ask Tom Hanks.

2) It is reminding us that we are all connected and something that affects one person has an effect on another. It is reminding us that the false borders that we have put up have little value as this virus does not need a passport. It is reminding us, by oppressing us for a short time, of those in this world whose whole life is spent in oppression.

3) It is reminding us of how precious our health is and how we have moved to neglect it through eating nutrient poor manufactured food and drinking water that is contaminated with chemicals upon chemicals. If we don’t look after our health, we will, of course, get sick.

4) It is reminding us of the shortness of life and of what is most important for us to do, which is to help each other, especially those who are old or sick. Our purpose is not to buy toilet roll.

5) It is reminding us of how materialistic our society has become and how, when in times of difficulty, we remember that it’s the essentials that we need (food, water, medicine) as opposed to the luxuries that we sometimes unnecessarily give value to.

6) It is reminding us of how important our family and home life is and how much we have neglected this. It is forcing us back into our houses so we can rebuild them into our home and to strengthen our family unit.

7) It is reminding us that our true work is not our job, that is what we do, not what we were created to do. Our true work is to look after each other, to protect each other and to be of benefit to one another.

8) It is reminding us to keep our egos in check. It is reminding us that no matter how great we think we are or how great others think we are,
a virus can bring our world to a standstill.

9) It is reminding us that the power of freewill is in our hands. We can choose to cooperate and help each other, to share, to give, to help and to support each other or we can choose to be selfish, to hoard, to look after only our self. Indeed, it is difficulties that bring out our true colors.

10) It is reminding us that we can be patient, or we can panic. We can either understand that this type of situation has happened many times before in history and will pass, or we can panic and see it as the end of the world and, consequently, cause ourselves more harm than good.

11) It is reminding us that this can either be an end or a new beginning. This can be a time of reflection and understanding, where we learn from our mistakes, or it can be the start of a cycle which will continue until we finally learn the lesson we are meant to.

12) It is reminding us that this Earth is sick. It is reminding us that we need to look at the rate of deforestation just as urgently as we look at the speed at which toilet rolls are disappearing off of shelves. We are sick because our home is sick. 

13) It is reminding us that after every difficulty, there is always ease. Life is cyclical, and this is just a phase in this great cycle. We do not need to panic; this too shall pass.

14) Whereas many see the Corona/Covid-19 virus as a great disaster, I prefer to see it as a *great corrector*

It is sent to remind us of the important lessons that we seem to have forgotten and it is up to us if we will learn them or not."

It’s a big eye opener all of this, isn’t it 

We are finally realising money has no value.

Your amazing job is no longer an amazing job, your expensive clothes now have no worth and no one gives a shit how you look anymore.

Your big house is just 4 empty walls like everyone else’s. 

Your nice car is running on 4 tyres, the same as everyone else’s. 

We are finally seeing who the important people are, the ones who make a difference to our lives and are doing the crucial jobs we need. 

Shop workers ✔️
Care workers ✔️
Medical staff ✔️
Emergency services ✔️
Farmers ✔️
Lorry drivers/delivery people ✔️
Cleaners ✔️
Refuse workers ✔️

These people are the ones who keep our country ticking over, the core of our daily lives, the people who regularly go unnoticed and are often frowned upon but keep working hard, generally on a low income.
People constantly look down on them and gloat that they earn more money than them.

But what worth does your money have now?
How secure is your job in the real world when we take a step back to reality?

I’m proud of all of these people, they don’t earn enough for what they do, and they’re never appreciated for what they contribute.

Be kind to them, thank them, go out your way to tell them what an amazing job they’re doing.

Could you imagine how shit this would be without them??

Be thankful, I’ll be happy to buy them all a drink if we come out the other side

"We fell asleep in one world, and woke up in another.

Suddenly Disney is out of magic,
Paris is no longer romantic,
New York doesn't stand up anymore,
the Chinese wall is no longer a fortress, and Mecca is empty.

Hugs & kisses suddenly become weapons, and not visiting parents & friends becomes an act of love.

Suddenly you realise that power, beauty & money are worthless, and can't get you the oxygen you're fighting for.

The world continues its life and it is beautiful. It only puts humans in cages. I think it's sending us a message:

"You are not necessary. The air, earth, water and sky without you are fine. When you come back, remember that you are my guests. Not my masters."

NGS Evening at Hazelby House June 2019

The NGS Party at Hazelby House

The NGS held a marvellous party at Patrick and Gabby Hungerford's Hazelby House on a beautiful June evening. I had not seen the garden before but was astonished at its perfection. The photos can attest that there wasn't a leaf out of place and there was superb garden statuary and sculpture to make even Travers Nettleton weep.

One of the tranquil pools at Hazelby

Beryl Williams 1949 - 2020

Beryl Williams was a dear friend for thirty years, who I got to know from the days when she managed a shop in the Royal Exchange to her life in Fethiye (Turkey) to which she emigrated in 2004 to ease her MS. She was a wise, bright and beautiful soul, and leaves a loving family of her daughter Amanda and Kirsty and son Paul and their offspring, as well as Peter, a former London insurance broker who she lived (and sailed) with for the last 12 years.

Beryl Williams on her boat in Turkey

The Story of the Raphael Seat

The Raphael Seat and brick piers

The Raphael Seat is, in fact, a large piece of sculpture, and now occupies the space in which for some time I had intended a sculpture or garden feature to stand.

The upper lawn area has always lacked a focal point - the Tang horse is off to the side under the tree and is easily missed and the quince tree is not yet ancient enough - and I had originally thought that some kind of sculpture such as a piece from Rachel Bebb's Garden Gallery would be perfect. But the cost was always much more than I wanted to spend. I did consider buying an old stone bench but those with age such as sold by Travers Nettleton at Garden Art were also prohibitively expensive,

I was, therefore, delighted to be directed to Haddonstone, the makers of good quality pressed stone garden ornaments, and there find a sculpture with an interesting provenance as well as being on sale. The seat in question was a 'Raphael' seat designed by Bob Haddonstone in the 1980s for the Drapers' Livery Company, so-called as it has Raphael drawings in bas relief on the back panels. An exactly similar seat (on four Drapers' Ram's bases) stands in one of the courtyards at Drapers' Hall today and given the family's long links with the Drapers, this provenance was an added attraction.

The area for the seat to stand required some preparation, as it weighed half a ton (but came in pieces on three pallets) and so Brian Dibley put in a concrete base topped with old York stone flags. Imagining the seat in place I also thought that it would need some additional masonry support, and decided to put in two brick piers topped by old stone caps that would reduce the dominance of the seat and also frame the view under the hazel tree in both directions. The result can be seen at the top of the page.

The seat covered with pond silt to encourage wethering (May 2020) 

At the moment the seat stands out too much due to it being so white, but when it has weathered to a decent patina, it should look as if it's always been here.

Hannah Arendt on Lies and Propaganda

When I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to power in the early 1930s. Paramilitary gangs terrorizing the opposition, the incompetence and opportunism of German conservatives, the Reichstag Fire. And we learned about the critical importance of propaganda, the deliberate misinforming of the public in order to sway opinions en masse and achieve popular support (or at least the appearance of it). While Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels purged Jewish and leftist artists and writers, he built a massive media infrastructure that played, writes PBS, “probably the most important role in creating an atmosphere in Germany that made it possible for the Nazis to commit terrible atrocities against Jews, homosexuals, and other minorities.”

How did the minority party of Hitler and Goebbels take over and break the will of the German people so thoroughly that they would allow and participate in mass murder? Post-war scholars of totalitarianism like Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt asked that question over and over, for several decades afterwards. Their earliest studies on the subject looked at two sides of the equation. Adorno contributed to a massive volume of social psychology called The Authoritarian Personality, which studied individuals predisposed to the appeals of totalitarianism. He invented what he called the F-Scale (“F” for “fascism”), one of several measures he used to theorize the Authoritarian Personality Type

Arendt, on the other hand, looked closely at the regimes of Hitler and Stalin and their functionaries, at the ideology of scientific racism, and at the mechanism of propaganda in fostering “a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member... is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders.” So she wrote in her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism, going on to elaborate that this “mixture of gullibility and cynicism... is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements":

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true... The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Why the constant, often blatant lying? For one thing, it functioned as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity. “The great analysts of truth and language in politics”---writes McGill University political philosophy professor Jacob T. Levy---including “George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is.... Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism.”

Arendt and others recognized, writes Levy, that “being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless.” She also recognized the function of an avalanche of lies to render a populace powerless to resist, the phenomenon we now refer to as “gaslighting”:

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end---is being destroyed. 

The epistemological ground thus pulled out from under them, most would depend on whatever the leader said, no matter its relation to truth. “The essential conviction shared by all ranks,” Arendt concluded, “from fellow traveller to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the ‘first commandment’ of the movement: ‘The Fuehrer is always right,’ is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war.”

“We too,” writes Jeffrey Isaacs at The Washington Post, “live in dark times"---an allusion to another of Arendt’s sobering analyses—“even if they are different and perhaps less dark.” Arendt wrote Origins of Totalitarianism from research and observations gathered during the 1940s, a very specific historical period. Nonetheless the book, Isaacs remarks, “raises a set of fundamental questions about how tyranny can arise and the dangerous forms of inhumanity to which it can lead.” Arendt's analysis of propaganda and the function of lies seems particularly relevant at this moment. The kinds of blatant lies she wrote of might become so commonplace as to become banal. We might begin to think they are an irrelevant sideshow. This, she suggests, would be a mistake.

King James' Bible and the Book of Common Player

The King James' Bible at Litchfield

Having attended a meditation on the life of William Tyndale at Bossington Church recently, I have become even more aware of the place of the King James' Bible in our culture. And when last week I attended an otherwise lovely carol service at St Katherine Cree Church in the City, I was saddened to hear the beautiful and time-honoured phrases in the lessons replaced with modern English.

I realise of course that I have been conditioned to hear the King James' version of the Bible over the past 70 years. Like many of my friends, I have attended school services since the age of five of six and since going regularly to my church at Litchfield for the last thirty years I am steeped both in King James and the Book of Common Prayer and have never heard any other. I love their cadences and phrasing. Any variation, however well-meaning, is a small psychic shock, akin to changing the words of a Beatles song.

The words used at church services make up the major party of the liturgy of worship and as such are imbued with deep significance and energy. It's not fanciful to imagine the words imprinted into the fabric of churches where they have been intoned without change for the past 400 years.  I am afraid that I agree with those who ascribe a fall-off in attendance at traditional church services to the lessening of the use of such glorious language.

See also - Litchfield Church - St Cecilia's Prayer 

See also - William Tyndale - the Translator of the Bible

William Tyndale - the Translator of the Bible

The Authorised Version of King James' Bible, published in 1611, was translated from the Latin and Hebrew by six committees of scholars, and remains, with some later amendments, the most authoritative text of the Bible as far as the Anglican Church is concerned.

However, the original translation of the Bible into English from Latin and Hebrew was undertaken by William Tyndale, who produced the first printed translation of the New Testament in 1526 while being sought and harassed by both the Church and Henry VIII in the form of Sir Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell. Any translation into the vernacular was regarded as heresy, and in particular, Tyndale's translation further aggravated the Church by choosing to translate the Greek 'ekklesia' as 'congregation' rather than 'Church' and 'presbyteros' as 'elder' instead of 'priest'. Working in secrecy in Antwerp, he made over 5000 revisions to the New Testament in the 1534 edition, which became 'the glory of his life's work'. The King James' translators left most of his work (said to be 93%) untouched - though, of course, not the two examples above. He also translated the first five books of the Old Testament (the Pentateuch) including Genesis and Deuteronomy, but while working on the rest in 1536 he was betrayed and executed.

Melvyn Bragg has written a useful short biography of Tyndale, and he concludes:

Genius Discarded

Yet in this country, the King James Bible has been allowed to fade away over the past few decades. While Shakespeare and all his Elizabethan and Jacobean pageant of language is played, filmed, televised and read more and more and in the original without dissent, it was decided that Tyndale was too complicated! This has proved to be a dreadful mistake, We have discarded a genius and are every day poorer for it. I see it as no accident that Anglican congregations have fallen away since the King James Bible was abandoned.

The Anglican Church has more or less outlawed then King James Version. It pops up now and again but with far less regularity and authority that it deserves. Why not have Tyndale / King James services in every church and every school on the first week of every month. For non-Christians, it would be a feast of language, adventure and argument,. For all who listened it would be to hear and understand the deepest spring of our cultural history through the mind of a unique genius; William Tyndale.

Melvyn Bragg - William Tyndale Postscript

There is also a film of Tyndale's life made in 1986 called 'God's Outlaw'

See also: The King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer

Favourite Paintings - Peter Breughel Netherlandisch Proverbs

Peter Brueghel the Elder - Nederlandisch Proverbs

I am sometimes given to complaining that modern paintings seem to have no meaning or significance. The same can not be said of Brueghel, and this painting - Nederlandisch Proverbs, painted in 1559 - is replete with illusions, some more evident than others. It is said that there are more the 100 proverbs illustrating human foolishness in this scene, the meanings of many of which have been lost. The principal figure of the woman draping her husband with a blue cloak is said to show that she is having an affair. A full list of those that can still be identified can be found on Wikipedia here.

See also Favourite Paintings - Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

See also Art and What it Means to Me

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Favourite Paintings - Landscape with the Fall of Icarus - Peter Breughel the Elder

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

W.H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong, 

The old Masters: how well they understood 

Its human position: how it takes place 

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; 

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting 

For the miraculous birth, there always must be 

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating 

On a pond at the edge of the wood: 

They never forgot 

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course 

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot 

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse 

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. 

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away 

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may 

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone 

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green 

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen 

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, 

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

See also Favourite Writings - Ovid 

Some Inadequate Words on Grief

I am not able to write with any authority on grief as I have never experienced it. But others have and do. Instead, I often give friends who have lost loved ones Joan Didion's book: 'The Year of Magical Thinking', which seem to capture the condition most truly.

This also seems to be a fine piece

See also Dirge Without Music