American Prints

A wonderful exhibition of American prints at the British Museum

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John O'Donohue at Glenstal Abbey

Reflection

We have spectacular landscapes here in the West of Ireland. Everywhere, dark mountains preside. It is also a landscape singularly unburdened by California-style sunshine. We enjoy generous endowments of rain, fog and mist. Sometimes, when the fog comes down, the mountains disappear completely. More interesting is when you awaken on a day when the fog has come halfway down the mountain, making the top of the mountain invisible and rendering the stem of the mountain strong and lucent. It is fascinating to stand under the mountain then, and experience the summit as absent. Though you know it is still there near you, you can no longer claim it with the eye. I always find this to be a thrilling experience of the power of the imagination. Like the mountains around every life, huge adjacencies preside, presences that remain invisible to the eye.

You have never seen your own face. You cannot see your thoughts, which shape your mind and world, and you have never seen the inner world hidden behind the faces of those closest to you. You cannot see the future that is already claiming you and you cannot see the divine, so the invisible world holds our deepest treasures and it is only through the gift of the imagination that we can sense these adjacent worlds and cross over their thresholds. The imagination is the great friend of possibility. For the alert and awakened imagination, possibilities always beckon towards new pathways of creativity, belonging and love. Each of us has been created by the Divine Artist, made in the image and likeness of the Divine Imagination. When we become creative, we approach holiness. The imagination knows that it is at these thresholds that new worlds rise into view. At last, we abandon the repetitive safety of the predictable and risk ourselves into the adventure of the unknown.

There is a sublime wildness in God that calls us to risk becoming who we dream and have long been dreamed to be. The Divine Imagination has no time for the closed and the finished. To each of us is given an unfinished, open-ended world and spirituality is the adventure of attention, to which its secret and sacred forms begin to emerge. More often that not, the language of religion falsifies the subtlety of Divine Presence and Imagination, and labels and names mislead us into the bland territories of the obvious. Often, when you wake in the middle of the night, unprotected, uncertainty finds you. The role an name you wear during the day, the things you do, what you have achieved, who others hold you to be, all of that seems so far away now. You feel alone, a stranger in the world. Though disturbing, such moments of dangerous knowing draw us deeper into who we really are and why it is that we are here. It helps us become aware of the subtle, but secret, order of Divine Providence that guides our ways and our days. This helps us realise even in dark times how light is kept alive in the world. It awakens us to the beauty of goodness.

Around us all the time is the invisible presence of the unknown saints, people who bring goodness alive. We will never know their names, for they live far from the world of image and headlines, yet through the dignity of their kindness, they keep the humane tissue of a culture alive and vital. Each day we awaken, unknown kindness supports and shelters us. These are the gifts we never see directly, yet their presence makes life bearable. Their endurance prevents the house of the mind from becoming a haunted ruin.

The great Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue, who died suddenly earlier this year. Transscribed from a BBC programme

Bark

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Snout

A bit of fun; a robot project

Vilhelm Hammershoi at the Royal Academy

I knew nothing about Vilhelm Hammershoi - a marvellous Danish painter -until recently, when the Royal Academy held an exhibition of his work

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The Best Hotel in the World?

Cliveden is sometimes described as the best hotel in the world. I don't know enough places which might fall into that category to judge, but it's certainly the finest I've ever visited. The glorious Italianate facade which greets you at the end of the magnificent drive is spectacular, but intimate - and indeed Cliveden still feels like a large country house rather than an hotel. An additional wing overlooking the famous swimming pool adds a number of more standard-sized rooms, but if you stay, take one of the rooms in the main house with their beautiful views across the front garden down towards the Thames.

You enter through the main hall - a marvellous panelled room dominated by a huge fireplace and hung with tapestries - and the original portrait of Nancy Astor. It's a perfect place for tea - or drinks before dinner.


You can have dinner in the Terrace dining room overlooking the garden, and it’s now done up like a pudding in an overrich terracotta but still lacks intimacy. Moreover, the chef still seems to think that the type of nouvelle cuisine where you need a golf trolley to find your way to disparate scraps of food on a vast plate is 'le mode’.. The 'haute cuisine' restaurant Waldo's in the cellars is more interesting and there are some fascinating portraits and photographs in the corridors - including a fine one of Christine Keeler. Breakfast can also be taken communally at a huge table in a magnificent room at the end of the house, just as it was when a private home - but now, only if you book for a large party.

The pool area behind a lovely old wall has been converted in to a full spa with a heated indoor pool, but it's still very easy to imagine the the beginnings of the famous Profumo / Keeler scandal there (for those too young to know about such things, there's a brief summary here)

Despite the grandeur of the house and its associations, it's marvellously relaxed and one quickly settles in to the lifestyle. Surrounded by a large park and formal gardens which are beautifully looked after by the National Trust, there is much to see before returning to the comfort of a chair by the fire in the library to contemplate starting some scandals of your own.

Favourite Comedy

I've always loved hand puppets since the days of Peter Brough, Shani Lewis, Rod Hull and the like- and the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre is wonderful!

The Poison of Bonuses

I worked in the financial services sector of the City for nearly 40 years, and from the 1980s onwards was increasingly astonished at the offering of US-style bonuses for doing an honest day's work. Such bonuses serve to skew individuals' performance towards a particular easily identified course of action - usually involving more risk - but more importantly are likely to erode people's personal values. Our work is performed as our duty to ourselves, our families and our colleagues and we should discharge it to the best of our ability at all times. We should not need the carrot of more money to do a difficult job; we do it because it is our job. Sometimes one just happens to be in the hot seat at the relevant time; if we weren't any good, we wouldn't be there. The chap at Barclays said to be getting additional compensation for finding outside capital is also just doing his job, and should need no more of shareholders' funds than his normal pay for doing it. To offer people large bonuses is to insult peoples' characters.

The Milky Way

Favourite Writings - The Lycian Shore

Photo by Kei Lawford. Click to enlarge

As I came down from the causeway through the theatre, a black snake like a shy god slid into the laurel thicket; I stepped over the stones rattled by earthquakes on their foundations, and climbed from terrace to terrace of corn where peasants built shallow walls round the pockets of ancient houses. The full ears, ready for harvest, beat their slight weight against my passing hand, as if they to would spend their weak resistance for the headland's warm and living peace. So remote, so undisturbed was the great hollow, that its own particular divinity seemed to fill it - complete in being as a cup is filled to the brim. There was no judgement here but only the consequence of actions; the good corn filled itself out in deeper places and the bad dwindled among stones, and all things were a part of each other in a soil that someone's building two thousand or more years ago had flattened or spoiled. A fair-haired woman, still beautiful, with green eyes, was reaping. I asked if I might photograph, and she called her husband, who came climbing up and stood beside her, and glanced at her and smiled when I said that she was like the English to look at: they were both pleased by her fairness, and there was a happy friendliness between them. He had the oval face of the Mediterranean, and she the straight northern brows: and the history of the world had washed over Cnidus to produce them both, from the days when their ancestors, in the oldest city of the peninsular, joined in building the Hellenium in Egypt, or sent the first caryatid to Delphi.

Freya Stark-- The Lycian Shore
(I make no excuse for resuing one of my favourite writings, as no one reads back to when this was first posted, least of all me)