Sue Vincent's Blog: Echoes of Life, page 1034
April 1, 2015
Review of Notes from a Small Dog: Four Legs on Two by Sue Vincent
That dog gets all the attention…
A lovely review of Ani’s book
Originally posted on new2writing:
Notes from a Small Dog: Four Legs on Two by Sue Vincent
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book came to my attention after discovering this writer contributed to a regular blog, Daily Echo (http://scvincent.com/), I had been lucky enough to read some of the excerpts and when I discovered these tales (no pun intended) had become a book I had to buy it.
Sue Vincents writing is beautiful and the variety of work she creates is astounding. Ani instantly captures the minds (and hearts) of all those who read her stories. Ani’s interpretation of the world is hilarious (and true) and her journey from pup to pen-pusher is magical. An endearing collection that will brighten anyone’s day. Along with a fabulous collection that would make any heart melt.
My only complaint is that I think my henry will now forever be known as the hoover monster!…
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March 31, 2015
Dear Wen XXII
Originally posted on Stuart France:
Dear Wen…
Yeah, yeah… …Romans!
Can’t get overly enthused myself despite the copious lectures I have had to endure…
It was quite good seeing the recycled roman columns at Chester Cathedral…
…and of course the floor tiles at Little Missenden…
…but they were never the main event just side-shows.
The thought of setting out specifically for something Roman seems anathema especially since the elusive yet copiously signed ‘road’ over the Moors…
Quite happy to trip up North again…the ‘Loki bound’ stone is interesting… his head bindings could be snakes or a jester’s cap…
And we always were going to get into Middleton, possibly on the way back to Whitby…
Wasn’t there a ruined Roman Temple in the precincts of Maiden Castle?
Fan Mail… who needs it?
You have my permission to instruct the Beast in two new words.
‘Art’ and ‘Prostitution’…
Love,
Don x
March 29, 2015
Dear Don XXII
Dear Don,
Seems a bit daft writing when I will probably see you before you get this, but you know what my memory is like… except for ‘useless’ information.
We really are going to have to go back up north… and this time via Hadrian’s Wall. If it hadn’t been for the snow we could have gone that way on the Scottish trip. Still, I’d like to show you the Mithraeum up there. Miles from nowhere and very little to actually see, of course… but you will feel it. The landscape wraps around it somehow.
Carrawburgh: image source
There are other Roman remains all the way along… now, now… we are going to have to look at some Roman stuff at some point, you know. Just to put everything else in context. But I promise we won’t go looking for non-existent roads again like we did in North Yorkshire.
It’s weird really. The Romans, just like the Normans, the Saxons… all invaders, yet there seems to be a separateness about the Legions. They marked the land by imposition, cutting through it rather than embracing it, I suppose. Even though the others imposed their will on the people, they do seem to have been more in sympathy with the land itself. Perhaps that is why we don’t ‘feel’ their relevance in the same way as we feel the ghosts of the others. They came, they saw, they conquered… then left again. And that’s without the whole Anglesey massacre, of course…
Anyway, if we do go up to the Temple of Mithras, we could always call at a few of the other sites we have mentioned… there are a couple more crosses we need to see, including the one with Loki. And that’s not so far… only at Kirkby Stephen… And of course there is the Loki at Middleton too. You know, the church that was closed outside Pickering?
Kirkby Stephen – Image: Geograph
I keep getting the urge to go to the British Museum too… though I’m not sure why. I keep finding good reasons to visit, but what is really pulling me I’m not sure. But it is ages since I was there…
By the way, the Beast hopes you enjoyed the copy of the new book anyway. Whether you liked it or not.
The Beast further asks me to mention who amongst us gets all the
fan mail…
The Beast, of course, may be in big trouble… ( even if it is perfectly true…)
Love,
Wen and Anu x
March 28, 2015
Life and death
“… So what do you think happens then?”
“Nothing… non-existence.”
“So what is there to fear in that?”
“Well, I’ll stop existing!” he said, as if that should explain it.
“But if you don’t exist… you won’t exist to know about it. So why be afraid?” I watched the wheels turn, yet even in acceptance of the logic, there was a kickback of ‘yeah, but’. I, of course, am convinced of the survival of the spark of being… not necessarily the ‘me’ I know… perhaps more of ‘me’ than I know, yet not the me who walks through life daily and looks out through brown eyes. Not the personality.
I have the best of both worlds, so to speak. If I am right, then there cannot be a reason to fear. If I am wrong, ‘I’ won’t exist to know about it… so there can be no reason to fear.
Dying, that’s a different kettle of fish altogether. I admit that I fear the manner in which the Reaper comes calling. In an ideal world I would die like my great-grandmother… in her own bed, surrounded by her family… compos mentis and fully aware of what was happening and how. But the world seldom delivers ideal situations and like most people the manner of transit sort of matters. But death itself holds no terror…. No more than birth and just as inevitable once the process of life incarnate has begun.
“It is dissolution you are afraid of?”
“Yep.” Now, you see, for me there is a subsuming into something greater than our individuality, a loss of the personal self, perhaps, but that personality is only a fragmentary reflection of what we are.
“Ego death.” My interlocutor bristled at that… the connotation of the word ‘ego’ raises spectres of selfishness, yet it should only raise the idea of self centred being. No, he wasn’t going to like that either. A being who looks out at the world from its own central point of focus then.
He growled a disclaimer, yet that is what we fear when we fear death. Dissolution. The loss of who we see ourselves as being now… the only aspect of self we really feel we know. This is what most of us fear when we think of death rather than dying… and probably why we avoid the issue so much in our modern, egocentric society. We view death almost as the ultimate robbery, a violation of who we are.
It wasn’t always thus; once the dead were honoured and their transition seen as just another rite of passage. The bones of the ancestors were kept and venerated, the presence of their spirit welcomed at the hearth; their wisdom, gleaned over a lifetime and beyond, revered.
It is hard to get our heads around the concept of our own ‘not being’; the dissolution of our personality is quite literally unthinkable… how to imagine a state where thought, emotion… we…are not? There are many who attribute the belief in some kind of survival after death as simply a fear-reaction to that unimaginable oblivion. Yet for many of us there is a simple certainty that there is more to it than that.
Yet does it truly matter… whatever we believe, unless we believe in all the tortures of the various hells, there should be no need to fear. And regardless of what lies beyond the gates of life, we still have to live each day in the world as best we can. Perhaps it doesn’t matter what we will meet then, so much as it matters whether we have lived our lives as if they matter… because every single life does; in our uniqueness we shape the face of the world with every breath and we owe it to ourselves and to each other to make each breath count.
Remembered joy
For a very little while, just a few, short weeks a couple of years ago, I managed to afford dancing lessons. I had always been a dancer and ballroom had replaced the stage after the pointe shoes had to go. But I hadn’t danced for a very long time. Decades.
Writing yesterday’s post and thinking of remembered joy took me back to that first waltz in so very long. The instructor, wanting to assess how much… or how little… I knew… waltzed me once around floor and stopping, with a grinning hobbit at arms length said, “You haven’t forgotten hardly anything.” Then we went back and started again and something inside me was incandescent.
The joy of those first moments of music, movement and dance was something I will never forget… and as my friend had come along too, I have a reminder if ever I needed one. She recorded that first waltz… and many laughter filled moments through quickstep, tango and foxtrot too…
I watched the video again… and again last night. Smiling tears and something that feels very like love go with that little clip.
Afterwards, I wrote:
I write a lot about joy. It is a simple thing, a word of a mere three letters, but it can be such a difficult state to attain in this crazy world in which we live. The stresses and strains of the daily grind, worries about finances, health, work or the state of the nation… the list is endless-seeming and different, but no less consuming, for each of us.
Yet, it need not be so. We can find joy in the most unlikely places and when we are least expecting it. It can be a shaft of sunlight through autumn beeches, a stag on a golf course green, a smile or a song. We can touch it through a child’s laughter, a blue sky or the sound of pebbles on a wave stroked shore. Wherever we find it, it is born within. It does not come from anywhere outside ourselves, but bubbles up and overflows like champagne from a wellspring of inner life.
So why do I write of it today? Because I am basking in its glow. Last night I danced for the first time in nearly forty years. With that first waltz as my feet miraculously recalled the steps and I sank into the music and movement, the world fell into place. The bare hall could have been a glittering ballroom and the practical leggings and baggy shirt a confection of shimmering silks.. it wouldn’t have mattered a bit. Only that moment mattered.
It is hard to define that moment of pure, unreasoning joy. It is not something we are taught about, nor, I think, something everyone feels automatically. It requires, perhaps, an openness to life and comes when we enter into a moment and live it wholeheartedly and absolutely. It rises from somewhere so profound and engulfs the being, feeling as if it will overflow, something so vast that it cannot be contained within one human form and must burst the boundaries.
Sometimes there seems to be no reason except a simple joy in being alive. Sometimes we know what has triggered it. The catalyst may seem obvious to us, and we may think ‘this makes me happy,’ or even ‘you make me happy’.. yet it is not so. Nothing and no-one makes us feel that inrush of joy. We do that ourselves when we allow ourselves to open the doors of being and hold out our arms to the moment and that feeling. When we experience life on all levels, entering and living it for a time with a conscious abandon.
And this is a great gift, for if joy depended on exterior things, situations and people, think how fragile it would be, how much at the mercy of change and loss. Yet joy, the capacity to feel it, remains… in spite of the impermanence and fluctuation of the material world and our mundane existence.
We are, I think, each responsible for our own capacity for joy. Circumstances may hurt or distress us, events and heartaches overtake us. But that capacity to feel remains, and we have that perfection of free will that allows us the liberty to simply react to outside pressures …or to act as we choose. And I believe we can turn our faces towards possibility and joy.
And it feeds the soul in the same way that light brings the rose to glory.
March 27, 2015
Bedwyr’s Song
I’m away again… so an old one.
Symbols of Avalon – SisterSpace
On the dark road to midnight
The bard takes his rest
With a song in his dream
And his heart on the Quest.
The hollow hills beckon,
The call of the Fae…
The Light in his heart burns
To show him the Way.
To the stone by the well,
In the green, leafy glade,
With the stars on the Water
Reflecting the Blade.
There Mother and Maiden
Will hold up the Grail,
Be true and your questing,
Sir Knight, cannot fail.
‘Tis only the purest in heart, it is told,
With an innocent faith, in his soul,
Who can follow the Path through the darkest of nights,
To the Castle that shelters his goal.
Though the wildwood bewilders his stumbling feet
The Knight marches onward and true,
Through bramble and thicket he forges ahead
With his Vision his heart’s only view.
On the shores of a Lake
Our Knight stops to rest,
Where once, for a King
As a final request,
He had taken a Blade
Wrought of glory and pain,
Cast it far in the Lake
To conceal it again.
For the glory had failed
And the story had died,
Pierced with a darker Blade
Deep in its side.
There the Blood that had fallen,
The Life that was shed,
Rekindled the Heart
Of the Land where he bled.
As the dawn rises over the dark, glassy Lake
On the shore, where the mistwraiths arise,
The incense of apple wood perfumes the air,
And the morning Light shines from his eyes…
The Veil thins, revealing the prow of a boat
That sailed to him thus once before,
When the Blade that was forged out of magic and Light
He had cast, in his grief, from the shore.
Then the barge had appeared
As the Hand took the Sword
And the Queens had enfolded
His sacrificed Lord.
Yet, this time is different,
For there in the prow
The Lady is smiling
And beckons him now.
He crosses the water,
The song of the Quest
Echoes the drum beating
Deep in his breast.
The Mists close around him
No longer to roam,
For Avalon’s Lady
Is taking him Home.
ARS GEOMETRICA IX
Originally posted on Stuart France:
‘…From a man and a woman make a circle…’
- The Sixteenth Leaf.
We thought again of The Officers Of Law who appeared to see the girl as a man?
‘The Spirit as Inner Fire is ‘Agni’ for the Vedic and ‘Hermes’ for the Greek.
The vessel defines the content which is a perception.
Make the vessel transparent in order to ‘see’ clearly.’
The ’Seventeenth’ Leaf
Clearly, this sequence of directions related to a famous alchemical engraving.
We dashed to our library…
‘The Flight of Atalanta’ by Michael Maier…
‘The squaring of the circle represents a marriage of opposites. It can be accomplished in two ways, by area or perimeter. The circle is a symbol of the eternal element in creation, whilst the square represents solid matter and human works…
The largest squared circle in the natural world is the earth and moon.
Earth’s mean radius is 3960 miles and…
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