Sue Vincent's Blog: Echoes of Life, page 1061

Notes from a small dog IV

It snowed! Not just a little bit this time… not enough, I have to say, but more than I’ve seen so far. It’s wonderful! She, of course, isn’t quite so happy about it, but she did mutter something about taking me out so she could shut the back door long enough for the house to warm up, put on a big thick coat and a flat cap, then she got the harness and lead….

I let her take the camera too. It keeps her occupied while I’m busy with the important stuff. The birds are so easy to spot against the white stuff! Especially the pheasants. You’ve no idea how many I was obliged to chase and speak to severely!

She took me down the lane towards the woods and let me off the lead, finally… It was so exciting, I just had to run! Of course, with the snow holding the grass down I could get inside all the hedgerows and through to the fields and woods. She had her new whistle though, so I knew when she was getting lonely and kept coming back to check on her.

She told me I’d missed the deer though. Kept going on about how beautiful it was just standing there so close she could look into its eyes. Hrmph. Pity, I’ve not see one of those. I expect it is some kind of bird. The red kites were busy up in the snowy sky. I wondered if they were playing too. They looked as if they were.

The little hamlet where the cat lives was all white. The cat obviously doesn’t appreciate snow as it wasn’t outside as usual. There were the blackbirds though. Still, the woods were waiting and I needed to check on my favourite tree. It has been too muddy to go in there... well, for her anyway. I don’t mind the mud. I can soon rub it off on the carpet and sofa….

My tree was fine. It is a special one, the first I ever got to know well when I was a puppy. I thought I’d better check the dew pond too. She doesn’t seem to like me going in there, even though it is very shallow and muddy and great fun, but I was too fast for her today.

I would draw a veil over the next few minutes, but she says if I am going to be allowed to use the computer I have to tell the whole story. Though if she keeps going on about Bambi on ice, we are going to fall out….I’m not sure what this Bambi is, but she keeps chuckling about it. However, I did get to grips... possibly the wrong choice of word, that… with learning about ice.

As far as I was concerned water was either cold, like in the pond or my bowl, or hot, like the perfumed stuff she wallows in. Either way, it isn’t solid. And it doesn’t break when you taking a flying leap and land on it.

Well, that’s what I thought.

It pains me to admit it, but I was wrong. She, of course, just laughed till the tears ran down her face. And pointed the camera. Normally I try and pose for her, but I was busy. Every time I got a pawhold on the ice, the stuff snapped under me. It took ages to get out of there, and to be fair, she did start putting her stiff down to come in and get me. I managed though... she hates having muddy feet.

I got my own back for the laughing though. Well a girl has to shake her fur dry, doesn’t she?

We went to the other pond too, but I thought I’d give that one a miss…

She keeps saying that experience is a great teacher. I’ll concede that she may be right. She could have stopped me going in the dew pond… well, she could have tried, anyway…but I wouldn’t have learned about the ice then and how fragile it is when you bounce on it. And if we’d gone to the big pond where the water is deep I might not have been able to get out on my own. I suppose that’s what she means when she goes on about lessons coming in spirals and it being better to face them first time round while they are smaller than to hide from them, or even protect people from them, until they are big and can do more damage, and take a lot more climbing out of.

Over the fields, where I dried and cleaned my fur in the snow, through the little copse then back home. Well come on, we’d only been out for an hour... I wasn’t ready to go in. So I let her play chase with the lead for half an hour longer to get really warm… then I very generously made her open the back door again so I could play in the garden some more while she cooled down some.

Of course, I’m a little tired now after giving her such a good run, but I like to make sure she stays fit and the fresh air is good for her. So I’ll sign off for now and stretch out on the sofa for a while.

Love,
Ani

Spreading the word...

We are currently busy working on the programme for the Silent Eye launch weekend in Derbyshire, England, in April of this year. In some respects it feels a little like sitting at the centre of a web and pulling the threads into an ordered and functional pattern. There are so many strands woven in and out of what we are building here and although some are ones you would expect, there are others one would not even have thought of, perhaps, until the work is begun.

The venue, of course, we know well and love. It is a perfect place for what we wish to do, in a quiet village and a beautiful location, with a traditional village pub a few yards away that will provide a convivial setting for socialising in the evenings, a place where laughter and friendships can grow, as well as in the quieter rooms of the Nightingale centre itself.

We have the story of the Troubadour which will weave throughout the weekend, carrying a theme that binds the entire workshop into a personal journey for each of the Companions who attend. Meditations, presentations, knowledge sessions and ritual drama are being created and brought to life as I write. There are beautiful things afoot.

The seven themes explored will form the basis of the teachings of the School, but again will be shared in ways which are fun and engaging as well as informative, and we firmly believe that these teachings are of value to everyone, not just those who may wish to join the School.

Although the weekend will see the launch of the School we want to make this something that will also stand alone for each participant, giving a personal experience of shared learning and exploration that is not exclusive to or dependent upon membership of the School at any point. Everyone is welcome to attend and will, we hope, find the weekend an interesting and vivid experience as we engage both the intellect and the emotions.

We have the dilemma of advertising the weekend, of course. We do not have unlimited funds to spend on traditional advertising, the School is not a business and will be run on a not–for-profit basis. The time we give is our own and we give it because we are driven to do so.

We have chosen to stand alone and not take advantage of the associations with the School we loved and served in the past. We do not therefore have a membership that runs to thousands worldwide. The School is being brought to birth and needs to be seen. We cannot be a School without students, and students cannot find us if they do not know we are there. So we write, to raise awareness, both of the School itself and what we wish to share through its teachings.

Every ‘like’ and ‘share’ on the social media networks helps us achieve this goal of being visible and we are so very grateful for those who have chosen to support us by doing this.

There are still places available if you would like to be with us in April as we launch the Silent Eye. Everyone who attends will add something unique to this birthing of a new Mystery School and you can be sure of a very warm welcome.

Levels of communication

I wrote this entire article before I finally abandoned the attempt to sleep, though of course, I lost most of it on the way downstairs. A pity, it was a brilliant piece as I was dictating it in my mind. Isn’t that always how it is, though? That, like the doorstep wisdom that allows us to find a perfect retort in only retrospect, is the sort of wry irony the mind seems to delight in occasionally.

It is three in the morning and I cannot sleep. I’ve tried for the past couple of hours but have tossed and turned, too warm in spite of the frozen night, my body reminding me of the painkillers I should have taken and my mind hovering around the edges of that odd lucidity that lies somewhere between consciousness and sleep.

By the time the kettle had boiled about all I had left of the mental article was that it spoke about Helen Keller. Firing up the computer I realised how little I actually knew about her at a conscious level. Only that she was counted a heroine and was blind. I could not for the life of me remember more than that through the fuzziness of fatigue although I must know more than that to have woven the article around her. It had made sense on the threshold of dream.

The memory must be stored in there somewhere in the cobwebbed halls of the mind. The girls Grammar School I attended followed the ‘house’ system, each house being named after a remarkable woman. I was in Ockenden house, but I remember Keller was one of the others and at some point we must have learned the stories of these women or it would have been a rather pointless exercise to name the houses for them and use them as exemplars.

A glance at the internet reminded me. A truly remarkable woman, Helen Keller was an American writer, speaker, social and political activist and the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. Losing both her sight and her hearing after a mystery illness in her second year she had no concept of speech or words and little means of communication until Anne Sullivan began to work with her. The remarkable mind and determination of the woman shines through the rest of her story. So does her courage. There is a quiet fearlessness about her achievements.

Of course, there is also another story intimately linked with hers and that is Anne Sullivan’s tale, of which less seems known and written. It is quite as remarkable to me to be able to teach such an abstract idea as speech and the naming of individual items and concepts to a child who can neither hear nor see, and to a level of complexity that allowed Keller the freedom to learn and to express herself at the level she attained. It resonates with a tale of patience and determination.

Now forgive me for being a bit fanciful. It is, after all the wee small hours of the morning, and a little surreal here. The house is utterly silent apart from the creaks and groans of its fabric as it attempts to reconcile the warmth inside with the freezing night air, sounding as if a small army of ghosts are populating its very bones. Even the dog merely opened one eye and looked at my wakefulness in disgust.

It seemed to me as I read the stories of these two remarkable women that there was a parallel here for the relationship between the levels of human consciousness. On the one hand there is the child, closed in from so much awareness by the lack of sight and sound, unable to comprehend that each item in her world can be individually named, that even abstract things like emotions can be described, discussed, communicated. Unaware that words exist and therefore restricted in her learning to what she directly experiences. On the other hand there is the teacher, fully aware of the possibilities of language, seeing the potential in the child yet powerless to open the floodgates of possibility until a line of communication is found and established.

This seems such a similar thing to the way we ourselves stand in our quest for spiritual progress, where the physical self is limited by the form and the senses, yet within there is a higher consciousness that is struggling to reach us on a level we can understand and communicate something beyond the realm of physical experience.

Even at three in the morning when we ought to be asleep.

Framing the past

I bought a couple of cheap frames while I was in town today. Inevitably, as it was a spur of the moment purchase, they were the wrong size for the paintings I intended to frame, but, with the thought of the boxes of old scribblings and paper piled in the corner upstairs, a trip to the studio might produce something.

Now, let’s be fair. Although I paint and have a room grandly referred to as the studio, in actual fact it is the simple luxury of a tiny back bedroom now vacated by the last of the fledglings. It is space I inherited from my younger son and the luxury of a room little bigger than a cupboard cannot be overstressed when canvasses the size of a small county have, hitherto, been painted on an adapted deck chair in the living room, getting in everyone’s way and making dinner taste inevitably of turpentine and varnish.

It is ironic, of course, that I finally have this space to use uniquely for painting yet tend to bring the whole lot downstairs so I can spread out, oblivious of the mess or the turpentine flavoured coffee as there is now only me and the dog…and she will curl up quietly under the easel wherever it is. It is the only time she does.

The piles of boxes hold sketches and pads full of stuff going back years…decades. I keep meaning to go through them and throw the rubbish away, which would be most of it to be honest, but I never get round to it.

For years they were shoved into the attic to make way for an ever increasing household as my own children grew, stepsons, their children and dogs took over the small house. In long-suffering silence I stood by as more and more of the things by which I thought I identified myself… books, paintings, photographs and memories from the past… were pushed to one side to make way for others and the necessities of daily life.

I imagine many people will identify with this if they think about it, in some form or another. It may be that personal pleasures and hobbies are foregone in order to fund things for the children. Time, energy and opportunity are spent where the priorities and necessities lie. And at some point most of us turn round and wonder who on earth we have become, because it sure as hell isn’t who we thought we would be.

It took me a while, of course… half a century or so… to really grasp that the ‘things’ don’t matter. They do not define me, simply remind me of times, places and people I have known. They may reflect my tastes or my efforts, my experiences or my hopes and dreams. But they are not me. They are not the experience, the person, the place or the dream. They are not even the memory. They are just things. Precious by association, meaningful because of memory, irreplaceable sometimes, but they only describe me, reflect me, they do not define.

And I have a feeling that once you come to that realisation, you are able to let everything go. I’m not suggesting a mass bonfire of memories and photographs here. I mean simply that you can enjoy them for what they are, triggers for memory, reflection s of dreams…things you own, but which do not own you.

I was torn between cringing and chuckling at the awfulness of some of the things I had kept in those piles of papers today. But I found a few I am going to frame. Not because they have any artistic merit at all, but because they remind me of a journey I have been taking all my life to bring me to today. They remind me that I had the courage to try something new, to experiment, to play and explore, to laugh at myself, to not be afraid of mistakes or failure, because they teach us more than success, every time.

So today I framed past failures and hung them on the wall. And do you know something? They make me smile.

Chasing Snowflakes

I woke to snow this morning. Not a lot, but it was a start. The child in me always feels that sense of wonder when I look out of the window on early morning snow. The world is pristine white, hushed and silent. It was still dark and the street lights gave the village a magical air that made me think immediately of wardrobes and fur coats. The inner child wanted to don the white furry cloak that still sits in its case in the top of the wardrobe and wander through the village while it awakened, like some arcane creature of myth.

That cloak could tell many tales, of castles and cliff tops, sea caves and magic, of Tintagel and Avalon. It could tell of friendships and beginnings and loving laughter…but it has yet to be worn in the snow.

However, there was another furry thing that needed to go out in the snow with more urgency. So I left my dreams on the windowsill and headed downstairs to let Ani out into the garden.
She loves snow.

After doing her usual dive through the door, she skidded to a surprised halt, looked round in excitement at me with a huge grin and started chasing snowflakes.
I watched, chuckling for a while with the camera, trying to capture her delight.

And of course, even before coffee hits the brain cells, the mind is working. So it was no surprise that I saw the analogy. How much time do we spend chasing snowflakes? Those elusive, illusory things that attract out attention, seem so important and desirable, only to find they were less solid than they seemed, less tangible… or turn out to be quite different from what we expected, melting into nothingness almost as soon as we catch them?

It was a day like that today, when everything seemed to be overlaid with different meaning. The light dusting of snow that changed a muddied field into a magical landscape. A simple change in perspective... snow is only water after all, and had it been rain that had fallen, the field would not have looked as beautiful. I would certainly not have stopped the car to take a photograph of the trampled mud. But the calm, misty white caught my imagination with its mystery.

It echoed a comment in an exchange of emails this morning, about how the smallest shift in perspective could change the whole landscape of a life.

I have been pondering these things today; it has been a thoughtful day, when unworded realisation hovers around the edges of consciousness where you have to try and catch it and hold it without damaging it… like catching a butterfly in your hands, fragile and delicate. Then, half the time, just when you think you have it, it wriggles out between your fingers and you can't squeeze in case you crush it.

Or it melts like a snowflake in your hand.

An intimate glimpse

As I was changing the sheets on my bed earlier it struck me what a very intimate portrait can be painted by the things kept on a bedside table. Anyone with eyes to see could learn a lot about a person from what is kept there. The bedroom is generally a fairly private area and we tend not to hide away the very personal little items in the same way as we might, perhaps, in more public rooms. Not that any room in my home hides me very well… even a cursory glance across the overstuffed bookshelves would sum me up in a trice. That is without Ani’s toys around the room, the paints on the table or the stacks of paperwork strewn across the desk.

Where was I? Oh yes. Each item on the little table holds a story, a small glimpse into a fragment of a life. Let me tell you about them.

The table itself is an old one, recycled and painted. Nothing special. The room looks bright and tidy, but on closer inspection you will see, if you look, that most of what is there has seen better days and been revamped or adapted, given a coat of paint and changed from old to ‘new’. That tells a whole epic on its own. There are a couple of pictures, a favourite painting unsold and the one of the Clairon in Paris. There are mirrors on the walls, cheap but effective, giving a modern twist and throwing light around the room. The window is a strange shape and almost impossible to curtain decently, so it remains draped in white voile that lets in the light of sun and moon.

There is, beside the bed, the almost obligatory lamp. Purple, of course, to match the walls. Don’t start me on the colour… it flows through most of the house in varying shades… it is amazing how many you can make with a big tub of white paint and a few tubes of acrylic when needs must. Thankfully, I quite like it. So the lampshade is purple.

The reason for the lamp lies in the small pile of books, duly bookmarked, that sit on the edge of the table. We won’t mention the larger stack on the floor…Ouspensky and Bennett , for the School of course, and Browning. Not exactly light reading, and to be fair, Browning has to go… Keats, perhaps? Or maybe Spike Milligan…Hmmm….

Light reading is on the Kindle, currently opened to van Gogh’s Letters. It could equally have been displaying a work on the Ennead, Terry Pratchett, Dion Fortune or a treatise on recovering from brain injury. As I said, a glance at my books is revealing.

The wire for the mobile phone charger is trailed across the surface… yes, I take it to bed, just in case. One son rides a motorbike, the other is recovering from brain injury. I’m a Mum.

There is a music box. A nice little thing. A bit of Italian marquetry that plays Torna a Surriento. My mother brought it back from Italy for me many years ago. An innocent bit of prettiness on the surface, but you wouldn’t believe how many closet skeletons that little box represents. Those are stories I have shared elsewhere or upon which I hold silence. It sits there to remind me that I want to see the Bay of Naples one day. And that I am a lot stronger than I ever used to believe.

There is a photograph, a captured moment of laughter, frozen in the frame. I cannot help but smile back at it, and so every night as I switch off the light and each morning when I open my eyes, my day is bracketed with smiles and love. No matter if I haven’t slept well or if the day has been a pig. It never fails. There is an irresistible joy in that picture.

Finally there is a tiny box of trinkets that deserve a story all of their own. Two pairs of earrings, one from a dear friend in the strangest of circumstances that carry the Eye of Horus. The other pair in possibly even stranger ones! A couple of rings. A miniature sword. A pendant. Each tells a story… of love, friendship, care or loss. Much of human emotion is represented in that tiny collection. They are there because they are dear to me. Not as objects, but because of their stories.

And that is what came to me, really, as I tidied the room. That tiny patch of space, perhaps fifteen inches square, held so much of my life on display. The stories may not be obvious to the casual observer, but they are there. Even the quickest glance could read a fair bit about me from that table, just from the surface without knowing what lies behind them or the associations they may hold.

Of course, that is true of so many things, isn’t it? We skim over surfaces every day, picking up snippets of information yet seldom stop to look deeper and see the stories being played out beneath. Sometimes it is ‘easier’ to ignore the pain in the eyes when the mouth smiles and says ‘Good morning’. Sometimes our own tales are being played out and occupy our attention so much we cannot see beyond them. Yet there are clues and it takes little to see the human stories that lie hidden in plain sight.

Morning Mists

My breath hung on the air, echoing the shifting mists over the village as I stood on the hill this morning watching the pale sun rising in the east. The dog ran through the undergrowth chasing elusive scents, catching little crystals of frost in her fur.

Though not far from the village and the road, the world was silent apart from the muffled birdsong, wrapped in a magical blanket of amorphous white, cocooning the landscape in mystery. Yet there was an unmistakable air of awakening as the sun rose, tinting the mists with rose-gold. A burgeoning awareness, a glimpse of distant headlights as the world woke to action, a whisper of activity carried on the air. Tiny lights defined by distant windows flickered like terrestrial stars through the shrouding wraiths as households awoke and began their day beneath the pall of mist.

I watched the sun as it came up, a luminous eye gazing over a numinous world.

For a moment as the dawn bathed the surface of the mist below me, the face of the world changed. Nothing below the liquid gold existed to my sight, only the clear blue of the morning sky and the golden illusory sea of mist upon which I felt I could have walked to the horizon and into the sun itself. It was an echo of eternity in a single heartbeat. The humdrum life of necessity and duty was engulfed in glory. It was still there, the foundation upon which this beauty lay, supporting it from below, reaching through it as tree top or spire, yet hidden as my usual perception of reality shifted and was lifted clear and untrammelled to soar with the kite on gilded wings.

Not for the first time it came to me how close this was to man’s quest for the Light. We spend much of our lives seeking our way blindly, following what little light we can find, yet above us, if we have the courage and commitment to make the climb, the pure, clear Light awaits us always, whether we perceive it or not through the shrouding mists of normality.



The sons of dawn will greet the liquid Light,
Lustral gold on heavens canvas glowing.
Painted magic banishing the night
Gilds the dream of every Seeker’s knowing.
Wings of morning flutter on the breeze,
Crystal raindrops scatter diamond bright,
Feathered choirs haunting in the trees
Bear the Seeker’s soul in joyful flight.

The Seven Pillars of Transformation

Esoteric Schools are for those seeking personal transformation. They should not be discussion groups for a general ranging across a wide field of different approaches. The value of a true school lies in its focus. That focus can help you to transform your life, if you can develop the will to do so within its “walls”

The shallowness of much of modern esoteric practice derives from the fact that there is the expectation of result from very little effort, and that the meaning of the esoteric term “The Work” is misunderstood.

The Work has always been here. It surrounds us like a vast and loving Sea, it constantly calls to those who have attuned their lives to its presence. We do not manifest it; rather it manifests itself, using the vehicle of our Selves as a wonderful resolving engine, whereby it may reach its ground state - that of coming into being in our lives and thereby the collective life of the Earth.

To achieve that at the individual level requires a curious combination of Active and Passive skills. The Work will use everything positive that we have to offer it. In this respect we are a very active part of the process of the Work’s manifestation. The passive element is that it cannot carry out its purpose while we are in the way . . .

To not be in the way means to remove our “belonging to personality”, and to learn to act from Essence, instead. To begin to do this needs a carefully structured approach, ideally personalised to each individual. Where this is not possible, working with a Group can accelerate the process, and add a feeling of conscious harmony.

The first of the Silent Eye’s workshops will address the start of this process. Everyone present will actually help to bring the new School into existence, using their own strengths and love. There is, of course, no presumption that those attending, the Companions, need to be part of the ongoing School if they do not wish to be.

Every esoteric school has to be built on certain principles. We have adopted an ancient seven, comprising the following:

The attraction of Knowledge
The essential presence of Struggle and Hazard
The personal need for Service
Getting out of the way of the Work - Manifestation
Receptivity to higher influences - opening ourselves to the loving Cosmos
Discovery and Submission to a Higher Will without any loss of individuality
Striving for Perfection.

These will be explored in the April 2013 workshop, but, as an example, let us take the first, the Attraction of Knowledge and expand on our thinking a little.

We confuse Knowledge and Understanding. Knowledge leads to understanding, but only when we can see the “bigger picture”. Initially, this sounds counter-intuitive. How can we know the bigger picture when we are struggling to get to know the basics of our esoteric learning? The answer is strange and wonderful: as we work from “Below” (and for this we should only understand something more limited than the “Above”, not lesser in its essential qualities), the higher Understanding works from Above, and can only work in us. This dual process is built into us so that we all have some chance of fulfilling the magnificent spiritual potential that we all share.

When knowledge becomes understanding, we know it to be so. There is no inner argument, no doubt. It is as though we have grasped something with more than one part of ourselves. Often, our emotions are involved, such as the joy of the whole being in attaining a new skill - learning to ride a bike, or learning to ski, or being able for the first time to hold a small conversation in a new language. These encounters with the “Higher” we take to be just personal revelations, but they are more than that, and are there to show us what potential lies ahead if we are bold and unafraid.

The different part of ourselves with which we perceive such events are called, in this System of learning, Centres (or Centers). They operate as individual Minds within us and are quite separate to each other. They each take over the “control room” of our lives as one becomes tired and drops out of the cockpit, leaving it free for a more hungry Centre to take over where we’re going next. That’s either a wonderful or a frightening picture, but it very accurately describes our lives. Think about it and watch it operating on the day you first read this and you will see the truth of it.

The April 19-21 event will go into much more detail, but in a relaxed and exploratory way. Good knowledge, lovingly explored and nurtured into true Understanding, is the basis of the Silent Eye School.

Further information may be found on the Silent Eye Website along with brochures and booking forms.

http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk/Events....
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk/Portals...

Sue Vincent & Steve Tanham

Notes from an indignant small dog - II

She hid the ball!

I mean… how mean can you get? She was laughing about it too. Had me searching the entire room for it. Asking me where it had gone, as if she didn’t know…

looking at me all innocent with those big brown eyes… grrrr…. I checked under all the sofa cushions, on the table, in the desk, even on the windowsill…

I suppose it may have had something to do with her wanting to close the back door. It isn’t my fault she gets cold... you humans ought to grow fur. I rather like sitting on the carpet inside the back door, watching the sun rise and waiting for the pigeons and next door’s cat…. She sits typing away in the big fluffy pink thing, grumbling about heating bills and wrapping a blanket round her knees.

Then … it must have been a whole five minutes later too… she showed me the ball was under my bed! And if that wasn’t bad enough, when I forgave her and took it back for her to play… very kindly, I thought under the circumstances… she hid it again!

I wouldn’t mind. I just don’t know how she does it. I didn’t take my eyes off it for a second… yet it disappeared. She had me running round like a headless chicken searching for it. It was behind her all along…. Then she did it again…

Now, I am far from being a stupid dog. I am highly observant and can read her moods as well as she reads her books. Better, probably, because I love her, so I just know. I can smell chicken or cheese (well, pretty much anything edible really) from miles away, never and not ever, miss an opportunity for a treat, given or… well, let’s be polite and say purloined. I know when she is just going upstairs, or when she is going out. I know when I will get cuddles or when she is working hard. I’m so tuned to her that I even know whether we are going for a walk or going in the car!

I’m not allowed upstairs most of the time, but she lets me guard he in the bathroom, or sit under the easel in the studio… and I know every time…

So how come she can always fool me with the ball?

Maybe because it is so very important to me to know where the ball is at all times? Do you think? Maybe I am so fixated on the ball that I just don't see what is happening to it? Tunnel vision...

I've noticed you humans do that a lot. You fix your eyes on the details and lose sight of the bigger picture.

She's not too bad sometimes. When I ate the turkey on Boxing Day, she just laughed and said at least she wouldn't be stuck with it for days...though she wasn't too happy about the smoked salmon, I admit...

I shouldn’t worry too much, I suppose. When the last ball fell apart, she was there with a new one for me. There is always a ball, even if I can’t see it. Even if she makes me work for it sometimes.

I think that’s because she loves me.

With love,
Ani.

Faulty Perceptions

I have been thinking a lot about perceptions, how we shroud ourselves in the filters they provide and often hide behind them. It is far easier to make a judgement and stand on our own moral high ground; than it is to admit to ourselves that we are afraid of understanding. Easier to justify our actions than it is to admit we might be wrong.

We perceive through the filters we have allowed life to impose on us. Faith, belief, events, even gender ... everything that touches our lives grows our range of experience, and too often, I think, we allow that experience to force its way through at the weakest point of our moral fibre. Like the wall of a dam, once there is pressure on a weak point, the waters can rush through. That weak point can be a sluice gate where we have control of the switches, or simply a fault in the masonry. Should we really be allowing our perceptions to become faults in the wall? How often do we ask ourselves whether we are building on truth, or whether it is just possible that we may have misunderstood a basic premise?

"I know what I'd do in those circumstances..." We hear and say that so often. Yet, actually, we don't know. We only know what we hope we would do, what we would like to think we would do. Anything else could mean looking too deep, and it is easier, safer to stick to the surface. Because, I have the feeling that the biggest fault in our perception is ourselves.

We too often close the doors of our minds to that which is new and challenges our vision of self, especially when it brings our good opinion of self into question. We stick to what we would like to believe about ourselves instead of examining our reflection in the mirror of the inmost heart.

Let me give you an example, if I may. On Friday a young man will be released from prison on licence. He will have served less than half the seven year prison sentence he was given for a sickeningly violent crime, while his victim will spend the rest of his life fighting the injuries and consequences of the attack. When the release was reported in the papers there was outrage. The violence of the assault was appalling and unprovoked and people were aghast that the prison term should be so shortened under the law.

However, what I found impossible to accept were the ill-wishes, the desire for revenge, the hatred and the violence that was suggested as a fitting punishment for his early release. Yet these are people genuinely moved by the story, who sincerely feel for the victim.

The victim himself said to me that he cannot understand this. People are outraged because they despise the violence of the attack… yet they imagine, speak of and even offer a similar level of violence in response to it. It makes no sense. Violence begetting violence, rather than the experience itself being allowed to highlight the consequences of such action and be a positive force for change and growth.

Somewhere there is a fault in perception. People who feel they are taking a moral stance are yet ready to sink, even if only in thought, to the level of that which they despise.

I am no saint and as I cannot forget, I cannot forgive the perpetrator of such horror. But nor do I hate or wish him ill. I hope that the young man has learned something that will change the way he faces the future. I can say this in all honesty because I am part of this story and do not have to wonder how I would feel. I know.