Dear Wen: ‘Dead Enkidu?’…

Dear Wen,

… I expect that is what is so endearing about Thomas ‘the Covenanter’ although his leprosy does become a metaphor for our culture and its ‘outcasting’ of the land.

A ludicrous idea if ever there was one, I should have thought, with consequences which are far from fun for anyone, as ‘we’ are beginning to realise to ‘our’ cost…

Paradise Lost… The Fall… Call it what you will…

Rowan and ritual surprises me, not one jot.  I am always up for a little berry harvesting, especially if it  promises to open the gates of vision.

No, it is definitely the Stones.

I was sort of hoping you would dig out the Statues-at-the-Stones picture.

Strangely, I am still somewhat enamoured of Statuary, primarily for its photographic possibilities… Stratford, and Coventry, and Oxford, and London all seem to be calling.

The Lordly ‘Em’ as ‘grisly protuberance’ certainly works for me, Sire of the Great Roger, eh? Possibly best not to go down that particular route.

If we are talking Shrewsbury, here, I cannot help but be reminded of our Swimming Shrew who could definitely be described as a neural impulse and one expressly sent from the collective mind of the Gods…

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A Day in the Life of Tokenism ~ Iain Kelly #writephoto

Tokens of his love left by way of an apology before he left last night to go back to his wife and children. She dumped the flowers in the bin.

At her yoga as she tried to revive herself from too much wine the night before. She stuck to the back of the class and tried to avoid the instructor’s eye.

Sitting round the table at another work meeting with the identikit, white males who will never learn to listen to her. The only female on the company board, tolerated but never listened to.

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Coffee break

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She sat down heavily at the little chrome table. She’d just have a minute. Around her the Saturday shoppers passed unaware. The tears had come from nowhere. Well, that wasn’t strictly true… it was the spectacles that had done it, left next to the empty coffee cups. Just like his. A style no-one wore these days. Seeing them there on the table had made her heart lurch. Just a minute, then she’d take them in to the counter. Somebody would be bound to miss them.

He’d always worn the same style… aviators, they called them. She shook her head to clear the memories. It was a long time ago… a good innings, they’d said… Too young though.

She had been young then too, slim and attractive, once the dark circles had faded and the pinched look of grief left her eyes. She was older now than he had been… older by far. In fact, if she was honest, she was just plain old. Old and plain. All illusion of glamour had disappeared beneath the upholstery, the curves had multiplied with a mathematical logic that owed nothing to aesthetics and far too much to gravity.

She didn’t mind. There was compensation… grandchildren, bus passes, senior discounts… that kind of thing. And she had lived more than many; not longer, not yet… but lived with a capital ‘L’. It was a good letter… laughter, love… a good way to live…

She watched the young people passing. Half of them doing twiddly things with their phones, others trying to look interesting… all preening, though, hoping to be noticed. Mothers with pushchairs that looked like something from a science-fiction novel. Men rushing through the shopping with more haste than interest. It never changed, not really.

“What can I get you?” The waitress didn’t meet her eyes. She looked bored, her pen poised over a dog-eared pad covered in scribbles and doodles. She supposed she’d have to order something. One of these new-fangled coffee thingummies. “Madam?… Are you okay?”

The young woman looked upset. She wanted to reassure her but couldn’t seem to find her voice. She stood and felt an arm slide around the slender curve of her waist. “She’s fine,” said a familiar voice. He took the spectacles from her fingers and smiled down at her. “She’s with me now.”

 

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Tokens ~ Lady Lee Manila #writephoto

Strips of token left by the porch

A feather, apple by and large

In the kitchen some cinnamon

Crisp leaves that seem to come alive

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Survivor #midnighthaiku

Storm  winds bring ruin

Fragile perfection survives

A passionate heart

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The Smell of Cedar ~ a new novella by River Dixon

Reblogged from The Stories In Between:

I’ve got a novella coming out next month. You can pre-order the eBook now or wait and pick up the paperback in a couple of weeks.

Click here to pre-order

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Next Show ~ Reena Saxena #writephoto

It has been six hours since we got lost.…

We are playing a game for a TV show, buddy! Dan was irritated.

But I don’t see the cameras following us…

I think I heard the buzz of a drone.

I’m on the verge of giving up…

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Going West… On the Road

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June 2016… a journey into the ancient and sacred places of Wales…

We were heading into the west… over the border. Our destination? Friday. Other than that and the hotel we’d booked for the night, we had few plans. For now, it was Wednesday morning and we were enjoying roads that took us through pretty Cotswold villages and past churches, ancient sites and inns where we would normally have given in to the temptation to stop…but we had a long drive ahead.

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The Silent Eye’s Whispers in the West weekend was due to begin on Friday afternoon at a beach near St David’s, the westernmost point of Wales. We had been due to visit Ireland, yet once again, the prospective house-move had rearranged our plans…which ought to have been a clear enough message… we go where we are called, when we are called… not where we choose. Last time we had tried to force the issue, I had ended up in the burns unit of the local hospital. This time, at least, the house-move had finally happened. And a couple of extra days in Wales would be good.

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We did have a first destination. It is always good to have somewhere to aim for, even if you get sidetracked… which we usually do. The idea of the Silent Eye landscape weekends is to start with a theme and a loose structure and see what happens. They are not guided tours… although we are guided around these places by a companion who knows and loves them. They are not walking holidays… though we sometimes walk a lot. They are not teaching sessions, though we share and learn a good deal. They are not structured rituals, though they may contain rituals and we approach them with the same intent and reverence for what each of us, individually, holds sacred. What they are times out of time, when the world and its cares are allowed to take second place, where companionship and discussion have time to unfold. Times when there is space for spirit to move where it will, within the beauty of a landscape that speaks to the mind, heart and soul through the experience of the senses.

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We knew that we would be going back in time with many of the sites we would visit over the weekend, but we had time to skip across the continuum for a while and would start a mere thousand years ago. There was a place we had both long wanted to visit and it was this that saw us heading towards a small Herefordshire village.

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The Entered Dragon (4) : the world within ~ SteveTanham

Continued from Part Three

I know these posts, so far, have been intense. The picture painted by Carl Jung and his Jungian successors of our linked internal and external lives is a detailed and vivid one. We began by looking at the Shadow, that suppressed ‘mind’ of parts of our psychological self (psyche) that have been pushed, by conditioning, society and personal choice, from our everyday lives. Censored might be a good word to describe their fate… or exiled, perhaps.

By way of a more gentle read, this post will set the scene for the space in which the relevance of Jungian thought is unrivalled in all of psychology – the Unconscious.

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Kirkoswald…

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… “That’s the church we nearly used in December for ‘Full Circle’.

It was on the back up list in case it rained heavily.”

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“I thought the name sounded familiar.

I didn’t realise we were so far down already.”

*

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