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A story should be taken to heart
And incubated
Brooded upon
Mulled over
Savoured.
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The subject of a good story is always you.
Every one of you.
Not you as you are.
You as you could be.
And, perhaps, really ought to be.
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We can consider knowledge as a function of being.
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A change in the being of the knower
brings corresponding changes in the tone and tenor of knowledge.
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In growing from child to adult for example
knowledge becomes more conceptual
and systemic in form and its factual utility increases.
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Sojourn
And now she stands alone again
stands in rarified company
stands unafraid upon the scree
stands far above the shadowed glen.
Continue reading at Shift ‘n’ Shake
Yesterday, I was looking through my photo files in search of a particular shot amongst the tens of thousands of files stored on my various drives. Most of those photographs document our journeys through the landscape, visits to sacred places and the beauty and history hidden within our mediaeval churches and cathedrals. Some, though, document the events we have held at many of these places and in particular, the faces of those who have attended, caught, almost inevitably, in laughter.
Just looking at the pictures from those weekend events, I found image after image of smiling faces, happy to share a moment with the camera or caught off guard in merriment. Even the ducks were smiling. And I found myself smiling back. It was not something over which I had any control… each smile drew a response, both in memory and in actuality. The photographs may have been taken a while ago, but the smiles on the screen were my ‘now’… and because I know and love these people too, each smile was familiar, warm and direct. Especially as, nine times out of ten, it had been me who was pointing the camera in the first place.
It was April last year when I wrote ‘A Bridge of Smiles’. Things were not looking good with our world at that point. The virus was biting and fear was oozing in through every crack we allowed. And yet we could still smile and connect with each other… sharing anecdotes and laughter as we waited dutifully in socially distanced lines to be allowed into a shop. That was before masks became mandatory. Before smiles were hidden behind a veil of fabric, before voices and laughter were muffled and the expression of joy made to feel like some kind of guilty pleasure.
Continue reading at The Silent Eye
Lights blaze in darkness
False hopes and new horizons
Unwary steps drawn
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as tomorrow calls
no longer under his spell
a heart returns home
Reblogged from Tina Stewart Brakebill
Reblogged from Pondering the Past… a beautiful visit to the Isle of Mull…
It was a day when the stags roared.
We walked along routes used in ages past. Along tarmacked roads, past machair and grey-blue sea. Then inland. Green grazed fields, golden moor and heather, sheep, geese and buzzard, onto earth and grass track.
We stopped to look at abandoned, ruined blackhouses, sitting squat either side of the track. Overgrown and roofless, the first we passed had been roofed within living (my) memory. It sparked remembrance of my father’s photographs of the last inhabitant of that cottage. An elderly lady, my father had known and visited. He had taken photos of the newspaper lined walls of that house, and a nesting bird sharing the shelter of the cottage. By the time I had known the house, it was empty. Though the last inhabitant was long gone, the dilapidated thatch of the roof remained in my earliest memory. Now that thatch was gone too and the house stood stark, abandoned and old.
We stood for a while in remembrance of that place, discussing memories that were not our own. This was a place changed in a little more than a lifetime. Altered in a relatively short space of time. Yet few will remember it as an occupied, peopled place. Most who pass by will consider it ancient and people-less. But human hands are visible everywhere still, not just in those abandoned houses, or in re-remembered memories. But in vegetation and moor, in the shape of the landscape, the track that we followed. This place is full of people still.
Continue reading at Pondering the Past
Window in the south transept c.1914 (Click to view larger image)
Another huge window fills the end wall of the south transept, showing scenes from the early history of the Abbey at Selby. On both walls, the stained glass depicts members of the Royal House; on one side Victoria, Queen and Empress, with Albert, the Prince Consort, and on the other Edward VII and his queen, Alexandra.
Victoria, Queen Empress and Albert, Prince Consort
For me, however, this little corner holds memories far more personal. I remember standing here with my Grandma Annie as she told me about the tradition of Maundy Money. There is a little display case with the purses and coins that Queen Elizabeth handed out to parishioners here in 1969, at the time the nine hundredth year of the Abbey, the only time the Royal Maundy Service had been held in a Parish Church rather than a cathedral.
King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra
The Royal Maundy Service is an ancient tradition that has evolved over the centuries from the instruction of Jesus… the mandatum given to His followers at the Last Supper. He told them to love one another. In medieval England, the monarchs would, on Maundy Thursday and on other Maundy days throughout the year, wash the feet of the poor in the rite known as pedilavium. The poor would be given food and clothing as alms. King John is the first monarch in recorded history to have performed this act in 1210 AD, though the bishops and other personages had done so for centuries.
Maundy purses and coins
Today the Maundy Service is one in which Queen Elizabeth, known for a deep and real faith, participates every year. Specially minted coins are given out these days, instead of goods, to a number of pensioners from the parish; one for every year of the monarch’s life and while the coinage is a nominal sum and legal tender, their value to collectors is much higher.
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Beauty dived into the bushes led by Prince then gasped as one of the thorns from the brambles traced the delicate skin of her inner arm.
The blood came in spurts and rivulets.
“No wait,” she cried, pausing to peer back through the leaves.
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‘Shadowing’ is our term for the phenomenon whereby a standing stone, or group of stones, recreates a distant landscape feature and thereby renders it immediately apparent or tangible.
Most other megalithic writers on the subject have also, independently, recognised this phenomenon although they usually refer to it, less accurately perhaps, as ‘mirroring’.
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This being the case, it is highly unlikely for such a notion to be the product of fantasy, yet it is still quite difficult to credit the skill set required to so accurately render this technique, and especially so in a people still regarded by many as ‘primitive’ in relation to us.
Continue reading at The Silent Eye
Sue Vincent's Daily Echo 