Passing Out of Polite Society

 

It is difficult to know whether the aspects of the way I am in the world are a product of nature or nurture and probably for me this is academic. However, I am sure that crashing out on my upper middle class life has been  powerfully influential. I recognise my terrible hunger for praise which I seem unable to give myself, my need to prove myself constantly to me as well as others, the fact that despite a National Human Rights Award and other signifiers of fame I know I am nobody of any import in my old world.

 

 

The difficulty I have in accepting well meant criticism, my volatile interest in politics, my tendency to want to verbally assert myself (listen to me, listen to me) and the myriad of other behaviours I so wish were not me. I know that some clinical psychologists would have a field day with this but I don’t give them permission. The knowledge that has most helped me to understand my world is sociological in  origin and not psychological.

 

 

Crashing out of one’s social class is a reality that deserves and needs sociological attention.

 ~ Merinda Epstein

Bertha Rochester in the Time of Medicated Deinstitutionalisation

Bromeliad pink

Charlotte Bronte was sincerely horrified when it was pointed out to her that her depiction of an insane person in Jane Eyre (1847) had been devoid of sympathy for this most terrible of human conditions. 'It is true that profound pity ought to be the only sentiment elicited by the view of such degradation,’ Bronte wrote in her mea culpa: ‘and equally true is it that I have not sufficiently dwelt on that feeling; I have erred in making horror too predominant.’ 

Whilst Charlotte Bronte may have feigned horror when it was pointed out her depiction of Bertha Rochester was devoid of sympathy, the fact is that she was not the bowels of compassion when it came to her only brother's psychiatric illness.


It galls me that a cult of personality has developed around an emotionally immature narcissist such as Charlotte.  Her depiction of Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre troubles me less so than her role within the Bronte family as a skilled liar and manipulator.


In the modern age of medicated deinstitutionalisation, families are forced to be the primary carers of members with acute-on-chronic psychiatric disturbances with little support.  The general public tends to only hear about celebrity lunatics on their way to 5-Star rehab with a  signed contract to give an exclusive interview to Vanity Fair in hand to defray the cost.


In the time of the Brontes, opiate-derivatives such as laudanum was all that was available to calm the thought-tortured mind.  It is regrettable that Branwell is still perceived as an opium-addicted inebriate when he was nightly subjected to his father's misguided yet good-intentioned attempts at a DYI exorcism of the "demonic" impulses that Reverend Patrick Bronte was certain afflicted his only son and heir.


Much is made of the oppressed and restricted roles of women in the 19th century, yet how much freedom from cultural tradition and societal expectation did an only son with three unmarried sisters and an aged father really have?  How much did Charlotte, Emily and Anne contribute to the deterioration of their only brother's psychological wellbeing through not seeking out and acquiring husbands?  Was Branwell the first documented victim to fall under the bustle of emergent pre-First Wave feminist insensibilities?


For my part, I have always questioned why Charlotte Bronte "blinded" the love interest of her protagonist, Jane Eyre: such a violent act and disturbingly controlling.  Sister Lottie was quite a nasty piece of work.

 

The Good Doctor Snow

Blue Mountain, Aotearoa

 

 

 

 

Peter Snow was a leading medical researcher who helped identify chronic fatigue syndrome (or "Tapanui flu") while working as a dedicated country doctor who served his West Otago community for more than 30 years.

 



He was a family man, a country doctor, a researcher, a photographer, a deer farmer, an entrepreneur, and a man of the community whose impressive and wide knowledge was often called on by various sectors.

 

 

Locally, he was at the forefront of efforts to keep open the doors of Tapanui Hospital in the face of Wellington's demands for centralised health services, and, like most rural doctors, he was virtually on call in the West Otago area 24 hours a day, seven days a week for more than half his working life.

Nationally and internationally, he led the research effort to identify and suggest the means of alleviating the effects of chronic fatigue syndrome.

 

 

 

Being a GP has its own rewards, especially if you are part of the district. In time, the country doctor has the privilege of becoming a confidant of the community—on hand at births, deaths and all the life in between.

 

"It's hard to put a price on the satisfaction of watching someone you helped deliver into the world grow up, reach adulthood and have families of their own."

 

Image sourced from The Dreamstress

 

 

 

Perhaps his greatest claim to fame was his key role in identifying chronic fatigue syndrome, or what the media termed "Tapanui flu". In the early 1980s, farm stock in West Otago were suffering various selenium deficiency characteristics, and he noticed some of his patients seemed to have a similar syndrome. He and two University of Otago academics studied the outbreak—of what came to be called chronic fatigue syndrome—and their research conclusions, published in the New Zealand Medical Journal, attracted international attention.

 

 

Dr Snow had been concerned about the intense media interest in the syndrome at the time, fearing it would make light of the issue. But, on reflection, he believed that interest had actually been positive because it revealed the extent of the problem, both locally and globally. The media had also uncovered the medical profession's initial disbelief in the existence of chronic fatigue syndrome, as well as the widespread dissatisfaction among sufferers of the debilitating condition with the profession's lack of understanding.

 

 

Since then, much research has been carried out, including an unpublished study by Dr Snow and his University of Otago colleagues that revealed chronic fatigue had multiple causes.

 

 

Dr Snow was also nationally influential in raising safety awareness about the use of farm bikes, after several West Otago farmers suffered severe injuries from accidents on their farms.

 

 

Dr Snow was a man of wit and intelligence—one who always relished the stimulation of quick minds—and hosted many New Zealand and overseas student doctors in his practice. Dr Fox said he had maintained a lifelong interest in seeking knowledge and he was at the forefront of general practice research.

 

 

It was noted in his citation for the fellowship that Peter had:

 

 

 "the farmer's ability to perceive the connections between what to others might seem unrelated things".

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr and Mrs Snow moved permanently to their Lake Hayes home after selling the West Otago practice to the West Otago Health Trust three years ago. The couple had initially planned to operate Venetian-style gondolas on Lakes Hayes and Wakatipu, but decided to shelve the idea due, Dr Snow claimed, to stifling by "red tape".

 

 

Text swiped from The New Zealand Medical Journal

Aramoana: Pathway to the Sea

As long we continue to buy the convenient propaganda that spree shooters do what they do because they are mentally ill or otherwise defective, the more the thugs who trade in the commodities of cruelty and harassment will be held unaccountable for their participation in sponsoring massacres such as Aramoana.

The tipping-point for David Malcolm Gray was being informed that he had to pay $2 for a bank cheque to draw out his own money.  He was unemployed, receiving benefits and living frugally - $2 is money that he needed for food, to pay a utility bill. Sometimes the only difference between insanity and humanity is a gold coin donation.

In the wake of the Aramoana massacre, did New Zealand banking institutions abolish their practice of charging customers for bank cheques?   

Memorial to those who died at Aramoana
13 - 14 November 1990

The Aramoana Massacre

Book of Whoa Nelly!

Shopgirl,
 September 8th 1906
Kensington Church Street
 

DSM III and subsequent iterations pulled psychiatry out of the dark ages of Freudian ids and Jungian collective consciousness, and at least pointed it toward a scientifically testable structure. Unfortunately as it has become the bedrock of not only research, but also for billing codes and benefit eligibility testing, it has skewed the thinking of its users in maladaptive ways.

I always tell my students, when it comes to psychiatric problems in your patients, don’t treat diagnoses… treat symptoms. Address the individual symptoms the patient is having as best you know how, whether at the neurobiological level with medications, or at higher integrated levels with cognitive-behavioural or even psychodynamic techniques, or whatever combination seems most appropriate and seems to work best. And remember that all these symptoms exist on a continuum, whether sadness, or anxiety, or inability to concentrate, or personality problems.

Another analogy: Think of it as multiple gauges on your dashboard for various emotional, cognitive and behavioural states, rather than warning lights that light up with a diagnosis. Treat when they’re problematic enough to warrant the risks and costs of treatment. ~ compulsive empathy

Garry Greenburg Blog


 

The House of Mirth: Sustained Denial

The House of Mirth is one of my favourite books and a cautionary tale as relevant now as it was then, to how easy one can cultivate an unlived life.


Wharton's wrote a chillingly stunning book about the vanity of human wishes and the damage a superficial culture can inflict on those who do not know how to play by its rules, or who play by the rules in a manner too incompetent to be successful. 


Lily Bart is a fictional character whose descendants are the help-rejecting thirty- forty- fifty-something women of the 21st century, caught between the twin gears of career and domesticity; the laudanum of yesteryear has morphed into the chronic fatigue and constant guilt of now.


In 1905, Wharton displayed an uncanny understanding of the power of shame to control behaviour and crush hope and like the changing leaves of Autumn, nothing is more entrancing than the last burst of life before it is snuffed out.  As Sim Rosedale observed:

".....the dark pencilling of fatigue under her eyes, the morbid blue pallor of the temples, brought out the brightness of her hair and lips, as though all her ebbing vitality were centred there."

Nougat and paisley corset made by
The Dreamstress

The House of Mirth, published in 1905, novelist Edith Wharton tells the story of a beautiful unmarried socialite, Lily Bart, age 29, and her precipitous fall down the social ladder of New York society. Eight years older than the average age for marriage in 1900, she's nervous about her precarious position within New York society. She runs with a fast crowd, and she must keep up appearances. She needs clothes, fine accessories and the means to travel abroad, and unfortunately, she requires available cash to bet on cards at her friends' gatherings. Toward the beginning of the story she loses three hundred dollars in casual gambling. She's vague about how money works, and it gets worse from there.



Lily shouldn't be betting on cards, but she's not aware of personal finance, and she's caught up in pastimes of her wealthy friends. The women with whom she plays can afford to lose money; they're engaged in the games as just another idle pursuit. Lily, whose father lost money before his death, and her mother, who was excellent at keeping up appearances, requires the money in order to maintain her own illusions of social stature. She looks down on the shabby genteel or indeed anything shabby. She's even dismissive of her best friend, Gerty Farish, a woman who works on behalf of the poor and lives contentedly in her own place. Lily thinks she's above all that.



Lily's circle of friends in New York do not just have money but they have serious money, the type circulating in Fifth Avenue circles in 1900. We're talking Astor money, Vanderbilt money, Morgan money. In November of 1900, the marriage of Louisa Pierpont Morgan, daughter of J.P. Morgan, to Captain Herbert Satterlee, in New York City was the social event of the season. In addition, a whole new class of bourgeois muscled their way into the city, building one ostentatious house after another up a swath of Fifth Avenue. Outside the WASP establishments, many prosperous Jewish merchants sought the same sort of status afforded to members of Old New York.


In The House of Mirth, the character Simon Rosedale courts Lily to be his wife in order to legitimize his rise and break into the establishment. With his rapidly accumulating wealth he repeatedly presents her with a way out of her financial predicament, but she wants nothing of it. It's just not done. In a real life New York equivalent, she could have married someone like millionaire B. (Benjamin) Altman, but for her, and presumably for Wharton, such a proposal could not be considered.


Gus Trenor, a wealthy married man with a Fifth Avenue mansion, offers to help her out with her financial predicament. He suggests a little Wall Street transaction. Wharton writes, "She was too genuinely ignorant of the manipulations of the stock-market to understand his technical explanations, or even perhaps to perceive that certain points in them were slurred; the haziness enveloping the transaction served as a veil for her embarrassment, and through the general blur her hopes dilated like lamps in a fog."



More like a deer in the headlights. Initially, Trenor makes money for her in investments, and Lily resumes the shopping spree. What she doesn't understand is that Trenor expects something in return. When he demands some of her time and company, friends and remaining family members take notice and start to gossip. Her reputation starts to slide. Her ailing aunt is likely to leave her much of anything, and suitable suitors fade away. Her reaction to her predicament is to sustain denial as long as possible.

Found at Walking Off the Big Apple


 

Absinthe

A Bar at the Folies-Bergere

Manet, 1882

 

 

Three weeks ago I received an email from a distant cousin requesting information on a mutual ancestor after viewing my tree on a genealogy site.  Born in 1944, this male cousin hails from a side of the family that has distinguished itself with producing boorish abusive alcoholics with a sense of humour that rarely deviates from references to genitalia and rectums. 

 

 

I think it is official now that when it comes to  relatives, close and distant, from this particular maternal line, the capacity to address other family members with respect or courtesy is completely absent.  The trait is to presume too heavily on the existence of  family connection and its privileges without having nurtured or maintained them: it is a sense of entitlement that has always been a one-way street.   There seems to be an hereditary cruelty that has been passed down through the generations and it shows up in a multiplicity of ways.  Mostly it comes as a stab in the back delivered during a time of crisis: funerals seem to be the agreed upon occasion.

 

 

I hope to divest myself very soon of the vestiges of a conditioned belief  that I must tolerate being spoken to and treated like I am a hole for the male relatives on my mother's side to take a dump into.  The Australian side of my family seem to be people who could never be accused of exemplary behaviour or responding with compassion and intelligence to their own kinfolk.  More and more I understand that my mother's side were little better than gutter-snipes, deeply envious and resentful of those who had what they did not. 


Factor in the Australian propensity for cutting down tall poppies and one is really behind the 8-ball in a family who literally eats their children.  Parents who sacrifice their children to preserve the lies they have told and are utterly devoid of a moral compass or a sense of integrity.

 

 

I do not know what a loving close-knit and safe family network looks or feels like. I definitely hold the Elders one-hundred per cent accountable for being too self-absorbed and short-sighted to consider how their love for interpersonal and impersonal conflict would contaminate the future they claimed they wanted to be better for their children.

 

 

It is always good to brush up against what I have left behind.  It is like receiving a vaccination needle that boosts my immunity to a poisonous pedagogy that runs deep in my culture and has so many torch-bearers.

 

I Dream of Jeanne

Portrait of the actress Jeanne Samary
- Renoir
 

Amor: this refers to the passion that pulls the sexes together to create a family. It is as powerful as gravity itself. You meet her, your heart stops and you are inexorably drawn to her. You could no more resist her than you could jump out of a 20-story building and fly.


Eros: The god of sexual love and beauty … intimacy. This is that mad, gaga, head over heels, driven, obsessive love. This is that love that JD Salinger was writing about: “I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the one thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty … you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.” 


Affectus: This is the feeling of affection and admiration: the desire to be with your lover, because you admire him or her so very much. it is the source of compatibility. CS Lewis thought that it was this feeling of affectus that was “responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.”


Dilectio: This is where we delight in the person so much that simply being around her gives us unimaginable joy. The word comes from the root word electio: to “choose” to “elect.” In marriage, I think that this is of paramount importance. When eros is dormant and even affection wavers, it is this love of choice based upon deliberation that holds you steady. 


Amacitia: this word speaks of friendship; alliance; mutuality. Break the law of mutuality to your peril. My dad once told me that marriage was 70-30. Sometimes you give 70, she gives 30, and sometimes the ratio reverses. BUT, and this is critical, over time there is a mutuality of giving and receiving. One of the challenges most of us face in relationships is found here. What does he want? What does she want? Pay attention to her…to him. How is he demonstrating love? How is she demonstrating love? Go thou and do likewise … and then some. Study the other’s Way of Being and you will discover what you want to know regarding increasing your mutuality


Caritas: charity; mercy; God’s Love. As I was thinking about what to say here today it is this love that stood out. I have come to believe that many, many love-relationships fail because the love they have for each other is not tied to something or, for us Christians, to Someone: the transcendent God.

 

 

Swiped from Monte E. Wilson

 

A Horse called David

“The mind will trust the body, the body will trust the mind.”

'I believe that every soldier who has anything to do with horse or mule has come to love them for what they are and the grand work they have done and are doing in and out of the death zones.'  ~ Captain Sidney Galtrey, autumn 1918

 The Forgotten Army

The Wolf and the Lamb

A hard day at the office for Jeremy Irons

 

by Leslie Scrivener, Toronto Star
November 28, 2001


He's a British actor and Academy Award winner; she's a Zen master and Roman Catholic nun - and they share a compelling interest in changing the lives of prisoners.



Sister Elaine MacInnes will receive the Order of Canada next week in recognition of her work teaching meditation in prisons in the United Kingdom and the Philippines.


 Jeremy Irons, who is in Toronto making a film, has been visiting with his old friend who is anxious that Canadian prisons introduce the simple meditation that can bring calm, inner change and spiritual awareness. At 77, MacInnes is one of the world's highest ranking teachers of Zen.  While acknowledging the award is well deserved, Irons says an even better way for Canada to show its appreciation for this remarkable, strong woman would be to open the doors to her work in Canada. "She's the real thing. Canada, having her here, has the most wonderful opportunity to make full use of her." 


The actor and the nun have been friends since Irons became a patron of the Prison Phoenix Trust, the British charitable organization that teaches yoga and meditation in 86 prisons and where MacInnes was the director until her retirement in 1999.  The nun and the actor met again this week in a small, fire-lit room at the Windsor Arms Hotel over strong tea as Irons smoked thin, black cigarettes. He's in the last week of filming Against the Current, the story of American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald's last years.


 Lean and languorous, he listened intently as she spoke; and she listened carefully as he spoke with the voice made famous in Brideshead Revisited and Lolita, and in the role of Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, for which he won the Academy Award for best actor.  Irons said he prefers local charities so he is involved with the Prison Phoenix Trust based in Oxford, which is close to his home in Oxfordshire. 


Through meditation, people in deep pain can face up to the wrongs they've committed, and learn to live with themselves and later, in society, he says. "If you can teach them to turn their cells, which may be places of torment, into ashrams, which are places of contemplation and healing, it's an economic way to help people rebuild themselves instead of marking time and wasting away," Irons says. More practically, he believes meditation would reduce recidivism among prisoners once they are released.


 Because she had lived away from Canada for many years, MacInnes says she doesn't know anyone prominent in the prison system here to explain what a prison trust does and how helpful it can be for some of the country's most troubled men and women.  Recently, she gave four classes in Nova Scotia prisons, which confirmed her belief that the human heart is universal, and that just as the Prison Phoenix Trust was effective in Britain, a similar program would work in Canada.


Jane Robertson, a Nova Scotia woman who has volunteered in prisons for 25 years, watched MacInnes teaching meditation to men in a medium security prison and women in a maximum-security prison.  "When the women came into the chapel - they are used to a very confined space - in this larger space, they were really restless and shuffling and one was walking around. Sister Elaine was very firm with them and in the second five-minute meditation, you could hear nothing. They sat through it. The women were amazed at what they had experienced. "If someone was guiding them this way each week, think how much they would develop."



MacInnes, born in Moncton, was a goalie on her brother's hockey team, trained at the Julliard School and played violin with the Calgary and Edmonton symphony orchestras, then joined Our Lady's Missionaries, a Canadian order. Shortly after taking her final orders, she was sent to Japan, where she immersed herself in the study of Zen, a practice that does not conflict with her Christian beliefs. In 1980, after 20 years of study, she was the first Canadian to be invested as a roshi, or old teacher. Her autobiography, Zen Contemplation: A Bridge of Living Water, was published by Novalis this month.


Having taught meditation to some of Britain's toughest, most dangerous prisoners, she has taught them to be aware of their breathing and has found them peaceful and willing to alter their self-destructive ways. MacInnes remembers being in Wormwood Scrubs, a London prison, with 24 lifers. "They meditated in silence for 17 minutes and when I rang the bell no one wanted to move. Having been in silence, they had nothing to share."



She believes as her teacher, Yamada Koun, Roshi, told her, everyone is born to be a mystic.



She told the hardened men at Wormwood Scrubs this. "Not one snickered. That's probably the basis of why I go into prisons. It has to be therapeutic. For me, I have to lead people to their deepest centre."  

“Spirituality is what you do with those fires that burn within you.”  

 

 

 

Irons joined MacInnes for one of her Zen classes in County Clare, Ireland. "You have to be a very advanced pupil to understand the depths of your teacher and I am a beginner."  

 

 

 

He says society should care about prisoners for the same reason it should care about the poor or those who have failed. "We all fail constantly. The Bible tells us forgiveness is all and though I'm not particularly Christian, I know that if you don't forgive it eats you up.  If it's not important that we care about prisoners, why not kill them? We don't do that because they are people and they live in prison and since they are living at taxpayers' expense, we want them to be better. We can't let people rot away without help."   

 

 

 

Say again, Jeremy............we have to help people rot away?!?   Zen masters are enjoying a good belly-laugh over that Freudian slip. 

Wolfberry

Releasing deep sadness from the past, Wolfberry helps us allow grief to take us to a transpersonal experience. When we experience that something is shifting around inside ourselves but we don't know what it is, Wolfberry helps us be at peace and allow the process without insisting upon defining it.

Desert Alchemy

 

Are lichens the mask trees wear?

Why is sanity a mask? Is sanity actually a mask? Most certainly it is, because we have now come to one key element of our exploration of the mask: it is arbitrary in its definition and presentation; that is the signifiers are always arbitrary. It's back to the difference between the idea of tree or "tree-ness" and the word tree. Why the word tree? Does it hold something magical about the idea of "tree-ness"? Could we not just as easily have used the word feather to describe the idea of "tree"?

Most certainly.

If I suddenly tell you that anytime I use the word feather I am talking about a tree, you will understand from thenceforth what I have now arbitrarily established "tree-ness" with feathers: Feathers are usually tall, and there are two types: conifers and deciduous. Feathers are usually green because of chloropyll, which assists chloroplast in the the photosynthesis process of turning water and sunlight into starches and sugars. Feathers are part of the plant kingdom, and some feathers are amongst the largest organisms on planet earth. ~ Patrick M. Dey

Where Ants Live

It’s a growing trend that we are losing our medicine traditions, and a sense of our ancestry in general. I think being rooted in ancestry is powerful, and plants help facilitate this connection. To grow into a tall tree, one must have strong roots. Right? 

 read more Traditional Medicine, a Conversation with Renee Davis

Unexamined Blindspot

image by UK botanical artist, Simon Nunn

 

 

 

Much like racial, gender, or socioeconomic privilege, health privilege shames the individual for being ill, attributing illness to New Age judgements of spiritual impotency, or impure thoughts/actions. It rears its head when someone asks you if you’re “still taking those crazy medications?!” or tells you that daily consumption of bentonite clay would have prevented it.

When you enjoy unexamined health privilege, you may think that someone is ill because they ate poorly, or haven’t learned a karmic lesson yet, possess stuck/suppressed emotions, lived dis-harmoniously with Nature, or lack chutzpah or spiritual willpower. And we pass judgement. In the clinic, this can disrupt the healing process. I think it can even cause harm.

~ Renee Davis, MA. Community Herbalist



Hecate's Child: Disenfranchised Grief

Memorial for Unborn Children

Sculptor - Martin Hudáčeka of Banska Bystrica

 

 

On October 28, 2011, in the resort Bardejovské Nova Ves, Slovakia, opened the monument of the unborn child of a young sculptor of this country: Martin Hudáček. The artist is of Banska Bystrica, the center of Slovakia. The inauguration ceremony was attended by the Slovak Minister of Health, MD.Ivan Uhliarik.

 

 

The monument not only expresses regret and repentance for mothers who have abortions, but also the forgiveness and love of the unborn child to his mother. The idea of ​​building a monument to the unborn child was a group of young women (Prayer Movement of Mothers), mothers who are aware of the value of every human life and damage you inflict, not only in the irreparable loss of unborn babies, but for the permanent decline in mental health (and sometimes physical) of every woman who decides, driven by different situations, to abort her child.

 



 

 

Confessions of a Funeral Director

Working at the Crossroads of this World

& the Next

 

 



Read My Lips

"I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of coarse jest, yet, when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent." - H.D.Thoreau

The Family of Things

 

 

still from movie The Wild Geese

 

 

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

 

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

 

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

 

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

~ Mary Oliver

Legends, Lunchboxes & Scallywags

Legend Café, with Leonard French paintings on wall, Bourke Street, 1956.

A short time ago, I learned that Stuart Wilde popped his clogs on May Day in Ireland.  I enjoyed Stuart's humour while some of his writings scared the squirrel crap out of me.  His writings drew me into a deeper questioning of my own naive gullibility and ability to discriminate and think critically.

I have most of his books.  He was my teacher.

I am still terribly spiritual without a pot to piss in and I know what that phrase means in the historical sense.

How precious it was to walk in this world, to breathe the same air, to look at the moon and the stars at the same time as a legendary teacher.  I would not have missed it for the whirlwind.

Somewhere, out at the edges, the night

Is turning and the waves of darkness

Begin to brighten the shore of dawn

 

The heavy dark falls back to eary

And the freed air goes wild with light,

The heart fills with fresh, bright breath

And thoughts stir to give birth to colour.

 

 

 

 

May I live this day

 

Compassionate of heart,

Gentle in word,

Gracious in awareness

Courageous in thought,

Generous in love.

~ John O'Donohue

 

 

 

Vale, Stuart Wilde

[1946-2013]

 

 

 

Mystics, Mediums, Misfits & the Vidyadhara,

 

 

EVERY generation manufactures its cults, gurus and devotees; what is interesting is the pattern of recurrence rather than the antics of the dotty and fraudulent. Peter Washington's chatty and populist book stresses the latter, but takes an occasional cool look at the underlying repetitions. It is based on an impressive quantity of appalling stuff: as Mark Twain remarked, what was miraculous about the Mormon sacred books was not Joseph Smith having written them, but the fact that he stayed awake to do so.

Meeting the needs of the credulous in America and Britain from the 1870s, theosophy 'reconciled' all the leading world religions, and rationalised doubt by means of secret languages, levels of initiation and lurches towards the occult. The founders, Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, set the tone for alternative religion in the new age: Secret Knowledge from 'Masters' to whom only the gurus had access; esoteric or 'hermetic' traditions, loftily invoking Neo- Platonism and Rosicrucianism; rejection of 'rational' logic while preaching a reconciliation of science and mysticism: a smorgasbord approach to other revealed religions and 'teachers'; and a final opt-out to the 'inner self' when the going got sticky. [clickum to read full article at 'The Independant', circa 1993]

Tographical feature on planet Mars, high-resolution image, 2001
 

 

Following is Publishers Weekly brief review of Blavatsky's Baboon...

Around the turn of the century, renegade Russian aristocrat Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky declared herself the chosen vessel of the wisdom of the East through her reputed contact with a dematerializing Tibetan master, who unveiled a Hidden Brotherhood located in the Himalayas and Egypt. The Theosophical Society, which she cofounded in 1875 in New York City with Civil War veteran Col. Henry Olcott, attracted a wide following with its amalgam of Hinduism, Buddhism and occultism. In this enormously entertaining, witheringly skeptical, highly colorful chronicle, British journalist Washington deflates the self-mythologizing and woolly philosophizing of theosophists and rival schools and gurus, including flamboyant Armenian-Greek mystic George Gurdjieff, Austrian philosopher/holistic healer Rudolf Steiner and Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian ex-theosophist turned California sage. Those who came under their influence include Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, Christopher Isherwood, W.B. Yeats and Frank Lloyd Wright, making this a heady intellectual adventure as well as a clear-sighted saga of human foibles, charlatanry, bizarre antics and genuine spiritual hunger extending to New Age cults from the 1950s to the present.
 

Chogyam Trungpa

It is a marvellous ensemble. Blavatsky, a wisecracking mixture of Russian grande dame and country-cute Kalmuck; her 'chum', the lugubrious old soldier Colonel Olcott, straight from Anthony Powell; the unspeakable C W Leadbeater, writing hectic letters to small boys encouraging masturbation as a path to spirituality; James Wedgwood, the same but more so (caught cottaging by the police - 18 lavatories in two hours - he said with hauteur that he was searching for a friend known in a previous life); the elusive Krishnamurti, man made god; the brilliant spoofer Gurdjieff, inventor of the ashram as high-fashion labour camp; the literal- minded Ouspensky, dervish-dancing to a 'higher' plane of consciousness; A R Orage, coiner of the 'New Age' slogan.

 

Good Mother Gateway

At the northern end of Rosalind Park in Bendigo, is a granite gateway leading into the Fernery, known as the "Good Mother Gateway"

 In 1879 G S Mackay who was a leading authority on ferns proposed the establishment of a fernery in an area known as the Willows, which was once a bend in the Bendigo Creek. The billabong was levelled and transformed into an open air fernery where mature trees now provide a canopy of shade for the more tender ferns.

G S Mackay dedicated the fernery to his mother.

Bendigo from its earliest days has been one of the major Cornish Australian settlement areas. In 1881 46.9 percent of fathers and 41.4 percent of mothers in Bendigo were born in Cornwall. This was in addition to those Cornish who were born in Australia or places as far afield as Mexico or Brazil.  The Cornish in Bendigo outnumbered the combined strength of their Irish and Scottish counterparts

 

The Second Sunday of May

The origins of Mother's Day date back centuries, but the seeds to making it an official national holiday in the United States began with a poet and activist named Julia Ward Howe.

Born in 1819, Julia would grow up in New York city, one of seven children to Julia Rush Carter and Samuel Ward. Her mother, a poet, would die after giving birth to her last child and left Samuel to raise the children alone.

While Samuel was a educated and established banker on Wall Street, the absence of her mother often left the curious Julia to learn by herself, and she immersed herself in European literature in a time where very few women had the opportunity to do so.

Julia Ward Howe would be the first to propose a "mother's day". In 1870 she introduced her "Mother's Day Proclamation", which was based on her experiences as a wife and mother throughout her suppressive marriage and the atrocities she witnessed while living through the Civil War. It was her belief that women should have more social responsibility beyond tending to her husband, and she used her gift of prose to spread the message:

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears
Say firmly:

"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of
charity, mercy and patience.

"We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

 

 

Lemuralia

 
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says, "Disarm, Disarm!"
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!
Blood does not wipe out dishonor
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have of ten forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war.

Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions.
The great and general interests of peace.

 

 

 

Julia Ward Howe

 

 

Source

 

Iceland

 

'Creativity is a place. Memory is an image. The artistic process itself is a journey, a specific one, the return to a lost and cherished childhood realm, the original source of inspiration and identity.'

 



~ Janine Burke

 



Everything Comes Out in The Wash

The Turning of the Tide - John Duncan

 

The Magdalene laundries were used as reformatories where girls were sent without due process. But they were not brutal: anti-Catholics have lied about them.

What was aptly named Metaris A Estuarium – a bay with tidal marshes
and mudflats – back in Alexander the Greats day started to become known as The Wash much later on.

Most agreed that there was what was termed “psychological abuse”: most “described verbal abuse and being the victim of unkind or hurtful taunting and belittling comments. Even those who said that some Sisters were kind to them reported verbal cruelty as occurring during their time in the Magdalene Laundries”. The real question about these places is whether they should have existed in the first place in the way that they did, and whether the women sent there understood why. Why was their freedom taken from them? Often they were never told, and for that, the State is directly responsible (usually the sisters didn’t know either). But these were not, as is widely believed, brutal institutions.

Frankston Bathers
Victoria late 40s
 

 

Holy Cross Retreat [in Australia] was operated by the order of the Sisters of Mercy. It was established and co-located with the Magdalene Asylum for unmarried mothers. The retreat was based on the Magdalene asylums of Ireland, the object being to provide a home for the destitute and needy irrespective of creed or country, to aid and reform the erring, to shelter the weak minded, and to train the wayward, uncontrollable and erring, to habits of self restraint by necessary instruction and kind but firm discipline.

 

Now, I Lay me Down to Sleep.....

St Bride
1913 tempera on canvas
by John Duncan
[1866-1945]


John Duncan was born in Dundee, Scotland, on July 17, 1866. As a child, he found his calling to be art; by the age of 11, he was a student at the Dundee School of Art. Art was his calling, as he admitted he heard “faerie music” when painting. He was therefore truly angelic, born with a mission to paint the fairy realm.

Friends & Family sadly announce the passing of globally respected Author & Metaphysical Teacher Stuart Wilde. Wilde suffered a fatal heart attack on a scenic drive through Ireland on Wednesday May 1st, 2013.