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.