Wondering

Lent - knackered

No not Lent, just me. I'm on my second packet of crisps in five minutes and I haven't got a non-frugality dispensation.

I'm exhausted. I'm at war with a kiddy virus /kiddy with virus.  And I want to die.  I'm also trying to write about  The Creature's language acquisition in Frankenstein.  So I'm knackered - should that have a k in front or not?   Who cares.

Seriously now lets do a bit of bothering.  Lent was a time for rest.  Enforced rest?  Just imagine you're a medieval peasant  and it's the depths of February or March. The earth is as hard as iron (thanks Christina), and the frosty wind is moaning.  This is pre-Global warming folks. All your farm animals are pregnant - no artificial insemination to effect lamb birth at Christmas - you wait for the proper  lambing time at the end of March or the beginning of April.  The cow hasn't enough food to produce much milk.  The hens have stopped laying, so no eggs. You're on your sixth bowl of boiled rotten cabbage today with only an oatcake  (have you ever tasted one of those things) to look forward to tomorrow.  The beer and the bread are more flat than usual because there isn't enough heat to make the yeast grow and raise.   You could poach a trout or a rabbit.  Phew. At least it's too cold for Bubonic Plague.  So what do you do?

You do nothing.   You lie there with exhaustion.  You have an enforced rest.

Spring was a time of starvation for the poor, so lets not get too rosy about Lent 

Lent Slave

Is there any such thing as free?

We may be imprisoned  by the constraints in our lives;  social class,  poverty;  race, prevailing moires, education,  anything you can think of really, if you want to, we can get really existential.

We have issues in our society about wage slavery certainly, also questions surrounding personal freedom like the proposed ID card system.  Slaves to technology  at work and at home, we answer to computers and  TV schedules. are we slouching towards Melmoth. [Not sure that is quite the right allusion there but nevermind - perhaps The Terminator or The Running Man are nearer the mark]

I can think of things in my life that make me want to cry, but nothing I have experienced is like this, Act to end slavery - Set all free and especially this from the ILO Child Labour - The Web Movie  

Top ten books

My Books

The Bible

Anna Karenina       -    Tolstoy

Germinal                   - Emile  Zola

Wild Swans              -  Jung Chang

Jane Eyre                  - Charlotte Bronte

Dune                           - Frank Herbert

Little Women           - Louisa May Alcott

The Various             - Steven Augarde

Day of the Triffids  - Wyndhom Lewis

The Hobbit                - J R R Tolkien


Submit your top ten books to Spread the Word -the 10th anniversary of World Book Day

Lent Wondering

Wondering  - expressing awe, admiration, amazement or surprise, synonymous with inquisitiveness, speculation, questioning.

Western culture sees wondering as a waste of time. Navel gazing.  Vagueness.  Weakness.

Lack of wondering in any person is a worry and a wonder in itself.

We move towards complete and absolutist answers for every question.  In formal evangelical Christianity the wonder that is God is replaced by hard nosed righteousness  -  a kind of efficiency of understanding.  Ditching wonder allows us to be right and it allows us to have a comforting answer to everything.  Lets step back into wonder once more.  We don't have to switch off our faculties just redirect them.

Practice wondering. Learn to leave the wonder in place.  Wondering should be a resource for our minds and our hearts. 

Lets rehabilate Wonder. 

Lent Silence

 

 Is silence a modern need born of endemic noise?  As I write a telly blathers away.  I'm not watching it. Upstairs, I can hear a child muttering.  This computer hums.  The busy 'A' road reverberates it's Friday night post pub travellers and I hear a neighbour calling out in the street to someone.  My chair creaks.  I can't believe the bloody noise!!!!  A yellow taxi grumbles and a teenager knocks at my door bearing gifts of Jammy Dodgers conversationally discussing an evening out.

Did He experience
blather
muttering
hums
reverberates
calling out
creaks
grumbles
knocks
conversationally discussing an evening out?

"Is Peter Kaye on and why don't they advertise motorbike's on telly?  Lets flick channels. "  

Is the real silence inside us, or is there a real place where there is absolute silence?  I want to go there.

I think first century Palestine experienced
blather
muttering
hums
reverberates
calling out
creaks
grumbles
knocks
conversationally discussing an evening out?

BUT WITHOUT MECHANICAL AND ELECTRONIC AMPLIFICATION.

Now shuddup. 

Please?

Troops Out?

So Blair is going to pull the Army from Iraq?  Nothing to do with the fact that a massive anti-war rally is planned for Saturday 24th February in London?  An announcement before Saturday would certainly knock the stuffing out of any protest against the war in the eyes of the great British (apathetic) public.

Lets be clear, it's not the troops who are the problem - it's the politicians and the Petro-Chemical industry.

The government pulled a similar stunt by "sponsoring" the Make Poverty History campaign and the Live8 concert.  They managed to completely diverted the attention of the Young  - the people most likely to protest violently outside any G8 conference. No? Yes?

I wonder - is poverty history?  And will British troops in Iraq be part of history soon?  What will G W Bush have to say about the matter?

Happy New Year - Again

In February we enjoy Chinese New Year celebrations - well I do  - with a Take Away from my local Cantonese restaurant.   Bit skint this year so I'll celebrate a bit later when my husband gets paid.  Lemon Chicken here I come! 

Less well know is the Mongolian New Year celebration Tsagaan Sar  .

Based on the Lunar calendar the holiday usually falls on or around the full moon in February and is a great celebration for the whole family.

Today I made pancakes for Shrove Tuesday. Very tasty with lashings of Tate and Lyle Golden Syrup. Mmmmmm.  Homemade so much better than those rubbery things you warm up in the microwave...........Ah the kitchen beckons...........just a few more? 

We NEED these winter celebrations and highlights to keep us going.  Just a few more weeks and Spring will be really here or even sooner thanks to Global Warming ?!?!   I've been feeding the birds in my garden.  The birds are quite picky.  They all go for the "Robin Mix"  with  freeze dried  meal worms.   Their second favourite is the  dried sunflower head with seeds packed in fat pressed into the back of it.  They haven't touched the sunflower seeds I scattered on the ground.  Oh well - food for rats.  The trouble is these birds don't seem that hungry.  I've noticed Blue Tits, Great Tits and a Firecrest all feeding on small insects in the trees.   Yesterday I had eight Magpies in the garden, not a Sparrow or Blackbird in sight.

How on earth did this post get from Tsagaan Sar to British Garden Birds? I wonder?

Well I've just thought about this too............I looked out of my bedroom window at about 9:30pm.  The sky is completely overcast and  ORANGE .   The joys of the Sodium street light.  I wish someone would ban these monstrosities.  Why don't we care about light pollution?  As pollution types go I suppose light pollution is pretty low on the agenda.  It doesn't obviously threaten our health but it threatens our souls our spirits.  My children don't believe me when I tell them that you could actually see the Milky Way when I was a child.  We camped near Lamorna in Cornwall about six years ago and they were overwhelmed by the stars; actually I was pretty bowled over too.  I had forgotten just how starry the sky is - the lesser light!

Tonight I wonder if I will dream of stars, pancakes or distant lands.

Blog Mongolia

I've a list of blogs connected to the subject of Mongolia.  I've decided to have a list so that I have a convenient access point to these blogs.

Mongolia has been a fascination to me for a long time.  I'm a student at the moment but I am trying to plan a trip out there either tourist style or as a teacher of English.  I'm also having to consider how to fit this around my family.  So the blogs are part of an info gathering process.

I am also writing a book which features a fictionalised account of a European's journey into Mongolia.

Whilst interested the period of Chingiss Khan and his successors I have developed an interest in real-life present day Mongolia and it's people.  This country is very much a modern day backwater and many of the people are suffering terrible hardship but in the West we never hear a thing.

Hiraeth

I came across the word Hiraeth today.   A Welsh word with no exact translation into English. I am not a Welsh speaker, but I think this word is beautiful both in sound and spelling.  I think it means something like conscious longing for a homeland.  I think that it is something I feel deep inside even though I have lived in one place all my life.  I have always had a sense that I have a real home somewhere else.

I imagine my Hiraeth to be an open place, no fences hedges or borders.  I believe the weather is wild and unpredictable. I see grass beneath my feet and in summer thousands of grassy and alpine flowers. The sky is the deepest blue ever seen.  I feel the wind in my hair as I turn following the horizon's length.  I am alone.  I am unafraid. I feel complete peace.

Hiraeth is a trail across sand dunes. Hiraeth is the back of the Southern Ocean or the frozen polar wastes. Hiraeth is fish swimming through a bed of corals. Hiraeth is the Robin looking at me through my window.

Hiraeth is where my father and mother are free and where I will go too.

Hiraeth is in the heard laughter of a child and is felt in the arms of a husband.

Hiraeth is a warm bed on a winter's night, or an empty beach after every visitor has left except you and me.

Hiraeth is Heaven.

February Blue Skies

February Blue Skies.   What a relish for life  a blue sky can give me.  These things I adore;  the feeling of Life breaking into the world, having some Me time for a few hours,  Blue Tits in the garden, seeing last year's Hops glowing like gold in the sun.

I've just had an enjoyable hour reading the letters of Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu.  Such a self possessed woman. That she was so, may have been in part due to her aristocratic background however, her pursuit of knowledge, combined with the very intimate and direct manner in which she recounts her journeys: one develops a sense that this was a remarkable woman.

As her husband's companion in diplomatic duties she also manged to visit the Harem in Constantinople as to arrange for the conversion of Turkish poetry, which she immediately identified as similar to Scripture. 

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu : Her Letters