Doer of good

Dear Friend (you know who you are!), 

Doer of good remorselessly. 

Placing wreaths on old graves. 

Remembering lost ones over decades. 

Tidying and cleaning their resting places in honour of the love that lives still. 

Visiting lonely living elderly relatives and nurturing them with that life-affirming connection. 

I care, you matter, these regular long trips, crisscrossing the country affirm. 

Keeping friends, tight, through stress, divorce, separation, and loss of loved ones. 

Making sure the safety net of your love and concern is strengthened with additional knots of love. 

Never failing in loyalty, even when brought to the knees by the suicide of dear ones. 

The devastation of losing dear ones by their own hand strikes that huge heart to its core. 

But keeping that love alive despite the loss, the pain and absence.  

Remembering and holding their spirit in gentle arms of understanding and compassion.  

Dropping everything and giving anything to help a friend in real need. 

Providing constant help of finance, time, and love. 

Not buckling in the face of death but tightening the armour of love and heading anywhere for those you hold dear. 

"The betterment of the world can be accomplished through pure and goodly deeds and through commendable and seemly conduct. "

Baha'i Writings

Mystery of the Missing Earbuds

I lost my expensive Wi-Fi earbuds. I looked everywhere, under things behind sofas, and then in the most unlikely places, drawers and coat pockets, cupboards and shelves. No sign of them, and after two days of no success, my thoughts took a darker turn. Which of our visitors had pocketed my earbuds? They were a top-of-the-range model, an expensive gift for my birthday. You only had to look at them to know the quality. Even the case they were stored in seemed expensive. 

Perhaps it was the man who called in to read the electricity meter this week?  I had held the corridor cupboard door open while he read the meter inside. Had his sticky fingers closed over my precious headset as I fumbled with the door? Another suspect was John the man who comes once a year to spray clean the guttering and windows of the house. He had called and asked if he should do it this week. I went to ask my mother as he waited on the doorstep with the front door open. Had he reached in while I was along the corridor and pocketed the earbuds? His huge hands could have easily swallowed the small slick case in seconds. 

And so it went on. By the fourth day, I even searched the garage, the toilet and the car. Places I had never even used the earbuds. Desperation had obviously set in. They were gone. Was it my carelessness or another’s callousness? Would I even ever know? This morning I put on my white trainers and deep inside there were the case and earbuds. Mystery solved! 

It is human nature to make mistakes and to blame others. To vent our anger out on someone else. Too often the sad truth is the mistake is simply ours. The root cause is right here in us.  How many times do we decide to blame others instead of fixing the problem?

You can get discouraged many times, but you are not a failure until you begin to blame somebody else and stop trying.

John Burroughs

Life of the spirit and the art of carpet cleaning

I contemplate my life, my purpose.

The floor is covered in pieces of dirt. 

Life sneaks through our fingers and drops its debris everywhere.

This carpet will need a good hoover today. 

At times, I feel a bit adrift and rudderless. 

Some of those spots on the carpet will need to be scrubbed after hoovering. 

Finding direction is hard when stationary in the water. 

It’s only when I start to make progress on the carpet. I will suddenly see how filthy the settee has become. 

Momentum is needed to achieve anything of worth in life. 

Perhaps I should make a list, to-do list 

1. hoover carpet 

2. clean spots on the carpet 

3. wipe down the settee

When I get started, I can make some adjustments in life as I go, these first steps are just the beginning!

1. Forgive everyone

2. Work on my own defects

3. Clean the rust from off my soul

Impossible to fix?

At times, it feels impossible to fix. 

The problem beyond solution. 

However adept and agile the mind, however, clever and cunning the plan. 

It still feels like an impossible task. 

When you've done everything you can, thought it out from every angle, consulted with those with experience or wisdom, or who know you best, then there comes a time to leave it in the hands of God. 

Not like a spoilt child, crying for a parent to fix the broken toy, but with tenderness and humility leave it in the hands of God whose compassion is greater than we can possibly imagine.

Ballybosnia Writer's Group

A writer’s group fuelled by coffee and biscuits. 

An armpit room up steep twisted stairs in a community centre on a dismal estate in Northern Ireland. 

So many houses burned out the locals call it, Ballybosnia. 

The laughter and creativity set hearts aglow. 

Sharing thoughts and experiences of life. 

Rich in failure and very rare successes. 

But open and unveiled. 

A space to share even the raw pain of loss with others. 

For that pain to be spread butter like, over waiting hearts. 

Soaking it up like crumpets and lightening, the teller of sorrows. 

Awakening, empathy and support in the listeners. 

Healing wounds with silence, and some words. 

An honour to share such space with such souls.

"... engage in meaningful conversation in those social spaces open to you; and participate, to the extent possible, in undertakings and efforts directed towards the common good."

The Universal House of Justice

Dishing the dirt on diaries

Went through some of my old box of diaries in the garage and was quite depressed by the groaning complaining tone of many of them.  Adolescence can be so totally self-centred that even reading one’s own personal perspective makes you want to smack your younger self!  At this particular age, you are generally the hero of the movie and every other person in your life is an extra.  Not of great importance and usually ignored, resented or actively disliked by the perpetually embarrassed adolescent.  One friend pointed out that her 13-year-old daughter told her, across the dining table, that she couldn’t stand the sound of her mother’s breathing!  But along with the growing recognition of one’s self-preoccupation over the years the diaries have occasional gems.  I found this interaction with my teenage eldest son, captured as we wrote in the diary to each other as we sat side by side at a summer school talk in Greece.  It was fascinating to see his handwriting and mine on the page as we discussed stuff.

Me: What makes for a good speaker?

Son: Authenticity, systematic but also give an interactive presentation.  They should be confident, and knowledgeable and speak loudly with excitement. 

I have a vague memory of the speaker we were listening to as we wrote was quietly speaking in a monotone as he read head down from his notes.

Me: What is the reaction of an audience to a good speaker?

Son: They don’t try and correct the translation.

It was a Greek Summer school and any English talks were translated into Greek.  Unfortunately, some of those in the audience who could understand both languages would often complain about poor translations.  Such interruptions could entail ten minutes of excited arguments about the correct words to be used.  The visiting Speaker would stand confused as shouting and arguments in Greek seemed to follow everything they said. 

Me: But what should the audience get from the experience?

Son: It shouldn’t show until they check the sources used themselves and reach their own level of understanding, I guess.

Me: Is spirituality equivalent to following the Will of God for the age in which you live? 

Son: Nope! I think spirituality is the quality of human consciousness and soul on a level that equates with the harmony animals have with nature.

Me: Thanks, I think I understand you, but deep stuff!

My Son just drew this in response.

Here are an assortment of entries from all the years of writing that resonate still.  They remind me of so much I’d forgotten but also allow time for reflection. We live in such a reactive mode these days that it is rare to have time to really look back and learn the many lessons life has schooled us in.

• Some plants can only be distinguished by the differing parasites that infest them. Some mindsets can only be distinguished by the differing prejudices they exhibit.
• Strange, but I can see for the first time quite clearly why there is a need for an integrity of nature in those with whom we live. There is an honesty and dignity with which they carry themselves despite what they encounter. You know with certainty that even if you fell out with them and never associated with them again they would never backbite about you. It is because their code of behaviour is not dependent upon the fragile bond of human fellowship, but draws its strength from a higher source.
• A joy, intense and wonderful lifts my heart, and makes me smile at it all. How glorious is life, how intense, how abiding! Love should be like sunlight, blinding all, with its glory, curing all with its bounties.

Tales of the unexpected, Sirius A and B, Dogon people, 1844, twin stars

My eldest son Nason visited us from Edinburgh last weekend with his four-year-old child, Milo.  Apart from loads of cuddles with my grandson there was also an opportunity for Nason to share memories of his own childhood in his grandmother’s home.  He showed Milo the brass bed warmer on the wall at the front entrance of the bungalow and lifted the lid to show the tiny knitted mouse hidden inside.  It has been there for over many decades and on occasional visits I catch my almost forty-year son checking its contents to check the mouse is still there.  We all have those homecoming rituals that ground us with a younger version of ourselves.  Another memory was conjured up by a Reader’s Digest book called Mysteries of the Unexplained. 

My son remembered being quite scared by its contents when a child.  Things like human spontaneous combustion were covered along with a photograph of a burnt figure seated on a sofa along with other weird happenings.  No wonder it quite mesmerised and frightened him in equal measure.  After my visitors left I happened to flick through the book and it did indeed have a Ripley’s Oddities feel to it.  

There was a section on the Dogon people of Southern Mali in West Africa who passed on, through their oral traditions, information on astronomical details of the Sirius star that seemed incredibly precise in terms of details for a simple tribal people.  

According to French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who worked on field missions during the 1930s and 1940s the Dogons had their own ancient knowledge of astronomy and believed that Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, had a twin star (which is invisible to the naked eye) and that it had an elliptical orbit with Sirius A at its focus and took 50 years to complete its orbit.  This second star was said to be white in colour.  In fact, in their tradition, there was even a third star in the system even smaller than the other two which had a single satellite orbiting it.  

Being the brightest star in the sky Sirius A has long played a powerful role on earth throughout history. The star is twice the size and 25 times as luminous as our Sun it is certainly noticeable. The heliacal rising of Sirius marked the flooding of the Nile in Ancient Egypt and was equally important for ancient Greeks, even the Polynesians, in the Southern Hemisphere, used this star as an important reference for their navigation around the Pacific Ocean.

This Reader's Digest book was published in 1982 so it prompted me to do a little research on what modern astronomy has to say about all this.  I was curious about what had been discovered since and how this compared with the Dogon’s tales.  Sirius is a twin (binary) star consisting of a main-sequence star of Sirius A, and a faint white dwarf companion termed Sirius B. The mass of the dwarf star Sirius B was only calculated in 2005 by the Hubble Telescope. The distance between the two varies between 8.2 and 31.5 astronomical units as they complete orbit every 50 years.  So far so good and remarkably in tune with the Dogon oral tales. 

In a letter dated 10 August 1844, the German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel had reasoned from changes in the proper motion of Sirius that it had an unseen companion. Eighteen years later an American telescope-maker and astronomer Alvan Graham Clark was the first to successfully observe the faint companion, Sirius B which was a white dwarf star.  Fascinating to read that since 1894, some apparent orbital irregularities in the Sirius system have been observed, indicating the possibility of a third very small companion star, but this has never been confirmed.  

By now you will be pretty impressed with the accuracy of the Dogon people and their traditions. However, there could be other interpretations.  There is some speculation that Marcel Griaule’s accounts may be flawed as his observations were not borne out by other researchers.  In Griale’s accounts the Dogon people indicated that their information was passed on by half-fish and half-human creatures which feels slightly far-fetched.  Also, information on astronomical data on Sirius B could have been conveyed to the Dogon people during 5 weeks in 1893 when French astronomers travelled to the region to observe a solar eclipse on 16 April of that year.  Who knows, but how impressive would it be if a third star was found?  At present the scientific opinion is that Sirius is a twin star system and some fascinating details already known about this star system blew me away.

Sirius is expected to increase in brightness slightly over the next 60, 000 years to reach a peak magnitude and around the year 66, 270 CE Sirius will take its turn as the southern Pole Star. After that date, it will become fainter, but it will continue to be the brightest star in the Earth's night sky for approximately the next 210,000 years, then Vega, another A-type star becomes the brightest star.  The time scale blows the mind as does the magnitude of a starry sky at night.  Perhaps on a fundamental level, these star-filled skies are there to remind us of the wonders of this world we live in.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars. 

Og Mandino