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

Absalom Yancey and the Lady's Newspaper 1850

We have a family heirloom in our household. It is a collection of the Lady’s Newspaper from the year 1850. Originally it had been carefully bound, but with time it has been deteriorating and now has only one of its back pieces intact.  It belonged to my great-grandmother, from all accounts a feisty character. She held onto this collection, carefully bound, and it was only when my mother first visited her with my father she suddenly took a shine to him and insisted on presenting him with this carefully bound book.  

Over the years I have dipped in and out of this collection of newspapers, enjoying the wide range of issues covered and deeply frustrated by others. For example, there are huge sections dedicated to royal court proceedings, which consist of details of where an Earl went to Europe and which landed gentry had gone to Bath, and all kinds of nonsense about the royal family and what they were up to. Obviously, people in the 1850s, were as fascinated by royalty as some are today.  

There are huge sections entitled Accidents and Offences, recording, dire accidents, like mines flooding, industrial fires, or people being dismembered inside spinning mill machines.  Gruesome accounts of events such as the decapitation of a worker are spelled out with horrific detail. It was depressing to find that the normal conclusion of the coroner to all these workers’ deaths was invariably ‘died under unforeseen circumstances’ or ‘death by misadventure’.  Murders are also elaborated on with excessive relish and it seems that people have always been fascinated by crimes of a gruesome nature.   Nowadays, we have whole TV channels dedicated to this genre, but in the 1850s, it was part of a column, entitled Accidents and Offences.

There are simply pages and pages devoted to crochet and lacework. Obviously, something a fashionable woman was interested in those days. 

Then, of course, there were sections on drama, musical theatre, and popular literature. An unusual addition was a whole column, entitled Charms and Amulets, I need not go further. There was an interesting chess problem given in every publication which surprised me given its audience.  There was an interesting and rather nasty piece, entitled simply, Gypsies. Quoting from the paper, 

‘These swarthy itineraries, have spread themselves all over Europe, as is testified by various travellers of all nations, and everywhere, like the Jews, pretend to keep themselves as a distinct people. Attempts have been made to drive them out of various countries.’  

Prejudice like this towards various nationalities (and indeed the poor from anywhere), leeches from almost every page.

Daring fashion trends from Paris and London are given with under the title, General Observations on Fashion and Dress.  

As you can see from the illustration. There is no flesh on show just the mere glimpse of a hand and face.  But then again fashions do change with the decades and these were very early days indeed.  I came across a very small note about a certain Absalom Yancy in the States. I almost regret finding it, as it has prompted me to plague my entire family, with either giving details of his life or asking them to do research to find out the details I don’t know.  Here is the article with which I shall now plague you too!

A person cannot be held responsible for their name, but it does feel a bit weird that someone chose to call him Absalom.  I know it was fairly common to use biblical names in the 19th century, but why choose a chap who not only murdered his own brother but then attempted to overthrow King David, his father?  The unusualness of the name Absalom Yancey, did make it much easier to do research on it.  Note the sympathy towards the aged planter in the article, however, it does point out that he whipped his slave sufficiently hard that he fled and then proceeded to hunt him down with dogs. When I began the research I already had my doubts on which side sympathy should be given.   A little bit of research had indicated that his father was Zachariah Yancey (1754-1852) and his mother was called Nancy (1807-1891). I was even able to find Absalom Yancey’s will and testament online. Note the section where he gave his slaves to his children and his odd anger at one of his daughters inheriting her mother’s estate rings loud and clear. The slave’s increase means that all the children that the slaves might have by the time of his death would belong to Absalom’s descendants too.

ABSALOM YANCEY

IDENTITY: SON OF ZACHARIAH & ELIZABETH (MAYES) YANCEY

STATE: ALABAMA

COUNTY: RUSSELL

DATED: 1841

PROVED: 1850

RECORDED: RECORD BOOK 2 PAGE 12

I, ABSALOM YANCEY, of the State and county aforesaid being in a low state of health but of sound and disposing mind and being fully persuaded of the certainty of death am moved to make this my last will and testament.

Item 1st. I give my soul to God who gave it, my body to be buried at the discretion of my friends.

Item 2nd. I will and bequeath unto my two sons MILTON P. S. YANCEY and ULYSSES Z. M. YANCEY and my daughter MARY A. T. YANCEY the settlement of land whereon I now live. It being the east half of section number twenty three in township number nineteen in Range number twenty eight containing three hundred and twenty acres more or less; also all my landed Estate which I hold in the state of Georgia.

Item 3rd. I will and bequeath unto my three children above named all my negroes, thirteen in number together with all their increase named as follows, viz. Sarah, Candis, Alfred, Eliza, George, Tony, Robert, Louisa, Evaline, Elvira, Loyd, James, Arminda, together with all my stock of horses, mules, cattle, sheep, and hogs, and all my household and kitchen furniture and tools of every description including my gin and thrashing machine.

Item 4th. It is further my will and desire that my three children above named shall inherit the crop that may be made or growing on the place at my death, together with all the money or notes that may belong to my estate after paying all my just debts.

Item 5th. To my daughter PELONEY ANN ELIZABETH MCCALL I have not given anything in this my Last Will and Testament, my reason for not giving is not for the want of affection for she feels near to me, but my reasons are the following - when she married I gave her a negro and some property and at the death of my father-in-law [H____all?] he willed to her my wife's share of his estate which in justice ought to have been willed to all my children and was much more than a share of my estate.

Item 6th. I hereby nominate my two sons MILTON P. S. YANCEY and ULYSSES Z. M. YANCEY executors to this my Last Will and Testament.

In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal this second day of September in the year of our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and Forty One.

ABSALOM YANCEY 

Since the slaves are named it suggests that one of the male slaves might have been the one who murdered Absalom.  That leaves us with 6 suspects, Alfred, George, Tony, Robert, Lloyd, or James.  My curiosity got the better of me so I decided to consult the database giving executions in the US from 1608 – 1972.  https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/executions-overview/executions-in-the-u-s-1608-2002-the-espy-file executions US.  

I searched in 1850 for those who had been executed for murder in Alabama to see if any of Absalom’s slaves were mentioned.  It was frustrating not to find any of them.  Strangely, when you examine 1608 – 1972 this gives a total of 7, 363 people executed.  This averages around 20 people per year over this timescale.  Another file gives those more recently executed in the US from 1977-2023 as being 1577 this equates to 34 executions a year on average.  In other words, the US has increased the number of executions a worrisome trend.  

But back to Absalom Yancey when I looked in 1851 there was a black man executed for murder in Alabama and his name was Dick (Yancey) and as it was November that Absalom was killed so perhaps justice took time.  It was not uncommon for slaves to take their slaveholder’s surname. However, none of the slaves mentioned in Absalom’s will match this name.  However, to be fair the will was made out in 1841 so it is possible that this is a recent slave acquired in the nine years that followed after the will was written. Meanwhile, I discovered a legal document concerning Absalom Yancey which indicated that he was more than just a plantation owner with slaves.  He ran a slave trading firm with a partner and we know this because Absalom took his partner to court for stealing some money from him.  See below an excerpt, 

In 1820, Absalom and Jackson M. Yancy established a slave-trading firm. According to Absalom, they bought "a great many slaves either for cash or on credit," spending a total of "twenty thousand Dollars or some other large sum," all of this using his money. He claims that Jackson took the blacks to South Carolina and Georgia, and sold many of them. He charges that Jackson gambled away the profits, and turned over eight thousand dollars of the company's money to one Dr. Thomas Hunt to deprive him of his share. [ further details ]

Obviously, we are often shaped by our peers and their views and perspectives.  Perhaps Absalom was shaped by opinions similar to that expressed by the Southern States well known Presbyterian preacher, Dr. R. L. Dabney of Richmond:

"If our civilization is to continue, there must be a class who must work and not read.... There must not be a mixture of the decent and the vile in the same society. they [the decent? must not be daily brought into personal contact with the cutaneous and other diseases, the vermin, the obscenity, the groveling senti-ments, and violences of the gamins. The State is too poor to afford public education."

It is hard to digest such vile nonsense but perhaps when you and everyone you talk to shares the same views it becomes normalised instead of being recognised as the prejudice it epitomises.

It suddenly struck me that due legal execution might have not been the fate of Absalom’s slave.  After all, lynching was a fairly common aspect of life for African American slaves who misbehaved in the southern states. There is a list of lynchings carried out in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lynching_victims_in_the_United_States

Unfortunately, this search did not prove productive but it was a depressing lesson in how degraded human nature can become when hatred and mob violence enter communities.  A particularly depressing entry from 1851 from California is given below.

So just to recap this woman in her home was attacked by an intruder who assaulted her and in defence she killed him (a white man) and was lynched for it.  Another tale of injustice concerns an African American called Adam.  

I had to read this a few times to get my head around it.  Apparently, it was a local practice that if a white man was murdered a random African-American slave could be chosen as a substitute for the actual criminal (presumably when the actual villain could not be found).  Here the law courts declared the whole shady affair a mistrial and a mob disliking the result broke into the jail and lynched an innocent man.  It all feels quite awful and so very far from any sense of justice and fairness.  

Of course, this is only a tiny snapshot of an even greater injustice that had already taken place much earlier than 1850.  From 1662-1807 British and British Colonial ships purchased 3, 415, 500 Africans for the transatlantic slave trade and of that number only 2, 964, 800 survived that dreadful sea journey.  Only Portugal and Brazil transported more than Britain and the total number of Africans sent across in the transatlantic slave trade is reckoned to be 12 million. This was the largest forced migration in human history.  In 1807, thanks to people like Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, the slave trade was abolished in Britain.  However, it was not until 1838 that slaves in the British colonies were freed.  As far as the US was concerned it would not be until 1865 that slavery would be abolished.  

Of course, the driving force for the transatlantic slave trade was profit.  It is interesting to note historically injustice has often been fuelled by the financial gain of others.  Today, the US has over 1.77 million people incarcerated in prisons (this has dropped 14 % from an even higher figure since the Covid outbreak in 2020), and incarcerated workers in the US produce at least $11bn in goods and services annually.  While pay rates for prisoners in the US vary widely by state and job, the average minimum wage is $0.93 per day.  China has the second largest prison population (1.69 million) in the world.  However, to set this in context the US has only a total population of 334 million whereas China has a total population of 1425 million.  It is clear that the US is pretty unique in how many of its own citizens it keeps incarcerated.  It has been claimed that a full quarter of all prisoners worldwide are held in U.S. jails and prisons and sixty-five percent of the total U.S. prison population is black.  When the Lady’s Newspaper mentioned poor Absalom Yancey’s murder the sympathy of its readers was definitely with the slaveowner and not his whipped slave.  One wonders how the future will judge our present society’s injustices and our ability or inability to see them?

If thine eyes be turned towards mercy, forsake the things that profit thee and cleave unto that which will profit mankind. 

Bahá’u’lláh