Circumstances and choice

I suppose the thinking of nearly all of us is shaped by the electronic sphere now.

It has advanced slowly and quietly in our lives, so that it is only when I look back, from where we now stand, that I see how different life used to be.

Everything is moving so fast and has changed so much, that I have come to the place where sifting through it and trying to understand what we have become, and how we got here, feels as pointless as picking up pieces of the shattered bricks of a home that has been bombed, trying to see how once it all fitted together.

We are where we are, we have what we have, life is what it has become — and I reluctantly accept that "we ain't seen nothing yet", we are only part-way through.

This shaping by the electronic sphere means that what we think about and how we see the world is heavily influenced by the pathways down which algorithms inexorably shepherd us. Never has it been more true that what we pay attention to we get more of.

So I suppose it's conceivable that your mind is full of crochet patterns or analog bags or recipes for quiche just at the moment, and you are only dimly aware of the cyber attacks frying supermarket fridges across Europe, and riots in European cities, and the weird EU coup in Poland and the governments worldwide instructing their citizens to prepare and the escalating military preparations and the ominous waiting to see what will happen regarding the US and Iran now the pause for the mid-term elections is behind us. 

These issues are what the helpful algorithmic handmaidens are serving up to me. The vocabulary is full of exclamations and extremity — "wake up", "get ready", "doomsday", "fear", "the end", and so forth. I am so tired of it that by this time I no longer feel afraid of anything. Fear takes energy and mine has been used up by all the "I told you so" and exhorting and Final Warnings.

I am also very tired of polarisation and tribal thinking. The Far Left and the Far Right share the same vocabulary, they just direct it at different people. Anyone who thinks this or that public figure is the source of all our problems and the epitome of evil has oversimplified to the point of uselessness. Politics in its present form looks increasingly like "sound and fury signifying nothing". This suggests to me that the countries of the world are indeed different characters in the same play, that we are indeed marching in lockstep toward a global governance bent on absolute control; though whether it's where we will in fact arrive, I am inclined to doubt — because I don't think that's the will of God, and God is the source of our reality; there is no power but of God, we can rest in that with total confidence.

But, where I used to be a fairly political animal, I no longer am. The political groupings no longer offer any resemblance to the ideologies they represented in former years. And the churches feel increasingly political while the governments feel increasingly like religions. 

So today, I asked myself — then where would I want to put my energy? If I am here to make a contribution, what do I want to support? What is my political direction now?

I found my way to two things, and both are about staying close to the natural world.

The faith family where I have been worshipping in recent times plans to use the small patch of land behind the church to make a community garden. It's to be somewhere for kiddies to play and fruit trees to grow, with paths and raised beds so people in wheelchairs can participate, and plants for bees and butterflies, and a little pond for the frogs and newts to find a home. In a limited way, because my body is somewhat impaired nowadays, I would like to act in favour of that initiative.

That's the first thing.

The second thing is to buy some of our household's food from the Knepp Estate, to give it our custom, our vote. Do you know about Knepp? If you have never seen the film about it, called Wilding, I strongly recommend it as something to lift your heart and inspire your soul.

It seems to me that such initiatives as these, that take us back to the hope and beauty of the natural world, are now my instinct in terms of political choice.

Slurring those I am encouraged to hate, denigrating those who see life differently from me, banding together in likeminded tribes sealed off from one another by mutual enmity — none of that feels like the will of God for our human future. But to leave the earth better than we found it, to build something that protects and enhances biodiversity, that allows us to smell the summer flowers and give the children somewhere safe to play — that's more worthwhile.

We do not choose our circumstances; they are the hand we're dealt. Even if we manage to influence what comes our way by choosing wisely, life has a way of surprising us. Of course it helps to live simply and keep our homes clean and tidy, to be thrifty with our money and educate ourselves about nutrition and develop a nose for a scam. But even with all that, our circumstances shift and change, and sometimes very suddenly and radically. 

So I think there's not much point in fear. God is watching over us, and we do not choose our circumstances, so what's the use of worrying?

But we retain the power of choice within our circumstances. In the book of Acts, when Paul was in prison and could not sleep, he chose to sing hymns. When the Carthusian martyrs were led to the gallows during the bloody season of the Reformation, they chose to forgive.

Day by day, moment by moment, we can choose the small things; to make the bed when we get up in the morning, to remember to clean our teeth, to go for a walk in the sunshine, to feed the cat. And if all else has gone, to be kind and to say thank you and be truthful, and to hold the hand of Jesus along the path we have been asked to tread.

Does that sound political? It's what my politics has become. It's what I'm voting for now. All the rest has grown too loud and too big; and I don't want to get caught up in it, I don't want to turn my friends into enemies, I want to stay in love — and if love feels like too big an ask, then at least to stay in kindness. I'm going to join that party. 

Systems not things — more thoughts on preparation

 I see that govt (UK) is now advising us to stock up wth a prepper pantry and lots of water, in case of any one of a possible range of emergencies. 

The water is a good example of what I want to say about systems rather than things. Govt advice is to have a 3-day supply of just-in-case water, being 3 litres per person per day, which would give you 9 litres each for however many people are in your household. Say there are 2 adults and 2 kids, that would be 36 litres, which is quite a lot (especially if you have a small house) but not a massive amount.

Of course the next thing that happens is people get wind of this and before you know it the supermarkets are all out of bottled water.

I suggest that there is a better approach. Instead of focusing on buying 36 bottles of water, because there's loads of water falling out of the sky most of the time; get a filter.  

A few years ago, the ageing water pipes in the town where I live sprang a leak, fairly high in the network. Southern Water leapt into action, delivering bottles of water to all vulnerable people, and giving it out from the back of lorries in supermarket car parks. As a result, the approach roads to the supermarkets were gridlocked, jammed with the cars of anxious people desperate to be sure they had their share.

This all passed us by as if it hadn't been happening. As soon as I heard the water was going to be turned off, I filled up our bath and told my family and neighbours to do the same. That gave us enough for all the things we normally do with tap-water, to cover the several days the system was shut down. Meanwhile, in the garden we have 3 water-butts each holding 250 litres of rainwater from the roof, and we filled up a watering can of this for each bathroom (in that house we have 2 toilets and one bathroom with a toilet), every morning and evening, to flush the toilet. And we followed the time honoured rule, "If it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down". 

For our drinking water we did what we always do, walk down to the spring and bring back a bottle of free, natural mineral water straight from the earth, which we run through a filter like this that stands in the kitchen. It's just easy.

The flaw in this system for some people is old age or disability meaning it's too hard to go and get the spring water from the wild places, or someone may live in an apartment with no garden to stand a water butt. 

But this is what I mean about systems not things. Thinking has to be specific and individualised, and part of it is people acting like a mycelium, all working together and helping each other. So far in my life I have never had to ask my grandson or my neighbour's lads to lug the water home for me, but maybe the time will come when I have to find the humility to do that if I want top quality water, or just filter the rainwater for a while. If push comes to shove I can just run the de-humidifier — that certainly yields plenty of water!

Similarly with food. Yes, have some rice or pasta, some tea/coffee and dried milk put by, have some powdered bone broth (you could probably live on that), some ghee/tallow and some tins of oily fish. But don't bother with tins of vegetables. Grow herbs if you have a garden, get familiar with which wild plants you can eat (eg nettles and dandelion greens), notice where the mushrooms and blackberries grow, and any sweet chestnuts or wild apples or hazelnuts. You can just improvise.

I don't think it's helped us to view everything as commodities that have to be purchased in commercial units. We do better to shift a bit closer to the natural world. When we took one of the cats to the vet the other day (not Clarence, Miguel who lives in the other household), I overheard a conversation in the waiting room between another client and the receptionist. The client was lamenting a recent occasion when her dog, a sight hound, had bagged a rabbit while out on a walk. She was explaining how she had managed to persuade it to let the rabbit go. What? I would have cooked the rabbit for tea, boiled the bones and offal for broth, and taken the dog for walks in that place very frequently. I think it is time to take the pressure off our lives by moving closer to the old ways. A lot of our problems are unnecessary, springing from the complication we've put in place that make financial transaction too much of everything we do. We don't need to buy everything, but we do need to lay down a different pattern, set our own system in place.

I was going to say something about inner preparation too, about the soul work, but I think you might be tired and have finished your cup of coffee by now, so I'll come back to that another day.

Preparation

 If you looked at my previous post (or scroll down to check it out) you'll see that it was about preparedness for adverse circumstances.

Several spiritual leaders and teachers have advised us that we would do well to prepare for times of challenge shortly coming our way. My previous post looked especially at the YouTube videos of Steve and Esther Uppal on this topic. 

I concur. My senses have been on red alert for some while now, and making ready for incoming choppiness has been high on my agenda.

Today I want to add some further thoughts and pointers about the same area of consideration.

Preparing cannot occur in a vacuum. You can't possibly get ready for anything and everything. If you are getting ready for a holiday, you might be sure to pack your bikini and beach sarong, be sure you have some appropriate currency for Spain or the South of France, purchase a dress and high heels suitable for dining out in the evening, and a big shady sunhat. But if you then discover that you're being treated to a hike across Alaska with Bear Grylls, your preparations will have wasted a lot of time and money and be utterly useless.

The spiritual leaders I have seen exhorting us to prepare, typically tell us to "Wake up!" and "Get ready!" We are warned that Something Awful is coming — the problem is that they don't say what; probably because they don't know. Their antennae have correctly detected disruption and radical change, but they don't quite know what it will look like.

Here's a list of what they might be sensing:

• Invasion by foreign nationals
• War overseas resulting in different priorities for our own national budget and recruitment of our resources and personnel
• Economic collapse — banks abruptly shutting, work redundancies, extreme inflation, and that sort of thing
• Particular priorities of government spending that throw the public and private sectors out of balance
• Extreme weather and other influences on nature and agriculture, leading to food shortages
• Power outages for any of a variety of reasons
• Fuel scarcity, leading to rising prices, supply disruptions, loss of agricultural fertiliser and disruption to harvesting machinery etc
• Water scarcity because of extreme weather or pollution or water-hungry industrial plants (eg AI data centres)
• Significant widespread illness
• A chaotic political environment (eg protests and riots) leading to emergency measures disrupting national life
• Changing ideology in our political leadership resulting in unexpected detriment to our existing plans and provisions, or to our habitual patterns of life
• Reduced or interrupted access to services we normally rely on
• Religious or political persecution — this can take a variety of forms, and is sadly prevalent globally, in modern life

That sort of thing. Please feel free to add ideas of your own!!

At the turn of the century, our family had a massive life crash. It was not of my doing, but I needed to take responsibility for the fallout: we lost our family home, all our sources of income, and my marriage abruptly left me. It was tricky. The consequent problems lasted many years, and had a significant impact on my mental health. Fortunately, with a lot of help from my mother and from my ex-father-in-law, we got through. 

Until that point, having grown up in a family with slender means and ambitious aspirations, I knew quite a lot about how to make the money stretch and somehow make things work. From monastic friends and thinking a lot about St Francis, I'd learned how to live simply and frugally, without sacrificing joy and playfulness. 

So I had a good head start; the main thing I needed to do was apply what I'd already learned. What I took away from it all is that there is never any point in worrying: what you thought you had firmly in place can be lost or let you down, but help and hope come from unforeseen avenues.

A man in hard times once expressed to the spiritual teacher Wayne Dyer that he was very anxious about being able to fulfil his obligations and pay his bills. Wayne Dyer asked him if he had always done so until now — he replied that yes, he certainly had. Wayne Dyer said, "Then you always will." I can think of possible circumstances where that might not work out, but I think in general he was right. So the first aspect of preparedness is character. 

Seeing storm clouds gathering on the horizon, over the last few years I have been working on being ready for adversity. Since I don't know quite how it will manifest, I have prepared generally rather than with sharp focus. For instance, if we could be sure that whatever comes means there will be massive food shortages, we might choose to blow our budget on supplies. But what if the challenges mean we have to move to a rented room in another location? If that happens, we'll wish we still had the money and not box upon heavy box of tinned food to transport and store. So rather than prepare a lot for a few challenges, I've prepared a bit for a spread of possibilities. In case it helps focus your own thinking, here is what I've done:

• Where hitherto Tony and I shared accommodation with other family members, we moved to live separately. Each house could take all of us, if that became necessary. In tough times, governments may seize your assets, but generally let you keep your family home — especially if it's unassuming and in a not very special neighbourhood. So we have added to our options for offering sanctuary for other family members, without adding the appearance (or reality) of affluence. Each house has a good-sized garden where we can grow food, and have sunshine and fresh air (this was massively important in 2020). Each house has solar panels and water butts, and one has a wood stove and an open fire and is near places where one can forage for firewood.
• In times of serious disruption, money in the bank often evaporates. Tony and I are growing old. If we had a lot of money to leave behind, it would mostly go in taxes. So we have spent it on making sure our home is in good repair (as prices rise we may not be able to afford to do this later) and cheap to maintain, we have planted our garden with things we can eat, and added the solar panels to our roof and a line of water butts to conserve rainwater. Though we personally don't currently have an electric car, we have added an EV charger to our house, as it extends possibilities for the future, for someone even if not for us.
• We have two portable power banks (these, as it happens) to protect against the impact of power outages.
• We have set aside some modest reserves of food: just very simple things — tinned and potted meat and fish, salt, a few pounds of rice, long life milk and coconut milk and a tub of dried milk, some boxes of dried bone broth sachets, and a big box of oats. With the addition of the herbs growing in the garden and wild edible plants, we'd be OK for about a month. We always have on hand a couple of 10-litre bottles of mineral water, which we collect from a local spring and (for extra health precaution) filter before use. 
• Each day we include a long fasting window (works out at about 9/15 or 8/16 eating/fasting).
• We are careful with grocery shopping, looking for bargains and keeping to a budget — but prioritising food that offers high quality nutrition suitable for our age group; and we have researched this in some depth.
• We have adjusted our stash of clothing to give us a modest and simple wardrobe that is easy to wash, quick to dry, doesn't need ironing, and that layers up or down to keep us warm in winter and cool in summer. We have a laundry line in the garden so we don't have to rely on a tumble dryer.
• We cook using only an air fryer and a hob. We have a spare camping gas hob in case of power outages.
• After much searching we have found a church where the people are friendly and kind and care about us, prioritise prayer and bible study, and know how to build community. They are about to embark on creating a community garden. This church is within walking distance, which motivates us to take extra exercise without the need for equipment or gym membership.
• The last few years we have studied and experimented to improve our health, which was badly dented in 2021 as was the health of so many other people at that time. We have developed strategies to optimise our health without needing to be rich or to rely heavily on support from our compromised and struggling national health service. We do rely on particular inexpensive supplements, without which we struggle, and we make sure to always have in good supplies of these in case there are shortages.
• We have divested ourselves of all the possessions we considered to be surplus to basic everyday needs and likely requirements for hospitality. We now have very little stuff and very few treasures. We could easily relocate or downsize, and our house is very easy to keep clean and tidy.
• Both our requirements and commitments are few, and our life is as frugal as we can manage. We do run a car, but are careful about how much we use it, and it is the only vehicle for 3 of our 4 family households in this town.
• We keep a small amount of ready cash on hand, just in case electronic methods of payment unexpectedly fail us.
• We aim to be as inconspicuous, insignificant and unimportant as it is possible to be. The politics of envy would find no foothold in our life. We have no financial debts.
• Every morning we pray together, and we orientate our lives around the presence and power and peace of God as we know him in Jesus.
• We value — and do our best to prioritise, consolidate and increase — a robust network of family, neighbourly and church community relationships. Several years of illness bringing isolation, the times we're in, and difficult fluke experiences with church have set us back, but we have kept at it, repeatedly rebuilding.

Those are the ways we — who are elderly, have impaired health, and have small financial resources and almost no influence or power or connections — have done our best to create a stable and resilient life.

I'm not quite sure what preparedness would look like, in the minds of spiritual leaders who urge us to wake up and to prepare. I expect there may be gaps in our own preparation, but at the same time I think it is as unwise to obsess anxiously about being prepared as it is to neglect the issue — because optimism, a relaxed body, a calm routine, a peaceful mind and a habit of joy, taking delight in loveliness found with life's ordinary circumstances, are integral to facing adversity without falling apart. 

So I hope we have done enough to get ready for whatever the future may bring, and I'd be very interested to read your own thoughts on this topic.

"The Lord is looking for somewhere where his glory can dwell."

 "The Lord is looking for somewhere where his glory can dwell."

Those words arrested my attention in a video put out by Steve Uppal in recent days. He's referring to the 8th verse in Psalm 26 that describes the holy Temple as the place where God's glory dwells — and of course we, you and I, are the Temple of the Lord, dedicated and set apart for Him, the place where His glory dwells.

So Steve is saying that in these times the Lord is looking for those who will make themselves available to hold God's light steady, to be as were the anchorites of hold whose vocation was to anchor the Light for their particular spot of earth.

He (Steve Uppal, not God) has put out a three-part video series on the topic of disruption, that I recommend to you. I'll give you some links below.

In the last few years I've had an increasing sense of urgency about the need to get ready and hold steady. I've felt the need to communicate the importance of making ourselves available as pure vessels for the Light in the times we're passing through and get ready for the times we're about to pass through.

The last two books I wrote — St Luke's Little Summer and The Light of One Lamp (you can find them on Amazon) — are for teaching how to each create our own world (our own New Earth) and how to hold the line under temptation to antagonism and division. I also wrote a book some years ago called The Road of Blessing, which should also be helpful in this context. It's out of print now, but I have some spare copies for anyone local to me (I'm sorry, at present I don't have a budget for shipping) and I see there are some secondhand copies online, via Amazon here. Those are a lot of money. I see SPCK still say you can buy an e-book of it here. They should not be selling it because they no longer hold the rights to it, but it may be possible to snag a copy at that much more affordable price. Eden likewise has the e-book here; same applies, they shouldn't have — but hey, they do. US friends, Abe Books also has affordable copies here. 

So that book might be helpful at the moment, and as I say, I do still have a few copies if you can't get one more easily elsewhere.

But this post is mainly to draw your attention to the teaching Steve and Esther Uppal are putting out on YouTube, the first I have seen from the church giving clear and Spirit-led direction about the path we're walking now.

They have a 3-part series on disruption — Part 1, then Part 2, then Part 3 — and a longer sermon here (40 mins, some sermon!!) giving a helpful overview. There's also this that they did almost a year ago, that I haven't yet watched, which I'm guessing is where they started to focus in on all this.

I have a feeling what they are teaching could be important, and as the time-frame is somewhat short, I recommend these videos to you. What they are saying concurs exactly with my own inner sense, and with what the seers and watchers from outside the church are also saying.

This seems very apposite — at the present time we are in St Luke's Little Summer, the brief window of mild and calm weather that comes at St Luke's tide every year (the feast of St Luke is October 18th), before the St Jude's storms set in (the feast of St Jude is October 28th). This is all preceded by the feast of St Michael and All Angels on September 29th; St Michael stands at the Equinox (the feast is set alongside it) pointing down the year and warning us to get ready because the dark days are coming. St Michael and All Angels are also the Lord's reapers, bringing in the harvest of souls. 

Meanwhile, after the feast of All Saints at the end of this month, and St Martins feast on November 10th, traditionally a time of sharing and community, again in readiness for the oncoming winter, we then come into the second great fast of the year (the other is Lent), Advent, during which we prepare for the coming of Christ as Lord and Judge, and to welcome him as the Light who comes to find us in darkness, the Word of Life, the Light of the World.

Both the Now Moment in which we find ourselves, and the traditional cycle of nature and the church, are saying the same thing to us as the prophetic word now (at last) beginning to stir in the church: it is time to get ready; it is time to prepare; the time to get ready is now.

As always, your own thoughts on this are welcome. My fervent prayer is for watchers and seers local to me, with whom to gather and pray and listen and talk through what we're seeing unfold. A bumpy ride ahead, I think, but most insistently this song keeps coming to my mind.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. 

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

[Psalm 23. KJV]

Soul Tribes

This morning as we prepared for our daily prayer, talking about the previous evening and the day ahead, my husband mentioned that yesterday he had seen a political programme that he knows I don't rate highly. A guest on it had been a politician I neither trust nor like, but whom he respects and esteems.

This makes me happy.

If he and I espoused identical political views and listened only to the same people, I think we would be at risk of consolidating an ever narrower outlook. Our understanding would be coloured by a shared bias, and we would lurch further and further away from reality.

While he was watching his political programme, I was considering listening to a podcast from a YouTuber I like very much, that he does not follow. In the end I didn't because I saw that in this particular podcast she was urging us to find our soul tribe. That's not what I want to do.

I have begun to think that soul tribes — ideological clans — are something of a problem in the modern world. The whole phraseology around "identifying as" is indicative of separation.

In recent days there's been a tremendous to-do about the Green Party's ill-advised vote to dub Zionism as a form of racism. Do we need this to add to the suspicions and separations and antagonisms we already have? Absolutely not.

Humanity faces the steep challenges of climate change. I do not share the perspective that it is greatly affected by human activity; the planet's climate has always changed, and will continue to do so regardless. At present it's heating up, and I doubt there's anything we can do about that. But — if we work together — there are many simple measures to help us adapt to the changes. There is wonderful knowledge and practice about permaculture and mob-grazing, water capture and re-wilding, that can protect us against desertification and extend our possibilities for feeding ourselves and protecting our fragile and vulnerable physical bodies against heat. What won't help us is fighting for control over resources, threatening one another, and dropping bombs on what isn't already polluted and ruined. If we really had the intelligence of which we so proudly boast, we'd co-operate, we'd treat one another with respect, we'd take responsibility, we'd accept and learn from one another.

It must break the heart of God that religious factions are among the worst soul tribes for cruelty and violence. 

I know of nowhere but my own life, my own heart, to make a beginning with this. The two books I wrote this last year (St Luke's Little Summer and The Light of One Lamp) were to address our responsibilities in these matters. There is a sense in which we all share the same world, but at the same time we can each be said to create our own individual world. St Luke's Little Summer is about taking responsibility to create and establish and heal one's own world. As it has been said: "Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me".

The Light of One Lamp is about constructive ways forward when cohesion breaks down, when people who once saw eye to eye find themselves in dissension. How to stop this hardening into separation and dislike, how to stop it spreading into factions and division? 

There is one world which is our home, and one creation which is our soul tribe — wider than humanity; the trees and plants and water and animals are also on our side. And there is no power but that of God.

Our task is to use our minds constructively to figure out pathways of healing and peace. Our days are for wonder and service of the living God. We are here for friendship, and creativity and joy. We are here to be kind to one another. Possibly also for the opportunity to have tried cake.

Not my duck, not my bottle

There's something I'm quite sure I must have written about here before, but I can't find it so I apologise if I'm repeating myself tediously. It's just that this evening I saw a bit deeper into it.

We went for a walk, Tony and me, after supper. We only go round the block, and it takes about fifteen or twenty minutes, but that's far enough for us these days. Some of the houses we pass have a habit of putting out, "Free to take", any toys or items of furniture they no longer want. That's all well and good, but I get stressed about it when they put out a really good piece of furniture, nicely made, and I know there'll be a dewfall during the night, or it might come on to rain later, and then the finish on the wood will be spoiled. Why don't they move it on with more care? They could put it on Freegle or the Hastings Give-and-Takery on Facebook. 

This was how, back in the summer, Tony and I temporarily came to have the old coffee table that looked Chinese. Some people in that very same place just put it out "Free to take", so Tony (yes, with his bad back and his foot drop) took the car along the road so he could lug the table up the grassy bank, load it into the car and bring it home; and I polished it up and we put it on the Hastings Give-and-Takery and found it a new home.

Well, this evening they'd put out a chest of drawers. Beautiful, good quality, a lovely piece of furniture. It bothered me (and Tony) to think of it left out all night, now we have the heavy dews of autumn. We talked at some length about going back to collect it, but it was quite large and looked heavy, and our car is very small, and the place is down in a dip with a steep grassy verge to drag it up to the roadside.

Plus we've just gone through all our belongings to eliminate any surplus possessions and been really happy with how calm the house looks now it has just enough and not too much of everything. We have nowhere to put an unwanted chest of drawers, we'd only have to move it on, and our house entrance is up a flight of steps — long story short, we gave up on the idea and left it where it is.

But it made me think again of two stories that always come back to me forcefully when I think about taking responsibility (in this case, for disposal of a chest of drawers). These two stories belong together.

The first is a Zen type of story about a disciple coming for an audience with his Master. The master gives the disciple a bottle with a duck in it, and sends him away with it, instructing him to get the duck out. The young man tries every which way, and just can't do it. So he goes back to the master and confesses his failure and asks him what to do. The master just shrugs and says, "Not my duck, not my bottle."

I loved this story from first hearing it — I received it as being akin to the expression "Not my circus, not my monkeys", about knowing the boundaries of one's responsibility.

But this evening, thinking about the chest of drawers, it dawned on me that (unlike the circus/monkeys saying), the duck/bottle story is about restraint in accepting responsibility. This is important. The lesson for the disciple is about not taking on something unrealistic, too much for you, beyond your remit. 

That chest of drawers was not our duck and not our bottle. It was a pity, but it had to stay where it was. Our neighbours are forever fly-tipping their old junk. If we bring it all home it'll become a second career, and only encourage the practice.

But I said there was a second story that goes with the one about the disciple with his duck in the bottle. 

Again, it's about responsibility, and recognising what is yours to do and where that ends.

A friend recounted it to me.

They worked at a place staffed by volunteers, a sort of spiritual centre. On one occasion, they were walking along the main driveway to the accommodation buildings when they fell in with a young man who had been there as a volunteer. Not a very inspiring individual, neither interesting nor industrious, he had nonetheless been taken on, housed and warmed and fed and given work to do — and now he was tired of it and decided to leave. 

My friend stopped to talk — or, more accurately, listen — and heard his tale of woe and how he was leaving. He had no transport, the place was miles from anywhere, and (crucially) he had no money. 

My friend, ever kind and protective, immediately felt concerned for him, and was on the verge of offering to help him out — give him some money and a lift to the station — when the director of the place drove in through the gates in his Landrover, spotted them there and pulled up to chat. He, too, listened carefully as the now ex-volunteer regaled him with his troubles. 

Thoughtfully, not unkindly, the director said: "Oh, dear. What're you going to do, Jack?"

And that's the thing, isn't it? There are the things that are yours to do, and the things that are not. The director had given the volunteer bed and board and a chance to belong: but he didn't want it. He rejected it.

That was fine. No one blamed him. No one was annoyed with him. But when he wanted to pass on that duck and bottle for someone else to fix, in effect the director simply said, "No thanks. Not my duck. Not my bottle."

As the Tao Te Ching says (Ch.59): "In caring for others and serving heaven, there is nothing like using restraint."

It has taken me a long time to learn this. This evening, I thought that I might finally be making some headway.

Dogs, people, politics, assumptions

 When my children were little kids, we had two dogs. One was a cross-breed — a combination of bearded collie, border collie, labrador and spaniel — and the other was a wolfhound. 

The cross-bred dog only came up to the height of the top of the wolfhound's legs; but, as they say, "It ain't the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog."

When anyone called at our house, the dogs would come to the door with me. Freya (the wolfhound) would just stand there looking calm and interested, but Mary (the little collie-cross) would bark.

And the caller would assume that what had happened was that the wolfhound barked at them.

I think this must have been because they saw a big dog as somewhat threatening, and a barking dog as somewhat threatening, and they clumped them together and categorised them as one threatening thing. They stayed inside their own opinion/perspective/viewpoint, instead of remaining objective enough to notice what was actually happening.

So it is that many people find it difficult to distinguish between facts and opinions. If you can be bothered with it, there's a very good instance of this in a video about British politics that I'll put at the bottom of this post.

The man in it is talking about a hiatus to a proposed change for local political regions. To explain briefly, we had boroughs (relatively small, town-sized regions) and counties, each having their own council — so in Hastings we have a borough council for Hastings and St Leonards, divided into smaller neighbourhood wards each with their own councillor, but we also have the East Sussex County Council. It's all rather tedious because (for instance) the county looks after the roads, but the borough has to deal with endless complaints about the roads and a lot of councillor time is taken up trying patiently to explain to unconvinced residents that they're complaining to someone with no jurisdiction over the problem in question. 

The new proposal from central government is for larger regional authorities, each having a presiding mayor. Many of us in Hastings have been looking forward to this, because our town is very poor (though well-managed) and other parts of East Sussex are a lot richer. We hoped that by joining together with them, we would be part of something better resourced, with size giving us the benefit of streamlined costs: only one set of accountants, auditors, planning consultants, health authorities, etc, and more money to pay them. Our borough councillors consulted the local residents, gave us various options to choose from, publicised the consultation, gave us every opportunity to have our say, and the majority voted for the change to a bigger regional authority.

It's also worth saying that Hastings is quite a hippy place with colourful pagan festivals, a big arts scene, predominantly Green politics, and a heavy emphasis on inclusion — religious, sexual orientation, trans issues, all of that — despite which we have a superb treasurer who is no hippy, has his feet on the ground, and keeps us on a realistic fiscal base that helps us thrive. We voted him in. Hippies are not necessarily stupid.

Now in the video below, using many such words as brilliant, awful, good, bad, etc, the video man is rejoicing that this change to bigger regional political districts has been put on hold by central government.

He says this will save us money — it won't, we've already spent millions because we're well into the transition. He says the people who want the change are anti-democratic and want money and power for themselves, not for the people. Certainly in our borough, this is the opposite of what is the case. He says that all the mayors will be like Sadiq Khan (the mayor of London); well, they will in the sense that they will all be mayors, but they won't necessarily be like Sadiq Khan — we'll get who the majority vote for. He says the mayors will waste money on their own pet project and he cites trans pride processions as an example. But we already have such projects rolling big time in Hastings, and the people seem to enjoy it. We'll probably get less of that from a mayor elected by a wider demographic than our bonkers artsy Green Hastings-world.

In fact just about every single thing the man in this video presents as fact is in actuality his opinion. Most of it, if you look at Hastings, is (in our area at least) demonstrably incorrect.

How intriguing. Because I don't think the man in the video is (intentionally) lying. He speaks with great conviction and I think he is saying what he absolutely believes to be true.

On the one hand this feels somewhat frustrating, but I think it's also quite restful. It's like the Taoist farmer story — "Maybe yes, maybe no" — it means that what is (daily) presented to us as awful, bad, catastrophic, greedy, selfish and evil (private landlords, for example), may not be so at all. 

There is peace in this. It means that, though we should remain vigilant, watching and listening with real attention, it is probably unwise to take to the streets or shout slogans and carry banners. As a wise person once said, "The things we worry about will probably never happen, but things will happen that we didn't expect; so we're probably worrying about the right amount but about the wrong things." 

It also means that it is unwise to clump things together, to create categories (as callers to our house did with our dogs). Things are what they are, very individual, categories are almost meaningless.

Sometimes people categorise me and my husband into one undifferentiated unit. They assume that because we are married, we think the same thing (I know this by listening to what they say to us). And they make class assumptions about us, too. So there is an assumption that we are rich enough to go on holiday because we speak like educated people; that he is interested in Taoism and Celtic spirituality because I am; that we share the same theological outlook and vote for the same political party, and so forth. None of these things is true. 

Something I am really looking forward to is the publication of my husband's first novel. Because he has worked in Christian publishing, was a Green Party councillor for the borough, is supportive of other people even (sometimes) when he doesn't agree with them, and is an irenic spirit who avoids arguments, people think they know him. They don't. My husband is surprisingly hard to get to know. But when he begins to publish the fiction he has been writing, it will be a chance for his true voice, his own voice, to be heard. I wish everyone would write a book, so every voice would have a chance to be heard.

Anyway, this is getting too long so I'll stop now. Here's the video I mentioned. The man in it is hard work but curiously fascinating in his inability to distinguish fact from opinion, and grasp that other people see things differently. Politics, eh?

Sorted

 Comments glitch has fixed itself! Yay!

Comments

 I still can't reply to comments on this blog. Sigh. 

This has happened to me before, actually. In the sidebar here is a link to Beth's blog (BLT in MT). I couldn't comment on her blog for about a decade, and as mysteriously as the possibility of doing so vanished, now it has come back. Same with San's blog (Multicoloured Madness); years went by where I couldn't comment on her blog and then suddenly one day recently I could. And now I can't comment on my own blog.

It tries one's patience, it really does. These modern marvels sent to revolutionise our world — well, they do, but I've come to the conclusion they disable and limit as much as they facilitate and extend.  Back in the 1970s I would ever have known you unless we had physically met (or I had somehow heard of you and been given your address) and we would have stayed in contact by letter. And we all depended on letters so there was an evening post as well as a morning post. And there were no Zoom calls and there was no YouTube and no electronic games, so we came out of our houses and drank tea with our neighbours and there was still Evensong at every church and doesn't it all seem a long time ago.

But now things come and they vanish, out of our control and beyond our understanding, governed by a mad world of robots behind the scenes. And now, I write here, and you have the kindness to come and read what I have written, and comment on it, and I can't even reply to you, and I am angry about that. I have asked the robots what to do and they have advice about how to tinker with the settings of my blog and of my computer and their bright ideas have not worked.

I'll put my mind to it, but this is a time of endings and conclusions, so maybe after all these years it's time to start again elsewhere. If I do, I'll leave a post to let you know.

In the meantime, there were two comments I wanted to leave. I tried repeatedly and could not. So if one fine day you come along here and read the comment section and what I'm going to say appears there about thirty times, that'll be why.

On my post about modesty, Lynda left a comment. Because I'd said I looked at her photo on her own blog, and moved it to my desk top so I could enlarge it and look at her clothes properly, she said this:  

Oh dear, I'll have to be careful what photos I post of myself if people are going to enlarge them!! :))

And she described her own clothes, and then she said:

I really must do a blog post about it...

And I wanted to say — I would love to read that blog post! Please do it. And then I also wanted to say that every time a person leaves the house or opens the front door to someone, it's like an enlarged 3D photo of their self, so no need to worry. 

Waving to you, Lynda. xx

Then just today Krista left a comment on the post I wrote called "Parameters for perimeters", in which she described her wonderful green light that shines through the night and gives reassurance and a sense of presence to her neighbours. 

And I wanted to say — Krista, I think I can see your light shining all the way across the world; thank you for holding it steady.

And to all of you, my friends, thank you for being here and for reading my thoughts and sharing your own. It's such a cheerful thing.

So for the time being I'll wait to see if the comment facility comes back, and in the meanwhile I'll reply to your comments like this. 

If you really want to be sure to stay in touch, remember that you can send me your email address in a comment. All comments come to me to read, I manually and personally publish them, it's not automated. At least something isn't done by robots, thank God. So if you leave a comment with your email address, I will delete the comment and get in touch with you by email, so you can correspond with me as much as you wish. Then we can also exchange street addresses and write to each other in the old-fashioned way on paper, if the fancy takes us — though it's become breathtakingly expensive to send a letter now.

And if all else fails and the possibility of commenting doesn't return to me like a homing pigeon, I'll strike camp here and move to somewhere that works.

Google uh-oh

 The last post I put up here was blocked by the Google robots because they had some kind of unspecified objection to it.

I have tried numerous times to reply to Lynda's comment on my post about modesty, but my comments won't go through.

This kind of thing does seem to be an increasing problem with all the big sites since AI took over the world.

I'll give it a day or two, and if the wrinkles don't iron themselves out I'll set up somewhere else — Wordpress maybe? Anyone got recommendations?