The cogs of my brain synchronise
To some machinery
Deep in the sea.
The background hum of its engine room
Drowns out the tick tock
Of this human clock.
Engine room…
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Author Archives: Chris Goan
Making games work…
My mate Nick has written a book!
This is the blurb;
Are you someone who occasionally runs games to help people to learn?
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Would you like those games to work better?.
Do you want people you work with to gain even more from your training?.
If this is you then “Making GamesWork” by Nick Smith is definitely worth reading.This book takes you through all the steps you might want to consider from initial planning to final evaluation, in an easily-readable style. It can be read as a whole or you can dip in to get advice on the bit of games-running that you most want to improve.
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You will learn:
- How to plan a good games session to meet your learning outcomes
- What to say in your briefing
- How to run the game and intervene successfully
- Suggestions for reviewing to draw out the learning
- Example games to illustrate each chapter
- Safety considerations to be aware of
- What you need to be a good facilitator of games
- How to design a game to use the equipment available
“‘Making Games Work’ fills a significant gap among books about team activities. It is a plainly written guide from one practitioner to another about how to get the best value from team games/tasks/activities/challenges. It is full of tips and tweaks for adapting activities to suit different groups, different situations and different objectives. Every part of the process can be adjusted. Nick Smith points out the choices at every turn – whether briefing, monitoring, reviewing, evaluating, designing or redesigning activities. After reading Making Games Work I am confident that your tried and tested activities will be getting a makeover or two.”
Roger Greenaway, Reviewing Skills Training
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“This is without a doubt a book that should be available to all instructors, teachers, facilitators, youth workers, in fact anybody that works in the field of developing personal and team skills.”
Teresa Thorp, Grafham Water Centre.
“ When it comes to practicing a craft, a skilled craftsman will select the correct tool from his tool box. Nick, a time served master craftsman, has assembled his tools, laid them in this tool box and allowed us to choose which tool we would like to use. With sound advice from his experience, as to which tool will work best, he has delivered a service to the outdoor training world. Thanks Nick!”Ian Ross, Lagganlia Outdoor Education Centre
Nick has been running games as part of team and leadership training for 20 years. People regularly seek him out for advice on how to make games work with particular groups or for specific learning outcomes. He has a passion for helping people to enjoy the process of discovering and reaching their full potential.
Nick is a freelance outdoor instructor and life coach- his blog/website is here. (You might recognise one of the kids in his header as my son Will.)
Nick is one of the leaders of our Wilderness Meditations too.
The wisdom about Solomon…
Old Melvin Bragg did it again this morning- great discussion on what we know (and don’t know) about King Solomon. You can listen again to this programme (and all sorts of others spanning years and years) here.
Solomon- the archetypal enlightened Oriental monarch, the nearest thing we have in our adoptive western tradition of a Sun King. He is said to have lived in relative peace, accumulated great wealth, a vast harem of wives and concubines, built temples and palaces and a network of ‘chariot towns’ in an expanding Kingdom. He was said to have been visited by great Queens, and to have ‘satisfied’ them. Along the way, he asked God to grant him wisdom, and is accredited with authorship of several books in the Bible- Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Song of Songs. He is revered in Hebrew tradition as presiding over a golden age, and in the Islamic tradition as a prophet.
The truth of all this is in the dust. No certain evidence of his existence, or that of his great building projects, has been found. Authorship of his books in the Bible are almost certainly more complex. Having said that the written record of the minutiae of his life in the Bible are beyond almost any other comparable ancient figure. There is no doubt that Solomon is a dominant Icon in the history of us.
He is also a flawed figure. The Bible story talks about his enslaving of the people, and his descent into the paganism of his many wives. He accumulated vast wealth and thousands of horses- all on the back of slavery. According to scripture, God was not pleased, but rather than destroy his Kingdom in Solomon’s lifetime, God decided that the Kingdom would not stand. Solomon’s sons fought, argued and it all fell apart.
The interesting thing is that despite the obvious flaws that the Hebrew tradition records in this great leader, we remember mostly the wisdom and the glory. We somehow root for Solomon- we envy him his achievements- his wealth, his women, his worldly wisdom.
This led me to wonder what wisdom might these stories communicate to us, here, now? Why are these stories so central to the Bible story? Whatever the historical truth of these stories, what truth do they have to our spirits?
It is all there I think- the pursuit of a nationhood of conquest and empire. The accumulation of wealth and fame. The exploitation of women and sexuality. The enslavement of the powerless individual towards the wealth of the few. The demonisation of those outside the boundaries as less-than-human.
Then there is the rise and inevitable fall. Like boom and bust economics. And at the core of it all, the loss of the core of things- the turning from what is good and pure towards idolatry.
I look at this story through what we know of the journey that was to come, and perhaps most of all through the person of Jesus; who had no stately majesty, no wealth, no interest in power, other than power-to-save. Jesus who came to proclaim that other word that we have heard too much of over the last few days in the UK- Jubilee.
Jubilee not in the sense of a celebration of wealth and pompous privilege. Jubilee that had nothing to do with looking backwards towards an empire now gone, and had nothing to do with jingoism or nationhood. Rather it was about this;
The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.(See Luke 4 and Isaiah 61)
The focus shifts to the little people like you and me.
Solomon has had his day. May all Kings and Queens take note.
Statistically speaking…
Today is the 4 year anniversary of this blog. As a birthday present, I thought it appropriate to go for a new header- a cropped part of this photo;
We bloggers have a guilty secret called statistics. Sure, our motivation as we write is absolutely pure and totally high minded, but it also kind of helps for this to be represented numerically!
WordPress give you a whole range of different means of measuring your success (or lack of it.) Here are some of mine;
All time visits; 260,628
Busiest day; 1,029 (April 23rd 2012)
Number of posts; 1338
Number of comments; 1685
So there you go. The secret is out.
One step from eternity…
We have just been here;
Along with some friends, we spent the long weekend camping on the Ross of Mull, overlooking Iona- which is the most beautiful place I have ever been to.
And here is the evidence;
We walked a lot, swam, ate, cooked bread and baked spuds in makeshift ovens made of sand and driftwood fires.
Whilst there we heard of the mother of one of us having become seriously ill in hospital. The distance and ferries stopped any rush to her bedside- all that was possible was to stay and pray. To sit in such beauty with such a burden must have been an incredible rush of emotions- but it felt as though the place, and our community, was holding us.
We are delayed only by our hearts beating.
And each one beats with all the treasure of the universe.
St Catherine’s, dusk…
Honest doubt and fundamentalism…
I have been listening to some of this series on the old wireless during my travels this week- Richard Holloway‘s journey through the emergence of doubt in the wake of faith. Compulsive listening for old pilgrims like me.
For those of us on a quest for honest faith, we have also to be honest about doubt. The two things are intertwined, as I have written about previously. Doubt then is not the opposite of faith, but rather the means through we we engage, wrestle and ultimately it can become the way that we move towards light.
Today the discussion centred around the issue of revelation– the idea of an interventionist God, who reveals himself to his followers through dreams, visions, prophecy, and people ‘hearing his voice’.
Some of these ‘voice hearers’ began to write down these words, and it is these words that we go to most often as we seek fresh revelation.
One little morsel that impacted me today was this one, concerning the writings of Origen…
Origen was a hugely influential scholar, theologian and writer of the early church, writing in Alexandria in the second and third Centuries after Christ. His views soon were controversial- he was a universalist and believed in the pre existence of souls. He was condemned later as an apostate- but perhaps we should regard him as a theological adventurer, putting forward ideas and theories for us to chew on.
Today his views on scripture were mentioned. The gospels that were circulating at the time (and there were many more than the 4 we have in our Bible now) had all sorts of areas of disagreement and contradiction. This might be hardly surprising if we read these as eye witness accounts, or scholarly collections of stories.
We might also expect a gospel to bear in some way the perspective, the creativity, the agenda of its particular author- one person might focus on one aspect of the life of Jesus- love for example, anther might be more interested in proving some other theological issue. You could describe this as observer bias.
This is of course not a problem if you understand this as you read- in fact it can be extremely enriching to view the life of Jesus from different perspectives- this is the whole point of us still having 4 gospels in our Bible is it not? However it becomes a problem when you start to treat the text not as revelation through a man, but rather the very ‘Word of God’. Then you have to deal with the contradictions in a whole different kind of way. You have to make it all fit into one homogeneous whole. As we used to hear said- ‘inerrant; without error or contradiction’.
It seems that back in the second and third Centuries there were already disputes about the validity of scripture as the inerrant Word of God. Origen however suggested that God had deliberately allowed these contradictions/disagreements to remain in scripture precisely to remind us that it was not to be taken literally– rather it was to be engaged with, wrestled with, questioned and debated.
In this time of the rise of fundamentalist doctrine, this ancient heretic might well have some more agitation to do for this generation too…
(Really) ancient music…
I am not talking cheesy middle of the road, or even a bit of pretentious played-on-cat-gut-strings-baroque.
Apparently some blokes were poking round a cave in Germany recently, and discovered these;
Here is the story from the BBC;
The flutes, made from bird bone and mammoth ivory, come from a cave in southern Germany which contains early evidence for the occupation of Europe by modern humans –Homo sapiens.
Scientists used carbon dating to show that the flutes were between 42,000 and 43,000 years old.
The findings are described in the Journal of Human Evolution.
A team led by Prof Tom Higham at Oxford University dated animal bones in the same ground layers as the flutes at Geissenkloesterle Cave in Germany’s Swabian Jura…
…musical instruments may have been used in recreation or for religious ritual, experts say.
And some researchers have argued that music may have been one of a suite of behaviours displayed by our species which helped give them an edge over the Neanderthals – who went extinct in most parts of Europe 30,000 years ago.
Music could have played a role in the maintenance of larger social networks, which may have helped our species expand their territory at the expense of the more conservative Neanderthals.
To put this in perspective- these flutes are old.
They were ancient long before any kind of Empire- the British, the Spanish, the Moorish, the Monghol, the Roman, the Egyptian, the Babylonian, The Hittite.
The last ice age was still carving our valleys in which we still live.
And people were sitting around fires and laughing at the day. The air was alive with the conversation as people burped out their shared meal. Smoke swirled and children slept in the shadows. Then someone brought out the instruments.
What did they play? Where there other instruments too?
Did they sing? And if so, what did they sing about?
We know that in the area around these caves complex carving and paintings were being produced. Check out the Venus Figurine for example. People were abstracting their experience with art. They were seeking after collective meaning.
All of which is a rather amazing window into where we came from, and perhaps who we still are now, and will be in the future.
Humpback rescue, Loch Fyne…
There was a fantastic story in our local paper today, about some fishermen out diving for Scallops in Loch Fyne. They were a couple of miles NE of Tarbet, when they spotted what they thought was a big tree in the water, surrounded by buoys.
When they approached, the ‘tree’ blew water from it’s blow hole. It was a humpbacked whale- one of the most beautiful and mysterious of all the whales. This creature, normally at home in the deepest ocean, had come into the Loch and somehow become entangled in the fleet of lobster creels. Creels are usually laid out in a string of 8 or 10, with marker buoys.
Humpbacked whales travel on average 16000 miles each year. Who knows where this one has spent the winter. The males produce a complex song each year- specific to each pod of whales. They compete to extemporise and develop the song, for reasons that are unclear- possibly for mating purposes. Over the singing season the song will develop because of all these changes. Then, the seas will be silent again, until the next year, when the pod will start again exactly where they left off the year previously.
Humpbacked whales can be well over 50 feet long, so who knows what courage it took for one of these scallop divers (Chris Denovan) to decide to get in the water with it? They knew that the poor creature was close to exhaustion, and they decided that they could not leave it to suffer.
Chris managed to cut it free from the creels, and ‘after two hours of building up courage I went back to cut the tangled ropes and buoys from it’s fluke’.
Well done Chris- what a fantastic story.
I discovered some footage on you tube;
Here it is, swimming away. May it sing for many seasons yet;
Twisting with our fate…
I am reading this book at the moment;
I have heard people talk about it for years- it was written in 1988 after all, and became a publishing phenomenon in the early 90’s. At some point it arrived on one of our bookshelves, but I always avoided it because of some vague association in my mind with new age self fulfilment self help books.
However, different time of life and all, and different spiritual outlook, so in search of a book to read on the ferry that fitted easily in my pocket, I picked it up.
And I am really enjoying it.
Enjoying the writing and the story telling- which is ‘magical realism‘. A shepherd boy who meets a king who tells him his destiny, and he sets off on a journey in search of this destiny, along the way finding the depth of things – the Soul of the World.
But also enjoying the theological questions that it is bringing to me. In many ways the book proposes a spirituality that is a mash up of all sorts of influences- a bit of Jesus, a lot of Eastern mysticism, a lot more Coelho.
It suggests that each of us have a destiny, which we discover by listening to our hearts and following the omens and signs that the Soul of the World scatter in our way. Most do not dare to follow this destiny as it involves risk and pain, but when we do, the whole world conspires to deliver what we desire.
At first, there is what Coelho called ‘beginners luck’, we start out, and things fall in place. But the journey towards destiny always involves testing.
On the face of it this kind of simplistic magical thinking is the exact reason why the book has remained on the shelf for so long. It is too much like the prosperity gospel charlatans or the ‘success is yours if you go for it’ nonsense.
What rescues the book is its gentle thoughtfulness, and words like this;
We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it is our life or our possessions or our property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.
What has been occupying my mind is this question of fate. This post discussed some of the issues around vocation, and I suggested that I did not believe that God had a golden path planned out for us. In a reply to this, Paula suggested an alternative something like a flow chart with lots of different potential paths.
But as I think about the heart of the matter – the desires that in in the middle of us – I have to acknowledge the thought that we each carry unique individuality and creativity. The accident of our birth impedes or facilitates how this might shape our lives, but ultimately the degree to which this uniqueness is worked out is about the choices we make.
I wrote this line recently about God ‘twisting with our fate’. Mingling with us, laughing with us, prompting us, singing with us in success and holding us in failure.
Is this the same thing that Coelho is painting- the same fragments of the truth from the Soul of the World?
All I can say is that life is not for standing still, and movement has to have some direction, even if the way is indistinct and fraught with danger.
this fragile tent 