The running musical theme of our NY house madness has been
“Alalapoopoolala.”
As in this clip;
So my mate Andy (you may remember him as the one who has too much time on his hands) decided to make his own version.
Here it is, with my profound apologies.
You could take a wee swim in aid of charity? We did;
Another year.
May 2013 bring to you many good things.
It is nearly 2AM and we are enjoying some peace after a lovely evening with friends old and new. We let off a couple of sky lanterns, one to remember the year gone and one to express hope for the year to come. We also used this simple ritual;
1.
We stand on the threshold of another year
The old one is gone and the new one is still mystery
And we offer you our prayers
We watch them rise to you
2.
Last year was full of good things;
Friendship, laughter, music, art
New experiences,
New achievements
For these things we offer you our praises
We watch them rise to you
3.
For some of us the year gone by has had times of great difficulty
The loss of a people who are dear to us
Life has darkness as well as light
So we give to you all those memories-
All those times when doubt, fear and pain were close at hand
We watch them rise to you
4.
The future belongs to you Lord
Each breath, each heartbeat
So we give you our hopes
We offer you our projects
We offer you our dreams
We watch them rise to you
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 73,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
A few years ago I wrote about this film on TFT;
Back in 2008 I wrote this;
The concept of kanyini has been brought to us by a beautiful man called Bob Randall who grew up as an aboriginal boy on the outskirts of a cattle station in central Australia. His father was a farmer of Scottish extraction, but appears to have had no concern for him at all. Like 50,000 other black kids of mixed race (between 1910 and 1970) he was forcibly removed from his mother, and sent to school hundreds of miles from home. He was forced to learn the rules of white culture- the clothes, the way of life, the religion. He learnt to appreciate the contradictions between the words of Jesus, and the actions of these, his followers. Since then, he has been a welfare worker, a songwriter, and author, and now, works with Australia’s black community.
To be a native Australian in these times is to be part of a community with huge problems- health, crime, substance misuse, soaring suicide rates. It is a community living in the shadows of the sky scrapers of new Australia, but also in the shadow of genocide, in which everything ans almost everyone who was part of the oldest culture in the world was all but destroyed.
It is also the story of a Diaspora of westerners (particularly Celts from Ireland and Scotland) often still under the shadow of their own experience of oppression and injustice, who become in turn the oppressors, murderers and rapists of a whole culture.
It is their story, but it is also ours. It is the story of what happens when we become disconnected from who we are.
Because to hear Bob Randall speak is to feel the pull of something wonderful. He describes a culture where people are connected to land. Birds, trees, all living things- they are family. The proof of this connection is that we are… alive! And because everything is connected, everything is OURS, not MINE. Everything is already created in a perfect state and our job is to become part of it.
Bob describes his memory of life as a kid like this;
These were beautiful people, because they lived in a beautiful way.
Bob’s concept of Kanyini feels right. It has simple truth- and seems to encapsulate the idea of community as I understand it should be. It has 4 components;
belief system
spirituality
land
family
I am reposting this partly because I found the film in full (as above), but also because I think that this list is a good one to consider as we look again at the year to come this is a good place to start.
If life for the people in this film started to unravel as they lost connection with the things above- might the same be true for us?
How do we challenge this, for ourselves and our communities? Our connection to something we can believe in/live for, our connection to the divine, our love of where we are located, our existence within an extended family (whether or not we have blood ties.
May 2013 be your year of Kanyini.
Life is too short for magnolia
Let’s splash the old walls with new paint
Mix me purples and blues
Like a two day-old bruise
And gold like the robes of a saint
.
Where does it come from, magnolia?
Not from the wild places I’ve been;
Brown eggs in a nest
Bright robin red breast
And oceans of deepest sea-green
.
What is the point of magnolia
When rain is by rainbows replaced?
It’s the space left behind
When colours go blind
It’s like life being leached from a face
The lovely low days between Christmas and New Year offer to some of us the privilege of a bit of stock taking- asking those important questions about where we are now, and where we might be going.
I have been doing a lot of this of late, and will be doing some more- but one thing I am increasingly convinced of is the need to consume less, to make more with my own hands, to produce, to craft and to live more simply. Unfortunately over the past few weeks this has actually meant repeated trips to consumer-hell; IKEA and other temples to Capitalism. This is because we are setting up a guest house in a relatively out of the way corner of Scotland, and there are only so many things that you can knock together out of driftwood. It feels very wrong though.
I came across this today;
“But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer’s anxiety that he is missing out on what is “in.” In this state of total consumerism – which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves – all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Which chimed with something else…
I read somewhere that Journalist Mark Hudson proposed 4 stages in our relationship with stuff;
And of course, we can not take it with us on the next journey. How many journeys to the tip and the charity shops will we all be making in the next few days?
The problem is- how on earth can we do it differently- how can we live a better way of being?
Time for another quote;
“We have to create culture! Don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own road show The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
― Terence McKenna
I don’t know much about this bloke- I think he was a bit of a Hippie ‘herbalist’, but I find myself in agreement.
I am longing for life that does not conform to the same tired, self destructive, addictive patterns. Not just talking about this kind of life- but actually starting to live it, now, in the new year, 2013. Because how much time is left?
Next year is going to be our year of new beginning. I am not exactly sure how this will go, but let the wild rumpus begin…
Find him some DIY to do Clare- quick- or at very least some dishes…
Otherwise he will post yet more embarrassing video clips of me on YouTube.
This (I think) was taken clandestinely during one of our ‘wilderness retreat’ trips. Dancing is not usually encouraged, but I must have come over all 1970’s.
I am looking forward to spring though- Christmas day is past, and the uphill climb through the hard soil of winter can begin…
Sometimes darkness lies with open arms
Casting no shadows;
No zones of jagged uncertainty
The folded black is bosom-soft
An iris around the eye
Could it be that dark is not opposed by light
But is the place where light is falling?
For the night is not defeated by starlight-
It is anointed.
At the edge of this suburban half light
Beyond the reach of neon
Darkness is waiting
Like pregnancy
For light to be born
May you be richly blessed this Christmas.
I am very proud of Michaela- and so here is a chance to show you some of the things she does in her day job.
Recently she was speaking about a local project she has been working on- a local Timebank. (You can watch her whole presentation here.)
The bloke from the NHS talking on the video seems to have totally missed the point- the emphasis is not on ‘services saving money’, or ‘sick’ people doing something to make them better- rather a Timebank is a level playing field to allow everyone to build community connections- where everyone can contribute.
We joke in our family that the first ‘exchange’ of time in Dunoon was a few years ago when Michaela came home with a rusty Shopper bike and told me that I was to make it work again. And they were off! It has become a really great local programme, with some fantastic stories- including a whole wedding- flowers, photography, cars, catering- all arranged through time exchanges! People have some amazingly diverse skills to offer- translation of a document from Russian? No problem. Fix a computer? Easy. Proof read a document? When do you want it finished? Others have involved an older lady who learnt how to write properly using her handwriting skills on certificates, or another person teaching woodcraft skills. It is great.
Michaela would never agree that a lot of this is down to her- she would point to all the others who have worked so hard to make it a success- but I know different. She is just one of those people who makes other people feel safe and included, and by her own dedication makes other people stick in there.
this fragile tent 