Back to the ordinary

I came across some fine words attributed to William Martin which celebrates the ordinary. It reminds me of an earlier post which made reference to John Shotter celebrating the amazingness of the ordinary. I feel like ordinary is being reclaimed as a term of affirmation and admiration. It is in our ordinariness that incredible feats happen.

Spring is knocking at the door

The first signs of spring are gathering along the hedgerows
Clusters of engaging snowdrops eye those passing by
Tantalisingly they call in the spring
Reminding us of the endings of winter
The biting cold and endless darkness is waning
And yet this is the darkest hour before
The dawns of change
These are tough times for many
The challenges and triggers are coming thick and fast
Like deadly hunters arrows seeking their prey
It's hard not to take it personally
Our egos tussle and wrestle their foe
The snowdrop stands so tiny and humble
Reminding us that great strength can come in the smallest
most hidden away forsaken places
Less we judge and more we flow with the ever turning wheel of life
Nothing stays the same
Nothing
All will pass
All will change
Hearts remain open

In the words of the Tao Te Ching

Carrying body and soul and embracing the one,
Can you avoid separation?
Attending fully and becoming supple,
Can you be as a newborn babe?
Washing and cleansing the primal vision,
Can you be without stain?
Loving all men and ruling the country,
Can you be without cleverness?
Opening and closing the gates of heaven,
Can you play the role of woman?
Understanding and being open to all things,
Are you able to do nothing?
Giving birth and nourishing,
Bearing but not possessing,
Working yet not taking credit,
Leading yet not dominating,
This is the Primal Virtue.

SING

Solid as a rock

    Solid as a rock

Rooted as a tree

    Rooted as a tree

I am here

    I am here

Standing strong

    Standing strong

In my rightful place

    In my rightful place

This recall song was shared by Sofia Campos (Board Chair of United We Dream).

Wintery darkness leads us to the mystery

Listening to Peter Senge speaking today at the Presencing Institute's Global Forum he spoke about the human drive to simplify; in order to understand, in order to control. Hence we have academics reducing their knowledge into models and theorems that can only ever really approximate the real world. And we find corporations seeking to create pattens and mono-cultures of products, goods and foods. At the heart of all this simplification is the mystery, a much deeper complexity. How we approach the multiverse of complexity is quite different to the world of simplicity, hierarchy and order which seeks to control and take dominion over that we are ultimately apart.

This led Peter to turn to an ancient sacred text that has been telling us this very same thing for thousands of years in a much more eloquent way.

The opening lines of the Tao te Ching say ...

The Tao that can be spoken of
Is not the Everlasting Tao
The name that can be named
Is not the Everlasting name
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth
The named is the mother of ten thousand things
Therefore, ever desireless
One can observe the hidden mystery;
Ever desiring
One can observe the manifestations.
These two issue from the same origin,
Though named differently.
Both are called the dark.
Dark and even darker,
The door to all hidden mysteries.


And this brings me to the teachings of a lesser known person Tchenka Sunderland, an astrologer amongst many things, who has been telling those who wish to listen that we are living in a time of too much light and that we should be less afraid of the dark. Winter is the time of year to become aquainted again with the dark, both in the season cycle outside and in our own embodied inner journey of the year. Only by returning to the dark can we renew, refresh and return again. If we don't allow for winter we literally burnout. Society burns out and individuals burn out. Hence we live in a world were the suicide death rate out ways any other form or cause of death in the world today. We are burning out through climate change and all the present consequences to life that come with that and we are burning out ourselves and all the psychological pain and suffering that comes with that to communities, families and friends.

When will we stop simplifying and controlling the complex and start to live gracefully in the mystery embracing the darkness?

Forgiveness

Towards the end of 2013 the word that appeared before me to frame my 2014 was forgiveness. And it was a word for a while now I have resisted. In the last few years the words that have come to me Dance ... Freedom... Spaciousness... have been easier to embrace. And yet when forgiveness came it felt qualitatively different.

I have been listening to a short promotional video for a book called Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth A Collection of Essays edited by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee.



In this piece I heard the voice of Winona La Duke put into words the transformational and healing powers of forgiveness and why it is so necessary for me to go through this experience.

It is no longer okay to look away from the pain and suffering taking place around me, within me, by me, to me. Focusing attention on the positive exclusively is to avoid acknowledging the grief that is present and growing. This is not an indulgent, narcisistic solely inward looking retrospection. It is connected and inseperably joined to the whole.

There is a wail and cry to be heard if I listen deeply enough. And it has something to say, something to share and teach me. I would if I were more bold expand this beyond me to others, however, that is your journey and rightly your decision to make.

As Winona says, "The process of apology and redemption or forgiveness, is a mutual healing process."

 

H.A.P.P.Y

24hrs of Happy

A toe tapping tune

The soundtrack for the weekend

An epic video for an infectious song

Clap along if you feel like happy belongs to you

Posture

mermaid
openness
love
vulnerability
flow into encounter
dance and play
be open
curious
listen

tree
growing
upwards
feeling the wind
towards the sun
open blue
sky
be

be like a tree
be like a mermaid
be free

where do they come from?

i get scared sometimes
where do they come from?
the words i mean...
they are not mine
or yours truly told
and yet some trade on
ownership
what's mine is mine
and what's yours is mine too!

i look down on the page
and wonder
where did they come from?
the words i mean...
it surprises me everytime
to see the scratches and markings
gather and accrue in straight lines
standing to attention
creating a reaction.

Owen Jones's Agenda For Hope

Agenda for hope: 

Owen Jones’s nine-point manifesto

1) A statutory living wage, with immediate effect, for large businesses and the  public sector, and phased  in for small and medium  businesses over a five-year Parliament. This would save billions spent on social security each year by reducing subsidies to low-paying bosses, as well as stimulating the economy, creating jobs because of higher demand, stopping pay being undercut by cheap labour, and tackling the scandal of most of Britain’s poor being in work. An honest days’ pay for an honest days’ work would finally be enshrined in law.

2) Resolve the housing crisis by regulating private rents and lifting the cap on councils to let them build hundreds of thousands of houses and in doing so, create jobs, bring in rent revenues, stimulate the economy and reduce taxpayers’ subsidies to landlords.

3) A 50 per cent tax on all earnings above £100,000 – or the top 2 per cent of earners – to fund an emergency jobs and training programme for young unemployed people, including the creation of a national scheme to insulate homes and businesses across Britain, dragging millions of out of fuel poverty, reducing fuel bills, and helping to save the environment. All such jobs will be paid the living wage, supported with paid apprenticeships rather than unpaid “workfare” schemes.

4) An all-out campaign to recoup the £25bn worth of tax avoided by the wealthiest each year, clamping down on all possible loopholes with a General Anti-Tax Avoidance Bill, as well as booting out the accountancy firms from the Treasury who help draw up tax laws, then advise their clients on how to get around them.

5) Publicly run, accountable local banks. Transform the bailed-out banks into regional public investment banks, with elected taxpayers’ representatives sitting on boards to ensure they are accountable. Give the banks a specific mandate to help small businesses and encourage the green industries of the future in each region.

6) An industrial strategy to create the “green jobs” and renewable energy industries of the future. It would be focused on regions that have been damaged by deindustrialisation, creating secure, skilled, dignified jobs, and reducing unemployment and social security spending, based on an active state that intervenes in the economy, learning from the experiences of countries such as Germany.

7) Publicly owned rail and energy, democratically run by consumers and workers. As each rail franchise expires, bring them back into the public sector, with elected representatives of passengers and workers to sit on the new management boards, ending our fragmented, inefficient, expensive railway system. Build a publicly owned energy network by swapping shares in privately run companies for bonds, and again put elected consumers’ representatives on the boards. Democratic public ownership instead of privatisation could be a model for public services like the NHS, too.

8) A new charter of workers’ rights fit for the 21st century. End all zero-hour contracts, with new provisions for flexible working to help workers. Allow all unions access to workplaces so they can organise, levelling the playing field and giving them a chance to improve wages and living standards. Increase turnout and improve democratic legitimacy in union ballots by allowing workplace-based balloting and online voting.

9) A universal childcare system that would pay for itself as parents who are unable to work are able to do so, and which would take on the inequalities between richer and poorer children that begin from day one.

For more information about this article by Owen Jones click here

30 Day Plank Challenge

new year
new challenge
this and tabata
plus a game of badminton
thrown in on Sunday
for good measure
let the fitness programme
begin ...

Day 1 - 20 seconds 
Day 2 - 20 seconds 
Day 3 - 30 seconds 
Day 4 - 30 seconds 
Day 5 - 40 seconds 
Day 6 - REST 
Day 7 - 45 seconds 
Day 8 - 45 seconds 
Day 9 - 60 seconds 
Day 10 - 60 seconds 
Day 11 - 60 seconds 
Day 12 - 90 seconds 
Day 13 - REST 
Day 14 - 90 seconds 
Day 15 - 90 seconds 
Day 16 - 120 seconds 
Day 17 - 120 seconds 
Day 18 - 150 seconds 
Day 19 - REST 
Day 20 - 150 seconds 
Day 21 - 150 seconds 
Day 22 - 180 seconds 
Day 23 - 180 seconds 
Day 24 - 210 seconds 
Day 25 - 210 seconds 
Day 26 - REST 
Day 27 - 240 seconds 
Day 28 - 240 seconds 
Day 29 - 270 seconds 
Day 30 - PLANK FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE!!

... expect a progress report
in 27 days time!

Ever had a problem creating a password?

It is only nonsense because it does not fit our paradigm!

In this first video Brian Goodwin talks about wellbeing suggesting it is a word that 'relates to qualities because it is a quality of feeling ... you know what it is like to have a sense of wellbeing, but you cannot turn it into a number ... because wellbeing is a coherent integrated experience of that dynamic whole by a person'. If this is the case, could understanding wellbeing require a different level of perception?

This brings me to the second video where Wade Davis is talking about interspecies communication. What does this have to do with wellbeing you might ask? Here Wade references how Amazonian tribes people can distinguish different ayahuasca plants that a western scientifically trained botanist would identify as one species. When asked how they do this the tribes people will say, 'you take each one on the night of the full moon and it sings to you in a different key'. How do the tribes people find the plants? They will tell you, 'the plants talk to us'. As Wade suggests using our rationale Descartian mind we might say that this is nonsense - talking plants is ridiculous and there is no scientific evidence for such a claim. However, from a different standpoint Wade offers the view that 'it's only nonsense because it doesn't fit into our paradigm'. Different belief systems cannot only make for different individuals they can also make for different levels of perception.



Some might argue with Brian Goodwin and say, of course wellbeing can be measured and talking about wellbeing exclusively as a quality is nonsense. After all there are many people searching for that illusive quantitative metric of happiness and wellbeing. However, like Brian Goodwin's assertion that wellbeing is a quality, that may be correlated but fundamentally is each persons own unique experience, it thus requires or at least invites us to imagine that in order to understand wellbeing, like the Amazonian tribes people communing with plants, we have to inhabit a different reality, perception and paradigm.

Which brings me to my last video by John Shotter talking about the amazingness of the ordinary. Towards the end of this video (minute 13 onwards) John says ' as we go back into the enormous complexity of everyday life on the one hand ... on the other hand quite ordinary people deal with that complexity all the time without too much trouble. It would be nice if we knew how it was done. This would take a very different kind of inquiry from that used to create theoretical ideals and scientific models. It’s a kind of inquiry that looks into all the small details, the different arenas of interaction. And in many spheres of activity that’s the work that remains to be done. That’s the work of the future.'

John Shotter- sep 08- The Amazingness of the Ordinary from Dawn Dole on Vimeo.

What would happen if we took an action inquiry approach to study and understand wellbeing? Can we westerners' caught in the dominance of analytical rationale logical thought step outside of our own paradigm and see the world with new eyes? It's not like many thousands, nee millions of ordinary people aren't already intuitively doing this already. The only difference is they don't draw attention to it, they simple get on with living in all its complexity and messiness doing the best they can. What if we took our understanding of wellbeing from the experiences of ordinary sentient people.

For A New Beginning

Everyday offers up the opportunity for a new beginning. To start a fresh on a blank page. Today we went to visit our potential new companion. A beautiful 6 month old kitten rescued in October 2013 in a dreadful state who has gradually recovered to the point he is now ready to find a home. Little Rocky exemplifies the spirit for a new beginning. He doesn't appear to harbour any bitterness or cynicism for his difficult start in life. Instead he has a curious open soul, very trusting and willing to step into each brand new day.

I have spent the last 24 hours reflect on the year just past and yet as I scroll through facebook entries I came upon a friends post looking to the present and seeing the vista of newness in all it's ripe potential. And in the words of John O'Donohue perfectly summing up what new beginnings represent. New Year's are definitely not restricted to January 1st. They are open to us all the time.

Lest I forget - for a new beginning - thank you Emma Kidd for the reminder and John O'Donohue for the words.

In out of the way places of the heart

Where your thoughts never think to wander

This beginning has been quietly forming

Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire

Feeling the emptiness grow inside you

Noticing how you willed yourself on

Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety

And the grey promises that sameness whispered

Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent

Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,

And out you stepped onto new ground,

Your eyes young again with energy and dream

A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not clear

You can trust the promise of this opening;

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning

That is one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk

Soon you will be home in a new rhythm

For your soul senses the world that awaits you.