On Wisdom and the Cocoa Bean.

Part of my New Year’s Eve rambling to myself (there being no other person present to whom I could ramble verbally) involved coming up with a definition of ‘wisdom.’ I couldn’t do it. Wisdom is one of those qualities – like love – which appear to exist but have no universal definition. At one point I came up with:

Wisdom counsels, but avoids advising and never instructs.

Well, I suppose there’s something of minor worth there, but it isn’t a definition. It’s just a sound bite, and sound bites are almost invariably inadequate because they consciously seek to address abstract values which are not only complex but also untouchable.

Eventually I decided that it’s probably something to do with knowing yourself, living up to your own values, seeking to augment those values, and then promoting the concept to anybody who wants to listen (and keeping quiet if they don’t.) It seemed general enough. And then I wrote this because I was bored and tired of being earnest. I wonder whether hot chocolate would help.

A Personal Mystery for New Year's Eve.

’Tis now New Year’s Eve and the traditional time to look back over that artificially contrived span we call twelve months. I don’t usually bother, since dates are just numbers and I’ve long felt that the definition of a year should be solstice to solstice. But this year something is tugging at me, insisting that I write it down for no better reason than the fact that it seems rather more significant than it should. Back in May I was visited for the first time by the wraith of the Lady B.

At this juncture I should explain that I had known her for about ten years by then, and during that time she had moved in incremental stages further and further to the edge of my orbit. In consequence – and being a bear of moderate brain – I thought I had put her behind me and that she was no longer of any significance, especially since such significance had always been a bit of a mystery anyway. Not so.

On that day in the merry month of May I was hit in the middle of my chest with such force that it arrested my movement and seemed to pull my head and shoulders down. (Imagine getting a sudden and severe attack of heartburn; it was something like that.) And the message which rose into my mind from the onslaught was unequivocal. It told me in no uncertain terms that my fondness for the dear lady was undiminished, and so was the magical, magnetic pull which her presence in this world had long exerted on me, almost certainly without any artifice or volition on her part. And then, less than a week later, I learned that she had left my orbit altogether and shut the door behind her.

I found it devastating at the time and struggled for weeks to understand why. Eventually I did and it helped, but the wraith became a regular visitor and continues so to be.

So should I be grateful that she left something of her presence behind to haunt me - forcibly, though not aggressively - on the byways of the Shire, in my house, and even in the little market towns to which I make regular forays? I don’t know. On the one hand it can be enervating; on the other, it brings a splash of colour to an otherwise grey life. And maybe one day the wraith will explain to me the mystery of the Lady B connection. But that raises its own issue: without knowing what the explanation is, I can’t know whether or not it would be welcome.

Meanwhile, I can now rest content in ending the year with a brief explanation as to why the Lady B has attracted so many posts in 2017. I expect they will continue because some things just refuse to lie down and at least pretend to be dead even if they're not.

Avoiding the Badger Mafia.

We had quite heavy rain last night and rain has a disastrous effect on my bird tables. The contents, being a mixture of rolled oats and mixed seeds, turn into a cold, wet, gloopy substance which I like to refer to grandly as ‘fortified porridge.’ But the birds don’t like it. I see them looking disconcerted when I open the curtains in the morning, and the robins – being the most knowing of birds – eye me with a look which clearly indicates a measure of avian discontent. So I have to scrape it all off and replace it with fresh, dry stuff, and then the little feathered friends flock eagerly to the table again and all is right with the world. (They never fly to me and tweet a word of thanks, but sometimes you just have to accept that good deeds are their own reward.)

So what do I do with the scraped off stuff? Do I throw it away, thereby sticking hot needles into my extreme sense of disquiet at wasting perfectly good food? Nope; I deposit as much as I can manage in a polythene bag and tip it out close to a nearby badger sett. Badgers seem to be quite partial to cold, wet gloopy stuff. I came across one feasting on it in my garden a few winters ago, so I should know. And my question is this:

How smart are badgers? Might they have come to recognise that heavy rain is the precursor to a free supper of fortified porridge? And if I fail in my now time-honoured practice, will they take the hump and come a-stalking to punish me for my oversight? Badgers are the heaviest, strongest and toughest of the carnivorous mammals we have in Britain, so getting on the wrong side of a whole family of them probably isn’t a good idea.

The Southern Faux Festival.

There are several theories as to why 25^th December was chosen by the Romans to be Christmas Day, but most of them relate in one way or another to its close proximity with the winter solstice (the whole of Christendom being at that time in the northern hemisphere.) I think it reasonable to suggest, therefore, that in a cultural sense, Christmas is simply the current incarnation of the Midwinter Festival which has been practiced since time immemorial. And it is a routinely recognised fact that many well established Christmas traditions are pagan in origin.

So what about those people living in the southern hemisphere who celebrate Christmas alongside the summer solstice? Midsummer and midwinter are completely different in character and have different attributes associated with them. Australians and the like should surely be celebrating Christmas in June, otherwise the celebration has lost its connection with its historical root – which is most important in my opinion.

This is yet another mess we Christian Europeans created by insisting on ruling the world for our own benefit. (And it’s interesting to note that the Chinese never made that mistake, despite their having been the world’s premier civilisation at several points in history.)

On Misanthropy and Aspiration.

I’m one of those people who fit the occasionally heard statement: ‘I dislike people, but I love humanity.’ It sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it, since humanity is made up entirely of people, but actually it isn’t. What we love about humanity is its potential; what we dislike about people is their constant failure to aspire to that potential.

Too many people are consumed with a selfish disregard for the rights and needs of others. They start wars for stupid, selfish, arrogant and misguided reasons. They foster systems which reward the psychopath. They’re too prone to abusing one another, and often take pride in so doing. They abuse animals as a matter of course because they allow themselves to believe that animals have no emotions, don’t feel pain, and generally don’t matter anyway. They slavishly follow religious traditions which encourage this view, claiming that it is sanctioned by their version of God; and those whose God has a different name too often get slaughtered or abused themselves for being out of step with some small minded notion of rightness. They give to the rich and tread the poor into the ground, and the rich hoard greedily beyond their capacity to spend while the less fortunate struggle to subsist and often fail. And all over the world there persists the notion that women are inherently inferior to men, there only to serve the will, the desires, the needs and the criminally carnal drives of the physically stronger sex. I could go on…

I saw a fragment of a TV programme tonight in which a Thai woman was greeting her draft elephant at the start of the working day. The degree of mutual affection and respect which passed between them seemed entirely genuine, and I trust my judgement in such matters because I’ve been studying the signs of artifice for a long time. And then the woman said:

When I was a child I saw a bull elephant in the jungle. He was wounded from his logging work, but they drove him on regardless. The look in his eyes changed my life forever.

Therein lies the aspiration to human potential, and there are more climbing the same ladder. The two groups I have a problem with, and which validate my tendency to misanthropy, are:

1. The other 90+%.

2. The ones who hold most of the power in the world.

And so my prayer to the God of Small Things is: ‘Please show me more of those who aspire to humanity’s potential, that I may walk the rest of my road in company with the cream.’

On Emptiness and Patience.

The last post I made was one of my poorest. It was so badly written that it was beyond editing and I thought I should take it down. But then I decided to take Omar Kayyam’s moving finger literally and let it stand as testament to an imperfect being.

There’s a darkness inside me at the moment. It’s a grey, foggy sort of darkness which hangs silent and impotent in a void of its own making. Emptiness does not suit the living being. Emptiness is symptomatic of the dying time when the frigid air is filled with nothing but unreal images of times past going round and round on a wheel in the mind’s eye. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the nature of man is no exception.

A vacuum needs to be filled with life-giving air and energy – the fresh new growth of spring, the balmy breezes, the strength of a waxing sun, the scent of new-mown hay drifting off the field. The problem is that you cannot force the progress of spring. Though driven by an irresistible imperative, she’s young and fickle of purpose; she comes when she’s ready.

And that’s what this year’s Midwinter Festival has felt like: trudging without vigour through a dismal wood with only sleeping, skeletal trees for company, waiting for something or someone draped in colour, light and adventure to walk around the next bend so I can say: ‘May I walk with you for a while?’ I’ve been here before.

Tell Me Who I Am.

There’s a song that was recommended to me by the priestess recently and I’ve listened to it several times. It includes the lines:

There are worlds within me that I cannot explain

There are so many doors but they all look the same

I am lost, I don’t even remember my name

A few lines later it ends with:

…please tell me who I am

I think this relates to a problem experienced by those beset by the reclusive tendency and to which I’ve referred several times on this blog.

It seems to me that people rarely recognise that their sense of personal identity is largely a reflection – positively or negatively – of the environments in which they operate and the fellow human beings who operate there with them. As the recluse becomes more reclusive and turns his back on those people and environments, he suddenly wakes up one day and realises that he doesn’t know who he is because there’s so little to show him. It’s a feeling I have occasionally experienced. It’s confusing and uncomfortable, but I suppose you just have to get used to it and keep putting one foot in front of the other. There is, after all, a grain of personal identity still slumbering somewhere inside, so maybe it’s just a matter of finding the right people and environments to put some flesh back on the bones.

*  *  *

Tonight’s Lady B post didn’t get made because the allegory was too convoluted and I couldn’t be bothered to struggle with it. It was all to do with a pearl, a beach and the ebb tide. Will that do?

The Lady B at Christmas.

The Lady B’s ghost did her charging rhino act again last night. She does occasionally; her wraith crashes into my consciousness with an almighty thud and it’s always unexpected. It happens when I’m engaged in some trivial act which has no connection with her and I’ve no idea why.

But of course, it led me to wonder what her erstwhile host is doing this Christmas and where she is doing it. I wonder whether she is musing quietly on her life thus far; I wonder whether she is looking into some celestial mirror and taking stock. I wish she would tell me, but she won’t and neither should she, since the only constructive purpose in looking back is to turn again and move forward with augmented intelligence.

And just to prove that I’m nothing if not imperfect in approving my own edicts, I have to say that I miss her and her little dog a lot sometimes. But trials will be trials and challenges will be challenges and isn’t that what Christmas is all about? And Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without a Lady B post, would it?

Finding Christmas.

It’s been an odd sort of Christmas this year. For as much as I’ve tried to ignore it as usual, something of its essence has refused to remain quiet. It pressed itself remorselessly against the creaky, reluctant door of my mind, persuading the rusty hinges to give just a little more until something of its fabric could be glimpsed in the dark recesses beyond.

What I saw, or thought I saw – for the light was low and the images vague – was not the Christmas of common practice. The three foundations comprising the spiritual, the commercial, and the traditional were entirely absent. There was no merrymaking, no gathering of the flock, no gift giving, and no thanks held up to any saviour of mankind.

There was only a kind of musty melancholy, but not the depressed kind. There was no joy, no excitement, no fear, no pain; and yet it was not without substance. There drifted from it the need to muse quietly on a life lived thus far, and to accept the challenge to look into some celestial mirror and take stock. I saw the Green Knight come to Arthur’s court at Christmas; I heard his challenge and felt Gawain’s response. And out of the darkness flowed some intimation of great significance about the midwinter festival.

Christmas Cheer from My Favourite God.

Christmas Day in the Shire has been mild, damp and breezy. The walk was pleasant and I managed to remain amenable to the couple who wished me a merry Christmas when I passed them in Mill Lane (it always happens when I go for a walk on Christmas Day.) I decided that gushing would be dishonest, but they did get a slightly lukewarm ‘same to you’ in return. Ah, but then the good old God of Small Things stepped in to ensure that my Christmas should not be entirely devoid of cheer.

There are two horses temporarily domiciled in a field at the bottom of my lane. One is a grey hunter of about 16 hands, the other a neat little bay of about 15.1. They often watch me with some curiosity when I walk past and they always get a word and a wave in return. Today was different; today they trotted over to the field boundary hedge and stretched their heads so far across it that I was able to touch their noses. Making physical contact with animals is a singular treat to me, so I did have a merry Christmas of sorts after all.