News has come through of yet another drug related death at a music festival. What a dichotomy, a festival of youthful enthusiasm and enjoyment of music marred by a death from a drug presumably taken to heighten the enjoyment and experience of the occasion. What a waste. Continue reading “Test or Not”
We have two elderberry trees in the garden outside my study, framing the window on each side with a swathe of green leaves and in their season, magnificent white blooms setting their berry fruit as they in turn expire. These leaves have lately given me a pleasant point of focus during my meditations and I have shared this view with you in the image above. As I sat meditating on the elderberry leaves one day last week a movement to my right caught my attention. Continue reading “Just A Leaf”
What is it with Halloween anyway? What a weird festival it is if the word festival could even be attributed to this very strange event. A date in the calendar when people appear to adopt all manner of pagan rituals and superstitions like ghosts, zombies, witches and skull sculpted pumpkins. When cruelty and fear becomes acceptable for people who for the other 364 days of the year are usually kind and considerate Christian people. Continue reading “The Halloween Question”
Willow stands silent and still in a front yard at the end of the main street. Obviously once a model, but her black dress, changing with the seasons, her pointed hat, broom, and a wand grasped lightly in her right hand suggest another occupation now, perhaps touching on the occult. Her presence always attracts attention, sometimes with approval, sometimes with a smile, sometimes with a little superstitious fear and trepidation, sometimes a lot of superstition and judgement leading to complaints and requests for her removal. Mostly though curiosity. Why? Why is she there? What does she represent? Continue reading “The Odd Thing About Willow”
My dear old Granpop often said “Ahhh getting old’s a bugger” and I can hear him saying it still after all these years. Please pardon the vulgarity but that is exactly what he said and to replace “bugger” with something more acceptable would be to lose the strength of feeling in his voice at the time. Of course what he meant by the expression was that getting old wasn’t something he was enjoying at all. As this baby boomer, a so-called New Age man, heads into Old Age I am starting to appreciate the depth of feeling and the essential truth in his words. Continue reading “New Age Old Age”
The gift of life comes with its inevitable companion, the sentence of death. You can’t have one without the other, there is no choice. You live, you die. As soon as you start living the clock starts ticking. Every life, human, animal, plant, no exceptions. There is no control other than adding the full stop through suicide, self-destruction. The length of the sentence is arbitrary and therefore unknown, unlike the sentence pronounced by a human court sitting in judgement. The sentence though is full of commas and colons and semicolons and capitals and hyphens, all defining the events of our life. But where does the natural judgement on the length of the sentence come from? Continue reading “The Sentence”
Weekly episodes on whatever catches my eye but with a keen interest in hearing the story behind blues musicians and craftsmen
Mike Stacey 2016
