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Speak to Bert....
We once took some kids to watch Bert, a clown. He did his best, but the 20 or so children there didn't find him engaging. So they didn't respond when he called for participation. Until in desperation...
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Balance, in meditation, in our bodily systems, in the weather.
More wisdom from my Cropredy friend.(it's a very nice village, by the way, as well as a festival. Here are the good people of the village hall serving their excellent breakfasts:which are a very good...
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Multi--tasking and mindfulness
It seems clear that women are better at multi-tasking than men. Whether that's because they have to be, or whether that's a good thing for any of us, is a different matter.This woman seems quite...
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The Mother of the Sea - Kathleen Drew is a Shinto goddess
Here's what seems to me a remarkable and moving story. Phycology is the study of algae, and Dr. Kathleen Drew was a phycologist at Manchester University. In 1949 she published a paper in "Nature" which...
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Being a funeral celebrant
I've posted on this before - a good while ago - and this one is likely to be just as opinionated as the earlier ones. But it's only my opinion, so just step over it rather than let it spoil your...
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Words, ritual, ceremonies - making wordless anguish articulate
Interesting article in the Observer yesterday and online, about an interview with Edward Hirsch. Thanks to Katherine for the tip-off. The article made me think, which is a bit hard on a Sunday morning,...
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Denial vs consolation, depression vs mourning, funeral poems
Edward Hirsch lost his son Gabriel in 2011, and recently published a long eponymous poem about Gabriel's life and his death. In the interview I mentioned in my previous post, he says:“I think ancient...
View ArticleGET RID of us professional funeralists.
If you let your cursor hover flirtatiously over the title above, it will take you to a BBC website article about printed houses, for people to live in on Mars and the moon (uhuh. Why? What's the point?...
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They shall not grow old" - the British Legion is mis-using these words.
This excerpt form Lawrence Binyon's poem "For the Fallen" is frequently used at the funerals of soldiers, and at memorial ceremonies for them such as Armistice Day:They shall not grow old, as we that...
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Mindfulness and depression: Anthony's wisdom and courage
If you hover your cursor over the title above, it will take you to a blog post that is a bulletin from the front line of using mindfulness to help with clinical depression.Anthony's honesty and...
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The Fear of Death - mindsets that might help.
I don't mean the natural (biologically-wired) drive to avoid death. Neither do I mean fears about the nature of our individual exits. I mean the sort of out-of-balance existential terror that some...
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The psychological appeal of polarised views: adolescence, The Process,...
I had two good friends at school who became heavily inolved in what became a full-blown cult. This cult, originally called The Process, and later the Process Church of the Final Judgement, was why I...
View ArticleSerenade - a poem by John Fuller
This poem links in my mind with my post about the fear of death, 02:10:14; I hope Mr Fuller doesn't mind my reprinting in full his fine poem, which I found in The Spectator, 4th October 2014, page...
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we are pluralities - meditation and the striving ego
It seems to me that we are not single entities, but pluralities, full of the voices and gestures of people we have known, the places we have lived, and then some. We are unfolding processes, and our...
View ArticleDying with dignity, funerals with dignity, depend on uniqueness
Your cursor over the title will take you to a BBC "Points of View" transcript of today's broadcast. Don't be misled by the title, it's not part of the assisted dying debate, it's simply about how...
View ArticleHarmony, and that Stephen Taberner live magic.
Singing as well as you can, with a goodly number of other non-professional singerswho were almost all strangers until the previous morning; singing a simple but powerful little song in the mighty...
View ArticleFunerals: Give them what they want?
This is a "funerals" post, so if you'd like to side-step it, that's fine by me, though Andrew Marr's BBC Radio 4 programme this morning made it pretty clear that thinking about death - yours - from...
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Mortality: if you're mortal, this book should help. If you think you're not...
This man (surgeon, researcher, teacher) Atul Gawande, has written a really important book. "Being Mortal" pulls together a lot of what many people have been saying for quite a long time: late and...
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Digital cloning - mortality awareness, artificial intelligence and the end of...
This remarkable human being:has warned us that artificial intelligence (computer power equal to the human brain)could threaten the survival of homo sapiens. He's a smart bloke and we'd do well to...
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"We never keep to the present," said Pascal
I can't remember a better description of the destructiveness of ignoring the present moment than this: "We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too...
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