respond to love. My mother has often asked what do we do with our dogs, they come to us as puppies or rescued adult dogs all quiet and well trained and after a while we have a bunch of characters walking around with us. And they are all different. Our terrier who was abandoned on…
Patronage
What can art give the rich? Actually nothing more than it gives us all. Some people becoming wealthy turn to patronage of the arts because they have the money to pay for the art works and places to exhibit them. But the energy of the creative force in the artist, the place where men get…
Sun Worshippers
I have to admit that apart from the debacle of human sacrifice, those scientifically challenged people’s actually did manage to highlight the fount of all life on Earth. That it isn’t sentient hardly seems to matter, and that there are millions of suns in the Universe doesn’t really matter either. Without it we have no…
Electric Cigarettes
They do exist. As my friend tells me there is a whole ritual around cigarette smoking that includes alleviating one’s stress and goes through the feel of the packet, the buying and lighting up, the inhaling and even the satisfaction of seeing the thing burning away. Electric cigarettes are there to help you and very…
If
If everyone in the world vanished in an instant and you were the only person left, how much of civilisation would be safe in your hands? I asked myself this question after reading Immanual Kant and the idea that ethical behaviour may be described as those actions anyone would do in the same situation. To…
Music
There were three occasions when I was a teenager when for no reason I could imagine, I heard pieces of music that triggered something in my brain and I could no longer feel my body at all for a few seconds. They all occurred when I was sixteen to seventeen and I have ascribed them…
The Creativity of the Subconscious
Deer caught in a storm. Olympic runners wreathed in smiles. Sea captains smelling of salt. Fish floundering. Songs. The sun in the eyes on a day when no sunshine was forecast. Patience. Leg warmers made of synthetic wools. Pink biros no one uses. The demi-john filled with old plastic bits-and-pieces and used as a door-stop….
The wide, wide world
When I was a teenager I had to stop thinking about the terrible suffering and torture of animals around the world. I found the sheer weight of the feeling of the immensity of it all crushed me. Now when I read humanity still chasing after money in their billions, still converting the free gift of…
When we are lost…
Laughter is more than a friend. It is a personality we can always count on because it is ourselves, it is a voice we can always understand, a sense we can feel throughout our bodies, a need that brings its own fulfillment. There is in laughters the relaxed knowledge of our own mortality, the sheer…
Dry Stone Walls
Having an old cottage in the county of Cornwall brings with it some challenges, in the main trying to make a home that was built two hundred and fifty years ago for dirt poor farm labourers who were supposed to be out in the fields all day, into a modern home. But there are some…