Bees

I've been reading about beekeeping; I intend taking a course in the spring and then getting some bees. I'm looking at topbar v national hive design and considering if there is anything to be said for so called natural beekeeping. Certainly I think I'm more interested in the keeping of the bees as a part of a 'spiritual life' and for fun than I am in harvesting large quantities of honey.

Bees are in decline due to a number of factors and need the support of beekeepers to help them. Although some would say that part of the difficulties they face have been caused by industrial beekeeping, the main root of their difficulties would seem to be the industrialisation of farming and the associated use of chemicals and loss of diversity and quantity of flowering plants. Which when you boil it down might be said to be due to human greed. But of course things need to be seen in context; some of those Victorian beekeepers would have thought of humans as God's chosen creatures with a right to reign over the earth. Fortunately I think most people would see that as a very suspect position now. I wonder what commonly held views of today will be regarded as strange in the future? I do hope to things work out so I can keep a hive or two, or three...

Red

I was washing some things by hand this morning and as the sun shone in through the window it illuminated this deep Red. 'Wow, what is it?' I thought. Followed by, 'Don't think, be'. I noticed some sense of a Red seen long ago, some essential RED, vibrant, fun and joyous, somehow full of promise. A vague recollection of, of what? Childhood? I dashed for my phone to take a picture. The sun had faded a bit by the time I got back but here is the picture.

Under water the colours are bright and rich. Above water the light is reflected and the Red is replaced by White. The contrast of other colours lends vibrancy to the Red. Stripes add playfulness.  :)

Thought for the day

I was half heartedly thinking whilst bathing after exercise this morning, which is to say that my monkey mind was babbling away to its self as it does, that one can hear lots of ideas around the Findhorn Community about the way reality is. And, musing on some of my own fantasies I had a brief thought about how the interconnectivity of everything might make for all sorts of possibilities. Yes I thought, but you can't make the toaster work by trying to connect it to the hot tap. Which is a nice way of reminding one's self about relative and absolute truths.

Sex is an interesting area when it comes to connection and creativity. We are all connected but not in all ways. The universe's desire to be, to create, seems to be evident in the drive to connect sexually with, in the case of heterosexuality or birds, bees and flowers, the concomitant procreative function.

So it's the different types and levels of connection that, as form folds over form, creates reality as we experience it in everyday life, i.e. at the relative level. Relative; from Wiktionary:

'Preposition: relative. Relating to, being relevant towards. Adjective - : not absolute ; connected to or depending on something else ...'

After that sojourn in a warm bath I headed off to the ball room and did some Tai Chi. Too fast, too fast, not enough meditation in it. So I went and got my MP3 player and used a bit of new age type music to help me slow it down a bit, which was helpful. Then a bit of free form dancing before tea. Which all goes to show inter dependant arising.

Funny things

When I was little I used to think that the trees made the wind and imagined that there was a room somewhere where they switched all the street lights on and off from.

Cues

DC bought me a Sony MP3 player for Christmas. His plan to get me to take more interest in the music I like seems to have worked and having up loaded CD's on to it I've started down loading stuff from the net too. Having it plugged into the HiFi I find I play more music in the house too. It's something to do with the availability of the music in one compact handheld sliver of a thing. And it has an 'intelligent' shuffle which lets one pick tracks by mood, that certainly makes me listen to more stuff.

Anyway, listening to the radio the other day I heard a track by the Eagles. I recalled that I'd always liked that music and so decided to download some from the net. Playing the albums 'One of these nights' and 'Hotel California' I recalled the 70's. I must have had a slight sense of the 70's that was generating such tracks- California and the watered down version that reached the English perhaps left leaning middle classes, as a kid, but that was not my world. No, it was just a hint of something I sort of liked the look of but did not know and could not have; my 70's did not come as an extension to the 60's people think of as the 60's. My 70's were of the Northern working class and short of cash. The left was of tabloids and trade unions not of the broad sheets and the party either political or dinner...

I can enjoy the music and there is no visceral wrenching of the past. It's of a time when I was a sensitive loner but not yet in adolescence. So the innocence is sweet. It's music of the 80's that can generate the wrenching feeling. But the pattern started sooner...

But, the Eagles music left me in good spirits and feeling quite alive. Interesting to muse how I liked that music both sides of sexual awakening.

And, a copy of 'I Heart Huckabees' arrived today in the post. DC and I have just watched it and it's GREAT! So many of the metaphors match my own! Thanks to Jenny (who I met on a course last year) for the recommendation. The movie is based around a couple of existential detectives... Funny and heart warming.

Thoughts, emotions, our stories, our aloneness our interconnection, the triggers or cues that set us off spinning our webs...

I didn't have the childhood or the adolescence that I as an adult fancy I would have liked then or is it now? But that past did lead me to the present and a probably deeper understanding of the meaning of the desires around all this than I might have had. After all, the electrical and electronic engineering books are replaced on the shelves by titles by Huxley, both Suzuki's, Sekida, Kapleau, etc. I practice TaiChi and dance to music feeling the energy in ways I would describe with reference to chakras, have explored the Red thread koan, sit zazen each day and try to practice throughout the day, write like this, live in a very pleasant 60's townhouse with my partner, I have been out as a gay man at work since a time when that was an issue, DC and I were at a Wesak festival at a local Zen Buddhist abbey at the weekend and I am back off to Findhorn at the end of the week. How close I am in many ways to that other world I might have had as a kid. And looking back, is it not the same koan now as then?

Fun

I checked:

http://www.thinkbuddha.org/

and found the wordle.net post

I tried it for Holding no bough.
The biggest word was time.
Try it!

Vitality

Vitality

What place Pan? The mythical figure Pan is connected with nature and fertility. Accounts of Pan seem to soon lead to tales of seduction and his shall we say base element seems clear. But there is more to Pan than this; there seems to be an element of creativity. We generally hold creativity in positive regard and so it seems important to understand the relationships between enslaving desires and creativity. Does Pan represent in some way our understanding of the desire to be, to come out of voidness? I recall that in his book 'Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist' DT Suzuki writes about trisna (tanha) as:

...more deeply rooted than we imagine, as it grows straight out of the root of karuna.
Let me cite a Japanese Haiku poet of the eighteenth century, Basho. One of his seventeen syllable poems reads:

When closely inspected,
One notices a nazuna in bloom
Under the hedge.

The nazuna is a small flowering wild plant.'

I feel we need to acknowledge our creativity and enjoy it. Just where this sits with the Four Noble Truths is not so simple.

Humour

Humour is as they say the best medicine. And for me if it is the somewhat surreal variety as most excellently created by the thoroughly imaginative Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer then all the better. I've just watched a review of the pair's Shooting stars; quite brilliant. I had forgotten this gem. Humour is often said to be based on some form of cruelty at bottom. Well the but of the joke in the case of Vic and Bob is our own pretentiousness. We can see this in the treatment given to any celebrity who takes part in the show; any egotism would be thrashed. There is nothing like the (probably typically British) surreal antics of this pair to bring me to earth, aliveness and a sense of the greatness of sharing time with fun people and to remember my own inner clown. Ah but with the passing of the years... We all slow down; the energy is just less vibrant or at least the pace of it slows. But the vibrancy can still remain; think of Humphrey Lyttelton or George Melley, they were both right in there living as full as they could until their deaths. The inner clown need not fade away and it need not be part of the closed armour of the adapted self, the circus clown complete with tears. No, the inner child is the playfulness here and the tears need only be of laughter.

Reminder to self- when the short, dark and cloudy days dampen the mood get some humour going David.

Fun

Well, I feel it's time for something light and fun. But what to do? How to post?
Then an e-mail from an old friend pointed me to John Shuttleworth on YouTube - 'Two margarines' and also 'Can't go back to savory now'. Brilliant. Then I noticed Jilted John is there too! What a blast from the past. Such fun. Try them on YouTube.