Listen up!

Listening extremely carefully to every word, and gauging the size of the spaces between the words, as I prepare the audio file of my book B’Hemoth, has made my general hearing very much more acute, and my vision more detailed. The regular sounds of everyday are sharper now, and I have discovered richer dialogue in my favourite films.

Singing, which is one of my great loves, has become wonderfully more pleasurable, as the voice can now investigate and more easily interpret musical scores. Can I have been nearly stone deaf most of my life? Very possibly; inattentive, certainly!

Another fascinating fact arose at the same time, namely that the B’Hemoth story, the words that describe the plot, the locations and the characters, have separated from me, as the author, and are following a course in the world in a wholly independent way, with something to say on their own account.
It is a very odd sensation to closely read one’s own words, sweated and toiled over for years, as if they’d been written by someone else. Maybe that is the case; a different version of me! But best not go too deeply into that subject in this blog.

A birthing has taken place; having done all that I could to get the idea ‘born’, I have become, without really knowing when, the passive observer, the looker on, the innocent bystander, the one who peers, with interest, into a shop window.

This process is the heart of quantum mechanics, the observer and the observed. This is what the cosmic dance is all about; the constant shifting without force (or ego), between states of on and off, active and passive.
When this essential aspect of life is fully understood, it is an effortless state to maintain, one that requires no modification, or third party intervention.
It is as life is supposed to be lived. Never take it or leave it, but take it and leave it.

Once, while singing a song, I stopped to say I wasn’t doing it well at all. My teacher said it had been going along perfectly fine, and added, “You sing, I’ll listen”.

There it is again, the reminder not to be caught straddling, not trying to be in two places at the same time, or judging or making assumptions, because if one is the observer, there is no way to acquire the information of being the observed.
Can’t be done, you’re stuck knowing only half the story.

So go with the cosmic flow, accept one’s position in the greater scheme of things, and be open and happy.

Via and ice

Why does anyone write?

Why does anyone write? Why do people climb mountains, cross rivers on high wires, or the Atlantic in straw boats? Because there’s something to discover about the project embarked upon, and the staying power of the person who has decided to do it. No matter if there are years of preparation at every stage of the way, and maybe the same time again in refinement of the necessary techniques to make the endeavour at all worthwhile.
From the first, the mind has to be prepared to remain solitary for long periods of time, and maybe also the physical body. The ordinary life pleasures often have to be put aside, so that the soft, quixotic germ of the idea that is seeking expression, is not diverted and lost in the loud, carelessly milling everyday crowd.
All is not lost; in giving up the external life, one is free to engage with the existence carved out by the word story, or the adventure, and there is more than enough to do keeping up with that, especially when the characters of the imagination or legend, come alive and express their opinions and desires.
There is the spirit of adventure and the adventure in spirit. This deeper part, if quickly acknowledged, makes the work grind very much easier. To travel alone is wearisome; to travel in the company of one’s awakened imagination and dreams, is high adventure indeed.

MAKE IT MINE!

Above so below

I watched the Jubilee celebrations for a while. When Elizabeth became Queen, we had a sport’s day in our village, and there were lots of prizes, I’ve still got one of the pearl necklaces I won that day!
Throughout her reign the Queen has always taken time to meet the people, and in the early days, before terrorism caught on, she would move freely wherever she wanted to go. There was a time also when her security was very fearful for her safety, but Elizabeth insisted on making contact with as many people as she could.

There are calls to get rid of the monarchy, but those sorts of complaints come from people who would get rid of their own mothers for the same reasons, she costs too much to keep and there’s no need for her now.

In this mad world anything is possible, but when you are royalty, you have been born to a life of service to your subjects and they, in their turn, are supported by the presence of kingship. Those words seem a bit ponderous, but they have real meaning, coming out of a very early time when the ruler protected those who lived and worked on the royal lands and the people, in their turn, did service to uphold the ruler.
This bond between a ruler and his people is very strong. It exists in the heart; it is a long-standing response that is in no way matched by the flighty, short-lived process of present-day governance, with its continual changing of statutes, rules and regulations.

Royalty represents the long past and the future, it offers stability to the people which no government can hope to aspire to. Those in the crowds who were interviewed all responded in like way; from the bottom of their hearts, not as Whigs or Tories, Republicans or Democrats, which they might well have been, but because they recognised the one element in their lives which was not subject to arbitrary change, and which gave them a real sense of continuity.

A nation that doesn’t pay attention to this sort of continuity is a very nervous one. The countries of Europe who became republics did so by maintaining the old infrastructure upon which royalty had depended.
Other forms of republic, that cannot call upon that framework, have been forced to elevate parts of their structure of governance to create the pinnacle of leadership, but this will always be difficult to maintain; there is nothing below, no long historical thread, no heart-felt bond that will carry the people on through thick and thin.

The Queen connects with her people because she knows that if it came to the crunch, they would choose her over any form of government. She has done her job faithfully, and largely well for sixty years, which is more than can be said of any British government during that time. Having the monarchy connects the messy every day and ephemeral with the solid core that is the country, and in a strange way this reciprocal connection allows change to occur, without incurring undue instability.

Fairies are put at the top of the Christmas tree for a purpose, they are there to be looked up to, they represent what can be aspired to.

Stay tuned

The relatively imminent completion of B’Hemoth, prequel to The Gatherers Trilogy, as an audio book, has made me think a great deal more about how I want tetralogia.wordpress.com to look and be interacted with. Audio and video clips are definitely on the list, and the ways to promote and sell content like this, will also have to be studied in depth. I’m always open to suggestions on the matter, and suspect there will be much to take in on the subject.

A change of this WordPress theme is possibly in order, as I hope to have more drawings and graphics to show, but until that happens, I will continue on with the present site, greatly reordered.

Nothing ever stays the same, including the early ideas which I thought would do what needed doing. However, I’m just as excited now as I was when I cobbled together the first tetralogia, and look forward to building all the ideas into something enjoyable for the readers.

2002!

There it is 2002 hits. I don’t know what I expected when I started blogging. The process is certainly interesting and surprising; I have been connected to people from every part of the world who have such intriguing things to say and ideas to convey, and I find it’s important that I take the time to know about them.

Our world is changing very fast, much faster than at any other time in history. Natural diversity of cultures and beliefs are being challenged by a comfortable homogeneity of lifestyle, promoted by those who seek to make an incredible amount of money by selling us a short list of carefully chosen items, computers, phones, credit, cars and cheap travel, to distract our minds and senses, till we begin to think we have no worries at all, that everything in the garden is rosy.
Earth is a garden planet, it needs tending, however, not wrecking, but the damage that is being done to this planet right now is also going on at a rate unprecedented in history, apparently to satisfy our needs, but really to cash in on more immense profit possibilities.
The ordinary citizen is not watching his back, just the communication devices, all of us are sleeping at the wheel, forgetting to look for the road that can lead us to a better, more sustainable future.

How I will continue to present Tetralogia: Four Books to Change the Earth, is under review at moment. There are so many ways it might be done that more ponder time is needed. I believe in the potential that is released by change, whether it is blogging or story-telling. But right now I feel I’ve got a huge ball of wool in my hand, and I can’t find the end that will allow me to unwind it properly.

Time Out

The arrival of the warm weather has put a different spin on the making of blogs.
It’s only eight months since I began to blog, and I am beginning to recognise how often the basic concepts have to evolve to stay fresh as the months roll by. Tetralogia: Four Books to Change the Earth, has a tight focus of interest, being all about the novels I ‘ve written over the past two decades, and while I have talked about the general ideas contained in Book One and sometimes Book Two, I have probably been too coy about revealing the stories in full.
No surprise if my followers get bored and decide to go elsewhere.
What is needed is another way to open up the stories, all of them, and I am presently working out how that could be done.
For the next few months Tetralogia will appear weekly, the look of the site needs a bit of a house clean anyway, and by the end of the changes there should be something to catch folks’ attention.
The Prequel, B’Hemoth, is being prepared as an audio book, and the plan is to have that completed by the end of August. More challenges to follow, no doubt, but that’s what keeps one active and well.
Hi to everyone, enjoy your summer wherever you are in the world. Keep your own blogs coming; I take great pleasure in reading them.

There are ways and ways

We have been enjoying a rare spell of rare weather, really the best spring in years, although it took long enough in getting here. There is to be more of the same for quite sometime, so maybe this year the big poppies will have their time in the sun without getting washed out.
On these sorts of days it’s good to get out and about, walk miles, enjoy the air, meet people on a similar mission, folk who’d squirreled themselves away to wait out the cold and wet of the last seven months, and who might have expired for all one knew, not the sort of fact one wants to discover.
Being outdoors, light-hearted, and free of all care is tough on blogging, which is a park-it-and-punch-it-out activity. But with the fine days, the priority list rewrote itself in a hurry, for the yard called for trimming and pruning, not to mention planting and setting up flower baskets. Usually those projects are long since attended to, but not this year. Not to worry, all is not forgotten. With the sun rising so early in the morning, I pop awake and spend time happily reading blogs and marvelling at the diversity of human endeavour, interests they contain and the many locations around the globe they come from. The world really is a small place, easy to reach and not expensive when viewed through the immediacy of a WP blog!
Alas, there are always downsides to enjoyment; cyclical responsibilities, i.e. keeping level with the fact that this is a big tent caterpillar year, that the wasps and the crawly critters get into some sort of symbiotic dance, which ends with the new leaves of fruit trees and others located in the full sun, getting eaten clean away. The whole neighbourhood looks very moth-eaten at the moment. Spent hours yesterday removing tents from critical trees; of course if I gone out in the cold and wet I’d have found the hard, brown plaques on the branches that would later explode into the problem we have now, but I didn’t.
Another appropriate step nature takes, truly, but it does seem a bit too severe. The wasps lay their eggs in the heads of the caterpillars, and from that unlikely spot new wasps emerge and dine on the corpse that had hosted them in life – which reminds me I must try not to get stung, or it’s a trip to the Emergency to monitor the reaction.
Insect populations are failing due to excessive human intrusion into their habitats, use of chemicals, getting smucked on car windscreens, overuse of WiFi equipment and a host of other things we do. Soon we can only hope that the wind and a few flies will be able to carry the responsibility of pollination, so critical in the production of food and the continuance in the chain of life.
Enter Monsanto and similar, thinking to do it all on their own and bypass the ways of nature that have worked the problems and balances out over millions of years; thinking, being a BIG corporation, of diabolical ways to make sure the company profit margin stays high and healthy for the shareholders. Forgetting that they know nothing of how delicate the systems are, and by their selfish efforts, contributing furiously to a failing natural order. There are billions of people that need fed, but Monsanto doesn’t have to do it for them, they should get out and do it for themselves, and along the way discover the wonders of life and become humble for the knowing of it.

Money talks

I may have used this snippet from the first novel, B’Hemoth, before, no matter it is a good discussion point.

The ‘power’ his people and others like them wielded didn’t develop out of the feudal structures of earlier centuries, which gathered resources around a power-base that was deeply rooted in the culture that supported it.
Only a thin strand of that long root survived, namely the hierarchical relationship between those who had, and those who had not. But the framework upon which the modern ‘lord’ built his strength was not the solid, gritty earth, but money mechanisms, flexible, unattached and fast-moving commodity devices, enormous numbers of which could be activated each and every day.
In the minds of some people it was unprofitable to rely on the labours of people; they were far too unpredictable, vulnerable, inclined to independence, extremely slow-moving and they needed homes and food and wages to stay alive. They could be used, of course, but not as workers but as conduits through which money hordes could be moved from place to place. It was a system of not having one’s eggs in one basket, very efficient but unfortunately always open to abuse.
In times long past there was a sacred code of honour to which rulers swore their oath. Everyone understood that power moved from a ruler to the people and back again, as a constantly flowing, dynamic and unbroken energetic loop which was charged by the mass of the people and then redirected back to them again through the wisdom of the ruler. It was a simple and effective pact, supported by the rule of Law and the Will of God.
Money is hardly an organic element; at best it’s a construct of the human calculating mind, and though money usage had evolved greatly over time, it could not avoid being subject to the foibles and inexactitudes that human minds can create.
The money moguls, who came into existence with the industrial revolution, were not to be likened to the leaders of old, most of them concentrated on their businesses, preferring not to make commitments concerning the welfare of their workers, and thereby ignoring the ancient traditions of reciprocal responsibility, they shifted into the deep shadows where they could be independent and far above scrutiny of others. The fate of the ordinary man, as a result, became subject to decisions made without his involvement, and actions were taken that could assure, but more often eliminated his livelihood.
The modern power base doesn’t reside with the people, despite claims supporting the democratic principle, nor has it been created for them. Power is, of itself, transcendental, abstract, anonymous and extremely hard to locate, but use money and it can be seen to be there, working for those who control its flow. Money as power is considered by many to be a means to an end, but, in fact, money, as flighty as power, can never be a satisfactory end point. It is like electricity, which has always to be kept in motion, or it will quickly go to ground where it will stultify, weaken and seep away into nothing amidst the confounding affairs of men.

Big Mothers of Volcanoes!

We have reason to be very fearful of volcanoes, they are not predictable, can’t be influenced in any way, take no prisoners and make no friends. They are the nearest thing Earth has to a creative urge, or an unexpected sneeze!
“Oh, excuse me, did I frighten you?”
The largest volcano in our solar system is happily NOT on Earth. It is Olympus Mons, and is to be found on the planet Mars. It towers 25 kilometers into Mars’ atmosphere, is nearly 600 kilometers across, and the caldera, the mouth, is 40 by 50 miles. It is truly an enormous creature of Mars’ nature, and when active was probably visible from other planets.
A study of Earth reveals the potential location of a few similar Big Mothers. Not so much on land, although they are there, but where land and sea meet, where oceanic waters, having drowned most of those ancient bodies, have left long curving coastlines and strings of islands sticking up like jagged and rotten teeth.
The Old Ladies are dead, they have done their work, never again will peoples on Earth witness what our forebears must have done. Never again will Earth be turned inside out, at least we fervently hope so.