Less than two weeks to Christmas Day, when the world pauses for one day, with almost all shops closed, almost all humans thinking about big questions:
Is there enough food for at least that day, plus maybe the next?
Who is sending cards this year and should I?
How much is postage costing now?
Have all those adults sending gifts had one from me?
Which crabby relatives must we tolerate this year?
Will I be judged, essentially...?
And who's that Jesus bloke anyway?
Bringing Peace and Goodwill to all Mankind, including women ...
With one or two exceptions, obviously!
All this pointless pontification arises from an early foray to the Co-op Store for essential supplies for a day or three ... negotiating the aisles half blocked by a major delivery from a large lorry, whose friendly driver is taking pause to allow the staff to fill the shelves ... he lives in Newcastle, works out of Birtley, the distribution centre for Co-op shops for miles around, and finds the employer fair, unlike some other delivery companies notorious for taking workers' rights back in time at least a century, before trade unions ... though even unions have lost their way recently, abandoning their members protection from Health and Safety legislation (1974 or 6) ... working all day in unnecessary masks a clear breach of human rights, let alone health dangers from reduced respiration ... the shop staff mostly comply cheerfully enough, the senior managers, maybe complicit and therefore culpable, encourage them to have fun ... happy staff mean happy customers after all ...
More conversation on the street elicits information that next Thursday evening live Carol singing led by the Bishop of Durham around the tree is planned ... a chance for more community engagement chorally and though it's late at 6pm, it's in the diary ... why not!
The villages are vying with each other for bragging rights to Light up the Dale, like every year ... going into the shortest day and longest night it helps to cheer us up ... indeed psychologically many humans suffer with seasonal affective disorder, physically deficiency of vitC and D especially ... medics prescribe pills, householders have extra lights inside as well as out, while those who can afford it fly South for a week or so in the Sun, pensioners stay there longer, the costs balanced by reduced heating bills and naturally occurring vitC and D ... plus conviviality, let's not forget that!
This winter retreat is turning more convivial than usual here at Railway Terrace, neighbours doing what good neighbours always do - checking out how we're doing in these strange times, not to pry but because we care ... it's one of the endearing features of humanity ...
The apocalyptic tongue in cheek headline of this post, hopefully not the last, though you never know, points not to the end of the world as we know it beyond the peculiar and serious games we are drawn into ...all the world essentially being a stage as the Bard is said to have said, though even that is questioned by the po-faced miserable measurers whose role this time round seems to be to remind us that there's infinitely more to Life than the mundane ... this particular game is reaching crisis point at many levels ... some even point to cosmic changes ... though we may not need to know that to spot the Sophists if we stay alert, question everything forensically, see the behavioural insights crew, ironically described as Sage, conditioned to believe their work is benign in the longer term ... benighted some might say ...
Anyway, there's more to this longish Christmas Season than politics ... or worries about whether we have enough food and tinsel to take us through to January! By then we will be over the hill and into 2021, a brand new year to look forward to ... a Local Agenda 21 they say, to replace the global agenda 19 which lingered overlong through 20, even though the coronavirus selected to serve the fear we needed to shock us from complacency peaked around April, declined steeply through the Summer and was given a second life in Autumn with specious testing throughout Winter aided and abetted by the servants of whoever is running the show (if not us), let's say the scapegoats plus the escaping goats like plutocrats so in love with money they have temporarily lost their soul ...
The illusory nature of money has been mentioned many times before, but as with the deceptive nature of language bears repeating ...
Meanwhile, back in the village, the best of humanity emerges thanks to the message of the Christ Consciousness, not necessarily to be confused with the cultural religious form expressed and used for a couple of millennia in the West ... these curious forms serve our need for company, solace, some certainties ... certainly a major error in any religion taking fixed form ... but that's all theology and philosophy and unlikely to arise at the Carol Service with the Bishop!
Walking to walk continues, cooking to cook a particular pleasure here ... and what with walking, cooking, engaging with the humans on existential questions in the street and on the fell, reading for pleasure and to learn more from history, herstory, psychology, quantum and cosmic science and so on ... oh yes, and writing to write ... finding some time for that, whether readers are reading it or not is not my business ... it all goes into the void, picks up some energy and joins all the 2D data from all the world in this Universe to expand it ... and so on ... speculation about cosmic big bangs and big crunches, infinity, eternity and universes after universes is really best left to Dao, which is to say, yet again, don't bother trying to describe the indescribable ... have some fun, life's far too serious as it is!
Love always wins ...
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