Moon

This month's full moon, appearing ten days earlier than the November one reported in Finisterre last year, was obscured on its debut, but the two subsequent dawn walks have been wonderful, with Moon hanging in the West as Sun slowly rises in the East ... beautiful features in the spectacular frosty, Weardale landscape ...pre-dawn FB friend reports sinister association of Moon with Saturn, though he is rather predisposed to wild conspiracy theories and rather ranty too ... maybe gathering energy from his gullible audience as well as his more sceptical viewers ... so many theories, so many realities; inevitable in a thought created universe(s) ... after finishing The Illuminatus Trilogy with all its fantastic and lightly held speculation, the mind relaxes a little and normal service resumes, which is an early sit with candle lit, dawn walking before breakfast, some reading or writing ... including a rare Sunday newspaper yesterday, to check what liberal minded folks are currently programmed with ... Social Media, of course, is infiltrated by mainstream mind manipulators with paid content to lure back the refuseniks ... and whilst the more respectable outlets are almost credible, mass circulation comics are beyond parody ... more polarised positions set out for our limiting opinions, laced with lasciviousness to degrade perceptions and divert attention from issues the powers that be (whoever they are) wish left alone ... HM the Queen comes under scrutiny for dodgy investments, though avoids further investigation of the Diana case ... not to mention other skeletons in other cupboards ...

Meanwhile, the annual outing  of the poppy police is upon us, as the symbol from the blood drenched battlefields of Flanders is brandished not so much to say "Never Again" as a badge to glorify and justify war and ongoing violence in the century since the First World War (but not the last) ... white poppies as a pacifist alternative, but this is only playing the game of polarisation and likely identified with the infamous white feathers handed out to non-combatants then, by the very patriotic people pushing the bloody poppy now ...best not engage in pointless arguments ... "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is clear enough and practiced less than preached ... on a personal note, my father, who never spoke about the war of his youth, served in the medical corps, suggesting a pacifist outlook and indeed he was mostly peaceful except when provoked and even then the occasional smack for the children was not considered violence in those times ... the good old days according to some and indeed it was a golden era in many ways, at least as far as economic conditions of the majority of the population went ... history is suspect, since the narrative is dominated by a small section of society ... these days of social media and citizen journalists and historians open things up considerably, whether to truth or crazy conspiracy theories, who knows?

The latest addition to the library arrives, thanks to Hive Books and the Royal Mail ... Rupert Sheldrake's "Science and Spiritual Practices" ... reports to follow ...