Silence

Another week passes and media chatter moves along ... weekend news settles on F.T. after many years conditioning the mind with the Guardian ... always an uneasy mix of liberal values and expensive fashion, cars, holidays, houses ... F.T. is quite straightforward in being the paper of the folks with the real money even if the taste in calling the monthly colour supplement advertising even more expensive baubles "How to Spend It" is tacky ... last week's royal story entertained the masses with front page spreads plus more inside from most of them, while the F.T. had a paragraph on page 9 ... meanwhile the other royal story subsides somewhat as the pedo Prince Andrew possibly hopes for more royal tales to regale the great unwashed and keep the heat off him ... well his Dad can't last long, so a funeral should help fill the paper's and airwaves ...

Readers may notice the  change in content along with the frequency during these house based retreats ... the radio plays its part in inviting opinions on all sorts of trivia and is finally coming more under control after the excitement of the General Election, which managed to draw thousands of enthusiastic first-time young voters into the game ... it remains to be seen if they stick around for another try in four or five years ... meanwhile Jeremy's successor is being chosen, a long drawn out process for our further entertainment as the contenders offer the choice of unelectable leftist or Tory-lite rightist ... Lenin's observation that "the British Bourgeoisie lets go of power with one hand, only to catch it with the other" seems to have stood the test of time ... unlike the workers' paradise he tried to introduce ...

Reading matter shifts from science to philosophy with Bede Griffiths' "A New Vision of Reality" finding common cause with major religions and contemporary physics ... though the convolutions of all the old stories seem surplus to requirements when silence supplies the route to reality and each of us responsible for embodying what we discover when the noise stops ... alongside science and philosophy are Wilding, an account of returning an intensive farm to Nature, leading to The Secret Life of Trees ... of course proper silence, or noble silence, excludes reading and writing as well as speaking and listening ... though whether it requires formal sitting is a question ... up to now the insights have arrived whilst walking or swimming along with sitting without purpose ...

Engaging with other humans is still on the agenda too, continuing today with two engagements ... a walk and lunch with dear friend, then a community engagement local planning workshop, with echoes of a previous life ... or rather a previous stage in this life ...