One million songs

Ham Wall, Somerset

Today my beloved and I went to Ham Wall in Somerset. We had promised ourselves for a long time that we would go and see the starlings and their flocking display. The birds - over a million at this site - come from their feeding grounds during the day and congregate in huge pods, swathes and waves which seem to undulate and pulsate with a life of their own. They come wave after wave for an hour at dusk.

I had seen clips of this phenomenon before on the internet, but I wanted to go with Drea so that we could watch the event together for real.

Here are some of the pictures I took - click on them to get a larger view:







The birds are masters of the air. It may seem obvious to say that none of them seemed to collide with any other in the flock, but the flowing three-dimensional shapes almost became entities in their own right. What was particularly interesting was that there was no sound other than the rustling of the wings. It sounded like satin being drawn across the back of your hand.

Once they had poured out of the sky into the reed-beds they were then free to discuss the doings of the day and to gossip about any late-comers. My mind suddenly shifted from one element to another, from air to water. I wondered if I would ever see those great shoals of fish which exhibit similar behaviour.

And - just for a moment - the sussuration of the voices of the starlings became the surf caressing a distant shore.

Happy Samhain

Happy Samhain to all who read this.

Samhain is one of the eight solar festivals of the year and marks the start of Winter.

How are these festivals determined? Well there are four fixed points in the solar year. There are the two solstices and the two equinoxes. The solstices occur when the Sun gets to its highest or its lowest point in the sky as viewed by us on Earth. As you probably know the Sun seems to get higher and higher in the sky (as observed at noon, for example) every day as we approach the longest day (June 21st). After that the Sun does not rise so high at noon until we have the shortest day of the year (December 21st) six months later. (Intimately connected with this is the Moon's apparent travel. Winter full-moons are high in the sky and summer full-moons are very low).

Between the longest and the shortest days we have one day in Spring and one day in Autumn when the day and the night are of equal length. These are the equinoxes and occur around 21st March and 21st September. Thus we have four fixed points. So how do we get eight?

The other four festivals occur half-way between any of the four fixed points. So taking them in order:


The shortest day (the Winter solstice)on the 21st December, is Yule.

Between Yule and the Spring equinox is 2nd February, Candlemas.

Then we have the Spring equinox (Ostera) on 21st March.

Between the Spring equinox and the Summer solstice, on 1st May, we have Beltane.

Then the Summer solstice (Lithia) occurs on the 21st June.

Between the Summer solstice and the Autumn equinox we have Lammas (or Lughnasadh, pronounced Loose-nah) on the 1st August.

Then comes Mabon, the Autumn equinox on the 21st September followed by,

Samhain (pronounced Sow-een) between the equinox and the Winter solstice.


The precise times and dates of the festivals can be determined astronomically and are shown on this site.

I have indicated some of the old names for the festivals above. Some, it can be seen, have been appropriated by the Christian calendar, with holidays such as Easter, Hallowe'en and indeed Christmas being shoe-horned in to the traditional dates.

We are not Pagans or neo-pagans and do not worship anything at these festivals. It is just a chance to sit down and have a nice meal and to talk. It is an opportunity to observe the turning of the seasons and to experience what nature is doing. The festivals are not commercial and therefore we can make of them what we wish. (For me, the biggest of the festivals is Yule and we make more of that festival than any other - but more on that at another time.)

But because the festivals are not commercial and they largely pass by unknown, we can just go out, have a walk, notice what is happening to buds, leaves, sky and Sun and get back in tune with the turning of the year. We collect fruits, leaves, corn or flowers - whatever plants are symbolic and redolent of the season - and make a display for the meal. We keep some of 'nature outside' in our home and in our heart. But how does observing these festivals feel more natural?

Well apart from knowing that you are celebrating something natural you also get to really see nature. We in the West live in a world where summer is depicted as that time when it is nice, hot weather, we are not at work and can go on holiday. If it's poor weather, well, "that's the summer gone then". Spring is the first few nice days after winter, and so on. But it is not so.

June the 21st is Mid-summer just as the 21st of December is Mid-winter. Winter, then, stretches from the start of November to the start of February, not just when it is cold and snowy. Look at the snow at the end of January - there are snowdrops and crocuses peeping through! These are the first flowers of Spring. Spring has started, my friend!

Appreciating the seasons by what nature shows and what it does is much more natural and more 'real' than what we are directed to appreciate by the needs of modern living. By looking at the real seasons we return to the seasons of our childhood - to almost how we 'used to think of the seasons'.

Living and appreciating the patterns and timings of the world in which we evolved is natural. And I, for one, feel more in tune with the world - and with myself.

What are the chances?

This is something that struck me a few days ago. And it starts with the impossible.

Our local supermarket is expanding which means that various aisles are being moved around from one week to the next during the refurbishment. Sometimes our usual purchases are not there because the shelf is being moved. It may be in another part of the store or it might not be available at all.

Drea (my beloved) always gets our favorite wine from the supermarket in the weekly shop. (To be strictly accurate she gets my favorite wine and just goes along with my preference.) One week it was impossible to get our (my) usual wine. So she did what she thought best - picked another wine, with similar characteristics.

Guess what? The wine she found was better than the wine we had before. It was a pattern-break - we had broken the pattern we had established, and that is useful. As simple as it sounds it is important to keep your options open. It actually becomes a matter of simple maths. . .

If I try 'something new' - whatever it is (ethics, morals and personal values permitting) then I am statistically more likely to find something better. This is because with any choice the new thing can be either worse, as good as or better than the original.

If it is worse, well, I won't buy, do or get it again.

If it is as good as the original, then I have a backup or an alternative that I didn't know about before. If nothing else I've increased my potential for supply in the event of one or the other failing. I may have a resource which will be useful to myself or others later. I have an alternative tool in my toolkit.

And of course if it is better, then I have improved my prospects.

Thus, of the three possibilities, two of them leave me as good or better off than what I have now. Given that this represents a broadening of my options or an improvement in them the choice of trying something new is, therefore a 66% (two out of three) improvement.

Opening ourselves to new experiences (providing they are not directly detrimental to you) is therefore something which is to be embraced.

It also helps us keep a positive frame of mind when things don't go according to plan and we have to change how we go about things - the change of direction is more likely to be beneficial for us.

The Fisherman's Cottage

I would like you to imagine a room.

It is the most beautiful room you have ever seen. It is furnished in a way that you find most peaceful. A room you could call your idea of a perfect 'home'. A place where you can relax. A room which has everything in it a perfect room should have - you decide.

Now keep that vision in your mind for a moment. Look around it, feel how warm or cool it is in there. Look at the furnishings, the decor, the floor and lighting. . .

Now, be honest, did you imagine a room underground? Did you imagine a triangular room?

I think I am fairly safe in saying 'no' to both those questions. Now why is that?

This was a question originally posed by the architect Christopher Alexander to show that we all have innate ideas of what constitutes beauty and that the patterns which create it for us are more common than they are different.

Here's another question for you. How many coats does a fisherman have? Hmmm, not so easy that one. So let me set the scene.

Let us look down on this area of the coast. Our vision is increasingly filled with views of the landscape as we float down to this little fishing village with a cove and its harbour. Look over there at the few shops and over there some chalets. Now look over here at this row of small cottages.

This one is owned by a fisherman. He lives alone. He lives by the sea. The sea is in his blood as it was in his grandfather's and his father's before him. He works a small boat with three of the other men in the village. Can you see the cottage in your mind? Let's go up the path. What's the garden like? We go in through the main door and into the living room. We see the rolled sea charts on the table and the unwashed coffee cup. We see the stains of other coffee mugs on the table. We see the sofa and the packet of cigarettes on the arm and the newspaper.

We turn back to the main door and notice how many coats are hung up beside it. Now, how many coats does the fisherman have?

Now you know the answer and you know what each one of them is for, don't you.

So how has this happened? When you were asked the question the first time it was almost impossible to answer except with a guess. But once you understand the context and the drives, once you understand the core the rest flows outwards naturally, you just know the answer!

This is the point. Going from the outside inwards we don't know the answer really. But working from the inside out, going from the core, the essence, the true self outwards, we add increasing layers which all naturally fit and work together.

Trying to create a life, or more correctly, a lifestyle, from the outside inwards will never really work. To try to convince yourself and others of your 'nature' by what you collect and try to shoe-horn together in some pastiche of a life will always have some incongruence. Flowing from the inside out, however, means that what we create will usually hang together, because each piece we add will be a refinement of what has gone before and will be tied to the central theme - your true nature. If it does look out of joint at any point it is probably because it is in the process of being adapted - just give it a little time, a little Kairos.

It will hang together naturally and uniquely, just as your perfect room did. It will be comfortable and be just perfect for you because you created it naturally.

And that is the secret of the Fisherman's cottage.

Priceless

Often the things we find priceless in life are given away freely.

It is difficult to be corrupt when our interaction is based on mutual respect, sharing and love.

The commercial world is not interested in this kind of interaction. It is concerned with the five golden rules of business:

1. What's
2. In
3. It
4. For
5. Me

Robert Ringer in his famous work "Winning Through Intimidation" identified three types of people in the business world.

Type number 1's: Those people who will tell you straight from the outset that they are there to grab as many chips off the table as they can and it is your lookout to do the same. He says these people are not great in number, but in terms of business ethics (of being 'straightforward') they are 'honest' - what you see is what you get.

Type number 2's: These people say that they hope you get everything you deserve out of the deal, but then try to do everything they can to grab your and their chips off the table.

Type number 3's: These are similar to type number 2's except that they genuinely mean what they say. They really do hope you will succeed. But through chance or accident, they end up removing as many of your chips as they can from the table in the end.

Type number 4's: These are the exception. These are the people who stand directly to gain from you succeeding in life or business.

But he did not discuss this fourth type of person in any detail. One of the reasons is that you don't usually find them in the world of business.

It is not in the commercial world's interest to allow you to take time. "Buy now!", "Hurry while stocks last!", "Time-limited offer!"

But the important things, the priceless things. . . they tend to be personal, individual, to take time - the kind of things a 'type number 4 person' will give you. And in creating these priceless things people add something incredible. When you get something from someone which they have created from deep down, you're getting some of their feelings. You can see that you have something special.

You're having the time of their life.

The time of your life

In keeping with the idea that you might be living your life too fast, I think I should say something about time.

The Greeks have two words for the concept of time. The first is the word 'Kronos'. This refers to what we usually understand by our word 'time' - the time-of-day type of time. It is the root of the word Chronometer (a time meter), chronicle, chronology and the lovely dendro-chronology, (finding out the age of a tree by counting its rings).

The second word they have is 'Kairos'. This also means time, but is a more emotional concept. It means 'the right time', or 'the appropriate time'. There are many 'right times' which occur in our lives. Loaves are cooked and wine is ready at the 'right time'. There is a right time to propose marriage and crops are ripe at the 'right time'. As soon as we grasp this slower beat to life we can see it in all sorts of places. We see it when things work to their own internal rhythm and pace and come to fruition when they are ready.

Of course we can hurry things along and we might also delay them, but then they would lose their organic integrity. Pieces of a system all have their own separate functions. In a natural system they don't tend go too fast or too slowly because various feedback and regulation processes govern their interplay. There are checks and balances. There are pauses in the system for a reason, whether we know what those reasons are or not. The system has evolved. It may have taken us many years to develop ourselves in order, like an artist, to let our skills flow in our work, and it has taken Nature millions of years to develop the living complexity we see all around us.

This is not to say that we live in a pre-ordained world and that everything natural beats to just one rhythm. Natural things all have their own rhythm of birth, growth, maturity and death. Rhythms may be similar or very different. Looking for, and respecting, those rhythms of Kairos wherever we find them will help us feel both some of the similarities in the living things and some of their differences. Seeing both the similarities and differences helps awaken us to the wonder of diversity in the natural world. And knowing they all fit into a natural wholeness helps produce a feeling of connectedness in us, knowing that we, too, have our own natural rhythm.

A fair deal

One of the first tools we need to be able to deploy in our mental armoury is the concept of the 'balanced transaction'.

It is evident from the principles of natural justice that if you do me a favour, I owe you a favour in return. If I do you a service then I resonably expect a comparable service from you. This is something which has helped the cohesiveness of our society, and if we did not have this feature in our makeup we would not be the social animals we are.

If I go out on the hunt, you look after my children. In return, you get a choice piece of the kill when we return. Swings and roundabouts. Fair play.

This gets interesting, of course, when we try to estimate and agree on the comparative worth of the two pieces in the transaction. It's simple to think one apple equates to one pear. But consider if you live in Britain, how many apples equate to one peach. The thing is, apples are reasonable common in Britain. So how many of them would I need to trade them for a peach grown under special conditions or from another country.

The answer is not simple to factor out (length of growing time, transport costs, freshness, bulk discount and so on), but can be determined between the parties to the negotiation quite simply by looking at things like sourcing it elsewhere (the scarcity or uniqueness of the product), the intrinsic appeal of the product, the time I have available to investigate other options, and so on.
What this comes down to is whether I feel I am getting a good deal - whether I feel there is a balance in this transaction.

Now the concept of balanced transaction applies in all areas of interaction with others. It is one of the marks of our improving culture that instead of saying, for example, that if a person commits murder they too should be executed - an eye for an eye - that we can instead balance the transaction and say instead that the murder should serve a prison sentence.

In an everyday sense, however we like to feel that we are getting more out than we put in - this magic ingredient and the whole meal is transformed. That new bauble and I will be happy. A little bit of typing and suddenly out pops something which looks like a typeset document with full brochure, courtesy of our new marketing software.

The thing is that deep down we are not fooled.

As the time taken for production reduces, the effort and emotional input from us decreases towards zero. As a result of the improvements in production, the number of items produced increases towards infinity. As the number of items in our in-tray or letterbox approches infinity our time available to deal with them decreases to zero. So the less effort in production, the more rubbish there is and the less time there is to look at it. Mass produced products in infinite variety overload our capacity to absorb and be interested.

But when we see something hand-crafted, heart-felt, unique and personally and recognisably designed for us, we will pay attention. It is our personal intervention, our care and yes, our passion (despite the business world hijacking that word and, through overuse, diminishing its true meaning) which will imbue what we do and give it true uniqueness, value and meaning in our lives.