Sunday Mornings

I love Sunday Mornings. Space, to stop, pause and listen to relative silence (don’t mention the tinnitus).

I love thinking, and I’m often a victim of the paralysis of analysis. However, I love sensing the glimpse and sparkle of the gap between the building blocks. I love the moment when the information and advice and smorgasbord of culture and consumables tumbles and the Bable tower partially collapses a tad and we a left with something closer to the grounding breath.

I was cocktail reading recently, juggling ideas. “People need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant…” Yuval Noah Harari. Remembering Neil Postman’s ideas “People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not”…  And then Wendell Berry’s ideas where the trees, fields, birds, light (rocks & stones, birds of the air?) become doors to other things; grief, love, amazement, blessings…

Between the extremes that our word illuminates is glorious truth. Like me, we are not all blessed with ‘an extremely sunny temperament’, but inside it all, we can see True Colours. Those of you who know of me, may be surprised by my choice of Nina Simone’s Feeling Good as a threnodic epitaph – turned up loud.

Music is often my touchstone.

I can’t pretend to know much about music but I do love it. I sing in a choir and have played a few instruments, badly. I love the extremes music gives us. I was this week captured by sounds from both ends of the spectrum; by the Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs track ‘Cake of Light’, and then Tchaikovsky’s ‘Cherubic Hymn 1’.

 

 

 

 

Both tracks essentially vibrant in their own way.

Two recommendations: Check out Late Junction on Radio 4. And as a tonic, I love to dip into Soul Music on Radio 4 – often humanly sublime!

Harari says “you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don’t take much baggage with you.”  I agree with him “Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy”, but I question the need to run.

Stop, pause, breathe… put down your bed, and walk. As De Mello discussed; all is well, all is well… wake up from the nightmare, to the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence. Perhaps.