Author: julesprichards

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.

We first noticed the Persian Silk Tree when holidaying in Corfu. We also found it widespread in France. Its proper name is Albizia Julibrissin.

To us ‘Brits’ it might seem quite rare and exotic but in other countries it is widely found as an ornamental plant in parks and gardens. It has distinctive vivid pink and white blooms. They’re like feathers or needles and resemble something more akin to a Dr Seuss character than a flower. The fragrant blossoms attract bees, butterflies and hummingbirds.

Its Persian name means “night sleeper”. Its leaves slowly close and bow during the night and during rain. In Japan its name means “sleeping tree”.

I love the idea of a massive vibrant conspicuous tree sleeping.

We liked it so much we’ve put it on the wall.

So another trip to the homeland, and of course this instigates new old things to ruminate on.

While visiting the resting place (and hence archived memories) of my maternal grandparents, we discovered the gardens of Tremenheere a stone’s throw away. After a few hours exploring Tremenheere; combined with a day in a sunlit St Ives the previous day; I found myself, a backslidden Arts postgraduate, again toying with ideas of perception, shape, form and texture etc. It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed thoughts of ‘Art’. The perception of Art can be fickle, subjective, and a culturally complex thing.

Tremenheere reignited thoughts about human constructions, decay, and the nature of life, and time. Thoughts about movement (dance & movement are also archived in my mind; I enjoyed the physical interactive elements of my studies as elemental to exploration of the human condition and artistic expression), movement and how change can make the subject seem exposed and perhaps become vulnerable, fragile, yet stronger and powerful…

The camouflage of routine and ritual can be broken by movement. Growth breaks shapes and makes new marks. As a creative thinker or creative artist, we might have an urge to make marks, create images, reshape noise. In thin places like Tremenheere, and for me Cornwall has many ‘essential’ places, we can to a degree silence some of the saturating noise of our culture and the echoing reverberations of our ever-present infotainment mediums.

The cleansing invigorating properties of art that works, especially when found in thin spaces, can be remarkable. I find that when combined with nature, good art might resound dark-night, bright-light, harmony, melody, discord, and new narratives that might both heal and/or shudder.

However, I return again to the fragile idea that no matter how exciting our creations and constructions, interaction with our natural wild world always surpasses the podiumed or framed human constructions we create. Conversation with the natural world, interaction between our individual creations, combination and respectful sharing of our endeavors perhaps is the god we might celebrate and learn from.