The Spirit Drums Of Kodo

We were in London yesterday.  I had to do some work and in the evening we had tickets to see Kodo, the Japanese drummers, at the Royal Festival Hall.

I had seen a snippet of Taiko drummers before on DVD and been impressed at the compelling nature of the sound they made, but nothing prepared me for the evening we had.  The show opened with two of the drummers walking through the auditorium, revving up the audience with small drum riffs that we then clapped.  The main show started with an intense piece that vibrated me through to my core and then it just kept getting better and better.

The audience was so swept up in the energy and joy of this event that we were mostly suffering from sore hands from clapping before the end of the event, but it did not get in the way of a standing ovation and enough thunderous applause to bring the drummers back for an encore.

As well as being an incredibly spiritual experience, the sheer joy that the drummers felt communicated itself to us, the audience.  In the last number, several of the drummers where laughing with the sheer delight that they must have felt flowing back from us.  If you have never seen Taiko drummers, I can't recommend a trip to see Kodo highly enough.  They don't tour very often and then only to one part of the world; it is Europe's turn at the moment for the One Earth Tour and I am so happy that I managed to see them. If you can get a ticket for the forthcoming dates, they are playing in Birmingham, Gateshead, Dublin, Manchester and a few other cities (last night was the first night of the tour), don't miss the chance!

Finding Your Inner Coalman

You have an inner coalman? Of course you do, you just don't know it yet. No, I did not make a spelling mistake, I did mean to say coalman; the chap who delivers your solid fuel. I had better explain.

We run all our heating and hot water on a coal fired rayburn and get free cooking on the big brown beast too. Every fortnight on a Wednesday, our coalman comes to deliver coal and kindling if we need it. Our coalman, Brian, can find a silver lining in every cloud you care to point at. He rolls up, large sack over his shoulder and greets us with a "Mornin' Guv'nor!" or in my case "Hello, my lovely!" and the broadest smile you can imagine. If it is raining, he is delighted that his lorry and car will be washed clean; if it is sunny, the brightness is almost eclipsed by his smile and if there is a forecast of snow, he's just gleeful at the prospect of sledging and snowball fights.

I want to find my inner coalman. If I could find so much pleasure in everything that Brian finds such joy in, I should indeed be a happy woman. It isn't that I'm unhappy, far from it, but when I talk to Brian, the colours seem brighter, the day seems cheerier and a whole lot better. He is a man who is happy with his lot in life, happy with whatever a day dishes out to him, content and capable of gratitude for whatever comes his way.

Have you found your inner coalman?

Big skies and small pleasures

Ah, the beauty of being outdoors at 5 p.m. and realising that it is not pitch black. The loveliness of standing outdoors, looking up and seeing hundreds of stars with no light pollution. The pure pleasure of standing in the garden breathing in crisp fresh air. Yes, I have been in London and reminded of how wonderful living in Shepton really is. Occasionally we get the odd waft of slurry and sometimes when the wind is fierce, the smoke from the coal-fired homes gives the air a tang, but generally, what we breathe here is very clean.

Two nights in Euston, listening to sirens all night, feeling the thickness of the air and the smutty film it leaves on one's skin was enough for me. One has to earn a crust, but goodness, I don't know how I would cope if I had to breathe that poisonous soup every day. I have to admit to surrendering to the final metamorphosis into country bumpkin.

On the way to the railway station, my verbose cabbie told me that he originally hailed from Salisbury but that he couldn't stand it as it was so small and slow. His measure of quality of life was the convenience of getting a take-away. Now, there's no saying that my values have any more worth than his, but as a man with two small children, I think I'd rather let me kids play in fields, know what shaped animal milk comes from and have roses in their cheeks than worry about take-aways. Somehow, I didn't have the heart to tell him that us bumpkins do have take aways, but they're usually on the wing a short while before eating or they're bubbling away in our kitchen range the way it has been done for ages past.

The cabbie I talked to was charming; but I realised that my values have changed so much over the past ten years that I am unrecognisable from the person I was. I would judge the flavour of a jam by how posh the label was where now I judge it by the taste and how easy it was to make, or not. If you had given me a jam thermometer ten years ago I'd have suspected you of owning strange devices for torture or something equally dark, but certainly never recognised it for what it was! Ten years ago a trip to London was a treat and a jaunt, now it is a chore that I can't wait to wash off my skin and hair.

The things that make me smile these days are the small pleasures in life; my neighbours young son beaming broadly, a clear day, seeing the first snowdrop. Give me big skies and small pleasures every time!

On Trust

Trust is a delicate flower. Like daisies in the summer, we take it for granted when it is there and, like the petals of a daisy, it is easily destroyed. For most of my life I have never thought much about trust and whether it was something that could be recovered. My world was always very black and white, full of comforting absolutes and certainties. If someone broke my trust, that was an end to my dealings with them - permanently.

I often wonder if moving away from the absolutes and allowing the possibility that things might be 'mended' or made better was a part of the confusion and disorientation of menopause, or perhaps the tiredness that I have felt for the last few years. That phrase "My get up and go got up and went" seems to have been coined for me. So, when my trust was broken recently, instead of becoming angry, strident and cutting out the thing that caused me pain, I sat on my hands. After a while, I decided that trust could be recovered and earned back, so set out on a long and painful journey. I am nearing the end of that journey now; I know this because I'm too tired to continue with the trip, so it has to end.

Many times since I made the decision to give this thing a second chance, I have wondered at the sanity of that decision. In the end, I had to try moving away from my comfort zone and very black and white world. Life before this had been about making decisions, often hard ones, and then living with the consequences. Making a decision is not a hard thing; facing the consequences of one's decisions can be a lot tougher. Mainly, I have been happy with the decisions I have made and for those that went wrong (and a couple were catastrophic) it has never been a problem dealing with the fall out, not always easy, but always something I was prepared to do because I had initiated the situation I found myself in.

Writing this has made me clearer that the difficulty I am having is that I did not initiate the situation that caused my trust to be broken and so the consequences I am suffering are not of my own making. Thank you blog for that insight. Knowing that helps because I have always been willing to live by the things created by my own hand. Likewise I have not accepted what others have dished out meekly or without question, yet when something like this happens, you have to take the person who just broke your trust on trust and hope you are not going to fall for the patter a second time around.

That puts me, or whoever takes this step, into the delicate position of not being entirely the master of their own destiny. The trouble with trying to rebuild trust is that it take a long time. There are ghosts, resonances of the things that finally alerted you to the mug that you had been, there are oversights that mean little or nothing to the person committing them, but are laden with dark promise and endlessly unfolding scenarios of what might be happening that I don't know about...

Over time, these forebodings diminish, but can come rushing back with a thoughtless phrase. So now, I am asking myself, how long is one expected to give it before this sort of thing stops? Will it ever stop? Is it possible to glue the petals back on the daisy? You see, I'm tired of it. Just when I relax and think it has stopped, or rather don't think about it, something happens to shake the security and comfort one should feel with a trusted friend. Maybe I was right all along and should have stuck to my absolutely black and white world where there were no second chances, no grey areas. I shall have to sleep on this...

Somerset Is So Civilised

I love living in this part of England, it's just so civilised. Apart from the luscious, green countryside, unspoiled by huge conurbations, the clean air and people who have enough time to still be polite and friendly to one another, we have Dillington House.

Dillington is a jacobethan confection from the early 19th century, though there has been habitation on the site since before Doomsday. It is privately owned and leased to South Somerset council, who use and maintain it for adult education. The food at Dillington is a dream and worth making the trip for, without the education!

What is best about Dillington is that they have such an interesting and eclectic mixture of courses, residential and day, concerts and public lectures. I found that they are running a lecture by Ronald Hutton on Pagan Religions Of The Ancient British Isles, how fascinating. Needless to say I have booked tickets (and they are only £10 whoppee!) and was lucky to get one as they are selling fast. Oooh! I am looking forward to this.

The Joke Is On Me

Ok, I admit it, I moaned and grumbled about the weather something chronic the other day. It has continued to rain, on and off, ever since and the only time my hair is dry is when I wake up in the morning. The rest of the time, I'm popping outside to get coal and other stuff and never quite getting dry.

Why am I telling you this? Because today I couldn't help laughing. I went outside to fetch coal for the rayburn and there, peeking out of the flowerbed in the corner was the first snowdrop I have seen this year. Tiny, delicate and perfect, it came from East Lambrook Gardens (not dug up and stolen, you understand, they have a lovely plant nursery!). Now, if that wasn't the Goddess giving me a jolly good kick up the bum for complaining, I don't know what it was.

As I type, the sky has dried up and I think I shall spend a little time in the garden. This year, I didn't tidy up anything, letting leaves fall and cover the beds; it seems to have encouraged the local birds, especially our resident family of blackbirds, to root around for insects and worms. I can't think of a better excuse for not tidying up my flowerbeds than that. The garden is tiny, smaller than a pocket handkerchief, but it is a source of constant joy, though I would love something a bit bigger. Still, our ancient cat, who at 16 1/2 isn't keen to patrol a large territory, finds it sufficient for a nibble of grass and summer sunbathing.

Here Comes The Rain Again...

I'm not going to launch iTunes and play the Eurythmics classic as I have had enough rain for one day. I'm starting to take it personally, actually.

This morning, I headed off to Taunton for a hairdressing appointment, a treat to myself after working long hours to get some projects finished. I was planning to have my hair colour changed after spending the summer and ensuing months a rather bright blonde. I suspect the blonde was an attempt to cheer myself up after the death of my father and the machinations of my mother and sister. Anyway, I had gone blonde, shocked a number of people and the chore of visiting the hairdresser every three weeks to have the roots done was more than I could bear. My hair grows at a rapid rate, which is great if you want to get it long quickly, but rather a nightmare if you are prone to sprouting dark roots within a week of the last dyeing.

As I opened the door to leave home this morning, the heavens opened. Granted, it had been raining all night and the wind howling so loudly that it woke me up, but there was a lull in the sound of gushing water in the lane beside our house that turns into a river without much encouragement. By the time I fell into the car in an unceremonious heap, I was soaked and my hair plastered to my face. Very elegant.

Sitting in the hairdressers, they were all cheery about how it had dried up (the moment I entered the building) and what a relief it was. Yes, that was certainly true. My hair graduated from Diana Dors to it's natural otter colour and I donned my coat to leave. Yes, it started raining again. Yippee.

I'd say I had scampered back to the car, but it was so damp that it was more of a rapid shambling limp and I pointed my trusty blue beast for my next appointment. I had arranged to collect some items, including a couple of strawberry plants from a kind lady on Freecycle. That was an interesting trip. I love my BMW to bits and have found the thought of trading her in hard, despite her age, for something else but tonight I decided I would - for a boat. The lady lived in the back of beyond... no, further. I drove up rivers that had once been roads, traversed puddles the size of duck ponds and eventually got there.

Returning home was even better. There is a road that lies low in the Somerset countryside and all the water from the surrounding hills washes down there. The road crosses water meadows and these have small, hump-backed bridges at intervals over the streams. In heavy rain, the space between the bridges turn into puddles. Deep puddles. This was my route home. There aren't that many roads around where I live, so it's not like I had a choice. Happily, there were two cars in front of me, far enough ahead that I could see if they succeeded in crossing the floods. It was school chucking-out time so the bridges were littered with gibbering women in 4x4s who could easily have passed through the water (had they had the brains to understand what they were driving). I went for it.

WoooHooo! My BWW made rather a splendid bow wave and she sailed majestically through, with a spray over the top of the hedgerow (and I was only in first gear and slipping the clutch like mad). I drove away, leaving the gibbering ones to the floods and came home.

Yup, I'm soaked all over again from the dash between car and house and the rayburn has gone out. I now look like a very plump otter again, though I don't have quite such a love of water at they do. I'm cold, damp and very grumpy and taking this all very personally. Would someone pass the gin please?

On The Nature Of Success

It's funny how people define success - I'm talking about work. For some it is about the amount of money they have made; for others it is how many contracts or the size of their business. I realised today that my measures are very different and personal. I have recently joined an international training organisation as a some-time lecturer, my business is growing and doing well and to some extent it has felt slightly... unreal. Today, however, I became a success.

My friend, I love her dearly, has always viewed me as a bit of a butterfly (justified, I have a low boredom threshold), as someone who plays at working (well, I don't know about you, but I have to love what I'm doing or it's drudgery) and who has regularly made "Hrumph!" noises when I have talked about my 'work'.

Tonight, as I lay sparko in my snuffly, cold and achy bed trying to get well enough to face the hairdresser tomorrow, she telephoned. My beloved answered the phone as I was unconscious and took a query from her about... work!

Good Goddess, it seem she has taken me seriously and wanted to know something from me on a professional level. When I woke up and was told this, I felt like I had just pulled in a £1M contract. How silly is that? It doesn't matter that I'm quite capable of standing in front of fee paying students to lecture them, it doesn't matter that new clients are rolling into the business at a faster rate that I have days to service them or any other the other measures that normal people would use. For me, knowing I'd 'made it' was getting that phone call.

I suppose, now that I have cracked that, I shall have to find something else to drive me on. Oh, I know! I want that large chunk of land so I can have my Wicca centre - that's a good carrot.

The HedgeBeast Rides!

Where, in the Rede, does it say that I have to suffer fools?

I have watched my public site go from somewhere that people found a cosy place to network with each other to the playground of people who can't manage a serious thought between them on time-share. There is someone slapping a new member for using the same (publicly available and free to use and share) avatar as them and in another forum someone slapping another because they don't consider the post worthy, even though the person doing the slapping has been capable of little more than speculating on the colour of people's nightwear. I feel so cross.

I should have expected it really. I have been so busy that I have barely looked in on the forums over the last days and it seems that the moment I look away, someone decides it is time to get too big for their boots. I have written about this before, on someone else's blog. I have had another person who is very knowledgeable but can sometimes get cranky and be unkind - somehow I can forgive that more easily, because I understand the impatience that makes suffering fools such a trial. To see someone, who has contributed little knowledge and less compassion than most, to start being unkind to others, both old and new, makes me cross.

More than anything, I resent being unable to take a short time away from the site, even though work is pressing, without the atmosphere deteriorating to the sorts of bitch-fests and slanging matches that one can find so easily on other Pagan forums. No doubt, someone will pop their head over the parapet and say what a beast I'm being, but without the constant reminder to manners, it's a slippery slope.

No, there is nothing in the Rede about having to put up with this sort of annoyance, just an exhortation to not spend time with fools. Thank you Goddess for reminding me that I needed to re-read this and take it to heart!

The Wiccan Rede

Bide ye the Wiccan laws ye must,
in perfect love in perfect trust
Ye must live and let live,
fairly take and fairly give.
Cast the circle thrice about,
to keep unwelcome spirits out.
To bind the spell well every time,
let the spell be spoken in rhyme.
Soft of eye and light of touch,
speak ye little and listen much.
Deosil go by waxing moon,
chanting out the Wiccan runes.
Widdershins go by waning moon,
chanting out the baneful tune.
When the Lady's moon is new,
kiss the hand to her times two.
When the moon rides at her peak,
then the heart's desire seek.
Heed the North wind's mighty gale:
lock the door and trim the sail.
When the wind comes from the South,
love will kiss the on the mouth.
When the Moor wind blows from the West,
departed spirits have no rest.
When the wind blows from the East,
expect the new and set the feast.
Nine woods in the cauldron go,
burn them quick and burn them slow.
Elder be the Lady's tree,
burn it not or cursed ye'll be.
When the wheel begins to turn,
let the Beltane fires burn.
When the wheel has turned to Yule,
light the log and the Horned One rules.
Heed ye flower, bush and tree, by the Lady, Blessed Be.
Where the rippling waters go,
cast a stone, the truth to know.
When ye have and hold a need,
hearken not to others' greed.
With a fool no seasons spend,
or be counted as his friend.
Merry meet and merry part,
bright the cheeks and warm the heart.
Mind the Threefold Law ye should,
three times bad and three times good.
When misfortune is enow,
wear the blue star on thy brow.
True in love ye must ever be,
lest thy love be false to thee.
These words the Wiccan Rede fulfill:
An ye harm none, do what ye will.

The Law of Busyness

The Law of Busyness is similar to Sod's Law; LoB states that when you think you will have time to do something, whether it is writing a blog, taking on a new element in one's work or whatever, there's some mean little entity out there who goes "Oh yeah? You think you have time, do you?"

The Law of Busyness happened to me recently. My cat business was going along, but not very lively, my web business was doing nicely, but not to the point where I was worrying how I'd get everything done and I decided to take on an new element in my work which is lecturing on Web and business skills. Silly old me also set up this blog. "Loadsa time!" thought I and then the Law of Busyness kicked in, rather like Sod's Law. Suddenly, I had more cats than I knew what to do with, new customers came whooshing into the Web business and before I knew where I was, there I am, having sleepless nights worrying about how to get it all done.

Still, there's nothing like having a blog as a displacement activity. I have an eCommerce site to sort out using a new technology that is bleeding edge. Bleeding edge (in front of leading edge and called bleeding because it hurts) means it's me who bleeds because there isn't a nice, glossy manual telling me how to do it, I have to struggle through the demented ramblings of a developer who wasn't properly introduced to the English language or to the concept that there are other people out there who may not be living on planet propellerhead.

Ah well, there are 24 hours in every day and for most of them I will be sitting in front of this infernal little box trying to make things do what they are supposed to do. I just need to desist from the displacement activity!