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Part consultancy, part thinktank, part social enterprise, Halcyon helps you prepare for and respond to personal, organisational and societal change.

Halcyon's 52:52:52 campaign on Twitter will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.

To be a catalyst is the ambition most appropriate for those who see the world as being in constant change, and who, without thinking that they control it, wish to influence its direction - Theodore Zeldin

Hope

On A Mundane Comedy

Submitted by Halcyon In Kal… on 22 February 2019
The Divine Comedy

 

These are working notes for a book to be published in early 2019. Please contact us with any questions about the evolving book.

In 2013, poet Niall O'Sullivan's The Mundane Comedy used Dante's terza rima to document a year of his life, detailing big current events, intimate everyday happenings and "the tired rope bridge of opinion that naturally forms between the two".  Touching and amusing in turns, O'Sullivan's poem is well worth dipping into on any day of his - or your - year. However, my ambition is somewhat different: firstly I have deliberately gone for the indefinite article and title my work A Mundane Comedy, as while Dante (and who knows, if he is picked up by the right publisher, perhaps O'Sullivan too is for the ages).

On T.S. Eliot
East Coker
Halcyon In Kal… 1 November 2018

T.S. Eliot died over 50 years ago now. His legacy remains profound and his poetry moves me deeply.

In 2016 I had the privilege of visiting his final resting place, East Coker.

I read or listen to the peerless Little Gidding at least once a quarter, sometimes more often, and almost every line entrances, as if peering through a veil at something once known, but half-forgotten because not looked-for.

On Recession

Submitted by Halcyon In Kal… on 13 May 2016
blog image

 

Of Mice and Men - redux?  Chastening and often stunning images of the impact that global recession can have in our day and age might suggest so, yet the blooming sunflower might suggest too that hope springs eternal or, as Roy Harper puts it so lyrically, "through all destruction flies new dawn".

Man such sunflowers constantly emerge, displaying a wide variety of proposed "antidotes to the pessimism of the post-crisis world". If you'd like to hear constructive suggestions for our way ahead economically, you could also listen to the following podcasts:

Quote 2457

Submitted by halcyon.admin on 17 June 2013

We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Quote 2456

Submitted by halcyon.admin on 17 June 2013

Spring is sooner recognised by plants than by men- Chinese Proverb

Quote 2455

Submitted by halcyon.admin on 17 June 2013

It is in the power of everybody, with a little courage, to hold out a hand to someone different, to listen, and to attempt to increase, even by a tiny amount, the quantity of kindness and humanity in the world. But it is careless to do so without remembering how previous efforts have failed, and how it has never been possible to predict for certain how a human being will behave. History, with its endless procession of passers-by, most of whose encounters have been missed opportunities, has so far been largely a chronicle of ability gone to waste. But next time two people meet, the result could be different. That is the origin of anxiety, but also of hope, and hope is the origin of humanity - Theodore Zeldin

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