Halcyon In Kaleidoscope

These pages highlight our founder Dominic's subjective views on the ever-changing range and scope of subjects that Halcyon focuses on.

This is less a blog than a set of irregularly updated and often fragmentary views - on ideas and values, places and people - evolving over time into mini essais which pay humble homage to the peerless founder of the genre. Our writing is provisional, always open to change as new thoughts and ideas emerge.

The kaleidoscope is Halcyon's prime metaphor, encouraging us to embrace change and to view issues through an ever-moving series of lenses.

This is a work in progress. Please contact us to discuss further.

Related elements: Kindness-Empathy-Compassion-Love; Anxiety-Depression-Therapy-Self-Esteem; Charity-Activism; Conflict-Peace; Space-Time; Environment-Climate-Sustainability;

On an alternative world view

The sheer novelty of the ideas of such leaders not only addresses the issues at hand and but gives the world a new perspective to address issues of the future. The outmoded ways of leadership, of securing selfish interests and of exploiting public sentiments, should be relinquished. The new age leaders must look forward to lead the global thought rather than leading only a particular country or a section of society - Club of Amsterdam

This page will contain regular updates about A Mundane Comedy, Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published in mid-late 2019. Please feel free to contact us with any questions about the book.

52 responses to issues you may face over next 52 weeks. Week 1 = #Acceptance: on unrequited love as a vital force http://bit.ly/1Sl7Eh0 

52 responses to issues you may face over next 52 weeks. Week 1 #Acceptance: on why it may pay to be pessimistic https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/on-pessimism/

52 responses to issues you may face over next 52 weeks. Week 1 #Acceptance: on living with the psychology of regret http://bit.ly/2ieps5l 

This is an evolving manifesto, more modest than great charters calling for widespread political change, or updated commandments for our time, or even simple poems for our time.

Instead, Halcyon's small charter is primarily a call for inner change, leading to outer change.

We want to help people think more about how they can nurture key values, chief amongst them kindness.

Kindness

In spite of spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers - Martin Luther King

This evolving paper will examine the overall Ethical Development Goals (EDGs) that Halcyon is developing to complement the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Introduction

The EDGs are inspired by the SDGs, officially known as ‘Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’, an intergovernmental set of aspiration Goals with 169 targets.

Dave Pollard wrote thought-provokingly of the "Now Time”, a multidimensional recursive eternal present familiar to aboriginal cultures the world over, and recalling Friedrich Nietzche's desire to be a "yes-sayer" to each moment.

This recalls Camus' celebration of Sisyphus starting afresh each day and more recently, Eckhart Tolle's "power of now".

For the White Horse of summer, with its crown of hope made from fern and flower, has left the land. Now we must wait till the Grey Horse comes amid the dark days of winter shivering - Hookland

In the 1840s Henry David Thoreau swapped his busy schedule in Concord, Massachusetts, for a wooden hut he built himself near Walden Pond. We had the privilege to visit Walden in July 2012; it exceeded expectations in its tranquility and beauty - and the swim in the pond itself was unforgettable.

See also:

Karl-Erik Sveiby on aboriginal cultures:

• Treading Lightly: The Hidden Wisdom of the World's Oldest People
• The First Leadership? The non-hierarchical model of the Australian Aborigines
• Aboriginal Principles for Sustainability
• Keep All Alive!. An Aboriginal model for Sustainability
• Nhunggabarra Knowledge Painting and story.

Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism

Jean-Paul Sartre, whom I studied at university and whose work has interested me ever since, introduces us to the idea of our absolute freedom. While he admits that we are limited by some physical and social circumstances, he places us utterly in charge of ourselves.

Halcyon's 52:52:52 campaign will launch in early 2019 and will feature 52 fast-changing issues and 52 possible responses, over 52 weeks.

I remember snow falling quietly on 14th Street in January 1999. 

I've long held a (completely invented) theory that one can distinguish not only people, but also places, in fact almost anything, by whether it is major- or minor- key dominant.  Here I focus on the minor, which has always felt like my spiritual home...

• "Last night I read those letters, and they made me feel one hundred years old...", from Stolen Car, Bruce Springsteen

I first heard the album Odessa at New Year 1978, and it filled me with excitement immediately.  Its eponymous title track was no.1 in my many (unsent, but circulated within a very small, select group) Radio Caroline Personal Top 30 listings. 

What attracted me too was the coincidence that the opening lines of my then favourite song - "Fourteenth of February, eighteen ninety nine, the British ship Veronica was lost without a sign" - so closely echoed my then favourite film, Picnic at Hanging Rock, set exactly 12 months later, on Valentine's Day 1900.

I was first attracted by Camus, "prince of the absurd" when I was 16.  Camus still fascinates me, now well beyond what would have been his 100th birthday, and close to 60 years after his premature death in a car crash in Burgundy (it's said that he was found with an unused train ticket in his pocket - he'd planned to go by rail to Paris to rejoin his wife and children, but had accepted at the last minute the offer of a lift from his publisher).

"I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself", said Michel de Montaigne, describing his own poor memory, his ability to solve problems and mediate conflicts without truly getting emotionally involved, his disgust for man's pursuit of lasting fame, and his attempts to detach himself from worldly things to prepare for death.