Please see below significant recent changes across the more than 150 elements of life that we monitor actively and please contact us for help in dealing with change.
I have always been attracted by the veil, by seeing through a glass, darkly:
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between the two waves of the sea
- from Little Gidding, T.S. Eliot
When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse,
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone.
I cannot put my finger on it now
This page will contain regular updates about A Mundane Comedy, Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published later in 2024. Please see below an introductory extract.
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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, Intimate History of Humanity
This book is about what goes wrong in our lives, and about how we can try to make things better, even if temporarily and contingently. It’s not about imaginary progress, which John Gray in Straw Dogs punctured definitively.
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, our small charter will be primarily a call for inner change, leading to outer change. We want to help people think more about how they can nurture key values.
This is a work in progress. Please contact us to discuss further.
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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 is for you and about you...all of you.
I share below (without comment...which is a personal act that belongs in the real, not the virtual world), an evolving, far from exhaustive, but from an emotional point-of-view, highly illustrative and authentic selection of my favourite poetry and lyrics...
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And it's a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace
And a wound that will never heal
- from Tom Traubert's Blues, by Tom Waits
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(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift
- The Uses of Sorrow, by Mary Oliver
Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" is an epic poem written in the early 14th century, divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.
Inferno:
Purgatorio:
I finished primary school half a century ago on 19th July 1974. My memories of that last day at St Helen's are still vivid (in part) and very positive. I started at Campion on 3rd September 1974.
This evolving paper starts to imagine and sketch out Personal Development Goals (PDGs) that could complement the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
We will also draw ideas and inspirations from the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) not for profit and open source initiative. (See also Can the Inner Development Goals help us create a more sustainable future? and Start working on your Inner Development Goals now.)
Introduction
Please see below "talking change" pages, containing a wide range of quotes - some famous, many unavailable anywhere else - covering each of the 150+ elements of life that Halcyon writes about.
This is a work-in-progress and many more talking change pages will be added in late 2024.
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Michel de Montaigne's Essais help us better frame and address the fundamental question: "how to live?"
"I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself", said 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.
My fascination with perfume - or scents more generally - probably began in suburban teenagehood. My then girlfriend wore Smitty, and I proudly sported Blue Stratos (which trumped my second choice, Old Spice, and was streets ahead of Brut, "fashionable" at the time).
Fast forward the best part of 30 years and a family trip to the perfume museum in Grasse, where the fragrant air, even in the streets outside, and the fabulous design on show inside hooked me once again.
Next was picking up a copy of The Emperor of Scent and trying to understand the scientific processes behind the olfactory skills of Luca Turin.
In late 2016 came my first attempts at creating perfume myself, taught by the inspiring Sarah McCartney and her kind husband at 4160 Tuesdays.
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone - Herman Hesse
As a member of The Woodland Trust, I regularly signed petitions to preserve ancient woodlands and unique trees. Does this make a difference? The battle is an ongoing one, but worth fighting, if necessary tree by tree.
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
Lammas or Lughnasadh is the first of the three Wiccan harvest festivals, the other two being the autumnal equinox (or Mabon) and Samhain. Wiccans mark the holiday by baking a figure of the god in bread and eating it, to symbolise the sanctity and importance of the harvest. Celebrations vary, as not all Pagans are Wiccans. The Irish name Lughnasadh is used in some traditions to designate this holiday.
Growing herbs, seeing them, smelling them, touching them, eating them and I hope, soon sharing them (as plants and incorporated into recipes and remedies), makes me - as it does millions of others, I'm sure - just feel better.
Jekka McVicar is an inspiration - she now grows around 700 different herbs.
In 2018 I was privileged to spend a day in the company of the wonderful Jekka and her family. Jekka, with no fewer than 14 Chelsea Golds, probably knows as much about herbs as anyone in England. Then in 2021, I attended Jekka's first HerbFest, which was filled with expert talks, gardening workshops and cookery demonstrations from Jekka and her team and friends.
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Now online, Paul Hillier et al's Proensa interpretations of the troubadours have long enchanted me - although perhaps not some of the dinner party guests on whom I inflicted the vinyl version at various times during my more earnest past.
Is it really as long ago as the mid 1980s that I specialised in Medieval Provençal and wrote my dissertation on the amour de loinh of Peire Vidal?
Rupert Gordon and I were the only students at Edinburgh to choose the option in many a year (perhaps since the 1950s, judging by the stamps in some of the books I borrowed!), and having been back in the George Square library many times since when two of my daughters were studying at Edinburgh, I've wondered whether anyone else has borrowed (m)any of these books since?
Four decades ago this month I left Aubagne, without any photos - which I sometimes regret, but I was young and stubborn and romantic and weird - but with images imprinted on my mind, and maybe my heart, forever.
Indeed, over the intervening years, these images have grown much stronger in relative terms, and moved closer and closer to the front and centre of the painting of my life, even as other, once seemingly permanent formative experiences have gradually faded.
According to Open Culture, Orwell's Animal Farm was almost never published. The manuscript barely survived the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, and then initially T.S. Eliot (an important editor at Faber & Faber) and other publishers rejected the book. It eventually came to see the light of day but, reportedly, Animal Farm still can’t be legally read in China, Burma and North Korea, or across large parts of the Islamic world. However, the Internet Archive offers free access to audio versions of Animal Farm and 1984.
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Indigenous peoples who have never even listened to the radio can nonetheless pick up on happy, sad, and fearful emotions in Western music. A studied suggested that the expression of emotions is a basic feature of Western music, whereas in other musical traditions, music has traditionally more often been appreciated for other qualities, such as group coordination in rituals.
Carl Jung, who founded analytical psychology. was influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies.
Jung was a pioneer in his field who established analytical psychology as a discipline. As a young man, he was seen as Freud’s intellectual heir, but their differences in approach soon became apparent and they went their separate ways