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.

These are working notes for a book to be published in mid 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).

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 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

Is it possible to appreciate fully Dante’s work without understanding the man himself and the society in which he lived? A recent book attempted to shed new light on what some have called the greatest of all European poems.

See also:

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 

The Ego Trick looked at the 'bundle theory' of the self, and argued that we don't have a permanent essential self, but instead are a bundle of thoughts, sensations and impulses.

Meanwhile, a Harvard clinical psychologist and Tibetan Buddhist scholar, examined the nature of awareness and self.

Michel de Montaigne's Essais help us better frame and address the fundamental question: "how to live?"

Montaigne has been covered well in both In Our Time and in a Philosophy Bites interview with Sarah Bakewell - listen also to Bakewell on Montaigne and/or read her series of Guardian articles about Montaigne.

For more on Montaigne, see e.g.

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.

You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star - Nietzsche

Ah, Nietzsche. Always so fashionable, always so little understood and even so little read, although the young man I vaguely remember once being enjoyed first Beyond Good and Evil and then on to The Birth of Tragedy and On the Genealogy of Morality and of course the far cooler Thus Spake Zarathustra while bumming around the Ionian Sea (funny how these things always seem hip with hindsight),

What if we could we remember and honour all the dead...yes, the estimated 110 billion or so humans who have ever lived? 

Imbolc, imbolc, the light will soon return, warm the Earth this winter's night and let the candles burn - from Ancient Dream, by Aeolian Songspell

A time of purification (hence spring cleaning), this is a hopeful time of year, with the days drawing out and even the mornings slowly lightening. Later this month, the first snowdrop and crocus should visit, suggesting that Spring is not far behind.

See also:

Please see below an evolving set of forecasts for 2019. This is work in progress, due for completion before the end of January 2019. 

Introduction

Not really a card player, but one card calls to me down the years nonetheless. Not superstitious or credulous either, but the following raised a wry smile nonethless. Seem about right:

• 6 of Hearts: Indicates a time of peace and harmony where you can work well with others to achieve your goals and overcome obstacles.
• The Six of Cups in tarot is a card that takes you back to the joyful memories from your past, whether as a child, teenager or young adult. ... The Six of Cups often indicates an increased level of harmony and cooperation in your relationships.

Though not particularly taken by recent film adaptations of her novels, and well-used to my family calling me "Mr Bennett", I remember very much enjoying Pride and Prejudice when I read it as a student in France.

Today, Jane Austen is loved mainly as a charming guide to fashionable life in the Regency period. She is admired for portraying a world of elegant houses, dances, servants and fashionable young men driving barouches. But her own vision of her task was radically different, believes The School of Life. She was an ambitious – and stern – moralist. She was acutely conscious of human failings and she had a deep desire to make people nicer: less selfish, more reasonable, more dignified and more sensitive to the needs of others.