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The 52:52:52 project, launching both on this site and on social media in early 2024 will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.

A Mundane Comedy is Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published in mid 2024. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

This site addresses what's changing, in our own lives, in our organisations, and in wider society. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 areas, ranging from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and very much else inbetween.

Halcyon's aim is to help you reflect on how you can better deal with related change in your own life.

Arts

On Steve Harley

Steve Harley

 

"Come inside, see my mind...in kaleidoscope" - the governing metaphor of this website owes its origin to the late, great - gone-far-too-soon - Steve Harley.

Saw him in concert many times and in many places and it was always an intimate, unforgettable experience. A top singer, poet and raconteur.

His legacy? Enormous, and perhaps encapsulated in the crowd's reaction to these lines on the double live Face to Face album, a much-played, much-treasured possession of mine since teenagehood:

 

What's Changing? - Arts

Arts

 

Please see below selected recent arts-related change.

 

See also:

 

February 2024

 

On Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche

 

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

 

Ah, Nietzsche. Always so fashionable, always so little understood and even so little read, although the young man I vaguely remember being enjoyed Beyond Good and Evilin which he argues that the good person is not the opposite of the evil person; good and evil, rather, are different expressions of the same nature, which bubble to the surface by complex and nuanced currents of potentiality and choice.

On Music

Music

 

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.

On Awe

 

Award-winning social psychologist Dacher Keltner believes he’s found the answer to happiness: finding awe. In his book, Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder, he shows how this elusive, but powerful, emotion can have physical and psychological effects, impacting our bodies and brains.

In a talk with the RSA in January 2023, Keltner identified opportunities such as introducing "awe design" into hospitals, in order to turn clinical, tiled, bright but sterile environments into contemplative spaces where people can peacefully live...and die.

On Albert Camus

Camus

 

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 more than 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).

On Poetry

Poetry

 

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

 

On Books

blog image

 

Above and beyond the (too?) many unread volumes I already have, there are many other books that I'd still like to read, given sufficient life and leisure, including the following: