Crafting Gentleness

Still here

2009-06-11T14:54:00.001-07:00

Sorry - remiss in my duties! Back soon :)

Disney, Casino Capitalism and the Exploitation of Young Boys: Beyond the Politics of Innocence

2009-04-17T01:40:00.000-07:00

http://www.truthout.org/041509J

Rapid-fire media may confuse your moral compass ...

2009-04-17T01:37:00.001-07:00

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090413180703.htm

Cure for Honey Bee Collapse?

2009-04-17T01:35:00.001-07:00

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090414084627.htm

Dark Mountain

2009-04-17T01:33:00.001-07:00

http://www.dark-mountain.net/

Combatants for Peace

2009-04-17T01:23:00.001-07:00

http://www.combatantsforpeace.org/

The Gentle Art of Saying 'No'

2009-04-17T01:22:00.001-07:00

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/the-gentle-art-of-saying-no.html

PEACE MEDIA Clearinghouse

2009-03-30T03:44:00.000-07:00

PEACE MEDIA Online Clearinghouse for Conflict Management-Related Multimedia
http://peacemedia.usip.org/

Georgetown University’s Conflict Resolution Program and USIP have created an online database of multimedia resources related to conflict management, as well as best practices for designing and using them. The resources include films, radio and TV programs, video games, music, and more. Many of these materials are accompanied by teaching guides that help educators and conflict management practitioners facilitate discussion or community action.

The goal of this clearinghouse is to provide a central site where individuals and organizations working in the conflict management field can access materials that support conflict analysis and prevention, conflict resolution, and post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation. At the same time, the site will encourage development of the field itself by distilling best practices for creating and using multimedia in support of conflict management activities.

The multimedia tools in the database are drawn from conflict management activities around the world, developed by a wide range of talent from non-governmental organizations, academia, and the private sector. Some were generated specifically for peacemaking purposes, while others are simply explorations of conflicts or issues that we believe can be useful to those trying to understand or manage conflict.

MLK, India, Gandhi

2009-01-20T01:53:00.000-08:00

A rare clip of Martin Luther King addressing Indians via All India Radio in 1959 is available here along with transcript. The speech is about violence and the role of US and what India could do about it:

http://subalternmedia.com/?p=2579

(from Kishore Budha via a media studies list)

Scything

2009-01-20T01:25:00.000-08:00

I must thank my friend Lawrence for the following ...

Jan 2009 Scything Calendar

IF YOU WISH TO SUBSCRIBE OR UNSUBSCRIBE TO THIS MAIL OUT PLEASE EMAIL ME, SIMON FAIRLIE,
at chapter7@tlio.org.uk; tel 01460 249204

CONTENTS

1. The Scythe Festival and S Somerset Green Fair 2009

2. The Grib Forest Gathering, Denmark

3. Course in Ireland

4. Other Scythe Courses

Somerset, Devon, Notts, Bristol, Hackney, Anywhere Else?

5. World Championships (in Germany?)

6. Haymaking Festival in the Serbian Mountains

7. Coppicing Weekend

8. The Recession and the Price of Snaths

9. Poem The Scythe, by Stanley Snaith

1. The Scythe Festival and S Somerset Green Fair 2009 will take place on Saturday 13 and Sunday 14 June at the same place as last year:

Thorney Lakes, Muchelney, Near Langport, Somerset .

On the 13th there will be courses for both beginners and for mowers with some experience.

On Sunday, which is the festival proper, there will be a wider range of events than we have held previously. More details will be given in the next mail-out, and posted on the website, but if you want to pencil in a place on the course, please contact me [Simon].

For the results of last years festival see http://www.thescytheshop.co.uk/festival.html and for information about the Green Fair side of the event see http://www.greenfair.org.uk/

If anybody is interested in helping organize events for the festival, we are holding a meeting on 21 February in Oxford. Contact me [Simon] for details.

2. The Gribskov Forest Gathering

Last July Ray Lister and Simon Fairlie visited the Grib Forest Gathering deep in the woods north of Copenhagen where a group of Danish scythesmen have been mowing a 12 acre (or was it hectares?) clearing in the forest for the last 10 years. We were part of the “rest of the world team” (together with a Swede and a Belgian), who competed in a gang mowing contest with a Canadian team (the Vido family) an Austrian team, and a Danish team. In the spirit of Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards we came a glorious last, and made up for the unseemly obsession with medals that so marred the UK performance at Beijing.

This year, just prior to mowing their meadow on 4 July, the Danes are holding an informal instruction course for “improvers” with some experience of mowing. They have places for a limited number from England. We highly recommend this course as the Danes are good mowers, most hospitable, and the venue is lovely. It can be reached easily from Copenhagen by public transport — the single track railway stops in the middle of the forest at Gribskov Halt where there is nothing, not even a paved road. The Grib mowers are also astonishingly knowledgeable about single malt Scotch whisky. To find out more about the event contact Henrik Jorgensen at HJG@sns.dk

3. Course in Ireland

Simon will be holding a two day scything and hand haymaking course at a farm near Mullingar, Co Westmeath, Ireland on 20 - 21 of June. Two days gives more time for practising different peening and mowing techniques — and also allows time to cover haymaking and grassland management techniques.

The event takes place at Porterstown Lodge Farm, Killucan, on the banks of the Royal Canal in Co Westmeath, Ireland’s lakeland. Food is provided and camping, or else you can lodge at a B and B nearby.

For more details contact Jo Dalton on +353 (0) 44 9358916 or jodaltonuk@yahoo.com

If anybody has an opportunity to e-mail this information out to other people in Ireland, or even better to an appropriate e-mail list in Ireland, we’d be very grateful.

4. Other Scythe Courses

Somerset

Simon will be giving courses at South Petherton on Saturday May 2 and Saturday May 23

For information about these courses see http://www.thescytheshop.co.uk/courses.html

To register e-mail chapter7@tlio.org.uk

Devon

I [Simon] will also be giving a two-day course in Devon on 4-5 July. Ring Gill Westcott on 01647 24789

Bristol and Hackney

LILI (the Low Impact Living Initiative are holding two courses this year, run by Simon (again!) on April 18 at Windmill Hill City Farm, Bristol (let’s hope its an early Spring) and on 15 August at Hackney City Farm. See http://www.lowimpact.org/courses.htm LILI also provide lots of other practical courses.

Notts

Ray Lister will be giving his courses in Nottinghamshire.

Raymond Lister, 22 Hind Street, Retford, Notts DN22 7EN; 01777 710091.

Anyone Else?

Is anyone else out there doing courses? If so, if you want to advertise them there will put them in the next mail out, round about April.

Anywhere Else?

If you are interested in organizing a scything course in another part of Britain, I might be able to do it. Please contact Simon to enquire about rates, dates etc.

5. World Championships

Martin Hierstetter writes:

Ichteile ihnen mit wir veranstalten am 1./2.August 2009 die Weltmeisterschaften im Mannschaftsmähen.

Wenn interesse besteht dann geben Sie mir bitte die Adresse und ich sende die Unterlagen.

Herzliche Grüße Martin Hierstetter Sensle2@aol.com

1.Sensenmähverein BaWü 1999 e.V.

I think this means that the world mowing championships are taking place, presumably in Germany, on 1-2 August, and if you want more information contact Martin Hierstetter at Sensle2@aol.com

6. Haymaking Festival and Walking Holiday in the Serbian Mountains (7-8 Nights)

British couple Rob and Trish MacCurrach will take you to the annual haymaking festival on Rajac Mountain. This is both a festival of mountain culture with grass scything events and a colourful homecoming for Serbs. Plus 3 days walking in the little visited and remote flowered meadows of the Western Serbia mountains.

Accommodation is authentically simple and rural; the food traditional and tasty. It is an opportunity to visit places few foreigners have had the privilege to experience.

For more information contact Trish at trish@maccurrach.com

7. Coppicing Weekend

If you want to keep yourself in trim until the grass grows, how about going to Tinker’s Bubble’s coppicing weekend, on 21 and 22 February? Two days in a Somerset wood with billhook and saw, picnics and cider. Free. Telephone 01935 881975.

8. The Recession and the Price of Snaths

The volatility of the pound has meant that anyone who imports goods from Europe has to become a currency speculator, which I am not very good at, so virtually all the scythe equipment I sell will become more expensive. Most worryingly the Swiss snaths will be well over £50 unless there is a complete reverse in the rate of exchange in the near future. However I am unwilling to stock cheaper snaths as they are all so inferior to the Swiss model (designed by Peter Vido and the Schroeckenfux technicians), and I have had almost no-one who has tried the adjustable wooden snaths telling me I should stock a cheaper kind. The snaths arriving this Spring will have new handgrips angled slightly outwards (ie as if having to make space for a pair of very wide hips).

I am still open to any proposals from UK woodworkers interested in producing adjustable wooden snaths in this country and happy to co-operate on design. Many have thought about it, but nobody yet has come up with anything.

9. Poem

The scythe maybe more elegant than the spade, but the following poem is not quite as elegant as Seamus Heaney’s “Digging”, though it shares the same message.

THE SCYTHE by Stanley Snaith

This morning as the scythe swung in my grasp
I thought of the sinewy craft my fathers plied,
Those men whose hedgerow name has come to me,
Those soil-bred Yorkshiremen who fashioned snathes.
They lopped and barked and seasoned the leafy staff
To bear the blade with balance. There is a stern
Puritan cleanness in a true-made scythe.
A scythe purges the hands of awkwardness.
It has its own instinct, a subtle weighting
That pulls it round in a rich curve of motion;
And when the steel, fined to a creepy edge,
Rips and rings through the stalks, and the swath sighs over,
And the cropped circle widens at each stroke,
What a singing power flows from the hands!
The old rhythm came smoothly to my wrist.
I seemed to feel my ancestry move within me.
For though I left their soil, I found a craft
Nourished with a tradition choice as theirs:
They toiled in wood, I curb the grain of words,
Both winning grace and service from what's wild,
Scythe and sentence share one craftsmanship.

Back

2009-01-20T01:03:00.000-08:00

Hi,

To be honest, I really don't mind when technology takes a back seat to real life. What seems like silence on this blog is anything but silence in my everyday life. Life has been good for me in the last few weeks, and also sad.

The violence in Gaza has been horrific, and the cold, lame rhetoric that has been used to justify slaughter has been despicable, heinous, and mechanical, in ways that cannot but remind me of other rhetorics and slaughters throughout our histories. And some of them not so far from Israeli imaginaries.

While the killing continued in Gaza, there were small, hidden reports in the media of the continuing tragedies within the Congo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm8qXdEaGXo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1FQmUQ1-mM

Or the death toll of 'civilians' in Iraq, which is reaching the 1,00,000 mark.

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

People die every day. Violence of various sorts continues to be generated and perpetuated within our lives. What are we doing about it? To what extent do we even understand it?

Christmas

2008-12-21T01:43:00.000-08:00

It's going to be a little bit of a strange Christmas this year. Not having Dad around is an obvious reason. Another, though, is that this is the first time I have felt properly uncanny in the midst of the celebrations - uncanny in the psychological (Freudian) sense of feeling out-of-place-at-home. I talked about this somewhat on my Strule FM radio show last week with my guest Kerill Winters, the way that being an untheist (not an agnostic - I just don't engage with the question) has me reflecting on the habits of a lifetime - the religious ceremonies, the money spent on presents, the hypercorporatism, the Christmas lights that fly in the face of the calls for us all to be more circumspect in our use of electricity, the branding saturation of our everyday with Christian symbolism completely disregarding that there are plenty of people out there who aren't Christians.

I like that we get an excuse to think more about family and relationship. I like that we get an excuse to speak more openly about listening out for people who might (but might not) like our help. But I would like it more if we didn't need the excuse in the first place.

This was the year I found out that many Quakers don't celebrate Christmas like other Christians tend to. It was the excellent BBC drama on Eddington and Einstein that let me into the open secret.

Quakers, Christmas and worship
http://www.newstatesman.com/200612190001

Candles in the Window: A Quaker Christmas Story
http://www.kimopress.com/candles.html

Friends (Quakers) and Christmas
http://www.quakerinfo.com/quakxmas.shtml

Quaker Open Christmas
http://www.thefriend.org/articledisplay.asp?articleid=1748

This resonates very strongly with me, a return to notions of simplicity. In my own terms, perhaps a commitment to a predominantly uncommodifying quality of relationship.

How is it helpful if I buy someone a present yet do not work at being loving with them during the coming year?

There are a few writings out there for a more thoughtful Christmas ...

Reasoning Through the Season
http://thepublicsphere.com/2008/12/reasoning-through-the-season/

Stan Freberg's "Green Christmas"
http://www.wepsite.de/Freberg,%20GREEN%20CHRI$TMA$.htm

What Would Jesus Buy?
http://wwjbmovie.com/trailer.html

The Battle for Christmas, by Steve Nissenbaum
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl/9780679740384.html

Christmas, consumerism, and climate change
http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-vision_reflections/christmas_4201.jsp

Christmas Consumerism
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/consumer_culture/54854

Gene Halton from Notre Dame Sociology Department speaking on Christmas (Youtube)
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=I0QFrWR49uE

A Charlie Brown Christmas
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=icB7_Lh_M-w&feature=related

Words Can Heal

2008-12-20T08:03:00.001-08:00

I thought that this site/campaign had gone by the wayside, but I'm glad to see that it's still up and running ...

http://www.wordscanheal.org/

"Words Can Heal is a national campaign to eliminate verbal violence, curb gossip and promote the healing power of words to enhance relationships at every level."

"At a time when so many feel that outside events are beyond their control, we offer concrete tools and know-how to dramatically rebuild our communities and relationships through the words we speak and the way we communicate."

You are sufficient!

2008-12-20T02:58:00.000-08:00

Quite a while ago I mentioned an Inside the Actors Studio interview with William H. Macy in which he states "You are sufficient!" Here it is:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma-lB2NR1vg

New School in Exile

2008-12-18T02:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.newschoolinexile.com/

"The original idea of the University in Exile, and the New School in general, was to be a safe-haven for academic freedom and scholarship free of oppressive political regimes, be they in Europe or America, and to be a center for critical engagement with important issues of our times. It was known for its deep thinkers, its innovative academics, and its committment to social and political justice as a bedrock of all other scholarship. The New School, under its current administration, is no longer able to fulfill that role of critical engagement and dissent. This continued betryal of our founding principles cannot be tolerated any longer, and the time has come to revive the University in Exile. This is a call for student action!"

A gem

2008-12-09T00:43:00.001-08:00

A primary school teacher friend of mine told me last week that she teaches the children that 'happy people don't do nasty things'. It's so simple, it's a gem.

Time out

2008-12-07T10:45:00.000-08:00

I have a copy of the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying on my shelf, but I haven't picked it up yet. I holed up for three weeks from the world to work out where I was at, to settle into what it feels like to be a son without a father, and to take time out to work out again what's important to me in a load of areas in my life. I spent the time avoiding public social events, turning down friends' requests to go out, staying in, going for walks, and thinking, a lot, and not thinking, a lot. I suppose I needed to regain stewardship of what was going on in my life, and to allow myself time to cry when I needed to, and I needed to. Losing my Dad sucks.

2008-12-07T05:56:00.000-08:00

And all the things you taught me
And all the things you braved
I kept them all inside me
They’re with me everyday
With the things I didn’t say

http://www.janetaylor.co.uk/lyrics_fall.php

A good week

2008-12-07T04:49:00.000-08:00

This has been a good week for making connections.

It's important for me to meet people in person. I am not terribly interested in championing causes or organisations (does that make me a bad Aquarius?), but I am interested in championing particular textures of attitude or approach. Meeting people allows me to feel affiliations from heartlogic rather than justify them on the basis of headlogic. When heartlogic then gives way to heartpresence, the fun starts! :)

I had the privilege this week to finally meet Hetty Van Gurp, who runs Peaceful Schools International. Hetty was originally brought to my attention after she had a chance meeting with a friend and colleague of mine, Sharon Porter, after Sharon had travelled to Nova Scotia. They got to talking, and one thing led to another, and we all connected up, and so it continues.

The documentaries Teaching Peace in a Time of War (both on Youtube) give a good sense of what Hetty does. There's also an interview with the director of Teaching Peace in a Time of War, which I think is a great introduction.

Anyway, it happened that a friend of my Dad's, Kevin Cassidy, is a member of the Peace People, and I mentioned Hetty's work to him, and he invited Hetty to Belfast for dinner at Peace House on the Lisburn Road, and Sharon and myself got invited along as well. Sharon and myself met up with Hetty for coffee beforehand, and we also got to meet a colleague of Hetty's, Rick Lewis, which was an unexpected bonus. Rick works as a Safe Schools Coordinator in Palm Beach, Florida. I am very interested in his work on emotional climate in schools, on account of my own research interests relating to affectual registers, the tranmission of affect, and emotional intensity. A Google search for information about Rick also brought me to these sites:

Safe School Ambassadors
http://www.safeschoolambassadors.org/

Crisis Response: Creating Safe Schools http://www.ed.gov/admins/lead/safety/training/responding/crisis_pg22.html

What I find particularly impressive about Hetty's and Rick's work is that they do it voluntarily, they do not advertise, and they only go where they are invited to go. I have often wondered how to negotiate the notion of 'speak not to those who aren't willing to listen, for your words will be poison', and this seems to be a very practical way. Personally, I wonder whether doing such work voluntarily might be sustainable in my own case. I would hope that it could be, if I could find other ways to ensure that life and limb were sorted.

The dinner with the Peace People was a good night with good food in good company. Led by Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Corrigan they are working to promote the Charter for a World Without Violence, an open meeting about which is being organised at Peace House on the Lisburn Road in Belfast on the 24th January, 2009, from 10am-6pm. Mairead also told me about the work of Glenn Paige and the Center for Global Nonviolence. Glenn's work looks very helpful for me, particularly his book, Nonkilling Global Political Science.

Doing a search for Glenn Paige also brought me to the name of Petra K. Kelly. There's a webpage dedicated to her memory at http://www.macronet.org/women/petra.html . Her book Fighting for Hope is still available, and the introduction to her book, Nonviolence Speaks to Power, is available online (PDF).

Other books I've come across this week on my cybertravels:

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea - Mark Kurlansky

Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination - Walter Wink

Peace Is the Way: Writings on Non-violence - edited by Walter Wink

I'll try to comment on some of these as I get a chance to read them, although that won't be before the end of the year, I imagine.

'Soulmate'

2008-12-07T04:18:00.000-08:00

Any time I have found myself in an intimate relationship where nurturing and loving are possible, where a commitment to caring and emotional vulnerability is taken up, at such times I am reminded of the notion of a 'soulmate'. It's a word that has certain resonances for me, and not only because I was told by a psychic friend once, in a spontaneous reading, that I was looking for a soulmate when it came to matters of the heart. To be honest, I don't disagree. But I think it's important to draw out some of the nuances of the notion.

I think it's a word that can drag along a lot of unnecessary baggage, the kind of baggage that comes with the worst excesses of soppy love songs (and yes, I have written a few). But I don't think it has to come with that baggage, all that language of destiny and only-one-ness. I think if I lift the word up and look underneath to what it can helpfully mean for me it can speak to a quality of possibility in relationship that is really beautiful.

In the film (pronounced 'fillim' in my universe) Good Will Hunting there is a scene where Robin Williams' character Sean asks Matt Damon's Will if he has a soulmate. Will asks what he means.

SEAN Someone who challenges you in every way. Who takes you places, opens things up for you. A soul-mate.

In Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love a helpful Texan offers the following suggestion:

…A true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever. Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it (Eat Pray Love, p.149)

Whatever a soulmate is or isn't, what I would hope for in an intimate, caring, emotionally committed and responsible relationship is a person that invites that vulnerability, that transparency, a person that invites me to The Work in every aspect of my life, by simple virtue of their being alive. A person to encourage and support, to challenge and critique, to nourish and cuddle (etc.!).

But I don't know if meeting such a person is something that's too painful, as that quotation suggests. I think that once you sit through the painful part, that's where the gentleness can flourish.

I think I've referred to this before, but Bell Hooks speaks about the practice of love and loving in All About Love: New Visions:

"We can only move from perfect passion to perfect love when the illusions pass and we are able to use the energy and intensity generated by intense, overwhelming, erotic bonding to heighten self-discovery. Perfect passions usually end when we awaken from our enchantment and find only that we have been carried away from ourselves. It becomes perfect love when our passion gives us the courage to face reality to embrace our true selves. Acknowledging this meaningful link between perfect passion and perfect love from the onset of a relationship can be the necessary inspiration that empowers us to choose love. When we love by intention and will, by showing care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility, our love satisfies. ...

"All relationships have ups and downs. Romantic fantasy often nurtures the belief that difficulties and down times are an indication of a lack of love rather than part of the process. In actuality, true love thrives on the difficulties. The foundation of such love is the assumption that we want to grow and expand, to become more fully ourselves. There is no change that does not bring with it a feeling of challenge and loss. When we experience true love it may feel as though our lives are in danger we may feel threatened.
True love is different from the love that is rooted in basic care, goodwill, and just plain old everyday attraction. We are continually attracted to folks ... whom we know that, given a chance, we could love in a heartbeat. ...

"The essence of true love is mutual recognition - two individuals seeing each other as they really are. We all know that the usual approach is to meet someone we like and put our best self forward, or even at times a false self, one we believe will be more appealing to the person we want to attract. When our real self appears in its entirety, when the good behavior becomes too much to maintain or the masks are taken away, disappointment comes. ...
True love is a different story. When it happens, individuals usually feel in touch with each other's core identity. Embarking on such a relationship is frightening precisely because we feel there is no place to hide. We are known. All the ecstasy that we feel emerges as this love nurtures us and challenges us to grow and transform."

Yes, being with someone who is loving also invites me to a loving presencing of myself, also invites me to allow myself the same gentleness, and sometimes that's something I'm just not willing to do. Someone that invites me to acknowledge and accept the more painful parts of myself. Warts and all, as they say. But that's a good thing, no?

The Work

2008-12-07T03:56:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about this a bit. I find that in my thinking I often refer to what I aspire to as The Work. What I mean by this is whatever I can do as a human being to reduce the possibilities of violence, coercion, domination, and oppression in my life, in my relationships. I don't think that there are areas of my life in which that work doesn't apply, and I think that commitment to The Work most helpfully involves a commitment not to just do 'gentleness work' in contexts that are formally identified as places for 'gentleness work'. Learning to live the attitude I aspire to means working to walk with an attitude of listening, with an openness to situations, with an openness to vulnerabilities, whenever I can, wherever I can. I find that hard, because it means I can't pretend that I'm not hiding from that challenge when I actually am. But it doesn't mean that it's always hard, just when I fight it. It's easier when I let it happen, or often when I simply get out of my own bloody way. Does The Work have to be hard work?

Doing and Being?

2008-12-07T03:46:00.000-08:00

I do what I do, and there's not much that I can do differently once it's done, but I don't tend to be what I think 'I am', despite my frequent protestations to the contrary. If I protest that 'it's just the way I am', that's surely a low-grade cop-out that facilitates a whole clatter of denials. There isn't an identity category out there that can adequately leave me safe from the change or challenge of circumstance. If I reframe that as 'it's just the way I tend to be', then fine, I can tend to be differently, if I make the effort. I remember reading once, in a movie review, of all places, 'be careful who you pretend to be for that is who you may become'. I would maybe re-word that awkwardly as, 'be careful who I (pre)tend to be as that is (w)ho(w) I may become'.

Disbeliever

2008-11-28T06:10:00.000-08:00

From a colleague on an email list. He lives in Mumbai.

On January 11, 1998, unidentified gunmen entered a movie theater and a small mosque in Sidi Ahmed near Algiers and massacred 120 men, women, and children at close range during Algeria's ongoing civil conflict.

Disbeliever

By the limping of the people of Iraq
By the sound of frantic running in Qana, in Kosovo
By the men and boys of Hama massacred
By the swollen bodies in a river in Rwanda
and Afghani women and the writers of Algiers,
I am a disbeliever

in everything that refuses to kiss
full on the lips the ones still living
and receive them into the bosom of the self,
no matter the religion or the nation or race
I am a disbeliever in everything
that does not say "How was the movie? I love you"

I need a body outside my life that can travel and kneel
on the sidewalk beside a movie theater in Algiers
over the bodies of the supple children
who will never be my children's playmates or marry them
over the bodies of the men and the women
who will never write a letter,
will never phone me from Algiers:"How was the movie? I love you. I love you."

I need time outside this history
where I can whisper in the ear of each of them,
By God, you will never be forgotten
By God, I will make sure the world
buries its face in your beautiful hair,
sings to you, learns your name and your music,
lifts you up in the crook of its arm like a gift

I am a disbeliever
in everything but the purity of the bodies
of the men and women–with or without the veil,
with or without the markings of the right identity–
in everything but the suppleness of children
I am a disbeliever in every scripture
in the world that leaves out
"How was the movie? I love you. I love you."

Mohja Kahf

Rock and Water

2008-11-25T12:18:00.001-08:00

When I was in Liverpool recently I met up with Sue and Graham Lane from Newcastle, Australia. Graham knew people I knew, through the Social Ecology programme at the University of Western Sydney. They told me about a program called Rock and Water, run from the University of Newcastle. It looks really interesting, and maybe some day I'll be able to get out there to find out more. In the meantime, a collection of essays has emerged from the programme . They have also developed teaching materials.

Cuddles

2008-11-22T02:25:00.001-08:00

I'm sitting in my front room with my cat, Nila, stretched blissfully across my chest. She seems pretty content, sounds pretty content, purrpurr. There's an effortless generosity that comes with Nila. Yes, she can seem a bit needy sometimes, especially when I've been away for a bit, but I love her anyway. Yes, Cassie (dog), I love you too, with your boundless enthusiasm.

One of Nila's ways of showing affection is biting. At first I would pull away, and end up getting scars to record her attentions. Then I worked out that if I gently lean my hand into her as she bites, the bite turns to a lick, and scars are averted. It was a hard learning.

Nila likes a little human warmth and a quiet cuddle. As do I. The online etymological dictionary refers to 'cuddle' as follows

"c.1520, probably a variant of obs. cull, coll "to embrace" (see collar), or perhaps M.E. *couthelen, from couth "known," hence "comfortable with." The word has a spotty early history, and it seems to have been a nursery word at first."

I find it really interesting that the possible etymology through 'couth' refers to knowledge as a question of presence, of being-with, of relationship, and of emotional comfort or familiarity. This is very different from later dominant understandings of knowledge that abstract knowledge from relationships, link knowledge to mental cognition, and anchor knowledge to certitude, the absence of doubt.

Cuddles aren't about certitude for me. But they allow for a confidence about being-with, a confidence in being-present-with, a familiarity with bodily warmth, gentle breathing, and fitting-together. Cuddles tend to be unregulated; what I mean by that is that they allow us a space where we aren't enticed to manage ourselves or another, a space where the headiness of logic doesn't really get a look-in, where words often simply get in the way. Cuddles for me often constitute the quintessential uncommodifying moment.

A cuddle isn't just a hug with benefits. You can hug someone you don't really know. A cuddle implies a comfort, but a comfort that comes with familiarity and trust, a comfort that comes with a vital vulnerability that opens a space for gentleness to just happen. Whether it's Nila on my lap, or my niece cuddling up with her Granda to hear a story, or the comfort of a romantic moment, cuddles are for me about as beautiful as being human gets. I'm pleased that the word cuddle may have been a nursery word first. Babies are about as vulnerable as we ever get, and any words we might use are only helpful insofar as they communicate a soothing tone, an emotional texture, another reminder of being-with; without agendas, without schedules, without a felt need to control.

So, yes, if you want to understand what I mean by gentleness, think on cuddles for a while. Or, better still, go and find some.

Nila, at this point, has decided that lounging in the sun streaming in through the french windows is way more attractive than cuddles with me.