A wildly leaning wall, best viewed before a few pints

looking down at the remainder of the ruins and the steam train from Swannage approaching Corfe

looking upwards

an awesome cut in the stone that I do not know the meaning of....

more ruins

spring flowers

Corfe castle presented a clear and present danger to the English parliament of the day so it was bombarded by canon and 'destroyed' . A senseless waste of a magnificent castle.

at the bottom of the hill approaching Corfe castle on the "Isle of Purbeck"

an English frog 'acquired' by master 19 from outside a house

Rushing around, trying too hard - sound familiar? Fr Ron Rolheiser writes thus:

Hurrying can hamper life's sacredness

In Exile By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi Rome

"Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried." Thoreau wrote that and it's not meant as something trivial.

We hurry too much, pure and simple. As Henri Nouwen describes it: "One of the most obvious characteristics of our daily lives is that we are busy. We experience our days as filled with things to do, people to meet, projects to finish, letters to write, calls to make, and appointments to keep. Our lives often seem like overpacked suitcases bursting at the seams.

"It fact, we are almost always aware of being behind schedule. There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, unrealized proposals. There is always something else that we should have remembered, done or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligation."

What's wrong with hurrying? Any doctor, police officer, spiritual director, or over-worked mother, can answer that: Hurrying causes tension, high blood pressure, accidents, and robs us of the simple capacity to be in the moment.

But spiritual writers take this further. They see hurry as an obstacle to spiritual growth. Donald Nicholl, for example, says, "Hurry is a form of violence exercised upon time," an attempt, as it were, to make time God's time our own, our private property. What he and others suggest is that, in hurrying, we exercise a form of greed and gluttony?

Too often we have a simplistic notion of greed and gluttony. We imagine greed, for example, as hoarding money and possessions, as being selfish, hard-hearted, like Scrooge in the Dickens' Christmas tale.
continues

Do words signify things?
Was Aquinas a zen buddhist?
Is it worthwhile reading philosophy?
Why did Wittgenstein leave the room after brandishing a red hot poker whilst arguing the eternal question 'what is philosophy?" with Popper?

Notice how the questions get longer.

for those who drool on substance enjoy: fin de siecle Vienna

So a wild Wednesday draws to a close. You ask gentle reader why I use the word wild? Perhaps I know the wildness of the beast within. The sub-clinical depression I was experiencing earlier has moved into a wild rage about the inhumanity of my fellow humans.
From year to year the litany does not change. Israeli soldiers humiliating Palestinians, Sudanese 'arabs' raping children in Dafur, bashings on city and country streets in 'civilised ' countries. aaarrghhh! I am impotent in my anger, my frustration, thanks be to God I can cry out in prayer and call for justice. How long, O Lord, how long?

I seek refuge in my books - for the last three nights I have been rereading "Contemplating Aquinas" On the varieties of experience . A book guaranteed to stop the average reader in their tracks. Expressions such as: diachronic relation, conceptual linkage, mimetically representative, methodological solipsism, genuinely irreducible semantic triangle: triad reduced to a conjunction of dyads, the quiddity of God, and even more esoteric language permeates the text with liberal quotations from Latin and Greek. A deep familiarity with Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas is presumed and Heidegger captures a portion of the book as well. If I have not already lost thee, oh enlightened reader, you, perhaps, should be blogging not me. Any pretensions that I am a self educated academic fall away in reading such a book, my basic theological and philosophical reading leave me ill prepared to cope with the upper echelons of academia...

Such books however point me towards the light, the hope that all will be well, this vale of tears is but for a time, and gentleness of spirit and love of one another will succeed. Hope must well up eternally in our breasts or else we become but animals.....

Tonight we had Taize prayer at our local church, one hour in near darkness with the familiar music of mainly European languages chanting praise and worship. I was able to leave my angst with my Lord, and pray for those I know and do not know, for the world in all it remains - imperfect but loveable.

I am glad for my lovely family and for the friends I have both immediate and the internet acquaintances of the past year = people need people it is true, and touching each others lives in a sense touches the godhead in each of us. Peace and goodwill G_72

pottery kiln closeup

pottery kiln surround

note the repair work on the right

once all this was buildings
the official website

w00t! King Arthurs grave

first view after entering the enclosure

the tor on the hill approaching Glastonbury

Glastonbury Abbey over the car park wall

Sherborne pub interior, who cares about the lighting after a few pints :)

Salisbury Catheral taken by moi

I am not a great pix taker so enjoy these my effort will be posted above

the tower at Southampton

church ruins from WW II, a local told us a tale of a fellow being up in the tower when the bomb hit, he flew down head first into the pavement (sidewalk); apocryphal tale - I dunno.

The traditional watchmaker meets the digital age, a clock projected onto the wall above a jeweller shop

one lane and another

This pillar had plaques commemorating every major historical event since the pilgrim 'fathers' set out. Unfortunately my co-tourists were in a hurry and would not let me take close ups of each plaque, each one a marvellous history lesson.

another piece of history

follow the signs to walk the walls

Here be examples of viking ships. Master 19, Auntie and cousin engrossed in signage!

Someone else has done the hard work of text entry about the wander around the walls!

another old stone trough

around the corner

kewl overhanging road buildings in Southampton

Detail of the old wall entry

the old wall at Southampton, main entry

I am blushing gentle readers.
I had a '/' on the end of the code for my profile, and thus it would not work.
beware oh children of html!

a 19 year old by the name of graeme can successfully present his profile
another graeme not Graham
Mr Bean puts a new twist on things!

Mr Lincoln watches over the Londoners

London March 2004

Snow at Incheon airport March 2004

Sunny Sunday afternoon!
Can be frustrating when one is inside trying to blog finetune.
1)profile is set to show but it will not display:
access is enabled but summat is broken somewhere.
2)confusion about posting comments also rules.
When you click on comments, you are taken to an individual post page for the post you are going to comment on.
Blogger tells you that anonymous posts are not allowed - DO NOT BELIEVE that! Post on and be posted!

What has gone right: finally back on my computer, marital bliss is being restored!
However nos 1 son now has no monitor or internet access on his computer so trouble still exists...

What did I need to do on mine - I've deleted Lindows, pinched my sons monitor, swapped in another network card, reformatted the hard drive and spent almost a week trying to delete a nasty little popup called actulice. Finally a shareware program called Security Task Manager download from here finally got rid of the little horror. It seems to still be investigated by Symantec as Norton Anti Virus could not find it....

I have got Trillian working again on my computer as well, so chatting may become a time waster again. ....download here

I am very happy with the ability of blogger.com to allow photo uploads now as well.

Well off to another lazy sunny afternoon lunch at a friends with a bottle of red, blogging will have to wait

When I am at the salesdesk at work my view of life...

Amazing week in Canberra, just south of the city a bushfire continued to burn in freezing weather, as sleet snow and rain failed to extinguish it, due to the ultra-dry conditions of the Aussie 'bush'. Meanwhile in the city the Coronial Inquiry into the Jan 18th 2003 fires that killed 5 and destroyed over 500 homes has been hearing evidence from the people whose homes were devastated. The euphemisms used by the press in reporting the stories of destruction have been interesting to say the least. We are losing the ability to call a stone a stone!

no bonfires this year to celebrate the Queens Birthday

fluff:

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like
wrapping a present and not giving it.
William Arthur Ward.

When the tide of life turns against you and the current
upsets your boat, don't waste your tears on what might
have been, just turn on your back and float."
Anonymous

He, who loses money, loses much;
He, who loses a friend, loses much more;
He, who loses faith, loses all.
Anonymous

Never seem more learned than the people you are with. Wear
your learning like a pocket watch and keep it hidden. Do
not pull it out to count the hours, but give the time when
you are asked.

-- Lord Chesterfield

In the big brass bathtub at Stapehill, a place where the Cistercian nuns escaping from the French Revolution settled, now a wonderful tourist place that I recommend....

Cornwall, like all of England in March green and cloudy skies...

looking back on the way out of Tintagel

Another archway at Tintagel, legendary place of King Arthur

Tintagel Castle Cornwall UK

interesting pavement

Another view of Blandfords main street

Blandford, a town destroyed by fire and then rebuilt in architectural conformity

Road on the right was the original bridge. In WWII the wider bridge was built to let the US tanks travel thru... DORSET

In Weymouth, food cost thus in March 2004
Fish and Chips English style are but a memory now

Cider, cider, cider - drink, drink, drink!
more than two pints creates a sore head!

Looking south-eastward towards Charnmouth, fossils galore!
South West English Coastline

Inebriated at the murder mystery!
When one is the murderer it is best to be not in ones full faculties; only one person guessed that I was the one..

a story of determination that makes me hopeful for the worlds future

I have almost caught up with the financial stuff!

Hooray - my gmail account exists!

currently reading about the 'troubles' the litany of death,
murder, bombings, and violence listed in Gerry Adams
HOPE AND HISTORY is almost too much to take, but it has to be read in order to appreciate the demands that the struggle for peace and reconciliation dictate to those who have to walk the walk.

Another useful read is here:

Rendering unto Caesar
New Challenges for Church and State
by Samuel Gregg

Over 1000 slides presented, and the technology worked faultlessly. Thanks be to God.
At the synod - powerpoint rules, death by bullets avoided!

Red Cross warned US and UK of prisoner abuse over 12 months ago
BUT waited 12 months to leak the warning reports...

My life seems to be running beyond control, but I am not yet having that dream
where I am in a car, applying the brakes but the brakes do not work, so I must be coping...

update on the UN and Sudan

currently listening to the Mikado

fluff:

Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.
-- Kahlil Gibran

Don't be afraid to take big steps. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.
- - David Lloyd George

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated failures. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
--Calvin Coolidge

sorry about the extended posting quietude
but I've been over busy....

Our Archdiocese is having a Synod weekend (which Catholic Dioceses have infrequently) and I am caught up in the business of preparing talks and powerpoint presentations.

The bookshop work is still way behind as well, thanks to the holiday, the Easter break and the Anzac holiday.

Sick of hearing about google - well maybe - I was an orignally tester way back when, and still remember the quizzical looks when I mentioned it to people. Most people I mixed with then were altavista fans....

now google is god

my internet addiction has been under control, my smoking has almost stopped - 1 cigarette every three days at present and i just squeeze in a quick look at the agonist every 6 hours or so.

mike-thanks for the picture, sorry i have not had time to reply..

On the bad news front I have to pull my home computer to bits as it is playing up.

My beloved will not let me near hers coz she is in the middle of university assignments, so it will be another pause between posts...

meanwhile enjoy this fellow: Ron Rolheiser - he pleases me.
on becoming post liberal


weather report- its getting cold, frosts and cool breezes and the sunlight ends almost at the end of the working day.

a family of mice decided to invade the house, which has led us on numerous mouse hunts, snails in the garden are almost non-existent from six months ago, and I have found several frogs as I weeded the ponds in preparation for the winter.

back to the grind of accounts and 'powerpoints'! - you be kind to one another!

pleased to report that the back is on the mend.
very hot spa baths and much alcohol and pain relief medication plus a slow down in my normally frenetic lifestyle have helped.
The bad news is I seem to have got back onto the cigarettes again after a nine year near abstinence....

meanwhile this review touched me deeply:

Preacher who is all humanity, no cant
God, Christ and Us
Herbert McCabe (ed. Brian Davies)
Continuum, £12.99
Tablet bookshop price £11.70.
The next best thing to knowing Herbert McCabe is to read him. He died in 2001, mourned as a eminent Catholic philosopher and theologian, and a great Dominican preacher and teacher. But he left behind an enormous quantity of work, including the texts of sermons and talks he gave throughout his life. He took preaching seriously; he never ad-libbed, and he wrote down what he was going to say. This material was the basis of the book, God Still Matters (playing on the title of the collection of talks that Herbert edited himself, called God Matters) which his friend and brother Dominican, Brian Davies, edited. Now he has found enough material for a volume of sermons called God, Christ and Us, which has most of the elements that were quintessentially McCabe.

Like G.K. Chesterton, who was one of his favourite authors (P.G. Wodehouse was another and so was Jane Austen), Herbert wrote with vigour and clarity and the kind of humour that makes you snort with laughter in the middle of a deadly serious subject. He also had that remarkable capacity for discussing ideas to which we are hardened by familiarity in such a way that we see them as if for the first time: the sheer scandal of the Cross, for instance; the real bodily humanity of Christ; the animal nature of all of us; the friendship that is the Trinity and our destiny to share in it; the obvious and necessary association between faith and politics; and the mortification of the flesh. There is a lovely essay on the Trinity in this volume in which he compares us with an intelligent little girl who is looking on at a delightful get-together of her parents with their friends, where she can’t quite understand what is going on, but is destined one day to share that adult life and its pleasures.

The nature of his writing, like his teaching, can be described as radical orthodoxy, or subversive tradition. In other words, he saw Catholic doctrine – God talk – as the most interesting and important subject in the world. Which, of course, it is. It is also honest thought. He is impatient with cant. Accordingly, he never talks in formulae and there are any manner of subjects where you realise, once you read him, how often we force ourselves, in a religious context, to say things that we do not really mean. Take his pronouncements on death. “There are people who will pretend to see death as quite natural, as natural as birth,” he wrote, “but I think they should look again. Human life, unlike other life, is more than a simple cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decline and death; during and within this cycle there is the development of a person which is not a cycle but a continuing story that is arbitrarily cut off by death…” And for that “we are right to be angry about death…and we are right to be angry with God”.

I don’t know about you, but personally that frankness comes as a relief. Of course we get angry with God. As he says, if you think the concept of being angry with God is shocking and irreligious, then read Jeremiah, or the psalms, or Jesus on the Cross. And like Aquinas, to whom he turned instinctively, he is emphatic that we are not merely spiritual creatures. We all know people like to talk about the body as though it were something quite other than our spiritual selves. McCabe, who imbibed Aquinas’s dictum that “my soul is not me” early on, never ceases to insist that we jolly well are bodily creatures who really do die. That is why our resurrection, and Christ’s, really mean something.

But for all the fine things in the book, the sermons on prayer alone justify the price. They deal with most of the real objections to prayer that have occurred to any Christian, including the obvious one, that prayer changes God’s mind. To which McCabe’s answer is that prayer does not change God, it changes us. And his solution to the problem of distractions during prayer is perhaps my favourite. “This”, he says, “is nearly always due to praying for something you do not really much want; you just think it would be proper and respectable and ‘religious’ to want.”

So you pray high-mindedly for big but distant things like peace in Northern Ireland or you pray that your aunt will get better from the flu – when in fact these are not your most immediate concerns. Distractions are nearly always your real wants breaking in on your prayer for edifying but bogus wants. If you are distracted, trace your distraction back to the real desires it comes from and pray about these. When you are praying for what you really want you will not be distracted. People on sinking ships do not complain of distractions during their prayer.

Try it: it works. I knew Herbert, and loved him. Read his book. In it, that clipped, distinctive, compelling voice can be heard again.

In his own words ... Friendship is always with. It is always reciprocal. When Jesus consummates his friendship with the Father in his death on the cross, the Father reciprocates. And his love for this man Jesus not only brings Jesus from death to a new kind of life but brings all those whom Jesus loves to share in that resurrection and new life. So long, of course, as we abide in Jesus’ love; so long as we do not value anything else at all more than this love.
From “Jesus and Sanctity”

When Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, he was doing two things. First of all, he was expressing hospitality: these men are his guests; he invites them to share in what he has. When you invited people to eat and drink with you in Jesus’ society, the first thing you did for them as they entered was to arrange their feet to be washed. But Jesus proposes a new kind of hospitality, one in which the host is also slave and, therefore, not lord; in which the slave is also host and therefore not subservient. Here is something that is neither lordship nor servitude. Here is the meal of equals.

This washing of the feet by the one who is both lord of the feast and servant is a symbol of a new kind of relationship amongst men and women, a relationship neither of dominance nor subservience but of equality in love, a relationship in which we are equal in love to each other as Jesus and the Father are equal, a relationship in which we are one as he and the Father are one, a relationship which is the Holy Spirit.
From “Washing and Eucharist”

Faith is not first of all accepting certain truths about Jesus. It is first of all knowing who he is – which is a truth about him in a very odd sense. Faith is knowing Jesus for who he is.

It is like when you recognise a friend and say, “It’s you of course.” And then you go on to say, “Do you remember when we met in the pub? I’ll never forget how you rescued me from that terrible old bore.” Those memories are rather like the articles of faith or the story in the gospels; we use them to celebrate our recognition. We recite the creed out of our exuberance at meeting Jesus again. But the doctrine, the statements of faith, the scriptures, are nothing without the faith, the recognition of who Jesus is that they contain and express.
From “Resurrection and Epiphany”
(All extracts from God, Christ and Us)

Melanie McDonagh writing in the Tablet

oh yeah and some fluff:

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do
it himself.
A. H. Weiler

If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is
always another chance for you. What we call failure is not
the falling down but the staying down.
Mary Pickford

I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have
seen yesterday and I love today.
William Allen White

hurrah, I messed around with the time settings
now i show the correct time of posting, hurrah!

Thursday it is - Thursday It posts!

Several mornings ago I lifted a box of books.
I lift boxes of books daily upto about 30kg in weight.
I know how to lift, in my earlier life I was a nurse, so I got taught how to lift properly.
HOWEVER:
Tuesday morning I must have twisted slightly as i moved.
Now I have a very painful lower back....

I can sympathise now with all the people I have met with bad backs....

It hurts, man oh man, it hurts....

Hot baths, reiki, drugs, alcohol and heat packs have all helped.

But after 6 hours at work the pain level rises once again.

owwww!

hattip tfisb:

transcending credibility
emotional and otherwise
Stalin vs. Hitler
russian comic

Yeah I know not too much posted lately.
My offsider at the bookshop is away and several big displays are coming up so I am drowning in the workload. Plus domestic bliss has to be worked at so I am limiting my computer time a little....

anyway here's what's interested me over the past few days:

Spare a thought for the Church in Sudan.
Thousands upon thousands of Sudanese are turning to Christ as their one sure hope in times of trouble.

And yet an unholy alliance of persecution and poverty has the Church firmly in its grip.

Just back from the Sudan, JOHN PONTIFEX from Aid to the Church in Need tells of a people suffering the Way of the Cross and desperate for the dawn of a new era.

“THERE are many people who want to stop Christianity in this country but it will never die. I want to keep it going. I want to serve the people of God as their priest.”

Daniel* spoke his words with quiet authority – even defiance. Until that point, the teenager had been bashful and reluctant to come forward.

And then it all came out – how as a toddler he and his family had left their home in the south of Sudan as the bombs began to fall, how they had struggled hundreds of miles north – mostly by foot it seemed, how they had arrived in Khartoum and moved into the shanty town where their mud-hut “house” was built.

“I really was afraid of being killed,” he then said before falling silent again, his eyes dropping to the ground.

The 16-year-old’s story was typical of those I heard in that grass hut full of excitable children, as dark as ebony. continues : here
[hr]
and doug is a good read:

Where Are God’s Warriors and Wild Men?

also:

Caritas continues its presence in Iraq


The international Caritas agency is continuing its presence in Iraq, despite a deterioration in the relationship between the coalition forces and certain groups in Iraq in recent weeks.

Military conflict between the coalition forces and the Sunni fighters in Falluja and other areas of Iraq has escalated since then, with the bombardment of areas of Falluja and the injury of 1500 and the death of more than 700 civilians.

Caritas reports that Coalition forces have blocked all roads to the city and access to hospitals is limited. It says hospitals are suffering from a lack of medicines, medical supplies, disposables and sterilizing materials. Some operations are being done without anesthesia for the lack of anesthetics.

With the support of the international federation, Caritas Iraq’s response has been to prepare four vans of emergency drugs and medical supplies, to go to Falluja, A’adamiya and Baquba.

"The ordinary people of Iraq continue to need our support, despite the worsening situation and we will continue our work in easing their suffering , caused by circumstances over which they have no control," said Mr Jack de Groot, National Director of Caritas Australia.
Caritas

more fluff:

I've found that worry and irritation vanish into
thin air the moment I open my mind to the
many blessings I possess.
Dale Carnegie

Think deeply; speak gently; love one another;
laugh often; work hard; give freely;
pay promptly; be kind.
Anonymous

I'm grateful for all my problems. As each
of them was overcome I became stronger
and more able to meet those yet to come.
I grew on my difficulties.
J.C.Penny