Perception
A certain level of trust
Thursday, November 5th, 2009I overheard a conversation on the way to Budapest airport last week after a lovely few days away with my wife celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary, and it caught my attention. One thing we both remarked on as we travelled around Budapest using their excellent public transport system was the level of trust shown to [...]
Break the seal
Thursday, August 27th, 2009Someone I’ve really been enjoying reading recently is Margaret Wheatley. This is taken from an online article about her appreciation of T.S. Elliot, and caught my attention. I know that we notice what we notice because of who we are. We create ourselves by what we choose to notice. Once this work of self-authorship has [...]
No longer us and them but we
Thursday, August 27th, 2009Hans Rosling’s latest TED talk proves as stimulating as his previous ones, and in particular his focus on illuminating the amount of convergence happening across the world over the last 50 years or so. He uses various datasets to try to demolish the old ‘developing world’ v ‘western world’ mindset that many of us [...]
A deeper truth
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009I really enjoyed reading a good article from George Monbiot yesterday in the Guardian Online which cast the idea that the reason behind the uproar over MPs expenses is actually rooted in something far deeper – our country’s history of extortion through use of its empire both physically and more recently the powerful impact of [...]
Focus
Thursday, June 4th, 2009I’ve been mulling over how often I have defined things by drawing lines to separate one thing from another, as though something can have a fixed state of understanding to enable such a delineation. I suspect I do it to be able to get a grasp on how things fit together, to be able to [...]
New songs need new singers
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009The Guardian Online carried a very interesting article under its Comment is free section about Gordon Brown’s dilemma yesterday – not that the situation hasn’t been covered in gory detail elsewhere – but from the perspective that new songs that usher in unheard music absolutely require new singers. Poor Gordon Brown could have any number [...]
Much in the window but nothing in the room
Sunday, May 31st, 2009Oft quoted I know but I came across this quote reading the Transition Handbook the other day and it just summed up so much of the madness going on at the moment….. We have bigger houses but smaller families; more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense; more knowledge but less [...]
Public Perception
Friday, May 15th, 2009A fascinating phrase emerged from the Parliamentary Treasury Select committee investigating the city’s bonus culture, courtesy of Robert Peston’s latest post "naivete as to the public perception of these matters” Now laying aside all that has happened over recent months what is intriguing is the power of ‘public perception’. Only a couple of years back [...]
Naming (part 3)
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009Yet more on the subject of naming – part 1 and part 2 are interlinked closely with this one. One fascinating thing is just what our need for a name for our groupings actually shows about us. It is far far easier to stay connected to a branded group than to follow a person. The [...]
Naming things
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008Walking to school this morning with my youngest we got on to the subject of names. Around the corner from us used to live the man who named the clouds ( what a title, namer of clouds), and referring to this led pm to a discussion about how Adam was asked by God to name [...]
What constitutes a breakthrough?
Sunday, November 16th, 2008We see clear breakthrough points in scripture such as Exodus and the stepping free from empire and oppression into freedom. But are we to expect something similar today to happen in society, to burst into the conscious experience of a society or even one community, to mark a clear split from previous practice? Or are [...]
Further up and further in
Saturday, May 3rd, 2008Recently my youngest daughter has become totally captivated with all things Narnian. Every evening involves reading chucks of the books, almost every day her chosen TV viewing is actually the old BBC series on some of the stories, and so on. And while reading I have continually come back to the realisation of just how [...]
Lenses
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008And again some really good stuff from Len: It’s really simple: the lenses through which we view reality affect what we see. Worse, some of us eventually confuse the maps we use with the territory itself. This is another reason why change is so difficult. We have to first see our seeing. As Richard Rohr [...]
Different view
Thursday, October 18th, 2007Sometimes you need to hear very different views to help you understand something that is perplexing you. I write this as a couple of guys carry out investigation work to the front of our house, as a number of (to us at least) alarming cracks have appeared this year in part of the front wall. [...]
Friends in unlikely places
Wednesday, June 20th, 2007I was chatting with my friend Keno the other day, who is always good for a stimulating chat. She has been very busy over the past year or more setting up a web site called Spiral Universe, and in the process she told me about a remarkable opportunity she accessed to present her site to [...]
Your attention please
Thursday, June 14th, 2007How easily to you give your attention to something? How much capacity for giving attention to things do you have? Are you more attracted to certain types of attention grabbing than others? Does volume nab you, or visual imagery, or the promise of a reward of some kind? Do you take notice of known sources [...]
Different take on spreading the gospel
Saturday, May 5th, 2007Len picks up on a fascinatingly different view on the propogation of the gospel given in an interview in Christianity Today magazine with Bishop David Zac Niringiye. It really does show how our circumstances can so often draw us to particular passages of scripture that in reality accord with our physical and social positions. How [...]