Robert MacFarlane (Travel writer b.15/8/1978) - A Road of One's Own.

                                   
                                   map of London , 1860.

' Psychogeography: a beginners guide. Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw around its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favour: film, photograph, manuscript, tape. Catch the textual run-off of the streets; the graffiti, the branded litter, the snatches of conversation. Cut for sign. Log the data-steam. Be alert to the happenstance of metaphors, watch for visual rhymes, coincidences, analogies, family resemblances, the changing moods of the street, and the record ends. Walking makes for content, footage for footage.'

Reprinted  from: Time Literary Supplement

7/10/05

Melting Pot

Dedicated to the streets of London town,
which I'm visiting at the moment.

Sitting outside on the pavement,
still looking for the future,
as life's wild unstoppability,
hurries by in the air.
People walking on filters,
of time and memory,
on corners tapestries are woven,
seamless threads stitch together,
while new languages are formed,
under hot baking sun. 
On the edge, the lost and abandoned
the hungry and the thirsty,
paths carved, with fear and danger
warm energies releasing chains,
ignitions turning on another logic
as wild petals blow in all direction, 
the sunlight following free blades of grass
while this city drips in every corner,
trailing the rhythms of different beats
the heat moves people steadily together,
embracing passion's kiss,  labourers of love
cancel out divisions, keep planting kisses
flaming in firmaments, a new day dawns.

 

Anonymous - A message to Humanity

A very powerful message to all the people of the world.

United we stand. . .

Together we can fight for a better world.

No man, women, or children should be in-salve for the greed of the few.

No human life should ever be sacrifice!

Stop the Prawer Plan

On June 24th the Israeli knesset approved the discriminatory Prawer-Begin bill, with 43 votes for and 40 against, for the mass expulsion of the Arab Bedouin community in the Nageb (Negev) desert in the south of Israel. If fully implemented the Prawer-Begin plan will result in the destruction of 35 (unrecognised) Arab Bedouin villages, the forced displacement of up to 70,000 Palestinian Bedouins citizens of Israel, and dispossession of their historical lands in the Nageb.
Despite the Palestinian Bedouin Community's complete rejection of the plan and strong dissaproval from the international community and human rights groups.
The Prawer Plan is happening now. Protests have been taking place all through Israel and Palestine today, where Israel Police have been attacking demonstrators.
The Palestinian Bedouin have lived in  the Nageb since the 7th century - long before the state of Israel was created. This plan was completed wthhout consultation of the local community is a gross violation of basic rights, and can be seen as Israel's determination to escalate the dispossession of these  people, a process that has been ongoing for 63 years now,and if forced to abandon their long historical  existence and forced into towns it would spell disaster for the Bedouin community. It must be rejected and suspended immediately, it is not just an attack on the Bedouin people it is also an attack on universal human rights. 

Their is a petition you could sign here,
please consider adding your voice  if you have not already done so.

Thanks/diolch.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Stop_Prawer

Poster by Palestinian graphic designer
Mohammed Hassona

Arthur Machen (3/3/1863 -15/12/47) - An Enchanted Land

Arthur Machen, Welsh writer and mystic, best known for his wonderful supernatural, fantasy and horror fiction.

' I shall always esteem it as the greatest piece of fortune that has fallen to me that I was born in that noble, fallen Caerleon-on-Usk in the heart of Gwent . . . .
The older I grow, the more firmly am I convinced that anything I may have accomplished in literature is due to the fact that when my eyes were first opened in early childhood they had before them the vision of an enchanted land. As soon as I saw anything I saw Twm Barlwm, that mystic tumulus, the memorial of peoples that dwelt in the region before the Celts left the Land of Summer. This guarded the southern limit of the great mountain wall in the west; a little northward was Mynydd Maen - The Mountain of the Stone - a giant, rounded billow; and still to the north mountains, and on fair, clear days one could see the pointed summit of the Holy Mountain by Abergavenny. It would shine, I remember, a pure blue in the far sunshine; it was a mountain peak in a fairy tale. And then to eastward the bedroom window of Llandewi Rectory looked over hill and valley, over high woods quivering with leafage like the beloved Zacynthus of Ulysses, away to the forest of Wentwood, to the church tower on the hill above Caerleon. Through a cleft one might see now and again a bright yellow glint of the Severn Sea, and the cliffs of Somerset beyond. And hardly a house in sight in all the landscape, look where you would. Here the gable of a barn, here a glint of a whitewashed farmhouse, here blue wood smoke rising from an orchard grove, where an old cottage was snugly hidden: but only so much if you knew where to look. And of nights, when the dusk fell and the farmer went his rounds, you might chance to see his lantern glimmering, a very spark on the hillside. This was all that showed in a vaque, dark world; and the only sounds were the faint distant barking of the sheepdog, and the melancholy cry of the owls from the border of the brake.'

 

Reprinted from 'Autobiography -Arthur Machen

5 year old Palestinian boy detained in Hebron.

The above five year old Palestinian boy was caught after allegedly throwing a stone at a tyre belonging to a settler. throwing a stone in Hebron. The soldiers detained, blindfolded and hancuffed his father. Imagine what the father thinks? Imagine what the boy feels? Remember that the age of criminal responsibility is 12. Imagine if this was a European child and the outrage that this would stir. After  the incident, the boy was taken into an I.D.F jeep and taken to his parents house where his father joined them. The soldiers took the father and son to an I.D.F base from which they were eventually transferred to a Palestinian Police Station.  B'Tselem released a video capturing the moments of his apprehension.
For many a daily occurence under occupation. This the latest in a number of similar detentions. But Israel we should remember has a long list of human rights violations , including it's siege of Gaza, demolition of Palestinian homes, to name just a few.

For more on this story go here

http://972mag.com/watch-idf-detains-5-year-old-in-hebron-blindfolds-and-hancuffs-father/75594/

Free Shaker Aamer

At 6.30 today hundreds of us will simultaneously share the same message to Cameron and Obama.

Free Shaker Aamer.

There's still time to add your voice.

Head here now

http://thndr.it/12m3coi

Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) force fed under standard Guantánamo Bay procedure

Yasmin Bey (aka Mos Def) force fed under standard Guantanamo Bay procedure.

As Ramadan gets underway, more than 100 hunger strikers in Guantanamo Bay continue their protest. More than 40 of them are being foce-fed. A leaked documen sets out the military instructions, or standard operating procedure, for force-feeding detainees. In this four minute film made by Human Rights organisation Reprieve and Bafta award winning director Asif Kapadia, US actor and rapper Yasmin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def), experiences the procedure.

Warning some viewers may find these images disturbing.

Read more about Ramadan force-feeding AT Guantanamo Bay
HERE
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/08/obama-urged-halt-ramadan-guantanamo

Link to article on Reprieve website:

Judge : Obama  has power to address "Painful degrading Guantamo hunger strike.

http://www.reprieve.org.uk

Thanks Mona

Happy Ramadan Mubarak

Matthew Arnold ( 24/12/1822 -15/4/88) - Celtic Magic

In Matthew Arnold's lifetime only a quarter of his productive life was given to writing poetry, his reputation rests equally on his prose and critical essays, especially the relationship of man and nature. Ideas that W.B Yeats himself would later develop. Both attracted to the secrets of natural beauty and natural magic.
Here is a famous essay where he draws on these themes, which he brings alive with much eloquence..

'The Celt's quick feeling for what is noble and distinguished gave his poetry style; his indomitable personality gave it pride and passion; his sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still, the gift of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical charm of nature. The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wild flowers, are everywhere in romance. They have a mysterious life and grace there; they are Nature's own children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters and plants of Greek and Latin poetry.  Now of this delicate magic, Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress, that it seems impossible to believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts. Magic is just the word for it, - the magic of nature; not merely the beauty of nature,-  that the Greeks and Latins had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism - that the Germans had; but the intimate life of Nature, her weird power and her fairy charm . . . Gwydion wants a wife for his pupil: "Well." says Math, " we will seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out of flowers." So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw. And they baptized her, and gave her the name of Flower-Aspect." Celtic romance is full of exquisite touches like that, showing the delicacy of the Celt's feeling in these matters, and how deeply Nature lets him come into her secrets. The quick dropping of blood is called "faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of red-grass upon the earth, when the dew of June is at the heaviest." And this is Olwen described:
"More yellow was her hair than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemony amidst the spray of the meadow fountains."

For loveliness it would be hard to beat that; and for magical clearness and nearness take the following:

"And in the evening Peredur entered a valley, and at the head of the valley he came to a hermit's cell, and the hermit welcomed him gladly, and there he spent the night. And in the morning he arose, and when he went forth, behold a shower of snow had fallen the niight before, and a hawk had killed a wild-fowl in front of the cell. And the noise of the horse scared the hawk away, and a raven alighted upon the bird. And Peredur stood and compared the blacknness of the raven, and the whiteness of the snow, and the redness of the blood, to the hair of the lady whom best he loved, which was blacker than the raven, and to her skin, which was whiter than the snow, and to her two cheeks, which were redder than the blood upon the  snow appeared to be."

And this, which is perhaps less striking, is not less beautiful:

"And early in the day Geraint and Enid left the wood, and they came to an open country, with meadows on one hand and mowers mowing the meadows. And there was a river before them, and the horses bent down and drank the water. And they went up out of the river by a steep bank, and there they met a slender stripling with a satchel about his neck; and he had a small pitcher in his hand, and
a bowl on the mouth of the pitcher."

And here the landscape, up to this point so Greek in its clear beauty, is suddenly magicalised by the romance touch:

"And  they saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one-half of which was in flames from the root to the top and the other half was green and in full leaf."

Magic is the word to insist upon, - a magically vivid and near interpretation of nature; since it is this which constitutes the special charm and poer of the effect I am calling attention to, and it is for this that the Celt's sensibility gives him a peculiar aptitude.

From:
Matthew Arnold - On the Study of Celtic Literature

For those interested in Celtic themes and narratives, I will also refer you to The Mabinogion a rich collection of texts relating to the mythological past of the British isles. A collection that I return to again and again.

Getting there

Poem written after my grandsons tentative first steps.


It takes time for many  of us to master long journeys,

a while before we can bathe in shadows cast by steepness,

fall among grasses deep,

follow patterns,

conjour magic,

to walk steadily to the edge.


It only takes a moment though,

to see lights flicker upon a July morning,

footprints slowly leaving a trace,

one day at a time,

following the merryground of adventure,

step, step, then leap,

soon running like sunlight through the garden,

and as every day grows,

consider it done,

we will continue to do our best  to protect you,

as  new paths are found to explore.