Blake

What bravery, what extremes, completely
to leave the world and etch the real one
engrave it, ink with rainbow, then copy-- 
world everlasting, repeatable, done;
and listen only to voices inside
not the outside, political rabble’s
rush to the bottom financial scrabble, 
take dictation, write songs and hymns, abide
the time when valleys’ green can meet again
inside our hearts that realm whose pure exchange
does not pollute; single-handed counter-
balance, counter-culture, who was madder-- 
poet of fire, brimstone, smoke stacks, vision
of sadness, small cold rooms’ introversion.

Although I cannot attend in person, I will watch online and feel very
honoured to have some one else read my sonnet.

Here are the event details: 
Month of November
Wednesday 28 November 2018 at 7pm for 7.30pm
We look forward to seeing you at Blake’s Birthday Revelry.
!!! Please note the change of venue from that published in our printed programme !!!
7pm for 7.30pm on Wednesday 28 November 2018
The Theodore Bullfrog, 26-28 John Adam Street, London WC2N 6HL
Birthday Revelry
Then was a time of joy and love
And now the time returns again
Come and celebrate the 261st anniversary of the Eternal Prophet’s entrance into this vegetable universe with an evening of art, poetry, music, drama, and wit.
Join the Tithe Grant Award winner Will Franken as he compères the night’s festivities, introducing a bevy of talented performers of all stripes in honour of the manifold layers of Blake’s unique genius as poet, painter, satirist, rebel, and prophet.
If you would like to perform or be involved, please email:
revelry@blakesociety.org

Here is my sonnet:

Blake
What bravery, what extremes, completely
to leave the world and etch the real one:
engrave it, ink with rainbow, then copy -
world everlasting, repeatable, done;
and listen only to voices inside
not the outside, political rabble’s
rush to the bottom financial scrabble, 
take dictation, write songs and hymns, abide
the time when valleys’ green can meet again
inside our hearts that realm whose pure exchange
does not pollute; single-handed counter-
balance, counter-culture, who was madder -
poet of fire, brimstone, smoke stacks, vision
of sadness, small cold rooms’ introversion.

'Blake' was first published in the anthology of eco-spiritual poetry 'The Soul of the Earth' published by Awen Publications, edited by Jay Ramsay

Perceval finally realizes that he is on a quest to restore the Wasteland.

Part 13 of a 15 part animated retelling of the Grail story. This powerful myth encodes our psychic DNA helping us remember that what we most desire is the presence of our inner self becoming known. This is an embodied experience, not an intellectual one.

This month's edition of the online magazine Amethyst carries one of my poems, check it out and the magazine's other content here:

Perceval is confused and grief stricken when the Grieving Maiden berates him for not asking whom the grail serves, then tells him his mother has died. Meanwhile King Arthur sets out to find Perceval and celebrate his deeds, and Perceval meets Morgana for the first time ...

Perceval wakes to find the castle deserted, he wants to ask about the grail, and follows tracks into the forest, but all he finds is a maiden grieving over her lover ...

Coherence means the quality of forming a unified whole. We experience coherence in relationship with a caring partner, a close friend or mentor. These relationships are balanced, reciprocal. We are each different individuals, but we have a sense of meaningful relatedness, one which nurtures and expands the fundamental sense of ourself. We feel part of a unified whole. We can also experience coherence when we walk through buildings that have been well-designed. We respond to the proportions of their physical space, and are able to find our way around with ease, feeling on both counts again a sense of meaningful relationship. And we may find the way some one writes or speaks coherent. Their ideas are logically consistent and hold together,  their arguments are clear and make sense so that we understand what they mean.  
    But the cornerstone of coherence is the experience of being a unified whole in our own right as individuals. This is a potential available to us as human beings because we have two aspects to our identity. We have an inner self, and a personality self. And in this book I want to show how it is the meaningful relationship between these two aspects that opens the space of coherence in us, with its percolating lift of relief and perspective, which then leads to coherence in how we think and what we create.  
    The modern west mostly ignores the presence of our inner self, so that its potential lurks like the proverbial elephant in the room that no one talks about.  Only this elephant is not just in a room, it is in the entire social and cultural world we inhabit.  Alan Watts described this syndrome as a taboo:
                "The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing  or what you really are ..”  
         from ‘The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are’
To acknowledge the inner self goes against a prevailing orthodoxy that takes its cue from scientific reductionism which sees the world as material only, including human beings. According to this view, our minds, emotions and personalities are just electrical firings in the brain cells. Scientific reductionism has coalesced out of interpretations of the theory of evolution, psychology and genetics. The end result is the notion that we, like the rest of the flora and fauna, are biological survival mechanisms, driven by the imperative of genes that want to reproduce themselves.  
    But this interpretation of the life-sciences has not kept pace with the discoveries of quantum physics which showed, over a hundred years ago, that matter is not simply material because at the sub-atomic level particles appear to be temporary energy waves appearing and disappearing out of a vast ocean of deeper energy.  Therefore the advance guard of science, which is physics, tells us that something else is in the mix, and that all of matter is interwoven with an energetic or non-material aspect.  And on this basis alone, the scientific reductionist approach is incoherent because it is not logically consistent with the findings of physics.
    In my own experience, the existence of a deeper aspect of myself has always been obvious, and characterizing humans as highly complex biological survival systems seems a bizarrely narrow view. But more importantly, I believe that because this view is incoherent, it leads to incoherence in our thought and actions both as individuals and as a society. This is because it conditions us to think of ourselves as what I term the personality self only, defined by the sum total of the nature and nurture elements allotted to us. As a result, we mostly override the presence of our inner self, discount its promptings and thereby drain life of its deeper meaning.   

First I have to create the 'world', ie, the scene in the diorama, and sometimes each section of action can require a different set up: such as creating 'hills' (boxes draped with brown and green cloth) or woods (I go and prune my hedges) or castle interiors (I use an array of clothes, decorative details, Led lights)  - then I may have to make a costume for the 3 3/4 " figures, add a cloak, or headdress, and this is tricky because they are so small, then I have to take a load of photos, check which ones will work (ie, are not out of focus or don't work for other reasons), finding poses/close-ups for each line of dialogue, stage direction or sound effect. Then these photos have to be photoshopped into the 'Coloured Pencil' effect. I also have to search on wiki commons, or my own photos, including some which my children or husband have taken, and combine these with the photos of the figures in the diorama, to create a rough time line on i-photo slide show. Then, my husband Jon, who is a film maker, imports the timeline into Final Cut Pro, and adjusts the time line and edits of the photos, adding FX/cuts/connections, to make it all work, puts in the titles and credits, and uploads to YouTube!

In this episode Perceval does find the grail in the castle home of the Wounded Fisher King. Meanwhile, Morgana, the narrator, plays psychotherapist to the Wounded King, probing why he has caused so much destruction in his many guises ...