“That’s women’s’ work…” I threw the wet sponge in his direction. Had he not been laughing as he said it, I might have been tempted to throw something more substantial. There was a time, not so very long ago, when the roles of men and women were thus rigidly defined, and women continue to suffer the fallout from centuries of patriarchy, even today. But, I wondered, as I scrubbed the bathroom, where did the whole idea of gender roles come from, and what, in reality, might that mean?

Define your terms, I reminded myself. What was I looking at here? Okay, ‘gender role’ was a bit of a generalisation. There have always been those who crossed the divide, adopting and excelling in areas usually considered the preserve of either male or female.  For anyone with an interest in the Mysteries, that divide is not a physical thing anyway, but…

A long hot summer
Drink the lifeblood of the land
Draining it dry

Wide shores to greensward
Transforming desecration
Lake to rivulet

Greed ignoring need
Blind to Nature’s warning laughs
Empties the chalice

Exposing the depths
Drowned villages re-emerge
Giving up the ghost

“The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things…”

At 17.00 every day, I like to publish a guest post, inviting other writers, bloggers, photographers and artists to share their work and their stories. The Daily Echo Blog has just topped the 17,000 followers mark… not a huge readership by global standards, but not a number to be sneezed at either, especially if you have something to share.

Why not be my guest? Read on to find out how…

Have you have had a strange experience or encounter that you would like to share? I am not looking for sensationalism or fictional tales… but in light of the response to recent posts, I think it would be both useful and reassuring to others to realise that none of us are alone in these strange encounters and experiences and perhaps we can open discussion on what they may…

(https://en.wikiquote.org)

“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.”

                                                          Maya Angelou

“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”

                                                          Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Hatred leads to bigotry, violence, and fascism. It is one of the great challenges of our contemporary world.”

                                                             Charles F. French

A weekend with the Silent Eye

Derbyshire, UK

Friday 13th – Sunday 15th September 2019

We are all afraid of something.

There are the fears of the everyday world, from arachnophobia to a fear of the dark, and the deeper fears of the personality, that play upon the mind and heart.

What purpose might such fears serve, beyond protecting us from potentially harmful situations?

How have our ancestors addressed such fears across the centuries? Can we learn from the past a way to see beyond our fears to a future lit by serenity and hope?

Join us on Friday the thirteenth of September, 2019, in the ancient landscape of Derbyshire as we explore how to lay our personal gremlins to rest.

Based in the landscape around Tideswell, Bakewell and beyond, this weekend will entail some relatively easy walking on moorland paths.

The weekend runs from Friday afternoon to early Sunday…

A BEAUTIFUL WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS:

A Father was reading a magazine and his little daughter every now and then distracted him. To keep her busy, he tore one page on which was printed the map of the world. He tore it into pieces and asked her to go to her room and put them together to make the map again.

He was sure she would take the whole day to get it done. But the little one came back within minutes with perfect map……When he asked how she could do it so quickly, she said, “Oh…. Dad, there is a man’s face on the other side of the paper….. I made the face perfect to get the map right.” She ran outside to play leaving the father surprised.

MORAL OF THE STORY:
There is always the other side to whatever you experience in this world. Whenever we come…

With the very first name that comes into your head: who is the most important person in your everyday life? (I should point out here that the dog doesn’t count, regardless of what she thinks… not in this particular instance anyway. The rest of the time, she has a point…)

Now, hold that thought… the thought of the most important person in your world… then ask yourself what you do for them? I don’t just mean the practical things like providing for them, cooking, buying flowers, throwing tennis balls or being on the end of a telephone. They are important, but they are ‘direct doing’. Think about the other things that you do because of them and their presence in your life… Do you make the house a home? Put a bit of extra effort into your appearance? Stay fit and healthy for them? Make real time for them? Even…

*

… “Is he meant to be a giant?”

“In the story he is two-thirds divine, one third-man.”

“Which doesn’t actually answer my question.”

“I don’t know, is he meant to be a giant?”

“Ah, I see… Well, if that is a full grown lion, then he is very definitely a giant.”

“The Hebrew story-tellers saw fit to make the lion, a cub.”

“With the express aim of de-gigantisising him I expect.”

“Is that a word?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

“So why would they downsize him?”

“Because the strength of their hero didn’t come from his size. It came from God.”

“The Spirit of the Lord.”

“The Spirit of the Lord, that’s right.”

“But if Gilgamesh is two-thirds divine, doesn’t his strength come from ‘God’ too?”

“Gilgamesh has a divine mother, Ninsun, and a father who was born human but later became divine.”

“Ninsun, is a name to conjure with,” murmurs…

As the seasons tumble from summer into autumn, the fields turning to gold, I realise that it’s already October and I still haven’t finished writing up my account of The Silent Eye weekend I attended in June. I suppose I’ve been on a blog break (I’ve been doing a lot but have little to report as yet; however, stay posted), so I guess that’s one excuse.

But I also think that Maiden Castle, which was the next stop on our weekend, is somewhere that I’m still processing, the echoes of our visit there ringing through my mind. It was massive, in so many ways. Sue had warned me, the previous afternoon, as we were making our mad time-twisting dash between churches. ‘I want to see your expression,’ she said, ‘when you first see it.’

I hope it was suitably awed – I know I felt it. I can still…