A church under wraps II
by Steve Tanham
From Sue…
As we opened the door into St Kentigern’s church, it was fairly obvious we had picked the wrong time to visit. Not only was the sudden and relative warmth of the building steaming up the camera lens like there was no tomorrow, there was just so much to see… and we were still ‘not with it’ after the weekend’s workshop.
We should have known better, really. With a church on the site for the last fifteen hundred years, there was bound to be a lot of history in there and we were not going to be able to take it all in properly.
Thankfully, after visiting a few hundred of these old churches, we are able to at least document them pretty well without thinking too much… and the research always comes later anyway.
We much prefer to experience both the ancient sites and the churches before delving into…
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Full Circle: The final curtain…
by Steve Tanham
Sue concludes the story of our Penrith weekend
On most of our workshop weekends, we offer a ‘greeting of the dawn’ at one of the ancient sites. The winter workshops are perfect for this as the sun rises so much later, but as we are at the mercy of the season, the weather and the time local hotels serve breakfast, these are always optional. Usually we choose a place we would not otherwise get to visit, but this time, really, there was only one place to choose… Castlerigg. The stone circle nestles within a circle of hills and there can be few more spectacular settings for an ancient and sacred site.
Not everyone relishes such an early start, and we had made it clear that this would be a brief visit, just for the dawn… we would be gathering there later to end the official part of the weekend. Nevertheless, almost everyone chose to come and greet the…
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Sue continues the story of the Penrith weekend
Our final site of the day was to be one of the most astonishing circles we have visited. It is not the biggest, nor are the stones themselves the largest, but it has a ‘feel’ unlike any other. Castlerigg. That we would visit on our final day of the workshop, may rightly be accounted one of the most beautiful of circles, but what Long Meg and her Daughters lack in aesthetics, they more than make up for in sheer presence.
On our very first visit, the light had been going and the winter dusk had been bitterly cold. We thought we knew what to expect…after all, we had seen enough photographs of the place. I had even a vague memory of having been taken there as a child. Yet, we had rounded the corner and been ambushed by the stones. Getting out of the car, we had literally bounced with…
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Do we have automatic filters of perception that screen out the magical?
How many miraculous events in the natural world occur before our eyes each day yet are not noticed by our everyday awareness? We often feel this to be our experience – but it happens within an adult ‘self’ which has grown from infancy to adulthood, and therefore is to be trusted, Such childish and fanciful notions are to be put to one side in favour of a world-picture that sees all such things as coincidental and purposeless.
Much of this ‘structure’ of skeptical perception can be investigated by a useful metaphor: the antique telescope. Imagine that, instead of our eyes, we look, permanently, through two nautical-style telescopes at the world. But these are not ordinary optical instruments; rather, they divide our simple act of ‘seeing’ into three stages. The first and second are related to the world of raw perception and the near-instantaneous emotional response to it. The third stage of this ‘telescopic vision’ is that of the intellect – more usually described as the mind. These three stages are learned as we mature and fold out of the flattened telescope like the kind of brass antique that we see on collectors’ TV programmes.
What we actually ‘see’ is conditioned by the expanded telescope such that our final experience drops through each of those stages of perception before settling in our consciousness. We do not need to think about it; it just happens. The older we get the more set this pattern becomes. Some of this programming develops to reduce the energy needed to perceive. The mind is really good at taking the essence of a repeated experience and simply replaying what it considers to be the ‘skeleton’ of the event. It can add the precise details, such as whether the car in front of us is turning left or right, in real-time. Working swiftly, it both reduces our energy consumption and knows where to ‘insert’ the life-saving bits into the whole…
But it’s no longer the whole, and year on year repetition of this historical way of seeing things gradually takes the intellectual, emotional and ‘something more primal’ magic out of what would otherwise be a constant state of wonder. When we’re driving a car, this is essential. We would otherwise be overwhelmed by the data and the intensity of the experience. Our ‘robotic’ perception is fast and reliable. But when we are staring at a sunset or sunrise, and the sky makes patterns that are both beautiful and meaningful to our lives, then we might want to consider how to ‘collapse’ our telescopes and be prepared to stand more naked in front of the splendour before us.
We might then discover a much more intimate and less robotic relationship with the world… our world.
©️Stephen Tanham
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
You’ll find friends, poetry, literature and photography there…and some great guest posts on related topics.
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Between the Cant and the Greta rivers there is a castle. In it lived a great chief, a warlord who was a King in his own right. His name was Bernard Maltravers and his success was due to his ability to not only fight, but to think. Maltravers lived like a king and one of the joys of his kingly life in the castle was the company of his ‘court Jester’, a Frenchman they called, simply, L’est. No one knew how the man had come by the name, and he never spoke if it, himself. But everyone called him by it…. except Lord Maltravers, who simply yelled out, “J’est” in a well-rehearsed parody whenever he wanted the services of his Fool.
“It’s Christmas, J’est,” he said, after the fourth measure of mead. “Should we get rid of most of the castle staff? Give them a holiday?”
L’est looked forlorn at the suggestion. He knew that if his wilful lord put the plan into action, he, the Jester, would end up doing most of the duties, such as cooking and cleaning, instead of what he was good at: intelligent and witty conversation – and provoking his master to just the right degree. However, Lord Maltravers had insisted that L’est join him in two of the goblets of mead and he was less in control of his mouth than usual… so he replied, “Why not, my Lord. In fact, why not break with tradition, altogether, and invite the local peasants into the rooms of the castle, they can abide with us throughout the season, truly making it one of goodwill to all men…”
Lord Maltravers had a short temper, which the excess of mead did little to ameliorate, so he ran the Fool through with his long sword.
As he died by the fireplace, L’est thought of the idea of peasants, happily living in the castle… he used all of his will to form the image into a spoken and enduring curse, letting it escape into the air and the stone of the castle as his last breath filled the space.
……………………
Lester Atkinson, standing in front of the estate agent’s window in the centre of Kendal and drenched by the spray from passing cars, had no idea why he had been drawn to the central panel of opulent properties, nor why he was having trouble suppressing his jollity.
“Take that,” he muttered, laughing aloud.
A passing woman looked at him accusingly.
“What did you say?”
“I really have no idea,” said Lester, walking his uncontrolled mirth away before it could do him any more harm. “But Merry Christmas, anyway.”
©Stephen Tanham
This is entirely a work of fiction… apart from the Estate Agent’s window.
Happy Christmas….
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A must read from Running Elk…
I should have known really… the folklore, like a haddock to the face once you spot it, TELLS you!! But I wasn’t listening, and had to go the long way around… like 10 years searching up hill and down bleedin’ dale. And all along, the folklore whispered “You’re an idiot. We kept it locked, safely hidden away, in the old tales… stop walking, start listening…”
“Here the Saint stopped the advance of the plague.”
Oh. That’s nice. Christianised. Simple. Pictish. Incised cross.
Not much to look at. Could trip over it and not notice… (don’t even ask how many times THAT happened with the old hitching post…)
Niggle…
HERE. The Saint stopped the advance of the plague.
The Saint stopped the coming of the Black Death.
The Saint turned back death.
Death… a veil of darkness?
Darkness was turned back!
HERE!
And thanks to the power of GoogleEarth… so it…
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More from our Penrith weekend
We squelched through the mud at the gateway to the field, following the fence down to a tiny stone circle that is unknown to most casual visitors. Just a third of a mile from its big sister, the tiny cairn circle of Little Meg is one of the least known circles in the area and yet it is, with Long Meg and nearby Glassonby, one of only three in the area that has ancient carvings on its stones.
Technically, Little Meg is not a stone circle. When it was first discovered by antiquarians, it was buried within a mound of earth, making it the internal structure of a burial mound and the excavations revealed bones, charcoal and an urn, buried in a cist at the centre. The stones may, perhaps, have originally been a circle that was covered over, but the preservation of the symbols on one of the stones…
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From Stuart
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From Sue and Stuart
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©Stephen Tanham
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Two poems for the coming Solstice.
The first is The Iron Hand from Barbara Walsh, who is in the process of establishing her own WordPress site:
The Iron Hand
The iron-hard earth imprisons life below
Cold darkness, gripping life that glows
But not to conquer or destroy;
That life now sleeping waits to grow
Till winter’s touch so cold yet needed.
Releases gentle fingers new to spring’s caress
Waves goodbye to winter’s tending
Starts the cycle never ending
©Barbara Walsh
➰
And one from me…Dark Solstice
➰
Dark Solstice
If I had different eyes
That shone a bolder hue
I’d see the cycle of the year
As a single act surrounding you
➰
If I had larger ears
For a wider range of sound
I’d teach you of the double chord
St Stephen and St John resound
➰
If I had a bigger heart
That could hold both death and light
I would raise your gaze to the brightest day
Beyond this cold December night
➰
©️Stephen Tanham
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
You’ll find friends, poetry, literature and photography there…and some great guest posts on related topics.
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From Stuart…
*
One of the ‘hardy perennials’ on many of our workshops is the thorny problem of intent.
Thorny because much of what we now see may not have been originally intended by the erstwhile perpetrator or perpetrators, yet some of what remains most definitely was!
On our recent sojourn around Cornwall, having been cruelly divested of our guide book, we still managed to find one particular unsought spot ‘blind’, as it were, and this is pretty much the task we had now set our Companions…
The telluric current we were ‘following’ passed through the remains of Penrith Castle and on through the site of the Old Church.
The legends that attach themselves to these sites in many cases assume the outward appearance of unbelievable ‘gibberish’ and most certainly do not follow the reasonably delineated form of history, official or otherwise…
And yet, the wry smile which they inievitably engender, the…
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