Meditation: Tea Ceremony

I needed this. It’s to calm me down after all the lockdown nonsense that has been putting me on edge.

I try to be like the Turk in Candide and not enquire as to the goings-on in Constantinople. I try to cultivate my garden with my own hands. But people do pull my coat tails and bother me with news of which Mufti has been murdered this month.

So a cup of tea.

This meditation is close to A5 size rather than the usual square cards. Mainly to fit both hands in. And I also have some frames that this would fit.

I hadn’t realised how awkwardly I hold a spoon when I stir. So I had to record it. Maybe I’ll change now that I’m aware. Or maybe not. Such is the power that really looking gives you.

Accepted for Rugby Open 2020!

My print, “Love in an Age of Pestilence: Minuet” has been accepted for the Rugby Open exhibition. Further lockdowns notwithstanding, it should now open on 11th December and carry on to 23rd January. You can find the original post about this print here.

I quite like entering these competitive exhibitions. I find having a target to aim for concentrates the mind. Though I must admit I get quite antsy waiting for the decision.

I wanted to address the whole covid/lockdown/distance thing and felt that now was the time to do it. To put up or shut up, as it were. I do feel I’ve got it out of my system in this print and the other two that didn't get accepted (here and here). So I hope I can now focus on other things.

I’m glad the judges picked this one. It’s very much an antidote to my print “Purgatory” that got accepted for the Coventry Open in the immediately pre-covid era. Back then I seemed to tap into a level of social alienation that I have increasingly felt needs challenging.

Hell is not other people. No. Not even those people. We need to puncture our bubbles and dance with people who are not like us at all. This is how we grow. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.

Sursum Corda (Meditation 7)

Here is this year’s Christmas-card-cum-Jahresblatt. I had to think long and hard about it. What on earth can you do for a card at a time like this?

I remembered a postcard that HAP Grieshaber made at the end of 1947 and sent to his friends. I bid on one earlier this year, but didn’t get it. Anyway, “Sursum Corda” was the message he’d written on the reverse, “Lift up your hearts.” 

He had returned home to southern Germany after being a prisoner of war and then a forced labourer in the Belgian coal mines, just in time for the severe winter of 1946-7. It was one of those winters where huge numbers of animals died in the fields because the farmers couldn’t get to them with fodder.

“Sursum Corda” he wrote the next winter. It’s the message to send in dark times.

So here we are. A tiny light in the darkness. Lift up your hearts. There can and will be light. You just have to make it.