The Zen of Little Pickle - Day 16

Sunday 16th December 2018

16 is the age at which the Princess in the tale of Sleeping Beauty is predicted to prick
her finger on a spindle and fall into a deep sleep. The story is much older than the sanitised
Disney version that most of us are familiar with, and was much darker in earlier forms - often
including adultery, rape and planned murder/infanticide (after the princess produces
illegitimate twins that the wife of her lover demands to be killed and served to him as revenge, but
which are substituted for lambs by a swift-thinking court cook). Folklorists maintain that the
story is an allegory for the replacement of the lunar year of 13 months (13 fairies) with the solar year
(12 months and hence a fairy is forgotten). The princess represents nature (winter indicted by the wicked
fairy putting nature to sleep with pricks of frost, the spindle), the prince is spring and his sword is
a sunbeam and together they bring nature back to life.

Phew - that was a foul drive from Durham yesterday - snow, sleet, high winds,  flooding, freezing rain, you name it... Thank you Doris. It's good to be back home and able to relax in the warm with an Advent Blog.

Today's post is bound to make you smile. If you don't yet know its author -  Chris Nichols, Founding Partner of GameShift, a consultancy based in the UK that describes itself as providing "alchemy for business" through a collaborative hub of highly impressive professionals from diverse backgrounds - you should make contact as soon as you can. He is erudite, entertaining and inspirational. For 15 years he was a Director of the Ashridge Business School, having formerly worked as an investment banker, corporate financier and business strategist, most recently for PwC. He is a deep thinker, brimming with curiosity and encouraging energy, with an interest in sustainability, responsibility and innovation. As you can tell from his post below, he is passionate about people, seeing them grow and this is true in every aspect of his life. He describes himself as a poet and provocateur, but there is so much more to him... He is a loving and devoted family man. You can connect with him on Twitter and find out - his handle is @chrisnicholsT2i  

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Meet Little Pickle, granddaughter number two. She was meant to arrive on Christmas Day, but decided to pop in yesterday instead.  She hasn’t got a name yet, so I’m calling her Little Pickle for the moment.

She’s a really wonderful reminder of the Zen koan, “What is this?”.

What is this? A scrap of the cosmos, arranged in this way, that wasn’t independently in the world a few hours before, but is here now.

What is this? This tiny being coming to live on this fragile planet for a while, almost six decades younger than me. By the time she sees her grand-children born, she’ll be living in a world I can barely imagine.

What is this? This arrangement of energy that will unfold over months and years into whatever she will be. What will she be? What will be her unique voice? What will be the greatest gift she brings?

I have not one clue.

And that’s what makes Little Pickle such a great koan.

The point of a koan isn’t to get an answer. The point is to stop our busy brain in its tracks and insist that we notice what’s here.

Life is full of opportunities to live on autopilot. It is worth taking the time, at least every very now and then, to stop as ask “What is this?”.

After all, life is so utterly contingent.

These parents met. Then one egg, one sperm, these actual ones, not others, combine at that particular time. They produce this unique arrangement of life. Born in this time, this particular point in human history. Of all the possible arrangements of life, Little Pickle turns up as this particular human being, right now.

What is this?

One day, when Little Pickle is bigger, maybe I’ll get to stand with her on a clear Dartmoor night when we can see the star-filled sky. I hope I get the chance to tell her that we are both made of stardust and that there’s nothing else to be made up from. We’ve all been going around and around for 14 billion years, arranged as different forms of energy, time and time again.

Currently we’re turning up as Chris and Little Pickle. Later on, we’ll be something else.

Someone wise once said, just remember that when we look up in awe and wonder at the starlit heavens, we are the universe looking at itself. Let’s not forget, in our busyness and the dance of our familiar patterns, we are also the cosmos, in all its infinite and unfolding mystery.

If we take the time to stop and look, any day is a time of awe and wonder.

After all, “What is this”?

The Shadow is the Candle’s Son - Day 16

Day 16 (Saturday 16th December 2017)

16 - the average number of Christmas presents a UK child will receive.
Winter gifts were given to family and friends long before the biblical story of Three Wise Men
bringing gold, frankincense and myrrh was told. Pagan in Europe and the Middle East gave gifts 
on a number of occasions over the winter period, including the raucous Saturnalia on the 17th 
December, in honour of the god of agriculture, Saturn. People would drink to excess and give gifts of pottery and
wax figurines, edible treats and candles. During the puritan times of Oliver Cromwell and 
the Pilgrim Fathers in America present giving at Christmas was banned because of its pagan roots.
Christmas celebrations were legalised in the 1680s. People have complained about the increasing 
commercialism of the season over many years, in 1904 Margaret Deland, a journalist in Harper's Bazar,
wrote "Twenty-five years ago, Christmas was not the burden that it is now, there was less haggling 
and weighing, less quid pro quo, less fatigue of body, less wearing of soul; and, most of all,
there was less loading up with trash." This lead to the creation of the Society for the Prevention 
of Useless Giving, whose members included former President Roosevelt and Anne, the daughter of financier J.P. Morgan.

The weekend is here - given the date, I suspect that it will not be a day of calm reflection and relaxation. However, whatever type of day you have ahead, please ensure that you give yourself sufficient time to savour today's thought provoking post. It is written by the brilliant Chris Nichols, a Founding Partner of Gameshift - a consultancy, made up of a collaborative hub of coaches, artists, musicians and business experts that support organisational and individual change. Those of you who have interacted with him at work or via social media (his Twitter handle is sometimes the name of his business @GameSh1ft or else as himself @chrisnicholsT2i) will know that he is highly intelligent, quick-witted and a broad thinker. He works as a coach and is not afraid to speak out to help others learn and grow. Erudite but with a keen sense of the absurd, he is a fan of laughter. This will doubtless prove a delight to both him and his beloved granddaughter in the years to come. He is highly creative, his poetry has been published in Hold this Hand - a collection of poems on loss released by Cruse (the bereavement charity). You can find one of his stories in Knock Twice, a collection of tales for social change published in autumn 2017. Chis is a pleasure to be with and commands considerable respect from clients, contacts and colleagues. He lives in Dartmoor and loves the open space around him; he is a keen long-distance walker. He walked the 1,000km of the south west Coast Path in 2016 following his departure from Ashridge, as an act of recovery from anger and depression. He is currently studying an MA in Buddhist Studies and planning another long walk.

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The Shadow is the Candle’s Son

In nature’s heart, a deep silence reigns,
with bird-call, dog-bark,

the sound of rain:

each sits gently, beside the jet engine’s bite,

the sky is unmoved

by the easy-jet flight

As I sit I sense the ease

with which paradox rests among the trees.

Bright light bears shadow on its wings:
a still note spills from the moving string

The brilliance and the black
are one.

The shadow is the candle’s son.

Paradox, Chris Nichols (2007)

We live in a time of so much hashtag hate. So much effort poured into making clear that “we” are not like “them”.

Us and them - Pink Floyd

It’s a time of polarity, when much debate seems simplified into a Punch and Judy show of adversaries. 

There’s only a thin shoreline for understanding to stand on. It’s washed to nothing when the contesting tides deny all space for meeting and curiosity.

Caribbean meets Atlantic in Bahamas

Perhaps there is a lesson this season might gift us, if we step in close enough.

Alongside the marketing and merriment, Advent offers a deeper steadier voice, reminding us that this world is a pattern of brightness and night.  It once marked a time of fasting and abstinence in the move towards the birth of the light. The Christmas festival echoed the earlier solstice paganism of Yule, celebrating the turning of the dark and the return of the sun.

Every one of us is a fractal of this dance. Sometimes we can see only our own light. Sometimes we see only the dark in others. Yet we are all of us both dark and light together.

The ceaseless cycles of one season passing into the next reminds us that binary views mask something deeper, of a greater complexity, woven of richer tones.  We can’t do good work, we cannot live well on this tiny earth, if we assume to ourselves all of the light, and insist that some other is only an agent of darkness.

Perhaps we can pause at this time of the season’s turning to look beyond the identity dance of “self” as “not-other”.   Maybe we can take time to acknowledge that we too have our darkness, that our most brilliant light also casts a shadow.  Maybe we can look at another long enough to see the crack in the wall that keeps us from them, a crack through which their light becomes more visible to us.

Every such act of seeing our connection to another would indeed mark a turning of the season and be a cause for cheer.

CN
Yule 2017