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

Riding the comet’s tail

Day 17 (Thursday 17th December 2015)

17 hours is the length of a day on the planet Uranus. Like Earth, Uranus has four seasons,
however, each season lasts 21 Earth years, due to the fact that Uranus takes 81 years to orbit the Sun.

This excellent and very personal post is by Zoe Mounsey, who lives in New Zealand, having moved there a few years ago (from the UK), with her husband and two children. She works as a researcher and policy developer in Academia. Zoe has been involved in the Advent Blog series since its inception and it is a pleasure to have her back here with us again. Although on the other side of the world from me, I feel that I have got to know Zoe over the years via social media. You can follow her on Twitter, her handle is @zoemounsey. For all the time I have known Zoe, she has shown a deep interest in well-being, given her past year (and hence her post) this is a good thing.

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Yet another year has raced by and it is almost time to get the Christmas decorations out. I have come to regard writing my advent post as part of my seasonal preparations. It gives me a chance to take a breath and think about the year gone by. I struggled to write this year’s post as I didn’t feel I had anything to say that fitted with the theme. My 2015 has had lots of high points it has also had a lot of lows and I am not used to sharing the darker side of my soul. It has been a year where I have had to get inside my own head and learn some hard lessons. And this had had an impact on everything in my life – just like a comet tail perhaps.

Comet McNaught seen from the Southern Hemisphere

Earlier this year I hit a low – it had been building for a long time – but I reached a point where I was going through the motions and felt that I had nothing left to give. It forced me to look at the dark places in my mind, it wasn’t a comfortable place to be and I don’t think I was very easy to be around for a while. I was struggling with many aspects of my life, feeling very overwhelmed by everyone’s expectations of me. I just wanted to hibernate, hide away from the world until I felt stronger. I really retreated into myself, stopped talking to people or spent ages ruminating and talking about why I felt this way. I have a huge sense of gratitude to those around me who gave me a sympathetic ear, hugs and tried to help me find some answers.

I have experienced anxiety and depression before but perhaps not to this extent. Everything revolved around how I felt, all the things that used to make me feel good – reading, walking – just didn’t work. I felt like I was drowning in a sea of negative emotions and I was fighting the urge to just give up. 

I acknowledged that I needed outside help to manage my anxiety and depression that I didn’t have to struggle alone. A few months down the line I am in a much better frame of mind and am building up my reserves again. I still have low days where everything gets a bit too much, but I am getting better at picking myself up and dusting myself down. The key thing for me was learning how to ask for and accept help from others, to admit when I felt unable to cope on my own. 

I am finishing the year feeling stronger and with a developing sense of self-compassion. I have learnt that feeling good about myself and having a high sense of self-esteem is not the same as self-acceptance and self-compassion. 

This is something I am trying to promote in my working life and in my parenting style. I am embracing the Japanese concept of kintsukuroi (golden mend) - the Japanese art of mending broken pottery using lacquer resin laced with gold or silver. As well as a clever form of repair, kintsukuroi has a deeper philosophical significance. The mended flaws become part of the object’s design, and some people believe the pottery to be even more beautiful having gone through the process of being broken and repaired. Through kintsukuroi, the cracks and seams are merely a symbol of an event that happened in the life of the object, rather than the cause of its destruction. So it is my weaknesses and flaws that give me strength, courage and beauty, that make me who I am.

Thank you for reading my end of year ramblings, a very merry Christmas wherever you may be from a hopefully sunny New Zealand and here’s to 2016 being a year of laughter, fun and sunshine.