A Walk Around Britain

Avlyana has a big loaf of fresh bread, and 3 friends with her, Suna, Bill and Ted.

Picnic is everywhere...

This happy group have walked all day, and are now taking a late-afternoon picnic, hearing the birds and looking at the flowers.
Two of the group, Bill and Ted, have carried the bread and the butter, and think the other two, Avlyana and Suna, are less hungry than they are.
Suna has paid for half the cost of the bread, and Ted has paid for all the butter.

But then Avlyana makes a mistake while cutting up the loaf, and cuts it into 7 pieces instead of 8. Everyone wanted two bits each, and they are a bit disappointed not to be getting what they hoped for.

So who in the group now gets less bread, and why?

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“And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart: “Your seeds shall live in my body, and the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart. Your fragrance shall be my breath, and together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.”

(Rumi)

“Does not the world produce thinking in the heads of men with the same necessity as it produces the blossom on a plant?
By thinking, we can fit together again into one piece all that we have taken apart through perceiving.”

Rudolf Steiner

At Tara today in this fateful hour
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And fire with all the strength it hath,
And lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness
And the rocks with their steepness
And the earth with its starkness:
All these I place,
By God’s almighty help and grace,
Between myself and the powers of darkness.

(found in a bookshop in Kent, in a book of Celtic verse)

In a lonely cottage lives a mother and daughter. They are poor as poor can be, so the girl goes off to find work. She sets off, and finds a great mansion. There the lord asks her ‘What do you want?’
She replies ‘I am seeking work.’ ‘I will give thee work’ the lord says, ‘to find the leaves that hung but never grew.’

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by Jean Giono

FOR A HUMAN CHARACTER to reveal truly exceptional qualities, one must have the good fortune to be able to observe its performance over many years. If this performance is devoid of all egoism, if its guiding motive is unparalleled generosity, if it is absolutely certain that there is no thought of recompense and that, in addition, it has left its visible mark upon the earth, then there can be no mistake.

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The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind.

William Blake

by Herman Hesse

You will come to me too one day,
You will not forget me,
And the torment ends,
And the fetter breaks.

Still, you seem strange and far,
Dear brother Death,
You stand like a cold star
Above my trouble.

But some day you will be near
And full of flames.
Come, beloved, I am here,
Take me, I am yours.

According to legend, the Scythian king, Fenius Farsa (or Fenius Farsaidh), visited the Tower of Babel shortly after its failure, only to find that that the builders of the tower had already dispersed.

Babel?

Fenius stayed at the tower, but sent out seventy-two scholars to study each of the seventy-two languages that were now spoken by the builders of the tower. After ten years the scholars returned, and Fenius took the best parts of each language in order to create a “selected language”, which he named Goidelic after his companion Goídel mac Ethéoir. Fenius is also reputed to have discovered four writing systems, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Ogham, and as Ogham was the most perfect of the four it was chosen for writing the Goidelic (i.e. Irish) language.

The fact that there are different languages is the most sinister fact in the world. It means that there are different names for the same things.

All linguistics hides the striving to reduce all languages back to one. The tale of the Tower of Babel is the tale of the second Fall of Man. After losing their innocence and eternal life, human beings wanted to grow artificially to the heavens.

First they had tasted of the wrong tree, now they had mastered its ways and grew straight up. In return, they lost what they had managed to retain after the First Fall: the unity of names.

(Elais Canetti)