https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2018:16-33

Genesis:

²⁶ The Lord said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

²⁷ Then Abraham spoke up again: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, ²⁸ what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five people?”

“If I find forty-five there,” he said, “I will not destroy it.”

²⁹ Once again he spoke to him, “What if only forty are found there?”

He said, “For the sake of forty, I will not do it.”

³⁰ Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak. What if only thirty can be found there?”

He answered, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.”

³¹ Abraham said, “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, what if only twenty can be found there?”

He said, “For the sake of twenty, I will not destroy it.”

³² Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?”

He answered, “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”

³³ When the Lord had finished speaking with Abraham, he left, and Abraham returned home.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/blink-and-its-over-short-duration-high-impact-experiences-of-2017/

Extract:

In “Living and Thinking About It: Two Perspectives on Life,” Kahneman and co-author Jason Riis wrote, “An individual’s life could be described—at impractical length—as a string of moments. A common estimate is that each of these moments of psychological present may last up to three seconds, suggesting that people experience some 20 000 moments in a waking day, and upwards of 500 million moments in a 70-year life.” That would mean that a stint in a Kusama mirror room would be about 10 moments, while the eclipse’s totality consisted of a little over 40—so, relatively few to choose from as a “peak,” when you think about it. But these brief bursts of wonder formed the backbone to the story of my year.

February: Infinity Mirrors

I happened to be in Washington, D.C. in February when the Kusama exhibit opened at the Hirshhorn Museum—its world premiere. Nearly 160,000 people visited the D.C. installation, according to the Smithsonian Institution, before it moved on to dazzle Seattle and then Los Angeles. It was an unusually warm winter day, and I was full of energy and curiosity.

What happens in a timed infinity room? Imagine stepping into a large box with mirrored panels inside and a bunch of other objects, and then the door closes. Because of the mirror-reflecting-mirror effect, it appears as though you are surrounded by infinitely many of those things—multicolored lights or phallic-shaped protrusions with red spots, for example.

When I entered the special exhibit area in D.C., a museum docent explained the lines for rooms were up to an hour long (in practice, it was more like 30 to 45 minutes). Each person had about 30 seconds per room—and those of us who came alone shared these visions with strangers. I had not blocked out enough time for so many queues, so I saw four of the six main installations. Like everyone else addicted to validation on social media, I unfortunately spent a lot of the time taking pictures to post afterward—just as I would later do during the eclipse.

The mirrored room in which I felt I truly lost myself, and did not want to leave, was called Aftermath of Obliteration and Eternity. This room is totally dark save for glowing orange-yellow lanterns, flickering and seemingly hanging everywhere—even above and below you. I shared the room with an older couple, but we were all silent in our awe. The sense of peace and wonder in that room was potent enough, even in the 30 seconds or so, that I still remember it many months later.

“Kusama’s goal, in this project, can be described as creating otherwise inaccessible experiences of the boundless and huge. It’s not infinite, of course, because your body necessarily blocks the infinite regress at some point, and because of limitations of your visual system—but it’s a much larger experience of expansive repetition than can be readily created in any other way,” Landy says. “The solar eclipse, of course, does the same thing, both by focusing your attention on the sun and orbital paths of the Earth and moon, and also simply by refreshing your attention on the more mundane hugeness of the daytime sky.”

I’m in deep now,never been this deep before
The world’s hollow like a shell and I’m out its door.
In so deep, the ocean has its own startled floor.
I’m down,down.down.never been so dark , so more

I can’t rightly tell how I got where I am
I think I had an accident,fell over, then I swam.
Sometimes it’s a loss, be times it’s a man.
I guess I only do it cos I know some folk can.

I don’t know if the joy is worth the pain
Would I choose to relive if, I was born again?
The deep joy is the amazing gain.
But the sorrow is  damn sad, let’s admit it plain.

I’m in deep and it’s over my head
What was I thinking of,when I fell  out of that bed?
I look up and  the sea’s so  turquoise like  that mist   is red
When we get good and mad and wish some loon was dead.

At first, it was all just black,black pain
But from the bottom of the  well, I looked up with awed love again.
That’s when I recalled,feelings are deep and sane
Joy is much greater when we’re in the deep,deep zone.

I dunno if I’m  ever comin’ out.
We can’t control it,ain’t that what life’s all about?
I’ll never love with innocence again,nor not feel doubt.
But I’m no teapot and the devil ain’t got my spout.

I’m swimming and the ocean’s so   mysteriously bright
Down here we don’t have no day nor no night
Fish nudge me with  big grins  and teeth white
Sea flowers fondle me and whisper,turn off that light

Making sense of original sin with Reinhold Niebuhr

Extract:

Communal idolatry

For Niebuhr, sin is most clearly seen and expressed in communal idolatry.  This is the context of the epigraph that opens this post.  We see sin every day in the actions of groups, and above all nations.  I discussed communal idolatry in a previous post, so I won’t spend much time on it here.

In sin, we worship the idols of the group.  And not just extremist groups or nations.  In the midst of World War Two, Niebuhr argued that the American idealization of liberty could itself degenerate into a form of idolatry.  As Andrew Bacevich puts it in his introduction to a new edition of The Irony of American History, Niebuhr

went so far as to describe the worship of democracy as “a less vicious version of the Nazi creed.” He cautioned that “no society, not even a democratic one, is great enough or good enough to make itself the final end of human existence.” (Bacevich, p xii; Niebuhr, 1944, p 133)

The New Year is a construct like a clock
Yet we need division and a form
We need times to start and then to stop
Those who die today were once new born

The Resolutions and the Diaries  list
Whether on a phone or written down
All the things we never knew we missed
All the  faces with a smile or frown

A Wedding shall take place with black and white
The Royal blood  mixed with the blood of slaves
Who could have  foretold the marvelled sight
God for Harry, God for the betrayed

Oh,blessed is the family royal and true
Children’s blood will be both black and blue

I am not a rock upon the shore
Nor am I a pebble on the beach
I am sand, a grain and nothing more
Sucked by waves and sea in its outreach

I am small and yet I know I live
With the other people whom I love
Therefore of my being I shall give
To the One who dwells so  high above

I am grateful for my sight and touch
I am grateful for the gift of speech
I    live in faith and do not ask for much
So the unknown darkness  can me teach

Microscosm of all the Universe
How can I express this in a verse?

Now I have got 9,000 posts so  if you dip into them it could save you buying books and magazines.What I’d like is if it makes you happy and it makes you write  or do a creative activity

There was a  young lady from Barnet
Who wore no  damn clothes, just a hairnet
When she was asked  why
She said,I’m a spy
I write on my skin or the carpet

There was a young lady from Leeds
Who was prone to be too hard to please
When her lover shed tears
She just disappeared
She had asthma and thought it a wheeze.

I knew an old cove from Japan
Whose clock was too fast for  a man
We gave him a phone
So he could go roam
To someplace where ladies  made jam

Our honeymoon in Korea was  divine
The earth rocked for us every time
Yet since we got back
And got into the sack
The earthquakes lack reason or rhyme

A beam of light passed through my eyes

• And showed to me a world disguised
• So near,yet far,we do not see,
  Unless by gift of grace redeemed.That world is full of peace and calm
  It’s colours mingle like a balm
  In such a moment all thought dies
  Revealing Love which underlies.

  Colours caress my naked eyes.
  Sunlight blesses new designs.
  I stand enthralled,and do not wish
  For one delight,other than this.

  My breath slows down, and filled with joy,
  I rove my eyes with bliss to toy.
  Everything is just itself.
  This is now my living wealth.

  Beneath the noise of city traffic,
  This mellow joy,love soporific,
  This depth and peace, is always near
  When we choose Love and turn from fear

Midway down the cliff I shiver  ledged
No  guard  rail to  stop me falling off
And there I’m  stuck and  fear to breathe or budge

Of my world, I ‘ve reached the   final edge
The cliff is wet, the sea is wild and rough
Round the cliff, there is a narrow ledge

I cannot see enough to rightly judge
I must guess by watching green sea froth
As here I am fast stuck and  fear to budge

I will move  before the waves out-snatch
Lest in the ocean I am cruelly tossed
From the cliff  on fearsome narrow ledge

Now the demons,gulls and  merlins watch
For human souls who are both here and lost
Here I’m stranded and I  fear to budge

What is round the corner on my path?
I am weak yet fear no holy wrath
Round the cliff, there is a narrow ledge
On that I risk a  move; I cannot lodge

Sometimes it’s good to feel bad
Sometimes  we rightly feel sad
Let it all float by you
Decide what you have to do
No,you are not going mad.

Life has its upside and down
Sometimes a lover may frown
Take hold of the tiller
Wild sea will not kill you
Nor will the study called brown

Let your own partner feel blue
It’s not all the fault of just you
Their life is half private
Don’t try to deny it
We all have a soul to renew.

The large, the small
Love God and all

From Mike Flemming’s Blog.Copyright

I’d like to be a child and play in snow
Crack the ice on puddles in the road
The brittle bones of age  can’r risk a blow

Green as little branches, children grow
Their minds are open to the world’s rare gold
I’d like to be a child and play in snow

In our nature, hardening is a flaw
Though bones are done, our minds can  still be bold
The brittle bones of age  can’t risk a blow

Bend like willow, bow  with sacred awe.
For this life is the greatest story told
I’d like to be a child and roll in snow

We struggle on, we learn, we come to know
The love and friendship  can’t be put on hold
The brittle bones of age  can’t risk a blow

Hear the angels singing  clothed in gold
The stars shine out like candles overblown
I’d like to be an icicle  to show
How heat can melt the hardness at our core

http://www.openculture.com/2016/10/watch-a-27-year-old-glenn-gould-play-bach-put-his-musical-genius-on-display-1959.html

Glenn Gould died young, in 1982 at the age of 50, but the Canadian classical pianist made great contributions to the world of music in his short life. He did it in part by starting young — so young, in fact, that he first felt the vibrations of music played for him while still in the womb by his mother. She’d decided even then to raise a successful musician, and her plan surely worked better than she could ever have expected. Young Glenn had perfect pitch, learned to read notes before he learned to read words, entered Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music at age ten, and grew into the very archetypal image of a musical genius: eccentric and often difficult, but possessed of almost otherworldly skill and distinctiveness.

Those qualities came out nowhere more clearly than in Gould’s relationship with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whom he described as “beyond a doubt the greatest architect of sound who ever lived.” Even listeners only casually acquainted with Gould’s work will know his recordings of Bach;s Goldberg Variations the first of which, recorded in 1955, shot him to stardom and became one of the best-selling classical albums of all time.

Four years after that, the National Film Board of Canada documentary Off the Record, just above, captured his playing on film in the clips at the top of the post. “When Gould is not on tour or recording,” he spends most of his time at his retreat, a cottage on the Shore of Lake Simcoe 90 miles north of Toronto. Here he works on the piano he favors above all others for practicing: a 70-year-old Chickering with a resonant, harpsichord quality recalling the instruments of the time of Bach.”

There, in that cottage in the small community of Uptergrove, we see the 27-year-old Gould play Bach’s Partita No. 2, vocalizing along with the distinctive mix of forcefulness and delicacy issuing from the instrument that he never chose, but mastered to a degree few had before or have since. “His ambition,” the narrator says, “is to make enough money by the time he is 35 to retire from the concert stage and devote himself to composing.” In fact Gould put live performance behind him just five years later in order to pursue with more focus his own kind of pianistic perfection, which he continued to do for the rest of his life.

I’d like to thank all of you who have read my blog this year.And also I’d like to thank my collaborator Mike Flemming for allowing me to use his beautiful photographs.

http://home.btconnect.com/mike.flemming/

I like writing poetry so I would do it anyway but I am very happy if someone has read it  and esoecially a comment or a criticism to  give me the chance to improve what I have written

As most of you know,2017 has been a very hard one in Britain though nothing compared to many parts of our human world.
We had some serious terrorist attacks,two on London Bridges, one at Westminster near our Seat of Government.A policeman was also killed,Now if  you read that you may think it’s not too bad.But everyone who dies early loses their life, their world, for everyone has a unique world and we lose their contribution to our society, the love they give their family and friends, their presence in our city and country,  our security.
Many young people died in an attack in Manchester and later we saw Grenfell Tower on fire and learned many,many people died in their flats.It did not help that Boris Johnson had closed 14 fire stations in London.It was terrible for all of us here but especially for people living in Notting Hill to  know people close by were dying and firemen even broke the rules to go inside but they could not get to the top.
We know now dangerous materials were used as cladding.Nearby the wealthy lived in the areas where ordinary people used to live

This shows us what it is like in war torn areas and I hope makes us more sympathetic to the poor and to refugees,Remember,it could be us or our family.

Thank you all again.I hope to continue writing and I hope making you interested in what I write about and perhaps inspiring you to write or paint or take photographs

http://www.elizabethmoon.com/writing-block.html

Early in your writing life, the commonest cause of stuckness is your own lack of technical skill in writing. You know what needs to be said, but you can’t figure out how to do it. Like a beginner trying to build a house with only a hammer and saw and a pile of lumber, you have to work harder to accomplish the same structure. Writers can’t go out and buy a new writing tool–there’s no store that sells a “viewpoint transition chisel” or a “flashback installation kit.” So, when you get stuck this way, you have to make your own tools–by writing through the problem. Identify what it is that you can’t do, then read books in which it is done well–and then go do it. The exercises often proposed for getting past writer’s block may also work because many of them actually sharpen your writer’s tools. It’s fine to figure out a way to work around a skill you haven’t developed yet (such as the ability to handle multiple major viewpoints) as long as you keep working. Sometimes you can jump past the stuck point, and leave it to be solved later–by the time you finish the rest of the book, you may have developed the skill you need to clean up that bit. Another cause of stuckness hits writers with a trickle-feed imagination, those who can’t outline because they don’t know what happens until they write it. If you have this kind of imagination, and you are an energetic writer, then you can expect to overrun your inspiration repeatedly. When you do, you will feel “lost” or “empty”. Two strategies may help. First, be sure to stop writing before you run out of steam every day–save a little for the next day, so that you know what’s happening when you start the next session. Second, when you’ve overrun your primary vein, jump ahead in the story and see if you can find another vein to follow for awhile. You may end up having to circular-file a chapter or so, but you will enjoy writing something more than sitting there waiting for the bucket to fill.

I was thinking that the voice I now speak with is not my real voice.I have just read that I am using ” eye dialect” when I misspell words to make them sound like they do in my childhood dialect.

Outside owa house ‘t new umbrellas drip
~Wun is red and wun is pretty beige
They’re wa sunshades, t’weather’s hit a blip

If A wer a child A’d sail a ship
‘u stamp in pools u’ water in mi rage
Outside owa house,’t new umbrellas drip

Times there were Mam’s moods ‘d got a grip
Then it wu quite ‘ard t’ re-engage
Hide owa sunshades,mother’s ‘it a blip

Mam wer clever but she lost her top
The hint of h’ mad sayings had no gauge
Outside owa house ,’t new umbrellas drip

Nuns told me off for speaking in my voice
To get to Oxford, I must Me erase
Now I am a foreigner down here
No self, no mam, no sisters,just mi feah

Why,I almost bought a Harris Tweed skirt until I saw it was only  19 inches long.This puzzles me.Harris tweed is thick woollen waterproof fabric.If your skirt is 19 inches long what do  you wear on your legs? Why bother with a hot skirt that  barely covers the thigh? Very mysterious

I almost bought a poncho till I realised you can’t wear a cross body bag over one.
Cashmere knickers are in short supply.I  blame the Royals
I spent so long wondering if I should buy a  cashmere sweater, I burned  a pan.That kept me warm!

Harris Tweed is very good.if you live on Harris.My husband had a jacket years ago.He nearly died on the Tube.Maybe it might have been a good thing.See a new way to kill yourself without appearing to.
Cause of death: Harris Tweed bra, Arran sweater,Tweed jacket,Tweed overcoat and plastic mac.Suspected wool thief.Human moth

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/28/the-darkening-age-the-christian-destruction-of-the-classical-world-by-catherine-nixey

“This is also, however, a book for the 21st century. What concerned Gibbon was the clash between faith and reason; for Nixey, the clashes are physical ones. This is, fundamentally, a study of religious violence. Her cover displays a statue of Athena deliberately damaged: its eyes have been gouged and its nose smashed, and a cross has been etched into its forehead. The story of this defacement is told in her prologue and reprised in her final words. The events happened in Palmyrain the late fourth century, when some of the oasis city’s magnificent temples were repurposed as sites of Christian worship. Her choice to begin in Palmyra is, of course, a careful one. When she speaks of the destruction wrought on the architecture of the Syrian city by “bearded, black-robed zealots”, the reader thinks not of marauding fourth-century Christian fundamentalists but of television images from recent history. “There have been,” she writes, and “there still are … those who use monotheism and its weapons to terrible ends.” What is revealing about that last sentence is not the connection she draws between savage practices in Christian late antiquity and in the name of Islamic State but the phrase “monotheism and its weapons”. Many modern commentators like to speak of religious terrorism as a horrific distortion of religious truth; for Nixey, monotheism is always weaponised and waiting only for someone to pull the trigger.”