Indian Summer?

It's a stunning Sunday in September; it's 15 degrees C and people are wearing their T-shirts and shades; hairdressers drive with their tops down; everywhere the signs of a beautiful extended end to summer; and the shops are full of advent calendars.
There's something fundamentally unnerving about seeing Christmas paraphernalia being peddled just one week into the new school term. It's bad enough that, just as the holidays started, retailers were proclaiming "Back to school" with such glee. And then, when DIY shopping during a wet August Bank Holiday, the cashier said woefully, "Well, it's Christmas next".

This commercialised push from one season to the next means that we run the risk of losing the enjoyment of them. If we now spend four months thinking about Christmas shopping, when the day comes we will be tired and bored of it. And this is a shame because Christmas is ace.

Even in my atheist days, I saw something wonderful in the celebrations of December 25th. I saw its pagan roots (something which I now discover may have been invented by the Victorians), its history as a glowing light in the middle of darkest winter, its promise of escapism, its emphasis on giving. I loved all this. But I loved it in December, not in the tail end of summer.

And since then I have found God: he was sitting in my kitchen cupboard trying to do a sudoku. I couldn't help him with it. My sense of the divine has become almost electric - a whoozy joyful nausea, tasting of metal, like sticking your tongue on the contacts of a 9V battery. The Tao shows us the yin and yang of life, and this cycle fits beatifully with the pagan ideas of the death and birth of every year, reflected so poetically in the story of the birth of Christ. From the darkest places can come the brightest light. And, after all, light and darkness exist because of each other.

And atop all this spirituality, there is family. There's nothing like sharing Christmas morning with loved ones. Sharing gifts and, later, the family feast. The wine, the silly hats, the games, the snoozing in an armchair.
Even the cheap chocolates that one gets in the advent calendars have their place in the festivities.

But when Christmas becomes just another DFS sale, another Tesco branded tin of life stuff, it all seems so bland. It's Christmas in sanitised form, marketed by men more interested in profit margins than in celebrations.

I love Christmas. I love winter, but I love my autmns too: the shifting hues of the trees, the changing quality of the sky, the rising of Orion. The chance to enjoy other customs and traditions. But now, in a world where "season" is a commercial opportunity, and bananas are on sale throughout the year, we become immune to these natural cycles and "autumn" is meaningless outside of the school calendar. And because we have no reason to stockpile our foods, to make our jams and chutneys, to pickle our apricots (is that what one does with them?), we have no idea of planning for the future. And so we have rising debts - why save for the future when you can have it now? We have the elastic band of credit stretched to snapping point.
So let's not blame the greedy bankers for the recession - blame the shops for selling advent calendars in September.

22 weeks pregnant

I'm a little behind on the updates, I know. The business of life has exceeded my capacity to update the blog regularly.

So, where are we? The twenty week scan was another moment of world-shift. Bill was jiggling about a lot, letting us see the incredible intricacies of the bones. The facial features were quite clear, in so much as the position of the eyes, nose and ears. Big ears, like mine were (apparently). The heart was incredible: four pockets of dark pulsating with the energy of the cosmos.

And now, we're at 22 weeks. We've been to the Baby Show. We've bought things. We've ordered the pram.

22 weeks. Twenty-two weeks. Twenty-two weeks. We're past half way. I'm going to be a dad in less than 20 weeks.

And if that were not weird enough, we found this as we were googling. Amazing to think that there is one of those inside my wife right now. Frightening to think that here in the UK, abortions can still be performed at 24 weeks. I don't really want to go into the ethics of such things, but I find that a bit sickening.

But let's not dwell on such things. Let's think about the Bundle in his/her new clothes that we've been buying.

Oh, and I need to do some marking.

Sound of the Tao

Neither of us were expecting it. There had been no preparation, no planning and no expectations. It was a routine appointment.
And then she said, "Would you like to hear Baby's heart?"

An odd sort of question, really. How likely was it that we would say no? The small, square machine became an auditory portal to a different reality. It was like Vonnegut's Euphio, but without the calamity. She said the heartbeat was strong. Yes, I thought, it has the strength of the cosmos in every iamb. It was the needle in the groove of life itself, the music of holy magic reverberating through the horn.

There are a few moments one experiences in life that make the entire world shift slightly. It's an unnerving thing. Sometimes they are terrifying moments. Sometimes they are fragile moments. Sometimes they are moments of great romance. Sometimes they are moments of immense anger. Sometimes they are moments of extreme pain. But they are always awesome moments. This was one of those moments. I felt the Earth jolt. No-one else would have noticed it, consumed by their day-to-day: work, food, sleep, toilet, television. But in that moment, that small room became Wellsian in its potential to transport us. In that instant, I was everywhere and everywhen. I heard the breathing of God.

Tao haiku

Here are some Taoism-inspired lines.

Swaying in the breeze

Yielding to the ebb and flow

Dancing mighty trees

_____________

Water knows its path

Flotsam does not try to swim

But goes with the flow

Sonnet 2 - education

Sonnet 2

The fatal kiss of targets blows upon
The wind like whispers heard in darkened rooms
The measurements become our only truth
Imagination murdered in the womb
And who would dare to question how and why?
For fear of fateful consequence to come
And judgement is that numbers are the key
For raising the attainment of just some
It’s more to justify the jobs of those
Pathetic parliamentary whores of hell
Who prostitute our children’s future dreams
And have no souls their own that they could sell
There is a secret hanging in the air
It’s only known by those who really care

Swimming with the Tao - the way of water

I am a lapsed atheist. I used to think that religious people were somehow weak, cowardly or naive. I imagined that I had no need of a religious component in my life; that I was above that and that I was far too modern, far too rational for such childish hogwash.
But even in my darkest, most arrogant years of atheism, there was a doubt in my mind. Why did I ponder God for so much of my time? Clearly, I was agnostic.
I knew that my love of astronomy was more than just a scientific interest. Looking up, looking out, I was aware that I was part of something beyond my comprehension. I love the knowledge that I am made of the same stuff as everything else. I see a kind of romance in the idea that all we are is the product of cosmic explosions: a star whose life came to a violent end, but whose death gave rise to our own sun and everything that spins around it.
So, for a while, I wanted to be pagan. But there are negative connotations with that label, brought about by Wicca - a nonsense religion closer to Catholicism than Wiccans or Catholics would like to admit.
My personal theology is certainly pantheist. Interestingly, in his The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins dismisses pantheism as "sexed-up atheism". This is a rather whimsical argument designed to avoid the fact that Einstein, one of the dead scientists that Dawkins calls as witness, was clearly a pantheist.
And then I found Unitarianism. And I still consider myself a non-paying member of the global UU (Unitarian Universalist) community. The nearest Unitarian congregation, however, was still too distant for regular attendance, and my visits waned.

But then I stumbled across Taoism. I forget how. It doesn't really matter. I felt an immediate sense of, I dunno, belonging. Its basic tenets so completely matched my own theology that it seemed uncanny.
The Tao Te Ching is one of the most beautiful, and profound, things I have ever read. Full of oxymoronic poetry, it is a guide to life and leadership. And then I read Pure by Barefoot Doctor. And now I cannot get enough.

What is particularly interesting is that through the lens of Taosim, Christianity makes a kind of sense. "I am the Way" presents an interesting perspective. Now I want to be a part of my local church community, at the heart of this wonderful village in which I have lived for 7 years now. The only problem is, of course, that my local church is Anglican. But that's for another post, another time.

For now it's enough to say that I am a pagnostic Taoist Unitarian Universalist.

12 week scan, 1 week on

It's been one week since I saw my baby dancing. The image is prominent in my forebrain; it floats before me like a Shakespearian imp. I was speechless in the scanning room; but this was partly due to the uvulitis.

My wife had laughed at me when I said hello to her as I woke up. She couldn't understand what I was saying. When she peered into my mouth and exlaimed, "Oh my God!", I knew that something was amiss. There's a joke somewhere in this about having something large in my mouth causing me to gag, but I shall leave that for now.

And my wife jokingly accused me of never letting the attention be on somebody else: this was supposed to be her day, after all. "I know, I'm egocentric", I said. "What?" she replied. And so it went on.

So my wife was lying there, unable to see anything past the arm of the sonographer, her belly covered in a fantastically erotic gel, and I stroked her hand to comfort myself as much as anything else. At first we saw nothing. A dark oval of nothing, surrounded by science fiction. My heart missed a beat.
"There's your bladder," explained the sonographer. The relief was immediate and intense as she moved the scanner over a little and there, magically, was conjured the image of our little Bill. We've been calling it Bill the Bump for a while, nervous that this might anger the gods just like buying baby clothes too early might.
"There's baby's heart." I squinted and saw it. A little flash. And another. Something weird was happening to my stomach, something exciting and frightening, like waiting to jump out of an aeroplane.

I have never jumped out of an aeroplane. But I imagine the feeling is something exciting and frightening.

After a bit of prodding and poking, Bill got fed up and squirmed around, showing us its spine, its limbs. Its movement was quick and energetic. This was the ballet of the Tao. It was human and a dancer.

It's taken me a while to decide which pronoun to use. Although we've given the bump a masculine label, we don't want to assume anything about the gender of the child. So, calling it 'he' seems somehow wrong. Calling it 's/he' makes it sound like someone you'd see a documentary about on late night Channel 5.
I know 'it' seems inpersonal. But is this really such a problem? Is it safe to personalise the experience too much at this stage? It is the thing to call it 'Baby': "There's baby's heart". I like this. It's a neat solution.

So. I'm gonna be a dad. I hope baby will be into Doctor Who and stargazing. I hope baby will like trains. I hope baby will like reading. I hope baby will like poems, and stories.

I hope baby will like me.

An Amateur Astronomer's Fear of the Dark

It's a curious fact of my life that I love to spend time gazing up at the night time heavens, and yet I am scared of the dark.





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