#Covid19UK

Amazin’ foresight

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© Madeleine Baird Materials

It’s the thing everyone [well, creatives at least] wants to have: the idea which goes viral, launches crescendo fireworks, assures the bathing in asses milk for life. How to share that?

Entrepreneurs have sizzling ideas: all work their socks off; all surround themselves with clever people possessing the skills they lack; all are convinced theirs is the solution to the intractible problem de nos jours. But those who take their idea into the market place and persuade others to buy [into] it must also have amazin’ luck.

Tapping into the ZeitGeist is a spooky matter of … [clue being in the title] timing. Foresight: a wondrous gift but get there too far ahead of others and prescience evaporates in a wilt of incomprehension. Wait too long and it’s sunk before even being launched.

This has been ‘a rather complicated year’. All of us have been viscerally, physically, financially, intellectually reshaped by medieval blight: the reality of its avalanche, a woeful avalanche.      Though mean-spirited, 2020 vision might be accurately repurposed as 2020’s anakusis in light no executive ear listened to what was crucially foretold: not found credible.

Does the Nature of Balance laugh at foolish haughtiness of thinking ourselves the controlling arbiter of our surroundings? If we’re lucky, this apocalyptic 2020 will have brought reality into sharper focus; made our planet’s scream audibly discernable; caused a drive to lessen Nature’s suffocating suffering.

It seems we’ve already set the world alight: Australia’s ablaze once more, alas; pestilence months away from beaten-into-submission; unemployment and all mad complications that follow ambushing millions.

May Christmas be bliss and 2021 a bright new Beginning.

Wouldn’t it be amazin’ to leave this year behind wiser, kinder and more empathically disposed than we entered it, cascading out warmth and wellness? Be lucky.

madeleinebaird.com/blogos

Call me by my name

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© A Rinehart, 1892                                                  Teenagers: they never change

When in North London – or anyplace else, does this happen to you? A thought occurs, you turn to which ever device is to hand and before you know it, the original question is lost in mists of diversion and you find yourself looking at photographs of First People of Turtle Island, the original inhabitants’ term for their land, namely what is now North&South Americas&Canada.

Captivated by the strength of character in every single face of this montage of Turtle Islanders, you can see them all here.

If you look, perhaps you’ll share a sense of dismay in the documenting of a whole culture which now exists subsidiary to a European model.

Such was the way of the world.

It’s odd, isn’t it, that those whose dignity has never been questioned seem ‘to hold their manhood cheap’ while others robbed of grace and stature, are the living embodiment of those virtues others discard.

In light of the potential for begetting a fresh model of existence, perhaps we can all play a role in giving others the space and permission to live truly in the dignity of their culture? Rather than forcing others into our moulds, might not sitting together to smoke a pipe of peace achieve more?

A poem, We the first People, whose author is unknown ends …

But my question is | How did we exist | For hundreds of centuries without them?

madeleinebaird.com/blogos

Arc of our covenant

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© Evening Standard

In the UK, crayoned pictures have been fixed to windows reminding passers-by of how the NHS contributes to the health of the nation. We clap in recognizing heroic efforts of those on the front-line at 8pm each Thursday.

Last week, in the fifteen or so minutes preceding this weekly applause, there floated over London a double rainbow. The second, outer arc appearing a good five minutes after the first.

That confluence of coincidence cheered the heart … well, it cheered my heart while getting increasingly soggier … in virtue of an implicitly genial kindness: a gorgeous kind of empathy by Nature.

If the NHS – by which I mean the people who bring it into being each day and each night – has saved your life, you’ll know that it doesn’t have time to dwell on your renewed wellness because it is already acting on the next patient.

The clapping is really the only time we can transform our passive role into one of positive action. It is a kind of covenant we have to acknowledge that which is given and gracefully received.

The clue being in the title, a rainbow occurs when light penetrates through rain and is reflected, refracted & dispersed, appearing as a spectrum in the form of a septa-coloured, circular arc. Nuff said.

madeleinebaird.com/blogos