Trepanation according to Wikipedia.
Many thanks to Impacted Nurse for pointing out this article in New Scientist which talks about the use of trepanation (an illustration) as a potential cure for Alzheimer’s.
Deep breath, another deep breath…I guess there is merit in knowing what is going on in the world of science and medicine. Personally I like the standing on ones head cure. Painful, yet less invasive! But not for everybody.
This evening I lay on my back, in a large field, with sheep and cows grazing all around. Sometimes it’s just good to get out and gaze at the sky for a bit. Laying on the ground can be restorative. Then homeward with every good intention to write a post about a chap who has posted about sitting meditation. But I followed links from an email and ended up in hut world and specifically shepherds huts!
Shepherds Huts? Yes, apparently they are found laying around in fields and are being lovely restored by a chap in Norfolk. Vote for Harry the Hut, the shepherds hut restoration project.
Thanks to Ian in Australia for writing about meditation and the journey to the cushion and to Angie for the shed/hut links. I await a photo of your allotment shed in happy anticipation. With you sitting in it?
I’ve been encountering a lot of Travellers (See also Gypsies and Romini people) on the road and encamped on every available (and unavailable) spot beside the roads! They are on their way to the Appleby Horse Fair which customarily starts on the first Thursday in June and ends on the second Wednesday in June. When I passed through on Monday morning Alston had ponies tied to lamp posts, their rear ends stuck out into the road. Two officers of the law were walking purposefully towards the clutch of caravans, trucks, lorries loaded with painted caravans and sundry other vehicles. They were all crammed onto a tiny spot of land beside the road on the edge of the town. I must say I delighted in the general mill of activity, and the basic anarchy that emanates from Travellers activity. I think the police are fairly tolerant of them unless there is out and out crime going on. Just outside of Alston more encampments, ponies turned out into farmers fields, permission or no as I understand the situation. Is it a crime to feed ponies that have been trotting for 20 miles, they need their grass? (Paraphrased from the local newspaper reporting on the Travellers excesses or more to the point the farmers indignation.) Then descending Hartside Pass in the brilliant summer sunshine two carts – one a ‘rag and bone’ painted beautifully the other a simple pony cart. The ponies swinging along at a brisk trot, full of the joy of the open road, wind under the tail and feathery legs flying. What a sight! There’s that welling up of emotion out of seeming nowhere again. I’ll have to get to the bottom of that.
And now to what I intended to write about. Celebrity and notoriety. Yes, celebrity and how a swift turn of events, combined with human frailty, can transform over night into notoriety. This is the stuff of entertainment. The rise and fall of celebrity. We love the rags to riches stories, the Cinders WILL go to the ball stories. Now we have the story of Susan Boyle. It will, no doubt, be an ongoing one. Where will we be in that story? What of our own story?
As a child I’d puzzled at the three wise monkey statue my friend had and the saying which went with it. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Was it about turning a blind eye? I didn’t think so. And I was right, there is some actual wisdom involved, according to Wikipedia, in that it was probably adapted from a Confucian phrase and brought to Japan via Tendai Buddhism.
It is said that the monkeys in the tiny statues were modelled after snow monkeys who live in the Japanese Alps. In a BBC TV programme we watched last week we saw one tribe of these monkeys soaking in a hot spring. The story is one monkey stumbled upon, or into, the heated water and others caught onto the idea. Gradually the soaking became part of the tribes practice.
Sometimes there is a fourth monkey which depicts do no evil.