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Cheers for tears
Posted by Simon Parke, 20 Jun 2018
Part of a mourner’s behaviour is the attempt to hold on to the deceased. Weeping may be a calling out, a way to summon the deceased, just as a baby cries to summon the mother.
This ‘calling’ weeping – shallower, because the breathing is rapid – is trying to hold on to the deceased.
Whereas deep weeping – sobbing – is a letting go of them. We possess within us both a ‘calling’ weeping and a ‘letting go’ weeping…
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Anxiety and self-disgust
Posted by Simon Parke, 18 Jun 2018
Some thoughts if your anxiety is bringing you to a place of self-disgust and self- loathing.
One suggestion: try and give up making a project of yourself for ten seconds a day.
This may increase to fifteen seconds of freedom in time, possibly more. (Maximum per day, twenty-four hours.)
Anxiety is all about control…
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The Old Boys reunion
Posted by Simon Parke, 18 Jun 2018
They gather sixty years on.
It was the brain child of an ex-headmaster who realised that it was sixty years since left his prep school in the south of England.
Why not find out what happened to everyone, and organise a meeting back at the school?...
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Secret grief
Posted by Simon Parke, 15 Jun 2018
Secret Grief is a new book of poems/reflections by Cathryn Deyn around the subject of bereavement.
Here is the forward I wrote for the book:
The woman talks… a mixture of sadness, confusion and rage.
She is reluctantly letting go of a friendship, but she is letting go screaming…
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A hidden gospel
Posted by Simon Parke, 13 Jun 2018
You might imagine you know the opening line of the Lord’s prayer; and you do, in a way.
‘Our father in heaven,’ as the modern version has it.
But Jesus spoke in Aramaic, of course, and as Neil Douglas-Klotz observes, a single word in Aramaic can often mean several different things…
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In the first of my Abbot Peter mysteries, in a prequel to the Abbot’s Stormhaven adventures, Peter takes us back to the monastery of St James-the-Less. There in the shadows of Mt Sinai, Abbot Peter faces a discomforting cocktail of deception, delusion and death.
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The Abbot Peter murder mystery series continues with The Indecent Death of a Madam. What brings together the Stormhaven Etiquette Society, Model Services (the town’s only brothel) and Bybuckle Asylum, a desolate shell on the seafront that housed over 700 mental patients prior to the dubious dream of ‘care in the community’? A cold-blooded execution that both shocks and confounds.
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| SIMON'S NEXT RETREAT |
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The Beautiful Life retreat
Mon-Fri, 1-5 October 2018
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The Beautiful Life retreat offers a contemplative experience, including input from Simon, meditation, sharing, silence and time for yourself. Here you will find community and solitude, rest and inner search, based on material in Simon’s book The Journey Home (originally published as The Beautiful Life). In a climate of safety and acceptance, we dare to contemplate the truth of ourselves, the mess and the magic, the place to which our journey has brought us.
More retreats
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| SONGS FOR THE JOURNEY |
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Listen to songs by Simon for the journey
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| BREAKING TWEETS |
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