Buffy's Salon

A Garden of Thoughts

Geraniums   An interesting post based around Luke 8:14 painted a mental picture for me of our minds as a fertile garden wherein our thoughts grow like plants.  Some of them are vibrant and colourful flowers, bushes or trees, or healthy fruits and vegetables; but quite a few are unwelcome weeds.

Of course, the verse is talking specifically about the word of God, but for me the analogy seemed especially apt for that activity that influences us the most: what we are thinking.

I imagine a healthy mind is like a well-prepared garden, ready to seize on and nurture any seed that falls.  How many times is the falling seed a negative thought such as a form of:

• awfulizing
• resentment
• despair
• wishing someone ill
• malicious gossip
• criticism (of yourself or another)

Now your mind is, in a sense, neutral in that it will receive and nurture whatever stray thought falls to the fertile earth.  If it is the wrong thought, before you know it your entire garden is taken over by nasty brambles or stinging nettles.  Or, to put it another way, you will quickly be consumed by a fearful thought, ruminating over something unpleasant, over-analyzing someone's thoughtless words, and so on and so on.  By the way, worrying and strong emotions such as anger or fear do not exist in a vacuum; they use up your vital energy, leaving you tired and trained.

A garden needs a gardener whose job it is to root out and throw away the negative thoughts, prune those thoughts which are taking over and nurture the good thoughts that might not be able to grow strong without help.

If you are letting your mind lead you on without imposing any self-control you're letting your garden run riot.  And minds, like gardens, are easier to maintain with a little work every day than letting them do their own thing for weeks or months and then having to bring in the bulldozer because you've let things get so out of hand.

A gardener cannot stop certain weeds from turning up in her garden, any more than we can entirely stop random thoughts popping up in our head.  However, if she ruthlessly digs them up and casts them out the moment she notices them she can keep her garden the inspiring, soul-refreshing place it is meant to be.  In the same way, when we spot ourselves indulging in a negative thought, if we stamp on it straightaway then our minds can stay our most powerful tool rather than our worst enemy. 

To carry the analogy still further, a good gardener doesn't just yank out the weeds, she plants new seeds and youthful plants that she knows will be good in the garden.  Are we planting uplifting, happy thoughts?  Are we making sure we go back and water them and cut away any weeds that threaten to strangle them every day?  Are we in control of our garden or is it control of us?

What are you growing in your garden?

The Golden Calf for Modern Times

Worship of a Golden Calf by the Israelites in the Time of Moses

I recently read an interesting article by Andrew Marr called "The Danger of Worshipping Darwin".  The author is an atheist who has a great deal of respect for Charles Darwin but he is objective enough to see that amongst many humanists and atheists Darwin has started to take on something of the character of a god.  He raises an interesting question, are we replacing centuries of theologically based religion with a secular religion?

Andrew Marr highlights the similarities between the two.  For example, the two greatest science museums in England, the Natural History Museum in Kensington and the Oxford University Natural Museum both have the appearance of cathedrals (and to a large extent were deliberately designed that way).

In Oxford, the delicate carvings of animals and plants entwine pillars and arches, while statues of scientists look like latter-day saints.  In London, Darwin himself presides over the nave, as Gothic, Venetian and Renaissance styles jostle round...And what are most sacred objects in Kensington? Well, bones, of course - not saints' bones, but bones collected by Darwin on his travels, a voyage which brings a whiff of pilgrimage to the tale.

The author has no real argument with Darwin but with human's tendency to replace a religious creed with a scientific one. 

And if even scientists and atheists unwittingly forming a new religion, might one infer that it is the natural condition of human beings to worship something?

The psychiatrist Jung argued that humans have a strong spiritual drive, evidence of which can be found in, among other things, the building of cathedrals; a venture which would have taken many years, a lot of resources and much effort.  If humans were only driven by biological urges, such as the drive to reproduce, then building a cathedral has no meaning.

Although it is not absolutely proved, many biologists and psychologists have found evidence that humans are "wired for God".  Evidence can be seen in the proliferation of different religions throughout the world and in different cultures, as well as the universal existential search for life to have meaning.  A desire to know and even have a relationship with God has accompanied the human race as far back as we have records.  If you take a purely reductive view of this, what on earth would be the point of so much wasted energy if there was no God?  Doesn't it make more sense to think that God wired us, so to speak, to intuitively desire to seek him if he wanted a relationship with us? 

Science cannot provide answers to these questions, it can only provide evidence for interpretation.  Hay and Socha (1995) found that children have a natural tendency to seek spiritual experiences, even if they have not been raised with a religious background.  They have a stronger sense of the mystery of life than many adults.  It seems inevitable that, consciously or unconsciously, humans have to worship build our cathedrals for someone or something.  Are we really sure in this modern, materialistic  age that we want to replace God with something less magnificent?

The North East - a tour through History Part I

      Last summer we visited the north east of England.  The area is absolutely brimful of history and wildlife.  The photo above is from St Paul's church in Jarrow.  Part of the building dates back to the seventh century when it was attached to a monastery.  As you can probably tell, the church is still used today and very colourful it was too, decorated with angels.       The church is next to Bede's world, which contains an Anglo Saxon farm of the type typical at the time of the Venerable Bede, around 700 AD.  The buildings, the animals and the crops are as close as possible to how they would have been all those years ago.     Here you can see inside one of the timber buildings.  Clearly life at this time, for most people, was pretty basic.  Imagine how smoke filled this home would get once you lit the fire in the middle of the room.     This stylish dwelling was for the farm animals.  There were sheep, oxen and pigs, all mostly smaller than the farm animals we see today.       Now we leap forward in time to the nineteenth century as we visited the Beamish museum, a working museum which recreates how people used to live in the industrialised north.   At the colliery village you can peep into the miner's houses, with their trademark big black stoves which did everything from heating the home, providing hot water, cooking and heating the irons.  Once a week every good housewife got down on her hands and knees and went to "blacking" this monster.  You can also visit the pit, where the men and boys worked in dark and cramped conditions.         The board school caters for the younger children.       And for the older ones.  (Boys could start working in the mine from 14 years of age.)       These trams transport you around Beamish.  My mother can remember trams operating in most of the cities when she was young, but they have nearly all gone now.       We took the tram to the town where you can visit homes from the Edwardian era, along with shops and even a dentist.  Here we have a nursery.       Inside the co-operative store grocery.  Other shops included a bank, a hardware store, a motor and cycle works and a newspaper shop.         One of the replica locomotives working the Pockerley Waggonway, dating from about 1825.       Now a jump back in time again as we visited Housesteads fort on Hadrian' s Wall.  This fortification, which runs along northern Britain, was built by the Romans in the second century AD.  Its intention was to keep out the barbarian Picts (aka Scots).  The photo above was taken looking north over the wall.  The wall runs for nearly 80 miles and is broken up by forts such as the one we visited.       This is what remains of the public latrines!  You can see the channels down both sides for the waste (they probably had wooden seats over them) and more channels running around the middle of the room for water where they could wash their hands and utensils.      Here is what it probably looked like in its prime.  I hope the ladies had a separate area.       This would have been the granary.  You can see how the pillars would have supported a raised floor to keep the grain both dry and safe from rats, mice etc.

Happy & Healthy?

Harness' Electric Corset for Women of All Ages

A blog post at The Happiness Project looked at the correlation between happiness and weight.

It's a well known paradox that in many modern developed countries, such as both the United States and Britain, the average person is becoming more obese whilst the media consistently promotes photos of undernourished women (and even men) as the ideal.  Being either very over-weight or very under-weight is damaging to the health and not remotely attractive.  So why are we doing it to ourselves?

The thin ideal, which has infiltrated our culture to such an alarming degree, seems to have its roots in the following:

1. Whether it's inborn or inbred, most girls and women feel a certain level of dissatisfaction with their bodies, no matter how beautiful they are.
2. The media, especially in the form of girls' and women's magazines, the modeling world and all aspects of celebrity culture constantly push an image of the perfect female shape being significantly underweight.
3. Researchers have found that the most influential role models are those whom we perceive as being like ourselves. A teenage girl, for instance, will look at teenage girls on television or in magazines and unconsciously see them as a role model they should emulate.  Young women are particularly vulnerable because their bodies are changing through puberty, so their body image is not fixed or stable. 
4. Advertisers worsen the situation by making girls and women feel they need to buy their products in order to feel attractive and adequate.  In other words, a woman without deodorant, shaved legs and armpits, make-up, perfume etc is failing as a woman.   The vast majority of the women in the adverts are, of course, skinny.

The most interesting part of the post I mentioned above is a quote by Martin Seligman:

All thin-ideal cultures…have roughly twice as much depression in women as men. (Women diet twice as much as men...) [In] cultures without the thin ideal…the amount of depression in women and men in these cultures is the same. This suggests that around the world, the thin ideal and dieting not only cause eating disorders but also cause women to be more depressed than men. 

It's interesting that the ideal of a woman being skinny is prevalent only amongst societies which are relatively affluent.  This is because in a society where, for many, there is not enough to eat, being over weight becomes a status symbol.  Rather in the way that being suntanned used to be a sign that someone worked in the fields and wasn't a lady, being thin meant your family couldn't afford to feed your properly.

When we look back in history we see thousands of women torturing their bodies to fit a cultural view of beauty, which rarely has anything to do with good health or natural looks.  One of the hardest to understand is the women who bound the feet of their daughters, a practice I mentioned briefly in an earlier post about the excellent novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.  In the Western World woman have long constricted their bodies into corsets and at various times throughout history cosmetics have resulted in great damage: white face paint causing arsenic and lead poisoning and belladonna causing permanent damage to eye sight.

When will we realise that the only way to be healthy and happy is to be satisfied with our natural bodies and make the effort to nurture and look after them rather than try to force them to fit some relative cultural ideal?

Source for research: Journalism's Portrayal of the Thin Ideal

Journey through Lent

Celtic Cross: Create in Me

Lent has been part of the Christian church's calendar since the fourth century, beginning on Ash Wednesday and concluding the Saturday before Easter.  It lasts 40 days (excluding Sundays) to echo the 40 days that Jesus spent in the wilderness.  Traditionally this period was a time of preparation for Easter, rather like Advent is in preparation for Christmas.  It has long been associated with prayer, alms-giving and fasting.  The most enduring tradition these days, at least for Anglicans, has been to give something up for Lent, for example chocolate, alcohol or meat.

Note: Lent is remembered by the Anglican church and for Protestants generally the observation of Lent is considered to be a personal choice, and not an obligation.

Why is Lent a Journey?  Because it takes us from what we Brits call Pancake Day (the day before Ash Wednesday) through Mothering Sunday, Palm Sunday, and Holy Week.  In a country that has become very secular like Britain, many of the centuries-old traditions associated with these holy days are still continued.  However, this period offers an opportunity to the more profound thinkers among us for a little self-examination, repentance and, hopefully, renewed faith and spirituality.

Of course Lent has already started, but someone recently directed me towards Tearfund's Carbon Fast and I thought it was an excellent idea to pass on.  Tearfund is a Christian charity particularly dedicated to overcoming global poverty.  The Tearfund carbon fast aims to encourage you to cut your carbon usage with a different idea every day.  At the very least you should learn to what extent we in the developed world are dependent  on modern conveniences such as electricity, running water, supermarkets etc.

Meanwhile this year the Church of England is encouraging everyone to undertake a simple act of generosityevery day of Lent, perhaps a return to the alms-giving tradition of yesteryear.  On the other hand, the Methodist Church looks for increased simplicity and reflection.