This from Chris Goan https://thisfragiletent.com/
Photo by Alex Wolf mx on Pexels.com
This post invites you to do a bit of
pondering...
One of the
gifts of Advent is to set the business of hope in both a historical and an
extra-historical context. In other words, hoping has been going on for a long
time, even if our own version always seems the most pressing. Even in the span
of my own lifetime this seems true, in that my own adult children believe that
the political and economic circumstances they are forced to endure are the
worst ever - a view that is unchanged despite my description of the Thatcher
years I grew up in.
To help us
think about this a little more, I offer you two videos. The first one is rather
long and describes anthropological and architectural work to try to understand
the pre-agricultural hopes of ancient civilisations.
Why? I hear you ask.
The answer
to this is perhaps more evident in the light of the second video, which is of
me reading a poem.
Until the
realities of man-made climate change and ecocide became more widely
appreciated, human history was almost always understood in terms of rise,
ascendence, progress, advance. We moved from being primitive towards
civilisation. It is perhaps of note that the history we speak of is only a
fraction of human history. Homo Sapiens - people just like us - have been
around for at least three hundred thousand years, but our knowledge only goes
back a few thousand. For all of those year, our ancestors hoped.
What where
they hoping for? David Wengrow (in the video) describes a fascinating account
of the abandonment of a sophisticated city, and a return to the land. The hint
here is that people may have trying to find a better way to live.
Just like
us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR-EN0YIBIg
Here is my
poem, written a few years ago, recorded in the spring hills.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qojg-wFZD1A
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