Hello again! After a 6 week break a new series of Tea with a Druid/Tea with Druids is back, and here are some notes and links to topics mentioned:

Thanks to Matthew Kniseley for the great new intro film. His site is here.
Thanks to Charlie Roscoe for the music that accompanies this film, from the track Blessed Water in the Album Druid Circle. You can also hear this music in the meditation collection Sacred Nature.

The film I mention of the Chauvet cave paintings is The Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog.

The Hove amber cup  that I mention, and depicted left, dates from the Bronze Age. The blog I refer to can be found here.

Frank Owen’s books that I mention are: The Mist-Filled Path and The Spiral of Memory and Belonging, and then his more recent poetry collections are The Temple of Warm Harmony and The School of Soft Attention. All are easily discoverable online. Franks’s website is here.

Another proud dad moment! Our daughter Sophia has made a 30-minute film to accompany a new choral work by the Fieri Consort, and it really is beautiful. If you are free this coming Saturday evening and you’re within reach of Hackney in London, do come and join us for its premiere. Here’s an article about it, and the film’s trailer. And then, a link for tickets!

“Sophia has recalled how she was drawn to the project because it was an extraordinary opportunity; it was a director’s dream, she said, to be given such haunting, evocative and cinematic music as a starting point. She has worked on music videos before, but usually the lyrics would clearly define the storyline. For this project, however, she embraced the challenge of uncovering the narrative thread… The result is a beautiful creation of visual art which is united with the music yet which still stands apart, much in the same way as the music does – each strand being part of something bigger while remaining central to itself.”     Read more

To get tickets go to Earthhackney.co.uk

One of the great benefits of wandering without a destination is that you sometimes have serendipitous encounters which restore your faith in the inherent goodness of life and its riches. Stephanie and I were caught in a downpour the other day, and drove with no aim in mind in an area unknown to us – a spur of land between the River Adur and the English Channel. We ended up in the Shoreham Fort car park and saw a horse-box converted into a tiny café. It turned out to be the project of musician Richard Durrant and his family. Here’s their story:

We came away with a copy of his wonderful album Stringhenge – “In Stringhenge the maverick guitarist and composer is living on the folk/classical cusp playing his own distinctive, solo guitar music alongside a fascinating collection of other English melodies. He also introduces his trademark arrangements of unaccompanied Bach juxtaposed, for the first time, with British Isles folk tunes. The effect is striking, almost as if he’s using the high baroque to unlock the hill barrows and henges of Britain.” It’s fantastic, and Damh the Bard has featured two of Richard’s pieces in the latest edition of Druidcast. See Richard’s website here.

I hope we can get Richard to play at one of our Glastonbury events. Meanwhile I see that he’s composed music for a film to be shown on September 6th, which has taken 20 years to make: “we first meet Mir Hussain as a cheeky, funny 7-year-old living in a cave next to the destroyed Buddhas of Bamiyan statues in central Afghanistan. Over the following two decades the film bears witness to his adventures and Afghanistan’s struggles”. The director says: ‘I can safely say that no film has captured the life inside an Afghan family in the way this one does. And little did we know that the final days of filming would coincide with the Taliban once again being in control of the country.’

Watch ‘My Childhood, My Country – 20 Years in Afghanistan’ on ITV1 and ITV Hub on Monday 6 September at 10:45pm (immediately after News at Ten).

I’m looking forward to joining you in a new round of Tea with a Druid on Mondays at 8pm UK time, Youtube/FB,  starting this coming Monday 6th September. Meanwhile, you might enjoy this beautiful collection of songs  ‘Lost Word Spell Songs’. Here’s one for Willow:

Two resources for working with the transition from one life to another:

COMPASSIONATE ACCOMPANIMENT a really interesting-looking course offered by the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation in Mexico

THE SEVEN VALLEYS a guided journey to help with the transition: a book and online presentation by Philip Carr-Gomm & RoMa Johnson (includes a webinar for the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation in Mexico)

Every blessing of the season to you!

A blog post from the excellent Contemplative Enquiry arrived this morning and it feels relevant to this tea, so here it is: