Facebook Memorials

http://www.somethingawful.com/comedy-goldmine/paranormal-conspiracy-ghosts/1/

What happens to a person's Facebook account when they die?

I have occasionally wondered what would happen to all my on-line accounts if I were to die unexpectedly. On Facebook, for example, would my smiling face still come up on lists of 'People You May Know'? Would I still get friend requests from people who hadn't heard the news of my death? 

Fortunately, FB have already thought of this, and the story of how this came about can bee seen here:

http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/memories-of-friends-departed-endure-on-facebook/163091042130

Incidentally the policy has today changed so that the privacy settings on the account remain unchanged after death. So, depending on these settings, you can still see all those embarrassing snaps taken at the party or the photos of them lying on a beach in Crete. You can still see their timeline showing what they did on FB, as well as all the books, films and TV shows they loved and the causes they supported. And you can write your tribute on their wall.

In short, you have a virtual shrine dedicated to them.

I wrote in a previous post that we need memorials to friends and family who have died. This does not have to be a gravestone though. Imagine a memorial park where each person's name is linked by QR code or Bluetooth to a memorial Facebook page. You could sit in the tranquil setting where their remains are laid, looking at their old photos and videos on your mobile phone, and using an app (not yet developed), leave some virtual flowers to mark your visit.

Isn't science wonderful?

10/02/14 Life Goes On

Sunday of last week was Candlemas. In the Christian Church, it marks the presentation of Jesus at the Temple and is celebrated by the lighting and/or blessing of candles. The day is also known as Imbolc, Groundhog Day, and Brigid's Day, among other names. Brigid is the Pagan mother Goddess; the name Brigid is related to the word 'bright' and the root 'bel', meaning fair or beautiful; the pagan day marks the rebirth of the sun after Winter. In terms of the seasons, the day is half-way between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox, the point where the year turns to look towards Spring. In agricultural terms, it marks the return to work on the land, when the first shoots are starting to show.

At this time of year, Wiccans will light multiple candles. It is traditional upon Imbolc, at sunset or just after ritual, to light every lamp in the house - if only for a few moments. Or, light candles in each room in honour of the Sun’s rebirth.
http://www.thewhitegoddess.co.uk/the_wheel_of_the_year/imbolc.asp

While this practice is rare today, it can still be seen on December 13th in Sweden, St Lucia's Day.

Around Christmas time in Sweden, one of the biggest celebrations is St. Lucia's Day (or St. Lucy's Day) on December 13th. The celebration comes from stories that were told by Monks who first brought Christianity to Sweden.

St Lucia was a young Christian girl who was martyred, killed for her faith, in 304AD. The most common story told about St Lucia is that she would secretly bring food to the persecuted Christians in Rome, who lived in hiding in the catacombs under the city. She would wear candles on her head so she had both her hands free to carry things. Lucy means 'light' so this is a very appropriate name.

December 13th was also the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, in the old 'Julian' Calendar and a pagan festival of lights in Sweden was turned into St. Lucia's Day.

St. Lucia's Day is now celebrated by a girl dressing in a white dress with a red sash round her waist and a crown of candles on her head. Small children use electric candles but from about 12 years old, real candles are used!

The crown is made of Lingonberry branches which are evergreen and symbolise new life in winter. Schools normally have their own St. Lucia's and some town and villages also choose a girl to play St. Lucia in a procession where carols are sung.

A national Lucia is also chosen. Lucias also visit hospitals and old people's homes singing a song about St Lucia and handing out 'Pepparkakor', ginger snap biscuits.

Small children sometimes like dressing up as Lucia (with the help of their parents!). Also boys might dress up as 'Stjärngossar' (star boys) and girls might be 'tärnor' (like Lucia but without the candles).

http://www.whychristmas.com/cultures/sweden.shtml

 Here is a beautiful clip of this ceremony.



The words mean:

Night walks with a heavy step Round yard and hearth, As the sun departs from earth, Shadows are brooding. There in our dark house, Walking with lit candles, Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia!

Night walks grand, yet silent, Now hear its gentle wings, In every room so hushed, Whispering like wings. Look, at our threshold stands, White-clad with light in her hair, Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia!

Darkness shall take flight soon, From earth's valleys. So she speaks Wonderful words to us: A new day will rise again From the rosy sky… Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia!

There is a deep innate sense hard-wired into all of us that, for every Winter there will be a Spring;  for every end there will be a new beginning; for every despair there will be new hope; for everyone left alone there will be new love.

When the night has been too lonely
and the road has been too long,
and you think that love is only
for the lucky and the strong,
just remember in the winter
far beneath the bitter snows
lies the seed that with the sun's love
in the spring becomes the rose.

 "The Rose" Amanda McBroom (sung by Bette Midler)

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Gods Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins 

We know about the carbon cycle and the water cycle; we know the Laws of Conservation of Mass and Energy; Syd Barrett paraphrases the I-Ching: "Things cannot be destroyed once and for all." Even the cells of our bodies die and are replaced while our lives carry on. In astronomy. stars and planets are born out of the dust of supernovae, and if the planets have life, that life is made of stardust. How inspiring that our beautiful Earth and all its plants and animals were born out of the death of a star.

We know that when we die, our children and all the generations to come will continue to live as we lived, breathing the same air that we breathed.

Since ancient times, wisdom has held that our lives continue after our bodily death. Sufis believe that we pass through a lengthy recycling process, eventually returning to live once again on this planet.

Or do we just end? Are we destroyed once and for all? Does it even makes sense to expect a factual answer when we have a far greater Truth?

5/02/2014 From ghoulies and ghosties

From ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night Good Lord deliver us. (Traditional)

One of my brother's friends had a case of things going bump in the night. Doors slamming, to be precise. There was no rational explanation. Other things happened. Very often the kettle would turn itself on at the electric point. Objects were moved from one room to another. Things became worse as he was about to take a contract in Holland. Something had to be done.

Following a recommendation, he travelled to see a specialist in hauntings. The medium didn't even have to visit the property; she told him the whole story of a woman deserted by a lover who had promised to return but never did. This ghost had now formed an attachment for my brother's friend, and didn't want him to leave. So the medium arranged for spirit 'on the other side' to provide a safe escort to enable the ghost to move on.

This is all a lot of tosh, right? There are no such things as ghosts. What you see is what you get. Ghosts are for the gullible.

Maybe.

But the doors never slammed again, and the kettle stayed off.

Not the house I stayed in

I have stayed in a house that seemed perfectly normal in every way. On the semi-basement level there was a dining room and kitchen, and a door to the back garden. On the other side of the stairway was the playroom. The odd thing was that no-one ever played there. In fact, no-one went there at all, unless they had to get something. The other odd thing was that you didn't linger on the stairs outside that room. You got up those stairs as fast as possible. You didn't spend much time alone in the dining room either, but if you had to, you stayed on the side away from the playroom. There was no story to explain all this; that was just how it was.

A recent lottery winner had dreamed of winning, every night for a week, before he won.

There are many accounts of Aboriginal Australians suddenly leaving on foot with the words "My brother is sick. I must go to him", and returning after three months having walked 500 miles, tended the brother, and walked back.

Whole books have been filled with real-life stories like these. You'd think we would learn. How many trees do we need to count before we see the wood?

Human life is not grounded in facts or in science, although we are rather good at it. We live on another level, the realm of feelings, emotions, courage, belief, love, sensitivity  - the list goes on - but we don't learn these things on the national curriculum. What we are taught is that none of them exist, and so all our humanity is squeezed out of us until nothing is left but this shell we call a body.

What we need is more mystery. We need ceremonies and rituals for all significant occasions in our lives, from being born, being named, coming of age, and so on right through to death and burial. These rituals will link us to one another, our history and our future, to the earth and the stars, to all of our hopes and fears, to the one life that lives in everything for all time and beyond time. This is what it means to be alive. To be really alive.

31/01/14 Heaven and Hell

The closer you get to the meaning

The sooner you'll know that you're dreaming

(from Heaven and Hell by Black Sabbath)

Let me tell you about a couple of dreams I have had. The first was when I had a bad reaction to Prozac, following the death of my parents. In one nightmare night, punctuated by frequent violent awakenings that felt like electric shocks, I dreamt I went to Hell.

I felt myself being dragged at speed by an unseen hand across a black scorched landscape towards a precipice. At the last moment I was roughly pulled back from the edge and I was shown what lay beyond. I saw, far, far down, another even darker plain, a land of infinite blackness, a land from which there could be no return. I was permitted only a few moments to take this in before being forcibly taken back the way I came. I awoke with another wrenching spasm, cold and perspiring.

The other dream was a few years ago, after my first career had hit the rocks, and my second was about to crash. It was a three-part dream. In the first part I was killed while trying to escape urban warfare. In the second, I was making contact with something that looked rather like one of a number of distant moving dots. In the final part I awoke to find myself on a bench positioned on what seemed to be a quay which curved gently out to sea, although the sea was only guessed at. When I stood up I saw that someone had been quietly waiting for me. All I could see in the middle and far distance was suffused in white light, which gave everything a misty appearance, and I realised I was in Heaven. "Ah" I said to the other, "so it's true, there really is a heaven". It's hard to describe the scene because I experienced it in ways beyond my five senses. There was an infinite peace, but not a dead silence, more a matrix of infinite possibilities. Night no longer followed day; day would last as long as I wanted it to. The peace was all around and the peace was in me.

I didn't know what to say next, so I started to thank my host, but at that point the dream dissolved.

What do I make of all this? Do I believe in Heaven and Hell? I have often pondered this question, but I still can't bring myself to believe in Hell, even having seen it with my own dreaming eyes. I think on both occasions I was shown what I needed to see. I had needed to confront the depth of my despair in order to overcome it. I had needed to be reminded that there was more to life than just my career.

My own view is that, if there is an afterlife, it will be in the place we have prepared in this life. So it won't be a shock; it will be exactly what we expected. I think the Kingdom of Heaven starts here and now, it is within touching distance as Jesus said.

Photo:Wikipedia

By the way, if you click on the Harry Potter picture you will be taken to another blog. Click on the link "The Head Project", and on the page that comes up there is a video, which I recommend you watch.

30/01/14

• 1 million people across the globe die by suicide each year. That’s one suicide every 40 seconds.
• More people die by suicide each year than by murder and war combined.

• It’s estimated that approximately 5% of people attempt suicide at least once in their life.
• Between 10% and 14% of the general population have suicidal thinking throughout their lifetime.

• Suicide is the second biggest cause of death worldwide among 15-19 year olds.
• 100,000 adolescents die by suicide every year.

www.samaritans.org

"Don't kill yourself" Fat said. "Move in with me. I'm all alone"...
"It would really make me feel terrible" Fat said. "For the rest of my life, if you did away with yourself". Thereby, as he later realized, he presented her with all the wrong reasons for living. She would be doing it as a favour to others. He could not have found a worse reason to give had he looked for years. Better to back the VW over her. This is why suicide hotlines are not manned by nitwits.
Valis by Philip K. Dick

"Everybody hurts, sometimes" R.E.M.

Samaritans

CALL US

• 08457 90 90 90 * (UK)
• 1850 60 90 90 * (ROI)

27/01/14 Not so much a program, more a way of life

Ubuntu is a computer operating system derived from Linux, which is a variant of Unix. Microsoft is going to withdraw support from its popular XP operating system later this year, forcing the millions of XP users to buy Windows 7 (querky) or worse still, Windows 8 (a complete disaster). Ubuntu on the other hand is free.

Ubuntu is also a socio-political philosophy with its origins in Southern Africa. The name roughly translated means "humanness". At its core is the idea that our lives are not our own. Rather they are built up from the reflections we see in other members of our community. This is nicely expressed in the book "Cloud Atlas": 

Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb we are bound to others past and present, and by each crime and every kindness we birth our future.

The ramifications of this are many, from the idea of sharing and the common good, to the practice of restorative, rather than retributive, justice. I see Ubuntu as a timely counterweight to the rampant individualism and materialism we now live with.

It occurred to me that if our lives are not our own, then it follows that our deaths are not ours alone either. I was very moved when I read recently that after the death of Lawrence Anthony,who bravely rescued wildlife and rehabilitated elephants all over the globe from human atrocities, a total of 31 elephants patiently walked over 12 miles to get to his South African house. They stayed for two days and nights without eating. Then one morning, they left, making their long journey back home. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153168394075650&set=a.236505725649.299035.64803335649&type=1&theater

It has often been said that when someone we know dies, a part of us dies with them. But the converse is equally true: as long as we live and remember them together, the one we knew still lives among us. Jesus said "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them."

I think I might get Ubuntu, but I wouldn't want to keep it to myself.

Prequel

Written 12th September 2006, Jimena, Andalucia

This is the snapshot of the moment.

I'm sitting on the tiled roof, a few shirts listlessly rocking in the quiet air.

Above and on my left, the old Moorish castle walls crumbling defiantly while chickens cluck and cocks crow.

Below me and on my right the jig-saw pieces of mottled tiles and white walls lie strewn and seemingly forgotten down the hillside to the centre, where the church tower clangs mechanically to an absent audience.

Beyond the town, fields and trees, green and tawny gold, barking dogs, snoring cars sleepily following some distant purpose of their own, reduced to the scale of ants by the mountains which rise is a grey-blue haze to the white-whisped blue warm sky.

This is a snapshot of me in chains. For as long as I strive to capture the moment, to have it and hold it, to freeze it and dry it, to pin it on the wall and admire it, for as long as I try to own the view, I shall never be a part of it. Every line I write is a line drawn between me and my desire. All my snapshots are scenes seen from the bars of my cell.

Just as your true-love can never truly love you until you give her freedom, so no picture, no music, no moment can be saved for a rainy day; it will fall through a hole in your pocket; it will turn sour. Love is shown in the letting go. So let these times sing for you, dance for you, then let them leave the stage. Drink the wine while it is warm and drink ye all of it. Gather the manna while it is fresh and save none for later. God is in the downs as well as the ups; he is in the valley of the shadow of death and on the banks of Sheol. He is on the mountain top. The moment sits like a dandelion seed in the palm of your hand then you blow it away with a wish and it is gone over the wall and out of sight.

How can you have a holiday that lasts forever? How many sights do you have to see before you can sleep in the sand? How many postcards to buy, how many sangrias to sink? One morning you wake to find yourself at home though you have not moved, and you cannot think a clear thought for the confetti of casual acquaintances, and you cannot see out for all the sights you have taken in.

First then, for the holiday of a lifetime, you must give away the holiday and then go. Enjoy the flight out; enjoy the flight back; enjoy the sun; enjoy the rain. Enjoy the friendship of others; enjoy the friendship of yourself. Find peace in the noise; find a poem in a drop of water.

-------------------------------

Now I am in the garden. Pen in one hand, beer in the other. It's warmer now. Water clatters into the pool while the fountain motor whirls. I sit in the dappled shade of an orange tree, my feet on the cool cobbles. Curious friendly ants explore my arms and feet. A fly fidgets forgetfully before flying off. I look down the dusty red-flagged steps to the dark cool of the house, where, out of sight on the couch, a guest ginger cat sleeps insouciant, head back, eyes narrowed to a smile of bliss. I immerse myself in the moment, screw it up and throw it away; a moment later it comes back, having freshened up. Such is the grace of God.