Connected

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I wonder how many conversations you have been engaged in today? How much eye contact, argument, celebration, compassion, healing, helping, hoping, learning, listening, mourning, speaking, tenderness, touch, understanding, writing?

And I wonder how much distance has been lessened by all of the above? How connected we’re able to feel with our fellow pilgrim-explorers on the face of this beautiful and extraordinary – but complex and sometimes tragic – earth?

To my surprise, I’ve had to revisit my count for the day – there’s been far more connection than I at first recalled when my question arose; and the types and variety of connections have been wide – all covering, so to speak, a lot of ground.

This often astonishing array of worldwide connection is the daily stuff of my life – of our lives. And in each connected dew-drop shimmering in the web there are untold depths and reach of reflection and of prospect. Alone but accompanied, I come to the close of another day aware of many levels of gratefulness – and of love.

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Improvisation

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It’s an extraordinary world. Not so very long ago I could never have imagined I’d be keeping company – while seated right here in the UK – with piano improvisation teachers based in both South Africa and the Netherlands. There’s so much potential for good in a communicating and connected world. My friend in South Africa teaches a form of improvised ‘authentic singing’ alongside a piano improvisation that relies a great deal upon practised listening. Singing and playing today enabled at least some outlet for my frustrated sense that asking innocents fleeing from war zones to jump through well-nigh-impossible administrative hoops is – whichever way one looks at it – just fundamentally wrong. When our fears and ‘what ifs’ purport to trump the various degrees of hell from which millions are fleeing we’re in desperate need of some new improvisations. We need to be singing entirely new songs for our fellows from Ukraine – just as, one day, we might need them to sing some for us …