Jill Rees: Welcome Press

I wake up, and look at my clock in disbelief. It is already twenty past eight in the morning, and still dark outside. It has been unnaturally cold, below freezing for weeks now.   I turn on the radio to hear stories about snow storms and crashes on the motorways. Hospitals have closed because of the ‘vomiting bug’, and people have been asked to stay at home if they are ill, instead of seeing a doctor, and not to call the emergency services as all the ambulances are out.

It is rarely worth seeing a doctor in the UK anyway, as they usually miss important symptoms of real illnesses and they refuse to treat minor ones in cost cutting drives. If you have a bad stomach, they will tell you to rest and drink boiled water or coca cola. If you have a cold, they recommend paracetomol. If you are coughing, they advise that you come back in a fortnight if it isn’t any better. Bizarrely, this usually works, and you tend to be either better in two weeks as predicted, or you have given in and driven yourself to hospital to save the ambulances.

I sit up in the half-light at last, feeling definitely a bit groggy at all this. Have I got the vomiting bug coming on, or am I just tired after so long at work in the cold and dark? Every morning, I drive to work in the dark, and it is dark when I get back at four in the afternoon. Yesterday, I saw my garden for the first time in ages, and remembered all the jobs I didn’t get done in November because the ground was icy. Too late now, I will have to wait until February, if February ever comes.

Now that the festivities are done, our bellies still swollen with the ridiculous quantities of all the foods that are bad for us but so delicious, and our heads still swimming with booze, now is the time to think about what we have done this year and what we should be doing next year. It’s not easy of course. What a ridiculous season to have a tradition of looking to the future. I can barely raise my head off the pillow.

There is an illness in these parts known as SAD, Seasonally Adjusted Disorder. It is apparently caused by not having enough sunlight, which causes a lack of vital vitamins and makes one depressed.

Incidentally if you have pale skin, you only need 10 minutes of daylight to stay healthy and to get the benefits of the vitamin D in the sun’s rays. If your skin is darker, you will need a lot more time in the daylight. This can be very difficult when if you blink the day is already over. Vitamin deficiency caused by lack of light is prevalent in darker skinned people in the UK, especially Indian and Pakistani women in London and other cities. Extra vitamins A and D are provided free for these women when they are pregnant, to prevent rickets in the children. So you can see it is a very risky thing to live so far north in the winter time.

However I have come to believe that SAD is actually caused by the number one and number two in the music download charts being different versions of the same song, the doomed and damned Halleluyah by Leonard Cohen.

Originally he wrote an optimistic end, pledging his allegiance and trust in God no matter what.

And even though
It all went wrong
I’ll stand before the lord of song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Now however it seems to have transmigrated, like everything else, into utter misery. When the (deceased) Jeff Buckley sings in his misery, you do look for the razor blades to slit your wrists. Even worse is that awful woman who was on the TV show where you have to waste your telephone bill voting for non-musicians auditioning for a talent scout (a job that used to be done by an actual person so that we the public wouldn’t have to listen to singers unless they had been judged good enough to record. Now not only do we do the talent scout’s job, we have to pay for the privilege. And viewers are lining up!) So perhaps it isn’t so surprising the song has a gloomy end now:

It’s not somebody who’s seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

And though you listen to this desperate record of lost faith, somehow the depth of religious feeling in oneself grows even stronger, as if God is seen in the interstices between the desolations and lost hopes and dreams of our foolish petty lives.

In these times of global doom when everything seems to be collapsing and when gloom and hopelessness abound as people everywhere lose their jobs, industries collapse and our wars seem even more pointless than ever, people played each other this song over the internet and bought and downloaded it so it has turned out to be the song voted our number one for the holy season. In this materialistic and nasty dog-eat-dog world, the song of our time is this serious, deep, compassionate and ultimately inspiring message of hope that we share, all the world together. And there’s some magic in that.

So here and now, as we reflect about all the things we have yet again failed to achieve in 2008, hope draws us still to make new resolutions and new determinations for 2009. Let’s try again! Let’s dream up some new challenges! This indefatigability of the human spirit is after all what makes life worth living. And one day, if we keep aiming high, if we keep on dreaming, all people may just come together over our dreams of peace and justice, and make this tiny determination of ours, number one in the world.

999 words

©Jill Rees

22 December 2008

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Tags: determinations, faith, gloom and good cheer, God, Halleluyah, New Year 2009, resolution.

Today is not a day for soundbites, but I can feel the hand of history upon us. Today is the first day of the Soka Educators International Network week-long seminar in Bridgwater, Somerset, UK. It is fitting that Bridgwater is a post-modern industrial town and a total non-entity, since Soka, or value-creating, education is for the liberation and happiness of all people, however ordinary, however unacademic, wherever they live, whatever resources they have access to. This week will determine how the educators in SEIN, currently members of Soka Gakkai International Buddhist Organisation, proceed to find ways to support the world’s students and children by applying the ideas and beliefs of the founder of Soka Education, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi.

Soka Education, or Value-creation in education, isn’t originally a Buddhist ideology. The connection is that the educator Makiguchi first founded Soka Kyochi Gakkai, the society for value creation in education, in Japan in 1930, and later himself became a Nichiren Buddhist, realising that his humanistic ideas are in fact Buddhistic and are more powerful coming from the Buddhist faith.

My personal desire, or mission, is to enable all educators to benefit from Soka ideas, whether or not they be Buddhists, so that these wonderful humanistic methods which enable children to be happy at schol and to develop as they should naturally, can be to the benefit of all children in the world. These ideas are based on absolute respect for each individual child, and are the human right of every child.

Today some of the founder members of SEIN are getting together to discuss a varieyt of issues relating to SEIN activities, sustainable education and systemic analysis. They are: Stephanie Tansey, founder of humanistic schools in China and Turkmenistan, trainer in dialogue skills, author of the Handbook on Dialogue skills and founder of Dialogue workshops in Israel; Constance Haig, technical writer for NASA ; Jill Rees author here, consultant and trainer for sustainable education and acting teacher; Elissa Lewis, specialist in Systemic Family Therapy and the work of Gregory Bateson; Martin Rees, computer and webpage designer and trainer in Information Technology. Others may appear during the week.

Some of our discussions wil be about, SEIN Forum 6 which is to start shortly and will be in Portuguese; Systemic Ideology and how it relates to education; implementation of Soka education in the wider educational sphere; as well as more Buddhist-linked topics.

We are a Buddhist group, followers of Mr Makiguchi our mentor and founder of Soka Education, his disciple Josei Toda, educator, and his disciple and current President of SGI Daisaku Ikeda. These discussions are based on our Buddhist practise and are a faith activity. They will assuredly lead out into the secular world, enabling many more humanistic activities to proceed. This is my wish for this week’s discussions, and an espression of my desire to fulfil my vow to the Buddha to enable all beings to become absolutely fulfilled and happy in their own lives.

I will report on these discussions on this site under Buddhist Education during the week. Anyone who is interested and the other SEIN members are asked to please contribute to the discussion. The current blog is on at the following site: http://sein2008.blogspot.com/

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Tags: access, Bridgwater, Buddhism, Buddhist, buddhist faith, buddhist organisation, Buddhistic, Buddhists, dialogue workshops, disciple, faith, Gregory Bateson, history, Humanism, humanistic education, humanistic methods, liberation, mission, nasa, Organisation, respect, SEIN, SGI, Soka, Soka Educators International Network, Soka Gakkai International, Tsunesaburo, Turkmenistan, Value-creation.