Sunday, August 17, 2003

Daughter day ........it has been so long, too long since we saw our Sheilas. The have been working abroad and I suppose so have I. To get them both around is great and love it love it....................... Champagne.
We just hang out together so fine and catch up by talking about everything and nothing and watching MTV. Champagne.
I feel good with them. I feel happy. I feel beautiful. They tell me like it is of course. The advice flows free ......... from them to me! The let it flow to Mother too ...... and paint the toenails. Champagne.

Unpacking the vids and cd's from Prague was on the cards too. Then the repack for ~Greenbelt. Which vids to take to show? What else will I need for the 'grit' workshop. These are the only days to prep before venturing to Greenbelt on Thursday.

The 5 day weather looks good but I can only see ahead to Thursday.

It is late now. I have put Zig the cat to bed. The Champagne glasses remain unwashed. The three are all to bed. Me too. zzzzzzzzzzzzz

The thirty book about the life of Greenbelt is SO stinking fab.

see you there eh?

bhp
"work like you don't need the money
dance like no-one is watching
sing like no-one is listening
and
love like you have never been hurt"

www.pipwilson.com

Saturday, August 16, 2003

Feeling disconnected at Goodison Park, Cathedral of Football, today. There to watch the first game of the new season, the odd thing about this was that the game itself was taking place in North London.

The club rightly anticipated that there would be a demand for this, and so set up a live big-screen 'beamback' pitchside at the Park End. So me, and seven or eight thousand others found ourselves doing what we always do at the game - applauding the players onto the pitch, oooh-ing and booing at incidents within the game, shouting at the ref, going crazy when our team scored. Most of the time conscious of the fact that these events were taking place 200 miles away, that they couldn't hear us at Highbury. Probably just as well for (shirtlifter-provocateur) Thierry Henry.

I've been feeling disconnected from Greenbelt too, recently. At a time of year I'm usually making calls, making plans, making lists like Rachel below, I've been immersed in the trauma of two child deaths and their consequent funerals. Reading emails and others' enthusiastic blogs, I've been aware that something's due to be happening soon in Cheltenham. This week, hopefully, I'll make the connection. After all, only five days and we'll be on our way there. FIVE DAYS!!!!

Friday, August 15, 2003

I have really been off the blog planet of late.
Now I am back from Prague and weeks of preparation I slide wondrously into Greenbelt which is my soul-home. Love it love it.

Greenbelt has such a good published programme and yet I am always shocked and delighted by the new things, the passionate things - all coming from pulling 15000 members of Gods creation together to party!

I have returned from the Prague experience with all sorts of buzz. I will turn it into sense for my soul and I guess you will read some of it. It is incredible on the back of all that, going into my mission as a group worker and leading groups to knife their own soul in search of honesty. Setting a scene in a climate of trust where people can share and be honest with such things as 'feelings'. Also taking that risk to be open about the scars from the past which linger on. It is a MASSIVE learning for me and I am sure for them as we search out the meaning of life. Often from a life of failure which includes drugs, prison, family conflict, drink, low self esteem and more.

I love the adventure of self discovery and group learning. A group talking and listening. I feel so close as we share. Thanx for and to you if we have shared over the years. You have helped to mold me. God has helped to mold me through you. Thank you for showing me what God is like through your personality and character which is made in Gods image.

love it
bhp

Thursday, August 14, 2003

Hot Dog Vendor: "What do you want?"
The Dalai Lama: "Make me one with everything."

Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Beautiful Imperfection.
__________________
I had my arm around Charlie on the main stage in Prague. She was opening up herself. She was willing to talk honestly about her compulsive behaviors past and present.

Charlie has over 500 cuts to her body. The hot weather and the need to clothe lightly revealed the self harm to the ymca festival goers. "......and people just stared" she said. "The worst time was when I went into McDonalds just near the festival site and the people in the four long queues just turned and turned their heads, time and time again."
"I felt stripped"

She shared with me before she was interviewed on main stage that no-one had spoken to her. Just stared. During the interview she made it clear she is always willing to talk with people. In fact just before she came on our stage 'one' person from my crew, a young German man called Monty, had been the only person to be open and proactive in conversation. She felt alone at the festival. Among 7500 people.

Little baby nothing ----------------------
is the tattoo across her chest for all to see. Charlie is a remarkable woman of 22 who suffered a massive dose of self harming compulsive behavior between the ages of 15 and 17. Still fighting the anorexia type illness, she carries the scars of her past that others of us, with different scars, can hide.

She survived Prague and enjoyed some. She coped with being alone, the eating hurdles, not depressed, handled the insensitivity of others (including mine) and still able to articulate the experience and then say to me........... "It was a learning experience!"

We have sat and talked. Opened and dug into the feelings (she is so stinking good at 'feelings') She knows there is a journey ahead into wholeness and she is up for it.

She is a remarkable woman who is fighting something unique. She and me want to let everyone know the reality of all this. This learning experience needs to be that for everyone. The minority people 'alone' as well as the big groups of active singing and dancing and the crowds.

"BEAUTIFUL IMPERFECTION" was a workshop which was cancelled in Prague. She had planned to go. For me she she walks tall alongside these words.

pip and charlie bhp

Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Two years ago today, 12 August 2001, fans of Kirsty MacColl erected a memorial bench to her in Soho Square, London. The singer died in a swimming accident three years ago, and I was just reading about her in City journal, as Goldsmiths College are now offering a scholarship in her name.

The bench seems a fitting memorial. MacColl celebrated the place in a song on Titanic Days called Soho Square, "a place where lovers often meet, a place of awkward and sometimes illicit encounters", as the City article describes it. A bench is a good choice (rather than a statue or fountain, for example) because from benches, watchful people observe life, on benches conversations take place. And Kirsty MacColl was an acute observer of life, city life, her songs caringly express the rise and fall of lovers' conversations. "She was a storyteller in the sense that Walter Benjamin meant it, i.e. those whose 'counsel, woven into the fabric of real life, is wisdom'." (City, quoting Benjamin's Illuminations) Which is why it's fitting that her name will support students of 'culture, globalisation and the city' in their research.

All this got me thinking about benches. My favourite recent bench was one I discovered halfway up the steep climb into the wooded hills above Crinan Harbour. It's on a bend, where the trees clear and the view down to the harbour opens up into a wonderful panorama sweeping across the Sound of Jura, taking in the small isles of Scarba, Luing, Shuna, and Mull beyond. That bench is the gift of a local woman who evidently enjoyed that walk so much that she wanted to share her love of that view by offering grateful travellers the use of that wonderfully-positioned seat for generations to come.

If I were to choose a bench for myself, where would it be? Perhaps on the promenade at Llandudno. This could be a real sign of my age, but since being a teenager cycling or motorbiking to that destination I've always loved sitting there, breathing in the good air and that generous open Irish Sea view. Or closer to home, I'd love a bench on top of Everton Heights, this city's best vantage point. Looking out from a bench here, the buildings of the city tumble together beneath your feet, almost spilling into the Mersey, and in the distance the Irish Sea again features. So close to the minutae of the city's life, it's a place for breathing in the bigger picture.

My two favourite Greenbelt vantage points: that scaffolding tower once built in the middle of the festival village at Odell comes to mind. More recently, I enjoyed sitting astride the horse statue on a high level corner of the Grandstand looking down over the lovely people during the communion service in 2001. I was probably breaking site rules, I admit, but I didn't sit there too long - it's not as comfortable as a bench would be....