Skip to main content

Who Am I?

I've had two pieces of news in the past 24 hours. One is a date for my operation: Saturday June 21. The odds are that they'll whip out the prostate and, apart from the possibility of some embarrassing and, I hope, temporary side effects, I should be good to go for another couple of decades at least.

The other news is that I am sick. I have a piece of paper, signed by an actual doctor, which tells me so. Of course I already knew this but now, it's official and I am on sick leave not study leave. I'm an invalid, not a scholar. I marked my new found decrepitude by getting over -well, almost - the hacking cough which I've had for almost 3 weeks and by going for a long vigorous walk and taking some photographs.

It's odd how different I felt walking out of the doctor's office with my envelope in my hand. I was free not to sit with my tricky books. I was free to think about this illness, and what the rest of my life might bring, and how I might reshape my lifestyle to extract every bit of life I possibly can out of the (extremely long, if you don't mind, please Lord) time left to me.

What we believe about ourselves determines almost everything else. Our self perception will determine our values, our way of relating to others, the care or otherwise we display to ourselves, the love we will lavish on this lovely planet gifted to us, the measure of faith, hope and love which we will carry with us always . And I mean, always. The determining nature of our self perception is why personal faith is perhaps the most important single attribute of our lives. As Carl Jung said, there is not a single psychological or lifestyle problem that is not in the final analysis a spiritual problem. This time is important for reflection on my being -body, mind and spirit, and I have a new freedom to pursue it. No more dry scholarly stuff for me!

So now, poor invalid that I am, what will I do tomorrow with my new found freedom? I think, early in the morning, after my Bible reading and prayer/contemplation, I'll sit down, with the sermons of Meister Eckhart. I'll read some of them, and make notes and ponder the difficult points he is making. I think I'd really enjoy that.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Kelvin - I am sure you would have heard of the golden rectangle and fibonacci numbers. Do you use this concept conciously in your photographs?
Kelvin Wright said…
Yes. The fibonacci sequence lies behind the most basic and widely used rule of thumb in photographic composition: the rule of thirds.
Kelvin Wright said…
Your question prompted me to look at the photos on this page. Of the 7 shots only 2 are composed using the Ro3. Maybe I don't use it as often as I thought I did.
Anonymous said…
When it is used there is a quiet harmony to the photos. I have, amongst many other books, been reading about fibonacci numbers and marvel at their pervasiveness in the universe. The golden rectangle (a function of these numbers) is in evidence in everything from the pyramids to the profile of an egg, to the face of the Mona Lisa. An interesting experiment is to take a golden rectangle (I think - ratio 1:618) and cut off a carefully measured square from it. You are left with another golden rectangle.
Millions of artists, architects and photographers use it deliberately to create balanced and harmonious creations.
Anonymous said…
Kelvin, if I might be so bold, I'd like to recommend that you read some Alexander McCall Smith his stories set in Africa, and in Scotland, are full of spiritual insight, and they are truly lovely to read. You might start with The Number One Ladies Detective Agency, and work from there. I always feel uplifted after I read something of his, although it might sound like fluff to a scholar like you! Smith is also a scholar, and a keen observer of life as well, and if you are languishing about not studying, reading something joyful will surely improve your sense of well-being! If you do read and like his stuff, and say so in your blog, I'll tell you who I am!

Be well, and God bless!
Anonymous said…
Kelvin, You know better than me...finding a health problem is help from God for pointing out to go find cure. We never are free...Wherever we go..we bring with ourselves our conscious and subconscious mind...By not thinking of the health issue after all is settled with the doctor is the best medicine..Yes..you are free to go and SEE and document Gods world...and bring it back to us...with a special point of view from your Soul..God had blessed you Kelvin...and that is eternal...you will be fine...and see the difference of thinking about this world and all of us in it...Your photography is outstanding...but now close this chapter and begin a new one...the difference in depth of seeing and thinking will be amazing to all of us to see...I am walking on your path of freshly discovered condition for what there is NO cure...just extending life...and I take each day as a gift from God..and pray for everybody ill...Will come back to see your very deep meditation...as the situation shifted YOU already to other paths and views..Wish you successful surgery..will make a special prayer as I do for all who ask me on WS..and you will see how easy all be gone.. A paper is good to free your TIME to better meditations and less responsibilities...And you have your family...What a blessing..I outlived each and every one of my family on face of this earth...Good Health to You in Gods name...Da Nomad
Anonymous said…
Kelvin - Recently finding out about your illness will reveal that I have not been to St. John's for many weeks, but I want to thank you for the wonderful Sundays when I heard your sermons and felt so welcome in your parish. You seem to be taking your illness in stride and you are proving to be an enlightened individual yourself. I cannot offer any bits of wisdom (others seem to have that covered!) but I do wish you well, and again, I thank you most sincerely for your generous spirit. I wish you a quick recovery and many happy years ahead!

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old