For We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray

Sometimes we have to sit back and ask ourselves where we are going.
It is easy to get into a rut. Or find ourselves at a dead end with no sense of direction.
We had a visit by five Herdwick Sheep a couple of weeks ago. Evidently they had been loose around the immediate area for a few days. They are lovely creatures and I had no objection to their visit as long as they didn't stay long. (We made sure of that) It was the tup's fault. A handsome male, that tup. Those ewes wouldn't let him out of their sight — where he went the ewes were sure to go. Too often humans can be just like those sheep.
But we don't need another person to send us astray. We can follow an ideal, an ambition, a desire, an obsession. Then maybe stop and realise somewhere along the road we have lost 'our way'.
I have done that more than once. I have been sitting and doing a bit of thinking today. New patterns for a way forward have come to mind.
However, at the moment I'm more concerned for a group of people (who consider themselves Christian) that could, through the preaching of one man, cause the death of very many (if not thousands) of people. What are they trying to prove by burning the holy book of another religion? The only destruction our stray sheep could do would be to ruin a patch of garden. Let's hope these zealots will see the light before setting fire to a bonfire which could sweep across continents leaving nothing but hatred and death in its wake.

Paradise Lost

Go to my Writing For Joy blog for a fuller post and photographs.

The sea at Whitehaven.


We had only been home just over a week, when a dreadful happening took place in the very area we visited. Twelve dead, eleven seriously injured. One suicide.
Who was Derrick Bird? What made him snap and shoot his brother, colleagues, friends and neighbours? Twelve deaths and eleven injuries, some life-threatening. Then his own life. The horror is too great for my mind to taken in.
Those injured and dead, and their loved ones, are not the only victims. A mother has lost her twin sons — one of them having killed the other. Cain and Abel came to mind.
At present I feel strangely detached. I know, deep down, we all have a darker side. We learn to have mastery over it and use it creatively. Even to the extent of only recognising our ‘shadow’ as a force for creativity. But is also a place, a cellar, where our ‘demons’ live. Once the ‘policeman’ dwelling in our ‘upper’ mind — the authority voice, a combination of ‘voices’ that taught us right from wrong— is subdued, then restraint has gone and all hell is let loose. Even so, it is premature to speculate.
But we do need to understand what makes people break under pressure, that is, if we want to avoid these dreadful tragedies.