Casting Stones
Dancing Boys
Dear Friend,
The wood pigeons must be on the roof this morning. Their cooing feels like it’s inside me. Yesterday my friend Suella told me she’d found a VHS copy of an arts documentary I’d made at university. The story centres around a troupe of boys and their experiences with ballet on a Bristol housing estate. It’s about one of the inspiring cultural programs initiated by the late Vic Ecclestone in Hartcliffe, Bristol.
I’d thought the documentary was lost forever after I lent my surviving only copy to a tutor and then lost touch with them. How lovely to have it turn up, unearthed in a clear out. I found the picture below online, it was taken the year Vic won teacher of the year.
It turned up as Suella is getting ready to move houses.
The theme of change is very much in the air. I wonder how it is for you? The main message of the Labour Party election campaign in the UK is about change, so maybe that’s a contributing factor, and maybe it’s that as a species, humans are waking up to the need for change in the ways we live and connect with one another and the planet.
It’s complicated with humans.
We resist change on a personal and collective level. That’s okay. Part of a process of evolving consciousness across a great sweeping arch of time. The scale is beyond what our minds can really get a hold of.
Just to know that we, in this moment are evolving.
To become aware of the mental maps and the identities we’ve constructed is a big step for humanity collectively and individually. You see progressive ideas labelled and dismissed. Woke is one of the terms that I don’t fully get, but is being used as an insult.
The thing is that every one of us has an ego identity.
Refusing to judge others and trying our best to drop the judgement as soon as possible is something you do when you realise that it’s your ego doing the judging.
Let them without ego cast the first stone.
It’s much better to look for the good in others and to practice radical non discriminatory forgiveness as best you can in any given moment.
It’s the foundation of peace.
Peace is what we’re all searching for.
It’s found inside.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey