A week ago I joined my former colleagues for their regular breakfast, which I attend irregularly. We are a group of about eight made up of the regulars and the irregulars, to put it in old military terms. We banter, cajole and reminisce, mixed with varying critical and approving views of the old workplace, Sait. The old tends to be better than the new, but it has always been like that for most of us. Such a view gives you peace of mind, while otherwise you might be resentful.

The weekend was as usual, but without a visit with John and Annie; other Saturday activities are coming slowly into Annie’s life as she get older. I visited with friends at the Palliser and gave Herman the write up for my April talk. It will become a part of the Spring brochure and has to be readied for printing. I am continuing with the ‘My Belief’ theme; more about this follows below.

The Oscars had about two minutes of my attention, which reminded me how boring and artificial this show is, unless you are into the personality theme of its glamour people. All I am interested in is which foreign film is worth viewing and this I will probably find out from Calgary’s ‘fast forward’ entertainment review weekly

Coming Wednesday Shirley and I may visit a show of Japanese pen drawings at the Leighton Centre. Last night’s 'Writers and Company' by Wachtel had an interesting and very wordy author as the last guest in CBC’s Jaipur Festival series. The author ‘Tarun Tejpul’ latest book ‘The Valley of Masks’, may be an interesting and insightful read about India as a society and culture.

The colouring of my mandala progressed by about three hours worth. I now have an interesting idea about how I could show my progress on my website using the ‘ajax gallery’. It is well suited to the task of showing coming and going images the way a store’s show window functions. I’ll have to try this out! Just for clarification, I take one or two picture of my new colouring effort as I go.

The brochure write-up for my April talk is as follows.
“My Belief Explored:
Sharing my thoughts, old and new, on beginnings, gods, evil, good and the significance of the human experience. A.D.V.”

The initials stand in for my name. It took me about half a dozen attempts to get to this formulation. The main difference from the above choice was that I used ‘searching for’ then, for where I have ‘sharing my thought’ now. The latter wording to convey to the audience a sense personal involvement on my part and their’s.

Most of this I will have to work out, but the underlying concept is that we will have to work our own revelation about our globalising world, applying what we know to the problems of today. This, with the additional thought and observation that a true revelation never comes, until such time that the rational attempts have been exhausted to no avail. It is only then, that humans become willing to consider the ‘inconsiderable’, from which the solution will emerge.

This is actually an iterative process, which I have called ‘peeling the onion’ in my personal life and experience during the Fall of 1999, my year of retirement.
And with respect to the word ‘emerge’, I am using this here in the sense that Clayton explains that in his little jewel titled “Mind & Emergence”. Emergence here means ‘new coming forth from old, but in an intractable and untraceable manner‘.
It is a good description, if not a definition of revelation, keeping in mind [sic] the untraceable and intractable nature of revelations as these occur within Existence Divine, the mystery in which we are.
<9:03am~