Culture Articles
Moscow diary
The year 1991 was a momentous one in the Soviet Union. It led up to the resignation of president Mikhail Gorbachev and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, leaving Boris Yeltsin as president of the newly independent Russian state. Marjorie Farquharson was an Edinburgh Quaker who set up Amnesty International’s...
In Quaker Meeting
this morning I practise sitting still in the top of a tree legs abreeze
Music ministry
Paulette Meier is a Friend from Ohio who has been visiting Britain and sharing the wisdom of early Friends through her ‘song chants’. Her ‘music ministry’ involves singing quotations of seventeenth century Friends and her tour in Britain, doing workshops with Friends, took her to Swarthmoor Hall, Woodbrooke, Oxford Meeting,...
A negotiator’s toolkit
As floods, droughts and wildfires can neither be ignored nor rationally explained away, government departments – in every country – require ‘concise arguments for urgent climate action’.
Destinations
The route I need To reach my destination My sister losing touch with life Departing from the North at dawn Alone No-one to say ‘well done’ or ‘take a break’
Quakers, guns and money
When Quakers talk about their history they tend to focus on the good bits: Quakers against war, against slavery, speaking truth to power. Priya Satia’s book Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution also talks about Quaker history, but in a way which may cause discomfort...
wake
Thirty years ago Gillian Allnutt, the recipient of the 2016 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, was one of four editors of a controversial anthology: The New British Poetry. Each of the editors began their section with a foreword. Gillian Allnutt, presenting the feminist poets, offered various thoughts, including: ‘Poetry must...
prayer
may I make amendment not in the mind – Le Corbusier’s machine for living in his signed environment –
Truth
The concept of truth has always fascinated me, both spiritually as a Quaker, and psychologically as a child and adolescent psychotherapist, so I was interested in how this could be explored using song and movement.
I see you now
I have looked into your eyes, spoken no words except ‘Forgive me. Please forgive me’.