Hello from London UK

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Hi Everyone

Sorry, no poem today, but I am working on one so... hopefully, by Monday.

Hope you are coping as well as any of us can in the middle of a pandemic. Me, I do try to keep looking on the bright(er) side of life, and manage to do just that most of the time, but - like everyone else - I have good days and bad days. On a good day, I can usually complete a poem to publish here, and that always lifts my mind-body-spirit.

A new reader appears to have taken offence by my suggesting that religion has no monopoly on spirituality. No matter, we will just have to agree to differ.  The same reader also disputes that I can have a sense of spirituality without believing in God as according to any religious agenda. Again, each to their own, surely? 

As I have said before on the blogs, also at my poetry reading on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, back in 2009 (my contribution to Antony Gormley's "One and Other" project that ran for 100 days) , I see myself as a pantheist; I still do in so far as I see God as nature, not its creator. The reader clearly sees this as blasphemy, but I could never get my head around the idea of a personified God, even as a child; when I discovered pantheism, I could relate to it instantly. Besides, religious bigotry is not uncommon and - not least as a gay man - I find bigotry in any shape or form as distasteful as it is indefensible.]

No one has to embrace the religious beliefs of others to respect them, and I do, whatever reservations I might have, so how about this reader’s respecting mine…?

Another reader asks how I am coping with various medical issues, not last the prostate cancer with which I have been living since 2011. Again, good days and bad days, and the same with others problems.  Stress has a nasty habit of making us feel worse regarding just about anything likely to prey on the mind, even at the best of times; I dare say I am as prone to coronavirus stress ( hovering at about 80 on a sliding scale of 1 to 100) as anyone else! All we can do is take each day as it comes, for better or worse, and keep telling ourselves that life can only get better. Never easy, but do we have a choice?

Yet another reader is unhappy about my poems and preambles that suggest that my regular reference to ghosts as the personification of a posthumous consciousness indicates “an insultingly casual approach” to the death of loved-ones. Believe me, there is nothing ‘casual’ about it; it is a subject dear to my heart. I am 75 years-old, and those I have loved, as friends or more, are with me always, so great has been the impression they have made on me; impressions and precious memories that have helped me through good times and bad as well as exposing my flaws and showing me - not least by shining example - how to recognise and (hopefully) overcome them as needs must in the course of a lifetime.

Few if any of us are perfect. Others are as likely to take issue with what we consider out strengths as with any flaws or weaknesses, seeing them in a different light altogether. (How we come across to others is never easy to work out unless they tell us, and then it can sometimes come as a shock to mind-body-spirit. At the end of the day, though, I suspect it is how we see ourselves and what, if anything, we choose to do about it that counts, certainly in so far as managing self-confidence, self-consciousness or that old standby conscience is concerned.

Many thanks for dropping by, folks, always much appreciated,

Take care, be safe, and let's all try to nurture a positive mindset, whatever... 

Hugs,

Roger

PS New readers might like to take a look at poems in the blog archives now and then; they can be accessed on the right hand side of any blog post.

[Note: This post also appears on my gay-interest poetry blog today.]