Janet Cameron

Copyright K. Kendall, Wiki Adrienne Rich, poet, activist, thinker, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, died 27 March 2012 aged 82. “There is no writer of comparable influence and achievement in so many areas of the contemporary women’s movement ,” says the   Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States.   The British newspaper,   i,   quotes Rich’s own description of herself as “…a white woman, a Jew, a lesbian and a United States citizen.” Rich married economist Alfred Conrad but eventually she began to reject conventional family life and heterosexual relationships. The couple separated in 1970 and Conrad committed suicide a few months later.  Her collection   Diving into the Wreck   in 1973, was committed to “…breaking down the artificial barriers between the private and the public” and it won her the National Book Award, an honour she shared with fellow nominees Alice Walker and Audre Lorde. In 1976 she ...

Writer and poet Pam Brown says, “Women feel guilty to sit down and do nothing. Usually they are spared this emotion.”  This is true, but Birthdays and Mother’s Day are different. On these special occasions, enjoyment is mandatory and guilt is banned. Mum's Special Days Years ago, in my own childhood, paste brooches fashioned into the word “Mother” with shiny stones were popular for mothers' birthday presents. They were priced to suit a child’s pocket money, and the child would feel s/he was giving Mum a wonderful and valuable gift! Nowadays, of course, gifts are likely to be more sophisticated than this, but the old tradition of sparing Mum the daily grind of cooking and housework by taking on some of her chores still holds good. It’s claimed that the tradition of celebrating Mothering Sunday dates back to the 16th century. A young girl in service would bake a Simnel cake to take home to her mother on her day off. The Simnel cake was a fruit cake, rather si...

Saussure on Language - Limited Boundaries Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) is widely held to be a father of twentieth century linguistics. He says: “Language is a system based entirely on the opposition of its concrete units,” and this leads him to believe that units do not have value except within the system to which they belong. They have value only: “…from the simultaneous presence of other units.” To be of value, the unit must function and establish its role within the system. This leads on to Saussure’s conviction that no thing has intrinsic value. His example is that “…chess pieces change in value according to the moves that are made.” By this, he means that the pieces are the internal grammar of the set, taking on a diachronistic (ie. historical) role within the synchrony (the now) of the game. This can be applied to any other set, for example, language. Saussure's Linguistics - Signifier and Signified The most obvious point is that a book or a symp...

Photo by Jenny Harris, (back right) - with some helpful photoshopping by Victoria Nicks. One of the members in my Wednesday philosophy group read out this story today. I can't credit it with a source because there isn't one, and I'm guessing I'm not breaching any copyright as the story is so widely shared in so many places. It's well worth sharing again, in my opinion; such a beautiful and relevant lesson in philosophy: When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day is not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and two cups of coffee. A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and fills it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was. The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured it into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into...

Eight Top Tips Trust in yourself to stay on track and reach your goal, even if you don’t know exactly how you’ll get there. Find out what works for you and be prepared to use a little cunning – so long as it doesn’t hurt anybody. Don’t be afraid to be different.  Don’t be too hard on yourself either, make allowances for yourself in the same way as you would for another person. Know that you're worth it . If you’re lucky enough to receive some feedback from the editor rejecting your work, be grateful for it and use it if you can.  If the editor has taken time to comment, s/he clearly thinks you’re worth it.  Always take constructive criticism on board provided it is from an informed and impersonal source.  Ignore envious comments from those who feel threatened. Rejection is not personal .  It is for this particular piece of work at this particular time for this particular publication.  If yo...

Copyright: Janet Cameron Eckhart Tolle  uses the metaphor of a lake to describe compassion and its secret depths. By now, through meditation and relinquishing the negativity of constant mind-chatter, you should have dispensed with those self-inflicted opposites that cause conflict. You are ready to identify with Tolle's lake, for its surface represents the outer situation of your life and all the things that happen to you. This surface may sometimes be calm and sometimes turbulent, depending on the seasons. But deep, deep down, the lake is still and undisturbed, like the deeper recesses of your Being. Don't Cling - Just Be Stay in touch with the depths of your Being; don't cling to life situations; trust that your inner peace does not depend on those things. "You abide in Being," says Tolle, "unchanging, timeless, deathless - and you are no longer dependent for fulfilment or happiness on the outer world of constantly fluctuating forms." ...