As I drive around and see all the Blossoms in bloom, I realize that nature is taking back her planet and that nature will always prevail. The Covid 19 Virus is but and an invitation to wake us up because it is shaking us up to step it up in making massive changes in all aspects of our lives.
While the virus is shutting our lives down, it is healing the planet with less pollution from us, we are seeing nature reclaim its place with the dolphins in Venice and lakes and rivers running cleanly and everyone able to breathe more fresh air.
We have learned a valuable lesson in cleanliness, the simplicity of washing our hands can save lives. We have seen the negative impact on this planet with our pollution with our cars and industries. We have had to wake up to the fact that we the humans are indeed the true virus on this planet and that we have to stop being so nonchalant and entitled and realize we created this mess, and we can with changing our ways, clean it up again.
Let us step up and show Mama Nature that we can respect this wonderful planet of her’s, and we can give back and not just take. Let us look at our opulence and re think what we eat, how much we eat, how much we buy, how much we waste.
This is a time of reflection, a time of new connections, within our selves, with each other and with this divine planet.
A Gift of time in this Isolation
With the gift of the internet, we can reach out to each other and support each other during these toubled times. We can listen (right here on this network) to the wisdom of solutions in healing us and this planet. We can enjoy our home, our family, our animals, and open up conversations that we have not had time for in the past.
I do hope we come out of this stronger, in spirit, in body, in mind, and in action, for actionisim is needed right now, and that is one of planning to live our lives in a more respectful way in all aspects of our lives.
Let us stop being the virus on this planet, and let us start looking forward to all the solutions and connections that are just waiting for us to implement.
I ask at this time for you are to stay strong, to not panic, to choose this time to look forward to living life differently and to respect and support each other while we navigate these turbulant waters. We will come out of this stronger, wiser, and with more empathy and concideration for each other and planet.
My love and support is with you always, may you step into your faith and trust we will grow stronger for this. Let us send prayers to all those on the front lines, for with out them we would not survive at all. My love goes out to all how are effected in any way, and stay strong, you are not alone.
A GOLDEN AGE? • Joanna North ponders on how the old are portrayed on TV ‘I just don’t recognize these people…’
An article my Mama wrote at 81, she passed away at 95, how do we look at getting older?
Some people grow old gracefully, some grew old disgracefully and some just grow old. I’d like to think I’m an inbetweener. Ageing is unfortunate, but natural and although we have every right to fight it, in the end I believe that it is a case of mind over matter. Once in my early forties I met up with an acquaintance three years my junior. She sighed and declared, “We have to face it Joanna, we are old now, we have to take things slowly and accept our fate.”
I fled.The loss of my husband in my mid-forties left me somewhat adrift and once the grief had been faced and stowed away I squared up to life. Years before I had made a list of places I would love to see, so I dusted it off and went. If that previously mentioned acquaintance could have seen me then, swinging from boat to boat, taking planes and trains across Europe she would have fainted.
My children also loved change and travel, so our lives took on a whole new meaning and although in the beginning we settled in Africa, by the time I was sixty, I had children with their own families in Canada, Africa and England and loved visiting them all.
Now, I have passed eighty and I am an OAP I know my life has been full of experiences but it’s not true that one can sit back and just enjoy the memories. Being old isn’t necessarily a barrel of laughs.I find myself living in England where the old are slowly but surely being vilified. They are always depicted as senile on the TV and no one seems to value what they have been or what they may have to say. We are all ‘good for a laugh’ and this spills over into the street where the old have become targets for criminals, violent attacks and even rape is shockingly common.
Well I would like to stress that I am alive and the brain is still functioning , I still like to think I have taste and an appreciation of culture and the simple things of life such as my flower garden. The soaps on TV almost show people of my age as stupid, unreasonable, difficult and oblivious to their surroundings. I hasten to say that I know a lot of people my age and not one of them is like this and although many are less agile than they would like to be, are most certainly mentally alert and good fun to know.
But does English TV shows reality? Well if Eastenders is reality I just don’t recognize these people as natural or decent or real. The hatred they all feel for each other may make for good ratings, but if I had grown up in a society as fearful and desperate as these soaps, I very much doubt I would have reached old age. Where is the laughter or joy in their TV lives. Is this what dumbing down means, to produce a life of unrelenting misery? Incredible very frank sex scenes and couplings between people with no regard for their husbands or wives or significant others will also signal to younger viewers that a loveless society is OK. We have become a nation of voyeurs.
Add to this, the endless inane games shows and manufactured pop groups, it almost seems that we are nurturing a world where talent and effort are no longer required.
The trouble is, for most of us TV is our lifeline and a window on the world but yes, I am one of those people that think that TV, ‘British TV’ was funnier 25 years ago. Certainly the repeats of the old shows seems to prove that. I do love a good mystery but even here the TV detectives seem so bogged down in their own misery, policework seems forgotten.
I read the TV guide everyday and my spirits drop – but luckily, I have good eyesight and comb the library for books every week and of course I am addicted to crosswords. But I have to admit that I do envy other cultures where the old still reside with the family and have a value in their day to day lives. I love my nieces and nephews but I so rarely see them as they grow up and make their own lives. I am here,they are far away abroad, visiting me only once a year in a crowded hectic couple of weeks. I can hardly complain, for my daughters and son all are like me and traveling, seeking adventures, fending off any suggestions of middle age.
Joanna lived in Lincolnshire, still does her crossword everyday and can still beat most contestants on Countdown. She has been an actress, housewife mother, and children’s author and you can read one of her kids stories here HORATIO MOUSE
I FEEL OBLIGATED TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY OF JAMES PAUL MCCARTNEY THE DAY AFTER I AM WRITING THIS – JUNE 18, 2022. BEYOND THE FACT THAT I HAVE NOTED CERTAIN MILESTONES FOR MANY OF POPULAR MUSIC’S GIANTS HERE OVER THE YEARS AND FOR A WHILE BECAME THE DE FACTO EULOGIST FOR TOO MANY MORE, THERE HAS BEEN A WEIRD CONNECTION I’VE HAD WITH SIR PAUL FOR THE PAST THREE YEARS.
Not the least of which having conceived a book project around his greatest song (in my humble opinion) “Hey Jude” titled Take a Sad Song – The Emotional Currency of “Hey Jude,” which was released just a few weeks ago, mere days before this momentous occasion and the actual date the man wrote the song, most likely June 29, 1968.
One of the things I learned hanging in the shadow of Paul McCartney these past years, is the importance of staying alive. For the longest time, especially after the death of his songwriting partner, the iconic and sainted John Lennon in 1980, McCartney’s significance in this little four-piece rock and roll combo he founded, the Beatles (have you heard of this?) was greatly and woefully diminished. Living was a bad career move for Macca. At first. Now it turns out having several lives after you’ve peaked at 26 years-old is a good thing. And an argument can be made that now that Paul has managed to make eighty and has completed his tour triumphantly in front of eighty-thousand or so fans in a massive stadium here in N.J. last evening, it was a tremendous career move. Not to mention a good personal one, because, you know, otherwise…
Makes sense that Paul McCartney is still with us. I mean, what sixteen year-old boy – music-obsessed, sex fiend, ego loon – takes the time to write “When I’m Sixty-Four?” Then, instead of forgetting he ever did such a thing put it on an album (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – have you heard of this?) that came out eight years later when he was just twenty-four. The man had a plan. And it has gone way past sixty-four. If my math is correct, sixteen years past. The age he was when…
Okay, so Paul has lived and has made a lot of music. And as I write in my book, people seem to like this music. Some stats for these songs that Paul’s come up with – composed with and without some notable collaborators like the aforementioned Lennon (wowza) and Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello, Johnny Cash and Kanye West to name a few – include thirty-two that have gone to #1 in the United States and/or in the United Kingdom. A staggering 129 of his songs have charted in the United Kingdom, ninety-one reaching the Top 10. He is the Guinness Book of World Records’ Most Successful Songwriter of All Time. “No one else.” I wrote, “is remotely in this stratosphere.”
Paul McCartney might be the most prolific and influential songwriter of popular music ever. He is Gershwin and Porter and Ellington and Berlin and all those other guys and then some. Paul, as I discovered also in my research, is song. He has been song, and he will forever be song. I think it is possible if you look up the word “song” in Webster’s it might have Paul’s smiling face next to it. There is no daylight between a hummable tune and James Paul McCartney.
Oh, I also found out during this book journey that apparently the Campion men over a century-plus were fellow Liverpudlians who married a lot of Irish women from across the water. This is thanx to my Little Brother, PJ, who is now the family archaist. Before this, I was merely another of these Irish/Italian types from the Bronx by way of a large boat of people. Turns out there was a large boat or two or three, there was just a Liverpudlian Campion on it.
I was already here in 1964 when the Beatles arrived via an airplane and changed the planet forever. There are pop stars and icons and then there is the inexplicable sonic boom of the Beatles, who were four scrums from that British port town that no one gave a flying fart about until they invaded every cover of everything. People coming from nowhere to dominate is the stuff of legend. And for some weird reason Paul, this old soul with his songs about retirement written before he could shave, rode it like he knew it all along. And this is the same boyish charm that pervades today. You see his glee when he performs and gets those cheers. He loves those cheers. His little dance when he stands up from the piano after serenading us with “Maybe I’m Amazed” or “Let It Be” or the next masterpiece is pure unadulterated joy. Saw him for the second time in my nearly sixty years on the planet a few weeks ago in Syracuse, NY, where my wife is from and her amazing family that is my family and where I signed my books that afternoon with his visage on the cover, and all those the years between 1964 and 1968 and 1978 and 1989 (when I first saw him at MSG) and the rest melt away into one big Macca moment.
A musician friend of mine back in the mid-eighties once mused that it is strange that anyone can do an impression of almost any rock star from the 1950s onward, except McCarney. Paul doesn’t have a distinct sound (unless you listen to Badfinger or early Billy Joel or any boy band that has existed after the Beatles) but I kind of know what he meant. He meant that Paul could be a vocalist for any time and any occasion His songs demand that his voice run the gamut. It isn’t an affect he is doing; it is Paul being song, again and again, and, blessedly, again.
So, all those year ago, and the years in between and the ones to come, are right there for Paul, who is a time machine, an indelible mark on our sense memories in sound. He brings us there, time and again, with a melody for the ages. Because he has aged.
So, fuck dying and leaving a good-looking corpse and all the bullshit about burning out and fading away. James Paul McCartney is eighty. Long may he be song.
Do yourself no favors and “like” this idiot at www.facebook.com/jc.author or, if you dare, follow on Twitter (@FearNoArt) and Instagram (@jamescampion)
Love…To…Turn…You…On James Campion Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at 50 It was fifty years ago today… June 1, 1967, to be exact; the day the cultural axis of the Western hemisphere is altered by a singular artistic event.
Prince Rogers Nelson – 1958 -2016 James Campion During the most prolific musical period of my life, my early twenties, when I wrote and played music for a living, more or less, there was only one artist that mattered; Prince Rogers Nelson.
One Alien Alienation in the Alien Nation – James Campion 6.10.22 David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars at 50 – It is difficult to express how important David Bowie’s fifth album was in the annals of popular music without understanding its connection to the genre, purpose, and essence of what rock and roll meant (in 1972)
from Hackwriters.com••• The International Writers Magazine – 23 Years on-line – Reality Check – Macca
It is hard for me to believe that I have had my own Podcast network for 9 years now. I had no idea of what I was doing when I first started out, and over the years I have created my own style in interviewing, show postings, and platforms to view and hear on. It has been quite an adventure and one I still love doing.
I have hoped to be further ahead with certain things, like my Orchard of Wisdom site and the Fund-Action program and the second book; but life has a way of either redirecting you and slowing you down, and some of those goals have not been met yet, but I do hope soon.
When I first started out I had Bill who edited my audios for me and put them up on SoundCloud, and when I ran into issues, he would help, but as of around early 2016 I was on my own and had to learn fast. Now I do all the editing, audio files, video, show postings, graphics, sharing and etc and I do my very best to give my podcast guest and representation that serves all their info and show.
I want to do more, but simple for one person there is no more time, each show is about a 5 hour production and I do anything from 4-8 shows a week, that is before the sharing. I have also created 3 more platforms. Mentorshipswhere coaches can share their skills and program’s that serve you the audience. Practitioners, those who offer hands on programs, and Supporting the Supporters, where we support the organizations who are doing exemplary work in supporting others.
We already have onE-Book, but I hope by years end to have a collaborative book on ourForgotten Childrenseries out too. Hopefully by the time this goes live, my new site will be up Orchard Of Wisdom where all our programs will be laid out will be up. It all depends on chiseling through some tech issues of which is not my strength.
So as I go into this new year of exploration and continue to bring you the most awesome liberating and illuminating people to inspire you, guide you and empower you, join me and help us get there even faster. I do all my shows via donation, some people are very generous, some not. We are on Patreon where you can support the SHOWS, the POD-BOOKS, the FUND-ACTIONprogram, we ask humbly for your support so we can continue to bring these shows and the Pod-Books and much more. You can give a one time donation on the blue donate button, of go to Patreonand support us there on any or all our programs, every drop fuels the productivity.
You are not just donating, you are building up hope and solutions for those in need.
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