Musings on a Silent Night

I received a nice little present from WordPress the other day: a certificate to say I had been blogging with them for ten years!

Ten years… Where did they go…

Back then, Sue Vincent was our Silent Eye blogger – and she already had a large online following. Persuading her to join the fledgling Silent Eye was doubly beneficial: I got an excellent foundational partner, and the School got the benefit of her digital reach! Not to be abused, of course…

Stuart joined us shortly after, and the three of us set off on a great adventure that launched officially in the Spring of 2013, in the remote Derbyshire hills with a workshop called ‘The Song of the Troubadour’.

My job was to set out the vision of the School and to create the three-year correspondence course, a task that took every day of those three years! But during that time, people began asking why I had disappeared from view; and so I tentatively tried out this blogging thing…

Nowadays it would be hard to imagine a week going by without the regular cycle of Sunday’s photographic blog on Sun in Gemini; the more personally oriented Tuesday blog – where I can provide whimsy and the odd peace of humour; and the build up to the serious stuff on Thursday, where I try to present the joy of mystical study, and the way it brings about a reorientation one’s life.

The ten years on the WordPress certificate mirrored the current life of the Silent Eye, and also our personal residence here in Cumbria in the extreme north of England.

The constant presence of the mountains and lakes of the Lake District on our doorstep certainly assists the creative impulse. There’s nothing like chewing over an idea while walking the fells to get a fresh influx of energy and expansion of the kernel with which you started. Often the problem is getting the rush of ideas down in some form before they evaporate from the mind.

The sad loss of our co-Director, Sue Vincent, still weighs heavy, and can be deeply poignant at this time of year. Sue made a big thing of Christmas, and was a superb cook. She could turn her home in the Buckinghamshire village of Waddesdon into the most Christmassy place imaginable in a seemingly short time.

Time moves us on with changes, whether we wish it or not. Covid brought great changes to the whole world – and is still doing so. But one of the great benefits of being home-bound was the international regularisation of the use of Zoom and other ‘remote meeting’ technologies.

We are now able to offer a monthly meeting online, in which we greet, chat a bit, then settle in for an hour’s deep but friendly discussion – with meditation exercises. Examples of the content of the past few meetings can be found on the Silent Eye Explorations FaceBook page.

Part of that online world we have entered is the gift of a new Director of the School: Caroline Ormrod.

Caro is a highly literate and competent administrator, and possesses that ‘lightness of spirit’ that make so much difference to how a School of the Soul presents itself.

Caro is helping us to consolidate the Silent Eye’s online presence and make deeper and more frequent use of our Zoom facilities. She’s based in Canada – which seems to be fertile ground for our work – and is coming across to the UK for the ‘Water, Circle, Cross’ workshop in Windermere in May 2023.

By way of a small Christmas present, here is the best photo I ever saw if Sue, taken by Darcy at the winter weekend in Penrith. We like to think that smile rides with us, still…

So, now I’ll take my leave for a short while and rest my mind and typing fingers over Christmas and the New Year. I leave you with my 2022 Christmas image of the giant Christmas tree at the Art Deco Midland Hotel, in whose coffee lounge we are frequent flyers! The beautiful staircase has featured in several Poirot adaptations.

We wish everyone a loving and restful Christmas. Thank you for your presence and support in 2022. May the light and kindness that is in all our hearts have the strength to unite through the differences, and help us work together to rebuild our wounded world.

Steve, Stuart and Caro.

Reference and links:

Water, Circle, Cross will take place around Lake Windermere in the English Lake District from 19-21 May, 2023. Email us for details. See the Events page for details – The Silent Eye’s website

For an invite to the monthly SE-Explore Zoom meetings, open to all and held on the third Sunday of each month, email us at:

Rivingtide@gmail.com