Stillness at St Mary's

 Hay Forum was fun yesterday afternoon.

I walked down with my neighbour, who had never been before, and he said he'd enjoyed it at the end, too.

The main speaker was Jenny Bullough, who has taught yoga for many years, so much of what she was saying was drawn from that tradition.  It's not just 'tying yourself up in knots'!  Exercise is part of yoga practice, but it's also about slowing down if your brain is working too fast, or speeding up if your brain is stuck and stagnant, to a balance of stillness somewhere in the middle.  I liked the description that the extremes are water buffaloes and drunken monkeys!  

She also demonstrated the idea with a clay bowl and oil - you need the structure of the bowl (a routine in your daily life) or the oil (all that energy) will go everywhere chaotically.

She started off with a roving mic, since she had props dotted around the space, but only the fixed mic at the lectern worked, so she had to dash off and demonstrate and then dash back to the mic to tell us about it.

Quotations on her theme came from the children's book Ferdinand the Bull (he liked to stop and smell the flowers), and the poem Innisfree by Yeats - she got the audience to hum, and in the silence after that she read the poem.

Music came from Deborah Rose.  First she sang one of her own compositions, Capel-y-ffin, inspired by the quotation from the psalm cut into the glass of the chapel window - "I will lift up mine eyes to the hills", and later she sang Amazing Grace.  She has a beautiful voice, and will be giving a concert at St Mary's on Saturday 24th February at 7pm with the cellist Sonia Hammond.  Tickets are £10 in advance and £12 on the door.

And there was also the first of a series of updates from Primrose Organic Farm.  In keeping with the theme of stillness, January is their quietest month, in between the last harvesting and the first planting for next year.  They had a slideshow of the Farm to show us, though - they manage to pack an awful lot into 1 3/4 acres!

The next Hay Forum will be on 3rd February, and will feature Christina Watson talking about icon painting.