Author Archives: Helen White

What can we learn from the dying stars of the previous era; those places that thrived without apparent rhyme or reason due to a particular mix in their qualities? There’s much to learn when we come to realise that certain places asserted a particular energy (first) and then humans came along and interpreted that energy through their actions, expressing them as what looks like human life, human decisions, human preoccupations, human mastery. So what made people settle in this swampy, mosquito-ridden place, for instance; what made them just so determined to be here that they exercised all their powers of ingenuity to build where there was almost nothing to build on, to keep innovating, starting over from scratch when the waters reclaimed all their efforts, learning from their mistakes in order to build a city that became an empire and a spiritual, cultural, commercial tour de force of the separation era? What can we take away from that, on the inside, once we come to understand that the global mind is a mirror-image of the human mind, with all the same bells and whistles? My experiences of 30 years visiting this extraordinary place thew up some answers for me earlier this month. Continue reading →