May 22nd Club June 9th

John read a beautiful french poem then translated it for me,quite beautiful.

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,
Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,
Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant :
Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle.



When you are very old, at evening, by the fire,
spinning wool by candlelight and winding it in skeins,
you will say in wonderment as you recite my lines:
“Ronsard admired me in the days when I was fair.”

Ronsard wrote many poems to a woman called Helen.


I read from a dear friend Dave Cormack's ( now passed)book Peacing Together
I have not seen this book for a while but when i noticed it on the shelf it took me back to summer evening in a Hotel in Manchester many years ago when he mentioned he was writig a book about conflict resolution.

I being quite young idealistic,and in the peace movement said " why do you have to write about conflict? write about peace" he laughed at the time,but when i met him a year or so later,he showed me this book,with its rainbow cover and pointed to this passage,he said it was because of what I had said the first night that I met him that he chose this title.

Peacing Together

Dave's passage.

" Peacing"?
I had some difficulty in arriving at the title Peacing Together.
The English language is righ in words relating to conflict-
we have words such as "fight"and"fighting" ,"war" and "warring","conflict" and "conflicting","battle"and "battling " and so on-all the nouns and their accompanying
verbs.But we have not verb in English to correspond with the noun "peace".But this book is about doing peace.It is a guide to action for peacemakers,and i could find no word that satisfactorily captured the concept,so i have taken the liberty of creating a new one--peacing.
Peacing is a hig rist business.The forces that seek to divide,as we shall see,must not be underestimated.The lone peacemaker is too vulnerable,too exposed and under too much pressure to survive long in the midsts of damaging interpersonal conflicts.
Peacing is, then,a team game,to be done with the support of others.So Peacing Together will encourage you to revise your ideas about conflict and reconciliation and to work with others in new ways to bring a greater degree of stability and peace to the lives and organisations of those around us.

Thank you Dave--we have some good times!