Meeting Houses Are For Meeting In...

 You make a venue available and people will use it- and things will happen there and conversations will occur and contacts be made. That's why I'm committed to opening the Meeting House on Thursdays- and would love to open it more often. And that's why when the older Quakers stopped meeting in one anothers' homes and started having dedicated Meeting Houses they installed wardens on site. Our Meeting House has a flat attached which used to be used by a warden until quite recently- so recently several of our members were around when it happened- when conflict arose between warden and clerk and the warden got turfed out and the flat was rented commercially. It was, I think, a deplorable decision...

Not that I have anything against the people who live in the Meeting house flat. We're on friendly terms. I watch the wife watering her potted plants on a Sunday morning and a couple of weeks ago the husband apeared after the Meeting for Worship with a tray of cakes...

You never know quite what is going to happen when the Meeting House is open. Yesterday a woman who had been hiring the building in the evenings popped in and gave us her keys in return for her deposit fee- which had been dropped off first thing by Helen. Also John, who has just moved into a house across the street- and has a thing for the minutes of Quaker business meetings- came over and spent a happy hour or two sorting through our files. Also Edna, who is moving house, came by with some bags of books she wants rid of and I selected a handful for the library and Ailz suggested we sell the rest for Meeting House funds. Also Helen, the other Helen, came by in time for lunch- and it was all good in a low-key but constructive way. The place was alive with human activity just as it should be...

First thing, of course, we had a half hour Meeting for Worship. Ailz and I were the only ones to make it this time- but, as it says somewhere in the New Testament, "when two or three are gathered together..."

Here are some pictures.

This is the front door. We throw both leaves open and keep them open because this looks welcoming. Whether we can continue to do this in winter remains to be seen...



And here is the Meeting Room, with Ailz providing human interest.





And this is the business end of the operation, looking from the library, through the dining room, into the kitchen. There are partitions that can be drawn to separate the several spaces but mostly we leave them open so the chi can flow...

Extraordinary

 Karahan Tepe is an archaeological site in southern Turkey. It's around 12,000 years old. It belongs- as does its sister site at Gobekli Tepe- to a culture about which we have no information- apart from what is coming out of the ground.  Gobekli Tepe is the better known of the two- if only because excavation started there earlier- but both are extraordinary. Many other similar sites have been identified nearby but are yet to be properly investigated.

It used to be held that human civilization emerged 5,000 years ago. The Turkish sites push civilisation's origins back another 6,000 years- to the end of the last Ice Age. 

Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe are sizeable complexes, stone built, featuring megalithic T-shaped pillars, carvings and statues. Those who understand such things claim to have found astronomical alignments. If the people who did this work were hunter-gatherers (as orthodoxy requires) they were also remarkably sophisticated, skilled at working with stone and- in order to carry through such ambitious building projects-  must have had a great deal of time on their hands....

I'm doing my best to avoid interpretation, because at the moment everything is guesswork- and the next thing that gets dug up could radically alter the picture. 

This past year, for instance, a remarkable statue showed up at Karahan Tepe. It's seven and a half feet tall and represents a naked man with a beard and a mullet. He is not only anatomically correct but seems to be drawing our attention to his genitals. Culture hero? Creator? Fertility god? Nature spirit? Ruler?

Who knows...

And what's that funny little square box-like thing over his diaphagm? It can't simply be an artistic grace note. It must mean something....

He is- as of this present moment- the oldest statue in existence....