Eye - 02 February 2018

From an inspiring exit to a weather eye

An inspiring exit

A visit to the British Museum’s exhibition ‘Living with Gods: people, places and worlds beyond’ has inspired one Friend to put pen to paper.

The exhibition examines how people believe, rather than what, by exploring stories, objects, images, prayers and rituals. It builds on a Radio 4 series of thirty programmes that are available on BBC iPlayer.

Lesley Morris, of Witney Meeting, told Eye that ‘Living with Gods’ was ‘wonderful’ and the content ‘arranged in a new and illuminating way’.

She went on: ‘At the exit to the exhibition were the words:

It is wholly indeterminate
It has no specific traits
It is entirely ineffable
It is never seen
It is not accessible.

‘It was not attributed to anyone but I had a strong reaction and was drawn to write immediately. This is my reply…’

It is the turn in my ribs
as I breathe
It is the thickness of silence
It sits under the yew tree
in the throat of a bird
It is a thread in my DNA
It lies in the curved cup of my skull
and the arch of my instep
It is the colour I can’t yet see
and the sound that remains
when the noise has abated
It hovers in the mist
above a blade of grass
on a Spring morning

A tongue-in-cheek tale

A jocular offering from Jamie Wrench, of Southern Marches Area Meeting, tells the story of four people. Their names? Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody…

‘There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it. Everybody knew Anybody could have done it, but was sure that Somebody would do it, so didn’t do it himself.

‘In fact, Nobody did it.

‘Everybody got angry about that, because as far as Everybody was concerned, although Anybody could have done it, Somebody really should have done it.

‘Anybody could indeed have done it (and Everybody thought Somebody might have asked him to), but Nobody realised that Everybody wouldn’t do it, so Nobody did it.

‘So, in the end, Everybody blamed Somebody because Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

‘Which is a bit rich when you think Everybody was asked to do it in the first place.’

A weather eye

Connie Hazell, of Bournemouth Meeting, spied a mention of Friends in a history of forecasting in a November edition of the Daily Express:

‘The term “weather front”… – meaning the weather that arises along a narrow zone where warm air meets cold – came from the zones of trenches in the first world war. It was coined by Lewis Fry Richardson, a pacifist and Quaker, who was attached to an infantry division as an ambulance worker… [He was an] uncle of the actor Ralph Richardson and the great uncle of Julian Hunt… who ran the Met Office in the 1990s.’

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