I am adding Fable Seven here to the pieces uploaded in previous posts (see further down on the blog for earlier Fables). They belong in a series called “Fables and Reflections” which consists of sixteen pieces in all.
In this fable, I suggest that the “people who don’t appear” are the helpers, the healers, the teachers, the people whose task includes applying the skills of love and thinking with the right hand side of the brain turned on, not switched off. We tend to blame these people, and that side, when things go wrong, while also largely ignoring them when we make our policies and organise our structural revolutions. But if we are to have a future, these may well be among the people we should turn to for help in building a future of hope and sanity.
Each piece takes just a few minutes to read. I am uploading them one at a time, every month or so. The idea behind this approach is that people running all day just to keep up, are more likely to read them in short doses and at intervals.
But for those who prefer them all at once, here is a link to the sixteen together.
The series is a set of essays written after a working life spent in the care services, primarily in the field of mental health. It thus records what I learned and saw during all that time deployed at one of Society’s many fault-lines dividing Have from Have-not, Them from Us, I from Other. In a sense you can say that, in exploring the constituents of community here, and at this time of strain and fragmentation, frantic materialism and crude zealotry, the series asks and discusses what are the binding and redemptive skills of true human connection, the skills of love, the skills of being human.
All being well, the series will soon be published in book form, thanks to my friend the poet Mevlut Ceylan.
If anyone finds value or virtue in these Fables and Reflections, please send word of them to people you know who you think might want to read them. You could simply pass on this blog address, or, alternatively, I am happy to e-mail them individually as attachments to people who would find that easier. I am already doing that for some people. I would also be happy to send hard copy versions by surface mail. If that is your preference, just send me your address.