royal wedding celebration

At risk of jumping on a massive bandwagon, I just can't get over how truly wonderful Susan Boyle's success is. There is something about her voice which was apparent from that first audition and which is so unique because it is absolutely from the soul. Isn't it interesting that she said on an interview that when she was born her parents were told, 'not to expect much' of her because she had a disability? Just goes to show how narrow minds can be.

Still more lovely is the way that she just comes alive in her singing. It is as though there is such focus on the song that she is the music. So very different from the glossed-over, plastic faces that make so many stars look like clones - Susan is beautiful and untainted by her huge stardom. How utterly refreshing and what an honour it is to hear someone sing straight from the heart!

When a person is inspired to create something - a painting, a book, a piece of music, a dinner, a flower arrangement - it seems like it comes from somewhere else. An inspiration, which literally means something s/he breathed in. There's no personal gain to be made other than the necessity of somehow expressing - exhaling - whatever was inhaled. Surely, that is true art. It comes from somewhere else; a place beyond ego, a place where the singular desire is to participate in creation to express whatever that 'je ne sais quoi' is that blows through us sometimes, and which is always beautiful. The great artists, the great musicians always says that they do not know where it came from - it just seemed to work through them. "For the wind bloweth where it will; you know not whence it comes or whither it goes."

The idea that art is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration was surely brought from a mind that was bound up in the old - and happily, passing! - idea that we are here to labour like slaves. Sadly, most of us bought into that myth that somehow to succeed at anything requires great suffering and sacrifice, or that there must be a purpose in our creations. Watch children painting. A dab here, a daub there and they see with their mind's eye a work of art that we don't see without the eyes of that child. They have to kind of translate it for our slower brains - it gets lost in translation.

When a person sets out to create something from their own desire, it is quite different. It might succeed instantly if it is hyped by the general race-mind media, which says, "This is what people want." Art, music, literature has been handled this way for a relatively short time (about five decades, I think) but there seems to be a real return nowadays to wanting something that goes deeper than that veneer and is rather something new - not as in rushing to latest craze, but in the sense of a new creation. Unmade beds, pickled fish and so-called poems about joy riders and crime have had their brief day and happily are no longer our daily diet. The exposure of corruption in parliament, the shame of the greedy city-boy bankers, the whole sense of living in an unreal reality governed by egos has been blown wide open.

I think we are living in crucial times and when people speak of 'people power' it is very different from the socialist myth (which is really tyranny!) but is really about handing back individual power to people to live their own lives and to shake off the notion that we are anything less than Divine beings whose sole purpose here is to realise the beautiful creativity within us and to be.

On a lighter note! Congratulations the the brilliant 'Diversity' - who won Britain's Got Talent (why can't they be grammatically correct and call it Britain Has Talent ???) - what an utterly stunning performance! Congratulations to Susan Boyle, who sang so beautifully and what a gracious response to those who came first! And congratulations to Julian Smith, who clearly plays from 'another place'. Thank you for giving us such a variety of beauty!

The endless fascination with the Romanovs and the glittering world prior to WWI, I think goes beyond the immediate draw of the tragic and beautiful family to something deep within us that harks back to another era - a Golden Age. Of course, that Golden Age never really was. In the late 19th Century, they dreamed of Camelot; and who knows what they dreamed in the Dark Ages, but undoubtedly, it was of a better time before that. Perhaps that longing is really a seeking for our true selves - that part of us, buried within us, which seems to come from a past, and that is at the very core of our being: the belief that the world can be kind, good, noble and all that is finest in us. We're so used to projecting our views of everything onto the world, that maybe we dream of an ideal past that is really a dream of a return to our own true nature.

That having been said, it seems often that the lure of the past is of an age of respect and chivalry and good manners; the age of people taking time over projects and producing beautiful results - not the rushed, busy-business, not the rat race, not the throw-away society that the Industrial Revolution spawned.

It seems to me that the most fascinating things are happening right now. Groaning from almost 2 centuries of industrialisation and people becoming little more than cogs in the wheel, there is a huge desire to return to Nature, to real values, to be free of the packaged fruits and perfect EU-acceptable bananas and the gloss and sham of music, literature and art of the past few decades. Without wishing to jump on the bandwagon of the hugely deserved success of Susan Boyle, who performed so genuinely and incredibly, hasn't she arrived at just the right time? Sick of the surfeit of counterfeit nonsense and hype and plastic and sham, people have been longing for reality again. Out steps a true talent - someone singing from the heart; no hype, no fake-tan, no million dollar dress or a host of sexy dancers - just a true talent, and it was as though everyone in that audience, and everyone watching at home gasped a great collective whoop of joy! At last, we are free of the superficiality. The fact that her performance coincides with loss of faith in hypocritical governments or greedy banks, is significant. People can only be conned so far before there is a backlash because we are all so much more wonderful than we are led to believe most of the time. We don't have to fit the bill, look a particular way, be controlled, be made-to-measure, be told how to live in order to succeed.

The Golden Age, is the age of people being true to themselves and therefore true to one another. I think Susan Boyle has succeeded in doing what that wonderful line from 'Sunset Boulevard' expresses, she has quite unintentionally 'taught the world new ways to dream.'