The Personal Website of Michael Foord

In times of tragedy we see those who love evil, because it gives them a reason to hate. A loving challenge to my Christian friends. We all know what God is capable of. We all want many, many lives to be transformed by love. But if you say you want the new thing, is what you really want the old thing again? Are you willing to think differently. Are you willing to see things differently. Or is all that you can see the old thing? God is at work, God is moving. There is a new thing. God is love (1 John 4:8), this is the most beautiful truth in the bible. Wherever you see love at work, that is God at work. So the question was never "do you believe in a deity?", but "do you believe in love?". If people believe in the power of love, that love transforms and rescues, that love heals, that love is worth living for and can achieve anything, then they believe in our God. The question of what you think you believe with your mind has very little to do with it, and neve

"Rest in Natural Great Peace, this exhausted mind." - Prayer by Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche Siva the destroyer and friend of the poor, Ganesh the remover of obstacles, Loki the trickster and the madman who is not mad, the horror who has no name whom I call nightmare, Sophia who is wisdom, Venus who is unbridled passion, Dionysius who is abandoned revelry and is also called Bacchus, Delia who is beauty and is also called Artemis, Diana in whom is the moon who may also be Artemis, Anubis who shows the path to the dead, Isis the mother who is all women, the Father from whom all springs, and Michael who is war. And Jesus who is love, who is all in all. The Godhead incarnate who was dead and yet lives and who makes all things new. These are the metaphors, the archetypes, the aspects of the divine that I know. Oh, and you. I know you. If you will permit to be known. Codicil: lest it remain unsaid, beauty has married war and their love is glorious and terrible. Look not. &

In times of terror we see those who love evil, because it gives them a reason to hate. We often think about the struggle between doing what is right and what is wrong, but far more often the problem is not doing the right thing but knowing what the right thing is. In my experience, more often than not I want to do the right thing but it isn't clear what that is. There are often several options, none of which seems exactly right and all of which could be wrong. Wouldn't it be good if you could trust your desires, if you could know that you are good and that what you want to do is therefore likely to be the right thing. Then you could usually just do what you want, except  where it is clearly wrong, and most of the time you would be doing the right thing or at least have the right intentions. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". Aleister Crowley wrote this in the early 1900s. Contemporary society misunderstood him as saying "do what you want&q

Didn't there used to be magic   When you were five the world was magic. And then gradually, the magic fades. But it hasn't gone, it's still there. When you were five. When I was young I was haunted by a wild and ferocious desperation and I was so afraid. It cut me and drove everyone away. It hurt so much. The thing is that emotions, these parts of yourself, don't really go away. Instead if you learn not to fear them you can turn them to good. My desperation is still there, a wild longing to love and to burn and to blaze. An unquenchable thirst for the river that never runs dry. As for the pain, that remains too. And when I see it in others, because everybody hurts, I can sometimes bleed. As we bleed together we heal. Let your inner pain be the engine of your empathy. Finally that lost lonely death that had me. That I can turn on the fear. Fear must die. Why should I fear, I've been dead. "The best defence is a perfect mirror. The fiercer and ugli

Beauty is to be found in a naked paradox. Objective reality is the composite of all subjective realities. And right at the heart is love. Fundamental reality is chaos and uncertainty, and I love her with all my heart. Wherever you go walk the worlds. Let people into your world and enter theirs. Eventually they merge, as you evolve a common language. Our common subjective reality is our objective reality. Let's share reality, all of it in every way. As we do our reality gets stronger. Fear is what keeps you out of chunks of reality. Parts of reality are very frightening. So let's conquer fear and help other people conquer fear. My strong suspicion is that as we defeat fear we discover that actually it was really only the fear we were afraid of all along. The rest we can handle and sort out between us. 1 John 4:18 Perfect love drives out all fear. The Litany Against Fear, from Dune: "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that br

Awaken to dream and be the lucid dreamer. This article is one of a series on my experience of psychosis. The articles are: Account of a Curse Wretchedness and a Gun Those Times my Psychosis Nearly Killed Me Fragments of a Once Broken Mind In a Different Place In a different place, in a different life, I did community service in Cambridge. Three memories remain. Clearing a lake a young gypsy lad asked me if I'd ever stabbed anyone. He meant me no harm and I replied that I didn't like the sight of other people's blood. Then, in a workshop on Newmarket road, we built bikes painted green from abandoned wrecks or unclaimed stolen property. This was to be Cambridge's community bike scheme, free to use. Within a week of starting all the bikes were gone. Most probably drowned in the Cam. A common tragedy perhaps. Building bikes they bullied me and threatened me and I didn't go back. After the court summons they sent me to a little charity distributing f

I is a selfish perspective, and I is sorry. This is one of my amethyst treasures. Amethyst is my favourite stone, for no particular reason. This ring is a medieval brass ring, dated from the Norman era around 11th-12th century. It's a metal detector find from Britain. Up until the 18th century amethyst was one of the most valuable, gemstones (along with diamond, sapphire, ruby, and emerald). No longer true as there are huge amounts of it in Brazil and Uruguay. But "back in the day" this would have been an extremely precious ring. The ring is large on me, larger than a UK size "X". In general rings from that era are smaller than modern rings, as people were also generally smaller. This means that this ring was probably once owned by a very rich and very fat man. As another interesting factoid, medieval European soldiers wore amethyst amulets as protection in battle in the belief that amethysts heal people and keep them cool-headed. In Gree

I wrote an article and someone put it on their website:  Software Engineering and Testing This is the accumulated wisdom of my software engineering experience, boiled down into 30 points on the practise of building software systems. As always, the only theory worth a damn is the theory of the practise. The website, opensource.com , is run by my employer Red Hat.  In the first week after publication this article got around ten thousand page views and was the second most viewed article on the website that week. It prompted a good discussion on reddit  (over 300 points and 50 comments at current count) and was shared a stack of times on Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn. Yes I'm boasting a bit, but it made me happy. The article only took a few hours to write, and more than ten years to prepare. "What is reality is a dumb question. It is, and that's the end of it. And the beginning as it turns out."