The bishop was seeking to reference a poem I love, T S Eliot’s Waste Land.  It was written in 1929, when society was on the cusp of major change.  I happened to have written my own novel, The Journal of Bran Ayton around the poem, so I know a bit about it.  Incidentally you can buy my novel through the Publications section of www.spiceframework.com.

The bishop tried to make the point that T S Eliot wrote his poem as a tribute to the memory of his wife who had died from Spanish flu in 1922.  Of course, that is partly true.  T S Eliot did mourn the death of his wife in that particular pandemic that took so many.  Just as with the current coronavirus pandemic, Spanish flu must have been dreadful and brought so much grief and distress.  Certainly, my own heart goes out to anyone, any family, any business affected by coronavirus at this time.  Indeed, some of my neighbours and friends have suffered and lost loved ones. It’s a terrible thing.

However, if T S Eliot wasn’t writing about his wife’s death from Spanish flu when he wrote his poem Waste Land, I cannot sit where the bishop sat in his blog in saying that is the sum of it.  For T S Eliot wanted people to traverse the Waste Land he saw; he wanted them to find their way through it.

For T S Eliot, was commenting on a world on the cusp of change, change to be worked through; like finding our way across a waste land laid bare by sudden change, maybe from a storm or some pestilence or other.

In creating www.spiceframework.com, I wanted to develop resources to support businesses through these storms of change.  You are welcome to browse the resource in our store on the website.  However, you might also be interested in six themes at the heart of our own thinking.  They are bundled into two separate groups of three themes as follows:

• ïTools for Time of Change describes the approach we have taken to developing resources that are a great user experience, accessed from anywhere and promoting ongoing development
• ïTools of Connecting People describes how we are seeking to connect people to one another and to appropriate resources on demand, in a changing and challenging world

Anyone can download free resources reflecting our thinking on these themes by visiting the homepage of the website or the Promotions product category.

I think the bishop made two mistakes in his own blog.  On the one hand he misunderstood T S Eliot’s concern, linking it too closely to the death of his wife, however traumatic.  And on the other hand, he failed to point over the Waste Land to a new place and a new set of realities, which was T S Eliot’s main concern.

So, I would encourage anyone reading this or visiting www.spiceframework.com to seek out resources enabling them to cross their own waste land, their own unusual and unfamiliar world to establish a new reality, a new way of developing and flourishing.

Written by Michael Croft

May 28, 2020