What are you worth?
Impossible isn’t it.

What is your time worth? Is that easier to judge?
Does it vary depending on what you are doing?

You may be paid the same as your co-workers but have different skills / knowledge…

Now compare that to other countries. Are you worth more or less than a human living there?

As an artist, teacher and performer, I charge different rates depending on the circumstance.

Sometimes (as is the case with teaching) I charge an hourly rate as recommended by the Musicians Union. As a performer, the rate I charge is affected by the number of paying audience, the budget of whoever is hiring me and again an hourly rate.

As Pete Townshend pointed out in his recent John Peel Lecture, everyone entitled to work in the U.K. as an employee is entitled to a wage based on their work by the hour including actors and musicians. This is not the case with creative work which is essentially self-employed.

As an artist, the work I do is done mostly for the love of the thing itself and is it’s own reward. Now that anything visible or audible can be instantly digitized, stored, reproduced and globally distributed – then made accessible free of charge to anyone with internet access, it is increasingly hard to be paid enough to make a living from selling your creativity.

We could argue ethics and morality all day long – and I am grateful for anyone who values my work enough to pay for it – but the bottom line is that people will do what they can get away with and just as many of us used tape recorders to tape radio and  TV programs, so now do we stream or download on demand.

Is this a bad thing?

It is still possible that a songwriter could do an afternoon’s work and if the material is catchy enough, they need never work again.

Is that right?

Our current financial system rewards one person with poverty and one with luxury for performing the same task. One need only compare the wages of Doctors, Nurses, Teachers, Cleaners, Chefs, Mothers and Fathers with Bankers, Financiers, Stockholders and Footballers salaries to know that the problems we are experiencing point to the need for a radical rethink of one word: value.

What do we value? How do we value? What is life sustaining? Life affirming? NEEDful?

Let us put first things first in our own values, then perhaps we shall find as it says in the Bible that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

Wednesday  was International Peace Day – a day for wide-scale community action, and a day for UN agencies and aid organisations to safely carry out life-saving work.

Since 2007, over 100 million people have participated in meaningful actions across the world which have built towards peace of some kind or another.

The Quakers held a small march for peace here in Sheffield along with a lunch and a meditation meeting beforehand. I made some new acquaintances who could easily become friends and I feel I did something small to build a community of peace in the city where I live.

Moments of peace and tranquility sustain me when peace eludes me. I had one such moment a few weeks ago in a sensory garden maintained by a Horticultural Society to give people a place to experience of peace.

This call for peace came to me while I was there – feel free to sing it, adapt it or use it as you see fit.

Call for Peace by storyfolksinger

Many organisations offer the opportunity to encounter peace. One such organisation is Sage Greenfingers in Sheffield, who share allotment with those suffering from mental unwellness. There are all kinds of opportunities to offer peace to each other within our communities if we are willing to seek them out with patience.

May we find peace and dwell there.

We were gathered together by Philip Shallcrass of the British Druid Order for whom the stories of the Mabinogion have held a particular fascination for many years. Gaining insights from people who have made the unravelling of the mysteries held in these ancient, indigenous stories of ours a life’s work was an experience that I shall reflect on for many years to come.

One of the many things I am still chewing over is the power of time and place that the stories have. I’m trying to describe that numenous quality that many perceive upon walking into an old church or a stone circle. These stories, many of the events from which have archaeological evidence supporting them and certainly place names that still exist have a similar quality – as if many travellers have walked these story-lines approaching the mystery of life for thousands of years.
I understand that these British Isles are a relatively recent development geologically speaking and that the peoples who populate it are and always have been immigrants of one sort or another, bringing their stories with them, but so many are lost and obscured by wars and lack of a teller to pass them on, so it is it is amazing to hear the tales that people will have heard in this land many generations before in a similar setting. It’s also very encouraging to believe that if I do my job right as a Storyteller, they may still be doing so in a couple of thousand years.

I found the weekend spiritually enlightening, professionally instructive and personally fulfilling.