Waterheartsong - A Journey
Hi! I am a 46 year old physics graduate and Mensa member born in Leeds in Yorkshire and I suffer from a schizoaffective disorder. In connection with this I have recently started an online support group called 'Beautiful Minds' for people with any mental health disability. For more information click on the link on the right hand side of this page. Amongst the links, you will also find a brief description of the illness from which I suffer.

One of my favourite hobbies is amateur radio where I was awarded the licence number G4ZMR.

Politically I am independent.

The mainstay of my life is the Christian faith. Being part of a house church gave me back a feeling of self-worth that had been all but destroyed by my illness. My spiritual home is St Mary's in Nantwich.

My primary gifting is music. I am a guitarist who also plays the drums and piano, and sings. My original songs have been recorded and played by BBC's Radio Stoke and Shropshire including a specially written song about the 9/11 disaster. In 2003 I completed two recordings of my theme song for the School Children's Song for Europe Competition with legendary Liverpool producer Billy Stratton which has now been broadcast on BBC Radio Merseyside in conjunction with my friend and colleague Geoff Jackson's life story. Also on October 20th 2004 the song was performed before the Liverpool School's Parliament Upper House and was received well. Between July 15th and July 21st 2004 I had my first visit to the U.S.A. where I attended the annual reunion of the limbic region internet support group. There I wrote a theme song entitled "Love's Come To Town." On the 14th and 23rd Novemeber 2007 I wrote the music setting a short piece by Nantwich poet Mike Fuller called 'Does the moon'. On the 16th September 2008 I went on a workshop to study radio presenting skills with David Blaxhall who was instrumental in setting up 2BR in Burnley. The day was a success and I was told that I have a good radio voice with a laid back style suited to late night broadcasting. I love improvising and am quite good at it. In the summer of 2002 I won a bursary to study jazz improvisation for a week at Dartington Summer School under Lewis Riley. In 1962 Jacqueline du Pre rediscovered her calling to play the cello there, aged 17. I wasn't really prepared for the experience. In fact my confidence was shattered. It's made me aware of my limitations which I have ultimately found liberating. In classical music my long-standing affection is for Ludwig van Beethoven. In the words of Karl Bohm he is the grandest and best friend of those who suffer and struggle. He was a profoundly religious man who looked forward to the day when all men would be brothers. On his work desk was the following inscription: "I am that which is. I am everything that is, that was, and that will be. He is of himself alone, and to this only one all things owe their existence." However the god of music is Johann Sebastian Bach whose perfection surpasses all other composers. In the modern era I admire Pierre Boulez. He is a man of great vigour, who has worked tirelessly to improve the understanding of contemporary music. In jazz I will always hold a particular affection for Tony Coe. He is a great genius who always displays an astonishing understanding of the music he plays. He has recently completed a series of classic jazz recordings for Zephyr Records. In pop my schooling was with The Clash and on 22nd November 2002 I saw Joe Strummer performing his last concert, in Liverpool, with his superb band, the Mescaleros. John Lydon's 1977 spin of 'Revolution Blues' introduced me to Neil Young who became pivotal in my development as a musician and as a man. During my illness, for many months, there was only Neil and me as he seemed to speak directly into my situation. The same thing happened more recently with the song 'Razor Love' where Neil sings " you came to me with open arms, and I really took you down the track." Someone once wrote that at times only a Neil Young song will do. That's how I felt. Later on, through him I discovered Nirvana and Pearl Jam. The death of Kurt Cobain seemed to have parallels in my situation that were frightening. For months I felt that I was destined to die in a similar way. Other favourites are Bjork, whom I read about before I heard and decided she was a nice person and Kate Rusby discovered on Andy Kershaw's excellent show formerly on BBC Radio 3 before he was overtaken with personal problems in the summer of 2007. Since the demise of Andy I have taken an interest in the work of Mary Ann Kennedy of BBC Radio Scotland. When she sets up an interactive section to her website she has offered me the position of host. I consider this a great honour. The most important Christian songwriter is Graham Kendrick. I had the pleasure of seeing him lead the worship every day for six days at Spring Harvest 2002 in Skegness. He's an exceptionally nice man but a real fighter for Christ and a consummate musician. In February of 2004 Graham, with an all-star band, gave a breath-taking performance lasting 3 hours at Liverpool Anglican Cathedral. On 6th November 2005 he played with long-time collaborator and friend Steve Thompson at Liverpool Lighthouse. He introduced many new songs which the congregation soon got the hang of. A good time was had by all. Since visiting Finland in the summer of 2005 I have become interested in Finnish culture and I discovered the Karelian folk orchestra Värttinä which means spindle. More recently I have left behind Neil Young and followed DJ Paul Sherratt into a wide variety of quality popular music. Paul is one of 40 members of my Andy Kershaw fan group on Yahoo!. I truly believe Dr Malcolm Andrew when he says "music is what happens when a poet runs out of words but keeps singing."

My chosen profession is mathematics. Fairly recently I studied fluid mechanics with Dr. Jonathan Healey of Keele University. His speciality is the stability of the rotating disk boundary layer. Between 31st July 2005 and 28th August 2005 I had the honour of being chosen to do paid work with Professor Robert Piche and my good friend Dr Eero Arola in the Mathematics Department of Tampere University of Technology in the so-called Tietotalo ( House of Learning ). We worked with Chebyshev polynomials using Matlab to try to reproduce the stability diagram of the Orr-Sommerfeld equation as found by Dr Jonathan Healey in 1995. Unfortunately we were unable to obtain sensible results and the work was abandoned. On the 3rd February 2007 I began a Level 3 Undergraduate course in Complex Analysis with the Open University. I had to abandon this after a month due to stress. I really have had a chequered career and the highs and lows have been the living embodiment of Kipling's verse 'If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat both those imposters just the same.' I hope I can.

Finally I am interested in the writings of Carl Gustav Jung. During the worst phase of my illness I met a Jungian analyst called Dr Eric Hutchison who impressed me with his profound grasp of my situation. It turns out that he had actually met Jung in Africa when he was a younger man. Eric recommended that I read 'The Road Less Travelled' by Scott Peck which many years later I did. I was thus led into studies of Jung's original works where I learned that he was the first psychiatrist to investigate the content of the speech of psychotic patients. He was a man of wide-ranging interests: religion, philosophy, mythology, alchemy, mysticism and the creative arts. He used anything he could to illuminate the subconscious and its effect upon conscious thought patterns. He is nowadays a controversial figure as he was during his lifetime but he has a band of loyal followers. He was responsible for the terms introvert and extravert, and his theory of personality types is still used today being incorporated into the Myers-Briggs personality tests. In case you're curious I am an ENFP type in which the most dominant feature is a perceiving characteristic. This means that I like to spend more time taking in information and perceiving the world around me, rather than making decisions or judgements about the world. The composer Joseph Haydn was of this type. I seem to have a deep respect for the INFJ type as both Carl Jung and Neil Young fall into this category. On the whole subject Isabel Briggs Myers said: "Whatever the circumstances of your life, whatever your personal ties, work and responsibilities, the understanding of type can make your perceptions clearer, your judgements sounder, and your life closer to your heart's desire." However your type is not the end of the story. Jung envisiged a process he called individuation in which we become our mature selves. He said: "Individuation means becoming a single, homogeneous being, and, in so far as 'in-dividuality' embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one's own self. We could therefore translate individuation as 'coming to selfhood' or 'self-realization.'" And again: "Individuation does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the world to one's self." I am a media volunteer for Rethink and in that capacity have appeared on the radio, written a magazine article and been interviewed for a published book. I am also Secretary of the Mensan Schizophrenia Special Interest Group. In 2007 I was elected to the Rethink Regional Reference Group to join as one of ten committee members. Unfortunately I have not yet felt able to attend any meetings.

In moments of relaxation I enjoy listening to music and in February 2008 I bought a turntable which plugs straight into the USB port of my PC. Hence I can listen to all my old vinyl in digital quality. I have also enjoyed reading Russian literature. My favourite author is Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev. His masterpiece is Fathers and Children, a story about the age old clash between generations. The hero is Yevgeny Vassilyevich Bazarov a young medical student and nihilist who believes that art and many contemporary institutions are utterly useless and that only practical things are of importance. It is a classic portrait of a materialist of the 1850's which succeeded in alienating almost everybody at the time. The revolutionaries thought it libellous whereas the moderates were shocked that Turgenev seemed in sympathy with this young Turk. The novel is characteristic of the author's keen insights into human nature and his breathtaking word painting. But there are plenty of classics by Turgenev and even some of his minor works can give much pleasure.

I like Albert Einstein's maxim: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." I hope I have achieved that.

All comments on this site would be welcome.

May God bless you all.:)

 
My Favorite Links:
Myers-Briggs Personality Test
Political Compass
Schizoaffective Disorders
Beautiful Minds
My Info:
Name: Martin Reynolds
Email:
m.jreynolds@tiscali.co.uk
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