Betwixt Lakeland & Edinburgh
‘The Graceful One.’ We’ve seen every hue and shade over this little island today. Bright sunshine, a column of rain, a rainbow, golden sand, red volcanic rock, the blue and turquoise sea. And at twenty-three degrees today, this is a warm and beautiful place to be.
Just for joy – an occasional series entitled Everyday Art – a little record of some of the beauty I see in the world about me every day. Sometimes this is seen in the art and photography of others. At others the photos or drawings will be of beautiful sights I saw with my own eyes. Everyday Art enriches life daily. I’ll enjoy revisiting it from time to time.
Grand staircases like this one enchant me. But I am also jumping ahead to thoughts of cabins, reading nooks and elegant workspaces.
I wonder how many of us have stories, or could write fiction, centred on particular architectural or other precisely designed detail?
I have often heard of ‘the wonders of the earth unfolding’ and meditated on that graphic imagery. Birds, bees, butterflies, flowers, persons and so on. Today I am sitting on an island that rose from the Atlantic Ocean twenty-five million years ago. A mere 300 years ago it was still unfolding. Over a period of 6 years, a new mountain moonscape was formed as tonnes of molten rock erupted from the bowels of the 4.2 billion years old earth, cooling and settling to become eerily beautiful art-desert. Is that a squirrel? A goat? A hermit? My eyes deceive. These are robust creatures of the earth, unmoved for centuries – until succeeding wonders unfold and call forth psalms of appreciation from little awakenings like mine.
A bibliophile and a lover of words, I also delight in empty new journals of all shapes and sizes. The latter condition probably owes a great deal to the former.
I remember the dry scent of the paper stock room in my primary school more than fifty years ago. The sight of a stack of brand new unmarked exercise books delighted me then, as now. Odd, though, that while my head was full enough of stories, I always wanted to keep a brand new writing book brand new! There was (and is) an instinct for preserving things in me somewhere, together with a distaste for ‘spoiling’ something already beautiful. But such energies conflict – for I also delight in re-reading journal entries years after the writing. A ‘finished’ journal delivers enormous satisfaction and recollection.
Perhaps the psychology is bound with invitation still afforded by blank sheets, where full ones speak of something already done and dusted? Maybe empty journals are a happy call to silence? Or being reminded of long gone days and ways – and the school stock room? But I think blank journals are just plain beautiful too. Do you?
A few days ago I was struck by the Japanese poet Ryokan’s
If we lose something, it is hiding somewhere near us
I was much comforted at the time, and remembered a dear late friend who used to tell me with delight that St Anthony of Padua often provided her with similar assurances! For Ryokan and for Joan I think the basic idea was that one shouldn’t get too wound up about these things, that things have a way of working out – or, better still, turning up.
So I breathed deep and waited for inspiration.
Dear reader, I now joyfully confirm that Ryokan was onto something. And so was Joan. Both encouraged me to walk the paths of peace. And that which was lost was indeed hiding somewhere near us and is now found. All sorts of appreciative images come to mind – the cat with the cream, the dog with the bone, my grand-daughter with cake.
Or a bear like me. Post honey!
Snow topped Fells. Frosted fields. Winter sharpens ancient definition in glorious Lakeland scenery. And every year, noting steaming breath, I marvel at sheep knees and noses withstanding intense cold.
At the Maryport Literary Festival, hosted at the Senhouse Roman Museum where picture windows frame the Solway Firth, I enjoyed a tour de force from Steve Matthews (‘polymath and raconteur’) whose book Lap of Horror tells of early travellers to Borrowdale and Derwentwater.
The genius of the Brontë family came alive in Angela Locke’s illuminating conversation with renowned authority Juliet Barker. Each of Patrick Brontë’s children was shy. Writing became their means to articulate rich inner lives.
A personal and poignant reading by Grevel Lindop, the timbre of whose voice hums in his stanzas before he speaks, brought poetry’s moving power to search depths centre stage.
Echoes of Roman soldiers on the mileforts. Time-travel to walk with early Lakeland tourists. Encouragement to the shy. A great poet’s inspiring to aim high. Solway Firth’s sea and sky. Treasure of a way to spend a winter’s day.
Here is light behind letters that turn into words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters and stories. Expressions of my life – or of yours.
That’s why I write. That’s what brings writers back to blank pages every day. The pursuit of illumination beneath letters.
The light behind letters speaks to me of Creation herself. Darkness and light. Something of light inscribed upon dark. Something dark frames light. One does not exist without the other.
As music needs silence to sound its aliveness, so writers paint dark upon light or light upon dark and know that there is a knowing.
Life behind the letters.
PPP – Poetry, prose, and photography. Three inspiring gifts for which I’m grateful every day. I wouldn’t want to be without any of them. Each shows me something of past, present and future.
Memory, life now, and what may be to come.
Today I am entranced and inspired by this elemental image. A young Buddhist monk, playing as any girl or boy might, in water. I’ve returned to it on and off all day. A bowl of water poured to silver swirl, overflowing and returned to source. Unfathomable tranquillity.
PPP – bedrock for vivacity and contemplation.
In all ten directions of the universe …
In all ten directions of the universe,
there is only one truth.
When we see clearly, the great teachings are the same.
What can ever be lost? What can be attained?
If we attain something, it was there from the beginning of time.
If we lose something, it is hiding somewhere near us.
Look: this ball in my pocket:
can you see how priceless it is?Ryokan
translated from the Japanese
by Stephen Mitchell
Soul Food
If we lose something, it is hiding somewhere near us.
I need only stillness and quiet breath enough to see the pricelessness in what is ‘in my pocket’, my hand, my life, right now. Aware of my heartbeat and that of the universe.
Like Rabindranath Tagore, trying and failing to count stars, I soon lose count of the gifts in my hand. But I have confidence in still further graces ‘hiding somewhere near us’.
my old monkey mind
I watch him at this dawn hour – already
skipping around between synapses with
boyish enthusiasm, hampered by marked
lack of focus, though the diffusion of
the neurotransmitters across which his
impulses pass at the junction between
two nerve cells models perfect precisionNever skipping a beat, the intention
in direction is mapping the past and
planning the future, electrical charge
that needs watchful earthing in being and
in quietly focused attention – not
mere reaction – for highest fulfilment
at this dawn of my day and come what maySRM
My father could hear a little animal step,
or a moth in the dark against the screen,
and every far sound called the listening out
into places where the rest of us had never been.More spoke to him from the soft wild night
than came to our porch for us on the wind;
we would watch him look up and his face go keen
till the walls of the world flared, widened.My father heard so much that we still stand
inviting the quiet by turning the face,
waiting for a time when something in the night
will touch us too from that other place.William Stafford
Listening
The Way It Is
William Stafford’s Listening is open on my desk – one of my all-time favourite poems – ‘waiting for a time when something in the night / will touch us too from that other place.’ This man’s humanity and sensitivity are boundless.
Often I reflect on the quality of listening that is touched upon here. The quality of my life tilts towards good when I allow space for listening deeply, before food, before prayer, before work, rest and play.
So I’m especially delighted today to find a William Stafford musing I’ve not read before, on writing a poem:
Writing it was like getting a lock on a feeling
and just letting the feeling lead me from one
part to the next.
Poetry leads us somewhere.
Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray:
And, when I crossed the wild,
I chanced to see at break of day
The solitary child.No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor,
The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door!You yet may spy the fawn at play,
The hare upon the green;
But the sweet face of Lucy Gray
Will never more be seen.“To-night will be a stormy night –
You to the town must go;
And take a lantern, Child, to light
Your mother through the snow.”“That, Father! will I gladly do:
‘Tis scarcely afternoon –
The minster-clock has just struck two,
And yonder is the moon!”At this the Father raised his hook,
And snapped a faggot-band;
He plied his work; – and Lucy took
The lantern in her hand.Not blither is the mountain roe:
With many a wanton stroke
Her feet disperse the powdery snow,
That rises up like smoke.The storm came on before its time:
She wandered up and down;
And many a hill did Lucy climb:
But never reached the town.The wretched parents all that night
Went shouting far and wide;
But there was neither sound nor sight
To serve them for a guide.At day-break on a hill they stood
That overlooked the moor;
And thence they saw the bridge of wood,
A furlong from their door.They wept – and, turning homeward, cried,
“In heaven we all shall meet;”
When in the snow the mother spied
The print of Lucy’s feet.Then downwards from the steep hill’s edge
They tracked the footmarks small;
And through the broken hawthorn hedge,
And by the long stone-wall;And then an open field they crossed:
The marks were still the same;
They tracked them on, nor ever lost;
And to the bridge they came.They followed from the snowy bank
Those footmarks, one by one,
Into the middle of the plank;
And further there were none!Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.O’er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.William Wordsworth
1799
Conversation about poetry on a visit to my 84 year old Dad today. Frustrated sometimes by Parkinson’s-induced interruptions to his memory-flow, Dad still recites Lucy Gray. All sixteen stanzas. I’m amazed and grateful. Poetry, for both of us is a great grace.
But the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence
we call God. This is the deep
calling to deep of the psalm-
writer, the bottomless ocean
we launch an armada of
our thoughts on, never arriving.It is a presence, then,
whose margins are our margins;
that calls us out over our
own fathoms. What to do
but draw a little nearer to
such ubiquity by remaining still?R S Thomas
Counterpoint, p.118
‘Where is the source of your deepest creativity?’ – I ask my artist, poet and writer friends, the thinkers, imaginative day-dreamers, the most effective doers.
‘In silence’, they reply in unison – some introvert and some the very opposite.
‘In silence. That’s where we live life best. That’s where we’re most creative’.
As R S Thomas has it: ‘… never arriving’.
‘In silence’, the concert pianist tells me, as we board the train after a tour de force recital.
‘Without silence there’s no music. No spaces in between. Nowhere to hang the notes.’
Silent. We’re called – ‘out over our / own fathoms’.
Silent. I rest and thrive in this space.
A wind from whence
Stirreth the wayside dust
And passeth hence
And the dust sinketh
Unto dust.Sunshine and shower
Sweet falling rain
A flower
Plucked ere its time
– Or seeding –
Fadeth all the same.Flash of light on a stream
Vision across a dream
Darkness
Over the passing gleam.Nov 2nd, 1912
John H Mason RDI
Poems
Happenstance leads me today to John Mason’s little collection Poems, self-published in 1938. A couple of hours ago I stood before Ray Ogden’s Fisher King – an extraordinary painting that stirreth the wayside dust, in the always startlingly bright colours fleetingly seen in a Kingfisher’s flight.
There’s an echo of colour. Dazzling of the eyes. Coloured dust afloat in the airstream like that from the wings of a moth, or a butterfly, but brighter. Flash of light on a stream. I intend to revisit the painting at Rheged upon the morrow. With this poem in hand.
Yes: I feel them near –
the closer ones who
share my days and walk
life’s low and high waysYes: I feel them near –
the Ones who have gone
before us. And I
celebrate in themAll Saints
SRM