Month: July 2017

Feel beauty with our eyes closed

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Mauro-Morandi
mauro morandi | photo at greenews

I would like people to understand that we must try not to look at beauty, but feel beauty with our eyes closed

Mauro Morandi
National Geographic – where you can read his story

Mauro Morandi has lived alone on Budelli, an island in the Maddalena archipelago, near the strait of Bonifacio in northern Sardinia, for twenty-eight years. Like the Desert Mothers and Fathers of Egypt around the 3rd century, this lover of reading, silence, sea and sunset has patently learned a thing or two.

Feeling beauty with our eyes closed.

My favourite quotation of 2017 to date!

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I am grateful for …

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click photos to enlarge – a second time to zoom further

… lingers awhile along borders for a translator to savor secretly,
borrowing from both sides, holding
for a moment the smooth round world
in that cool instant of evening before the sun goes down

William Stafford
from Walking the Borders
The Way It Is – New and Selected Poems

I write a few lines in my meditation journal each day, and from time to time review what I’ve written – looking for patterns and repetitions. One of the most frequent notes that appears in the ‘I am grateful for …’ sections is what I often describe as ‘nature’s art and light’.

And I realise that the poets I regularly turn to have eyes and ears for the detail in the natural wonders that surround them; some having especial penchant for the sky, or sea, or lakes, or mountains, or sweeping plains, or animals and their particular, chosen, encouraged or given habitats, flora and fauna. I delight in all of these.

But most of all I am entranced by light, always changing, writing, painting, softening, sharpening, defining, reaching, touching, listening – full from earth to sky with metaphor and parable, reaching onwards, upwards, and into the heights and depths of the Universe. And into my soul.

So it was during our after-supper walk this evening. So it was a million aeons ago. So for a million, million more. Meditating in and upon light I stand time and again in awe.

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Examine for a while

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tree-2435269_1280
photo at pixabay

I have learned from long experience that there is nothing that is not marvellous and that the saying of Aristotle is true – that in every natural phenomenon there is something wonderful, nay, in truth, many wonders. We are born and placed among wonders and surrounded by them, so that to whatever object the eye first turns, the same is wonderful and full of wonders, if only we would examine it for a while.

John de Dondis, 14th century
quoted in J S Collis
The Worm Forgives The Plough, 1973, p170

Plenty of reason to have a good English moan about continuing rainfall today – or to sit down to a meditation session, having first noticed the magnificent, soaring canvas of clouds in every shade and hue of grey on high, and the all-the-more-glorious advent of sunlight from time to time, so that the potatoes in our kitchen garden are both moistened and warmed, beneath the chunter and fuss of thirty or so disgruntled sparrows who don’t appear to like rain much. Or meditation.

Open your eyes gently and focus upon just one wonder for a while, breathed the guide – in the fourteenth century. And I did – on this wet July day in the twenty-first. And as it turned out there was no moaning about the rain. Or anything else.

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Lunch

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food-2375468_1280.jpg

Some were very old
and stiff and struggling
to navigate chairs
and tables

Some were very young
and wanted burgers
while their mums chose cold
ham staples

Some didn’t care how
long it all took, just
pleased today not to
have to cook

Some were business-folk
a bit glassy-eyed
frazzled, distracted
lightly fried

And us of course, we
were out for lunch too
where noticing the
others is

part of how you do

SRM

Questions and no answers

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Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort. As long as I have questions and no answers I’ll keep on writing.

Clarice Lispector
Hour of the Star

There’s no music without depth of silence upon which to paint notes. Often I have shared my love of ‘silent music’ – the spaces in between. Absence of answers, the unfinished, the infinite, the eternal, the questions – are as important to me as expressed chords and symphonies, every bit as important to me as the words I yearn to read, and shape upon my tongue, and set down upon a page, and have engraved upon my heart, occupying my days and nights, my soul-work, my love, my leisure.

It’s not arriving, or the making of judgments, proclamations, speeches or songs that draws me towards the eternal. It’s living with questions that have no trite answers. Writing, reading, making poetry and prayer, long-savouring notes and words, meditating before the great backdrop of silence. Effort. Gratitude. Occasionally glimpsing an Eden of simplicity.

Anchored to the Infinite

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IMG_5796
photo at pixabay

The builder who first bridged Niagara’s gorge,
Before he swung his cable, shore to shore,
Sent out across the gulf his venturing kite
Bearing a slender cord for unseen hands
To grasp upon the further cliff and draw
A greater cord, and then a greater yet;
Till at the last across the chasm swung
The cable then the mighty bridge in air!

So we may send our little timid thought
Across the void, out to God’s reaching hands—
Send out our love and faith to thread the deep—
Thought after thought until the little cord
Has greatened to a chain no chance can break,
And we are anchored to the Infinite!

Edwin Markham
The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems, 1929

Whether we conceive of the infinite religiously or not, metaphorical bridge-building is, consciously or unconsciously, the stuff of human life – billions, trillions of ‘timid thoughts’ sent out into void and – somehow caught, transformed, transfigured, vivified and made strong enough to reach deeply into present-day aliveness, here and now.

I love to be aware of this bridge-building consciously, daily, awake, in returning again and again to the silent music of meditation. And – joy of joys – anyone can do it, anywhere. Just by sitting quietly. Just by breathing. Threading the deep. Yes, indeed, in The Shoes of Happiness.

Tranquil

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tranquil-e1500286234891-squashed
morning view from the bedroom window

We left Brittany a little over a week ago but I can still hear the gentle lapping at the riverbank, see the view of the river from, and taste the air blown through the wide open bedroom window. It is a tranquil scene. This tidal river never appears in a hurry. The turning of the tide gently pirouettes the moored boats as though deliberately practiced in the arts of slow motion. Regular returns to that window and that river are restorative. So, too, is my daily return to river-like practice and pirouette. A life long lover of the lexicon, favourite words, thoughts and practices are tranquil.