Evening at the close of a perfect hay day. I’ve met several people while out walking, two of whom, separately, described the sky as ‘milky’.
Month: August 2017
Inner light
A walk
My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance —and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on,
answering our own wave …
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.Rainer Maria Rilke
Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Robert Bly
With an entire ocean separating us, I watched a traumatised woman, already suffering the effects of advanced Alzheimer’s, being rescued from chest high water in Houston this morning. The pathos well nigh overwhelmed me. And that was only the first of the day’s news that seemed to suggest, again, that the world has gone mad. There was so much more to follow. One simply doesn’t know what to think or say.
And yet inner light, even from a distance persuades me, even when unable to find words, to stay positive. To hear that it’s not true that everything’s gone to pot. To notice the tenacity and the goodness that resides deep in the heart of humanity and comes to the fore when needed. By grace at work in somebody the elderly lady was rescued and that ought to be held close to our hearts as encouragement for everybody.
May the people of Texas – and the afflicted and the fearful of the world wheresoever they may be – speedily find again a sunny hill.
The Unrevealed
The Unrevealed
Always a door within a door we find
When curiously we venture to explore
The obscure and labyrinthine corridor
Of man’s unsearchable immemorial mind –Always a shrine within a shrine, when we
Would seek through courts and chambers crystalline
The temple’s holy of holies, to divine
The secret of the soul’s flame-folded mysteryWilfrid Wilson Gibson, 1878-1962
Islands, 1932
Mystery keeps us searching – reaching both inward and out. This is our task – and it’s a vivifying and infinite one. We humans have access to ‘courts and chambers crystalline.’ That’s something worth getting out of bed for in the morning! Mystery is Life. And its Source. Gift and charism await us all, always. Much still unrevealed.
Inward and outward
The Inner History of a Day
Born quietly from deepest night,
It hid its face in light,
Demanded nothing for itself,
Opened out to offer each of us
A field of brightness that travelled ahead,
Providing in time, ground to hold our footsteps
And the light of thought to show the way.The mind of the day draws no attention;
It dwells within the silence with elegance
To create a space for all our words,
Drawing us to listen inward and outward.We seldom notice how each day is a holy place
Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens,
Transforming our broken fragments
Into an eternal continuity that keeps us.Somewhere in us a dignity presides
That is more gracious than the smallness
That fuels us with fear and force,
A dignity that trusts the form a day takes.So at the end of this day, we give thanks
For being betrothed to the unknown
And for the secret work
Through which the mind of the day
And wisdom of the soul become one.John O’Donohue
The Inner History of a Day
To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings
I’ve been enjoying photos of the Eclipse as seen in the US; and good and brave souls embracing and ‘getting back to normal’ on Las Ramblas in beautiful Barcelona; and hundreds of other snapshot fragments of life around the world on the 21st August 2017.
And I’m so grateful for John O’Donohue’s calling our attention to the ‘eucharist of the ordinary’ – that quiet inner life, the dawn ‘born quietly from deepest night,’ where all humankind and natural phenomena together are joined in the ‘work through which the mind of the day / and wisdom of the soul become one.’
Transforming our broken fragments.
Attentiveness
This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness
Mary Oliver
cited by Parker J Palmer,
Quaker elder and columnist for
On Being – here
What would the world feel like tomorrow morning if broadcast ‘world news’ tonight was comprised of just the one piece of Wisdom Mary Oliver notes here?
No advice, no opinions, no looking to leaders of any kind, nor any seeking to lead or be led. Just every single person in the world watching quietly, without reaction, and with benign interest, the stream of soul-destroying thoughts ticker-taping inside their own head. And letting them go.
What would the world feel like tomorrow morning if there was a complete absence of noise – noise replaced with no thing other than focused attentiveness, however brief?
Could we laugh at ourselves and our shifting certainties? Could we put to one side our politics and religions, our tribes and education, our perceptions of culture and dominions – even for a little space? Would we yearn to return soon to the stillness and silence of such a soul-building place?
In the morning and at afternoon and evening: let it begin, again, with me.
Transparent screens
1954
MayAttachment to the self renders life more opaque. One moment of complete forgetting and all the screens, one behind the other, become transparent so that you can perceive clarity to its very depths, as far as the eye can see; and at the same time everything becomes weightless. Thus does the soul become a bird.
Philippe Jaccottet
Seedtime: Notebooks, 1954-79
It is a marvellous thing to observe from time to time that one forgot oneself – even for a few moments. And I recall that Philippe Jaccottet had similar thoughts back in 1954. I’ve noted them often enough that they come back to me of their own volition every once in a while.
I wonder how many people recall the frequent ‘don’t forget’ (this, that or the other) of schooldays and years of life-school days thereafter? Don’t forget. Don’t forget. Don’t forget.
And I forget, and perhaps you forget, that it can be good to forget. Especially oneself. Once in a while, like an ever more glorious dawn, we forget so completely and wonderfully – and maybe unexpectedly – that we know without a doubt that we’re alive!
Five senses are suddenly, inexplicably, entirely attuned. Curtains, screens, checkpoints, and don’t forget lists fall to the floor, and everything takes on the dimensions of the extra-ordinary. And a person flies.
Allegiances
Allegiances
It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all of us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things
we live by.Far to the north, or indeed in any direction,
strange mountains and creatures have always lurked –
elves, goblins, trolls, and spiders: – we
encounter them in dread and wonder,But once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold,
found some limit beyond the waterfall,
a season changes, and we come back, changed
but safe, quiet, grateful.Suppose an insane wind holds all the hills
while strange beliefs whine at the traveler’s ears,
we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love
where we are, sturdy for common things.William Stafford
The Way It Is – New & Selected Poems
A few key dates in William Stafford’s life: born in Kansas in 1914. A conscientious objector in World War II. A man whose habit was to write something daily, who would rise at 4.30am to ‘sit and wait’ for what he knew lay within to be written. His volume West of Your City published by Talisman Press in 1960; Allegiances published by Harper in New York in 1970; the author of over fifty books, he died at his home in Oregon in 1993.
William Stafford thoroughly understood that once we have tasted far streams … / found some limit beyond the waterfall, / a season changes, and we come back, changed …
And therein lies our hope for this old world in our own time and season.
Dreadful elves, goblins, trolls and spiders have always existed. Some of them, some of us too, have sought to be ‘heroes’ – fenced around by their and our own ignorance. It is time for all the heroes to go home.
How then may I and we locate ourselves by the real things / we live by – ?
Perhaps – having tasted – it has always to start with me, with what I now clearly see: that instead of kidding myself it’s my job to change the entire world (whoever I am, whatever my place of birth, gender, skin colour, creed or lack thereof, and wherever on earth I think myself called to be the hero, the unsolicited ‘saviour of the world’) my best contribution to that same world will be to allow seasons and experience to change me.
While strange beliefs whine at the traveler’s ears,
we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love
where we are, sturdy for common things.
Note sturdy. Not wimps without cogniscence of – or willingness sometimes to act upon – right or wrong. Not people who turn blind eyes to goblins and trolls. Not people who do not grieve, or hope, or offer healing or hospitality, or pray, or live and die. But sturdy. Believing in the possibility of being positively changed. Experienced in the quiet and slow methods and the poetry of seasons.
Just for the joy
I’ve been longing to find a couple of hours to begin to get to grips with Affinity Designer, new software I’m cock-a-hoop about. After adding some super new brushes and absorbing some encouragement and samples by Frankentoon today, I’ve been completely and happily occupied this evening – and blithely thought I’d share the fruit of that delight. Just for the joy of it. Only the beginning of what I hope will be a long friendship with Affinity. But already I love it.
Daybreak
The New Song
For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back thenthere is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new songW S Merwin
The Moon Before Morning
Our neighbour brought us a beautiful thrush, stunned after flying directly into her window. ‘You’re good with birds,’ she said.
And it’s true that, sometimes, after an hour or two of warmth and watching, breeze ruffling feathers revivifies, and we have known the joy of tentative flapping giving way again to flight.
But not this time ‘as I had found it the first time’. So there’s been another little burial.
And a flood of metaphors perennial.
And then this morning, at daybreak …
Buttoned up
Yes: I know it’s August the first, not January. But anyone reading the papers and online world news today might be forgiven for believing that we’re all caught up in nothing other – past, present or future, than a perpetually dreadful ‘winter of discontent.’
I say tosh to that!
Jack Kornfield’s vignette about his twin brother Irv touched a chord with me this afternoon.
When I was eight years old, on an especially bitter windy winter day, my brothers and I dressed in jackets and scarves and gloves and went out to play in the snow. I was skinny as a rail and shivering with cold. My twin brother, Irv, stronger, wilder, and more robust, looked at me, contracted and fearful, and laughed. Then he began to remove layers of clothing—first the gloves, his coat, then a sweater, his shirt, undershirt, all the while laughing. He danced and paraded around half-naked in the snow, the icy wind whipping around us. We were all wide-eyed, laughing hysterically.
Finding freedom is an active process that engages your intellect, your heart, and your whole spirit.
Jack Kornfield
No Time Like the Present:
Finding Freedom and Joy Right Where You Are
Who among us hasn’t looked in the mirror sometimes and encountered a buttoned-up-seen-it-all-done-it-all-already little caricature of themselves – ‘contracted and fearful’ – ?
Better to avoid gazing at our own reflection too much and see if there’s a bit of twin-brother Irv to be found in us somewhere. And – even if we’re not soon laughing hysterically – we’re as likely as not to wind up wide-eyed. With wonder.
And breathe deep.