Category: inner life

From the mindfulness bench

~ windinmywheels ~ Leave a comment
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What we need is here
Wendell Berry – from The Wild Geese

A meditation on presence, play, and the scent of red leather


A wonderfully pale blue sky has framed Dumfries and Galloway in the last couple of days. Warm sunshine, together with the provision of a lovely ‘mindfulness bench,’ just big enough for two people, and overlooking the pond and Dalbeattie Burn at Colliston Park, made it an absolute pleasure to spend a couple of happy hours in this 9.5 acre park playing with my younger daughter and grandchildren. Yes, we shared some mindfulness, and – as is quite often the case after a time of stillness – the light scent of my daughter’s red leather jacket lingers with me now. My teenage grandson spoke of being willing enough, but needing practice at writing 1000 word essays, and of enjoyment in working with his hands. His younger sister ‘took us’ all – by way of an imaginary tractor, to Kirkcudbright – 42 miles away, ‘for fish and chips,’ returning just in time for (actual) donuts from Dalbeattie bakery before we went our separate ways. Flowers, sunshine, sky, running burn, meditation, conversation, warm scent, dreamscape and donuts …

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It is a serious thing / just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in the broken world
Mary Oliver – from Invitation

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To the one who watched the sky

~ windinmywheels ~ 2 Comments
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Look at the sky. That’s enough – Rainer Maria Rilke


we write in dusk what
morning might understand …

… he’d penned thus far. The sky now very pale blue, and crossed by pink floss, he’d wondered – ‘is that a satellite, or a star?’

And in the way of such things, stillness descended as it often does when the answer doesn’t really matter, nor whether satellite-or-star is near or far.

And from time to time, amid the gentle reverie, he became aware of illuminated windows, some with orange glow, one a string of white fairy light, to the right a flickering quadrant, and several with the kind of log-fire-warmth one sees mid-winter through the steamed-up panes of an Edinburgh bar.

Fleetingly he wondered whether any behind those windows were ever aware of his being at his window – from over there, from just beyond entirely clear focus, afar.

And then, on Thursday morning, aware of windows having featured in his deeply restful dreams, he found a small sage green envelope had been pushed under his door. There was a thoughtfulness about the sort of chosen stationery, with the slightest trace of scent about it, for special sorts of notes – he’d seen once or twice before. And – with quiet delight – he’s contemplated the content of that note now, for a week or two, or more:

To the one over there who watched
the sky when I did, thank you for being
a quiet lantern in the dusk. We never
spoke, but your stillness reached me –
and towards the end of a frenetic day
it mattered, and quietened me, more
than I can say

Sometimes he was mildly aware of an angel at his shoulder. Tonight, in a quiet light, he heard her whisper

You looked at the sky
like it was enough

It was

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Sometimes we meet ourselves in the gaze of another, across silence

There are moments when the soul touches the world, and the world gently touches back

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes,
but in having new eyes – Marcel Proust

Shoreline

~ windinmywheels ~ 2 Comments
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Down the dusty slope to the long sweep of
gold sand and the beach café’s garlic gambas
and Pablo’s distinctively rich dark brown
coffee where the chief scent of the morning

is of suncream and warmed skin and quiet
conversation is accompanied by
out-of-control symphonies of wind-blown
wires thrashing the masts of a rainbow of

sailboards – and yes – we come here every year
to tell again of the turquoise and the
turtles and shyly aware faithfulness
to-a-fault to these times and to these hot

prawns and coffee like this and even to
the same sun oil and quieting stilling
soothing murmur of the ocean of love
and abiding in hearts and souls that know

one another so well that the shoreline
paddling and the holding hands and the light
and the deep and the sad and the funny
conversation and affectionate and

glad recollection will carry us both –
after our falling into the deepest
of deep sleeps – unto shoreline and sunshine
of our universal eternity

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We walked, still

~ windinmywheels ~ 4 Comments
DSCF5989.jpg
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We walked, still, even
after her energy had
waned far, unreplenished
by the ordinary grace of
food once consumed easily
and by most simply taken
for granted

And in the walking saw
and felt again and again
that nourishment may
be drawn for the soul
though the physical frame
tires and slows and evening
firelight glows

illuminating kaleidoscopic
memories and warming
hopes long held and yet
aspired to. Yes, we walked
still. And as though they had
been aware of a greater than
usual urgency

on Christmas Day in rain
around mid-afternoon and
a five mile tramp from our
beloved fireside she stooped
to feel snowdrops newly
raised from earth between
her fingers

Not too late this arrival –
not too late – it was a
timely coming
and is now a photograph
developed upon the backdrop
of my mind. Souvenir
We have come. We remember

And we walk, still
again and again