I have seen the sun break through to illuminate a small field for a while …
R S Thomas The Bright Field
It’s a wonderful thing that a 30-day walking challenge opens onto such fascinating horizons — both in the outer world and the inner one.
Today, in rural Lakeland, I find myself in glad company. I can almost hear R S Thomas on his knees in a Welsh parish church, contemplating depth, quietly murmuring beneath the great panoply of dark and light that stretches over us all –
Life is not hurrying on to a receding future …
I delight in the heart-held companionship of the poets and sages I’ve known and loved across a lifetime. And I am so profoundly thankful for all who ‘walk’ with me.
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 …
.
It is a serious thing / just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in the broken world Mary Oliver – from Invitation
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
..
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
As I thought more about this, it became clear why this deep transformation we seek remains beyond our reach despite our best efforts. We wait for it to come from outside of us. We want others to give it to us. Unfortunately, real self-transformation defies teaching. It makes all teachers ultimately irrelevant. For its nature is to be grown, like a plant. It wants to arise spontaneously. Only then is it real.
Amit Pagedar Finding Awareness: The Journey of Self-discovery
What a wide firmament of experiences, images and words live in the depths of us! I’d want to suggest to Amit Pagedar that teachers contribute to our inner lives and are not therefore ‘ultimately irrelevant,’ whilst understanding the thesis that self-development absolutely arises from and is processed within – and deeply appreciating the ‘like a plant’ imagery.
Almost every outward encounter I have invites me to contemplate the rooted plant that is perpetually growing within me – fed and watered by everything I’ve ever known – by ‘both sides now.’ And the silence heard in such watchfulness counters – or balances – external cacophany and generates hope, for me, for humankind, and for the world.
Sometimes – I hear a tap tap tapping though I’m looking at a photograph of a typewriter – which image makes no sound; I encounter story in silence where neither keys nor pen have yet shaped words; I feel what is over an horizon though it be beyond my sight; I sense poetry busy in the act of creating; I touch that which is not yet present. Sometimes all of life presents as mystery to be aspired to – and hoped for.
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