Values, beliefs, thoughts

First lawn mowing and raised-bed weeding of the season today. Satisfaction paradoxically coupled with prayer for peace in Ukraine – with every weed pulled and every blade of grass trimmed.

Every glass of water, cup of coffee, conversation, good book, meal, news bulletin, sleep or walk brings Kyiv to mind. Yaroslava wrote in her Twitter war diary yesterday

I dream come back home. Drink my delicious coffee. Read my books.

And today

Break for #warcoffee. I write this diary for 20 days. Sometimes it feels like 20 years. During these ‘years’ I’ve been changing. Values, beliefs, thoughts. So the diary is not only about ordinary woman living through the war. It’s about new me being born.

Digging my garden, mowing my lawn, thinking of you and of all your fellow Ukranians, Yaroslava, my prayer is for a new and peace-loving inter-national ‘we’ being born.

🙏🇺🇦🙏

Belfast ii

8000 miles in diameter. We don’t take up an awful lot of space in the firmament but we sure make a lot of noise at times! I think I knew first time round that Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast was always going to warrant a second seeing soon. Oddly enough, years ago, I saw the 3+ hours long Titanic on two successive nights and was reminded today of her having been built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast’s famous shipyard – but I digress: I think I hoped I’d be able to shape a choate response to Belfast after second seeing. My friend and I agreed that, whilst the glorious cinematography stole hearts the first time, the nuanced and poignant dialogue won the day today. But further response? Still too early. Still too stunning. Especially poignant today – as Ukraine comes under fire. Words fail. I’m sitting in silence, gazing at a photograph of our small and precious planet, and for the umpteenth time I yearn for a quietening, wondering what – in the name of every imaginable good – what do we humans think we’re doing waging war with one another – nation upon nation, or one on one? When will we ever learn? My small silence reaches out unto the greater, knowing Silence. And recalling a bus, trundling down a tragic street, bearing away to unknown future a small and fragile family, far from all that had mothered them, parentally and metaphorically, I keen …

Questions and no answers

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.

Hollowed out

lights
Photo at Pixabay

Can even a little peace be breathed into human existence today?

Can a willed intention for light amid the darkness of the present world’s confusion and fear, grief, haplessness and hopelessness make the slightest difference? Do my prayer, contemplation and meditation heal or illuminate anything beyond my soul at all?

I don’t know.

Only that I must pray, contemplate and meditate. The not knowing facilitates kinship with the millions most desperately in need of peace-light (and food, drink, safety and shelter) tonight. And I have a pervading feeling that if hollowed-out humanity were ever able to surrender some of its ‘knowing’ to accepting and tolerant living, we might yet thrive and grow within the embrace of Wisdom – way deeper and beyond the confining walls of religious houses and capitols.

Wishful thinking? OK. But today I heard a seven-year-old girl bombed out of her home and frightened beyond any measure of decency, thanking those who have shown an interest in her story. Yes. I wish. I wish. I wish.

The know-all will make nothing great again, at all.