more @gardenstudiogram | click photos to enlarge
.
and it strikes me that
this city has come alive
like this through aeons
.
Morning
Tag: reflection
From the mindfulness bench
more @gardenstudiogram | click photos to enlarge
.
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
.
Carlingwark loch
more @gardenstudiogram | click photos to enlarge
.
at Carlingwark loch
the pale blue sky was touched
by wisps of angels.
To the one who watched the sky
more @gardenstudiogram | click photos to enlarge
.
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 enoughIt 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
Dynamic earth
Let the worries be quietened
let the gladness be celebrated
let every dream inside me
find its path and dance purposefully
joyfully, toward this worldI have a story I have never told:
once, when I was dreaming
I looked up at the firmament
and saw the vastness and knew
I was a creation made of stardustI am still a creation made of stardust
.
Peace
Consciousness is experience
Christof Koch
The Feeling Of Life Itself
Today I asked AI to create an image of peace, using the words ‘bright reflective colours, peace.’ I’m interested in what artificial intelligence can contribute to our conscious human capacity for creativity, experience and reflection.
Now I shall spend a few days considering the (I think beautiful) image I’ve been presented with. What can I see of peace here? I wonder, too, what you might see? Will several responses differ widely, or will we each see similar attributes of peace?
First response in me sees multi-layered, multi-coloured richness, depth and diversity with an immediately obvious lack of sharp edges. No grazed knees or broken bones here. I recall something similar from my childhood imaginings about ‘Heaven.’
What would a more fluid human consciousness look like? How would our experience of life change? Is the sharp-edged, the hard and fast, the ‘absolute,’ helpful? I see inviting pathways in this image – cohesion, unity in diversity, no walls, no weapons – and I feel something of peace.
We’re all too familiar with the experience of what it feels like when we encounter deliberate fomenting of anger, anxiety, lack, loss, and warfare in its various tragic guises. I dare to hope that our humankind may become more familiar with the sort of intelligence – ‘artificial’ and ‘human’ – that presents, holds out to us all, new visions of peace.
.
Capital reflection
more @gardenstudiogram | click photos to enlarge
.
early evening rain
in Edinburgh will paint a
reflective landscape
.
Oh, Glen Coe
more @gardenstudiogram | click photos to enlarge
.
Oh, Glen Coe, I wonder if you’re at all aware of the impression you make upon human souls, or of the expansive, spacious poetry you inscribe upon the hearts of women and men? There’s a liturgical usage that, addressing the Divine, speaks of ‘the silent music of your praise,’ and – in precious moments, when the breeze stilled, I heard the silent music in the praise, and in the guardianship, of a magisterial glen. Yes, one cannot help but wonder whether – by way of millions of years, innumerable sunrises, windswept hours and mountain-painting sunsets – you have known of how you touch us, change us, reshape and restore us.
the silent music of your praise
And it turns out that silent music is unforgettable, immortal – carrying and soothing, as it does, the eruptions and heat and formation and battle and defence and peace and prayer and unimaginable majesty of height and breadth and depth and antiquity. Oh, Glen Coe, you weather the changeability of all that is with such stillness and grace. Your might and height calm my littleness and insecurity. Your breadth and depth remind me to celebrate the gift of life, of a great abiding, of presence, of the human senses and awarenesses. You humble me and simultaneously ‘raise me up.’ In a matter of hours I have visited Doune Castle, and Stirling Castle, and am now home again beneath the storytelling ramparts of Edinburgh Castle. As Enya might have it – ‘how can I keep from singing?’ In silence and in song, how indeed?
.
Hearth of red and gold
Reflections by a Fire
On moving into an old house in New Hampshire
Fire is a good companion for the mind;
Here in this room, mellowed by sunlight, kind
After yesterday’s thrall of rain and dark,
I watch the fire and feel some warm thoughts spark …
May Sarton
Collected Poems
A good walk on a cool grey afternoon, coupled with thoughts of some more baked apples for supper, have resulted in the lighting of my wood stove and plans for that most lovely of autumnal occupations: hot coffee, buttered scones and books beside the fire. Sometime yesterday I was speaking with a friend about the power of evocation. Oh so very much is evoked and re-membered by a warm ash-burning hearth of red and gold. And ‘warm thoughts spark …’
.
Evening breathing
Momentous seasons give way, eventually, to quiet watching and thankfully slowed evening breathing …
.
A cloud of interests
more @gardenstudiogram | click photos to enlarge
.
There wasn’t
time enough for all the wonderful things
I could think of to do
in a single day. Patience
comes to the bones
before it takes root in the heart
as another good idea.
I say this
as I stand in the woods
and study the patterns
of the moon shadows,
or stroll down into the waters
that now, late summer, have also
caught the fever, and hardly move
from one eternity to another.
Mary Oliver
From ‘Patience’
New and Selected Poems
Volume Two
Happy September! I’m having a quiet evening and feeling peaceful and mellow.
I’ve been thinking, too, about my automatically generated ‘tag cloud’ here, and of how it gives a pretty good account of some of my chief interests … inner life, contemplation, Edinburgh, poetry …
Autumn and winter will be warmed by an array of interests and occupations like these.
.
A Universal Song
Writing is a journey of discovery that takes me places that I never expected …
… a friend wrote to me today. And – in the way of such things – I have been taken thereby to places that I never expected, wondering all day about the extraordinary gift of languages in words, and in music, which can sometimes transport our words so exquisitely.
When I was first moved by Les Miserables in the 1990s I remember being sure in my mind that Marius’ grieving in Herbert Kretzmer’s Empty Chairs and Empty Tables was not for one revolution alone, but for every reflection and reconsideration of past, present and potential. A Universal Song.
Hearts are breaking all over the world for innumerable reasons today. Too many empty chairs and empty tables. I find myself awed by the purity of young Cormac Thompson’s rendition here – a clarity that carries an invitation to reflect straight to human hearts.
May our words be quiet, kind and clear; may our music sometimes be hope-filled silence – so that we really hear both, allowing ourselves to be reshaped, that we may the better transform our world. A quiet revolution. Thus may we be taken to unexpected, perhaps joy-filled and hopeful places.
The variety of life
more @gardenstudiogram | click to enlarge
Sad though I am to be missing our second bothy weekend, I have to admit that temporary grounding in house and garden by Covid-19 is not without its joys.
Gardens, and nature generally, inspire my soul and enhance my perspective. I’m drawn to remember, and to reflect upon, the extraordinary diversity and variety in all things living – near and far, tiny and gigantic, colour, complexity, scent, size, shape, textures, life span and so on.
Peaceful today, and moved only a little by a mild breeze, beautiful life-forms in my garden appear simply to revel in their being-ness. As do the galaxies shown in glorious, mysterious technicolour by the world’s latest most advanced James Webb Space Telescope. I’m moved to be still for a while – to look at my own being-ness – in wonder.
Dance
The journals of our lives (like this one) are filled with very ‘ordinary’ chapters aren’t they? – accounts of daily life that quite often – very often – feel a tad mundane, on the surface at any rate. And yet somehow, in many of us, there’s still an impulse to record some of our experience of the hours – aide memoire – a tool for later reflection and remembering. And it’s often the ‘ordinary’ stuff that comes most readily to mind.
Walking home, at nearly 10pm on a balmy Edinburgh summer evening that feels like early afternoon – peaceful, happily aware of surroundings that make me feel good, conscious of other walkers headed home, slightly out of breath after the uphill stride to the bus stop. Thinking of contact with a number of family and friends during the course of the day. And of flowers and gardens. And the Poetry Library. Noting the bright Italian restaurant for future possibilities. Grateful for the interested friendliness of the lady bus driver on the 113 for Pencaitland, and the many familiar repetitions of the ‘Stop’ bell and the phrase ‘Thanks. ‘night …’ And from somewhere unseen come strains of ABBA –
I’m nothing special, in fact I’m a bit of a bore
If I tell a joke, you’ve probably heard it before
🎶 (Thank you for the music …)
– and I smile, recognising the sentiment. Yet blood and energy is coursing through my veins. I’ve been engaged in non-verbal connection with other ‘ordinary’ humans for a couple of hours. There’s nothing mundane about the dancing class, nothing boring about a hall full of people glowing and gliding and laughing and smiling and seeing and hearing and feeling their hearts beating in their chests like drums. Hearing car tyres on the cobbles outside – because the windows are open – I’m reminded in this dancing of the ‘ordinary’ dance of life, and my experience of that ordinariness is lifted here. Transformed. This journal, this record, this reflection, remind me that if I move myself, if I’m engaging with others in all the myriad ways I and they might choose to engage – then I’m alive! And aware of that, grateful. Profoundly, warmly thankful.
Helloooo! We’re alive!
Photo by Jacob Mathers at Unsplash
An Underground Rail Strike led to pandemonium in London this drizzly morning. Major bus delays and absolute lock-jam for cars meant that I missed my booked train home to Edinburgh, and – shrugging my shoulders – surrendered to having to buy a new ticket for a later train – which delivered me, four and a half hours after boarding, to sunny Scotland.
But the inconvenience en-route isn’t really the point of my story. That would be Khadija, a young Somalian woman, the driver of my mini-cab-going-nowhere, who is so full of joy-filled sunshine we might have been reliving yesterday’s ABBA Concert. ‘Hellooo,’ she exclaimed several times in the course of a 50 minute crawl, ‘Hellooo: we’re alive! I woke up today and I thought ‘hey! – I’m still here.’’
And I came to learn about Khadija’s family, and about how Covid lockdowns had on the one hand rendered her unable to work (mini-cab driving) and on the other hand, immeasurable joy: she’d volunteered to support neighbours who struggled to shop, or with loneliness. She brought them food and – I don’t doubt for a second – entire summers’ worth of sunshine. But all this was nothing, Khadija told me, compared to the joy that those ‘helped’ gave, and continued to give, her.
Khadija is raising small children – and the well-being of her neighbourhood. ‘Other people reflect back to us all that we decide to be ourselves, each and every day. Smile and be happy then. And what you get back will have you sayin’ ‘Hellooo: we’re alive!’’
Missed trains and traffic jams, like clouds, have silver linings. I’ll long remember the ABBA concert and a lovely dinner in Paddington with my brother, his wife, and an old friend. But I won’t be forgetting conversation with Khadija anytime soon either: ‘you know what’s really great about my job? You get to see, every day, that the world is FULL of really beautiful people.’
THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC of your joy, Khadija!