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
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.
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.
Hans Christian Andersen by Anne Grahame Johnstone – see art.co.uk
for MWG
Green velvet smoking jacket
svelte and warm and treasured
since Cambridge
the pool of light that quickened
the grain in his oak desk was
as much a portal for him
into other worlds as was the
oak door through which he entered
his library at every
opportunity
Sometimes the desk supported
the console of a racing carriage and
at others the cockpit of
a spaceship from the pen of
Leonardo da Vinci and
at others still the pool of light
upon the desk resembled that upon
the spectacles of a tiny Rumpelstiltskin
or the chestnut hair of Lydia
the one and only he’d ever
truly adored
And his pen added a carrot-nose
to a snowman fashioned
by his father and the slowing
pace of his seventy-five year
old legs was rejuvenated as
his pen pointed brighter than
candle flame into the
archives of an always fertile mind
His eyes could appear as blank
black discs in a handsome patrician visage
when observed at the desk from
eventide street window but
only because there they gazed
inward, remembering, rejoicing
resurrecting realities borne of
fairy tales of wingéd truth
Here is light behind letters that turn into words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters and stories. Expressions of my life – or of yours.
That’s why I write. That’s what brings writers back to blank pages every day. The pursuit of illumination beneath letters.
The light behind letters speaks to me of Creation herself. Darkness and light. Something of light inscribed upon dark. Something dark frames light. One does not exist without the other.
As music needs silence to sound its aliveness, so writers paint dark upon light or light upon dark and know that there is a knowing.
