On Breathing: Poem

Some days, you just need to breathe. 

Consciously.

With awareness.

To centre yourself.

　

Here is a song by one of my favourite artists, Alex Murdoch: 'Breathe'.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCEzoOpG1zQ

Wonderland of our own making

　

There is this great quote that I haven't been able to put my finger on. It goes something like this: 'I realised that I have spent most of my life living just to the right of myself.'

 

Lately I've been thinking a lot about this, because I'm pretty sure this is familiar to pretty much everyone. How rarely do I - even now, when I'm much more aware than I used to be - live rooted deeply in my own body, deeply in the 'Now'. I am frequently leaning ahead of myself, just out of reach, off-centre, straining towards the next moment, the next relief, the next reward, the next task. And when I'm shrinking away from an anticipated unpleasant moment in the future, I'm still leaning away from myself.

On Being a Weathervane

Today I open my upstairs window and look at the gentle view over rooftops and chimneys and distant rolling hills. It is foggy, which makes everything seem suspended in ghostlight, somehow, just waiting for something magical to happen. Behind the sound of distant traffic and the single call of a starling from a television aerial, is hushed stillness. Streetlamps loom out of the mist. My breath smokes in the early morning air.

The Vulture's Wings: Poem

So often I feel just on the edge of understanding something, something important, something true, something just beyond thought and mind.  Mary Oliver puts it well:


The vulture's

wings are

black death

color but

the underwings

as sunlight

flushes into

the feathers

are bright

are swamped

with light.

On Meditating, Sort Of: Poem

Meditation, so I've heard, is best accomplished
if you entertain a certain strict posture.
Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.
So why should I think I could ever be successful?

The Canary Sings: a Moonsilver Tale

Inside a vast warehouse, where dusty shafts of sunlight filter down through grubby windows high, high up, there is a railway track.
     I'm standing on the platform. You are there, too. You are holding a canary in a gilded cage. The canary whistles, and its song bounces and multiplies off the struts across the high ceiling, and disturbs a flock of roosting doves.  The doves whirl in circles above my head, a blur of white wings and black shadows.
     'Why are we here?' I ask.

    You don't answer. You swing the cage a little, and - but no, I'm mistaken, it isn't you swinging the cage. It is a breeze, looping and charging down the tunnel towards us: a train is approaching.

On How Not to Steer

So easy to want to steer every moment, every direction in our life, to feel safe and secure in where we are headed.  Or even, for the more relaxed among us, who steer our life more generally, allowing for a few false starts and leeward winds - to fix our eyes unwaveringly on the distant goal, the aim, the moving target. 

Such Silence: Poem

As deep as I ever went into the forest
I came upon an old stone bench, very, very old,
and around it a clearing, and beyond that
trees taller and older than I had ever seen.

Forgetting the Sun

　

 

I can just about withstand the UK winter, particularly with my trusty old SAD lamp, and have done so for 19 years. But I can't withstand many bad summers, of which there have been far more than our fair share. The problem with a bad summer is that you know you still have to get through winter, untopped up with Vitamin D, pale as the moon, with lower than normal serotonin levels. And then there is no guarantee that the summer following the winter will be any better, either. And then there's another winter after that.

When Things Fall Apart

'We want to put out our poison.  Instead, we can connect with basic human restlessness, basic human aggression...Then we can send out a sense of space, which further slows things down.  Sitting there, standing there, we can allow the space for the usual habitual thing not to happen. Our words and actions might be quite different because we allowed ourselves time to touch and taste and see the situation first.'

From When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodron

We are All Connected

The older I am, the more I see how interconnected everything is.  Today I'm not talking about the deeper way we are connected, or the illusion of separateness that has ensnared us, but the simple external web of connection that links us all together. 

Beyond Lip Service: beyond judgement

My own spiritual path has taken me to many places and I'm not quite sure where I am now.  This probably makes me sound really flaky. But I'm finally wising up to the fact that whatever I think and believe now is very likely to change again one day, so how much weight should I really give my thoughts and opinions?  Manmade doctrine wearies me, and seems to exist in all the great religions, muddying the beautiful clear waters of their essence.

The Stone Giant: A Moonsilver Tale

  

My name is Markus.

I am the son of one of four princes who rule a strange kingdom, a kingdom of floating tiers that rise up, up into the ballooning clouds. Each tier is smaller than the one below, and the very top one can be crossed in twenty strides. Some people call it The Wedding Cake; they think this is derogatory, but I don't see why.

The Chance to Love Everything, by Mary Oliver: Poem

All summer I made friends
with the creatures nearby -
they flowed through the fields
and under the tent walls,
or padded through the door,
grinning through their many teeth,
looking for seeds,
suet, sugar; muttering and humming,
opening the breadbox, happiest when
there was milk and music.  But once
in the night I heard a sound
outside the door, the canvas
bulged slightly - something
was pressing inward at eye level.

Self-regard, self-worth, self-respect

I love this metaphor from Irvin Yalom's book, 'Love's Executioner':

'Her [thermostat] was malfunctioning: it was located too close to the surface of her body. It did not keep her self-esteem stable but instead fluctuated wildly according to external events. Something good happened, and she felt great; one criticism from someone, and she was down for days. It was like trying to keep your house heated with a furnace thermostat placed too close to the window.'

Loneliness: friend or foe?

Some of us know what its like to go through life with loneliness echoing around us like a distant bell. It seems to never leave us, in spite of times when we can almost forget it's there. Or we may have little experience of this particular suffering, until loss or grief or trauma knocks at our door. Then we can forget what our lives were like 'before' this unwelcome guest arrived. Or we may appear to have everything; close family, good friends, fulfilling work, and a happy disposition, only for others to discover with astonishment that we are on first-name terms with this unlikely bedfellow.

Everyone else is taken.

This has been around a long time, but I still find it powerful:

 

The philosophy of Charles Schulz, the creator of 'Peanuts':

 

1. Name the five wealthiest people in the world.

2. Name the last five Heisman trophy winners.

3. Name the last five winners of the Miss America pageant.

4. Name ten people who have won the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize.

5. Name the last half dozen Academy Award winners for best actor and actress.

6. Name the last decades worth of World Series winners.

To feel beloved: Poem

　

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on this earth.

'Late Fragment' by Raymond Carver

Untimely: A Moonsilver Tale

We arrived when the moths were beginning to gather. When clouds of hoverflies hung like smoke in the gloom, and the light was fading in a heavy sky. The mansion reared before us, a monolith, oppressive in its opulence and grandeur. Surrounding the ornate edifice was fantastical topiary and tightly clipped box hedges, and a kitchen garden laid out in neat rows. Here and there among the trees were life-sized stone statues, glowing luminous white.

To Dream or Not to Dream

 

Dreams. Those strange, half-life images that entrance and haunt and linger upon waking with melancholy, with sadness, with unease.  Or at other times tease with the suggestion of a magical story that evaporates before I can get pen to paper. Like last night, for instance.

I dreamt I was in a tiny village from which I couldn't escape. Every road out was under deep snow, although the village itself remained untouched. So I passed the time by wandering along the cobbled lane lined with olde worlde shops, peering through their leadlit windows with bottle-thick glass, and the first shop I entered sold smells. Not perfumes, but smells: cut grass, and horse sweat, and the first chill wind of autumn. Immensely frustrating, because upon waking I couldn't recall the wares of a single other shop in that village. I shall have to resort to conscious, effortful invention for turning this into a story; always a poor second best.

Intelligence: what is it?

 

I once read a classic book from the sixties called Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes; about a 'retard' who is experimented upon and becomes a genius, and then 'regresses' again to his original state. It makes the point that intellectual brilliance, without human affection and love, is meaningless. Another book on a similar theme is State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett, following the lives of scientists pursuing a hidden grail in the Amazon. Took me a while to get into it, but then I couldn't put it down.

One of the reasons I enjoyed these books is because I get fed up when I hear people talking about how 'intelligent' somebody is. Growing up in a circle of scientists and academics, I heard it rather a lot. The reason I have a problem with it is because most people - particularly those who consider themselves intelligent - define it in an extremely narrow way; limiting it to levels of knowledge, education, and the logic of the intellect.

Vulnerability: the risks and the rewards

Before I go any further, I must first mention the excellent book 'Daring Greatly; How the Courage to be Vulnerable' by Dr Brene Brown, who says much more than I am about to, and much more eloquently.

I have always been a naturally very open person. I have never seen the point of hiding my weaknesses, my fears, my struggles - such as with depression - from any other human being. We are all in this together, and often derive great comfort from knowing that we are not the only one going through stuff, as well as finding a helping hand or a listening ear that brings some measure of healing.

You do not have to be good: Poem

  Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You have only to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

a blue true dream of sky: Poem

my thought for the day:

'i thank you God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes'

excerpt from poem by ee cummings

Perspective: the ant, the bee and the kestrel

 

One of the reasons I love watching foreign films and travelling, is to see how others live and view the world - often so differently from myself. It stretches, widens and broadens my perspective.

 Sometimes, when I'm really stressed or tired or feeling overwhelmed, I like to watch ants scurry along invisible paths on the pavement, or bees in their incessant search for nectar, or kestrels hover, poised, in the sky above me as I drive to work. It reminds me that around me, all the time and everywhere, there are millions of non-human dramas unfolding. These dramas may seem insignificant to us, but to the ant, the bee and the kestrel they are a matter of life and death. Their life stories are as vital and as important and all-encompassing as ours are, depending on whose perspective you take.

 

To be Nobody but Yourself

 'To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest human battle ever and to never stop fighting.'  ee cummings

 

Lately I've been thinking a lot about peer pressure. 
 
It's not just something that teenagers encounter.  And it doesn't stop when we grow older, although it often seems to lessen, thankfully. My stories are often about people who are a bit different, who don't necessarily 'fit in' with everyone else. (Although being 'different' can sometimes become a label in itself, a way of feeling special and justified about being unlike everyone else. There is a balance in there somewhere.)
It can take quite a while to find out who you are, to live within the boundaries of your personality, and at the same time to not be defined by it; to realise that who you are is so much greater and so much deeper than this. Young children tend to live naturally from this place of being 'truly themselves' - expressing a distinct personality yet living so purely in the present that they haven't yet made an 'identity' out of it; they haven't limited themselves by it.