Frail skin holds the organs
in pink bags of flesh.
Incredible really,
this vessel enmeshed.
It comes with no manual,
it lives and it breathes,
it hastens to dying
and actions my deeds.
Expanding through feeling
with soul wings it flies,
to learning and vision
my vehicle gives rise.
This matter in motion,
a here and a there,
and loving brings to it
the Truth all stripped bare.
Look at these fingers,
they move as I ask!
And when I flow through them
they dance with each task.
A one-off uniqueness,
a fine joyful mess,
a tangle of loveliness,
chaos and rest.
For those who come closer
I offer my best,
embracing them wholly
I find myself blessed.
For M.W.
What the eternal thought wills
Words of the day, courtesy of the sublime George Macdonald.
Prudence
The one secret of life and development is not to devise and plan
but to fall in with the forces at work - to do every moment's duty aright -
that being the part in the process allotted to us:
and let come - not what will, for there is no such thing -
but what the eternal thought wills for each of us,
has intended in each of us from the first.
The privilege of pain
On the shore of a lake I sink to my knees, with blood condensed from the coarse weight of being. The earth subsides, and a burning tide flows into me. Like a bloated vessel I crack. Alone and broken, the brittle form built of fallacies and frailties cannot play with the flames. Every pore opens, scalded as certainty retreats. No singular thread of resistance remains. I stand unhoused in dislocation. Listen. The privilege of pain has blazed through me. As she lifts, a flicker of light beams through the haze. Refined, I rise and weigh my memories. Look! They are lighter too.
Healing
I have found myself asking for guidance often of late. With thought absent, I pick a book from the shelf and allow my fingers to choose a page. Time and again, guidance comes. The divine hand waves to greet me. Even when the days have a hard edge, small confirmations like these encourage my faith to grow.
Healing
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly,
that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can
help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance,
long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the
freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
by D.H. Lawrence
Rusty Teaspoon
There are days when I feel like a prisoner in a cell of self-made fictions and I am digging my way out with a rusty teaspoon.
George Macdonald
Through C.S. Lewis and my supernal sister A.H, I have discovered the writings of George Macdonald. George Macdonald (1824-1905) was a Scottish author and occasional minister. He is described by C.S Lewis as being the man who “batized his imagination” and led him out of atheism and towards God.
Every word from Macdonald drips with wisdom and sincerity. I find myself reading and re-reading each sentence. When I listen to his words, I have to drop everything and give him my complete focus. The depth and richness of his understanding and the devotion that you can feel in his work is quite staggering.
Presumption
"Faith is that which, knowing the Lord’s will, goes and does it;
or, not knowing it, stands and waits...
But to put God to the question in any other way than by saying,
‘What wilt thou have me to do?’
is an attempt to compel God to declare Himself, or to hasten His work...
The man is therein dissociating himself from God so far that,
instead of acting by the divine will from within,
he acts in God’s face as it were, to see what He will do.
Man’s first business is, ‘What does God want me to do?’,
not ‘What will God do if I do so and so?’”
The humble european robin
Little robin redbreast (erithacus rubecula) is the most perfect bird, always friendly and suitably adorned for festivities. This one was a chubby chap, charming in his demeanor. We shared a moment of mutual curiosity, and then went our separate ways. This is a small souvenir from our christmas eve exchange. Sublime.
Parry Riposte
What am I doing here? What is the purpose of this collection of virtual pages? Words shape thought: they sculpt the inner landscape and influence the outer terrain. I am looking to share something of my individual path of healing and the realisations that have come along the way. I send the finest words I can conjure up out into the ether, in the hope that they will touch other human beings who are filtering similar matters through their own hearts, minds and wills.
I am sowing seeds of dissent and seeds of faith. I am practicing articulating the things that matter and working on my ability to form language so it reaches out with both greater precision and greater flexibility. Doing all this through a public platform allows me to track my own progress and perhaps receive a litle feedback. It also offers the possibility to cultivate humility, as I inevitably catch glimpses of my own naivety and misconceptions as I move forward. I am a witness and a chronicler. Does sincerity and truthfulness point to the untruth and deception of the society around us? I hope so.
The keyboard, the pen, the word in motion; the gun, the sword, the body in motion. Choose your weapon. Bow to your opponent. Fight with honour.
In Perpetuum Mobile
“God bless those lovely ladies who hold stillness for us during our nomadic motion, while we learn to carry home within.”
This is the wonderful sentence that my friend M wrote to me this morning. As it happens, I consider her to be one of the lovely ladies who has been holding the stillness signal especially for me. I suspect she was doing this before we even knew one another. I picture her charming arrangement of green smoothie, red kitchen stool and smiling face and feel immediately at home – even when I am on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, sitting in a cold, smelly railway station waiting for a train that is three hours delayed.
Over the last few days I’ve been writing in my notebook about home, in an attempt to untangle why it is that I’ve been moving and moving and moving and moving over the last decade.
The relentless tumult of set shifts is a grand challenge, and quite frankly I have absolutely bloody hated it at times. For the virgoan introvert and semi-retired perfectionist who has a love of alphabetizing books and making neat arrangments of whatever objects are to hand, it can be deeply unsettling. Organic cotton bed linen, well sharpened kitchen knives, loose leaf tea and the satisfying weight of a cast iron teapot are sorely missed when on the road. Beauty and quality, two of my favourite things, are often in low supply in my transient abodes. “NO IT WON’T DO” and “THIS IS HOW THINGS ARE” do a merry little jig in my mind. A battle of stomping feet and graceful sentiments.
With pen and paper, I have explored my own chronic case of Perpetual Motion and drawn three fundamental conclusions on the underlying whys of P.M:
- In order to find, one must seek through movement and pilgrimage.
- In agreeing to be transformed by the experience of living, one also agrees to a period of intense external changes that reflect and illuminate the inner growth.
- A lack of home out there is asking us to explore home in here.
As I have mapped this out, I have also noted that my current environment is quite lovely, quite beautiful. This simultaneous surfacing is no coincidence. In tandem with these ponderings I’ve felt drawn to watching various documentaries on monastic life. This has been a counter-balance to looking back over a year of high-velocity travel and expansion, and an encouragement to draw myself into the stillness and hibernation of winter. This one in particular touched me immensely.
I shared this film with my friend M, and in response she sent me a link to a blog containing a short clip of another monastic documentary. Much to my wonder, this blog (created by another M) articulates beautifully everything else that I had hoped to write about in relation to home. This came as another lovely reminder that even in those moments when the destination seems unknown and you cannot see anyone on the path with you, you are never alone.
Comforting Sanctuary of Home
This blog post is dedicated to the M I have already met, and the M I haven’t yet met, both of whom have channelled my thoughts and feelings sublimely. Thank you.
After Curiosity
Curiosity is indeed a good place to start. Endless technicolour adventures are to be found in the realm of curiosity, and many doorways present themselves. There is plenty to occupy the inquisitive heart and the opening mind, much of goodness too. However, curiousity also appears to be a destination. It is a place where many stop, where stalemate is common place.
What is it that stops the stopping in certain individuals? Are some born with inate qualities that provide an extra blast of spiritual jetfuel to propel them through those doorways and upward? Can we thank the attainments of our previous rounds on Earth for foundations laid out for us?
Among those who are committed, there are common themes. I observe and discuss these patterns amongst my little circle of peers, so for now I will speak of a ‘we’. Two notable components are a great willingness to take risks and a mighty capacity for chanelling the upheaval of repeated change. Within this, there is an ability to handle the extreme poles of the personal growth tide: gradual, sloth-pace changes to self and dramatic collapsing of identity. There is a constant shedding and recompiling of both the exterior shell and the interior components, again and again and again.
No matter at what age we realise or are first able to articulate what it is we are doing, there has always been a nagging feeling that something was not right, that what we are being handed under the labels of ‘real and important’ smells funny. Something is rotten, so experiments in living differently ensue. Motivated by a burning desire to avoid glaring compromise and the feeling of having entered into a faustian pact, we ask ourselves often what our vision of authentic living might look like. We end up in some funny places, but those are the stories reserved for face-to-face encounters…
We do not follow the routines that society expects us to adhere to, and sometimes we find ourselves in hostile territory. At times it is necessary to step back in order to go within and observe from a different vantage point, to close the curtains or retreat into the forest. Our unexpected, wild paths send us off the map, over cliff edges and into deep water. When we find ourselves in these unpleasant, pain filled places, we do not turn away. When the strength is found to chart every millimetre of the human-experience-terrain, an incredible source of learning is discovered at the extremes.
This trajectory makes for an individual who appears hard to pin down. Inevitably, we become un-locatable to family and old friends. They no longer know where we are, and separation occurs. As we continue to walk, the desire to place ourselves in God’s hands grows, even when we don’t fully know what that looks or feels like. The ego-driver has to be constantly reminded that it is not really in charge. With many of the more determined, fierce, individuals this is one of the most relentess tasks undertaken. We offer ourselves regular reminders. TWnmBD. Discipline and letting go simultaneously.
Being a walking question mark 