Walking

12/30. St Gregory's abbey.

For years I have been immersed in water. Longing to be close to it. Painting it. Photographing it. But the urgency of that need has dwindled away over the last year. I still rejoice when I come across its marvelous reflective gift. But now I am drawn to walk. Why did I not walk when I was young and did not suffer from the aching joints?

Finally after much dithering I am planning to walk from Winchester to Eastborne, along the South Downs this spring. The Downs are chalk hills which run west to east south of London. They are for me the essence of English. Rolling green hills, made up of deposits of the carcasses of dead shelled creatures. The cliffs of Dover are vertical cemeteries, deposited over eons of dying, and exposed by the searing action of the  sea. The Downs have been walked for thousands of years. They have been carved by our prehistoric ancestors with massive white chalk figures. The hills roll with the ancientness of the land. And they are so green!

And William Blake knew these green lands.

The New Jerusalem

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my charriot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

And if you want to watch the Brits go mad with joy, watch them singing Elgar's version of this poem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ0oCmDXrVk

These walks are called Old Ways. Our ancestors walked them, on pilgrimage perhaps, fleeing danger maybe, or carrying commerce and knowledge from village to village, monastery to monastery. It appears there is a walking renewal all over Europe. Perhaps we are re- creating or mining the Songlines of  our lands. The Australian aborigines walked their Songlines, singing creation into existence. As our planet is threatened with  destruction are we walking in honor of the sacred earth? Are we bringing the presence of each step on this earth into an awakening so that must be done can be done? This is the work of love. The politicians, the scientists, activists have theirs to do. Mine is to step into love.

YouTube - 

beauty

I am discovering that the essence of the feeling of laziness is a warm loving kindness. No pushing, no agenda, but also no sloth couch potato either. And even though there is no direction, no movement, no drive the love is intimate and desires the simplicity of beauty.

Words can be beautiful. I hope so. And photos can capture the fleeting moment of the ordinary turned beautiful. Walking with a camera invites a deep seeing. The moment is frozen in the focus and the click of the shutter. Shadows, dense spaces, negative spaces, color, lines, blurred edges and especially light capture me. I move into position and all is narrowed down into focus.

And then it is done. Just as sensing that there is a "right" word. One that matches the silent knowing, the suspicion that something is waiting to be caught.

Indra's Web comes to mind. According to Wikipedia:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering "like" stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.


Does Indra's net catch the special words, the ones that pop out of silence and shiver in beauty? And what about the words that are duds! Do they get caught in this mysterious web too? They come out or rather leach out of the silence. They just don't sparkle like jewels. 

Perhaps the shiver of beauty, the essence of the word, is in the sparkle of the infinitely reflecting jewels hanging in the infinite eyes of Indra's Net.

Dark Poetry

Poems by Rilke.


…whom should I turn to,
if not the one whose darkness
is darker than night, the only one
who keeps vigil with no candle,
and is not afraid--
the deep one, whose being I trust,
for it breaks through the earth into trees,
and rises,
when I bow my head,
faint as a fragrance,
from the soil     (I 2, p. 32)


You darkness, of whom I am born---
I love you more than the flame
that limits the world
to the circle it illumines
and excludes all the rest.

But the dark embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations--just as they are.

It let's me imagine
a great presence stirring beside me.
I believe in the night.  (I. II p. 63)


…when I lean over the chasm of myself---
it seems
my God is dark
and like a web: a hundred roots
silently drinking.

This is the ferment I grow out of.
More I don't know, because my branches
rest in deep silence, stirring only by the wind.   (I.3   p. 47)

Beginings

JULY 2012
What is the desire to write? And to write with what audience in mind. Sometimes it is in speaking out loud that I know what I am thinking. And writing also seems a way to slow down, to let thinking go through some process, so that words show up on a page. For the last few years thinking has become more a journey, a reverie, and a silence out of which understanding bubbles up to the surface. Much is lost in this failing memory, but some stays and becomes the next thread, the next insight, and most importantly the next question.

I spent a wonderful afternoon with my cousinVeronica a few days ago. We wandered from the Millenium Bridge down to Tower Bridge and back. The river is industrial, full bodied, nothing gentle or subtle about the Thames. She works hard, hauling herself up into high tide and then breathing out into low tide, her muddy bottom exposed to the endless light of English midsummer. It is hard to believe that London sits on the latitude of Nova Scotia.

This is not the Thames. But the River Stour in Suffolk that Constable painted!  We spent the afternoon floating down the River. This is the England of my childhood imagination. To be very low to the water, watching cattle at knee height seems to conjure up the Wind and the Willows. I  expect to see Toad  and Otter to appear chatting away as we drift by. It reminds me of some movie I watched here in Michigan. Some hilarious take of a proper English matron growing high quality pot above a tiny fishing village in Cornwall. After the the film I sat in the car and sobbed. Something about the countryside, the cliffs and the ever so green fields and hills broke open the geographical DNA in my heart. As I get older I seem drawn into this English imagination.  Nostalgia perhaps. But there is a quiet beauty, even tidy, to the English landscape that tugs at me.

After the Election

This is a photo of rock with groves carved out by lichens. It reminds me of this time of year. The erie light of December and the darkness of the Halcyon Days. These are the days when the gods still the winds so that the Kingfisher can lay her eggs on the shore. Seven days before the solstice and seven days after, the winds are still so the eggs can rest in peace. These are thin times. The veils seem more porous, provided I listen.

There seem to be fewer words. More silent gaps between the words. Grace hides in the gaps waiting like the night owl, ready to glide out into into the night sky, silently seeking her prey. She seeks my openness, my effortless patience and hope. And she kills sometimes, blowing apart cherished notions of God. Sometimes it is the shiver of air as she flies by, touching the heart, a delicate membrane of love. And sometimes she lays her eggs. And years later they birth into unexpected wisdom. Her passage through the night of the soul, seemingly forgotten, she births over and over.

And what about the elections. Its been over a month. It has been a month of a long exhale. All those months of giving money, of turning off the radio, of praying that somehow this country would wake up. And yes! And Obama is playing hard ball. Perhaps the politics are changing. Certainly the demographics are.

Hope is a precious commodity. It nearly died. But of course for nearly half the population they may have lost their hope. They need compassion. And waking up too. But that comes so slowly.