Sea Journeys

Numinous moments

I am filled this morning with a deep sense of presence. Of calm after the storm. Of taking delight in the very small things in the world - those small but numinous moments when I look at  the face of a sleeping person, hear a bird sing in the copper beech outside my window, look at cherry blossom

Night fills the air with sacred silence
The stars make their music in distant universes
The perfume of the cherry hangs in the air, silent too
The deepness, richness of this moment
all moments never to be repeated.
Another moment follows, still
full with cherry blossom
Full of the joy and beauty of this spring night.
And full of the sadness of its passing.
I cannot hold on to this extraordinary moment.
Can every moment be an extraordinary moment?

Let me let Jack Gilbert express it better than I can. How to take delight in the world, despite everything.

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay .
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Singing my own song

My voice work sessions with Alexander Massey are proving even more interesting than I’d expected or hoped. That’s if “interesting” means stripping myself bare; removing yet more walls: the walls I’ve built to keep myself safe  but which keep me from truly experiencing the world as it is. The walls that keep me from being truly authentic – from speaking, or indeed singing, with my own true voice.

Alexander and I are weaving a metaphor of a special space.. a sacred circle where I  meet my own true voice and speak or indeed sing from that authentic place.  Rumi’s field:

     Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
      There is a field.
     I'll meet you there 

But I’m discovering how scared I am of inhabiting that sacred place, that field, fully and deeply. Of how much I need to learn how to support myself rather than to protect myself with those all-enclosing walls.  How easy it is to slip back into thinking of wrongdoing and rightdoing, of shoulds and oughts, of communicating with hidden agendas (and I'm suddenly acutely aware of, and embarassed about,  how much of the latter has been going on in my recent relationships, too).

Overwhelmingly,  I fear that as I stand in that place, there will be nobody there willing to hear me. I will sing my authentic song and cry out “Here I am”.... and there will be no reply. As the true me, I will not matter to anybody.

Sigh. Learning how to sing is provoking yet another existential crisis! 

I am strongly reminded of the story of Inanna's descent into the underworld - a story dating from Sumerai in around 1750 BCE and from a time when the goddess, woman, life and love was the center and the heart of religion. Inanna  was celebrated as the Goddess of love, war  and life itself. The story of her descent is a tale of death and rebirth, of the dismantling and reintegration of spirit.

In the story (of which there are many versions), Inanna makes her descent into the dark realm of her sister, Ereshkigal: the goddess of death.  Inanna passes seven gateways, and at each of the gateways she is obliged to surrender her clothes and jewels, symbols of her power, until at last she stands before Ereshkigal naked and helpless (as though to be reborn).

Ereshkigal siezes Inanna  and for three days she hangs like a carcass on a meat hook. Her faithful female companion, Ninshubur ("Queen of the East") whom she warns to go in search of help for her if she does not return, sets upa  drumming lament for her return, and is heard by the god of wisdom,  who sends two creatures to plead with Ershkigal for Inanna's release. They find Ereshkigal in the process of giving birth. Ereshkigal agrees to Inanna being restored to life on condition she sends someone in her place. Inanna  ascends like the moon after its three days' death to assume her place once more as Queen of Heaven, and sends her shepherd consort Dumuzid in her place.  He goes there for half of the year (hence symbolising night and day and seasonal changes; winter, summer and rebirth)

Before her journey, Inanna knows all that there is to know in her realm, but there is another world that she has no access to – the Great Below, kingdom of her dreaded sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld. There is no need to make the descent, no vital reason to take on such a terrible journey. No need at all except the experience of incompleteness in herself, and the demanding desire to know what one does not know, the desire to experience one’s own depths or personal hell. Like many since, Inanna need not make the descent, but she does. She risks the descent and through her relinquishment, death, and resurrection, she becomes more than merely the Goddess of Heaven and Earth. She has conquered the Underworld as well and has become complete.

Here's Frankie Armstrong's song of Inanna's descent (from "Ways of Seeing")

Seven Gates

Seven gates I have opened
Seven garments cast away
I have walked through growing darkness
For seven nights and days
I turned from the world on the first day
On the second I looked inside
On the third I wept
on the fourth I slept
on the firth I fought with pride
On the sixth I lost my way
My self on the seventh died.

And there was an endless bawling
For a woman I do not know
She has no name,
No occupation,
No place to rest or go.

Sister your eyes are empty
They do not welcome me
Your gaze is cold and deadly
and it has pierced me

Sister if I stay with you
In this dark place
Will you set me free?

When Jewels Sing

Radiance results from earth's pressure,
life working on us with each moments precision
into clear cut uniqueness.

A community of precious human beings
with origins primitive and wild as diamonds,
faceted by skilled and invisible hands that turn us
upon a wheel dusted with God's bright dark silence,
we become men and women joined to walk
swarthy, holy, original and transparent.

Catching first light of day upon ourselves,
our voices sing of truth and loveliness,
in response to vows first sung to us by stars.

John Fox

Naked and bare

Listening to a new CD this morning: Naked and Bare by Fiddler's Bid - an amazing and beautiful album of scottish fiddle music, almost symphonic in its sound. 

Actually the title is highly appropriate to how I'm feeling just right now- naked and bare.  I can't yet articulate what is happening, other than I am torn between wanting to run away into the safety of old patterns of behaviour, and wanting to stay with this feeling of being small, open, vulnerable, and seen.  Very scary. Can I risk that this me is acceptable?  Can I trust? Will I be hurt?   But if I don't stay here, I will never know.   And it could be a better alternative than keeping myself in my box......

(From "In and out of the box")

......Sometimes I go voluntarily
into the box.
The box is a place of safety
away from mother’s magpie thievery
I gave her small parts of me
and she took whole chunks
Offered one peanut,
she took the whole bowl
and offered me round to anyone who asked.
To prevent the wholesale rape of me,
the theft of my soul,
I built the box. 

In here, I’ve been safe from theft.
It may be small and cramped,
little to see.
But I’ve been safe, in the box.
Nothing could take away
the essential essence of me.

Past loves

An emotional day, all in all. Full of thoughts and indeed discussions about relationships - work, friendship, love, past love...   

Its so easy to deny what there once once in a relationship; to say "we shouldnt have married"; "we were wrong for each other";  "he was a  shit". But that's to deny the love there once was, to deny that part of myself that loved deeply and will love again. To honour that love and to greive and let go,  feel joyful with this moving on and yet feel still that want.   As Jack Gilbert writes "What fine provender in  the want. What freshness in me amid the loneliness".   

So here's a couple of poems in homage to that love... The first is my own poem, written to my long term partner of 24 years

To Adrian 
You sit across the breakfast table

your glasses perched on your nose

squinting at the paper,

absorbed.

You read a line out loud, amused

take a sip of coffee

light a cigarette

ponder the meaning of the day.

 

The sun slants in and lights your hair

the angle of your nose, your chin.

You just don’t know

how beautiful you are.

 

In this moment

a warmth inside me glows.

I pour another cup of tea

and smile.

And another Jack Gilbert poem to remind me that there was goodness too.

Failing and Flying
by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
On the other side of the island while
Love was fading out of her, the stars
Burning so extravagantly those nights that
Anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
Like a visitation, the gentleness in her
Like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
Through the hot stony field after swimming,
The sea light behind her and the huge sky
On the other side of that. Listened to her
While we ate lunch. How can they say
The marriage failed? Like the people who
Came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
And said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
But just coming to the end of his triumph.

Friendship

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

I've been developing new friendships recently, and this morning, I'm thinking of the wise words from "The Little Prince" (Antoine de Saint Exupery), towards the end of a beautiful passage, in which the little prince meets a fox and discusses what it is to care for someone or something.

"I am a fox," said the fox.

"Come and play with me," proposed the little prince. "I am so unhappy."

"I cannot play with you," the fox said. "I am not tamed."
.......

"What does that mean — 'tame'?"

"It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties."

"'To establish ties'?"

"Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world..."

*******
"One only understands the things that one tames," said the fox. "Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me..."

"What must I do, to tame you?" asked the little prince.

"You must be very patient," replied the fox. "First you will sit down at a little distance from me — like that — in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day..."

*********
"..... if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you... One must observe the proper rites..."

"What is a rite?" asked the little prince.

"Those also are actions too often neglected," said the fox. "They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours.

*********.
So the little prince tamed the fox.
*********
And he went back to meet the fox.

"Goodbye," he said.

"Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

"What is essential is invisible to the eye," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."

"It is the time I have wasted for my rose — " said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose..."

( Full text here: LITTLE PRINCE.)

A glorious sunday morning poem

Listen to Katrina Porteous performing her poem "Beach Ride" , which includes these lines

...Spindrift,
And the wind's drum –
Music, old
As wonder and longing;

Waves, hooves,
And a cave-fire story,
River of sand
Flowing under us, tell

How they stream headlong,
The minutes, the dear-ones,
Love to its end,
Time to its stillness.

This HAS to be listened to - words do not do it justice (but the words are here just in case: BEACH RIDE by Katrina Porteous)

Surrender

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
There is a field. I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, and even the phrase "each other"
Doesnt make any sense

Rumi

I’m finally understanding the importance of surrender – at its most basic, to be able to let go of expectations of things working out as planned, or achieving the “right” end results,  whilst still maintaining my intention and devoting myself wholeheartedly to whatever it is I’m doing.

 As an “achiever” and someone who admittedly wanted to control things (groan!), even the thought of surrender seemed to me to be a complete cop out - some sort of giving up of my personal responsibility to some outside force.  If I worked harder and tried even more, it would all work out. Like many people, it took major life events to wake me up and force me to confront this spiritual reality. When the only choices were few, limited, or even Hobson's, I came face to face with my limited-ness. It was when I hit bottom, that I was brought to even try the one thing that most benefited me: to let go of the controls and the obsession with choices and fashioning my own version of reality.

Perhaps the most difficult and most rewarding surrender has been to confront and let in the whole notion of my own mortality...    to face what it would be like to surrender to death.   Far from being the ultimate horror that many people seem to think it is (at least as judged by the way most people run away from death) I discovered something amazing… that for me death appears more than likely to be a blissful experience; a re-union or merger of my energy with the energy of the divine cosmos –the ultimate union with the divine, back to where I belong. I can see why the French call  orgasm “le petite morte”: perhaps the ecstatic experience of true sexual union with another may be the nearest experience to death we will get in a mortal body.

For what is it to die,
But to stand in the sun and melt into the wind?
And when the Earth has claimed our limbs,
Then we shall truly dance.

 Having thrown away what now seems like a huge weight and burden has left me in a state of lightness and joy, and a real wish to explore what its like to live my whole life from the point of view of surrender rather than control. To relax into life rather than to fight and clench and control. To open rather than to close. To experience relationships from the point of view of surrendering oneself completely to another. Its such an exciting prospect!

 “When you let go of attachment to a particular outcome, you allow yourself to be open to the surprise of something other than what you wanted… outcomes that may be extraordinary and filled with unanticipated delight. Instead of losing some imaginary freedom, this way of living offers you true freedom.” (from “Soul Sex”)

 
From Sabbaths by Wendell Berry

 

How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
of all its past, and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity, for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.

 

What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?
By climbing up through the six days’ field,
kept in all the body’s years, the body’s
sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through
the narrow gate on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way
to the high, original standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow, the shadow
of the grace of the strait way’s ending,
the shadow of the mercy of light. 

Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come into the woods you must leave behind
the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,
expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.

Living dangerously

I've just been reading Osho's "Courage: the Joy of Living Dangerously". 

Entirely appropriate for this week, which has been a risk taking week: risks at a personal level in matters of relationship; risks at a more practical level in deciding on the spur of the moment to do a sailing course; risks in agreeing to explore new and different potential work, which may well involve a radical lifestyle change; and last but not least, risking finding my own true voice.  And I am surprised at how comfortable this level of risk taking is becoming. In the space of 12 months I have (or will have) ended my marriage, sold my long term home, changed job, confronted the issue of my own death, coped with the death of someone close, and started a whole bunch of new things.

And how do I feel?  Just  amazing!  I'm starting really to see the benefits of "non-attachement": giving things up is very liberating.

Osho writes: To accept the challenge of the unknown, in spite of all fears, is courage. The fears are there, but if you go on accepting the challenge again and again, slowly slowly these fears dissappear. The experience of the joy that the unknown brings, the great ecstasy that starts happening with the unknown, makes you strong enough, gives you a certain integrity, makes your intelligence sharp. For the first time you start feeling that life is not just a boredom but an adventure. Then slowly slowly fears dissappear; then you are always seeking and searching for some adventure.

And it doesnt seem to matter too much that my risk taking is not always reaping the rewards I expected.  I do not want to live my life in hesitancy, fearfulness and fright of doing wrong. Osho again: " Commit as many mistakes as possible, remembering only one thing: don't commit the same mistake twice" 

Living life in this way seems to be opening up a whole new way of being.  I often feel filled with joy and love and almost a burning passion to seize life in all its possibility and richness.  Is this what it feels like to live an authentic life? So radically different to my "normal" state of existence in the past.   And in answer to Osho's question: "Just living is not always living. Look at your life. Can you call it a blessing? Can you call it a gift, a present of existence? Would you like this life to be given to you again and again?  Just right now, my answer is yes.. and YES and YES!! And I wholeheartedly agree with Osho when he writes:

"Life can only be lived dangerously – there is no other way to live it. It is only through danger that life attains to maturity, growth. One needs to be an adventurer, always ready to risk the known for the unknown. And once one has tasted the joys of freedom and fearlessness, one never repents because one then knows what it means to live at the optimum. Then one knows what it means to burn your life’s torch from both ends together. And even a single moment of that intensity is more gratifying that the whole eternity of mediocre living"

D H Lawrence's great poem on the subject

Escape

When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego
and when we escape
like the squirrels in the cage of our personality
and get into the forest again, we shall shiver
with cold and fright.
But things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in
and passion will make our
bodies taut with power.
We shall laugh, and
institutions will curl up
like burnt paper

D. H. Lawrence