Contemplative inquiry | Contemplative Inquiry

April 5, 2015

BOOK REVIEW: THE SALMON IN THE SPRING

This is the review of Jason Kirkey’s Salmon in the Spring which I wrote for Amazon in 2010 (and for Touchstone, the OBOD in-house journal). It was the book that introduced me to The Great Song/Oran Mor – earlier explored in Frank MacEowen’s The Celtic Way of Seeing and The Mist-Filled Path. MacEowen wrote the foreword for Kirkey’s book. Kirkey revises the traditional sense (in the Christian centuries) of the Oran Mor as a name for God. He says, rather, that “immanent in material processes is the implicate order of the cosmos: spirit, divine ground, Oran Mor (Great Song)”. I will say more about what this has meant both experientially and conceptually for me in future posts.

The review was a 5 star review and I strongly recommend it, as a book that manages both to be clear and to accommodate complexity.

“At the age of 12, Jason Kirkey had one of those ‘light bulb’ moments that can set a direction for life. A relative told him ‘nature does not require our belief. It is right there for us to experience’. Jason is from Massachusetts, of partly Irish ancestry and over time his new found awareness lead him to discover the ‘interplay of nature, story and ancestry’ as a practitioner of ‘Irish Earth-based spirituality and shamanism’.

“Jason presents personal story a thread within a larger, collective story; one in which spiritual traditions are moving through a process of re-imagination – of integration into the new story of the 21st century’. He describes going through a ‘dark night of the soul’ when an over-identified ‘attachment’ to his own tradition became narrow and constraining. He found resolution through the practice of sitting meditation and study at the Naropa University in Colorado. It wasn’t a matter of moving from one tradition to another, but of integrating the qualities of both.

“The Salmon in the Spring explores traditional stories – including the second battle of Maigh Tuireadh, Connla’s Well and the Song of the Silver Branch – in a process of creative revisioning for Celtic spirituality. It is a pioneer’s book and I recommend it to anyone interested in the possible futures of Celtic spirituality, Druidry and other paths in which the old stories are coming alive in new ways.”

Jason Kirkey The Salmon in the Spring: the Ecology of Celtic Spirituality San Francisco, CA, USA: Hiraeth Press, 2009

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April 4, 2015

KABIR: WATER IN THE HOLY POOLS

There is nothing but water in the holy pools.

I know, I have been swimming in them.

All the gods sculpted of wood and ivory can’t say a word.

I know, I have been crying out to them.

The Sacred Books of the East are nothing but words.

I looked through their covers one day sideways.

What Kabir talks of is only what he has lived through.

If you have not lived through something, it is not true.

Kabir Ecstatic poems Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992 (The English translations are free enough for Robert Bly to call them ‘versions by Robert Bly’. There is an earlier set of translations published by MacMillan in New York in 1915 by Rabindranath Tagore assisted by Evelyn Underhill under the title Songs of Kabir. Whilst I don’t follow Bly in calling the English of the earlier work “useless”, I do find that Bly’s interpretation has more passion and power. The Bly work includes an insightful afterword Kabir and the transcendental Bly by John Stratton Hawley).

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March 30, 2015

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: STEPHEN BATCHELOR

Stephen Batchelor offers some thoughts on immediate experience and concepts of mind, soul and reincarnation.

“I had noticed that when listening to the song of a bird, it was impossible to differentiate the cooing of the wood pigeon, on the one hand, and the hearing of it, on the other. Conceptually the two were different, but, in immediate experience, I could not have one without the other, I could not draw a line between them, I could not say where the bird song stopped and my hearing of it began. There was just a single, primary, undifferentiated me-hearing-the-birdsong.

“Being-in-the-world means that I am inextricably linked into the fabric of this fluid, indivisible, and contingent reality I share with others. There is no room for a disembodied mind or soul, however subtle, to float free of this condition, to contemplate it from a hypothetical Archimedean point outside. Without such a mind or soul, it is hard to conceive of anything that will go into another life once this one comes to an end”.

Stephen Batchelor, 2011, Confession of a Buddhist atheist New York: Spiegel & Grau

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March 27, 2015

HEAR THE STORYTELLER, NOT JUST THE STORY

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March 24, 2015

POEM: THE RAILWAY CHILDREN

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting

We were eye-level with the white cups

Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

Like lovely freehand they curved for miles

East and miles west beyond us, sagging

Under their burden of swallows.

We were small and thought we knew nothing

Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires

In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

Each one seeded full with the light

Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves

So infinitesimally scaled

We could stream through the eye of a needle.

From Seamus Heaney, Station Island London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1984

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March 21, 2015

AT TATE LIVERPOOL

I spent time at the Tate Liverpool yesterday. Currently there is an exhibition of work by Leonora Carrington the mystical surrealist and feminist. It was almost too much to take in. For me the work, among other things, aptly illustrated one of her own comments.

“One cannot understand reality. Paradigms are a transitory convention for man. It is to our advantage to believe that we know, but it is obvious that absolute truths that were accepted in the times of Newton and Euclid do not exist.

“Sorcerers and alchemists know about animal, vegetable and mineral bodies. To hack away the crust of what we have forgotten and rediscover things we knew before we were born.

“There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have art.”

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March 18, 2015

EVENTS UPDATE

The Contemplative Druid residential retreat (17-19 April 2015). at Anybody’s Barn, Birchwood Hall, Storridge, Nr. Malvern, Worcestershire WR13 5EZ. is now fully booked. However anyone interested should still contact us as there is a waiting list and there is the possibility of future residential retreats.

Looking ahead, we will have a presence at Druid Camp (29 July – 2 August 2015) and we will also be holding an open Contemplative Day in Stroud on 3 October 2015, from 10.30 a.m. – 4.30 p.m. at the St. Luke’s Medical Centre, 53 Caincross Road, Stroud Gloucestershire GL5 4EX. This will be facilitated by James Nichol, Nimue Brown and Elaine Knight. We will work with a maximum of twelve other participants, continue to build on the working methods we have developed in our local group over the last three years..

Contact grovelight@hotmail.co.uk for further information or to make a booking.

See http://contemplativedruidevents.tumblr.com for fuller events information, including the Stroud day on 3 October. For Druid Camp information see www.druidcamp.org.uk and www.facebook.com/groups/druidcamp/

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March 16, 2015

POEM: A POSTCARD FROM ICELAND

As I dipped to test the stream some yards away

From a hot spring, I could hear nothing

But the whole mud-slick muttering and boiling.

And then my guide behind me saying,

‘Lukewarm. And I think you’d want to know

That luk was an old Icelandic word for hand.’

And you would want to know (but you know already)

How usual that waft and pressure felt

When the inner palm of water found my palm.

In Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern London: Faber & Faber, 1987

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March 14, 2015

HEARTFULNESS & EMBODIMENT

I decided to kindle a Mindfulness 101 book* and do a spot check out how far my own practice meets ‘mindfulness’ criteria as currently understood. I was glad to find – as a wayward intuitive Druid – that I still seem to be incorporating the essential principles. I especially enjoyed the comment: “Ask someone from Tibet where their mind is and they may point to their chest – the word for mind and heart in Tibetan, and many other eastern languages, is the same. When we practice mindfulness, we’re recalibrating our centre downwards – as such, the practice might better be described as ‘heartfulness’ or even ‘bodyfulness’.” On this reading mindfulness becomes “an open hearted awareness of what’s happening, and learning from what we find” so that something which in English sounds like a quality of thinking in fact brings us down from our heads and into our whole bodies. Body sensations are driven at a deeper level than thought, which is why we can’t change how we feel simply be thinking about it. “By bringing attention to sensations within the body … we work with them more skilfully.”

My personal practice includes devotional, energetic and meditative elements with the meditative slightly more emphasised than the others. It includes a review of body, senses, life energy, feelings, thoughts and images. It also includes a period of either breath meditation or ‘choiceless awareness’. All of these elements are in the mindfulness book. What re-assured me most was the implicit validation of my recent choice of Duidsg mo chridhe/dooshk mo chree (awaken my heart) as an affirmation and reminder phrase during this period. This phrase comes from a Ceile De Fonn, and called to me strongly when I chose it. I’d already thought of ‘heartfulness’ as my preferred term for an awakened state – a fuller, more spacious and generous kind of presence than is conveyed to me by the term mindfulness itself. So I liked getting synchronous support from a book about mindfulness practice.

* Ed Halliwell Mindfulness: how to live well by paying attention Hay House Basics

Information about the Ceile De is available on http://www.ceilede.co.uk

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March 13, 2015

BOOKMARK

The other day I glanced at a bookmark I was using. It drew me in and I really took notice of it. I realised that this was an old bookmark, as bookmarks go, and that I’d been holding on to it and intermittently using it since about the dawn of the millennium. I know that because it advertises Banyen Books & Sound, 2671 West Broadway, Vancouver. I’ve only been to Vancouver once, for a conference in August 2001. I remember liking the city and the summer atmosphere. Retrospectively it feels like the last breath of the 1990’s, such a short time before 9/11 and all that has happened since.

One side gives the information about the store – I’ve no idea whether it’s even there now, books and music being sold so differently now. The other has a traditional Chinese picture – mountain, river, mist, all somehow spaciously portrayed within a restricted area of card – together with this quote from Joseph Campbell.

“To have a sacred place is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”

It’s true, and a great thing to bring forward from that time.

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Tag: Contemplative inquiry