contemplative spirituality | Contemplative Inquiry

December 19, 2023

BOOK REVIEW: SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE

Beautifully written, and highly recommended. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (1) is a novella set in the small Irish town of New Ross in the cold December of 1985, “a December of crows”. New Ross is in many ways a strong community, but business is bad. There are closures, poverty and emigration. The central, point-of-view character is Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, adequately prosperous and very busy at this time of year. Born on 1 April 1946, he is a pillar of his community, a regular if tepid church goer, married with five daughters. The older of these are at St. Margaret’s, “the only good school for girls in town”.

But Bill is also something of an outsider. His father is unknown. ‘Furlong’ is his mother’s family name. She herself becomes pregnant at the age of 16, whilst working as a maid for the Protestant widow Mrs. Wilson, comfortable on a military pension and a decent sized farm. Mrs. Wilson chooses to keep her on and takes an interest in the boy. This interest continues after his mother’s sudden death when he is 12. Technical School leads to an opportunity at the coal yard where he works his way up and subsequently becomes the owner. When he gets engaged to Eileen, Mrs. Wilson gives him some thousands of pounds to establish himself. He enjoys being a family man and a good provider. The Christmas season, with its time at home, rich food and present giving is a welcome opportunity to celebrate.

Bill is naturally generous, refuses to judge people harshly and is prone to spontaneous acts of kindness, the “small things like these” of the title. The main action of the novella begins when he personally delivers a Christmas coal and wood order to the local convent, a powerful-looking place on the hill, where the nuns run both a “training”, or possibly “reforming”, school for girls” and a popular laundry business. There is some lack of clarity over the detail. They might be involved in arranging adoptions as well. Although a little set apart, it is one of the major institutions of the town.

Arriving in the dark at the covent coal house door Bill finds the bolt stiff with frost and has to force it open. There he finds a young girl, Sarah, who has clearly been locked in there for some time. She asks him to take her away or at least ask the whereabouts of her 14 month old baby who has been taken from her. The Mother Superior becomes involved and embarks on an unconvincing performance of compassion involving tea and cake for both Bill and the girl, and a story about Sarah’s incarceration as the result of a game with other girls.

Bill, going home, realizes that he forgot to ask about the baby. He recollects the numerous locks in the convent buildings and broken glass on the tops of walls. He is unhappy and misses his way home, fetching up in a remote spot he doesn’t recognize. In one of the novella’s occasional fairytale moments, he asks an old man with a billhook: “will you mind telling me where this road will take me?” The old man replies: “this road will take you wherever you want to go, son”.

On his return he tells Eileen and, separately, two friends his story. They are keen to talk him out of any public comment or further action. The convent is powerful. Other church institutions would rally round it. It is also his largest customer with the capacity to influence others. Bill has worked very hard to get where he is. Why risk financial disaster? But he is strongly affected by his encounter with Sarah. He finds himself becoming reluctant even to attend mass, let alone take the sacrament. He thinks of what Mrs. Wilson did for him, particularly since he is now fairly sure that his father was not one of her own relatives.

Late on Christmas Eve he goes back to the convent on foot, unbolts the coalhouse door, finds Sarah, and begins the walk through town to his home, “the excitement in his heart matched by the fear of what he could not yet see but knew he would encounter”. On this journey, he also recognizes a “fresh, new, unrecognisable joy in his heart … some part of him was going wild, he knew … never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this”. The narrative ends when he reaches the door of his family home. On the other side of that door lies the beginning of another story, and another day.

(1) Claire Keegan Small Things Like These London: Faber & Faber, 2021

The author has dedicated this story to the women and children who suffered time in Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalen laundries. In a note on the text she adds: “Ireland’s last Magdalen laundry was not closed down until 1996. It is not known how many girls and women were concealed, incarcerated and forced to labour in these institutions. Ten thousand is the modest figure; thirty thousand is probably more accurate. Most of the records from the Magdalene laundries were destroyed, lost or made inaccessible. Rarely was any of these girls’ or women’s work recognised or acknowledged in any way. Many girls and women lost their babies. Some lost their lives. Some or most lost the lives they could have had. … These institutions were run and financed by the Catholic Church in concert with the Irish State. No apology was issued by the Irish government until Taoiseach Enda Kelly did so in 2013”.

1 Comment

December 11, 2023

POEM: IF I MUST DIE

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a cloth

and some strings

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze –

and bid no-one farewell

not even to his flesh,

not even to himself –

sees the kite,

my kite you made, flying up

above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

let it bring hope

let it be a tale.

Refaat Alareer (23 September 1979 – 7 December 2023)

NOTE: Refaat Alareer was a native of Gaza City who from 2007 taught world literature, comparative literature, and both fiction and non-fiction creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza. He had an MA in Comparative Literature from University College London and a PhD in English Literature at the Universiti Putra in Malaysia. He was one of a group of Palestinian poets who wrote in the English language. He was killed at home, together with his family, in an Israeli bombing raid on 7 December. The University in which he worked has been completely destroyed.

For me this is an extraordinary example of a poet bearing witness, acting as a voice for his culture in the most extreme conditions – yet retaining a light touch and a certain gentleness even when doing so.

See also American Friends* Service Committee website at: https://afsc.org/author/refaat-alareer

*Friends = Quaker

7 Comments

November 26, 2023

LATE FALL IMAGES

Recently I’ve been unwell and housebound, hardly even watching the world go by. But there came a day when I could go out again, a day that was blessed with sun. It seemed bright and new. I was almost blinded by its luminous presence on a white tree-patterned wall. I had entered late fall, a season with both autumnal and winter features.

The sun shone on trees in Gloucester City Park which retained some of their foliage, but in an end-of-season way that signals austere changes to come. Leaves showed a fragile, lingering beauty, prior to their necessary descent.

The Brunswick Gardens, sitting under a clear blue sky, were home to trees where the leaves had already fallen, leaving the branches as patterns of quiescent arboreal bones. The leaves were on the lawn. Other, managed, flora continued to flourish.

In visual and tactile ways, after an indoor confinement, the neighbourhood was full of reward for me. But I felt cold, and it was indeed the coldest it’s been for many many months. I could not stay out for long. But I had encountered a moment in the year, of interbeing, of living presence – where the wheel is visibly and palpably turning. I was glad to be there, however briefly, available for a nurturing and healing experience.

7 Comments

October 29, 2023

A SAMHAIN SHIFT

An old man, left handed like me, pauses over his writing. He is held in his concentration, and somewhat lost to the world. He faces away from the sky and the crescent moon. He relies on an interior candle to light him. But the moon sees and influences him anyway. None of the seven swords is drawn for martial combat. He wields a quill instead: the metaphorical sword of discrimination is an essential feature of thinking and writing, and sometimes it can bite. The number seven suggests a level of experience and resource, perhaps also a creative pleasure in his task. He’s been around a bit, taken a few knocks, and had his epiphanies as well. He perseveres on the journey, come what may.

The image comes from the first of a three card Druidcraft Tarot (1) reading. I did it on 26 October, early in the run up to Samhain and before the October moon was full. I had just completed a ritual that ended my formal contemplative inquiry within and beyond Druidry. I am still a Druid. I am still temperamentally inclined to contemplation and inquiry, both separately and together. There will be a great of deal continuity in my practice. But the structure of a dedicated project has quietly disintegrated, now redundant, and this needed a formal recognition. The image above reveals a constellation of consciousness, energy and activity that is now in the background. There, it has a continuing presence and influence – as a kind of internal ancestry. In the foreground, something new has the freedom to emerge.

The card below indicates how I stand now. Whereas I found it easy to identify with the Seven of Swords image, the Prince of Pentacles came as a shock. But the teaching behind the Tarot is that time runs differently in the psychic realms and doesn’t exist in the causal. Child and youthful parts of me still live. The young adult depicted here is at home and confident in the material world. He is not a compulsive warrior like some of his brothers but will take a stand when needed, using skilful means. He is an Earth defender. Health, home and material security matter to him and in these domains he leans toward practicality and realism about the world he is living in. He turns towards this world, not away from it, and does not position himself as above the battle. He is a counterweight to some of the spiritual movements I have explored in my inquiry, which would think of him as ‘unevolved’. He has, however, been an active presence over my last couple of years of relocation and now steps forward to reclaim an acknowledged space in my life.

The third card of the triad is the Six of Wands, and traditionally indicates what may be emerging. The sixes are all auspicious, suggestive of balance, union, and integration. In the active energised fire element, it suggests success, through the image of a landowner and his servants returning home after a successful outing with his hawk. The card seems to ask me what I understand by success at this time in my life, and how much I value it. What motivates and energises me to be successful by my current criteria? What skills, resources and help might I need to achieve successful outcomes? What role might magic play?

I notice, here and now, an unfamiliarity with this way of approaching life. I have thought of myself as too old, with no worldly ambition and nothing I need to prove. This card may be challenging me to review those understandings. Have I lapsed into limiting self-caricature? Have I overdone retirement? Asking those questions I find that I do still have energy and resources, and that I am also concerned about overestimating them. Balance and proportion matter, and I do not want to be consumed or over-taxed by a new project. Nonetheless, this reading opens up space and potential for new active ventures in the world. This reading, overall, has facilitated a significant Samhain shift in my sense of possible futures. For this is a season of not only endings, but of beginnings too.

(1) Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm The Druidcraft Tarot: Use the Magic of Wicca and Druidry to Guide Your Life London: Connections, 2004 (Illustrated by Will Worthington)

2 Comments

October 24, 2023

‘LIGHT ETERNAL’ AT GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL

Gloucester Cathedral – https://gloucestercathedral.org.uk – is very good at its public outreach and events. From 19-28 October this year it has allowed the whole building to become an installation, Light Eternal by Luxmuralis – https://projectionartgallery.com.

My wife Elaine and I went there early on Sunday evening, 22 October. It was my first visit, her second. She was very happy to repeat the experience. The picture above depicts entry to the building, and a brief walk towards what became a full immersion. The light effects and imagery were accompanied by a soaring and joyful music. The ancient building was packed with people sharing this experience. I was pleased to be held in such a celebratory space.

As I understood, or rather felt it at the time, the two images immediately below seem to show time and materiality coming into existence in an act of creation that speeds almost out of control. Certainly, for me, the rapidly changing sequence of images demonstrated a tremendous movement, power and energy. It looked, in those moments, more like sheer cosmic exuberance and play, than any kind of plan.

The installation as a whole had still spaces as well. It took advantage of the cathedral’s medieval architecture, where light and their colour could enhance its majestic serenity.

I also noticed the skill with which the installation incorporated medieval iconography, though I confess that it went past me in something of a blur. There was so much going on, and I found that I could not concentrate on individual images, or even identify them, as much as I would have liked. Then I let go, and surrendered to the experience as a gestalt.

Even the nooks and corners of the building that were largely left alone were washed in the magic of the light. I valued being briefly able to focus on them, their very plainess bringing something to the experience.

Finally, below, I show the tree of life, as light. It is an icon about which so many traditions have had so much to say, for such a long time. Certainly, it acted as a spiritual anchor for me, in that space: a comfort to a practising Druid. I loved the almost delicate fecundity of the portrayal. Gratitude to the Cathedral for enabling this installation, and to Projection Art Gallery for providing it.

4 Comments

October 20, 2023

PHILIP CARR-GOMM: PEACEMAKING

I was moved and inspired by Philip Carr-Gomm’s recent Peacemaking podcast on his Tea with a Druid. In the first five minutes he checks in with his live viewers, as is his custom, and finds a theme of anxiety and distress about world events. He speaks of the need for ‘islands of sanity’ – enclosures of calm and peace. He introduces the hope that the people gathered together by the podcast itself can become one. A guided meditation later in the podcast does the job. The gathering becomes an enclosure of calm and peace in real time. It still worked for me well after the event. Such is the magic of Druidry.

Before the meditation, Philip explains the role of Druids, ancient and modern, as peacemakers. The ancient Druids were exempted from military service and had a pan-Celtic authority. A Roman author depicts Druids as walking between warring tribes, urging calm and asking the fighters to put down their weapons: they were “shaming Mars before the Muses”. The God of war and destruction had to bow down before the Goddesses of creativity and inspiration. The Druids of that time were also lawmakers and judges. In Ireland, St. Patrick valued their Brehon Laws so highly that they were written down and continued in force. Peacemaking, peacekeeping and jurisprudence worked together.

In modern Druidry, Philip emphasises the attention given to peace in ritual, where the intention is to begin and end in peace both inward and outward. Our Druid prayer asks for justice, because where there is justice in the world there is also peace. Justice isn’t about killing. It’s about peace: right action, right speech, right thought, right behaviour. We trust the power of prayer and of consciousness directed by love. Sitting in meditation or prayer influences the people involved, and creates a field of consciousness and energy which acts as a patch of calm and peace in bad psychic weather.

I recommend readers to watch the video and, if you are willing, enter into its meditative space. I also include The Modron Prayer (Modron being the Ancient Mother) in this post, as a way of ending it:

“Deep within the still centre of our being,

May we find peace.

Silently, within the quiet of the Grove,

May we share peace.

Powerfully, within the greater circle of humankind,

May we radiate peace.

May peace prevail on Earth.

May it be so. May it be so. May it be so.”

2 Comments

October 11, 2023

LIMINAL BEAUTY AND THE FAITH OF A DRUID

6.15 pm, 6 October 2023. The experience has gone. The images remain. At a surface level, I can use them to trigger memories of my early evening walk. Chiefly, I remember being surprised at how early the twilight was. I hadn’t caught up with the year and was almost shocked. I have caught up now, nearly a week later, as the darkening process speeds up and we approach Samhain. In today’s world, my country will experience a dramatic boost on 29 October as our clocks ‘fall back’. The 6.15 of one day will become the 5.15 of the next.

Looking at the images more deeply, really looking, and giving them time, I can let them nourish me. I connect with their liminal beauty. Both images present me with land, water, sky, and hints of the fiery sun. But they do so in different ways.

In the image above, I am mostly drawn to the energy of water. The variation in shade emphasises movement and different ripple effects. Land, trees, and artifacts are all in silhouette, but the water has light and shade. It is the water that feels most alive. There is variation in the clouds too, with their patterned layers and subtle access to sunlight just above the trees. But they are not as mobile as the water. The sunlight itself seems very subdued. It’s still there, though very much in the background.This is not yet a night sky.

In the image below the water is strong too, but my eyes are drawn above to the clouds, which here are more dramatic. The residual power of waning sunlight is very clearly present. For me, there’s a sense of the tree tops yearning upwards as they reach for the gifts of the sun whilst it still retains a presence. Although I am contemplating images and not immersed in the landscape I have a strong sense of living presence in a field of living presence. In this state I feel a conceivably irrational confidence in life and the world.. A fragile kind of faith, that my heart cannot resist.

9 Comments

October 10, 2023

HEALTH PROBLEMS

We’ve lost the chance to sugar the pill.

This is a very bad result.

This situation won’t stay still.

This is a very bad result.

The problem came from an animalcule.

This is a very bad result.

Small and unseen – yet we look like fools

This is a very bad result.

Much more lethal than Covid 19

This is a very bad result.

The most toxic critter ever seen

This is a very bad result.

Coincidence it must surely be

This is a very bad result

That it came from my brother’s laboratory.

This is a very bad result.

Synchronicity? Cause and effect?

This is a very bad result.

Whatever the case we’re completely wrecked.

This is a very bad result.

One per cent will survive this thing.

This is a very bad result.

I hope it’s the one that I am in.

This is a very bad result.

I wrote this piece some months ago, still digesting the experience of the Covid 19 pandemic, the public health response to it, and the continuing presence of the virus in our world. I had also been reflecting on formal political messaging – government as public relations and media theatre, the intense pre-occupation with opinion polls and beauty contest elections – together with halting and inconsistent approaches to real-world problem-solving.

Writing of this kind is part of my Druid path and not a separate activity. My practice might have a contemplative foundation, but contemplation isn’t everything. The inheritance of Bardistry, and engagement with the wider world also matter. Currently, I feel a pull towards working for the healthy use of language, and challenging its corrupt and unhealthy deployments. T. S. Eliot once talked about poets being tasked to ‘purify the dialect of the tribe’. That’s not quite my language, but I can appreciate what he is pointing to.

I have recently been given another nudge, by Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (1) where she talks about the rise of ‘conspiracy influencers’ in a world where governments and corporations have deservedly lost our trust. “Conspiracy influencers perform what I have to think of as a doppelganger of investigative journalism, including many of its stylistic conventions, while hopping over its accuracy guardrails”. She goes on to say that “the end result of being surrounded by this kind of discourse is … a state of continuous disbelief” that replaces real threats with distorted versions of themselves. Hence the belief that “the problem with Covid was not a highly infectious disease being fought half-heartedly by for-profit drug companies and hollowed-out states, but an app that wanted to turn you into a slave”.

Klein also helps me to see a connection between the defence of language and contemplative spirituality. She speaks of calm as form of shock resistance. “When people and societies enter into a state of shock, they lose their identities and footing”. In the midst of such break down, the effect of conspiracy culture is to maintain panic and confusion. She suggests that some conspiracy culture influences are simply part of the panic and confusion. Others, more knowingly, manipulate it for ulterior ends. If shock induces a loss of identity, calm returns us to ourselves. “I write to tame the chaos in my surroundings, in my own mind, and – I hope – in the minds of my readers as well. The information is almost always distressing, and, for many, shocking, but in my view the goal should never be to put readers into a state of shock. It should be to pull them out of it”. Of her chosen work overall she says: “the role of the researcher-analyst is plain: to try and create some sense, some ordering of events, maps of power”. Clarity, calm and purpose support each other.

(1) Naomi Klein Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World London: Penguin Random House, 2023

6 Comments

October 2, 2023

“DULL, DREAMY, MOON-STRUCK”

Contemplative states come in different varieties. In today’s culture, we tend to privilege an alert language of mindfulness, presence and awakening. Through these tools, we learn take more responsibility for our own experience – not so much for what happens (though our effective agency may improve), as in how we respond. At a deeper level, we learn to embrace the gift of experiencing, even when specific experiences are unwanted or painful. We lean in to the at times heart-breaking miracle of human life.

There are other, also potent, ways to contemplate. In the following extract from his magical realist novel Atlantis (1) John Cowper Powys presents an archaic, more than human world, with a very different take on consciousness and our place in the cosmos. We are on the island of Ithaca, in the later life of its King Odysseus, following his belated return from the siege of Troy and resumption of control at home. We begin in a moment of great collective foreboding – something terrible is happening or about to happen. This is coincident with the old king planning a final voyage. In this place and time, a young boy encounters Atropos, oldest and most powerful of the three Fates. He intuitively grasps that sentient beings help to weave their own destiny simply by falling into states “wherein we simply escape for a moment from the trouble of being a conscious creature at all”.

“The longer Nisos Naubolides looked into the eyes of Fate and the longer Fate looked into the eyes of Nisos Naubilides the more clearly did the later realize that the imperishable frame of Atropos, the ‘one who could not be turned’, was made of a substance drawn from a level of existence outside both time and space, though cunningly adapted to play its part in each of them.

“The boy proved how ‘clever’ he was by imbibing, like an inexhaustible draught of timeless experience, much more at that moment than the mere physical nature of the oldest of the Fates; for there came over him in a trance that was more than a trance the surprising knowledge – and this … was really with him to the day of his death – that Atropos helps us in the creation of our individual fate by an infinitely long series of what some would call nothing but blind, stupid, dull dreamy, moon-struck ‘brown studies’, many of which take place inside the walls of houses, and others when we are moving about on our ordinary errands outside.

“In these interruptions of our ordinary consciousness we fall into a brainless, idea-less moment of dull abstraction in which we cease to think of anything in particular but just stare blindly and dully at some particular physical object, no matter what, that happens to be there at the moment. This object, in itself of no particular interest, and never selected for its real purpose is merely an object to stare at, lean upon, rest against and use as a trance=background, or brown-study foreground, or, if you like, a shoal beneath a stranded consciousness, or a reef of brainless abstraction, wherein we simply escape for a moment from the trouble of being a conscious creature at all.

“Nisos showed how born he was to be an interpreter if not a prophet by his complete acceptance – as from the trunk of his spruce-fir he faced the Mistress of Fate as she leaned against the trunk of her spruce-fir – of the revelation that our individual destiny is made up of an accumulation of brainless, uninspired brown-study moments of abstraction wherein we cease to be organic living creatures and almost become … things of wood and stone and clay and dust and earth, almost become what we were before we were intelligent of instinctive creatures: almost – but not quite!

“For, as our young friend looked Atropos in the face, there was permitted to him what is permitted to few among us mortals during our lifetime, namely the realization of what actually happens to us when we fall, as we all do, into these day-dreams. At that moment as Nisos Naubolides now knew well, all over the surface of the earth there were living creatures, many of them men, women and children, many of them horses, cattle, lions, wolves, foxes, wild asses and tame pigs, sheep and goats, rats and mice, who were standing or crouching, lying or sitting in one of these brooding trances when dazed or dreaming, we are asleep and yet not asleep.”

(1) John Cowper Powys Atlantis London: Faber & Faber, 2011 ebook edition.

NOTE: John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) grew up mainly in the English West Country, went to Cambridge University and then became a teacher and lecturer, mostly in the USA where he lived for about 30 years. On returning to the UK, after a short spell in Dorset, he settled in Wales in 1935 where he lived for the rest of his life. His best known works are Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Maiden Castle, Weymouth Sands, Owen Glendower, Porius and his Autobiography. His literary editors describe him as having a “weird, mystical, brilliant and obsessive imagination.”

September 29, 2023

UNDERWORLD DREAM

In the last segment of a complex dream, I am somehow bonded with a young woman. We are both at the end of our teens. We are not related and there’s no erotic buzz, or, if so, only a faint one. We are joined, rather, in a quest to visit the surface of the earth. No-one we know or know of has ever been there, but there are stories of such journeys in the past.

Our quest has been widely talked about in the busy, crowded underground community of which we are part. Opinions about its wisdom vary. There are longstanding fears of the uncanny Uplands. But this journey to the surface, and to a specific building traditionally understood to be or have been there, matters to many people. For us and our supporters, there’s a sense of pilgrimage about this enterprise. We understand it as a sacred mission. It might lead to consequential encounters – new and healing connections – contradicting our ingrained aversion to the open surface world. Or of course, in a variety of ways, it might not.

Our ascent will be either in an remarkably plush-looking lift or by climbing a long spiral staircase that looks shabby and undermaintained. Arrived at the bottom of the lift, we hesitate. An ancient AI, presenting as a humanoid robot, manages this lift. They sing its praises but we don’t trust them. Our instincts say that the staircase is the right way to go. My companion and I both suspect that whilst lift and staircase are adjacent at their underground departure point, they may be more distant at the top. They may lead to different destinations. The choice between them matters, and intuition is our only guide.

My companion moves decisively to the bottom of the stairs and begins to run up them. I follow, also running. We continue to bound up the stairs, regardless of possible weaknesses in their structure. I experience a flash of gratitude for the renewed youth that allows me to do this. Then I wake up.

4 Comments

Tag: contemplative spirituality