Love | Contemplative Inquiry

On completing a breath exercise I sometimes say, ‘I am the movements of the breath and stillness in the breath; living presence in a field of living presence in a more than human world: here, now, home’. This is both my most parsimonious and most spacious sense of home in a world where nothing lasts forever or stays the same. I find my ultimate feeling of home in simple breath and awareness.

Yet my body and feelings, my heart and my imagination cannot thrive on breath and awareness alone. I need love, loyalty and connection inside the turbulence and uncertainty of the world. For me, the risk of getting hurt is an acceptable price to pay.

Thinking simply of ‘home’ spaces, I have lived at my current address for two and a half years. Not long, but enough to establish familiarity and loyalty. The picture above was taken very close to the building I live in. Our estate has planted lavender and let the grasses grow wild. I have come to love this. Our public library building, opened in 1896, is in a simplified and elegant form of 19th century Gothic in its last stage. I know it as a busy and widely loved place. I also know that it won’t be used for its present purpose much longer. Yet I continue to experience it as ‘home’.

Earlier in the year, I wrote about a small group of birch trees growing up beside our flat. Then, they had a bare look apart from a few catkins (1). Now, in the picture below, they are in full leaf. I love the way they are now and also the way they have changed. Without impermanence and mutability nothing can happen. These very characteristics enable ‘living presence in a field of living presence in a more than human world’. They too are a necessary part of ‘home’.

(1) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2025/01/18/late-winter-regeneration/

March 11, 2025

EARLY SPRING: AFFIRMING LIFE

I am connecting with spring and its urgent affirmation of life – its green shine and fecundity. It is the sunrise season, the season of early growth. For me, where I live, the immediate pre-equinox period often generates a strong feeling of dynamism and emergent potential. I am in sync with the awakening earth.

Elaine’s return from hospital and the enhanced clinical support she is receiving are helping me to live this season more fully. In our joint lives we are both feeling more agency in shaping a new phase in our life together.

In this moment I feel refreshed and optimistic within my Druid contemplative path. I have adjusted my formal practice so that I have two practice sessions in the day, both of them roughly twenty minutes long. The first, at the beginning of the day and standing, is affirmative and dynamic. It includes body and energy work and a theme of healing and rejuvenation. The second, at the end of the day and sitting, is contemplative. It includes breathwork, a mantra meditation using beads, and prayer. In the modern Druid manner it includes a commitment to the collectively imperilled qualities of love, peace and justice. This shift is having a renewing and reinvigorating effect on me, as befits the season: another way of gratefully affirming the gift of a human life.

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May 12, 2024

UNSOUGHT JOURNEY

Ego sets me up, in both a narcissistic and rational way, to be the hero of my own journey. But it’s at least equally valuable to have a support role in someone else’s. On Monday 8 April my wife Elaine flew to Gran Canaria with her sister Glynis for a restful and undemanding holiday. It worked brilliantly for nearly three days. On Thursday 11 April Elaine had a fall resulting in a fractured femur. Instead of a restful and undemanding holiday, they were in a health disaster overseas.

Elaine was duly admitted to hospital. Other health complications – a characteristic of we older people – meant it took 9 days for Elaine to have a successful operation: not ideal given the problem being addressed. Glynis was the support person and champion at this stage. But soon it became evident that Elaine would not be well enough for repatriation for some time. An original plan for me to be the person who organised things at home was ditched, and I flew to Gran Canaria on 28 April allowing Glynis to go home.

In a way it wasn’t hard. But I was knocked around by Elaine’s predicament, which might have been fatal, and by the culture shock of being in a new place where, but for the kindness of strangers, I had the verbal and communication skills of, at best, a chimpanzee. I also had to be, or at least appear to be, competent in managing (influencing?) the hospital and insurance companies’ relationship both with Elaine and each other. A completely unfamiliar situation for me, and not one that I would want to be in again.

We managed somehow. Elaine and I know and love each other. We supported each other in our respective roles. I liked my hotel though its amenities were largely wasted on me. Its great virtue was in being 15 minutes easy walking distance from the hospital. I spent several hours a day with Elaine, but also had several on my own. I needed to be away from stimulation for a good deal of time. I did enjoy the warmth, and especially at sundown, the sky over Gran Canaria’s south coast.

The repatriation, when it came, felt almost sudden. We flew back, together with a wonderful paramedic and minder sent over for the purpose, on Friday 10 May. Elaine, whose left leg is not weight bearing at all, was trolleyed and chaired both on an off a commercial flight where she got her own row of three seats. The cabin crew were great.

The repatriation process ended with an ambulance journey to the Gloucester Royal hospital, where our paramedic had organised Elaine’s admission in advance and Elaine was wheeled straight onto the orthopaedic ward where she now is. This is also in walking distance from our home. At the moment she is largely being monitored and tested. A new phase will begin when the physiotherapists show up on Monday. I hope soon to get some sense of how soon Elaine will come home, and what resources we will need for our lives going forward. It’s my 75th birthday on 25 May, and my best present would be to have Elaine home by then.

This post has been a simple story, without much obviously contemplative, reflective or overtly ‘spiritual’ content. But I don’t in my own life and practice make much distinction between the spiritual and mundane, and I do know that this has been a life-changing event. A pilgrimage, of sorts.

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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.”

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December 1, 2022

ACCEPTING THE ARRIVAL OF WINTER

It was 26 November 2022, 11 a.m. I was at the Gloucester end of the Gloucester-Sharpness canal. I found myself accepting the arrival of winter. I was observing three cygnets, now without their parents but still keeping company with each other. The underlying temperature was around 7 C (44.6 F) and good for walking, But I was feeling the pinch of a cold wind. In memory I am feeling it now. The water and sky looked grey. The trees were starting to feel skeletal, whilst still retaining some leaves. My lingering sense of autumn had finally drained away.

To accept winter’s arrival in the presence of swans felt numinous. Swans are otherworldly birds in Celtic tradition. The three together, not yet in their full adult plumage, seemed auspicious. They suggested coming opportunities for creativity, love and celebration. Winter can be a preparation for renewal, both as season and as state of mind. My acceptance goes with a faith in winter’s regenerative darkness, and the riches this can bring.

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November 25, 2022

BRENDAN MYERS: A FOREST ENCOUNTER

“Over the last twelve years I have walked every trail, every hillcrest, every stream-edge within a two hour walking radius of my house: everything between Lac-Des-Fees and Pink Lake, and a little beyond. …. I still encounter things I never saw before. Last year I saw a Great Horned Owl in the park for the first time. Its swift yet stately flight above my head caught my eye; a dark shadow in front of the sun, silent, and powerful in its silence.

“It rested on a tree branch not more than twenty meters away, and regarded me. I regarded him in turn. I had known for years that there are owls in the area: I’ve heard their hooting, and seen their pellets on the ground. But until that day and for ten years, I hadn’t seen one here before. Further, and I think more importantly, since I had entered the forest that day for no particular purpose but to enjoy a warm afternoon, to reaffirm my love of for the park’s landmarks and vistas, and to experience a few hours of pure human freedom, in simpler words to play, the encounter with the owl could take on a magical meaning.

“In the light of such magic, what a magnificent animal he was! How proud he seemed, as though in charge of the world, as though I required his permission to take another step. How unpretentious too: this owl had no need to pretend to be something he was not. The size of his claws, the laser-focus of his eyes meeting mine, was proof enough that he was a predator. No need to flex his weapons or brandish them. And what a delightful conversation we might have, if he were to speak. How much he could tell of the places he had seen, the adventures he had while hunting, and the pleasure of flight… Much as I would have loved to stay and hear him speak, I decided to move on after a few minutes. I did not know whether meeting his eyes might be provocative. And much as I might enjoy telling the story of how I got owl-claw scars on my face, I would certainly not enjoy getting them.

“…. Such is the magic of the forest. It can mean what you want it to mean under the aspect of play, yet at the same time it can surprise, and threaten and reveal itself, in ways no human artifact can do. It can suggest a kind of magic no human artifact can adopt: the dramatic discovery of a world not made by human hands. Thus it participates in the play, bringing its own contribution to the emergence of meaning.” (1)

(1) Brendan Myers The Circle of Life is Broken: An Eco-Spiritual Philosophy of the Climate Crisis London UK & Washington USA: Moon Books (Earth Spirit Series)

NOTE: Brendan Myers is a Canadian philosopher and author currently living in Quebec, where he teaches philosophy at Heritage College, Gatineau. He has written extensively on Pagan themes from a philosophical perspective, and his most recent book takes them further through an exploration of the climate crisis. I will review the book in my next post.

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July 23, 2022

MEDITATION, AND A BILLION-YEAR-OLD SENSE OF BEING

I enjoyed a recent piece on meditation by poet and spiritual teacher Jeff Foster. He is not talking about a traditional practice regime – whether of a mindfulness, pathworking, or energy-focused kind. Rather, he describes an encounter with the sacred in everyday life. Initially, this meditation attends to the flow of ordinary, embodied experience. It is informal, and not dependent on a dedicated environment or special conditions. As it develops, it sets free a healer in the heart, who stands by and resources the meditator rather than fixing their problems.

Meditation becomes as a ‘field of love, an ever-present ground of safety, presence and stillness’. It is personified through references to a ‘loving friend in the breath’, a ‘mother in the motherless places’, and a ‘billion-year-old sense of Being’. This is not meditation as generally understood. But I notice that I am nourished by Foster’s recommended approach, and I find myself responding to his impassioned language. Part of me wants to resist such intensity, but then happily melts on immersion in the process. Here is his piece in full:

“Meditation is not about getting yourself into altered states. Altered states do not last. It’s about becoming intimate with this state – this present moment, this day, this Now, its textures, tastes, vibrations, contractions and aches.

“Meditation is not an out-of-body experience. It’s the opposite. It’s a full experience of the body and its ever-changing sensations, its amorphous clouds of shivers, tickles, undulations and pulsations, throbbings, fizzles, its pain and its pleasure, its opening and closing, its ever-changing form.

“Meditation does not always make you feel ‘good’. In meditation, you feel exactly as you feel, and you learn to love that, or at least to allow it, or at least to tolerate it a little more than you did yesterday. Meditation makes you feel more like… you.

“Meditation is not about getting anywhere. It’s about discovering that there is nowhere to get to. That you are already home, and your body is the ground of all grounds. It is about discovering true safety in the feet, in the hands, in the pit of the belly. It is about finding a sanctuary in your chest, a sacred shrine between your eyes, a loving friend in the breath, a mother in the motherless places.

“Meditation is not something that you do with your mind. In meditation, the mind relaxes into the heart, seeking relaxes into finding, and even the most intense anxiety finds its home. You cannot make it happen, but you can fall into it.

“Meditation is not for experts, or the ones who know. Meditation is for absolute beginners, those who are willing to face their present experience with wide open, curious eyes.

“Meditation is a field of love, an ever-present ground of safety, presence and stillness, that you remember, or forget, or remember again.

“Meditation never leaves you. It whispers to you in the stillness of the night. And even in the midst of an activated nervous system, a full-on panic attack, suffocating claustrophobia or the urge to get out of your body… meditation is right there, holding you, loving you, gently kissing your forehead, willing you on.

“It will not abandon you, and ultimately, you will not abandon it.

“And closing your eyes to sleep at night, meditation is there, snuggling right up to you.

“Your soft pillow, the rising and falling of your own delicious breath, a light breeze coming in from the window, that billion-year-old sense of Being…

“You are safe in your own body, my love. You are safe.”

– Jeff Foster http://www.lifewithoutacentre.com/

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July 6, 2021

A PERFECTLY DIVINE MESS

“Bow to your awkwardness. Kneel at the altar of your failures. Smile at your clumsiness. Befriend your incompetence. Laugh when you stumble and fall. These are all perfectly precious waves in the oceanic vastness of you.

“Perfection is unavailable in time, but found only in presence; the presence of imperfection makes you real, and relatable, and that’s perfect. You’ll be consistent when you’re dead. Until then, celebrate your silly old self, your marvelous inability to conform, or to live up to any image at all.

“Don’t bore yourself into a spiritual coma. Say the wrong thing, just for once. There is such freedom in allowing yourself to screw up, to be kind to your mistakes, to kiss the ground as you rise again, to adore the falling too.

“Don’t let your spirituality numb your humanity, your humility, and most important, your sense of humor.”

Jeff Foster The Way of Rest: Finding the Courage to Hold Everything in Love Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2016

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January 30, 2021

TURN ME TO GOLD

Turn Me to Gold: 108 Poems of Kabir (1) is a beautiful book, and the fruit of “five years spent in the unremitting presence of Kabir”. For Andrew Harvey, “Kabir is far more than a poet; he is a universal initiatory field, as expansive as Rumi and as embodied, radical and ferocious as Jesus”. Harvey himself is more than a translator, working with his “whole mind, heart and body on breathing and living his words, the fierce temperature of his truth” and speaking of his own work as “strange, precise” and “ecstatic”. I do not think of this post as an attempted book review, since both Kabir and Harvey are asking to be met rather than evaluated. Rather, I am attempting an act of recognition.

I have written about Kabir’s work before in this blog. In the past I have used other translations (2,3), particularly Robert Bly’s. Having now read Harvey’s work, I am clear that it would now be my first port of call when engaging with Kabir, whilst retaining my respect for the other translations and feeling glad to have them. When a text from another language, culture and time is important to me, I like to have multiple translations. Turn Me to Gold has the additional merit of Brett Hurd’s accompanying photographs of modern Varanasi.

A weaver by trade but a poet-singer by calling, Kabir lived in the Varanasi (Benares) of the fifteenth century. His philosophy incorporated various beliefs of both Muslims and Hindus and later became one of the major influences behind Sikhism. Like Rumi, further to the west and generations earlier, he followed a devotional and ecstatic path, and like Rumi he tried to be a bridge builder between traditions. His work, written as songs for public performance with musical accompaniment, was enduringly popular, surviving in late manuscripts from different parts of India, which show modification over time by the region, religion and caste position of generations of listeners. Kabir experienced himself as filled with the Divine, simply, directly and completely, and so was not a friend of religious formalism or extreme practices done for their own sake:

“I’m not in austerities, not in meditation,

Not in feasts, not in fasts,

Not in rituals laid down in sacred texts,

Not in yogic exercises –

Look for Me with passionate sincerity,

I’ll be beside you immediately.

Kabir says; Listen to Me –

Where your deepest faith is, I am.

Kabir had no truck with waiting for an afterlife: “everyone says they’re going to ‘Heaven. Where this ‘Heaven’ is, I don’t know … As long as you look for ‘Heaven’, you’ll never find your home’. To come alive, spiritual experience needs to be present and embodied:

“More than anything else

I cherish at heart,

What in this world

Makes me live

A limitless life”.

That sense of living a “limitless life” in “this world” connects Kabir’s poetic witness to my own contemplative inquiry, helping to enrich its purpose and meaning. I am a modern Druid, more Universalist than Pagan, and I have been concerned, though active, practical inquiry, to craft a practice that I call ‘contemplative’. But this identification, socially useful as it is, dissolves within the molten core of the practice itself. I do not have quite the sense of personified divinity that Kabir and Harvey do, but I have what I imagine to be the cognate experience of at-homeness in the flowing moment. In practice terms, this is represented in the “peace” at the centre of my circle, which I describe further as “the bubbling source from which I spring and heart of living presence”. This is an energised, dynamic and joyful peace, not a calm or static one. Such a peace, for me, is a taste of limitless life in this world. I find it hard to talk or write about – the words keep going subtly wrong for me. Kabir and Harvey use the language of love, and perhaps they are right. This peace is an aspect of love.

“You can’t tell

The story of love.

Not a word of it

Has ever been told.

A dumb man

Eats a sweet

And smiles for joy.”

(1) Kabir Turn Me To Gold: 108 poems of Kabir Unity Village, MO: Unity Books, 2018 Translations by Andrew Harvey Photographs by Brett Hurd.

(2) Kabir Ecstatic Poems Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992 English versions by Robert Bly

(3) Kabir Songs of Kabir New York, NY: MacMillan, 1915 Translated by Rabindranath Tagore, assisted by Evelyn Underhill

9 Comments

January 26, 2021

CHERISHING LIFE

The world is changing, again. New growth insists on its place in the world, however icy the conditions. Life asserts its rights, as we move towards the festival of Imbolc. But this post is personal rather than generic. I am welcoming the return of my wife Elaine from seven days in the Royal Gloucester hospital, where she was treated for a life-threatening, non-Covid condition.

This was the background to my previously reported Covid test, (1) since we thought that Covid might be a factor for Elaine, whose symptoms were severer than mine. I have not said anything about this context up until now, because Elaine did not want to be mentioned in this blog at the time of the crisis. Now she is fine about it. In her first two or three days of Elaine’s hospitalisation, I was very worried about her. In the last couple of days I have been more relaxed and confidently looking forward to her return and a period of convalescence at home. Elaine speaks very highly of the hospital, its staff and the treatment she has received. I was able to communicate with her (and others) by text, email and sometimes (on her initiative) phone. So I did not feel cut off from her even though the hospital is operating a complete ban on visitors due to the Covid crisis.

The week has reminded me of the fragility of both life and love, and of their immense value. The outcome feels like a victory for life at a time when nature, in my neighbourhood, is pointing in this direction. Meanwhile the festival of Imbolc celebrates the return of the light. I will cherish this time as we move forward from here.

(1) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2021/01/18/another-dawn/

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Contemplative Inquiry

Tag: Love

June 11, 2025

THE FEELING OF HOME

March 11, 2025

EARLY SPRING: AFFIRMING LIFE

May 12, 2024

UNSOUGHT JOURNEY

October 20, 2023

PHILIP CARR-GOMM: PEACEMAKING

December 1, 2022

ACCEPTING THE ARRIVAL OF WINTER

November 25, 2022

BRENDAN MYERS: A FOREST ENCOUNTER

July 23, 2022

MEDITATION, AND A BILLION-YEAR-OLD SENSE OF BEING

July 6, 2021

A PERFECTLY DIVINE MESS

January 30, 2021

TURN ME TO GOLD

January 26, 2021

CHERISHING LIFE