I’m walking in my local park. It’s a dull day in the first half of March. There have been many such days, and I could do with more sun. I certainly feel lifted when it comes. At the same time the days are longer and Mother Nature is busy with the work of spring: an abundance of willow catkins is testament to this.
I get my strongest impression of the strength and fecundity of willow when close up. The individual catkins are clearer, more prominent. The colours are stronger. There’s the sense of a rich and vibrant ecosystem, powerfully alive.
Still images don’t provide movement and sound, or indicate the presence of the March wind. I have tried to capture this in my short video below, illustrating another aspect of this moment in the year. It brought up fond childhood memories of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows which begins with spring cleaning and includes the gently Pagan chapter The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Willow became important to me in my early study and practice of Druidry. I began a special relationship with a particular willow in Bristol for many years (2), which continued after I left the city and continues sporadically to this day. I also developed a private tradition of following the wheel of the year through a mandala based on 16 trees, all in easy distance of where I lived, with Willow the focus from 17 March to 7 April, hence presiding over the spring equinox (3). Checking in with the willows is a continuing feature of my walks, though I was a little early this year.
(1) Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows London: Dean, in association with Methuen’s Children’s Books, 1991. (Ist ed. 1908. Illustrated by E. H. Shepard)
Highly recommended to anyone interested in Chinese traditional poetry and culture, and the way it is received in China today. I looked at an aspect of Michael Wood’s In the Footsteps of Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet (1) in my last post (2). This is a full book review. The back cover provides an accurate basic summary of its contents: “For a thousand years Du Fu (712-70 CE) has been China’s most loved poet. Born into the golden age of the Tang Dynasty, he saw his world collapse in famine, war and chaos. The poet and his family became impoverished refugees, but his profound vision and his empathy for the sufferings of humanity endured, and have endeared him to readers ever since. … Broadcaster and historian Michael Wood follows in Du Fu’s footsteps on a pilgrimage through the physical and emotional landscapes of his life and work”.
The book, lavishly illustrated, is divided into 24 chapters. Many of these are headed by place names. Michael Wood visited most of them on his own journey, talking with scholars and enthusiasts and also taking time to observe the very different China of today. The narrative is somewhat tilted towards the last 15 years of Du Fu’s life, when the War of An Lushan (3) displaced Du Fu and turned him into an internal refugee, constantly on the move, for the rest of his life. It is also seen as the period of his best poetry.
The first chapters of the book emphasise the easy optimism of Du Fu’s early years. A new Emperor, himself a painter, musician and poet, launched a cultural rebirth. He was a patron of libraries and scholars. He ruled a prosperous and peaceful country. Du Fu writes nostalgically of childhood years in which “rice was succulent … the granaries were full, and there was not a robber on the road in all the 9 provinces of China”. Growing up in the city of Gong-yi on the Yellow River, the son of an Imperial official, Du Fu looked forward to a successful life as both official and poet. “I’d read everything and I thought I was superb”. He went to Chang’an and took his exams for the Imperial service.
He failed them. “In the blue sky my wings failed me”. For some years he went on a series of family supported wanderings, honed his poetic skills and became interested in the Chinese version of Mahayana Buddhism. Returning to Chang’an he failed the exams again, but managed to get a lowly official job, married, and began to raise a family. He settled them in Fengxian near the capital, a place that featured hot springs. Although he had to be available at Chang’an, he visited often. At this point his poetry began to show a concern for ordinary people.
Here at the hot spring the emperor entertains his court
And music echoes around the hills.
Only the rich and powerful bathe here.
But the silk they wear was woven by people,
women whose husbands are beaten for their taxes.
In 755, even before war broke out, China was devasted by floods and a resultant famine. Du Fu lost an infant son to starvation and wrote that he was ashamed to be a father. Famine threatened again, on the road, after the rebel victory:
My little girl bit me in her hunger
And fearful that wolves or tigers would hear her cries
I hugged her to my chest, muffling her mouth,
But she struggled free and just cried more.
Michael Wood provides a map of the family’s subsequent movements, generally in the rugged, often spectacular and less populated west of China. They could never settle for very long, as political and military conditions remained volatile and unsafe. I describe Du Fu’s sojourn in Chengdu in my pervious post (2). Towards the end of his life, conditions seemed to be easing and the family began moving back east via the Yangtze river, in gradual steps. This gives Michael Wood the opportunity to describe his own experience of the hyper-modern city of Chongqing, though Kuizhou and the spectacular Three Gorges area are more important to Du Fu and his work. Wood says that, “in the Gorges, though it had been at great cost to himself, Du Fu’s gift was creative and imaginative freedom”. His output was prolific, and drew on a meditatively close encounter with nature.
Crescent moon stilled in the clear night
Half-abandoned to sleep, lamp wicks blossom
In echoing mountains unsettled deer stir
Falling leaves startle locusts.
By this time Du Fu was worn down by asthma, diabetes and years of hardship. Though he got a little further down river, he never made it to his original home. Nonetheless he was able to be defiantly celebratory:
Old and tired, my hair white, I dance and sing out:
Goosefoot cane, no sleep, catch me if you can!
Du Fu died at the age of 58 in Changsha in Hunan Province. Michael Wood went there simply to complete the journey, but was rewarded with a new lens on Du Fu’s work and the creative tradition he came from. He met Professor Yang Wu at the University there. One of her interests is “the living oral tradition of poetry and the possibility of reconstructing the ancient music that might have accompanied it”. Research on ancient poetry and music is an expanding subject in today’s China. Du Fu’s poetry has been preserved in Hunan oral tradition as well as in manuscripts. A local tradition of poetry clubs has survived the early Communist period. Now it is reviving and being encouraged. Professor Wu and her students have been busy with making replica’s of Tang dynasty instruments – for example the qin, a seven-stringed instrument with strings of twisted silk. They are finding manuscript records of early musical settings, and sound-recording local people’s singing. For me this adds another dimension to Du Fu’s work – where he can be understood , in part, as the lyricist for music that was performed in group and public settings.
In the Footsteps of Du Fu is highly informed and engagingly written. For me is also a beautiful artefact, though eminently portable, not at all a coffee table book. I rarely buy printed books now because the print is too small for me. But I was fine with this one and the illustrations are a joy. Another reason for my strong recommendation.
(1) Michael Wood In The Footsteps of Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet London: Simon and Schuster, 2023
(3) In December 755 An Lushan, a Turkic general in the Imperial service, marched on China’s then capital city, Chang’an, from North China with a quarter of a million men. They inflicted a series of defeats on the Imperial army and occupied Chang’an in July 756. An Lushan was assassinated by his own son in 757 but the war continued for 7 years. Tang dynasty China, whilst nominally lasting for decades longer, was never the same again.
Personal note: Michael Wood’s introduction begins: “if you love literature of any kind, you will have had one of those moments when you encounter a book that opens a window onto a world you never dreamed existed. Mine was at school when I first encountered Du Fu in A. C. Graham’s wonderful Poems of the Late T’ang.” I had my own version of the same experience, and still have my battered old copy. Du Fu is transliterated in that and some other translations as Tu Fu. The price, in the top left corner of the cover (see picture) is 4/- (four shillings, or 20 pence in post-1970 UK money). I have never been a formal student or scholar in this domain, but modern English translations of classical Chinese poetry have left a deep impression on me. Another poem from this collection can be found in this blog at: https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2016/02/04/poem-a-withered-tree/
Michael Wood In The Footsteps of Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet London: Simon and Schuster, 2023
This poem welcomes spring and also celebrates arrival at a place of safety. For a brief period in the early 760s the Chinese poet Du Fu (712 – 770 CE) had a cottage and garden in Chengdu, the Brocade City. It was a time of social breakdown in China and although from the landowning and mandarin class, Du Fu and his family had become refugees in their own country. At times, during their wanderings in the rugged terrain of western China, they were shelterless and close to starvation. Nonetheless, Du Fu retained an underlying resilience. Despite everything his capacity to notice, contemplate, feel, care and write were not compromised. One of his earlier poems, written when trapped in the rebel occupied capital Chang’an (City of Eternal Peace, now Xi’an), begins:
“The state is destroyed, but the country remains.
In the City in spring grass and weeds grow everywhere.
Grieving for the times, even the blossom sheds tears
Hating the separation birds startle the heart.”
As part of his following in Du Fu’s footsteps, Michael Wood visited Chengdu and talked to local people and tourists from other parts of China. Why does Du Fu matter to them now? One older local resident said that he came to the garden – now a well kept heritage site – “at least once a month” to reflect on Du Fu’s poetry. “For a long time we suffered, now we are better off, but today society is very materialistic, and spiritual things are going away. But I feel these things still matter, and here in this place you can go right into his mind: the thoughts and feelings of someone from so long ago. To me, this is a miracle. The garden here is big enough to get lost in, away from the public, especially if you come early in the morning. I sit in a corner and recall him, maybe read out one of his poems out loud, and reflect on it”. He described this as his meditation.
Below is an imaginary portrait of Du Fu by the artist Jiang Zhaohe (1904 -1986). It was done in 1959, during Mao’s Great Famine, described by Michael Wood as “one of China’s most shattering disasters”.
A familiar sight, in a familiar place. I’ve been living in Gloucester for two years now. This is the first February since 2019 in my personal life that I might call ‘normal’. The Covid-19 pandemic and relocations dominated the February’s of 2020-2023. Hyper-vigilant states aren’t such a feature for me in February 2024. My reduced anxiety has allowed a certain laziness and I have found it welcome.
Contemplating the image above, I greet these winter-skeletal trees as friends, today part of my internalised psychic territory. On this occasion, a 9 February walk, I call the afternoon ‘grey’ because of my initial response to the sky. The label has meaning for me as a first impression though it does over-generalise. Looking more closely, I find the sky turbulent and mixed. White hides the afternoon sun. There are indications of movement and change, and hints of blue. A slender branch yearns upwards to the hidden sun, pursuing fresh life and growth. That sun has moved well beyond midwinter. It may not yet be spring, but the days are longer and at times I experience a real warmth.
Moving on and now looking downwards, I discover a different world. Here there is evidence of both sunlight and shadow on the path. Mud and the puddles from refreshing rain too, with vivid green grass beside on the verges..
But the the most obviously verdant signs of annual regeneration in February 2024 are in the undergrowth beside the path. Here, in the picture below, is a feast of green freshness. New-appearing nettles are strongly present. They may sting to protect themselves yet they also nourish and heal. They have enriched our lives in many ways for a very long time. When I was ill with respiratory problems at times in 2021 and 2022 I valued them as a tea. I was pleased to meet the rising generation on my walk.
My memory of February 2024 will feature the colours grey and green as strong markers of this intermediate season. A blessing our lives, and a blessing on the land!
Yesterday – 3.30 pm or so – I was walking home swiftly from a shopping expedition. I was slowed down and halted by the water in Gloucester docks. It drew my eye and asked for a closer look. It had clearly been iced up in the previous cold night, and had been slowly melting in this bracing but above-zero day.
The sky is clear and I experience a strengthening sun now. I recollect that we are now several weeks beyond the solstice. The balance of light, shade, stillness and fluidity sends me into a more deeply meditative state, entirely trumping my original sense of domestic mission and wanting to be home.
Ice and water are made of the same stuff, manifesting in different ways. The patterns on the surface look still but tell a story of transformation – here, from fixed to free. Another drop in temperature could easily end and indeed reverse this process. In this space I see the same essence adopting different forms under different conditions. But here the change is gentle. The contemplative moment extends itself. I am open to the magic of nature. In such beauty, I find peace and stillness within my own being.
It is 3 January 2024, around 8.30 am. I repeat my best wishes to all readers for 2024 from inside the new year, as it begins to unfold. I contemplate the sky, uncertain about what this new year may bring. At some level I feel open and uncluttered, free of over-determined intentions. It is as if I have surrendered to a current.
My Contemplative Inquiry, once a formal structured project, has gradually evolved into a simpler and more natural-seeming contemplative inquiry in no need of capitalisation. This inquiry is wired in, no longer in need of much external input or formalised internal effort. I am aware of owing a debt to the formal structured project, with its inputs and efforts, for it enabled this evolution to occur.
The result of the early, more formal, years is recorded in my ABOUT section. It was simultaneously a gnosis and the discovery of a place to stand that felt right and made sense. “My inquiry has been a pathway to greater understanding, healing and peace. In the contemplative moment, I am living presence in a field of living presence, at home in a living world. This is not dependent on belief or circumstance, but on the recognition of what is given, joy and sorrow alike. I find that this simple recognition moves me towards a spirit of openness, a fuller acceptance that nothing stays the same, an ethic of interdependence and a life of abundant simplicity”. My inquiry today is about deepening, and living more congruently and confidently from this place. It is part of me now, and I foresee no end.
Seasonal Blessings to all readers, and my best wishes for 2024! I took these photos between 2.20 and 2.50 pm on 21 December, the last day before the Solstice, and a little more than an hour before sunset in Southern England.
The location is Alney Island, Gloucester, which I had not been to for some time. I encountered a sun that was low in the sky, clearly sinking, but still having an obvious influence on the landscape. Above, you can see a powerful luminescence behind the starkness of the trees. Immediately below, you can see light effects on the river and the trees themselves.
In the picture below, the midwinter sunshine is clearer and stronger. I love the way in which the willows show their vitality and abundance even when they have lost their leaves. The path is relatively dry, yet surrounded by green grass. There is a play of light and shade. There is blue as well as cloud in the sky.
On the ground, in the afternoon, and now in the evening as I write, I am thinking of light and dark, and of waxing and waning, as natural phenomena. I am not thinking in moral or metaphysical terms. These are different considerations, with a tendency moreover towards abstraction and absolutism. In my experience, nature tends to be nuanced. Different things are going on at the same time. Certainly where I live, there is always some balance of light and dark. The balance shifts, but both are always in play.
We treat tomorrow’s sunrise as the beginning of a turn. Here, in 2023, the afternoon before the change seems like a friendly one for an annual nadir of the light. This is also a bit how I am thinking about myself. Towards the end of November, when I last wrote a post of this type, I was celebrating a recovery from illness, and the opportunity of a good day. A good day was about what it was. Many people have pointed out in the last year or so that Covid-19 seems to have a long tail. I have been physically restricted beyond what I think of as normal.
I’m aware of a 75th birthday coming up next year, at which time our government will no longer consider my death as premature. Yet I am in good heart and feeling resilient. Without being presumptuous, I’m leaning in to longevity. I’m checking my capabilities and energy levels, anticipating some adjustments, and noticing the many rays of light which present themselves in my world.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
