WILLIAM BLAKE: ETERNITY
He who binds himself to a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.
William Blake Complete Writings Oxford University Press, 1972 (edited by Geoffrey Keynes)
Contemplative Inquiry
This blog is about contemplative inquiry
Tag: Poetry
July 5, 2019
WHEN I WAS A CREEK
When I was
a tree,
I sang and danced
with the wind
and offered
food and refuge
to all who came.
When I was
a cloud,
I floated freely,
bringing
shade and rain
wherever they
were needed.
When I was
a creek,
I flowed effortlessly
around stones
and nourished life
everywhere
I went.
When I was
a seed,
I held
the story
of what
I would become
inside me
until the sun
and rain
let me know
it was time
to share it.
When I was
a flower,
I opened up
to reveal
my beauty
and invited the bees
to share
the sweetness.
Now I am
human
and can do so many things,
yet I am
full of questions
about who I am
and why I’m here.
Kai Siedenburg Poems of Earth and Spirit: 70 Poems and 40 Practices to Deepen your Connection with Nature Our Nature Connection, 2017
CONTEMPLATION
I like this poem for its economy and simplicity, and for its gentle, shape-shifting animism – for the ease with which it moves between identities in nature. For me, there is power and beauty in this, all the better for a relative lack of ornament.
As a human, I do feel a bit set up. Whereas the rest of nature is awarded an innocence and generosity not always evident in the apparent world, we humans are implicitly stigmatised for our questions, and thereby separated from the rest of nature. In our mainstream culture (both religious and secular) we place ourselves above the rest of nature, so the polar opposite perspective does have a corrective value. But it leaves me unsatisfied.
My sense is that the writer is placing herself alongside me, the reader, and the other humans. She is not awarding herself a free pass on the grounds of her vividly present and enacted imaginative empathy. So I would say to her what I say to myself. As I read it, there’s a strong invitation to self-compassion in the last verse.
Our finite minds are as natural as anything on earth.. Our questions about who we are, why we’re here and what to do are part of us. For me, the only way through them is become more skilled in the process of inquiry and to learn to live by its fruits. I value this poem partly through what it evokes directly, and partly because it stimulates useful inquiry.
June 25, 2019
POEM: IN SILENCE
Be still
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
To speak your
Name.
Listen
To the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
Are you? Whose
Silence are you?
Who (be quiet)
Are you (as these stones
Are quiet). Do not
Think of what you are
Still less of
What you may one day be.
Rather
Be what you are (but who?) be
The unthinkable one
You do not know.
Oh be still, while
You are still alive,
And all things live around you
Speaking (I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.
“I will try, like them
To be my own silence:
And this is difficult. The whole
World is secretly on fire. The stones
Burn, even the stones
They burn me. How can man be still or
Listen to all things burning? How can he dare
To sit with them when
All their silence
Is on fire?”
Thomas Merton Silence, Joy: A Selection of Writings New York: New Directions, 2018
June 5, 2019
POEM: A SPECIAL DAY (CHOSEN FOR ELAINE)
Today
is a very special day.
Today we celebrate
sun and rain,
light and dark,
the cycles of life,
the great turning
of the wheel.
Today we celebrate
every leaf on every tree,
every feather on every bird,
every drop of water in every stream.
Today we celebrate
green growing ones and winged ones,
two leggeds and four leggeds,
all who walk, crawl,
swim or fly.
We celebrate
each breath of air,
each morsel of food,
each beat of our hearts,
each healthy cell.
We celebrate
the profound miracle
of being alive
in this body
in this moment
on this planet.
Today,
like every other day,
is a very special day.
Kai Siedenburg Poems of Earth and Spirit: 70 Poems and 40 Practices to Deepen your Connection with Nature Our Nature Connection, 2017
(Poem shared on the occasion of my wife Elaine’s birthday. It was transcribed for me on a card sent to me on my own birthday last month. It prompted me to buy the collection, which I recommend.)
May 30, 2019
HAIKU BY SARYU
Without a brush
The willow paints the wind
Zen Haiku, selected and translated by Jonathan Clements
London: Frances Lincoln, 2000
May 1, 2019
POETRY FOR THE MERRY MONTH
Below are two versions of late fourteenth century verse, written by an anonymous English author, probably from North Staffordshire or Cheshire. It depicts the turning of the wheel of the year as it moves through spring into summer.
The first version is a mid-twentieth century translation by J.R.R. Tolkien. The second is the original. The poem is embedded in the text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which arguably shows an immature warrior class (King Arthur’s knights) being taken down a peg by the primal forces of nature.
The extract here stands outside the main narrative, which occurs during the Christmas festivities of one year and the Hallowe’en to Christmas period of the next.
“But then the weather in the world makes war on the winter,
Cold creeps into the earth, clouds are uplifted,
Shining rain is shed in showers that all warm
Fall on the fair turf, flowers there open,
Of grounds and of groves green is the raiment,
Birds as busy a-building and gravely are singing
For sweetness of the soft summer that will soon be
On the way.
And blossoms burgeon and blow
In hedgerows bright and gay;
Then glorious musics go
Through the woods in proud array.
After the season of summer with its soft breezes,
When Zephyr goes sighing through seeds and herbs,
Right glad is the grass that grows in the open,
When the damp leaves
To greet a gay glance of the glistening sun”. (1)
“Bot thenne the weder of the worlde with winter hit threpes,
Colde clenges adoun, cloudes uplyften,
Shyre schedes the rayn in schowres ful warme,
Falles upon fayre flat, flowres there schewen.
Bothe groundes and the greves grene are her wedes,
Bryddes busken to bylde, and bremlych syngen
For solace of the softe somer that sues thereafter
Bi bonk;
And blossoumes bolne to blowe
Bi rawes rych and ronk,
Then notes noble innoghe
Are herde in wod so wlonk.
After, the sesoun of somer with the soft wyndes,
Quen Zeferus syfles himself on sedes and erbes;
Wela wynne is the wort that waxes theroute,
When the donkande dewed dropes of the leves,
To bide a blysful blusch of the bright sunne.”
(1) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo translated by J. R. R. Tolkien New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1975
(2) C. Cawley (ed.) Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight London: Dent & New York: Dutton: Everyman’s Library, 1962
April 18, 2019
RUMI: BEING HUMAN
This being human is a guesthouse.
Every morning is a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all,
even if they’re a crowd of sorrows
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture.
Still, treat each guest as honourable.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
I discovered this poem when learning Focusing, a peer and reciprocal support system described by one group of practitioners as based on a ‘bio-spirituality’. As such ‘a guide from beyond’ would be described, rather, as ‘a guide from within’. From the perspective of the discursive mind, I find, it amounts to the same thing.
Focusing works on the understanding that we can hold every experience within a larger presence that is loving but not identified with the experience or lost in it. I am not ‘the dark thought, the shame, the malice’, but I can acknowledge it as something in me that I can lovingly welcome. I can keep it company. This welcoming and keeping company is the essence of the practice, discovering what unfolds – rather than trying to fix or banish the initially unwanted part. For there is a wisdom in the wound. As Leonard Cohen famously put it, ‘there is a crack in everything, that’s where the light comes in’.
For more information about Focusing, there are several useful websites:
https://focusingresources.com/
https://www.livingfocusing.co.uk/
June 26, 2018
STILL POINT
My last post developed out of the phrase: the movement of the breath and stillness in the breath. My wondering about ‘stillness’ began when I was introduced to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets at the age of about sixteen, finding its language and imagery clear and strong. They were a little beyond my reach, but continued to haunt me.
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor
fleshless.
Neither from not towards; at the still point where the dance
Is,
But neither arrest or movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered.
…
“Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.”
1) https://contemplativeinquiry.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/pneuma-the-divine-breath/
2) T. S. Eliot Four Quartets London: Faber & Faber, 1946 (Extract from Burnt Norton, the first quartet)
June 16, 2018
LIGHT VERSE 3: TIME PIECE
Am I out of date
To wear a wrist watch?
I carry a phone,
after all.
Once you seemed so advanced and ‘digital’,
For you did not tick and tick and tick,
And I did not wind you up.
Over the years,
Batteries have died, and been replaced.
Straps have come and gone.
But your face, just a little scratched,
remains the same,
Old friend,
While time keeps moving on.
Contemplative Inquiry 