Spirituality | Contemplative Inquiry

February 19, 2015

BOOK REVIEW: ENCHANTING THE SHADOWLANDS

In formal terms, this is a five star review of Enchanting the Shadowlands, a book of numinous poems and short stories by Lorna Smithers. She describes it as “gathered from my local landscape in response to an imperative from a Brythonic god called Gwyn ap Nudd”. If you have any interest in the lingering subtle resonance of the old Celtic and pre-Celtic world in parts of England like the poet’s native northwest, you will appreciate this volume. If you have any interest in ‘awen’ as an inspirational force or creative current, and what it is to be ‘awenydd’, you will appreciate this volume. If you have any interest in poetry and landscape, or what is now called psycho-geography, you are likely to appreciate this volume. I strongly recommend this book.

More deeply, I am hoping in a small way to share something of the magic of the work as I have experienced it. I find that the best way in is to say that, for me, the resonance of the project, its feeling-tone, can be found in the first two verses of ‘A Journeying Song’, one of the later poems in the collection.

1: Horse and Hound

She will carry me

down invisible horse paths.

He will lead us

to invisible lands.

She will carry me

beyond the stolen skyline.

He will lead us

to where horizons end.

2: The Dreaming Land

The dream is not a dream

it is the life force of the land.

A living memory,

it is the dawn. It is the damned.

The dream is not a sleep.

It is a wakefulness

of past people and their dreams.

It is mistakes and shining laughter.

When I read these lines, I can feel myself riding the mare who will “carry me down invisible horse paths”, led (in my mind’s eye) by a large and shaggy hound. I can easily accept that, surrendering to the instinctive wisdom of these animal powers, I might find myself beyond a “broken skyline” at a place where “horizons end”. I can settle into the felt apprehension of a Dreaming Land where the dream is not a dream, but “the life force of the land, a living memory” and a “wakefulness of past people and their dreams”. The words are a portal to the living reality of the experience itself. In that sense, these two brief verses stand as a microcosm of the whole book.

Peneverdant/Penwortham, the locality described, is a watery place. Its first human inhabitants are called “The Dwellers in the Water Country”, drawn by the obvious attractions of auroch and deer and also by destiny and “the dream of a bard”.

They came with the splash of oars

and the steady splash of feet

drawn by auroch, deer and destiny,

the dream of a bard

who saw the green hill rising

from a wilderness of carr and marsh.

The awenydd poet’s own seership, her own process of inspired and connected reaching back, is caught in her ‘Prayer for Netholme’.

I write this prayer for the White One

Who loaned to me a mare of mist,

Led me across the marsh of time

And granted me the seer’s gift.

For later periods, the poetry is sometimes dialogical with older texts – such as the Domesday Survey of 1086, or James Flockhart’s ‘De Mowbray:A legend of Penwortham’. The latter is referenced in in ‘St. Mary’s Well, Twilight’ – a poem that also includes finely wrought observation of nature and the meaning it makes for the observer/the observer makes for it.

The setting sun is casting his vast aura

With a majesty I never dreamt him capable of

Enflaming clouds in luminescent orange and red,

Purple like mountains behind the trees.

The birds are singing as if it is their last dusk song.

I enlist bold robin, blackbird and little wren …

As if this is the evening of all evenings

And will be their last so better make it their best.

It is hard to write freshly about sunsets, though I do think this is well-managed even in the first four lines, especially through bringing in a delighted shift in the observer’s perception, and then going on to dare purple poetry. But what makes this section of the poem for me is the succeeding lines, which create a foreground for the majestic sunset background through the activity of the birds and their commitment to Being while it lasts.

Throughout the book we are aware of the interweaving of two worlds. This is done particularly well in the stories, which are every bit as inspired as the poetry. I was especially moved by the last, called ‘The Brown-Eared Hound: Rivington, October 31^st. 1917’. It concerns sudden, shocking bereavement and also a direct experience of Gwyn’s wild hunt. I could almost see a novel, or at any rate novella, in this story – bringing together the world of Wilfrid Owen, D.H Lawrence and Virginia Wolf with that of living Brythonic myth. At the same time the piece as written did everything it needed to.

I don’t think it is possible to do this volume justice in a single review. It’s hard, with poetry. So I’m suggesting that readers also have a look at Crychydd’s review in https://barddos.wordpress.com/2015/02/04 and the author’s own discussions about her work and its continuing development at: http://lornasmithers.wordpress.com/

Lorna Smithers Enchanting the Shadowlands Lulu, 2015

3 Comments

February 9, 2015

MIND AND LIFE INSTITUTE IN EUROPE

In a previous post on https://contemplativeinquiry.wordpress.com/2015/1/02 I wrote about the Mind and Life Institute which can be found on http://www.mindandlife.org/. Founded in 1987 it was largely the inspiration of the current Dalai Lama. Its aim is to bring together contemplative practitioners and the academic community to investigate contemplative states and their value. Although it has a largely Buddhist orientation, it is not confined to Buddhists.

This post is to draw attention to a Mind and Life European Summer Research Institute on Contemplative Practice, Science and Society from 28 August to 3 September 2015 at the Abtei Fraueninsel Chiemsee, Germany.

This will explore the influence of contemplative practices on mind, behaviour, brain function and health, but are also fostering the development of new fields of research known as Contemplative Neuroscience, Contemplative Clinical Science, Contemplative Studies, and Contemplative Education (see www.mindandlife-europe.org for more details, or check out www.mindandlife.org if you wish to learn more about previous SRIs in the USA).

Leave a comment

February 2, 2015

IMBOLC LIGHTS

I’m reflecting on the difference between ‘Light’ and ‘lights’. Yesterday evening my partner Elaine and I had an Imbolc ritual. We’ve decided to move through the seasonal festivals in this way, customising a joint practice as we go.

I reflect now on our time in the festive circle as in part a feast of lights. Not ‘Light’, but lights. We can have Light at the throw of a switch, one easy taken-for-granted ‘Let there be Light’ gesture. It’s very powerful and very useful – and effortlessly normal in our culture, at least for the time being.

But it isn’t a feast of lights. A feast of lights requires multiple, small sources. It requires the co-presence of darkness and shadow. It requires variation, degrees of light and darkness. It requires change and play.

We had two basic light sources, during the ritual. The one that attracted my attention most was an array of night lights positioned around the room in various ways. We had nine on the altar (one at the centre, eight at the circumference – with one at each station of the eightfold wheel of the year). And there were others around the room, grouped in threes. Very simple. Very traditional. Very minimal. Very meaningful. Very beautiful. These lights tended to be bright and a high yellow, glinting in some moments, softer and more diffuse at others. Each had its own aura. All tended to flicker in even the smallest current of air. And each had its sphere of influence, fading porously into the surrounding dusk, with no clearly defined or specific boundary – the transitions being so gradual, so gentle. Thus light and darkness were differentiated without being polarised and they cheerfully shared their debatable lands. The play of ambiguity was part of the feast.

The second source was the fire, a wood burner, well-established by the time we began the ritual and happily placed in a north-easterly hearth. Also very traditional. Very simple. Very minimal. Very meaningful. Very beautiful. And for the most part, in this mature phase, a deep red, in a way a dull red, though the word isn’t right. A potent light, a subliminal light, almost a kinaesthetic light. Not a very light sort of light at all. Its presence radiated through the room, bringing our centre of gravity, even in terms of luminosity, closer to the earth.

And that is a feast of lights. It was almost a shock, in the tidying up aftermath of the ritual, to return to the Light.

Leave a comment

January 28, 2015

MIND AND LIFE INSTITUTE: INQUIRING INTO FEAR AND TRUST IN SELF AND SOCIETY

The Mind and Life Institute can be found on http://www.mindandlife.org/

Founded in 1987 it was largely the inspiration of the current Dalai Lama. Its aim is to bring together contemplative practitioners and the academic community to investigate contemplative states and their value. Although it has a largely Buddhist orientation, it is not confined to Buddhists.

One of their current offerings is the 2015 Mind and Life Summer Research Institute (MLSRI) to be held from 13-19 June 2015 at the Garrison Institute, Garrison NY. The topic is ‘Fear and Trust in Self and Society’. (For anyone interested, the application deadline is 18 February,) The Institute says:

“This is is a week-long program to advance collaborative research among scientists, contemplative scholars, other humanities scholars, and contemplative practitioners, based on a process of inquiry and dialogue. With this unique program, we are not only nurturing a new generation of scientists interested in exploring the influence of contemplative practice and meditation on the mind, but are also fostering the development of new fields of research collectively referred to as the ‘contemplative sciences.’ This year’s institute will be held June 13-19, 2015 and will be located at the Garrison Institute in Garrison, New York, 50 miles north of New York City in the Hudson River Valley.

“The 2015 MLSRI will be devoted to examining fear, trust, and social relationships. Presentations and discussions will draw on research in both the sciences and the humanities, including neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, religion, and contemplative studies. Over the week, we will explore biological and experiential aspects of fear, its influence on our cognition and emotion, and its expression in both healthy states and clinical disorders. Critically, we’ll also be examining the role of trust and interpersonal connection as a counterpoint to fear, so we will also address the protective functions of secure attachment and compassion. Finally, we will ask how contemplative practices might be used to help us work with fear and cultivate social bonds.

“We encourage interested scholars to apply as either a Research Fellow or Senior Investigator:

Research Fellow candidates include students in contemplative traditions, as well as undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows in relevant academic fields.
Senior Investigator candidates are established researchers, faculty, teachers, scholars, or practitioners in a relevant field.

“We are now accepting applications online. Applications close on February 18, and applicants will be notified of selection by April 3. There is a $45 application fee. The all-inclusive program cost is $525 for Research Fellows and $775 for Senior Investigators. For more information, please visit our event website: MLSRI 2015.”

Although I sometimes worry about topics like this becoming over-academic, I like the way in which contemplative inquiry is being given increasing attention through initiatives such as the Mind and Life Institute.

Leave a comment

January 19, 2015

ETHICS OF EMPATHY: IMMRAM

Ancient Gaelic culture had a tradition of the Imramm – well-described by Caitlin and John Matthews (1). Imramma are “voyage quests, whereby a hero is called to penetrate to the furthest west to find wisdom, healing or paradise. For the Celtic peoples, the lands westward over the Atlantic have ever been the regions of the Blessed Isles, the happy Otherworld from which faery visitants, empowering objects and supra-human wisdom derive. As with the Grail quest, the Imramma are found in both pre- and post-Christian traditions, testifying to their importance, which may have been remnants of a once-coherent ‘book of the dead’ teaching, preparing people for states of existence after death, similar to the Tibetan bardo wisdom”.

I have one which was presented to me as a voyage to discover heaven and hell. I do not know its date or precise origin. The monks – I think they were monks – sailed past many islands in their hard journey into the open sea, their craft small and vulnerable, the conditions variable and sometimes scary. Occasionally they were able to land and refresh themselves – without finding anything much beyond the means of continuing subsistence. Eventually they grew close to a relatively large and inhabited island. They couldn’t see it very well through the mist and rain, but they could hear the cries and shouts of a human-seeming population in distress. Getting closer the voyagers glimpsed large, steaming cauldrons on the shore and the smell coming from these was succulent, not bad at all. Yet angry and emaciated figures were huddled around them – some were snarling, jostling and fighting; others were paralysed with despair and sunken into vacancy and helpless gibbering; yet others were just a little bit more solution focused (as we might now say) and caught up in their own private frustration about how to get food from the cauldrons into their mouths with the very long spoons provided. They were so caught up in this that none of them even noticed the travellers, who found it wisest to back away from this scene before they were discovered in ways that might turn ugly.

The voyage continued … and continued. Eventually, as the story goes, and on a brighter calmer morning, the monks found themselves approaching another island, with an uncanny resemblance to the first. Quite large, with similar human-seeming inhabitants and large, steaming cauldrons on the shore and the same succulent smell. The beings gathered around them even wielded the same awkward, ungainly and very long spoons. The only difference, of course, in the whole scene, is that they were using these spoons to feed each other.

There are three things I particularly like about this story. One is that the ethics of empathy can grow in very pragmatic soil, the soil of enlightened self-interest, the soil of common sense. The turn to co-operation doesn’t have, in itself, to be especially high-minded. So in a way the ethics of empathy, in a fuller sense, can develop out of the experience of simple, practical co-operation. The second is that, although hell is all too easy to get into, it is also quite possible to get out of: no need to abandon hope. The third is that the Otherworld journey takes us straight back into the realm of everyday life and how we do it.

Matthews, Caitlin and John (1994) The encyclopaedia of Celtic wisdom: the Celtic shaman’s sourcebook Shaftsbury, Dorset, UK: Element (also published by Element in Rockport, Massachusetts, USA and Brisbane, Queensland, Australia)

Leave a comment

January 12, 2015

UPDATE ON CONTEMPLATIVE DRUID EVENTS

After the publication of Contemplative Druidry last October, I set up Contemplative Druid Events together with my partner Elaine Knight, supported by other members of our local group – particularly Nimue Brown, Julie Bond, JJ Middleway and Karen Webb. Our main purpose is to organise, publicise and run a limited number of contemplative Druid events for the wider Druid community and others of like intent. We will also respond to inquiries from people wishing to join a Druid contemplative group or start one of their own.

We have arranged three events for 2015:

A half day introduction to contemplative Druidry in London on Sunday 22 February
A weekend retreat near Malvern from Friday 17- Sunday19 April
A contemplative Druid day in Stroud on Saturday 3 October

For more information, or to arrange a booking please go to our dedicated blog at http://contemplativedruidevents.tumblr.com/

These events are all in southern England. I am open to going further afield, and other colleagues might be. In this regard I am happy to hear proposals from people who are willing to gather together their own group and to negotiate times, programme and costs.

Overall our vision for the contemplative thread in Druidry is that it will develop organically, with initiatives coming from different sources and taking different forms. We don’t seek to own or manage this development under the banner of Contemplative Druid Events, though we do see a value in offering programmes of our own on a modest scale.

1 Comment

January 3, 2015

FAIRY TALES, ANIMAL HELPERS AND ‘THE PROBLEM OF GOOD’

Recently I came across an article about fairy tales, which included brief reviews of several books and some general observations. The author was Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Communion. Below, and without further comment from me, I include an extract which caught my attention.

“There is a clear strand of social resistance running through much of the old material, a strand repeatedly weakened, in not denied, by nervous rewriting. But this depends on the conviction underlying all this sort of storytelling: that the world is irrationally generous as well as unfairly hurtful. There is no justice but there is a potentially hopeful side to anarchy, and we cannot tell in advance where we will find solidarity. Or, to put it in more theological terms, there is certainly a problem of evil in the way the world goes. Yet there is also a ‘problem of good’ – utterly unexpected and unscripted resources in unlikely places. And at the very least this suggests to the audience for the tale a more speculatively hopeful attitude to the non-human environment as well as to other people. Just be careful how you treat a passing fox, hedgehog or thrush.”

3 Comments

January 1, 2015

POEM: WOLF VOICE

Happy New Year to all readers of this post! My very best wishes for 2015. I offer a poem by Martin Pallot, a wolf’s life-world in the northern winter.

Martin is my fourth poet from the collection ‘Moon Poets: Six Pagan poets’ published by Moon Books and edited by Trevor Greenfield. Martin has been writing poetry since the early 1980s, mainly inspired by Nature and his pagan beliefs. He admires the early poets and story tellers and the way they engaged the ear, as well as the mind of their audience, and encourages people to say his poetry as well as just reading it. The collection as a whole also includes work by Tiffany Chaney, Lorna Smithers, Robin Herne, Romany Rivers and Beverley Price.

Wolf Voice

Wolf, howling to the moon,

The wind hears your words,

The earth feels your voice,

Sending out your spirit sound,

Calling to the great She wolf

Who shakes the stars from her fur.

Loping in the light of her one great eye,

Silver, shadowing the pack path,

Snow, scented by the passing prey,

Guides you on your killing way.

The trackless whiteness,

Sculpted by spirits of the air,

Into shape of deer and bison.

These insubstantial ghosts,

A pulsating presence in your

Preternatural eye.

When the kill is made,

The pack song rises,

To thank the She Wolf

For her gift of life,

To the den of generations.

And the moon,

Resting on a bed

Of winter branches,

Smiles, to hear

The voice of Wolf.

Leave a comment

December 29, 2014

‘CELEBRATE … MORE THAN’: SHARING A PRACTICE

Earlier in December I shared ‘Awen space’, a Druid contemplative practice from my local group. Today I’m sharing something from my solo morning practice. It’s a set of statements that originally grew out of a traditional ‘who am I?’ inquiry but have now morphed into something else. They are partly a means of scanning and personal review – and partly a celebration or even re-enchantment of identity, supporting a gradual shift in my experienced centre of gravity.

The specific statements may look fixed but in practice they are in process: they shift and evolve over time. My rule of thumb is that they have to describe experiences I live and embody, or have at least touched into. I can borrow other people’s language, but I can’t use anything here on a purely liturgical or aspirational basis. I find this a dynamic and valuable way of working, I think largely because tailored to my emergent experience and understanding. If taken off the shelf, as a formula, these statements might not have had so much power. I suspect that this is a form of practice that has to be customised by the individual practitioner to work well, despite (or even because of) its transpersonal direction.

I celebrate my body and my senses – and I am more than my body and my senses.

I celebrate my life energy – and I am more than my life energy.

I celebrate my feelings, thoughts and images – and I am more than these.

I celebrate my everyday self-sense and the web of story it weaves – and I am more than that everyday self-sense.

I am the song in the heart; I am the healer in the heart; I am the wisdom in the heart.

I am the space inside the breath, and the stillness in that space.

Living presence, in a field of living presence.

Already enough and already at home. Awen.

Leave a comment

December 24, 2014

POEM: CIRCLE OF THE SOUL

A third poet from the collection ‘Moon Poets: Six Pagan poets’ published by Moon Books and edited by Trevor Greenfield. Tiffany Chaney is a poet and artist residing in North Carolina. Her poetry collection Between Blue and Grey won the 2013 Mother Vine Festival Award for Best in poetry. Tiffany can be found on http://www.tiffanychaney.com/

The collection as a whole also includes work by Lorna Smithers, Robin Herne, Romany Rivers, Martin Pallot and Beverley Price.

Circle of the Soul

Wake,

wake the witness,

silent Sulis

of the pond.

Pretend the nameless

are named.

Pretend the formless

are framed.

Wake,

wake the witness.

Wait,

until it is your turn

of the wheel.

Satiate

the self with

the making of souls,

until having played

pretend you can fall

asleep again.

Wake, and witness,

so we may recall.

4 Comments

Tag: Spirituality