The night is not enough. I want the day as well. I want to know and feel the heaviness of my limbs, the deep peacefulness of my breath. I want to feel myself pulled down, down, deep through the weight of earth, into the deep waters, where I shall float, perfectly unafraid, perfectly at peace. I want to drink in my own exhaustion and rejoice in it, greeting it with the same joy with which I greet the love of movement and light. I want to be embraced by my fatigue and allow it to carry me off into a new place of reverie, one that I rarely visit. It is a portal to another place where I need not feel a stranger. It is my home, one from which I am kept by the urgency of daily life. Only from the depths of tiredness can I find my way back, the tiredness that is not sleep but knows itself awake and travelling through the mysteries of being. I hunger for it; let it carry me away, trusting that it will return me back, back into a season of joyful and eager energy once more, when I will have been filled with the wisdom and peace of emptiness. In this emptiness I shall find the spark of true being, true life, and it will carry me once more into the light of desire. There I shall see once again with new eyes, new delight, as if for the first time. And it will indeed be the very first time, as every day is the first, the only, one that matters. For now let me rest in the sweetness of your breath, held in your embrace, like a song that haunts at the edge of memory.
Mine is a life of listening. Some listen to music, to words, to God. To what do I listen? To life itself. And surely to God. I listen with my whole body. I listen with my pen as words flow through it onto the page - words I had not planned or expected. I listen with my eyes and hands as colours call to swirl and blend. I listen with my toes in sand as the waves lap over them on a still and silent Sunday morning.
Is it selfish? Undoubtedly. Deeply. But here is what I’ve learned. The continuum between selfishness and selflessness is a circle. Consider the contemplative nun who withdraws from the world in order to pray for it. At a certain point, if I listen long and truly enough, I may arrive somewhere I had not planned. I shall not pretend my listening is any form of virtue; I listen thirstily, greedily, deliciously. I listen because I must. I listen with the pores of my skin and with a joyous heart. I listen because I want to listen, even as I want to breathe. And so I shall keep on listening. Who knows where I may find myself today? I am the still, deep lake reflected in the moonlight. I am the darkness and the fathomless depths, the silence and the weight of secrets whispered on the night. I am the gentle expanse of timeless possibility, the dreaming and the love that pulsates in and through the quiet spaces. I am the slow gentleness that comes when most are sleeping. I am the question that is its own answer.
I explore and celebrate the power of the forgotten and the neglected places, the dark, slow, deep and silent places. I give thanks for the beauty of both the day and the night. |
Introduction
"Only that day dawns to which we are awake," wrote Thoreau. This blog, in words and pictures, is my attempt to be awake: to be alive to the mystery of life. It is an exercise in gratitude and wonder, and an open invitation to beauty. Archives
May 2019
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