And so the name of my blog has changed. Where once I sought the space in which to "begin to be silent", now I look to Thoreau: "Only that day dawns to which we are awake." It's wonderfully aspirational, isn't it? Whatever happens, I seek to be awake and alive to the lessons and gifts of the day. I will not always succeed, and silence will still be there, welcoming me to its sanctuary. But I can always try.
I went seeking after silence. It remains important to me. But somewhere along the line, it shifted from a place of refuge and withdrawal to a powerful basis for creative awareness and extraordinary relationship with the universe. And it is most definitely not all of me. It is perhaps the foundation, on which I build the castle of life.
And so the name of my blog has changed. Where once I sought the space in which to "begin to be silent", now I look to Thoreau: "Only that day dawns to which we are awake." It's wonderfully aspirational, isn't it? Whatever happens, I seek to be awake and alive to the lessons and gifts of the day. I will not always succeed, and silence will still be there, welcoming me to its sanctuary. But I can always try.
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There have been many children: the wounded, the playful, the restless and the sad. They are of many ages and varied temperaments, all residing within me, more or less harmoniously and welcoming of kinship. Each has required my special attention and each has rewarded my enquiry with love and their own unique, quirky, fresh and talented views on life.
But there has been one... That one child, barely glimpsed, frightened, lonely and stubbornly inaccessible. Despite her youth there is something ancient and primal about her, like a wild and wondrous spirit of the woods: the one you glimpse fleetingly from the corner of your eye and that forever after haunts you with the desire to know what you have seen. That child lives also within me, a wraith of indeterminate origin and little trust in me or in any creature. I know that I need her, we need her, and we hope that she also needs us. I begin to suspect that she resides in the one place I have never yet had the courage to fully inhabit: my body. She alone is its caretaker and she guards it fiercely. As with any wild and beautiful creature, I approach in the only way possible. I move myself into the stillness of profound respect and welcome, and I settle down to wait. We do not earn love through giving; neither do we pay for the gifts we receive with an offering of love. Love is strangely independent of those acts and we are freed in recognising this truth. In our deepest selves we give, not to receive love in return, but out of a greater love for the world and for ourselves. We give, not merely from compassion, but in order to discover and offer up the best that is possible within us and to fulfil our deepest creative impulses. Thus are we showered in the blessings of countless benefactors, known and unimagined. We give to Life. We give to the eternal question of our creative being.
Who will buy this wonderful morning?
Such a sky you never did see. Who will tie it up with a ribbon? And put it in a box for me. Lionel Bart Ever since I can remember, whenever I have been particularly moved, I have tried to hold on to that experience. It is a natural enough response and across the millennia it has no doubt been the creative energy behind everything from the written word to the photograph, music, art and beyond. It has helped to write the stories and histories, myths and folklore we share with each other, allowing us to become time travellers and explorers of the human mind, making friends with people we have never met. Wise, compassionate hands reach out to us as teachers, guides and benefactors, even though those hands never knew whose heart, whose unfolding mind, they might be nurturing. For me it is the emotional energy that I seek so desperately to hold onto, and I hold it best through words. And oh, how I have loved those words, even as I have bewailed my clumsy grasp on them, seeking to clutch at something entirely beyond my reach. It is only recently though that I have felt also the fear behind them, the fear that I will lose myself if I do not hold and permanently record all the moments that matter. How is it possible that something intensely important can pass away in an instant, unseen and unheard? Does time itself alter with our feelings? Do we shape the universe with our passing? Or do the moments rise and fall like the waves, pounding shells into fragments, only to rise and fall once more? As I speak my love to a silent room, I watch curiously my impulse to write it into a permanent record and know that I have captured it, even as Oliver once desired that someone would buy the morning for him so that “I could see it at my leisure / Whenever things go wrong”. I know that the words I write will enter the graveyard of forgotten letters, like so many before them, but still the urge is there, because, who knows? One day I might just find them again. And I might again know what was important to me once. I watch my fingers twitch with the impulse to write and know myself remembered. I watch the underlying fear of emptiness and non-being. And I realise that I do not need to live in the past. All that is needful travels with me. It is true that tomorrow I might know a different love, a different desire, a different heartfelt prayer, but it is not a betrayal of this moment that I leave it behind. If I have the courage, I can recognise that wherever I am, it is the right place. If I have the courage, I can release my words and dreams to the air, in trust that what is, is enough. The full moon shines down on us tonight. It is also my mother's birthday. If she were alive today she would be 91 years old. I went to the beach with the hope of watching the moonrise but cloud cover sadly scotched that idea. Instead the sky had another surprise in store for me.
Happy birthday Maman. The dream is alive in each moment. It exists, not in past or future, or hidden like a perfect gem within a set of impossible conditions, but within the sacredness with which we approach the unfolding now. Even as nothing can live in stasis, the dream is found in movement: in our journey of growth and in the way we choose to respond to the divine gift of being. The most astonishing colours of fantasy and purpose are painted into the peeling of a carrot and the making of a bed. The real is far more extraordinary than our imaginations have the power to conceive; the birthing of dreams is in how we choose to see and live.
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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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