A clearing

I come out into the clearing where the light is different.

The journey through the trickier terrain is instructive, teaching about the shadows and the night of the soul. The journey is deep – more than it is long – to the inner place and is a homecoming, a luminosity.

The trick is go back and remember. How easily we forget when we are too busy to listen to our lives.

The heartbeat of my wildness, the drums, the dancing, the face paint, emblems reflected on cave walls, a celebration.

Back from the hunt.

The silence is a refuge, a solitude. It is in the clearing, and where the foliage blocks out the sun.

There is no loneliness, landing lightly, on a wing.

I turn around to bird song, hearing a sound of the numinous, a mystery taking flight.

Advertisements

A brewing

There is a rising tide of a nip in the air. The leaves next to the porch have the feel of the autumn about them.

The blue in the sky is the ghost of the summer that will have to bow to the inevitable. The last hurrah of the butterflies do a deep bow too, after the dance of time that has had me spellbound.

An Indian Summer may sneak back for a moment, just to provide hope of another season. We wrap it up in a memory, like a jumper to keep off the chill.

In the distance, I can see a discontent, having a wintry feel of a political storm, brewing uncertainty.

Naming it

It came to me in the car, travelling to work. This was no Zen moment really, just listening to a poet. They often hang round and surface stuff that you hadn’t really thought about in a while.

What he said, sizzled the skin. That time of darkness – yes, that one – had taken me to a hard, tight and unyielding place. My mind had been buried alive.

It’s a long story, with pain so deep, but somehow I had come to a threshold and crossed over and saw in the dark, the light, the buried beauty and glory of my messiness.

That the wildness was now set free.

That just naming it, helped.

It is strange to be here

I thought that it would be strange to be here, this pushing the boat away from the shore. I thought that I would feel unmoored in that kind of scary way that leaving the familiar feels.

But I don’t.

While the mystery still sits still within me, I feel a strange kind of freedom – that kind of freedom I think we feel as a child before we become self-limiting, before the adult constraints harness us to what they think we should be.

The invisible world beyond the shore is a new kind of becoming. The wind, in all its forms, weaves a new story of what is possible.

Beyond the ocean there are landscapes of beauty and a new becoming. Mystery has a a colour and life I never thought possible.

…

Inspired by John O’Donohue’s opening lines in Anam Cara, ‘It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone.’

Reading leaves

Autumn feels as if it has arrived early this year.

I know that you had alerted me to the falling leaves and we both hoped (against hope?) that it was just the wind.

Walking home yesterday from a lunch with old friends, I saw that the leaves had begun to pile up against the step entrance. They always do that. A kind of message.

This morning there was an earlier darkness too and a distinct chill in the air. Like a preparation for the coming winter.

We seek to read the leaves and wonder out loud if this is one of a great discontent coming because of a darker, political winter.

Somewhere to go

It’s funny how becoming awake the world is larger. I have never seen so many butterfly journeys. Until now.

These wild visitors.

Because of this, the wider lens of new possibilities. Like queens with gifts, travelling from afar.

It’s amazing to just stand still in the present and watch their flight, how they move at speed across a river.

Like they have somewhere to go.

Conversations

Sitting, loving what is, I am not entirely convinced.

Circling, before the dive in. The deep dive in. The lived life, the examined life.

If you want reality to be different than it is, she laughs, you might as well teach a cat to bark.

It then comes to me. The world is larger because of this.

When you walk into a room and everyone agrees on something, you know that someone is hiding something or there is something you don’t see.

We don’t need prophets for telling the future, because they are trying to change the present, he says.

With this, like the poet says, the coating of dead dust falls from the windows. The old ways of seeing – habits really – are broken.

We walk along the seafront, the meadowing path breathes with wildlife. The unexamined stories are airlifted away by butterflies and the thought of what the wise woman said: you are the one that can end your suffering.

Sitting still, loving the world as it is, making friends with the wind.

…

Inspired by John O’Donohue, Byron Katie, Omar Ghobash and Shane Claiborne.