‘A person who knows that he does not know and who opens himself to the truth without pride in his own personal capacities and without personal ambition may indeed experience the desire for contemplative freedom arising in himself unobserved.’ T. Merton.

He goes on to ask how can the disposition to contemplative freedom, to openness to natural signs of spirituality, imagination,originality and freshness of response to reality, be grown within the current technological world?

This was written in the late 1950’s America when the main technological interloper was the humble TV. How much harder can it be can it be to find ways to this stillness and peacefulness, reflection and restful spaciousness today. To slow down to allow, enable and encourage floods of freedom to wash freshness into our complicated city lives.

 

Bristol

my home town

with your creative verve pulsing

just below the surface

just beyond

the no thanks Big Issues of

metro mayor council cuts  

sofa surf and sleeping rough

to the lying rhythm of

‘affordable living.’

to the laying out of

browned duvets in

darkly disappeared

shop fronts.

 

Bristol

to all that’s becoming

encased within the bright

vacant glare of this new

shabby chic, this

industrial avalanche

of coffee chains

swallowing up

our Barista youth, our

shiny spare cash in

flat white swirls

and naked burgers for the waist

sweet potato chilly chips

warming mid-mornings

with fleeting fullness.

 

And Bristol

what the heck

I’m sure my genes can squeeze to

the double -whip–

chocca-mocha caramel slice

displayed haphazardly beneath

your cake laden

cathedral domed glass frontage.

 

And the smart phone fairy dust still

doesn’t fit the bill.

 

Bristol

in the diesel haze

of this sunny September day

you clutter me, you

raise me unknowingly towards 

a caffeine fuelled

hec-tic-tock, an

unreachable sadness of

non-specific anxiety

threatening to

distance me from coming home

to the glory be

enmeshment of dulled throb

simplicity and peacefulness

falling home within

the abundancy of expanding

flesh and thinning aging brittle bone

discovering Mind Kingdom

release

and on such short wing to

flutter brief and set

contentedly upon

The Silent Heart’s

communal ground.