Breathe in and stand
for Yah
is at hand
Breathe out and rejoice
let the Wey
guide your voice
for when
peace fills our hearts
when
breath-full-ness starts
anxieties fall for
Yah Weh
is the all.
On the pure
meditate
for the just
supplicate
praise the
noble and true
give thanks for
virtue
with the loveless
consort
and with all
good report
‘Rejoice’
You say twice
and be
strengthened
by Life.
‘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.
‘What I’d really like to do and I think it’d be really cool, if I could do this is ….’
and the white-haired man carrying his waste around his middle, strides past.
Dandily, holding a cigarette at arms waft, he brushes ash theatrically into the overhanging flora and fauna.
Loosely, at an unsteady trot, this drone is followed by a smaller bobble hat big bearded youth, beating out boredom and servitude in his flat foot pavement flop.
And in those four strides they are fixed in brain and gone from view.
In the next rotation of university square, in the next glimpse, solidity unravels as anorak and fleece unzipped they re-appear, all soft stress melt upon sharing joke, tall lilting laughter and smiles upon some mission complete.
And in those four and plenty strides all is released and remade anew.
I read a call to
‘Be still and know that I am God’
and my questions become more than just the One
how for example can I know and still release
my ever unravelling thinking fluff
my cling to this life long enough
to untether and completely trust
like Hildegard de Bingen’s feather
like some non-specific spec of dust
that this heavy clod of earths unease
will float upon the breath of God
by knowing stillness if you please
Why for instance would I welcome in the dark again
deeply ingest todays Ton-Glen of tension
blood-shed death and grief
if still breathing out I barely taste
Your luminous love above this stench
of mindless city living waste
But really
what if it could really be this easy
if i could seamlessly become We
if You could find Yourself in me
and what if all that’s needed for this embrace
is to clear some clutter
to lose my head
and create a heart shaped whole instead
to find You already found
in that place You dwell
within my ground?
My dear Richard Rohr, you offer me such unexpectedly healing words. You are a kindly Franciscan man from New Mexico, someone I feel close to even though, really, I don’t know you from Adam.
You say, (in Everything Belongs p.152) that ‘Western man’s (and women’s no doubt) work is to learn to descend, to go down into the tears.’ You talk of a unity and maturity where tears of happiness and sadness flow easily together. You briefly touch on how you have needed to learn to relinquish ‘your German, educated, male embarrassment at the inefficiency of these tears,’ and how they can be rejected as they slow you down.
What a relief.
I have for some time thought I was going through a (very light and relatively breezy) form of male menopause. I mean, I have been quietly alarmed at my willingness to burst into tears over the Bargain Hunt contestant who makes a profit at auction, over the redemption story arc attached to most reality shows, over the care, consideration and good humour shown by the GP’s on Gp’s Behind Closed Doors, over Songs of Praise for goodness sake!!
The more innocuous the good story is, the easier it seems for me to bubble up.
Quite quite unusual, embarrassing and pretty much unlike me. Ever since I have turned fifty my sensitivity and tenderness button has been cranked up to warp factor eight. But my response has been nothing like the manly stereotype of buying a new red BMW.
All this blubbering has up until now been seen by me as an inconvenient, guilty, illogical and very very secret affliction of the soul. But what if its got something to do with having upped my time meditating, waiting and generally seeking out stillness. What if its about moving into a maturity within my maleness? (I still inwardly flinch at that notion, but at least am more willing to ask the question)
I have, until The Grenfell disaster, avoided watching TV News, as the daily parade of bloodshed, disaster, inequality and poverty has physically hurt too much. I mean it has made me feel like I want to take to bed and not get up again.
But Grenfell has been different, it has been somehow grotesquely mesmerising. I have been glued to these events, willingly I have rolled into the vicarious pain, spent much time centring my thoughts and prayers of hope for the people involved to be held, nurtured and met within their anguish and distress.
There has been a strange comfort in the tears, in the feeling of being somehow a part of a nations opening up in the wake of such profound loss that is beamed daily into our living rooms. Tears and something bordering on comfort and connection in actually flowing into feeling a heavy heavy heart of thankfulness as well as pain. Thankful to all those people who are imperfectly, ardently, energetically trying to help family, friends neighbours and foe, help fractured people and a community negotiate the mess, shock and incomprehensibility that is life.
And yes Mr Rohr, I too want to be and grow in my abilities to be freely able cry from the heart, laugh (and give thanks) from the belly and to give without noticing.
I aim to share glimpses of my journals and poetry
that has grown from times of stillness and reflection.
My writing, meditations and daily readings helps me slow down, wake up and contemplate how I can grow love and compassion.
May you and all around you become and stay peaceful, contented and secure.
Thanks for stopping by.
city slowness 