Posted on by Glenn Mower

Poetry for wellness

During lock down I have been offering

an eight week ‘Poetry for wellness’ experience via Zoom. Me and two friends have been communing around some poems and themes offered by Lisa DeVuono (and others) in their wonderful new ‘Peer Facilitators Manual’. At the end of each week we have written spontaneously for 15 minutes and then shared snippets with each other (to further feed our ensuing weeks).

As I come to write up and share the final email with my two compatriots I have re-met these offerings. For a record of my journey over the eight weeks I have curated glimpses of my spontaneity within those 15 minutes of free flow writing below. What a privilege and what beauty my two friends offered, it is a shame I cant post all of their offerings, but during the first week we offered lines of our writing to each other which formed a group poem:

Initial group poem

Simple things in life, melt in.
Is this my child speaking and waiting?

I plant seeds for salad to eat soon and
I plant a tree that will bear fruit next year.

The harvest of an endless crop
The translucent sunbeam through the trees
Teasing new shoots to grow.

This life is an invitation to melt in.

Week three: On self-compassion

Unforgiving
drunkenness
crawls within me.

Week four: Making it real

Shutting out the world
is really
not an option
it has never been
it comes in glorious floods
sensations, opportunities and creations beyond
my wildest imagination.
Maybe I can be gentle enough
Featherlike enough to, let this newness
fall
and rest in my hands.

Week five: Overcoming obstacles

If

I embrace
this
Unknowing
maybe I
can ease
into my growing

and while

facing
the Sunshine
maybe
I will
emerge

more

clearly.

Week six: Creating Hope

Together
we are
melting fatigue
by
swaying on the branches of impulse
launching songs
entraining sirens of newness
we are
Together.

Week seven: Being in gratitude

To become released, to become more open, flowing even.
To hide and be happy.
To appear and be happy.
To be resourced and tearful and gratefully imprinted like Gibran, with his
‘Tear and a Smile.’
To allow the tears and be gentle.
To find the light, like my old friend Shuntaro Tanikawa.
The light in the darkness and darkness in the light.
To celebrate re-finding old friends, who I have neglected for so long.
Shuntaro, you have taken second,
third and fourth fiddle to Rumi and Hazarat, Gibran and Neruda
but now your ’62 Sonnets’ press in on my pen.
With silence my companion,
Floating the river of Melancholy,
Coca-cola Lessons,
The Traveller, The Naif, Watashi. All yours, signed sealed
and delivered to my bookshelf.

And ah, At Midnight In The Kitchen I Just Want To Talk To You.

Yes, tomorrow my friend, If I should be so lucky, we too shall talk again.

Week eight: Self care and endings

I am wondering where to go now
where to go now,
how to grow
How to move freely
Breathe more deeply
Love with an openness that
is all mine, an otherness that
is all yours, a togetherness
combining to stop time.

Read more

Posted on by Glenn Mower

Traffic jamming Light and Grace

Fuming beyond

this zebra crossing dripping throng

this head down, striding long

Gortex sway of human form

as wiper blades scud and grate

across this screen that separates

my heart from spleen from

gentle grace of

worried lines on

brethren’s face.

 

And yet.

 

unknowingly still I bow, yes

beyond this dashboard reach

for conditioning air

this rain filled rage begins to clear

as Lightening weight accelerates

and soft green shoots now reappear.

Posted on by Glenn Mower

secret books & gnosis galore

The Oxfam Bookshop on Park Street

has offered me the chance to buy The Nag Hammadi scriptures.

£8:95 and the complete 1945 discoveries are at my finger-tips, and now happily are upon my desktop too.

First expedition in the unknown; The Secret Book of James:

 

on Being filled and lacking (3,38-4,22)

‘So you should lack when you can fill yourselves and be filled when you lack, that you may be able to fill yourselves more. Be filled with Spirit, but lack in reason, for reason is of the soul. It is soul.’

To the ears of my heart this guides and glides me further into meditating and ultimately living contemplatively.

unpicking the two sentences, I follow:

  • So you should lack when you can fill yourselves 

Morning and evening are times when I can intentionally wait to be filled with Spirit.

These 20 minute bookends to my day are my precious times of Centering Prayer. Times when I initially pause and ask, hope and wait to to be emptied (lacked?) of body, mind, sight, sense and feeling.

20 minutes nearing to nothingness. A process of gently feathering my incessant thinking upon the breath of God. Time, yes much time to let go of thoughts and to nestle, nestle and nestle again within wideness and depth beyond this skin.

To become Another’s vessel.

20 minutes, twice a day where I AM resonates somewhere deep and unseen and well and well and well beyond this surface practice of sitting upon a cushion, of waiting and welcoming and repeatedly letting go of all earthly reasoning, of breathing, opening to release these-every-day-ego-driven-collections-and-confections-of-this -and-that-and-the-other.

In other words, to hope beyond words and to become no thing at all.

And after the bell sounds, after the 2 further minutes of peaceful momentary pause, I come back to the waves and vibrations of this bodily living.

  • and be filled when you lack, that you may be able to fill yourselves more.

The peaceful evening pause often helps me glide into a sleepfulness where my lack is unconsciously met and processed, sometimes without trace, sometimes within the sweat and ruffled bed-sheets.

The peaceful morning pause however can become consciously dismantled and plunged into active lacking in minutes, seconds even.

And yet even within the greatest shift into earthly lack, into this worrisome world of  soulful endeavour, even when face down in ego and mud,

A sense, an internal shift towards openness, towards a potential filling with Spirit,  has indeed been growing day on day.

Now, when buffeted by my so-say-sufferings, when daily bemused and angered and hurt by the daze of human botherings tiresomely gathering around this blood, flesh and bone,  I can sometimes pause.

Pause and somehow re-taste elements these 20 minutes, twice daily. And in this glimpse, I can meet the lack in us with a silence and a smile that greets suffering with  an overspilling, unnameable, abundancy that is well and truly beyond the very fabric of me.

Next blog: Know Yourselves (12,17-13,25)

Posted on by Glenn Mower

Recent offerings for a meditation group

 

‘ Draw me into the flames of Your love. Unite me so closely with You that You live and act in me….It is all about love melting in Love.’

St Therese of Lisieux.

‘Just as those who look at the sun cannot but fill their eyes with light, so they who always have a steady gaze into their heart cannot fail to be illuminated…for the heart is our knowing centre, the place of Divine encounter…God speaks in the great silence of the heart.’

St Augustine.

 

A re-fertilised Lords Prayer

Blessed Mother-Father of the Cosmos,

whose delight flows through us in wave and particle,

whose presence is with us always

and whose Spirit dwells within.

Hallowed be your Name of names.

May your kingdom come,

and may your pleasure manifest in us in light and form,

to shine in our lives and on this earth,

just as it does in everything and no-thing.

Thank you for giving us this day.

Thank you for freely pouring out all that we need for sustenance,

nourishment and growth.

As we turn away from your enduring love,

forgive us for these times of un-ripeness.

Oh Birther of all that is and that is not,

forgive us when we trespass against you and those you put in our lives,

and help us forgive those who trespass against us.

Keep us from yielding to temptation,

and guide us away from anything or anyone who distracts us from your highest will.

Divine Light of light,

Deliver and protect us from all that is unripe and guide our spirit

that we may sparkle like jewels in a thousand petalled lotus flower.

Water plentifully our individual and communal roots

so that your living desire may blossom within us.

For all glory, power and abundant ripeness are yours almighty God

Just as it was before the beginning-ness,

it is now and always shall be radiant in Oneness and Love without end. Amen

This adaption is based around a guided centering prayer meditation offered by Maria Gullo (accessed via Insight Timer App), it is fertilised by the words of Neil Douglas Klotz and watered into further growth by Glenn Mower.

 

 

Open the pores of my heart Lord

Open to pause in our hearts

Breathing your love in me

Breathing out Unity.