Hello
I have just started a You-Tube channel called ‘Slow in the City’, which is me reciting some of these blog entries.
If you are interested here’s my first offering:
If not me
Oh
wood pigeon you deep throat
cry me to mate.
Neck ballooning with longing
you resonate
above these slates
this mist, that
diesel track to Weston.
The roof top between us
is hiding my presence.
Acting the beat box.
What have you in store for me?
What desires drive your calling
to chimneyed horizons?
How far do you fly
your bare twigs
to nest hopes on
this city bird table.
Prepare to entice me
To your perch
and if not me, then
Who, who, who?
Who, who, who?
Becoming a true city Liver
A few days after an urban retreat with fellow South West of England contemplatives, sensitively and gorgeously lead by Cynthia Borgeualt from The States, I am energised again to become a true Liver in this my city of home. To take hold the call to embody all outer and inner complexities, to have a tenderized heart towards the human folly and wastefulness, the clamour and the one-eyed nature that fills our bellies and minds, our gullies and ground with extraneous clutter and junk.
I feel moved to show love for this Bristol urban sprawl, to unravel my arms and cherish the empty crisp packets and KFC bargain buckets, the smiling faces and stress filled waste skidding by, like plucked feathers upon the city’s deep-fried breath. Affluent effluence, only curbed by pavement edge and the ever-changing boundaries of road works invisibly labouring to still the revolution of rubber on a million VW diesel engines spewing stationary while raging for space to park their precious egos.
I feel ignited again to awaken the collective throbbing generous Heart, to engage in the wild ride of internal contemplation, to dive right into my chest region, to cough up hope to ingest fumes and to seep out goodness’s that I know already somehow flow in the elusive internal sanctifying citadel within.
To be guided by Eckhart as above and Borgeualt and Rohr and rivers from the now, to embody and allow such goodness to melt in and flow out from this sliver of light, this hidden gate. And yet more, to be
‘washed clean in contrition, heart filled, made ready, in longing made worthy,’ (Julian of Norwich Showings, Chap 39).
to fully embrace the onslaught of daily clinging to city centred passions.
To resolve to evolve.
Indeed, to go further, to microscopically, internally begin again and again to slowly grow the becoming’s of a true new Liver in and within these boundaries called home. To quietly sift through the Avon sea salting rhythmic crest and flow, to raise up and shift asunder, to ingest in unseen, untold, unhinged Bristolian fashions and in such limited human passion to sail deeper, opening softly internal organs to sing and singe within the fire-fuelled South Westerlies.
To fill up inside-out lifetime surges of wantage, unskilled non-frilled wilful wastage and in respite to welcome all upon such purposeful blood, upon and yes despite such and such longstanding chest breath clots of sadness, to wish release-full-ness, to draw You in.
Yes harvest deep to worrisome spleen and moving on to engrain in layering’s of stomach stretch an ardour of floating bloat that slowly creeps through intestine small and largely bubbling in half-digested forms, to boil down and to Transform all this living gnawing grind into a purse perfectly formed and gently divine, honestly held until at such a time that all is well, and all is well and all re-joins this Earth sublime.
‘A (wo)man goes upright and the food of the body is sealed in a purse full fair; and when it is time of necessity, it is opened and sealed again in full honesty.’ (Julian of Norwich, Showings, chap 6).
My cups running over
‘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.
St Mary’s Wanderings
Recently I spent a happy a few hours wandering around
St Mary Redcliffe Church, photographing the amazing gargoyles of grimacing animals and hybrid half man half pig type embellishments peeking out from the masses of concrete ivy chiselled into a vast assortment of archways and ancient crannies.
In time, with stomach rumbling and mobile phone on twenty percent , I left the carvings and the must-damp coolness, and while the quite scary religious blokes who are for ever stoned upon the high outer walls watched, I pootled my way into our lovely city in search of grub.
Somehow my car fume fuelled feet found me at The fine Cathedral on Park Street, and what the f? With almost no thought towards my need for another one of their oversized scones and strong coffee, I stopped at the Saxon plaque that is silently hung at the entrance of some murky side crypt.
I stopped and pondered the plaques blurred stone work, which, I was reliably informed, shows Jesus being pulled into the underworld by some insistent gaggle of less than lovely lost and grasping types.
The resulting disconcerted scribbles made upon a wobbly table, in between the coffee stains and buttery scone crumbs later transformed into this kind of weird poem…
Caged white folk in missed pigeon shit
And Old Testament zeal like sad poultry sit
In the sunshine, biding their perch
Until wreathed in the New-cut throb twilight
Poached by soft lamplight, they chill out
To evensong-scum-tide, as dark times approach.
Gall-gothic grimaces steep dust by the day
While intertwined surfaces are eaten away by
Diesel lead carriages until moonlight unfolds
Vine screed wine skinned ancient gargoyles and
Big bearded blokes sceptred to ride the
Four-legged tree folk, who leaping on wing
Of gossamer swift true grit, fly bold to some walled crypt
To save Christ the King from a nightly torn grippage
Through gnarled grasping cracks of red nails, wails and stoned teeth
Upon Dark Saxon plaque, dragging Passion downward
While underworlds peek up cassock to sip fresh blood
From chunks in His feet.
And paced at some distance, two foreign faces
Both wise and benign, emerge from stoned entrance
And follow gently behind, to spin Sufi wisdom of
Otherness and love, to encircle and question
That Heaven’s above,
That Hell is below us
That wrath may destroy us
That only we know how to define
The gateway to Oneness and thus
Truth Divine.
Let Icons be bygones, return tamed to One womb
Of moist waves and vibrations, until desert lands bloom
And the profits lost leaders, sow loves lightening speech
To grow fresh simple cities, where the warmed rivers meet.
city slowness 