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?
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).
Our essence, our being, our existence, our essential unity
‘hangs’ in God
for, ‘we possess this unity in ourselves, and in-fact, above ourselves.’
My goodness, try as I do, I cannot progress in my reading today. I feel thick and condensed within a translation, well not even that, within an introduction to a translation of Jan van Ruusbroec’s Spiritual Espousals. Crammed full, as it is, with an amazing density I cannot fully get, a condensation of Spiritual non-steps and steps that seem to act as a mesmeric: To whit
My essence ‘hangs’ in God! apparently. It seems to hang always and all ways, never given or actively wrought by good deed or sin, but indeed, is somehow ever present within and above floating lights of unity and love.
And how peculiarly happy I am to drift to this English translation of genuine mystic Brussel-Dutch wisdom. For these words fizz my tongue with intangible taste, ungrasp my mind in conundrums of sense (less earned than set deep upon and within distant joyful thumping gulps that call towards my unravelling heart).
To gleam free the eyes behind my struggling eyes, to move sense to essence, to ungrip this wrestling ego, to welcome in the noticer that always rests in the Breath within my warming breath, I resolve to go back to my cushion and in contemplation to gather again around the plainly blank fractures of silent still light.
as I sit
fogginess fumbles and sages profess bland
magnificence upon unclear shafts
that enlighten darkness with out
and offer deliverance within.
untamed, infinite, un-chartered glimpses
and likeness to these reported experiences is all.
Right now, unravelling blankly
in this shifting stillness I maroon
upon the plumpest cushion of nothingness
while hunger and thirst ignite the yearn
and burning embers agitate for
peace filled light.
thoughts laid down once and again
draft worries for wings
attempting to glide so far beyond
this intricate stack of ego and story and sense and
this senseless fluttering so often immerses
the purest of breath into such whining
defining nasal pretence, and yet.
still here I sit,
vainly thrusting trust forward to
pointless bottomless shining pit
to intimate flow so distantly familiar
that shakily, as if to drown in waves
of loveliness I wash the wish
that Love becomes my watering bowl
and I become the fish.
‘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.
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?
city slowness 