Remembering past times
When our children had childlike
Free flowing bold confidence
Unknowing pure innocence
When no fear could constrain them
From sharing unearned gifts
Unseeing the suffering
Where the self critic lives.
Let us begin to believe how
We were once like this child
Let us reconnect right now
With the ease and the power
Let our life courses choose love
Let our voices ring true
Drain doubt from our sweet Hearts
Flooded completely in You.
‘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.
Rilke, Rilke, Rilke,
I call out to you beyond this dark incarceration
I turn and tap-tap
and tap again towards the warming flow of you
and suddenly these damned thoughts break
and freedom floods from sweating pores
reminding me to bathe once more
within your overflowing Brook of Hours.
Refresh my being
so I become awash
and away within your mystical yearnings
your improvised outpourings
escaping this doubt to drown
yes drowning freely within these
watery wonders beyond my dried
and sorrow filled mind
and within this age-old
re moistening of newness
my vision softens
and reflections haze to
the greyness of these half ingested present days.
Breathing beyond this shallow pit
this constricted pleasure chest
I Panther prowl your prose once more;
‘His gaze, going past those bars, has got so misted
with tiredness, it can take in nothing more.
He feels as though a thousand bars existed,
and no more world beyond them than before.’
and smiles rise upon
a frail frame of trembling lips
and eternity missed in this flat packed paced world
of shape shift and guilt
of self-made universes spinning deeper within
the worrisome furrows
of my earth-bound skin.
Rilke Rilke Rilke
you offer the pause
the claw back and break
to my urge to perfect an ever exhausting rake
through the tap-tap trappings
and pressured increase of this current time.
Your fossils of sight
still seeing within those collected
and yellowing paper-back pages
stills my frame
my very being that
I might re-find the realness of ages
and taste once again
a peaceful existence beyond
and within
this word filled mind.
city slowness 