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.
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:
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.
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)
And as the past city life speeds,
my daze upon the Camino sporadically slips into the crevices between sandy screed, my stride scuffs un-timely, once and twice and once again, refining the footfall to the changing crunch of striations in rock and grey-brown earth that’s been pre-laid and pre-pounded by the millions of souls traversing This Way before me.
Founded, pre-pounded and now prepared for us by this Mother Earth who is pushing up her moulton heart to welcome home our weary souls, to reconfirm our pre-laid place beyond these shifting sands of sod.
Foot bottoms touch essences of love, then encroached within the rationality of rubber thin on rock so hard, they fall away.
This new days sun shadow softly calls to soothe minds that even still resist to perambulate upon such pre-occupations of partiality that niggle into this moment the half forgotten worrisome realities of distancing and home.
Shadows follow me far and close friends unknowingly chatter away.. Their words dance with the vistas to cool and delight, to distract the night but even so the internal workings of controlling thought still finds the right to rise unbidden upon my bile filling mouth.
This sputter and spittle upon every incline salts to blend chapped lip and furred tongue to extend fibres in warmth and dampenings to darken cotton and stick to skin and to the very frame upon my back.
I stop and stoop to breathe and chill this urge to just give in, to cool these sweats to no-thing, to engage in nothing but the witnessing of white rings growing freely upon clothing, as my heart sings to the soundings of eardrums that seem well beyond me and as eventually my rich red blood of imagining flows more deeply within rivers that gurgle to meet and greet in the most fulsome expression of coughing fits that are fit to fill this verdant valley before me.
And as time passes, as I gulp into this morning again and once again as I gradually begin to lose sight of my friendly companions, this road opens to become one.
Regrouped, I pick up by baggage and gingerly step into another unknowing clump of determination and propensity to drive my limbs into and through this mid morning slump of will.
Everything passes, this too will pass.
And so my mantra grows and sure enough, back into my stride, I glide and smile to remember that beauty and light naturally unfurls when determination and spirited will gently allows Earth’s tenderness to immerse within my feet.
Theresa of Avila (when speaking about how to move towards the infinite)
‘The secret is determination, decision and will.’
city slowness 