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:
Pausing to refresh
‘Secretly nature seeks and hunts and tries
to ferret out the tracks in which
God may be found.’
Meister Eckhart
(quoted in Eknath Easwaran Conquest of the Mind P. 195)
Signs of sheer beauty
how human our limits
that stonewall the old
when back-lit in turquoise
sage-pink and gold
we step fast from old steps
reject habitations
rooted in ivy and lichen and mould
to stretch long through wheat fields
and sing clear to blue peaks
as windmills sift slowly
the breeze that our throats seek
while temperatures rising
drench soft cloth and salt skin
as rugged the weary
pass mountain and memory
to pause at The Cross.
Camino time slips
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.’
Camino 2: New daze dawning
Waking I have become one of the thirty-two who gather belongings in the dark and move into this new day. I have become a breathing, watching part of The Way, this emerging disparate collective of 10,000 hero’s and shero’s who every month journey towards Santiago and St James.
gloom follows darkness while
memories encroach upon
un-stretched footfalls of this repeating now.
emergent sinews warm within an unfamiliar
familiar sunrise. heart rates beat through
dust tracks of sweat to trickle back and traipse to trail
before these mountainous beauties.
Moved to become, step by step, we move towards that distant place
where Love lays bare its beckoning
where futures burn the residues of mindlessness
where soft blues circulate and commune
to toe and heal past pavement cracks
to haze and soothe in mindfulness
this earth bound cling to far off family bliss
and the half remembered vagrancies
of city centre urbane stress.
‘….so too He fashioned the hero, the poet or orator. The poet cannot do what that the other does, he can only admire, love and rejoice in the hero….for the poet is as it were the hero’s better nature, powerless it may be as a memory is, but also transfigured as a memory is.’ S. Kierkegaard, from preview to ‘Fear and Trembling.’
Astorga to Rabanal: Camino day one
Julian Campo (Chelin) of Rabanal Del Camino
was a rich and successful businessman who became deeply changed by his walk along The Camino de Compostella.
At the age of 50 he left Burgos with seven horses and journeyed to Calcutta where he spent his time, money and energy tending to the sick and the poor alongside Mother Theresa.
When he returned home to Galicia he’d lost so much weight that friends and family didn’t recognise him. This statue sits quietly within the little village of Rabanal de Compostella.
At the age of 54, with 20 kms under my belt and 252 more to go, I slump slightly beside the granite rock of Julian. I touch his cool forehead and hope that he may transmit some radical change in me.
Picking up my sticks, I decide to stop shaving and through the slow blink of this first noon day sun, Julian continues to look blankly ahead.
city slowness 