inspirations & gratitude – four extraordinary women

As we come up to this year's turning, I find myself revisiting in my mind some of the non-fiction authors who've had a major impact on me in the past. It's something about gratitude, paying-back, I suppose. There are many many I could name, but I'm going to restrict myself to mentioning just a few, four women authors; those whose inspiration and influence have continued to resonate at a deep level over the years and decades.

Moving beyond fear
Firstly, Susan Jeffers. Her book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway shifted something in me in my early 30s, and I've retained it.

After I closed the shoemaking business on the basis of one commissioned n-f book (Riding the Dragon - myth & the inner journey) I launched into freelance journalism. I'd already written a few articles, but needed to pitch higher and wider than reviews in poetry magazines and longer articles in small-circulation journals. So for a couple of years – until pitching to bored editors in London on topics I was staying abreast of by the seat of my pants brought unmanageable stress into my life, despite the best income I've ever had (that's not saying much, by the way) – where was I? oh yes – I wrote for mainstream newspapers and magazines as well as New Age ones on environmental issues and holistic matters: psychological and physical health.

One article I wrote for a women's magazine was on confidence, and Susan Jeffers gave me a generous dollop of her time long-distance on the phone.

Two things I took away from her book: one is that true courage is nothing to do with not feeling afraid, but in not letting fear stop you. The other is that the way to overcome fear is to remind oneself that it's usually not the focus of the fear, the thing itself, that is frightening, but the fear that we may not be able to handle it. Remembering the latter, and that it's a choice, reminds me of the dictum that we can't stop the waves, but we can learn to surf.

Of wolves and women
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Jungian, anthropologist, and storyteller. I had just finished writing Riding the Dragon when her wonderful book Women Who Run with the Wolves came out. It's a magnum opus of passion and wisdom and insight; empowering, inspiring and illuminating. There is nothing like it, and if I were Education Secretary it would be, along with its equivalent for men, Iron John, by Robert Bly, compulsory school reading for every teenager. (The third and complementary book I'd put on the curriculum would be Jungian James Hollis' The Eden Project – the search for the magical other; that way we'd restore in our culture a vision of what love really is, or could be, and lift the burden we all unknowingly place on the Other, who is tacitly or even overtly expected to meet our needs and make us happy 'in the name of love'. I have said here and elsewhere that the best thing we can do for this poor fractured world of ours is to make our relationship with ourselves more conscious; this book expresses and articulates further this idea with great eloquence and depth, as well as with disarming wryness.)

Forget the horse whisperer
More recently, I've devoured with passion and delight Linda Kohanov's book The Tao of Equus. As a lifelong accompanier of horses (along with my daughter) I was over the moon to find that someone had started a worldwide movement that exactly echoed the way in which my daughter and I have intuitively always related to horses: not as possessions to be dominated, coerced or expected simply to do our bidding, but partners in a kind of co-evolution of conscious relationship.

Perhaps you need to be into horses to get it; but it's more about the way in which we in the so-called 'developed world', anthropocentric as it is, relate to other species in general, and about what happens when we objectify, through a reductive viewpoint, aspects of our intertwined co-arising life. Yes, there's a mystical element, and I don't apologise for that.

If you read this blog often or know my work you'll know that my big thing is about revisioning our relationships not just to human others but to the other-than-human, as a matter of urgency. Kohanov's book dosed me up with such excitement I could barely sleep; she articulates so beautifully and from her own personal and professional experience what more and more of us sense.

The ecological revolution
Finally, for the moment, a big inspiration for me over many years now has been Buddhist and deep ecology scholar, social and environmental activist, and general wisewoman Joanna Macy, who founded the 'Work That Reconnects' network, and in relation to where we are as a species right now and the possibility of a tipping towards critical mass for major change, gave us the term 'The Great Turning' (the ecological revolution).
 
The vision behind my own work, clearly on a much smaller scale, echoes her work in many ways. One of my sisters had the inspiration to buy me Macy's most recent book, Active Hope, for Christmas – exactly the injection of energy and optimism I needed when I have so nearly myself been overwhelmed recently to the point of helplessness and despair and then inertia at the dire state of the world – like so many of us.

One thing Macy brings so well is the prompt to remember the sheer energising power of what she calls active hope. She identifies three common patterns of behaviour, 'three stories', in our relationship to our current environmental and social crises. (She points out that by 'story' she doesn't mean a work of fiction but rather the way we make sense of situations and events.)

The first is a denial of the scale of the problems; 'business as usual'.

The second, what she calls 'The Great Unravelling', is a kind of despair at the magnitude of the problems, and a pessimistic feeling of powerlessness. This can lead to a sense that our individual drops in the ocean are too small to count; so alarmed and helpless we too can default to 'business as usual' (this story is putting us on 'a collision course with disaster', as we most of us do know, even if we'd rather not know).

The third, 'The Great Turning', is a recognition that together we can make a difference: 'The third is about a groundswell of response to danger and the multifaceted transition to a life-sustaining civilization. Recognizing that we can choose the story we live from can be liberating; finding a good story to take part in adds to our sense of purpose and aliveness.'

In the story of The Great Turning we make a commitment 'to act for the sake of life on Earth, as well as the vision, courage, and solidarity to do so'. She also reminds us that this isn't too far-fetched now: Paul Hawken, in his book Blessed Unrest, suggests that there are over one million and maybe more like two million organisations working towards ecological sustainability and social justice. Not so few drops in the ocean, then.

She reminds us that whatever situation we face, we can choose our response. This echoes Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning: 'When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves... Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.' 

We can live in denial – the comfortable way. We can live in despair – in some ways, also an easy, even indulgent, option, uncomfortable though it is.

Or we can elect for change, and challenge what keeps us stuck in old destructive patterns. This requires active hope. Here's Macy again: 'Active Hope is a practice. Like tai chi or gardening, it is something we do rather than have. It is a process we can apply to any situation, and it involves three key steps. First, we take a clear view of reality; second we identify what we hope for in terms of the direction we'd like things to move in or the values we'd like to see expressed; and third, we take steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction... Since Active Hope doesn't require our optimism, we can apply it even in areas where we feel hopeless. The guiding impetus is intention; we choose what we aim to bring about, act for or express. Rather than weighing our chances and proceeding only when we feel hopeful, we focus on intention and let it be our guide.'

(Some of these ideas are relevant to my next one-day workshop, Thresholds, here in Devon, with relationship both to our individual lives and what we contribute to the wider world.)

So I guess the best thing to wish you all for 2015 is active hope, and the courage to live your beliefs and visions regardless of what the tide of popular opinion is doing.

'See' you here next year...

pruning

'The purposes of pruning are to maintain, increase, or prolong the vitality of a plant, or to keep it in bounds, or to direct its energy to a special purpose.' (The Small Garden; C E Lucas Phillips)

These beautiful liminal days between the solstice/Christmas and the first day of the Gregorian calendar's new year are a perfect time to reflect on what's leaving our lives with the turning year, and what is still to be born.

Actually, the whole of the winter time can bring that hibernatory aspect, and there are many seasonal points in the wheel of the year that offer such pauses. But I guess I'm not alone in using this time for some kind of reflective process – it feels rather more substantial than the option of joining the feeding frenzy of post-Christmas bargain-buying (though I'm not pretending I'm free of consumerist acquisitiveness).

It's particularly poignant for me this year as yesterday my sisters and I cleared out the suite of rooms that our father, and before that our mother too, inhabited for the last few years of his, and their, life. It's been a bare three weeks since he died, and I've inevitably had the presence of his death, burial and now the clearout uppermost in my mind this month. I'd have liked to have had the luxury of leaving the clearing of his few possessions for a while yet, but there was no option.

As we went through his belongings yesterday one of my sisters said that she could understand the Romany way of setting light to the dead person's vardo (wagon), with all their belongings inside. There's something satisfyingly unequivocal about that, and one's memory and emotions have less opportunity to be reflexively dragged back to painful, or at least bittersweet, memories over and over, at least for a while.

It was a hard process. I've brought very little back with me: his wonderful handmade hazel staff with the antler thumb-rest; a wrought-iron handmade dragon; some books and music. The little earthenware plaque with the words of Julian of Norwich on it. A photograph that I had taken of my childhood beach.

None of his paintings – they went to my sisters, all bar one, of his grandfather, former Mayor of St Ives, that will be donated to St Ives museum. His silversmithing tools, his microscope, his musical instruments have all gone. What to do with the beautiful green and tan leather waistcoats that he made for himself?

But I brought back the 85-year-old teddy bear that was my mum's when she was a toddler – apposite as tutelary deity of my campervan which was bought with some of her legacy to me. I imagine it will be poignant for a long time, seeing these possessions of theirs each day.

Another legacy of my mum's was a Christmas tradition that she initiated when we were kids: giving away one thing for every present received. I'm so grateful to her for that principle, and today I've been going through some of my clothes with just that in mind. Tomorrow, much harder, I'll do that in relation to my several-thousand-strong books.

As I sat looking at the birds in the courtyard earlier today I was thinking about pruning the various shrubs and trees, and consulting my mum's book The Small Garden for just that. And I was thinking about my Inner Magpie need to pick up things that I see, and to which I attribute significance – the Iona greenstones, the shells from Cornish beaches, the buzzard feathers dropped in the field, etc etc. That's my own acquisitiveness – I don't buy much but I sure as hell collect. (Correction – I do buy books. Far too many.)

And so I was thinking about pruning. Of course, it's not just pruning material belongings, but attitudes and habits too. My inability to see something beautiful and just leave it where it is. My need to be right. My need to think, intensely and unremittingly. My need to join in. My compulsive need to communicate. My unwillingness to simply let things be without trying to sort or fix them. My lack of skill at 'keeping my own counsel'. My appetite for more of everything: intellectual and emotional as much as, or rather more than, material. There's a kind of 'spiritual materialism' at play in that, to use the words of Chogyam Trungpa.

Dare I call my listing of these habits my New Year's Resolution challenge?

And so, as I slide to the end of the year with its accumulations of loss and pain and also joys and inspirations, I remind myself again that, cliché though this is, the real pleasures, the real gifts*, are the everyday miracles of things that can't be sought, or bought, or measured, and whose impact is way beyond acquisition of the material: being alive, for instance. Having loved, and loving. Being loved. Friends. Intimacy – with self, humans, the other-than-human. Acts of kindness. Listening. Being listened to. Birdsong. Ideas. Music. Art. Touch. Poetry. Dance. The companionship of animals, birds, trees. A sense of belonging. Work that feels worthwhile and takes place with wonderful heartful people in beautiful places.

And yes also the material: enough to eat. Reasonably clean water to drink. Shelter, and a fire. The luxury of not only not being in a war zone, but living somewhere with very little light, noise or air pollution.

What more do I really need? What can I prune? Stripping back my acquisitions, material, emotional, and intellectual, might just free up what I need for more important direction of my vital energies.

'How little do I need?' is so much more useful a question than the converse.

~~~

* Since you, readers, are part of the 'real gifts' that enter my life freely, without my seeking or buying the privilege of your participation, this is a good opportunity to thank you for all you bring into my life with your presence – virtual, mostly, but still felt and appreciated. May the year's turning and the unfolding of 2015 be peaceful, happy, fulfilling for you all.

winter solstice poem 2013

This morning, at daybreak, a thrush was singing its spring song – fluid intervention in the owls' hauntier calls. Later, as I slid around in the mud of the valley by the brook, so was a blackbird. I know that, like the mild weather, it's unseasonal and it might be an effect of climate change. But oh how it lifted my heart after some dark days; and the fluting songs in an otherwise still day seemed to presage – well, something.

I remembered then the robin singing in last year's solstice evening, and so I'm reposting my poem from a year ago. Such journeys we all make, have all made, in this one circuit of the earth around the sun.

I wish you all a warm, heartful, creative and deep year's turning, and the wisdom and courage to keep surfing the waves, no matter how big, in the confidence and knowledge that you can.

May we all find peace, and remember what the truest values are. May all beings find peace.

~~

Just now, in the full night of midwinter’s night
over the traffic and the cop-cars and the late shoppers,
down at the bottom of the hill in the car park
where the red dogwoods flame, a robin started up
her strong ribbon of song in the lee of the storm, and as I
drive up the hill, window open to let in the dark,
a second tunes in, and then on the brow another,
each singing its loud hymn to the night and the cloud
and the brimming tapers of stars between, and this,
this, must surely be grace, a moment’s inbreath, in our
onwards rush, on this northern side of this lost-in-space
spinning-back-towards-the-light planet, our home star.

© Roselle Angwin 2013 

midwinter solstice, solar gods & fogous

We are at a time in the year's turning when for three days the sun will appear to stand still in the heavens – the word 'solstice' means that.

In many cultures the solar god figure was interred, hung from the tree (think Odin/Woden, and also the Hanged Man of the Tarot), or dismembered like Osiris, for three days and nights at this midwinter time, to be born again, as the sun seems to be after this time of the shortest day, towards a gradual lengthening of daylight, once the sun moves on. (It's no coincidence that Jesus' birthday is close to the winter solstice.)

In West Cornwall, there are some enigmatic underground chambers called 'fogous'. Many stretch for quite some metres, and many have little round side-chambers known as 'creep' chambers. They're Iron Age in origin, and we don't know what they were built for.

Some suggest that they had ritual significance, and this seems likely. Other barrows have similar side-chambers (for instance in Brittany), and the thinking is that an initiate would be entombed, alive, in this little womb-like chamber for three days and three nights, to be 'reborn' at the midwinter sunrise (usually; sometimes solstice sunset) when the entrance was unblocked. This sensory deprivation would have either killed through shock, made mad ditto, or transformed the individual.

Until the house was sold some years ago now I used to lead residential workshops at a place called Rosemerryn, near Lamorna Cove in West Cornwall. The house was built within a double concentric earthwork dating from the Iron Age, and it has a magnificent fogou in the grounds close by. Just up the road is the Merry Maidens, or Dawns Men ('stone dance') stone circle dating probably from the early Bronze Age, opposite a pair of tall menhirs known as the Boleigh Pipers. Close by is another menhir, the Fiddler. (West Cornwall has a very dense concentration of prehistoric monuments.)

Sometimes we entered the dark throat of the fogou, and lit candles to float in the deep puddle caused by the collapse of part of the roof – a magical experience, and in itself gently transformative.

As we move towards the return of the light, I am mourning the recent loss of my father. In a way, on an inner level, my sun is at standstill at the moment; but tomorrow I'll celebrate the 'rebirth' of the sun anyway.

Meantime here are two poems written after entering the Boleigh Fogou a few years ago. They both appear (the second in a slightly different format, a prose poem like the first, below) in my collection Bardo – an appropriate title for this liminal time.

~

Boleigh Fogou at midwinter 1

I am the dream of leaves in the bulb. I am the silence of under. Am winter.

Stone I have known; the tender touch of brow under me; rain –

I am waiting for rain; rain and the eyebeams of the new young sun.

I have softened into earth. I am in the blue dark, crouching. I pray.

~

 Boleigh Fogou at midwinter 11

Light that turns, hesitates, reverses.

Time’s thumbprint marking my edge.

The dark pool of bitter midwinter –

we’re standing in underground water.

I am a bowl of silence. Rooks knock

at my chest, beaking the leaf-winged air.

Initiations of the present moment. In the cove

below light slides and breaks, and breaks.

To give up one’s life to depth.

Nothing matters more than this everything.

© Roselle Angwin 2009/2011 

 

What-are-the-birds-doing-with-the-December-sky rap

Winter lounges, sodden and unused –

the sky is a washing-line of sorrows.

At night, the stream talks to itself;

becomes a dance floor for wintersong.

*

The wind does not care for my

predictions or predicaments; like everything,

it suspires, expires, rises again.

*

Day wakes, laden with blue.

I wonder how much words weigh,

and why the oak log splitting under the axe

shows sinews haphazard as memory;

and how it is that we can hold on

to nothing, even love.

*

All truths in the end are symbolic.

I am a metaphor for transience,

just as a bird is a metaphor for flight ­

– how a synchronisation of starlings

is an incarnation of wind,

maybe an act of God.

*

When the ash tree fell in the woods

its bunched keys hung like a roosting

flock of pipistrelles.

In my sleep, I said: leave

access points under the eaves

for swallows, bats, angelic hosts.

You heard me. Held me close.

© Roselle Angwin, 2009  in Bardo, Shearsman 2011 

 

 

 

 

the map & not the territory

A death reinforces the fact that, whatever our beliefs, imaginings, hopes, fears, intuitions or psychic/transcendent experiences, we simply do not know what happens after death. We are brought face-to-face with our own unknowing, despite any spiritual practice we have followed for no matter how long. Or at least, I am.

TM and I disagree on this quite ferociously at times, but I'm with Karen Armstrong: questions are more useful, more valuable, than answers. The truth is, who can really know with any certainty about the nature of realms or planes of being beyond the purely material? Which of us has privileged access, a hotline, to the Absolute?

For many of us, there is, we think, a continuation of some sort – of the soul or even of the personality bundle, of essence – on more subtle planes of being. For some, we incarnate with the same group of people over and over, for the purposes of soul-growth. For others, materialists, nothing happens – everything is down to neural impulses, including 'God', and at death our atoms are simply dispersed.  

I'm with Jai Lakhani, who says: 'To imagine consciousness originates in the brain is like saying that electricity resides in the light switch.' In my view, everything is consciousness; and for sharpening my thinking on that, I have TM to thank.
 
There is some comfort, perhaps, whatever your belief, in the fact that in some way, as mere atoms or as less tangible essence, we are returned to All That Is; to the collective, in union. As I say in my header poem, we might dissolve but we can't ever disappear.

During the period of the recent gruelling hospital visits – the worst thing is seeing a loved one suffer and knowing you can do nothing about it – by way of light relief I was involved from time to time in an online conversation about the nature of spirituality with the head of a Buddhist order. (Light relief?? – Well, you should see me when I'm heavy! And I don't do 'retail therapy'.)

This came about because I was invited, by someone I respect, to 'like' the facebook page about the teacher's latest book. I also like and respect the teacher concerned.

But I found I couldn't in all wholeheartedness 'like' the page, as the book makes the case for Buddhism being a religion.

'Yes and...?' you might respond. Well, for me, having been very deeply influenced by Zen for 40 years now, one of the very things that Zen Buddhism emphasises in my view is a cutting-through the ideas, structures and belief-patterns that keep us trapped in delusions of ego, of 'self and other'. It's a path of psychospiritual awakening, rather than a set of tenets I have to espouse to 'be a believer'.

I have always seen Buddhism as, rather than a set of beliefs relating to some distant godhead, a way of liberation from the beliefs and opinions that hold us separate. To me, it doesn't require belief but living. The Buddha is said to have said (in effect) 'Don't take my word for it, try it out for yourself'. 

It's a path of life and thought that integrates spirit and matter, consciousness and form, and in my view (and I'm not alone) is a spirituality rather than a religion – as the latter comes with an organisation, normally hierarchical, and prescribed sets of beliefs and practices that are, in one way or another, supposedly 'God-given' (and this God is normally envisaged as a kind of a male, distant, rather stern father-figure, in my view an anthropomorphic projection). Practice usually revolves around this deity, who is somehow external to us and all living beings, whom one worships. (It was the phrase 'worshipping the Buddha' that got me going in the conversation I was having – this seemed to me so contrary to the Buddha's teachings.) These are some of the reasons I left the Catholic Church of my childhood. 

A spirituality, for me, is an awareness and acknowledgement that the material plane is probably a manifestation of greater more subtle forces, of collective realities which are likely to endure beyond the cycles of transience that we experience in the physical plane. A metaphysic, in other words. 

It's also a felt sense that we are all in this together, suspended in Indra's Net, the great 4-dimensional web of being: mouse, gnat, oak tree, amoeba, human. This is what Buddhism calls interdependent co-arising.

The trouble with organised religion, too (though I do understand the benefits of fellowship, community and a sense of belonging), is that it almost inevitably calcifies into 'us and them' – sectarianism, separatism, prejudice and intolerance. Look at all the religious wars – which end up being about one group being 'right' and another 'wrong', and translate into power and territory wars. What's more, some have it and some don't.

I do have a strong metaphysic; that is, I am fairly sure that there are subtle planes of being behind the material world, out of which the material world arises and into which it dissolves. I don't know this but it seems extraordinarily likely, and it's very clear to me that we live our lives within a great interconnected and interpenetrating web of being that can be sensed, intuited and experienced, if not proven to exist (though I'm interested in the new science's agreement with, basically, mystics' experience from forever, and an acceptance of the notion of an ecosystem is a good illustration of the principle). 

My own path is, loosely, a blend of nature-based spirituality, our indigenous British Mystery Tradition and native shamanic practices, mystical experience, poetry-as-soul-medium, psychotherapy and Buddhist methodology.

But what I noticed in our conversation, which was at times, let's say, 'firm', was our individual attachment to our own maps, beliefs and opinions. A belief is merely that; an opinion is merely our own; and both are ways in which the ego attempts to shore itself up. It's an emotional reaction to a 'territorial' threat, basically. 

As practitioners of the Middle Way, we were still not immune from that. These are attributes of the personality, not the soul, or essential nature, and perhaps what all spiritualities offer is a way to transcend the dictates of the 'small self'.

And to the extent that we all shore up our little egos, we're all focusing on the finger, not the moon; the map and not the territory. To really pay attention to the moon, to the territory, to Other, we need to come empty – to attempt to see reality as it is, or seems to be, not as we are. So easy to say. But that, too, is the heart of Buddhist practice. And it's of course a lifelong apprenticeship.

Meantime, I 'believe' there are many paths up the sacred mountain; many different maps. 

And having said that, in the spirit of Zen paradox, I'll stay with Antonio Machado's words: 'Pilgrim, there is no path / the path is made by walking.'

a descent

This is not directly relevant, but it is a bit, to me, at the moment. And it's about a descent into the dark time. Every year has them; every life has them. Sometimes they coincide.

How it is.

So much of our suffering, says Jungian and cantadora Clarissa Pinkola Estes, comes about because we cleave to the 'life' aspect of the life/death/life cycle and push away the 'death' part. Buddhism says something similar.

So in the spirit of 'and this too', here is a small part of a story-within-a-story; it comes from my most recent novel, The Burning Ground.

*

SEVEN

There’s a gap in the story after Mark. It’s hard to talk about a descent, that wordless inviolable time when you can’t imagine ever feeling anything again. My memory only throws up a sense of endless twilight  – half-shapes, minimal motions; getting dressed, eating an occasional meal, speaking when spoken to. I suppose I must have worked; must have got through that summer and winter and the next summer somehow. Maybe it was longer. I don’t know.

          But even in Hades there are seeds in the fruit, and though the tasting of them seals a contract you can never again escape, so the swallowing of them yields something of nourishment, in time.

          Anyone who’s been bereaved will know that the returning feelings are both blessing and curse. I hadn’t really expected the rage, though I know it’s normal. It’s just that then, as before and as now, so many years later, I expected that when I thought of Mark I would feel only love. (I had expected, of course, love to be heavily tempered with desolation.)

          It took me a while to move beyond the rage. It wasn’t just at him, for leaving me behind so abruptly, but also of course at life, at fate, at transience; the arbitrary unfairness, untrustworthiness of everything.

          And after the rage, grief; a wild blind grief of which I could speak to no-one, not even my mother.

          But now as I write this I find myself smiling at the thought of Mark. Yes, I’m over him; have been for many years, and when I think about him, as I do from time to time still, it’s only with pleasure that he was in my life at all. Ah, time, knitting all these fractures, repairing the torn tissue.

         

*

I remember every moment, though, about the day in late September of the year after Mark’s death, Michaelmas to the Christians and the equinox to others, when Mark’s parents and I walked up to the top of Glastonbury Tor.

          We did it the old way, taking the ancient spiral path. We hadn’t really discussed this; it just seemed the right way to do it. Looking back I’m a little surprised: Mark’s family is Christian, and fairly conventional. I suppose what we were doing was a pilgrimage; and when you live near the Tor the Old Ways are part of the emotional and psychic landscape just as they are of the geographical one.

          It took us some time, and it was dusk when we arrived.

          We’d chosen a weekday, and the end of the day, hoping there wouldn’t be other people around.

          It had been stormy all day, gale force winds from the west slapping our backs on the exposed side of the Tor. I was conscious of my waterproof flapping and rustling; it seemed inappropriate to be making such irrelevant noises, such modern noises. My hair was blown over my face, whipping my eyes and lips. I was grateful for the storm; I wanted more, I wanted the elements present as they weren’t at the cremation; I wanted the diversion of physical discomfort. Mark’s mum Lena was panting slightly, and I could hear a low moan, a tiny low moan like a sigh, escaping from her open lips.

          Don had the little cardboard box containing the canister with him. He’d clutched it to his chest all the way up the hill, with both hands. When we got to the top there was a minute when we just looked at each other, not knowing what to say or do now.

          Don put his hand on my shoulder. ‘All right lass?’

          I nodded.

          Don put an arm around Lena and drew her to him. They just stood there, head to head, very human, very mortal. You feel small on the top of the Tor, small and vulnerable. I was aware of the privacy of their grief; not sure whether I should be there at all. And I couldn’t bear the silence suddenly; nor the look of anguish on Lena’s face. I moved away, stumbling a little on the ruts around the old chapel.

          To the west the clouds were breaking up and a lurid orange-red was bleeding around their edges. I suddenly noticed that the wind had dropped, as it often does at dusk; the silence seemed to roar until I couldn’t think. The physical details of everything seemed to press themselves in on me: the smell of wet earth, the stone of the chapel under my fingers, a pebble beneath the sole of my boot, the wetness of my cuffs and at my neck. I could taste salt at the corners of my mouth – I hadn’t realised until now that I was crying. I wondered whether I’d been weeping all the way up the Tor.

          The gentle Somerset landscape, the quilting of fields and hedges and ditches stretched out below seemed alien, somehow, and very far away. 

© Roselle Angwin 2013

Rite

Saturn has taken up position again
in the sky where it dwelled when we
were born, he and I both, a generation apart,
in the same holy river.
                                        Behind Saturn,
time’s gatekeeper, further again cycle
the greater cosmic forces by which the stars
are posted to their own allotted places,
spheres of a different finitude on the dark face
of night.
                                      In a day, in a moment
we are brought to a threshold and gathered
in and over. Nothing
                                     can stop the old order
breaking down; not our wishes, not tears,
not prayers – for only thus can the new
ever be born.
                        In this first, new, December day,
grey dawn paints in the monochrome tones
of the valley; and look! – at the old field gate
how beautiful, how heartbreaking, this lone
fragile white periwinkle, opening to sky.

© Roselle Angwin, 4^th December 2014, for JOA, 1928–2014

folding the wings

'Fold your wings, my soul,
those wings you had spread wide to soar 
to the terrestrial peaks where the light is 
most ardent: it is for you simply to wait
the descent of the Fire – 
supposing it to be willing to take possession of you.'

~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

just this

Clatter of woodpigeons from the losingleaf oak. 

This tightrope – birth, death, suffering, joy; cycling over and again.

One still, pure, moment on the hill – neither thinking nor not-thinking, neither lost nor found.

Taking refuge in the Buddha, 
meaning in wisdom teachings and the Buddha-nature in everything
Taking refuge in the Dharma, 
meaning my feet continuing to follow the path as and where it unfolds
Taking refuge in the Sangha, 
meaning in the All of it, in the human and other-than-human community of the Web of Being

Sanctuary in the present moment. As it is. Its pain. Its presence.

A breath. This moisty bosky air. How blessed I am.

Continuing.

To the north, Dartmoor's hills outlined charcoal, cloud-swathed. To the southeast, a brave assay of this tiny splash of sunlight penetrating cloud (the awakenened mind).

The Way leads between attachment which is not love and detachment which is not love.

This third thing: love – the compassionate heart that sees all, hears all, takes all in, holds all, lets all go, gently.

By the farm entrance, 47 new blue periwinkle flowers in this grey day. 

My feet, walking.

May he be free from suffering
May he be free from suffering
May he be free from suffering




 

Tongues in Trees 2: earth & spirit

kate compston

We live within a vast interconnected web, an animate web. Everything to which we are connected is alive; everything, in its own way, is an expression of consciousness.

Left to itself, our earth will get on with ensuring a harmonious interaction and communication between every living thing. Things breaking down into disorder and then reshaping is a natural cycle. This is, in effect, the Gaia principle.

It's probably true to say that disharmony, fragmentation and active destruction are predominantly the contribution of the human race. 'Because of our neglect, the world is strewn with unrelated objects,' said Jungian James Hillman.

A significant manifestation of the web in action is a continual exchange between every part of the web and every other part – everything is in constant co-operative action, and we alone as a species apply judgements to what we deem 'good' and what is 'bad'. The earth's intelligence makes no distinction between birth and death, for instance; both are simply necessary to the web of being.

In the West, we have inherited from Plato, from Roman/Judeo Christianity, from the patriarchal societies of the last two millennia, and maybe from way before all of those, a hierarchical picture of the universe that puts us, homo sapiens, usually man (sic), at the top of the tree. Mainstream Western science does this; mainstream Western religion, too. Both think unquestioningly in hierarchies.

We forget to allow for the fact that other species have their own particular kind of intelligence, and that each is crucial to the maintenance of a healthy web. Though many of us know this intuitively, paradoxically we have science to thank for bringing this latter, at least, to public attention with its awareness of ecosystems, and the fact that each part of an organic system has its own integrity and its own inherently important contribution.

We may not experience ourself as actively interconnected with All That Is; in our postmodern reductionist urban culture it seems that dislocation, deracination and a sense of disconnection is more the norm than not.

Both mainstream science and mainstream religion have done us and the earth a great disservice.

Science, by its denial of spirituality, by which I mean here the existence of subtle levels of being and our interconnectedness on all planes, and its divorce of the earth and other species from anything other than a reductive existence as matter alone, has taken a wrongheaded turn.

Religion, though it has contributed an awareness of subtle levels of being and direct perception through intuition, gnosis and direct experience of these non-material levels, by its splitting of earth/matter from spirit and valuing the latter over the former and (like science) the human over the non-, has taken a wrong-hearted turn. They are, perhaps, equally dangerous.

What we need now, in my view, and what all my work and life is geared towards, is a way of living that draws together spirit and matter, 'heaven and earth', the visible and measurable and the invisible (to the 'ordinary' senses), and the unmeasurable (by our current instruments and the rational mind), by recognising the equally-strong and equally-necessary apparent poles of immanence and transcendence.

Everything in the tangible universe, in this view, is animated by spirit and it makes no sense to polarise them. 

This recognition happens through integration, not through separation.

More specifically, perhaps, we need to recognise that the soul of the earth – that living web behind all manifest external appearances, that which animates All That Is – is no different from the human soul (except in particulars and tasks). We are part of world soul. We are living a collaborative project, a collective process, which needs to reconcile the splits and fractures in our world view and therefore the world conditions that we create.

In other words, a spirituality that does not include the earth and all her inhabitants will serve none of us for a harmonious future, any more than a view of the universe that is mechanistic or materialistic alone does.

lynn baxter

The purpose of my Tongues in Trees day was to begin the process of encouraging and enabling a sense of active participation and collaboration between human and tree, with an emphasis on ways of relating that are rooted in the knowledge that this exchange is necessarily two-way – the tree is as much in contact with us as vice versa. Clearly this requires an openness to the other-than-human, a suspension of scepticism, and a way of listening and receiving  that is not a much-practised skill in our time.
It seems that many participants on that day experienced a profound sense of this exchange in the  communication with the non-human. You can see on this page some of the many visible and beautiful results of my prompt to create a shrine, an offering, or indeed an expression of grief, at the feet of the tree each individual had chosen/been chosen by during the morning work. Walking slowly and in silence all together between the offerings was a moving and beautiful experience; one that many of us will not forget.

We're all in this together.

'The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth,' declared Chief Seattle. Time to remember. Well past time to remember; but maybe there is still time.

With thanks to all the participants of that day.