🙏
Untitled
photography
A Bright New Day
Chittering wrens
Pick from the larder of cones
Clutched in the pine-brush
And absorb the awakening light.
Beneath, I sit and ponder
On the nature of being.
Some would speak of mankind
Separate from reality,
Somehow living above it all.
Yet, I am moved
Upon the turning of the world
In season’s gentle shift
Of early beginnings
And day pushed into night.
Surely this body,
As all walking free,
Feels the thrust of life
In the burst of the bud,
Unopened but profoundly expectant.
Surely all are moved
By the first warm breeze
Tickling the pine needles above.
Who is really alone
When life thrums
Through the body’s instrument,
When the very moon
Sways the water of our moods
And the constitution of our minds,
And new light shines,
Drawing us out
To sit absorbing
Like the first insect
Roused from hibernation’s
Torpid sleep?
Morning Stillness
Stillness settled with the night
And did not leave,
And now a windless, blue sky
Brims with spaciousness.
Birds, twittering in the skeletal trees
Dissect the quiet, but not the stillness,
Their tongue’s music
Is the sharp edge
Of reality.
I lean against a wall
Bathed in fresh light.
Things happen in the stillness:
A car passes,
A faraway motorbike on a faraway road,
Blunter than the birds,
A squeal of a refuse truck, ever hungry.
But the stillness remains,
Deeper and more broad
Than the mind can conceive,
Deeper and more broad,
And deeper still.
The tree, standing elegantly tall
Knows the stillness intimately.
It stands beside me, thrumming
With a soundless resonance.
In the patch of sunlight
I lean against the wall,
Listening to the birds,
Knowing that stillness.
Chopping Winter Wood
Last night
Brought a frost,
A coating of crystalline white
Drying the air, stiffening every leaf,
Crisping every damp thing,
Stilling all life
But for the sparrows.
Into this
Plooms my breath,
Brought momentarily
From the invisible;
I feel wonder at the breadth
And reach
Of the ether if my being.
I select a log,
Choosing one with flawless grain,
Straight lines, unknotted,
Placing it upright.
I lift the axe, aim
Half heft and half let it fall.
If it is true
My kindling spilts with a snap
Akin to the most beautiful synchronicity,
The grain parting
As if only a thought’s worth
Cleaved it separate
And clean.
I cut more,
And while I swing my axe
And watch my basket fill
With rough cut pieces,
I listen to the sparrows
And the stillness,
Enjoying my breath
Realising wintery all about me.
Who Is The Leaf?
Leaves drawn of their vigour
Yellow in the chill light
And flutter down
With each stroke of the breeze.
–
Dying is a beautiful thing
When life’s sap is safe,
Eternal
In the trunk and the root,
–
Withdrawn from the world
Like an in-breath
Or tide, or season’s
Planetary oscillation.
–
Who grieves the leaf
Its turning or its loosening
On the branch,
Or its earthward mulch
–
Settling into new form?
No one grieves,
For the life in the leaf
Is not gone
–
But hides behind bark,
Gathers against the darkness
Of the shrinking wintery days,
And awaits the pull of the sun
–
And the soil’s warming
And the osmotic urge
To express itself again,
And again, and yet again.
You Are The Sun
You are the sun
Lighting the whole universe.
Through your eyes
And in your seeing
Is the illumination of it all.
You stand at its centre
Looking out:
The very self you seek.
The Morning Is Crisp
On the first crisp autumn day
Dazzling light from the low sun
Guilds the forest,
Burnishing every leaf.
In hollows
There is the shadow of frost,
Grasses jacketed stiff,
But in the open
The sky is clean
And the distant rolling hills
Seem magnified.
After coffee sipped
With the sun’s hand on my back,
I amble through the farm shop
Selecting delicious items,
And while paying for my goods
A conversation spontaneously happens.
Like two old friends
Exchanging intimacies,
The shop assistant speaks
And I listen.
We share our truth
And as I look into their eyes
I see wisdom
Deep in their seeing,
As if the autumn light
Came from understanding
As much as from the sun outside,
And I am warmed
And touched by the moment
And brought wholly into the now,
An openness without resistance.
Picture
In the floor to ceiling window
Opens the picture:
The river
Glassy with the sky,
Smudged with autumn morning,
A pale blue glaze
In which mists cling
And spiral,
Calling back
The chill night
That stilled the dew drops
To a crust
And freed the tattered leaves
To mulch beneath the trees,
Sending out
A sweet and heady breath
Of spores
As life withdraws,
Releasing jealousies,
Indifferent now
To the russet matter
Discarded.
The Blazing Heart
Perhaps you forgot
The searing light,
Buried it
In low-mood thoughts
And reason
As heavy as chains.
–
Oh, yes, you say,
Give me the nicotine of thought
And worldly misadventure.
Let me overlook my overlooking,
Let me ignore my ignorance
And dwell outside myself
In a swirl of worries,
While the light is left unacknowledged.
–
Instead,
Remember, not the cold intellectual light
And the optics of the brain,
But the warm body of love
Inside yourself.
–
Remember the needless state
Where the heart floats
On ethers,
And worries are nothings,
Neither fears, nor even yours.
–
Remember the you
Before the you
Who carried the weight of living,
The unfettered you
Buoyant and watching,
Alive in the now
From which all springs forth.
–
Remember the sun of love
Blazing in your heart,
Remember remembering,
And the knowing
That the heart has always, always burned,
Is never dulled
And will never ever grow dark.
The Looking Of You
There is a looking,
A looking into yourself
Where the eyes
Become ever wide.
Ever and ever wider
Grows seeing
As though astonishment
Were limitless,
And what the self is
Is no less
Than all.
And yet there is greater seeing
And wider eyes,
As astonishment
Is refreshed with each
Step into yourself,
Each looking wider still,
Seeing drawn into
An infinite expansion
Into seeing itself.
Ever wider sees the I
Behind the eyes,
Ever wider
Becomes the I.
distilledvoice 