Spring Awakening

Up early this morning to walk dogs in the exquisite morning light. An errand took me near fields above a hanging wood above Chicksgrove I once visited a lot.
While the dogs scuttled about I was sadly reminded of a poem I wrote 10 years ago. Poor old Lakshme, now 14, runs about gamely, but has a slightly dicky back leg - tho it seems to grow stronger the longer she exercises.

But my reason for writing these reflexions here is that I stood for ages listening to the birdsong in the holly trees set around the edge of the hill like a fortress. At first I kept decoding their song into notation, quantizing it into an octave, because that's the way the mind /literacy works; but then I began to simply listen to the energy in it as praise, rejoicing in nothing more than being alive.

I felt tremendously sorry for people who cannot see the metaphysical coherence of creation, cannot see how this bird is unconsciously honouring the life-spirit in all matter, the same way that your or I do with our conscious intention.
It made me reflect that the tiresome words about God & Christ & Mohammed or whoever are mere quantizations in the infinite octave of reality. We humans must approximate these hugely entities into our little linguistic semitones because of the paucity of moral capacity to comprehend the vastness of the energy available to us.

The Luminous Darkness

Into the echoing darkness I make my prayer,
knowing the dark itself is unanswerable.
All learned behaviour here’s unserviceable:
nakedness alone reveals what’s there.

The darkness that surrounds us is the fear
of ultimate non-existence: thus like child
with candle challenging the west wind wild
we can be nothing other than what appears.

Each black sun is a time of revelation
wherein we touch primordial power: the night
where, after wrestling with angels, light
brings permanent scarring bound up with transformation.

It's not enough to glimpse this mighty force,
we have to clasp its alienation
and wrestle with the pain of penetration
until we integrate the altered discourse.

Only afterwards we see the gift:
the pain arising from tectonic pressure
as old perspectives die to yield a fresher
deeper, larger, more abundant heart shift.

Gong

The chinese word means 'true tone' and denotes a sound whose authenticity makes it a tonic or grounding note. The issue in life is not merely to find one's authentic note, but to play it at the exact juncture where it fits with the spirit ensemble, and with an appropriate timbre so that it creates an organic whole with the world's gamelan.

Letter to a student

Anyone who follows a creative path knows these times of stress.
    You simply have to trust your inner life dynamic – whatever name you choose to give it – for it is throu these times of stress that you grow and mature spiritually, and ultimately come into your true nature. Suffering comes into our lives because that is the mechanism by which we are changed and deepened as individuals. In the process what we discover is that individually we do not control the bigger picture, but need to collaborate with this ‘inner life dynamic’ in order to reach a position where our impulses, our heredity and the needs of others can combine to create a beneficial interaction. Only when we reach that position can we give fully what others can receive fully.
    Everyone experiences these things, and always has done since the dawn of consciousness. What distinguishes the dedicated artist, and indeed any human committed to their own growth, is their willingness to allow themselves to be transformed by the experience and to incorporate the lessons so that their lives become richer and more multi-dimensional.

New Studio

It's been some time since I posted here, partly because I've been preoccupied getting my new studio finished. The building began by my moving out of my old studio in July, and I finally moved back in on 9th January. It has been tremendously disruptive to getting any creative work done, as there have been continuous interruptions from builders & other tradesmen with legitimate enquiries, & things I've needed to chase up. But now it's all over & I am beginning to inhabit the space ~ and. I hope, to begin a new chapter in my life.

Trust in that of God within you.

The anguish, also, is god –
    the desire for transcendence.
The search for unity
    of experience
links to the universal
    evolutionary
process of environ-
    mental adptation.
To each the choice of path:
    spirituality
or materialism?
    (The world needs both.)
But for the spirit-led
    life becomes
a constant alembic of learning,
    where we are heated
to burn away impurity,
    distilling the spirit
of transformation, whose ultimate
    goal isn't seen
in physical existence.

    Here my dear mother
claps her hands with joy.
    On earth she suffered
ending her days in pain:
    yet now she shines,
part of the constellation
    of love upholding
all material existence.
    The confusion
that was hers was mine:
    and now I share
in her clarity.
    What was physical
slowly burnt away
    leaving her essence.

So the life dynamic
    within each
spurs or dulls the evo-
    lutionary process.
If all the universe
    is one organic
whole, then every part’s
    contained within
a single entity.
    Thus we see
that the identity
    of All is One –
and One comprises All.
    Yet the harmonic
of the One transcends
    the All, a sublime
melody arcing above
    the orchestra,
defining all the music-
    making below it.
Within this ensemble
    discord and its
resolution are the
    light and shade
which give existence form:
    a little suffering
gives richness to delight.
    A night of anguish,
that final stepping stone
    to morning joy.
The cosmos within which
    we live and breathe
reveals an underlying
    intelligence,
surpassing human concepts
    of rationality –
as a great composer’s
    inspired designs
create the experiences
    enjoyed by millions,
with life far beyond
    their creator’s death.

Without the eye of faith
    noone can see
the ultimate destination
    of anyonelse’s
life trajectory.
    All that matters
is that we walk our own
    true path.
Sometimes that involves
    a walk in darkness.
Remember, the height of the building
    has to be matched
by the depth of its
    dark foundations.
Trust the architect
    who formed the world
to prepare the ideal fit
    for your contribution
to humanity
    now and forever.

When is a poem?

If a circle is not closed, what is it?
What is roundness when it is irregular?

There is always a gap between what we see and what we can describe.

Composing is wrestling what I hear onto paper –
with a similar gap. And into it flood my demons,
the voices that tell me I'm no good:
that the attempt to communicate is hopeless:
that what I write is, in any case, irrelevant.
In essence, that I'm a nowhere man,
making nowhere songs for nobody.

My creative powers are thus like a millimetric sperm
swimming on the world's egg, looking for an opening –
both aware that for fertilisation a loss of self-possession is required.
The intimacy of the process matched only by its impersonality.

My mission, which I chose to accept before I had any idea how hard it was to be,
to bring a certain vibration of spirit into the world,
a spiritual hum /om if you like – whose defining quality
lies in its unique apropriety to its environment and time.

Each room has a sympathetic resonant frequency.
Sounding the space requires that we identify it
and then glory cascades from the ceiling,
the walls disappear and we are in faery land.
So it is with humanity.
On hearing the right note we become our true selves,
and the barriers to all our possibilities disappear.
(Oh dear, how much the Judaeo-Christian concept of sin has to answer for!)

The challenge in each moment to Be Here Now –
when we would rather be anywherelse:
the past: the future: with someonelse:
anywhere but Here. Now.
And into this solitary unaloness we cram
the radio. the ipod, the committee meeting,
shopping – you name it.
Anything to be a busy body.
It's like living next to a spring
but drinking only bottled water.

The only thing that makes sense of life's chaos
is if we allow its spiritual harmonic to emerge
and attune to that note, realising its chord in our lives.
To find the sweet spot where everything makes sense,
and all our possible dreams come true in living reality
we need to study exactly where we are now.
The freeze frame - one 25th of a second.
There! That's it. Now I am truly present.

The challenge: can we unfreeze that frame
and live in the present 1500 times a minute,
90,000 times an hour?
Of course not. It doesnt work like that:
we have to take the dynamic of motion for granted,
allowing key frames to inform us
and trusting the bits in between.

Yet as an orchestra must tune to a common A,
so we must find our note by listening both
to human and spirit beings, detecting
the common note with sharpness of ear
if we are to play our single gong stroke
right in the world's gamelan.

Intunity is the perpetual now.
Now is a perpetual intunity.

And this, this circularity, is it a poem?
If it is not, what is it?

Freedom

Everywherelse I express myself conditionally, tailoring my utterances to the consciousness of my audience. Here alone I can express the fullness of my heart, my wild love of the being whose reality we tame with the word God. If there are gifts [charisma] then this is the greatest gift of all. This is the pearl without price. I am always looking for ways to bring this feeling into the world, and my recent sense of frustration is that my efforts seem to have borne so little fruit.

In my own mind a perfect harmony exists between the concept of a divine parent and the birth of hir child into time & space to be a catalyst within the art-work that is created matter. And moreover that then s/he would leave behind a constant echo, a wavelength suspended like mist in a valley, to whose vibration people could then attune. That seems to me such a beautiful & precious idea.

I see no conflict between the grace offered by this Christian concept of the supreme creator's engagement with hir creation, and the vedantic idea of the archetypes of religious experience lying on a spectrum between Vishnu, the imaginative perception of an ethical spirituality, and Shiva, the appetite-driven celebration of the cyclical life-force discernible throuout nature. These seem to me an accurate metaphor for the territory.

In all of this I see the activities of a loving parent who watches from a distance at hir children's maturation, and who know that true adulthood can only emerge if they have the freedom to make their own mistakes. I discern someone who longs to say 'please ask me – involve me in your life – call on my experience to guide you.'

This gives me confidence in my own humble offerings. My job, as I see it, is simply to set down what my inner consciousness shows me. It pleases me when people find personal meaning in what I create, and therein I feel a privilege to be part Christ's constant rebirth in the world – offering people spiritualy context, a way of orienting their lives, recalibrating their psychic gyroscopes.

As a young person I had the scarring experience of finding that composing what came naturally to me was meaningless to those around me. I was thus given an aversion-therapy where the more I produced my own music, the less it meant to anyonelse. I therefore retreated into producing what was guaranteed acceptance – for to me freedom meant a black hole of emptiness.

But part of my journey since 1991 has been to find how to reconcile the inner bleakness of autonomous creativity with the richness I experience spiritually. As to what is forming within me, I know little until it appears.

Song: Forgive & Forget

When you first start to walk the road, when you first start to roam,
you have no destination and no way home;
but as time and chance occur to each man,
so soon you develop some kind of a plan.
And as you grow wiser, and as you grow old,
you find time's a great healer, and so as you live
tho you cannot forget you may learn to forgive.

The hedges in autumn have a russety glow,
and the hedges in spring can be covered in snow;
but the hedges in summer are buried in rime,
for that is the season of rosemary & thyme –
and so make your hay in the good summertime,
for time's a great healer, and so as you live
tho you cannot forget you may learn to forgive.

So come you my dauters and take you good note,
you'll ne'er tell a man by the cut of his coat.
You must try them and test them, sure nothing's too hard,
for it's only by that means you see past their façade.
And maybe you'll love them, and maybe you won't;
but time's a great healer, and so as you live
tho you cannot forget you may learn to forgive.

Angels

I make it hard for you, don’t I?
Headstrong, impetuous, ego-led!
How can you wrap your loving
wings are such as me?

And yet it is from you that I
crave protection from
my folly, crave to know
the beings who inform you.

I do not welcome crises –
save for one reason only –
the times of greatest stress
are times of greatest grace.

Just as birds delight us
in the physical world –
so your tribes and types surround us
metaphysically –

each with its natural song.
Instead of flashing wings of
iridescent colour,
we are visited by sudden acts of kindness,

moments of dazzling love,
synchronicity,
cooperation – soul-food
abundant everywhere.

”But fear closes the windows
of the heart throu which
we enter to delight you,
even in troubling times.

“Breathe in and affirm:
‘Every change I welcome
makes me more the being
my birth prepared me for.’”

Holy, loving, wholly-
loving emanations
of the cosmic psyche,
tell us the age-old message

again in modern terms.
Visit our mortal weakness
with your angel-song of
constancy and service.

Let its bubbling melody
open and lift our ears
to the plane of simple truth,
the natural evolution

where we become who we
truly are, spirit-born
offspring of a knowing,
known, unknowable parent.

Bidden or unbidden,
recognise your angels’
wing beat, accept protection
for your openness.

Arc

In poems I record my passage across the trackless wastes
of night, where I receive such startling clarity –

as if the milky way were opened to invite me in,
and I, a child, enter Aladdin’s cave

where I am shown great wonders of the spirit that will not fit
into the two-dimensional suitcases

which language offers to convey experiences to others.
Noone knows I'm here or where I've been.

I feel a kinship with the madder Hebrew prophets, who dwelt
in deserts and lived on locusts and wild honey –

fierce and uncouth as they were, their inner ear was ever open.
So it was with early English hermits,

whose springside cells invited angels by their energy.
I do not know what all of this is ‘for’,

and yet I feel it charging some kind of cosmic battery.
In the silence of each vivid night

my voice projects across the void of time in ways it never
could with ideas tethered to modern age.

It's as if my task’s to walk the arc that travels outward
from our human certainties towards

divine uncertainty, where pregnant gods suspend the rules
and magic’s in the air. This glorious dance of

spirits, tho optically invisible, is joined by sacred
attunement to the subtle vibrations of light and joy.

It is a plane above the sphere of compromise that’s ruled
by non-materialistic reason, where

the laws of love create those self-refreshing structures which
in-form justice and truth and inner knowledge.


How easy in the night to know: how hard by day to do –
where perfect lines of thought must bend round others.

Voice is to audience, as language /image is to common sense:
melody to listeners, as genre to social tribe.

My task appears to be to smuggle out the sense I have of this
ultra-real world of spirit truth,

that it may flow like water where it will, and nourish those
who do not dam its purpose or dynamic.

The spirit speaks to all, but those with ears to hear are rare –
for most prefer to hear from human guides.

And so I make my mark on stones and trees with ill-formed tools,
not knowing whether what they signify

to me will have the same (or any) meaning to another.
Matching means to ends is a lifetime’s task.

How easy it would be if I were not constrained to bring
something of these precious gifts away with me.

In giving what I can to whom I may, I form another

link in the chain that stretches back to godhead.

Autumn Gold

 

I stood in autumn fields
where great warm thighs of hills
rose between wooded cwms
like earth-bound venuses
inviting the dying sun god,

For once my heart and soul
were joined in perfect accord
by an intense silence,
as a growing hedgerow
yearns in the sunlight.

The breath of foraging dogs
the loudest sound, apart from a
wren singing its heart out
on a distant ash.
From whom this gift of peace?

Whom do I praise and thank
for such extravagant beauty?
Can this truly be
the product of a random
feckless evolution?

Or have we failed to see
the nature of a spirit
unifying the sleepy
butterfly, the ancient
oak, the ocean’s power,

the milky way, and us?
 

Thank you – Being – with all
my heart for the unique
privilege of being
present at this inter-
section of time and space,
 

What is my place?

“Your place is not to go around doing things from your own initiative: it is to be in your place. There I can use you, nowherelse.”

Enantiodromia

Enantiodromia is when something morphs into its opposite.

I was struck afresh by the way in which the credal churches, but specifically medieval catholicism under whose shadow we all suffer to a degree, have corrupted the quality moral 'freshness' they s/ought to preserve. Last Sunday on BBCr3 I listened to a Catholic priest droning on in some basilica about the virtues of St Francis, and his values of poverty etc – I simply didnt know how he had the nerve, surrounded by the panoply and choral pomp which is the diametric opposite of what Francis preached. But of course that is the 'trick' of religion: if you can get people to believe something which is manifestly incongruent then they have as much invested in maintaining that belief as those promoting it.

Today in my Bible reading project I reached the Beatitudes and the teaching that follows them, which ties in extremely well with also dipping into Rumi. What Christ actually said remains as powerful and radical and left field as Rumi – both are talking of a love of inner truth, of connection to spirit/God that cannot ever been taken for granted in the kind of 'fact of life on the ground' way that a building creates – let alone one administered by a bunch of men in nighties (no matter how well-meaning).

No wonder the reformers throuout the ages have wanted to blow it up and smash the very stones that they see as creating an obstacle to true faith – and yet of course the stones still stand and appear to a faithless age (perhaps faith is only ever seen in retrospect?) as synonymous with the very quality it obscures. And now we have a vast 'heritage industry' which cares nothing for what Christ or anyonelse said, but solely concerns itself with the preservation of monuments to a dead faith. What hope for the living?

Do It

You are not alone:
draw on the love that surrounds you.

Invest in people, and love
will be your dividend.

You know what really matters:
do it with all your heart.

Noone is more important
than you in this plan I have

for bringing love into the world.
Simply go out there and do it.

Supreme Creative Energy

Evolution is love in action.
Love is evolution in practice.

Thou

To whom I cry I know not:
yet into that echoing dark
I raise my voice, asking
only for shelter against the
storm, and workman’s wages.

To whom I sing I know not:
yet my dancing heart
is fuller than a nest
of nightingangels
all the day long.

To whom I weep I know not:
yet my soul is sore
to see such cruelty,
such greed, such ignorance
of nature’s sacred laws.

To whom I plead I know not –
for justice, for respect
for all planetary life,
for compassionate restraint between nations
and for love between neibours.

O thou, thou listening space,
thou answer in the wind,
thou song in silence heard,
thou all-enclosing otherness,
honour my heart’s wishes.

Building

It wasnt until last week that I realised what a responsibility it is to build a completely new space. On the R is a picture of my old studio. It was a fairly ramshackle affair, built on the site of a greenhouse, whose refurbishment had been kindly borne by a delightful elderly pupil about 10 years ago.

For a couple of years it has been clear that rebuilding would need to take place, as the poor insulation had already had already taken its toll on my piano. Here is a picture of the interior in 2002 with my sister and late mother.

Hitherto all Ive ever done in terms of building might best be called intelligent conversion. Recently I dawned on me that what I am doing here will stand as an objective statement of who I was in the same way as my music – more conspicuous, perhaps, for who knows what fate that will enjoy?

I relish the responsibility, while realising that here, as in so much else, what we put on display is not our conscious intention, but our subconscious value system. At this stage I am greatly concerned about cost, but the whole process has been a great opportunity to engage (with) the energy of my guide Sai Baba.

Amor & Psyche

The Golden Ass of Apuleius is one of Marie-Louise von Franz's most insightful books. And in it her chapter explaining the tale of Amor & Psyche contains some of its finest passages.
p82
Love with its passion and pain becomes the urge toward individuation, which is why there is no real process of individuation without the experience of love, for love tortures and purifies the soul. Expressed differently, Eros presses the butterfly painfully against his chest, representing the soul being developed and tortured by the love god.
On one beautiful gem the goddess Psyche, with her hands behind her back, is being tied by the god to a column which ends in a sphere. One could say that this image expresses in a beautiful way the process of individuation. Eros tying Psyche to the column surmounted by a sphere, the symbol of totality which is realized by suffering. Sometimes one would like to run away from the person to whom one is tied, in order to run away from the dependence, but Eros forces us to become conscious through this tie. Love makes us dare everything and leads us thus to ourselves. Therefore one of Eros's main epithets, which he had in antiquity, was "purifier of the soul."
p90
What happens to the gods if this process of [incarnation] takes place? A relationship is never only a one-way thing, so the gods get pulled into the human realm and, in the counter-movement, the ego expands its conscious awareness. That is the process of the incarnation of a god. Actually … in the impulse towards individuation and integration [within a human individual] it is the god who wants to incarnate.
p107
[Eros] wakes up and gives her the greatest punishment this god can give: he leaves her. To be left by the god of love is really worse than anything else he could have done to her. Psyche now is completely in the dark, and now her real deeds begin with the long and agonizing search to find Eros again.
p113
… stages of unconscious harmony, like that in the story of Paradise, result in the stagnation of life, and naturally certain disharmonious or evil impulses are excluded.
Some people by a great mental and psychological effort will sacrifice the one pole of an essential conflict in the hope of establishing peace in their souls with the remainder. For instance, in the monastic life money and sex are cut out, and with them the source of innumerable conflicts, and by retiring from these difficulties the establishment of peace in the soul is sought. The whole Christian idea of inner peace is in this direction; that is, one first cuts out a certain aspect of evil which seems impossible to integrate, and then one tries artificially to establish harmony with the remainder. All over the world mankind has a tendency to go in this direction. It is probably inevitable, for one needs from time to time to be able to set aside an insoluble problem.
It is as though there were rest places where one has a moment of peace, though one has the dim feeling that the conflict is not solved and will reappear after a time. One can observe this in people who draw mandalas and in doing so leave a part outside. They put the dark things outside the border of the mandala and imagine that they have now reached a state of relative wholeness and totality. But in this way they exclude certain aspects, and they can be sure that this state will not last. Some of these left-out elements will break in and a new process of integration must begin.
At this point we have the essence of the whole novel, for all through it (though sometimes the author seems to be gripped by feeling) a mocking, skeptical tone creeps in, a devaluating judgment which works like the knife in Psyche's hand. When things go well, a devil whispers in our ears that it is "[only …]" a rational devaluation which destroys everything. In a woman it is generally the animus [inner masculine] who is the artist in this field, and in a man it is a certain aspect of the anima [inner feminine]. The more sensitive and delicate and untouchable a man's feeling is on one side, the more he tends to mock himself. The Swiss recognize this type of man in their poet Gottfried Keller, whose feeling, on the one side, was extremely delicate, while on the other he showed the typical mockery of an old bachelor. That was his defense against his own hypersensitivity.
p115
Venus then orders Psyche to sort out a quanity of different kinds of seeds during the night.
… this could have to do with the Eleusinian mysteries, for corn is the mystical substance which represents the mother goddess as the goddess of corn.
---
A chaotic host of seeds is, in a way, an image of the collective unconscious, which seems to be, at the same time, a single essence and a multiplicity of images and creative impulses. One could say that as long as the archetypes of the collective unconscious are not [activated] by a human being, they are not real. They only become a psychological reality if they are experienced by a human psyche. It is for this reason that the archetypes of the collective unconscious resemble a host of chaotically dormant 'seeds' inborn in every human being, which, if not activated throu contact with human consciousness, could … be regarded as nonexistent.
p116
In the tale Psyche cannot cope alone with the corn. But there is still something which can rescue her, for ants turn up and sort out the grain. The chaos of the unconscious always contains a relation to order as well. In talking about the unconscious one must always talk in paradoxes, and when we emphasize its chaotic aspect we know at the same time that the unconscious is not only chaos but it is also order. In the last analysis, only unconscious order can overcome unconscious disorder. Man cannot do anything but be attentive and make the utmost and, so to speak, hopeless effort, until order is established again by itself.
This is something which Christian theologians would call faith.
p118
So one can say that in the right way faith is a great achievement, or rather pistis; loyalty to the inner law. When this loyalty or feeling constellates, it calls forth the secret order which is the chaos of the unconscious.
---
Jung always said that truth does not speak with a loud voice. Its low but unsuppressible voice announces itself as a malaise, or a bad conscience, or whatever one may want to call it. Great quiet is needed in order to feel these small hints. When the unconscious begins to talk loudly and to manifest itself with car accidents and such happenings, then the situation is already very bad. But in the normal state it has been whispering softly for years, before the thunderclap comes …

Ray Wyre

In terms of someone willing to engage with his own darkness and use it as a medium to help others negotiate with their demons, Ray Wyre deserves a permanent memorial. Which in a way he has - in hundreds of changed lives.

The article contains an interesting example of how the unenlightened unconscious operates. Despite Wyre's manifest success rate in non-reoffending, both his residential clinics closed due to local paedophobia. As a society we project all our hatred onto paedophiles - they are the scapegoat for everyonelse's issues with sexual boundaries - & yet when someone demonstrates an effective way of dealing with the 'evil' he receives little or no collective support.

The same thing happened with (Quaker) prison shrink Bob Johnson 10 years ago. Michael Howard & others simply buried him because his successful therapeutic regime at Parkhurst did not fit their political agenda.

We all have our own issues with 'what we can get our heads around' within ourselves. And hence the level of integration to which we are willing /feel safe to go. I heard Ray Wyre interviewed In The Psychiatrist's Chair, & what really imprest me was his talk of how he prepared spiritually before & after sessions, so that in it he could be completely open & nonjudgmental yet also detox himself afterwards so as neither to become corrupted nor lose his vulernability.

That I thought was one truly wise man. I honour his passing.