Write!

Write what?
Write that your job is to bring love into the world. You do this by following your path, becoming fully conscious /present in the world, and seeking opportunities for harmony to emerge.

St Nicholas, Khamnoviki, Moskva

The priest withdrew to the chancel, attended by acolytes
and followed by worshippers – straggling throu the rough stone arch,
a hundred in all maybe: the old ones wearing black,
but also young urban families with anxious mothers in head-scarves
and youngsters with quilted jackets; plus a smattering of well-dressed
middle-aged women the communists would’ve labeled class enemies.

The low square nave slowly assumed a flickering stillness,
every painted inch absorbing the veneration
of a second wave of solitary iconophiles,
nondescript figures who moved and paused, and moved and paused,
mouthing prayers and crossing themselves continually.

The distant intonation of a homily
did not engage these private devotees, nor
the punk in street clothes with a fist of candles, lighting
them at random stations. This ancient heart of Russia
still beating fervently for all its long submersion.

Discreetly photographing faith’s timeless pageant, my eye
is drawn to a queue for a silver icon with blackened images.
The faithful mount a dais, triple-cross themselves,
kiss its covering glass – for a moment illuminated
in the bright reflexion – triple-cross again,
and descend once more into obscurity.

I join the shuffling queue, uncertain of how to behave.
Before it, touching my head to the glass I am visited
by a sudden rush of physical energy, as if
‘Our Lady, mother of victories’ had thrown a pan of heated
water at my face, drenching my head and shoulders
in a shocking baptism – delivered without preamble
or explanation. For me to decode its significance.

A mystical Russia now opens before me, where glory and savagery
coexist – this silent inner knowledge stretching
from here back to infinity, linking believer
and unbeliever in a majestic brutal bedrock
reality, unglossed by transient politics
or sentimental western ideas of normality.

Just then, the service ended and all the bells broke loose
as these indistinct individuals emerged to freezing sunlight,
honoured in the street by this majestic clangour,
and momentarily lightened from the oppressive city,
before melting back into their anonymous lives.
And I – left standing – uncertain if my life had changed
dramatically … or subtly … or not at all.


So, in all encounters, exists the option of change:
but how to recognise or unwrap these hidden gifts?
How to decode its meaning or reorientate our compass?
Experiences such as this show meaning itself to be plastic.
The challenge: to trust the unknown process moulding us into
an unfamiliar shape, during its amorphous phase.

The mystery of magic is the mystery of faith –
the way the fog of doubt dissolves when least expected
(like a crystal rainbow falling across the page) *
and we emerge to find an unfamiliar sunlight
with all the bells of heaven ringing in our ears –

and yet our human state’s unchanged, absolving us
from nothing that before was deeply troubling us –
but still we know, somehow, we’re indefinably different:
suddenly oppression’s lifted, and we have resources
to meet the challenges head on. Tho the final battle
may yet involve a descent from this very brightness into
the womby dark to tackle what we hoped to’ve escaped,
but was itself the gift that had come to change us for good.

St Nicholas of the Weavers,
Khamnoviki, Moscow
(Dec 2008) – 11/09/2009

*I had to include this line because it actually happened as I wrote! I will eventually upload the picture to prove it.

A Christmas Wish

If I could make one wish for the world this Christmas, I would not wish away pain, suffering or distress - rather, I would wish away greed, insecurity and doubt.
I would wish that everyone could find meaning in their lives, and throu that acquire a positive and compassionate attitude.
I would wish that everyone could see throu the delusions of wealth and glamour, and see that personal authenticity is the only goal worth pursuing.
I would wish that people would realise that emotional awareness is of greater benefit to humanity than any technical accomplishment.
I would wish that that those who aim to inspire change would realise that the only person they need to change is themselves, and that if they could accomplish that everything they desire would follow as day follows night.
I would wish that love would be born anew in each heart and become each person's inner guide.

Vers Libéré

At best, poetry resonates with spirit,
evoking joyful recognition of feelings –
the poem’s individual voice a balance of
subject, poet and otherness – the sweet spot
for each to find by personal attunement.

These days, distrustful of all non-material meanings,
we no longer call that otherness God;
yet the endurance of certain poetry stands
as witness to individual triangulation:
where intunity and intensity couple
producing a truly authentic timbre of voice.

Subject, poet, otherness = the sweet spot.
Were I to shout this, I'd immediately burst
the membrane of truth holding it together.
We might call it the prayer of the unconscious –
the yeast by which matter transmutates to spirit –
a private worship of the tao, an honouring
of living springs which flows in every heartspace,
connecting aquifers and the greater river.

I would not know this, had I not voluntarily
entered the wilderness 20 years ago.
Well, no, perhaps not voluntarily!
A dynamic entered my life from a single dream
creating a constant innergy that led me
off life’s oily, dusty, noisy highway.

Entering a room without artificial light requires
time for the eye to adjust to the natural darkness –
allowing a natural sense of wonder to form
wherein we hold a numinous communion:
observer :: observed :: and the harmonic of observation.

If I were to tell you the figure who appeared in this dream
it would immediately puncture the image you’ve drawn
by localizing it to the physical world.
The way I honour my iconic figure in art
is to distil the quintessence of what I'm shown:
presenting it now as poetry, now as music …

a metaphysical representation of spirit
innergising, throu my own unconscious,
the calling home – the calling to evolve –
the calling to be present :: grounded and yet
illuminated by the numinous.
16/09/2009

What do you need when you've got what you want?

I was feeling a bit glum, having just composed some rather beautiful music and being unable to see how to get it taken up, when my inner voice spoke: “This is what you wanted – to become fully conscious of your own voice & truth. Now you've achieved it, you're complaining that it isn't enough.”
So I responded, then what's the next step? To which the answer was “Wait & see!”

Information & Innergy

I was thinking just recently how profound the word in-form is. If we're looking for a word tha expresses spontaneous auto-generated form then 'in-formed' is ideal. Yet the word has lost that meaning entirely. To say that you will keep someone informed is to suggest you will send them something that may or may not be relevant to them. The very last thing in-form-ation implies is valuable content that could alter someone's mental makeup. Yet to allow yourself to be in-formed by an idea is a wonderful image.

Another new word we might adopt is innergy. I was struck by its possibilities when I heard an American speak about energy. But innergy really expresses what energy is in a personal sense

For Jonathan Harvey

When we think we come to the end of things,
in fact we arrive only at a new beginning.

Nowhere is this more true than in death
where altered reality begins with a final breath.

The arc of life inexorably leads
to this. But in learning pure intention seeds

of change are sown, producing a certainty
of our end point yielding to infinity –

a continuum with altered state where love
is the medium of existence, valued above

all other virtues. The greatest aspiration
simply to join this background radiation,

becoming a chorister in the eternal OM
that honours Life’s enigma: whose final sum

exceeds the logic of its constituent parts
by the measure hope expands each heart.

Where, in golden seam so deeply mined,
beyond what seems lies clarity of mind.

Thus in an old beginning, forever new,
we strive to recover what we always knew.

This ambiguity can art alone make real
and show each generation how to feel

reflexions not just of subjective truth
but waters of eternal life and youth.

Imagination

Most people can't imagine what doesn't exist. Those who can are destined to be tormented by the difference.

Fortress of Illusion

I recently completed the first piece of instrumental music which really expresses what I feel myself capable of. I wanted to write an orchestral piece, but realised that my chances of a performance were not high, so I decided to write it for two pianos instead. What is now the final movement was written first - which arose from experimenting with a perfect canon, and came q easily. I then decided to add an opening movement. It's called Crossing the Desert. That was a tremendous journey for me, where I encountered exactly the kind of attempts to derail my motivation that occur in the story I was illustrating. Altho I threw up my hands in despair many times, I returned and managed to wrestle it to a conclusion. which gave me a great feeling of self-worth.

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.