A place I call home

Among the folds of the hills nestled
on the valley floor spread
a sparkling jewel, a gleaming gem
is a place I lovingly call home

‘Where is Middle Hutt’ I was once asked
‘this is Middle Earth’ I had said
should have said ‘A slice of heaven
about which stories are written’

Where my spirit sings to the drumbeat of rain
on the roof, and stands in awe to the sound
of the wind wailing against the walls.
and laughs as the Hutt river does

as it skips through meadow, hill
and vale singing a silver-tongued melody,
of mad longing to merge with the sea.
Where my spirit soars to the twinkling stars

And the moon rises laughing behind the hills.
Where my spirit rests in the hollow of the valley
Nestling among verdant hills lit up with the laughter
Of a hundred, babbling, sparkling brooks.

~~~

Today was National Poetry Day, so the local library had organised a poetry reading session, where poetry based on our city or location was read out. So I had my first public poetry reading with the above poem :)

 

May

The calendar 

I find today

sits on May when

it’s almost August

maybe it’s telling me

through all the days of

May and non-May

that I May let myself

take the lid off

my box of dreams

and believe in

their coming true

ease into life

let go of fear

trust my wisdom

go with the flow

unravel unspool

bring down walls

love like crazy

find myself again

~~~

The dance of housework

household chores to
music performed
becomes a dance

so play that CD
or befriend the
radio and

sweep away
cobwebs to
the sweep of song

stir in stirring
symphonies into
sumptuous lunches

trap-zap that dust
to the hip-swing
of rock-n-roll

let the lilt of
low litanies
lighten your load

let the rhythm
sweep and dissolve
the drudgery

let the music
your pulse enter
let the fun flow

~~~

Love After Love

by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

~ Derek Walcott

What to remember when waking

A mind-blowing poem by David Whyte

WHAT TO REMEMBER WHEN WAKING

In that first
hardly noticed
moment
to which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the new day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.

What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.

You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.

Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love?  What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?

~ David Whyte ~
(The House of Belonging)

Rainmaker

I love this for reasons I cannot even begin to explain!

Brings on tears everytime ....

The poetry that lies in fingertips

you face, your face

it’s always your face

I fingertip touch

in poetic trails

of heartbreaking joy

tearful tenderness

that trembles where

skin meets with skin

singing pulsating

symphonies of love

laughing exulting

rivulets of joy

that must be when

soul flows into soul

dissolves into God

surrenders in bliss

~~~

The world

The world is our escape
our chosen opium
we slide behind shape
hide behind form

We abandon luminosity
for mere glitter
forsake audacity
embrace cowardice

We give up our knowingness
in exchange for knowledge

We have traded our kingdom
for a few pieces of shininess
sold our soul
in exchange for the world

But at times the world slips
the curtain parts
and we are given glimpses
of eternity

We are never ever
the same again

We realise the void
we are trying to fill
cannot be filled
with the things of the world

Sweet is the bliss
of the awakening soul
the angels rejoice
at the homecoming

~~~

Follow your bliss

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”

 – Joseph Campbell

Words

“Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being, between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.” 

~ Thomas Merton 

The dam

An avalanche waits
gathering fury
within heart walls

It’s only fear
that holds it in
of destruction

The dam bursts
debris washed away
new beginnings

Unripe

a blank page waits

words like seeds packed

the pod not ready to burst

It is strange

It is strange how
some people can talk and talk
and still not say anything
as if the words were
mere empty husks
falling to the ground
seedless, impotent
incapable of growth

It is strange how
some people can be silent
and you understand everything
as if the very silence
spoke in tongues
scattered seeds
that fell into your heart
and blossomed

~~~
 

The meeting

it must have been the rain

falling soft-petalled on the roof

the clouds in flower festivity

raining down their laughter

or the solitary bird

singing a single note after note

pulling in the reluctant evening

like a relentless oarsman

that my clouds of thoughts parted

and memories flooded in

and there you were

sandal-scented and smiling

your voice as you said my name

husky with tenderness

and I had simply melted

dissolved into pure joy

the world had ceased to be

time was irrelevant

there was no you or even I

just the lightness of being

One step to bliss

I surrender

in Your arms.

I cease to be.

Ego

Ego is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing, and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence.

In Tibetan, ego is called dakdzin , which means “grasping to a self.”

Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of “I” and “mine,” self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activities that will sustain that false construction.

Such grasping is futile from the start and condemned to frustration, for there is no basis or truth in it, and what we are grasping at is by its very nature ungraspable.
The fact that we need to grasp at all and to go on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self doesn’t inherently exist.
From this secret, unnerving knowledge spring all our fundamental insecurities and fears.

~ Sogyal Rinpoche, from Glimpse of the day

Bird watching

Sitting on the fence, back to me,
it doesn’t know I am watching
as it watches the yard next door.

Yellow beaked, black bodied,
head bobbing, eyes darting,
the blackbird looks for food.

Then, it sits still for a long time,
head held high, like a falcon,
as if sunning its beak.

I wonder if birds meditate,
or plan their day, maybe
stake out hunting grounds.

Or are they totally unaware
of the past, escaping fast
and the future, madly onrushing.

Living in the timeless Now,
unconcerned, about
an illusion called time.

Heeding only the voice
of instinct, as it surely guides
them from birth to death.

When I turn away,
it’s still there, unmoving,
as if frozen in time.

Home

The wind rages
like a crazed animal,
snarling up trees,
curling around houses,
scowling, howling.
In stark contrast,
the voices in my head
slowly stop clamouring,
stop rippling and fade.
I settle into stillness.

There is a place within us
that the winds of turbulence
cannot reach, the fire of
crises cannot scorch.
The floods of despair
cannot dampen. Here,
the soul resides.
And presides. Here,
boundaries vanish,
distinctions dissolve.

All it takes is a stepping away,
a conscious shift,
a delving into the silence
beneath all sound,
into the space in which
everything arises.
It is there, always,
ready, waiting.
For us to disengage,
to come home.

~~~

The chase

Something niggles,

like an itch in a corner

just out of reach.

The day was a pleasant enough,

helping a friend serve the monks

at the Buddhist monastery.

Steeped in tranquility,

lulled by birdsong,

sang to by streams.

But a haze came creeping around the corners.

Like a nebulous shadow

cast by a rain cloud

lurking just beyond the horizon.

I try to pin it down,

out-stare it in a staring contest,

but it shifts shape,

defies definition,

steals away.

Maybe the boil will burst in my sleep.

Maybe in my dreams

it will show its face.

For now, I chase

the shifting shadows.

Why our brains are large

In today's excerpt - Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania professor whose research has led to the development of the field of positive psychology, comments on the purpose of our large brains and speaks to the importance of relationships with others as one of the keys to our well-being:

"Other people are the best antidote to the downs of life and the sin­gle most reliable up. ... My friend Stephen Post, professor of Medical Human­ities at Stony Brook, tells a story about his mother. When he was a young boy, and his mother saw that he was in a bad mood, she would say, 'Stephen, you are looking piqued. Why don't you go out and help someone?' Empirically, Ma Post's maxim has been put to rigorous test, and we scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested. ...  

  

"Is there someone in your life whom you would feel comfortable phoning at four in the morning to tell your troubles to? If your answer is yes, you will likely live longer than someone whose answer is no. For George Vaillant, the Harvard psychiatrist who discovered this fact, the master strength is the capacity to be loved. Conversely, as the social neuroscientist John Cacioppo has argued, loneliness is such a disabling condition that it compels the belief that the pursuit of relationships is a rock-bottom fundamental to human well-being. ...

  

"Two recent streams of argument about human evolution both point to the importance of positive relationships in their own right and for their own sake. What is the big human brain for? About five hundred thousand years ago, the cranial capacity of our hominid ancestors' skulls dou­bled in size from 600 cubic centimeters to its present 1,200 cubic centi­meters. The fashionable explanation for all this extra brain is to enable us to make tools and weapons; you have to be really smart to deal instrumentally with the physical world. The British theoretical psy­chologist Nick Humphrey has presented an alternative: the big brain is a social problem solver, not a physical problem solver. As I converse with my students, how do I solve the problem of saying something that Marge will think is funny, that won't offend Tom, and that will per­suade Derek that he is wrong without rubbing his nose in it? These are extremely complicated problems -- problems that computers, which can design weapons and tools in a trice, cannot solve. But humans can and do solve social problems, every hour of the day. The massive pre­frontal cortex that we have is continually using its billions of connec­tions to simulate social possibilities and then to choose the optimal course of action. So the big brain is a relationship simulation machine, and it has been selected by evolution for exactly the function of design­ing and carrying out harmonious but effective human relationships.

"The other evolutionary argument that meshes with the big brain as social simulator is group selection. The eminent British biologist and polemicist Richard Dawkins has popularized a selfish-gene the­ory which argues that the individual is the sole unit of natural selec­tion. Two of the world's most prominent biologists, unrelated but both named Wilson (Edmund O. and David Sloan), have recently amassed evidence that the group is a primary unit of natural selection. Their argument starts with the social insects: wasps, bees, termites, and ants, all of which have factories, fortresses, and systems of communication and dominate the insect world just as humans dominate the vertebrate world. Being social is the most successful form of higher adaptation known. I would guess that it is even more adaptive than having eyes, and the most plausible mathematization of social insect selection is that selection is done by groups and not by individuals.

"The intuition for group selection is simple. Consider two primate groups, each made up of genetically diverse individuals. Imagine that the 'social' group has the emotional brain structures that subserve love, compassion, kindness, teamwork, and self-sacrifice -- the 'hive emotions' -- and cognitive brain structures, such as mirror neurons, which reflect other minds. The 'nonsocial' group, equally intelligent about the physical world and equally strong, does not have these hive emotions. These two groups are now put into a deadly competition that can have only one winner, such as war or starvation. The social group will win, being able to cooperate, hunt in groups, and create agricul­ture."

Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

by Martin E. P. Seligman by Free Press

 

------------- excerpt for the delanceyplace newsletter -----------------