27/05/2016

[Un]expressing pure moments

When I long to write I am least able. The need to condense an experience in words is most illusive the more intense the moment. When the feeling of wonder whirls most westerly, when I am swamped. Over spilling with a gratitude and longing, it is then writing rings reductive. Now, all the goodness of the universe envelopes me and leaves me breathless on a lake district fell. Great Gable to my face, Sca Fell on my back. Tent flapping in the wind, sky still setting stands. Simply stands. Stillness somehow soars. A sense of desire strongly sets in and roughly twists my inner parts. Twists them into the shape of a simple longing. I long for everyone to know love! Against the odds love, unlikely places love, unlovely people love. In an instant I am urgently grateful for the love that permeates my own life. Surrounded by it, I am cradled and rocked within a void. The hills heave a frozen cloak through the sky throwing incandescent frost light ardently. Heated rock that once flowed suddenly seems animated now, not indifferent. Here, I am vaulted by oneness and present in the joyful value of it. In fact for a moment I am connected. It is The Self melted in more.Though I know its the gaps, the scale, the reality of uncertainty that prised me open and created this. I don't seek to appropriate mass meaning out of thin air nor assign a one size fits all answer but instead I want to anchor the personally significant to some kind of bedrock, one I can share. The tension between personal experience and community rushes in with the wind. May I find ways to express the inarticulate. Seek opportunity to unfurl this longing in action. Find the simple faith to enact a beautiful and hope filled expression of life. May I fight for the purity that sometimes swells up within me. A purity living in each of us and waiting in everything, so goes my chosen belief.

25/05/2016

For Noah

Noah
Now an early lesson
The point of poetry 
When the gravity of a moment outweighs the power of words
When your desire to communicate outstrips that straight jacket language of the everyday
Then have a play, with words
Like now
I don't know what to write
Yet my first thought is my best thought
When it comes to self expression it is that I wish I had been taught

You are primed for life 
everyday vaulting into new
Learning, pushing your boundaries, expanding in knowledge and skill
May you hold that posture into adulthood, may you drink your fill
Yearning, burning with life 
As you are now
Attune with a oneness you must not forget 
As your identity firms do not own the illusion of separateness 
For we are not our own but connected
You are another me 
Your humanity,
is wrapped up in mine
A person is a person through other people
However other that person is 
We are made from the same stuff, recycled through the spiral of dust
and water
We reanimate, that is something to celebrate.  

People will talk about truth 
Say they know a thing or two 
Though Noah, if they stay aloof
Their message has no mileage 
Actions provide the proof.
Build bridges instead of walls
Not weapons but tools
Learn Love
It might come from above?
It does come from within 
It is there you should begin.