Invincible Summer

A thousand thanks for the many wise words and quotations you left in my comments' box. Here they all are, collected together:

Prompt me, God;
but not yet...
the meaning is in the waiting. RS THOMAS

... all will be well and all will be well and all manner of things shall be well... ST JULIAN OF NORWICH

Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best. HENRY VAN DYKE

Mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it. SRI NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ

Try it, what's the worst that could happen? UNATTRIBUTED

Things are in the saddle, / And ride mankind. RALPH WALDO EMERSON

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive. JOSEPH CAMPBELL

This moment is eternal. UNATTRIBUTED

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle. PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA

Now you will feel no rain,
For each of you will be shelter to the other.

Now you will feel no cold,
For each of you will be warmth to the other.

Now there is no more loneliness,
For each of you will be companion to the other.

Now you are two bodies,
But there is only one life before you.

Go now to your dwelling place,
To enter into the days of your togetherness.

And may your days be good and long upon the earth. APACHE WEDDING BLESSING

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. HENRY DAVID THOREAU

You don't stop playing because you grow old; you grow old because you stop playing. UNATTRIBUTED

Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention. JOHN O'DONOHUE

I will add just one more of my own:

In the midst of winter, I found there was within me an invincible summer. ALBERT CAMUS

I wish everyone a Happy New Year, and may we always feel the warmth of that invincible summer in our hearts.

1000th Post

This blog is about many things, and one of those things is poetry. So first of all I'll celebrate my thousandth post with a new poem. Naturally it's about Christmas.

Supposing Christmas Never Came

Supposing Christmas never came —
Santa on strike, the reindeer sick,
the presents barely wrapped,
the wise men lost, their camels lame,
shepherds without their flocks
(due to an outbreak of ovine flu),
the Virgin Mary, virginal no longer,
painting the town red,
Joseph distraught, the Holy Child
sans swaddling clothes, sans stable,
mangerless, and the bright star
of Bethlehem now a black hole,
turkeys extinct and Christmas trees
dead as Dutch elms — then I’d ascend
some nearby mountain such as Scafell Pike
or one afar like Ober Gabelhorn,
Aiguille d'Argentière or Monte Rosa,
and meditate within a little hut
like Thoreau at the edge of Walden Pond
or Kerouac on Desolation Peak.
I’d view the frosted ridges, snowy crests
(real mountain chains not paper chains,
real snow not the stuff out of a can),
thinking of nothing very much but Zen,
and letting pure agape flood right in.

At this point I'd like to thank most warmly blog poets Ruth, Lorenzo, Rachel, Pat and Dominic, whose own poetry constantly inspires and encourages me to keep on writing poems myself.

I would never have believed, after starting this modest blog four and a half years ago, that I'd ever reach post number one thousand. Yet here it is. And I must honestly tell you that each and every post has been a joy. But without your readership, your loyalty and your comments, I'm sure I would have stopped long ago. For it's this reciprocality that lies at the heart of all our blogging enterprises — of this I have no doubt. I'd also like to acknowledge a few blog friends who have stuck with me for the long haul — Grizz and am come at once to mind. Readers come and go — that's only to be expected — but others stay religiously loyal, such as our wonderful friend and fellow traveller George, for instance. Apologies for missing out so many names here — there are dozens more. You know who you are, and I thank you all for reading my humble offerings from the bottom of my heart.

Our blogs are forever quoting words of comfort and wisdom from different saints and sages, poets and philosophers. I wondered if, to indulge me on my thousandth post, you might quote me one of your own very favourite sayings, aphorisms, adages, bons mots, proverbs, koans, stories, prayers or truths? Something that brings you hope and inspiration, and gives you the motivation to carry on journeying down life's rocky road. We could create a rich storehouse of enlightenment here! My own contribution would have to be the Prayer of Saint Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Greetings to everyone in this strange time between Christmas and New Year.

Joyeux Noel

The Solitary Walker caught photographing the Christmas hearth.

J - urançon

O - rwell

Y - evtushenko

E - unate

U - ltreia!

X - mas

N - egative Capability

O - pium

E - nna

L - and's End 

It's been a wonderful walking year, in which I've walked most of the Hadrian's Wall Path (with George of Transit Notes), part of the Viking Way and all of the Via Gebennensis, the pilgrim route from Geneva in Switzerland to Le Puy in France. I wonder what next year has in store?

This blog is now four and a half years old, and every post has been a joy. The next post I write will be my thousandth. I've no idea what to do yet, but hope you will all contribute!

I wish all my blog friends and blog readers out there a very happy Christmas. Without you this blog would be as Santa without his reindeer, Fred Astaire without Ginger Rogers, a day on the Camino without a glass or two of wine at the end of it. Or something like that!

Paulo Coelho: The Pilgrimage

I was a book rep for twenty-five years, and for part of that time I carried the list of a publisher of self-help books, New Age books, books that were loosely 'spiritual'. Many of these titles were frankly unreadable. Some were written by those in pursuit of a quick buck, some by well-meaning people with woolly ideas, others by out-and-out charlatans and snake-oil salesmen. It was a question of separating the wheat from the chaff, and there was a lot of chaff. Often, unfortunately, the chaff dispersed widely, and the wheat was scarce — though precious.

As I've said before, I'm not a big fan of Paulo Coelho, and find his novels, parables, fantasies and so-called autobiographical books about 'the spiritual journey' too simplistic, too trite and too eager to please. Needless to say, he's an internationally bestselling author with a huge base of readers and admirers. I wouldn't go so far as to call him a charlatan — no, not at all, I'm sure he's totally sincere — but I find his sparsely told, derivative fables annoyingly childish. The message of The Alchemist (the book which propelled him to fame in 1988) seems to be that the treasure is not to be found at your journey's end (in this case the Pyramids of Egypt) but at home when you return. OK, but there's nothing earth-shatteringly new in this. In fact, many have remarked that the whole novel is simply a retelling of one of the stories in A Thousand And One Nights.

Having been disappointed with The Alchemist when I read it a while ago, I recently picked up a second-hand copy of The Pilgrimage, a book he wrote in 1987 after completing the pilgrim route to Santiago the previous year — and, again, I felt let down. There are real spiritual insights in the book, to be sure, but they're put across in far too simple and populist a way. Also the story is marred by all sorts of fantastic nonsense about the Knights Templar and their rituals. (It seems that writers can't get enough of the Knights Templar nowadays — from Umberto Eco and Dan Brown to Kate Mosse and Steve Berry.) In addition, Coelho uses far too much vocabulary and far too many concepts to do with 'winning', 'losing', 'conquering' and 'fighting the good fight' for my own personal spiritual taste. So I fear you're unlikely to find profound answers to profound questions in Paulo Coelho. You may think he's more sham than shaman. I leave it for you to judge. However, I did like this passage from early on in the book:

When you travel, you experience, in a very practical way, the act of rebirth. You confront completely new situations, the day passes more slowly, and on most journeys you don't even understand the language the people speak. So you are like a child just out of the womb. You begin to be more accessible to others because they may be able to help you in difficult situations. And you accept any small favour from the gods with great delight, as if it were an episode you would remember for the rest of your life.

At the same time, since all things are new, you see only the beauty in them, and you feel happy to be alive. That's why a religious pilgrimage has always been one of the most objective ways of achieving insight. The word peccadillo, which means a 'small sin', comes from pecus, which means 'defective foot', a foot that is incapable of walking a road. The way to correct the peccadillo is always to walk forward, adapting oneself to new situations and receiving in return all of the thousands of blessings life generously offers to those who seek them.

Banzan In The Butcher's Shop

Do you know the story of Banzan? Before he became a great Zen master, he spent many years in pursuit of enlightenment, but it eluded him. Then, one day, as he was walking in the marketplace, he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer. 'Give me the best piece of meat you have,' said the customer. And the butcher replied, 'Every piece of meat I have is the best. There is no piece of meat here that is not the best.' Upon hearing this, Banzan became enlightened. 

I can see you are waiting for some explanation. When you accept what is, every piece of meat — every moment — is the best. That is enlightenment.

ECKHART TOLLE The Power Of Now

I love this story. What I like most about it is the setting: an ordinary, humble butcher's shop. It's not about enlightenment dawning after many months of rigorous meditation under a banyan tree, or after years of wandering and soul searching in the mountains and deserts, or as a result of disciplined study and ascetic practice under a yogi or other spiritual teacher. No, it's about enlightenment dawning suddenly, and when least expected, in a prosaic, everyday setting. To me this has the ring of authenticity. Perhaps we are mistaken in walking so endlessly and so earnestly the caminos of this world in pursuit of spiritual illumination, when we are more likely to find it — if we remain aware, open and receptive — in the moment NOW, in our own ordinary home, in our wilderness back garden, in the local streets and shops of our town or village.

So, when you're at the butcher's this week picking up your Christmas turkey, sausage meat, gammon joint and pork pies, be sure to eavesdrop on the conversations going on around you. You never know, it might be the start of a whole new life.

Garden Wilderness

Acacia

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show. ANDREW WYETH

Crab apple

I trust your Garden was willing to die ... I do not think that mine was — it perished with beautiful reluctance, like an evening star — EMILY DICKINSON (From a letter to her Aunt Katie Sweetser, 1880)

Neglected herb patch

Piper To The End

Mark Knopfler at Nottingham's Capital FM Arena on 11 October this year.

When I leave this world behind me / To another I will go / And if there are no pipes in heaven / I'll be going down below / If friends in time be severed / Someday we will meet again / I'll return to leave you never / Be a piper to the end

Cats And Ducks Are Our Teachers

It's about realising that there are no problems. Only situations.

So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action - just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord.

Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now. As you become more deeply aware of this one step, you realize that it already contains within itself all the other steps as well as the destination.

True love has no opposite. If your love has an 'opposite', then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets. It is the ego's substitute for salvation, and for a short time it almost does feel like salvation.

A Buddhist monk once told me: 'All I have learned in the twenty years that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence: All that arises passes away. This I know.' What he meant, of course, was this: I have learned to offer no resistance to what is; I have learned to allow the present moment to be and to accept the impermanent nature of all things and conditions. Thus have I found peace.

I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them cats. Even ducks have taught me important spiritual lessons. Just watching them is a meditation.

ECKHART TOLLE The Power Of Now

My Children, Not My Children

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

KAHLIL GIBRAN The Prophet

Two Lives Of Dickens

Charles Dickens

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. EL DOCTOROW

Two biographies have been published recently anticipating the bicentenary of Charles Dickens's birth next February: Becoming Dickens: The Invention Of A Novelist by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, and Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life.

Both books mention the meeting Dickens reputedly had with Dostoyevsky in 1862. In a subsequent letter mentioning this momentous encounter, the great Russian novelist recalls his great British counterpart telling him that All the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him ... one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Whereupon Dostoyevsky was supposed to have asked: Only two people? 

Whether or not the meeting actually occurred, and whether or not the letter is authentic (it has never been traced, and there is no extant copy), no matter. What's interesting is the Jekyll and Hyde (though Stevenson's novel The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde did not come out until sixteen years after Dickens's death!) 'split personality' Dickens admits to here. Of course, Dostoyevsky himself was fascinated by multifaceted personalities (one of his stories is called The Double) and the dilemmas caused by opposing moralities struggling for ascendance in the same human soul (just look at Raskolnikov in Crime And Punishment).

Dickens, after twenty one years of faithful (so far as we know) marriage to his wife Catherine, began a liaison with the actress Ellen Ternan in 1857 - which continued until his death in 1870. Divorce was barely thinkable for a man in his position at the time, so he separated from Catherine in 1858 but remained married to her. Perhaps guilt about this was at the back of his mind when he made his startling revelation to Dostoyevsky, perhaps not. Who knows?

However, from a personal point of view, the longer I live, and the more I experience life, the more convinced I am that we all have, to a greater or lesser extent, split or multiple personalities. We all have some of the saint and the sinner, the hero and the villain, the good and the bad within us - in varying proportions. And it's only when we get beyond such manifest polarities of our fragile and fearful ego that we can start to experience the unquenchable joy, peace and love which characterises our true Being and Consciousness - as Eckhart Tolle* might say.

* I'll have more to say at a later date about Eckhart Tolle's book The Power Of Now.   

The Books In My Life (5)

We have books in nearly every room of the house. These are some shelves in our bedroom. I often read in bed before falling asleep. It's one of life's greatest pleasures, isn't it? There are lots of novels on these shelves. At one time I used to read novels almost to the exclusion of everything else. Now I still read fiction, but less so, and mixed in with biography, travel, history, natural history, religion, spirituality, philosophy and popular science. And of course poetry I've always read a great deal of.

Here you will find books by some of my favourite novelists: Balzac, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Scott Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Hardy, DH Lawrence, Thomas Mann, John Cowper Powys, Steinbeck, Stendhal, Tolstoy and Patrick White. There's a novel about Welsh hill farmers called On The Black Hill by the exquisitely gifted travel writer Bruce Chatwin. There are two books, Vertigo and Austerlitz, by the joyously uncategorisable WG Sebald, genre-busting works which are part fiction, part memoir, part history, part autobiography, part travelogue. There's a collection of short stories called Under The Dam by David Constantine, who is also a wonderful poet and was one of my old German lecturers at university. There's a selection of short stories by that master of the form, Guy de Maupassant. There's Philip Pullman's terrific children's trilogy His Dark Materials - these are definitely books for adults too! And there's Thomas Mann's classic novella Death In Venice, a book I reread time and again.

This is the final post in my series The Books In My Life.

Concerning The Spiritual In Art

The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life. It exists and has power to create spiritual atmosphere; and from this inner standpoint one judges whether it is a good work of art or a bad one. If its 'form' is bad it means that the form is too feeble in meaning to call forth corresponding vibrations of the soul. Therefore a picture is not necessarily 'well painted' if it possesses the 'values' of which the French so constantly speak. It is only well painted if its spiritual value is complete and satisfying. 'Good drawing' is drawing that cannot be altered without destruction of this inner value, quite irrespective of its correctness as anatomy, botany, or any other science. There is no question of a violation of natural form, but only of the need of the artist for such form. Similarly colours are used not because they are true to nature, but because they are necessary to the particular picture. In fact, the artist is not only justified in using, but it is his duty to use only those forms which fulfil his own need. Absolute freedom, whether from anatomy or anything of the kind, must be given the artist in his choice of material. Such spiritual freedom is as necessary in art as it is in life.

WASSILY KANDINSKY Concerning The Spiritual In Art

I suppose Kandinsky's manifesto does not sound quite so revolutionary today, and the argument for the spiritual and technical freedom of the artist has long since been won, but it's always good to be reminded of this influential treatise on modernism published early last century. It had a huge effect in its day, impacting decisively on the development of modern art.

Of course there are countries in the world (I'm thinking of China and its treatment of Ai Weiwei) where certain artistic freedoms are frowned on, even severely curtailed by the state - though no country or state will ever be able to restrict an artist's inner, spiritual freedom.

Nouvelle 55: Landschaft Mit Roten Flecken, Nr. 2

Wassily Kandinsky: Landschaft mit roten Flecken, Nr. 2

That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul. KANDINSKY

I am one among multitudes yet my soul

Raps out a unique rhythm through the woods

And forests, hills and mountains of my desires,

Singing a soft and sinuous path

On cliffs as tall as longing and in chasms

Deep as dreaming, dancing its course

Under rainbow bridges, tree-trunk chimneys,

Coal-black peaks and death-black doorways.

Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibration in the soul. KANDINSKY

(For Kandinsky's ideas on the spiritual significance of colour, and colour's relation to music, see this Wikipedia article. On the colour red: Red is a warm colour, lively and agitated; it is forceful, a movement in itself. On the colours blue and yellow: Yellow is a typically terrestrial colour, whose violence can be painful and aggressive. Blue is a celestial colour, evoking a deep calm. The combination of blue and yellow yields total immobility and calm, which is green. On the colour black: Black is nothingness without possibility, an eternal silence without hope, and corresponds with death.)  

The Books In My Life (4)

Just to prove not all of our books are rigorously classified, here are a couple of shelves of disparate titles from the living room. At the top, running left to right, are various illustrated books on Venice, Spain, Scotland and Ireland; a meditation on islands by John Fowles containing evocatively melancholy black and white photographs by the late Fay Godwin; Tolstoy's War And Peace (still haven't finished it!); an excellent biography of Tolstoy by Rosamund Bartlett; Sartre's Existentialism And Humanism; Chi Running by Danny Dreyer (I took up some gentle, early morning running in the spring of this year, neglected it over the summer, but have now started again - what a buzz it gives you); Paulo Coelho's The Pilgrimage (bought this just yesterday in an Oxfam shop. I'm not a big fan of Coelho, but felt I should read it as it describes his own Camino to Santiago); biographies of Maria Callas and Thomas Hardy (this by Claire Tomalin, whose book Charles Dickens: A Life is being serialised on Radio 4 this week to mark the bicentenary of Dickens's birth); The Oxford Dictionary Of Phrase, Saying And Quotation; and a book about photographing landscape by Charlie Waite.

On the bottom shelf are various gardening books, pride of place going to Geoffrey Grigson's The Englishman's Flora. There's also a title by Dave Hamilton we bought the other day called Grow Your Own Food For Free (Well, Almost) and one called Organic Gardening by Lawrence D Hills which Dominic from the blog ...made out of words was kind enough to send me. In between these gardening books and some practical photography manuals there's an illustrated version of Treasure Island, a book called The Ancient World Of The Celts and Anton Gill's Il Gigante, a detailed analysis of Michelangelo's supreme work of figurative sculpture, David. Mmm... I wonder how they got in there? You could say these shelves are an eclectic mix.