Sunday Morning

Sunday Morning

Sunday morning’s early light,

meadow lark on the rise

cotoneaster, feverfew,

wild thyme and bramble rose.

Step by step, each to each

to where the other goes:

hymnals and unison

seated in rows.

And I who walk behind them

to the valley down below

must trust in common wonders

and hope that it might be so.

Noonday shadows at their feet

mistle thrush in the hedge

hillsides and riversides,

saxifrage and sedge.

Pace by pace, side by side

each trusting in the way:

parables and stories

in the highest light of day.

And I who walk behind them

to the valley down below

must hope for common wonders

and trust that it might be so.

Shadows of the afternoon,

fieldfare and sage

measure out the silence

of another time, another age.

Tread by tread, step by step

each timing with the other:

sister blesses sister soul, 

brother blesses brother.

And I who walk behind them

to the valley down below

must pray for common wonders

and hope that it might be so.

Twilight shadows lengthen

with the evening’s lowering sun:

veiled shades and violet shades

as the long day is done.

Step by step, each to each

to where the other leads:

beatitudes and blessings,

miracles in the meads.

And those who walk behind me

to the valley down below

place trust in common wonders

and know that it will be so.

Painting Sunday Morning by Angelo Morbelli

Spirit of the Samurai

From feudal Japan there comes a story of a young woman who, when the castle in which she had sought refuge had been overrun by the opposing clan, and knowing that her fate would be to be ravished by the victors, threw herself down the castle well. On reaching the well’s mouth, the clan leader discovered this poem fluttering weighted beneath a stone: 

"For fear lest clouds may dim her light,
Should she but graze this nether sphere, 
The young moon poised above the height 
Doth hastily betake to flight."

Using the moon as a metaphor for herself, the young woman had chosen for her own light not to be dimmed, to be sullied, by rough desires. Her action embodied the true samurai spirit more surely than the band of armoured samurai who had overrun the castle. For quite some time now, coping with the challenges in my personal life seem sometimes to be beyond my strength. When I feel that way, I usually go hunting for my power. Today is such a day, and I am finding my power among the examples of women who fought as samurai.

But as the story shows, being true to the samurai spirit does not necessarily mean to fight. The spirit shows that it is how we acquit ourselves, how we cope in a situation, that counts. When we find ourselves in a difficult situation to cope with emotionally, it is so easy to allow ourselves to fall victim to thoughts of desperation, of helplessness. We allow our inner castle to be overrun, and rather than standing firm, we succumb to feelings of powerlessness. The young woman showed that there is always a choice – although our own choice need not be as extreme as hers. But we can still choose. We can choose not to give way to despair. We can choose to go on trusting that time will change a situation, as, sooner or later, it always does. We can choose to keep our power for ourselves, for no one can take our power from us – although we can choose to give it away.

And neither do we need always to think of ‘winning’ in a situation. Perhaps the most famous work to be written, both in this period and from this place, is ‘Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai’, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo. The book contains the wise comment that if we think only of winning, then our victory will be more wretched than a defeat. Neither defeat nor victory, but a simple acceptance, can bring change, can offer a measure of solace. ‘Hagakure’ can be translated as ‘hidden among leaves’. The typically poetic title contains its own wisdom: that it is in what is hidden, rather than what we can obviously see, where we can find the essence of the true samurai spirit. And this hidden essence cannot be taken from us, in whatever circumstance we find ourselves.

The Shepherd and the Shell

She has come from the sea, and he, all uncomprehending, can only wonder. His flock continue to graze on the salty grass of the coastal dunes, but he, the normally-attentive shepherd, has already forgotten their existence. Unawares, he sinks to his knees, suddenly suspended in a world between the commonplace of the everyday and a larger reality in which anything can – and does – happen.

She strides confidently out of myth, crossing the impossible space between the waves’ edge and the intervening sand, wading across a shallow lagoon to confront him. Her golden hair, decorated with strands of marine plants, flutters in the sea breezes as it must have fluttered in the more measured rhythms of the currents beneath the waves. She is no more aware of her nakedness than he now is of his surroundings. Her presence is more real than his reality. His water flask also lies forgotten on the ground at his side, and his shepherd’s crook, the emblem of his task, is grasped in his now-unsteady hand.

In her pale hands she holds a shell, and her simple gesture indicates that this is her gift to him. No word is spoken, for none is needed. Were she to speak, her language would perhaps be incomprehensible to him, as his earthly dialect might be to her. So she does not speak. And he cannot, transfixed as he has become by her miraculous appearance in his world.

All that he can do is extend his wondering hand to receive this offered gift from the sea, barely aware of his own gesture of acceptance. She smiles down at him, seeming somewhere amused at the consternation which she has caused, but comprehending as well, compassionate in her invasion of his reality. For a moment, for a brief sliver of time, her fingers brush his own as he takes the shell from her, and he feels an impression of pale skin more silken than human skin could be, like the smooth pelt of a seal.

Now she smiles at him, gesturing with her hands, cupping them to her ear to indicate what she wishes him to do. He obeys, holding the shell to his own ear. Entranced, he hears it: the slow murmur of the deeps, the tug and sigh of currents, the restless, wandering voice of the eternal ocean. He closes his eyes, surrendering to the sound, listening, listening. He has no wish to open his eyes now, understanding what will happen when he does. But he must, and eventually, he does so. She has gone.

Painting: The Sea Maid by Arthur Hacker.

The Loom of the World

Seeing patterns in things is a reassuring thing. It comforts us to feel that something, some experience, has an underlying purpose, even if that purpose is not clear to us at the time. We trust that it is so. All across the world, in different places and in different cultures, women are weaving. Women have been doing so for thousands of years, creating cloth from the wool of their herds or from other plants and animals to make into clothing, or baskets, or blankets. They might be spinning on a simple hand-held spindle while they watch over the same herds which provide what they spin, or they might be sitting outside using a portable back-strap loom, or using a large frame loom in their house. I myself have done my own share of weaving at the loom.

All of these women, wherever they live or have lived, are creating different things, using different patterns, distinctive to their times and cultures. But perhaps there is a sense in which they are actually creating the same thing. The activity is the same, however it is produced. What connects these women is that they are all weavers. They are all familiar with the warp and weft of the loom – the vertical and horizontal threads which create the weaving.

We readily recognise this warp and weft which creates the weave of our own life’s experiences:  pain and pleasure, loathing and delight, sorrow and rejoicing, regret and anticipation. Darkness and light are also part of this pattern, and the pattern tells us that the weaving would not be possible, would not even exist, without both of these experiences. But what is the weaving?

Perhaps a network, all-unseen, connects all women who weave, and who have ever woven. The common activity is in itself enough for a connection to be made. Perhaps through this connection one vast weaving is being created, a weaving whose mysterious form we might glimpse through the creative activity of all these individual women. And as long as there are women, the warp holds. As long as the warp holds, we can weave our world into wellness. We are all weavers, weaving at the loom of the world. From our sorrow and our love, from pain and forgiving, from all the darkness and the light, the weaving of love takes form.       

Copper Cascade by Donna Sakamoto Crispin

Ascension Day

Ascension Window Taizé.

Stained Glass made by Brother Eric.

In the story of my own soul, 
I can see the Light at work. 
Through stained glass it may sometimes appear 
to be patched and variable, 
but even so that Light is very real indeed.

Wishing you all a Happy Ascension day.

Emma

The Girl in a Kimono

She was born in 1877 in Zaandam, in the province of North Holland. When she was 16, Geesje Kwak moved with her sister Anna to Amsterdam to settle into the safe young ladies' profession of milliner. There, among the ladies' hats and bonnets, ribbons and bustling clients, she might have remained in obscurity, her name - and her features - unknown to art history. Except that one day her path crossed that of the artist George Hendrik Breitner.

Breitner, already something of a name in the art world of the time, had recently acquired a studio on Amsterdam's Lauriergracht (Laurel Canal), one of the prettiest spots in the city. In 1892 the artist had visited an influential exhibition of Japanese art in The Hague (which had also inspired Vincent van Gogh, among others), and had enthusiastically acquired several kimonos and some decorative room screens as a result. A year later, the artist's chance meeting with the young milliner seems to have lit a spark of inspiration, and Geesje found herself being asked - on a paid professional basis - to pose as a model in the kimonos. Breitner seems to have been meticulous about details. There is an existing notebook in which he recorded the various dates and hours when Geesje posed for him, and the amounts which she was paid for her time.

The notebook suggests a methodical, business-like approach to the model sessions, but the series of paintings which resulted reveal a special alchemy. Breitner's brushwork in the canvasses shows extraordinary verve and confidence, as if nowhere was it necessary to go over the same brushstroke twice. They are images which indicate that the artist knew exactly where he needed to go to achieve the required result, and what he needed to do to get there, and Geesje seems to have been the catalyst. Posed either in a red or in a silvery-white kimono, Geesje is there in the canvasses as a tangible presence, even when only her face and her hands are visible. Breitner never allows that presence to be swamped by the surrounding patterns of kimono, carpet and room screen which swirl busily around her; the balance between the naturalistic treatment of the model and the eddying patterns is always perfectly held.

Always a restless innovator, Breitner was among the first artists to use his own photographs as references for his paintings.  And indeed: among his collection we also come across his photographs of Geesje, apparently made by the artist for this very purpose. One photograph by Breitner in the Leiden Museum print collection shows a thoughtful Geesje posing hand-on-chin. This gelatine-silver print offers us perhaps our clearest look at the girl who inspired the artist. What must Geesje herself have thought about it all? Was she bemused? Was she flattered by the unexpected attention? In any event, she did not feature further in Breitner's work. There are two reasons for this.

The first reason is that, incomprehensibly, the series of paintings featuring Geesje met with either an indifferent or a scoffing critical reception when they were exhibited. The critical reaction was cold enough, apparently, to discourage the artist further in this direction, and he went on to other themes and subjects. The second reason is Geesje herself. Two years later she emigrated with her older sister Niesje to Pretoria in South Africa, where she sadly died before reaching her 22nd birthday. But this young death of the girl who became Breitner’s model and inspiration offered its own transcendence: the mysterious immortality which art can grant, even to a young unknown milliner. 

                                         

The Homecoming

Corals spread wide like open fans of lace, purple and red anemones unfold like flowers, reaching with delicate tentacles towards the dancing sun’s rays that filter down from above. And through these watery gardens swim schools of blue and yellow fish like flights of tropical birds. Long fronds of sea plants wave gracefully to the half-silent, half-forgotten echoes of sea shells: the music of the deeps… and I float between them, adrift from the world of the land, from the breathing of air, from the heavy and difficult walking on unfamiliar legs, from earthbound cares and sorrows.

Here, far beneath the surface waves, beneath the tug and turmoil of the world above, is where I was born. I do not know, cannot remember, the first moment of my existence. Perhaps my becoming was a gradual thing. What I do remember is a first awareness, a consciousness of my being. Perhaps I was created by an unknown other, or perhaps, in that new awareness, I created myself. I only remember those distant times as times of drift and darkness. Then later, much later, an emergence of a lesser dark as, still drifting, I rose slowly from the deeps.

For millions of years my body drifted. The seas around me changed, became less barren, were now sown with new growth: gardens and forests of sea plants that waved gracefully with the currents, amphora-shaped sponges that among the age-old corals clamped fast to their rocks in a world of muffled light and silence. Now the subtly-changing song of the sea shells tells me that I have reached another ocean, and I drift over gardens of flowers that are really animals: delicate sea lilies that turn their tentacles to the winds of this watery underworld, as flowers turn towards the sun in the world above.

This is my world: a world inhabited by water spirits and nymphs, sirens and sea maids: beings invisible to those of the land, as invisible to them as the pathways we travel across these great oceans, drifting in a deep sea dream of endless blue currents. I drift with them; am myself one of them, ever drifting in this world of blue silence beneath the waves. We never leave the sea, would never wish to, for the sea does not experience departures, only returns. Whether you believe in my existence, whether you believe or not in my slim and spectral sea maid body, one day you also will return, for our mother ocean is home to us all. And I and the others of my kind will be waiting to welcome you home.

Mother's Day

We need only remember her. We need only call her by the heart-name every human being has set into their very souls before they ever came to earth, that one word each of us knew before we could even feed ourselves, before we could even walk. The very first word inscribed into the hearts of all of humanity across the entire planet:

Mama

Mami

Madre

Mamo

Mommie

Makuahine

Maji

Majka

Moer

MànaAnya

Móthair

Maman

Máti

Mère

Okaasan

Mutter

Mor

Mari

Motina

Matka

Mother

Text: Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Painting The Soul of the Rose by John William Waterhouse

Hunger

HUNGER

Are you hungry, my Little One?

Never mind - soon it will be time to eat.

Look: Mamma is putting yams in a pot to boil;

you can eat them mashed,

that way your mouth will not hurt

the way it does when you have to chew.

Why don’t you lie down and rest now?

When you wake up, it will be time for dinner.

My Little One, my Beloved, watches me,

sees me take yams from a basket,

sees me place them in the cooking pot.

I make a show of putting the pot on the fire,

cleaning pans, busying myself

with preparing the meal to come.

From the corner of my eye I watch.

Little eyes grow drowsy at last with waiting.

Little eyes fall closed at last, still wondering

when the meal will be ready to eat.

I look down at the stones

which I have placed in the pot.

The water is boiling at last.

I let it boil. My Little One will sleep now,

and I will let my Little One sleep.

Letting Go

Dear Brave Souls

To let go 

Some have a hard time 

letting go of what is no longer, 

what cannot be, what is not,

what has never been. 

People say 

'just let go, 

just let go, 

just let go' 

scattering the platitude like confetti 

immediately swept away by any wind. 

What is it exactly, this letting go? 

No longer allowing the eye

to be caught by the hook...

No longer fastening the lock on the door, 

just letting the door swing as it will...

No longer visiting the graves 

where there is no love 

and no blessing in both directions...

No longer reviewing and reviewing the past, 

even the last moment, 

as though there will be a test. 

There will not be a test, dear soul.

What is it exactly, 

this letting go?

Not reading the same chapter over and over

and over and over, futilely attempting 

to make the indelible facts be rewritten… 

Making new memories of quality

to bathe old scars and new life...

Moving into a larger world 

in which the past 

is but a dot on the landscape

rather than the only continent in sight.

We all find our ways… 

letting go is shaking loose,

letting go is turning

in your great coat, into a new wind

forward into new sky and open road

leaving what cannot be,

and taking all treasure

from the wreck. 

Each in her own way.

Each in his own way.

This comes with love. Hang in there. No one deserves to be nailing the hem of their cloak to the crossroad that once was, but that is not now.

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Painting by Helene Knoop

Noli Me Tangere

Noli Me Tangere

‘Noli me tangere’, he quietly said

‘Do not touch me.’

But how could I not reach out

for my Dear One?

How could I not long to hold

even the hem of his garment,

gain some measure of substance

for what I had thought was lost to me?

Around us, all was still.

Even the birds had fallen silent

in the still air of that miraculous place

as if in wonder at this marvel.

And I, overcome, reached towards him.

‘Noli me tangere’, he softly said

in caution and in love.

Neither man nor shade,

but part of both these things:

a creature between worlds,

between realms, between kingdoms,

between what has been

and what is still to come.

And I reached out to him.

But ‘noli me tangere’, he said.

And I must stay my hand

And my great longing.

And so I showed him my greatest love

as he intended, and as he already knew.

For what he already knew

was that he would never be lost to me.

And my greatest love, in knowing this,

was to let him go.

   

Painting of Mary Magdalene by Louis Janmot Mirror