The Cherubic Wanderers

Sin is failure to notice a flower grow (Angelus Silesus)

When we are trapped in the affairs of the day, the news, and our own interior narratives, feeling like Wordsworth:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers
Little we see in Nature that is ours

and Shakespeare:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,

it’s time to attend to the mystics and their eternal rhythms and to breathe in sync with then. In a sense, mystics are trickster figures. who sharpen our attention and call us back. All mystics of whatever faith point beyond themselves to the mystery, bringing to it the quality of attention.
Recently, Angelus Silesius (1624 – 1677) arrived through a conversation. A doctor of philosophy and court physician in Poland who turned Franciscan priest, mystic and playful poet.

 Belonging

Inside this clay pot are canyons and pine mountains -and the maker of canyons and pine mountains (Kabir)

There are echoes of Kabir’s clay pot in countless texts. The 3^rdC desert fathers and mothers, Abbas and Ammas, talk of the kine and hills of creation within us. It’s William Blake’s ‘to see a world in a grain of sand.’ We belong to this immensity.

All is within us, as in the Krishna myth I retold waybackwhen:

The Child God

once he played in the sand
filling his head, hands and mouth
with its grains, sticks and leaves.
his mother prized open his lips
to clean the grit from his teeth.

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In the Beginning

“I’m not sure where to begin.” As a mentor I often her these words and wonder from where this voice is speaking in the aspirant writer. Old noises in the head and heart? For me the word alignment becomes significant, drawing on your reading, gathering your attention and placing yourself in the path of something bigger. Attending. Listening. Here are a scattering of
points of origin – where you are, epiphany, listening, meditation, contemplation:

A travelling elderly monk and disciple come to a tree where they rest. As they share their meal, the disciple asks, “From where can I enter Zen?” The old monk responds, “Can you hear the sounds of that distant river?” The young one listens intensely and then nods. The old monk raises a finger, “Enter Zen from there.” They carry on walking and after a good while, the disciple asks, “Master, how would you have responded if I had said that I could not hear the river?” Once more the sage holds up his finger and whispers, “Then enter Zen from there.”

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A Windmill Theme – Synchronicity

Round, like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel Like a snowball down the mountain or a carnival balloon Like a carousel that’s turning, running rings around the moon Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind (1956 lyric)

In Namibia this May, courtesy of a Swiss Carl Schlettwein Foundation grant, I was training people in story telling so they can pass this life skill to the children and teenagers they care for. In a number of community storyshops, I handed out two windmill stickers each – one to represent themselves, the other to represent lives they touch.

Enough

These few words are enough. If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here. This opening to the life we have refused
again and again until now. Until now. (David Whyte)

This month I’m returning to the joy of responses to the Saturday story pebble dropped in the lake, the ripples reaching, lapping distant shores then circling back to the very place where the stone plunged into
the still water. The lovely sense of expansion as a 3 minute story echoes, reverberates in a wider conversation. This April, a story plus quote brought
these two of a dozen plus responses.

Quote: Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him know he has enough.(Walt Whitman)

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Sounds of Silence

Whoever is silent touches the roots of speech (Rilke)

Are words silent when not spoken? There they lie these unwhispered shapes with gaps between them. In music, these are grace notes. Perhaps like the nuanced Inuit words for snow, or the 96 Sanskrit words for love, strange we own one word for the many kinds of silences that vary from hostile to silence when contemplating the divine, (Wordsworth’s ‘the holy time is quiet as a nun, breathless with adoration’). to the silence of being alone in nature and listening to the sounds.

Then listening to the subliminal sounds of the blood coursing through, rising at pulse points, The beat of the heart, the sound of the breath. The Buddhist koan (riddle) ‘What is the sound of one the hand clapping?” Cicero’s ‘Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.’ Rumi’s ‘Sing to me in the silence of your heart and I will rise up to hear your triumphant song.’

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Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
Don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
And do not let the past weigh down your motion.
Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,
For life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
From your work you will be able one day to gather yourself. (Miguel de Unamuno)

Many Selves

Writing and storytelling can be blessed work in the sense of play. Here are two versions of a story (Tony Grogan illustrations) that speak many tongues.
Traveller Tzu-gung encounters an old man struggling i to irrigate his vegetable garden. Tzu-gung says, “There is a way to irrigate a hundred ditches in one day with little effort. Take a wooden lever, weighted at the back and light in front. In this way you can bring up water so quickly that it just gushes out. This is called a draw-well.”
Anger shows in the old man’s face, and he says, “I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul, which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them.” (This could be a cautionary AI tale)

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life by artificial
means, and hold it fixed so that 100 years later, when a stranger looks
at it, it moves again. (Faulkner)

The Apple and the Egg

This December I wish to share and respond to Irwin Yalom’s Staring at the Sun (2008). A book to contemplate. I read it a decade ago, reread this week. His dedication reads, ‘to my mentors who ripple through me to my readers.’
enjoy meeting his mentors, the thinkers who inform his work all the way from Gilgamesh.
(‘Sorrow enters my heart, I am afraid of death.’) through Pascal, Dostoevsky,
Schopenhauer, Theroux, Rinpoche and and…

He writes. ‘The act of writing feels like renewal. I love the act of creation, from the first glimmering of an idea to the final manuscript. I find the sheer mechanics to be a source of pleasure. I love the carpentry of the writing process, finding the perfect word, sanding and burnishing rough sentences, tinkering with the tiktoks of phrase and sentence cadence. ‘

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GAGA

Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made….(Browning)

I wish you all a youthful 2026. This month, returning to a theme, GAGA (gracious aging, grateful aging) sharing from a recent storyshop in Sedgefield. We begin by playing the song, Don’t let the old Man in. Here are 4 verses :

Don’t let the old man in I wanna leave this alone Can’t leave it up to him He’s knocking on my door….
Many moons I have lived My body’s weathered and worn Ask yourself how would you be If you didn’t know the day you were born.
Try to love your wife And stay close to your friends Toast each sundown with wine Don’t let the old man in.
When he rides up on his horse And you feel that cold bitter wind Look out your window and smile Don’t let the old man in.

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