Poems I Journey With 3

As Irish children we were all brought up on a literary diet that included the work of perhaps the greatest poet in English of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939). As early as 1923, when he was 58 years of age he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, being the first Irish writer to be so honoured. The Nobel citation described his poems as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."

One of the poems/songs we learnt at primary school was one called "Down by the Salley Gardens" and it it is a song recorded by many singers since. Yeats wrote a note in one of his papers that this song/poem was "an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballisodare, County Sligo, who often sings them to herself." That old song, experts tell us, was "The Rambling Boys of Pleasure."  Yeats' reconstruction of this song is as follows, and it is a song of regret for opportunities not grasped:

Down by the Salley Gardens, my love and I did meet.

She passed the Salley Gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy as the leaves grow on the trees
But I being young and foolish with her would not agree.

In a field down by the river, my love and I did stand
 And on my leaning shoulder, she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs
But I was young and foolish and now am full of tears.

Down by the Salley Gardens, my love and I did meet.
She passed the Salley Gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take life easy as the leaves grow on the trees,
But I was young and foolish, and with her did not agree.

Below is the sung version of this poem/song by one of my favourite female singers - Maura O'Connell:

Journal of a Soul 23

Humpty Dumpty Has A Great Fall

Sunset, Malahide, Co Dublin, June 2013

When we are stressed, things begin to shatter and scatter all over the place.  It is as if the windscreen of our view on the world has shattered into a million pieces.  We might even recall the apt words from W.B. Yeats' poem The Second Coming: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."  Yeats was, of course, referring to a global crisis or disintegration of civilization in the wake of the First World War. The next line, which most people do not quote, strongly confirms  this truth: "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." However, perhaps the idea of personal disintegration is as horrible an experience or fear as that of the more global disintegration of the outer world.  Yeats had summed up wonderfully in these first quoted words the experience of either inner (micro or personal) or outer (macro or global) disintegration.  One thing is sure, disintegration is a horrifying experience as anyone who has experienced any form of break down or falling apart will aver.

Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again

We humans are at base a contradictory and paradoxical sort.  We are, on the one hand driven by greed, envy, anger or ego to conquer, desecrate, rip apart and destroy both things and other sentient beings, and, on the other hand, we are inspired by justice, generosity, pity or love to help, consecrate, embrace, lift up and bind together both things and other sentient beings.  Those of us who are by nature optimists believe that the second human impulse to the good vastly outweighs the former, the impulse to evil.  In other words we are here brought back to the inevitable mystery of squaring good with evil.  Freud spoke about these in terms of The Desire to Live: Eros and The Desire to Die: Thanatos.  Indeed, in speaking so, he was commenting on the basic paradoxical nature of the human condition.

Meditation Helps Put Humpty Together

I better begin this paragraph with a caveat which I will write is capitals here: THERE SIMPLY IS NO EASY ANSWER: THERE IS NO PANACEA.  Meditation is no panacea, no instant quick fix.  Rather it is a help, a sort of brush to help us clean up the breakages of our life - excuse the rather awkward metaphor here.  There is a centre of agency, a Still Point, a Seat where the Observer or Witness sits and from which we calmly review the scattered and broken pieces of our life.  As one who tries his best to pull himself together, I find that time spent in meditation helps me to "get my act together,"  a very common metaphor indeed, but nonetheless very true.  Meditation has to be practised on an on-going and regular basis to give one equanimity and peace of mind where things somehow hold together or cohere for us as we go through our daily tasks.  One won't feel 100% most of the time, if ever, but certainly  you will not be in the failure or no grade stakes where everything shatters completely.

My shadow, June 2013

Michael A. Singer in The Untethered Soul (See last post for details of this book and a link to his home page) suggests that we must move from "an outer solution consciousness" to "an inner solution consciousness" (p. 16).  He goes on to stress that there is a part in all of us that can "actually abstract from your own melodrama.  You can watch yourself be jealous or angry..." (p.16)  I admit that this is far easier said than done.  If one has fallen apart there is no amount of meditating that will bring you back together.  You may have to have medical intervention first, as I did, before I had gained enough stability to sail alone and embrace meditation as a repaired yacht might sail anew into the wind.  I have dealt with students with ASD and OCD where CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) had not a hope of being deployed until the lads had been brought to stability by psychiatric intervention.  Hence,  my caveat in the first few lines of this paragraph.  However, once this caveat has been accepted, reality and commonsense being equally embraced, meditation, then and then only can and does work wonders.

Pointed Questions on the Road to the Still Point or Observer's Seat

Singer refers to one of his teachers Romana Maharshi (1879-1950) who used to recommend that the way to attain inner freedom was to "continuously and sincerely" ask the question "who am I" as you meditate. (p. 23)  In this way, I believe, that such questioning will bring one ever nearer the Still Point of Being or the Observer's Seat (my metaphor for SP).  To finish this post I'm going to use the questions I will use for my meditation session immediately after writing this post:

• Who am I that sits here?
• Who is the thinker of these thoughts?
• Who is the feeler of these feelings?
• Who is feeling this sadness that now inhabits my soul?
• Who is experiencing this confusion?
• Who is feeling this fear?
• Who is feeling this love?
• Who is the one who asks these questions?
• Who, O who is this "I"?

And so on, ever inward to the Still Point... ah but the journey is so long and so slow... caveat, caveat... caveat...