Poems I Journey With 28

T.S. Eliot said in “Burnt Norton,” the first poem in the sequence of poems called “Four Quartets,” that “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” Reality here, I contend, can be interpreted as all that wears us down as human beings as we try to negotiate our way through life, as we try to cope with its many highs and lows and make some meaning of our own journey through it. Again, I repeat this great poet’s words merely to highlight our need for some form of escapism from time to time: a good holiday, an inspiring read, celebrations of all kinds, concerts, drama, plays, music recitals, and all the cultural conventions and traditions that attempt to help human kind cope with the “jagged edges of existence” or “reality” as T.S. Eliot puts it in the above quoted poem.

Here, I’d like to return to two poems from the pen of our great national Nobel Laureate for Literature, W.B. Yeats and reproduce here for the readers of these musings two lovely refreshing poems that quite soothe my drooping spirits in these stressful days after a traffic accident.

Poem 1: The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1888):

Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Poem 2: The Song of Wandering Aengus

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Source: The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)

Briefest of Commentaries

Yeats was born in 1865 and so he was only 23 when he wrote “Lake Isle of Innisfree” while he was 34 when he wrote the second poem. Eleven years is a long time in anyone’s life, and the second poem is obviously a far more mature and far deeper poem than the first. However, they are both written against the background of the nourishing and sustaining power of nature for us humans. In short, a good walk out in nature can heal many a broken heart and lift many a depressed spirit. These poems help me cope with life then at this first level, that is, at the level of the balm, the comfort and the healing that nature can offer us if we are open to her charms.

As Yeats grew older he became much more interested in what we in Ireland call the “Celtic Twilight” period, namely that Romantic turning back not alone to nature, but also to mythology and the strong links that mythology had with nature as it developed.  Also Yeats as a poet became far more enchanted with anything to do with mystery, mystique and, indeed the mystical. To commune with nature was to commune with the sustaining power behind that universe – the pagan Celtic gods as represented in that wonderful body of Gaelic Celtic mythology that he himself did much to preserve and to promulgate.

The “fire” that was in his head is a very potent line because it shows the passion for nature that is in Aengus’s mind and indeed in that of the poet himself. Again, Aengus cuts and peels a “hazel wand” and we are immediately enchanted with a magical act that brings us into a more mystical world to which we can escape from the harsh reality around us.  Everything around Aengus is magical and mystical and shot through with the powers of the gods of nature. There are moths on the wing there while the very heavens contain the mystical “moth-like stars” and the repetition of words serves to enchant us further as this is indeed the song of a wanderer through nature with all its healing attributes – indeed it yields up a “silver trout” to feed us on our journey.

Then we are invited into Aengus’s company as he lights a fire on the forest or wood floor, and then some mysterious person calls Aengus, or indeed us the reader, by our name. For sure, we are now in the mythical and mystical woods of the Celtic imagination, of the Celtic Twilight.  Indeed, we are so enchanted that we want to stay there with Aengus.  Like a fairy presence, this female voice changes into a beautiful girl who enchants Aengus and us the readers:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Reading the final verse, this commentator writing these few reflections feels old like Aengus in the poem: “old with wandering” or old and worn out from looking for meaning in an often sad and painful world.  But this final verse is full of promise and hope; full of beauty and truth; full of wisdom and inspiration, for we truly can live in an enchanted world when we read those wonderful final lines of this second poem:

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Poems I Journey With 23

Who amongst us does not at times wish to return to the more innocent and carefree world of childhood as we remember it, if only to escape the monotony of our daily lives or indeed its many troubles? In other words, nostalgia is no bad thing once it does not become an obsession that prevents us from dealing with problems that must be dealt with in our lives. One dictionary definition of nostalgia describes it as a wistful desire to return in thought or in feeling to a former time in one’s life, and in this sense it is mostly sentimental in thrust.  But we are allowed to be nostalgic and sentimental sometimes surely?

As I sit here writing these thoughts, I am travelling back precisely forty-seven years to the autumn days of 1969 when I was in fourth class primary school. We had a wonderful teacher called Seán Ó Sé (John O’Shea) who was an erudite teacher in most subjects, but who loved poetry and gave all of us an appreciation for its form, metre, rhythm and rhyme. I remember well his beating out the rhythm of any poem, whether in Irish or English, with his “bata mór” or “big stick” which he actually rarely used as he was essentially a kind and caring teacher. He would beat his “bata mór” on his old wooden desk.

Portrait of Thomas Hood

After this brief introduction, let me offer the reader a poem called “I remember, I remember” from the pen of Thomas Hood. For me this poem brings me back into that old classroom when I was just a sensitive little boy of eleven years of age. So, I am unapologetically indulging in nostalgia and sentimentality now, and sure why not!  Thomas Hood(1799 – 1845) was an English poet, author and humourist, best known for poems such as "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt". Hood wrote regularly for The London Magazine, the Athenaeum, and Punch. He later published a magazine largely consisting of his own works. Hood, never robust, lapsed into invalidism by the age of 41 and died at the age of 45. Other poets that were his contemporaries were the likes of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the many other lesser Romantic poets. Obviously Hood would not have been as famous, yet his work was indeed very popular. The poem “I remember, I remember” needs little or no commentary. It is enough to read it and reflect upon it meditatively and if it is sentimental superficially, I believe that it contains a certain deeper truth worth hanging on to. Enjoy, even for the briefest of moments. 

I Remember, I Remember

I remember, I remember
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon
Nor brought too long a day;
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away.

I remember, I remember
The roses red and white,
The violets and the lily cups--
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday,
The tree is living yet!

I remember, I remember
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;
My spirit flew in feathers then
That is so heavy now,
The summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow.

I remember, I remember
The fir-trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from Heaven
Than when I was a boy. 

Poems I Journey With 21

A young S.T. Coleridge

One of my favourite Romantic poets is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I was lucky to study him from two angles, once in an English Literature course at undergraduate level and once at the level of philosophical theology whilst studying at postgraduate level. That means that I have been lucky to have studied both his poems and his literary/theological/philosophical prose works. Coleridge (1772 –1834) was a complex individual and an extremely erudite dilettante, being a poet, a literary critic and philosopher as well as being an avid walker and lover of nature. He was also a wonderful raconteur who loved to regale his friends with stories and witticisms. Again, he was more Dionysian than Apollonian in temperament, yet in his philosophical and theological musings he could readily access and use profitably and aptly the higher reaches of logical argument and thought, thereby embracing both heart and head in a splendid and felicitous harmony.

With his friend and colleague William Wordsworth, Coleridge was a founder of what is called the Romantic Movement in England. His most anthologised poems and well known poems are The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan while his major prose work Biographia Literaria is an amazingly erudite, eccentric and extremely sui generis  work of his literary imagination. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was and is highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture through his studies in the German language and German philosophy at Gottingen University.  Coleridge, as a result of his concentrated studies, coined many familiar words and phrases, including “suspension of disbelief, the “esemplastic power of imagination” and many more. He is noted as a major influence on Emerson and American transcendentalism. In short, then, we may summarise by saying that it was through Coleridge’s writings and translations that German transcendentalism entered the English and American Romantic Movements.

On a personal level, throughout his adult life, Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression. Some have speculated that he had bipolar disorder, though that is impossible to prove definitively. However, it is important to note that he became an addict of opium through its medicinal and all-too-easily attainable form called Laudanum. All of this feeds into the wonderfully complex and inspiring thought of a great poet and marvellously talented critic.

The poem I wish to offer the reader this evening is one of what is called his “conversation poems” namely “Frost at Midnight.”

Frost at Midnight

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud--and hark, again ! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings : save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not ;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, everywhere
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. 

Briefest of Commentaries

Here in this wonderful poem we encounter the very quintessence of Romantic poetry: an openness to the splendour, wonder and magic of nature where even “[t]he frost performs its secret ministry.” In other words, from the very first line of this poem we encounter the mystery of nature in the wonderful patterns frost forms all around us on a winter’s night. It is important to note that Coleridge attributes power to the frost, namely the power to perform a ministry or ritual that brings the believer into communion with the very heart of nature, namely the Creator revealed through the mysterious and wondrous patterns performed by a minister called “frost.” Again, what we have here is the personification of nature in the workings of the frost. It is significant, also, the Coleridge ends the poem with a second reference to the frost’s ministry in the third last line of the last stanza.

From the first we are drawn into the profound solitude that obtains in the poet’s country cottage in Cumbria. We encounter all the sights and sounds of Coleridge’s surroundings depicted in wonderfully clear and vivid images: “my cradled infant slumbers peacefully,” “the thin blue flame lies on my low-burnt fire,” the “film which fluttered on the grate,” “the old church-tower,//Whose bells, the poor man's only music,” “My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart//With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,” “For I was reared//In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,” and so on and so forth.  Unlike his father, his son Hartley will be reared, attuned to the sounds of nature and not in a great and noisy city. Again, all these images and this last aspiration for his son are essentially Romantic in nature, that is, they serve to help us to commune with God in and through nature.

In conclusion, let me repeat here the final eleven lines of the poem, which essentially sum up the Romantic credo to which Wordsworth et al subscribed and that S.T. Coleridge so eruditely wrote about in his prose writings.  With that thought I leave the reader to contemplate these last lines of this great poem:

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 80

Poem 80

If a country is governed wisely,

its inhabitants will be content.

They enjoy the labor of their hands

and don't waste time inventing

labor-saving machines.

Since they dearly love their homes,

they aren't interested in travel.

There may be a few wagons and boats,

but these don't go anywhere.

There may be an arsenal of weapons,

but nobody ever uses them.

People enjoy their food,

take pleasure in being with their families,

spend weekends working in their gardens,

delight in the doings of the neighborhood.

And even though the next country is so close

that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking,

they are content to die of old age

without ever having gone to see it.

Commentary

This poem is certainly one we moderns would not understand as we live in a global village where the whole world has become our home. We can travel anywhere, now that air travel has become relatively cheap and within almost everyone's capacity.  Very few of us in the Western world do not go abroad for holidays or business or whatever.  Indeed, should we not wish to travel somewhere physically we can even journey there virtually by way of cinema or the Internet, both of which can bring us anywhere we wish imaginatively.  And the imagination and reality are next-door neighbours in a sense. 

As a man of 58 years who was born in a small rural Irish town in 1958 and who experienced at least for a few years pre-television era in that country setting, I would have an inkling of what the poet in the above poem is getting at.  I well remember a young friend's parents having bought their first tv set as RTE, the Irish public broadcaster began life on the 31st of December 1961.  They must have bought it soon enough thereafter, so I would have been about 4 years of age at the time. The TV ushered in the New Ireland, as from then on the global visited in a virtual and imaginative sense the sitting rooms of all the homes in Ireland. Therefore, I can slightly understand the above poem.  Now, we must remember that the Tao Te Ching was written roughly around the sixth century BCE in a very rural and primitive setting so the values of a small community would have been the prevailing ones: working in the fields, ploughing, planting seeds, watering the crops, going to the market, harvesting, participating in  the local gatherings, chatting and conversing.  Everything would have revolved around the extended family or clan, and then around the local tribe or community. The home and the community and the values asssociated with both would have been the origins of the only values known to anyone.  Therefore, it is against this background that we have to understand the above poem.

The above poem presents us with the ideal, indeed with the idyll.  It is purely romantic and is filled with Utopian sentiments.  No such place on earth could possible exist.  However, when we remember that it is a poem, that it was written so long ago and that as a poem it should not be taken literally. Bearing all this is mind, we may then read it and meditate upon it and see what wisdom we might learn from it.

One lesson is that of valuing our lives, valuing our experiences of life in the now, valuing simply being.  We are all so busy rushing to succeed, make more money, get a better job, travel to more countries, gain more wealth, acquire X, Y or Z new item that we often forget that it is the simple things in life that really make us happy like those mentioned in the poem: (i) enjoying our workaday life, (ii) getting in touch with nature, (iii) gardening, (iv) building up and enjoying our homes, (v) enjoying simple but good meals with our families and friends, (vi) supporting all the events that take place in the community, and (vii) happily growing old listening to the sounds of what naturally occurs in nature.

These are obviously extremely romantic and Utopian ideas, but the poem hints that we may experience an intimation of that blessed state by being more mindful and attuned to living in the now.

Namaste, friends. 

Journal of a Soul 46

The Validity of our Experience 1

John Keats by William Hilton

In my last post I mentioned that I have always been captivated by John Keats's remark that "axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses."   This was essentially the philosophy of the Romantic Movement in English literature, a philosophy espoused by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and, of course, John Keats.  It was simply no good thinking something, they argued, one had to feel it as well.  Of course, the Romantic Movement was very much a reaction to the extreme rationalism spawned by the Enlightenment. 

Thoughts are just that, thoughts, while human experience is something more.  Here we come to the "something more" that we humans experience ourselves as being.  What that "more" might be is the subject of much debate, both oral and written.  I have already mentioned that there are those who subscribe to the thesis that we humans are somewhat "less." That "less" is more easily defined as it sets limits to human possibility in a way - what I am referring to here is the whole thrust to the delimiting of humanity by reducing the human phenomenon to mere rationality, or even to matter (materialism) in some extreme cases.

We are a thinking, feeling, intuiting, believing and behaving unity.  To reduce that dynamic unity that we are to any one of its constituent parts is to do gross injustice to the mystery of the complexity of the human entity.  Over the years one understanding of the human brain, from which the human mind springs, is the three-layered model, or what scholars call the Triune Brain. * In the most fundamental of terms, and I realize that I am running the risk of over-simplifying things here, the first first layer of brain to emerge developmentally over millions of years of evolution was that of the reptile brain from which all our basic instincts and drives spring, that section of the brain that would parallel or correspond to the id of Freud's structural model of the psyche.  Next to emerge in that history of evolution was the central layer or mammalian brain where all our emotions and feelings live.  Then, over the millions of years of further evolution the cortical brain emerged literally to cap the entire brain with its fissures and folds that increase its surface area - the central processor of our thoughts as it were - so that it can be contained within the cranium, the bone helmet that protects the whole organ.

The More rather than the Less

A recent wintery skyline over Howth, County Dublin

It is the more rather than the less that we humans essentially are that fascinates this writer, and whether we can explain and explicate its (that is, the more) workings as I have attempted above is really irrelevant in a sense.  Why? Well, every human being is an expert insofar as he or she has their own personal experiences that are really rich.  Such experiences when shared within the community of all human experiences are thereby validated or even invalidated,  It is in this sharing that reality as we know and understand it emerges as something co-validated by all humans. This is important because in this way all abnormalities are consigned to the periphery.

The Turn to Experience in Psychotherapy 

These days we are inundated with the plethora of therapies that are available to modern well-off human beings to help them in their self-development.  In these therapies their experiences are validated, listened to and affirmed.  Prior to the development of such therapies various cultures with their specific traditions offered religions, rites of passage, stories, music, dance, drama and so on as vehicles of such healing. 

In all of the panorama of human existence since its emergence, it is surely the validation of human experience - in its extraordinary highs and in its dreadful lows - that is the most important aspect of any culture worth its salt.

Let me finish with the following short quotation from  Plotinus (205 - 270 A.D.): "The Human race is poised midway between the Gods and the Beasts."

Somehow, for me, this quotation captures the struggle in humankind to be  more rather than less.

* This theory or model of the evolution of the human brain was proposed was the American physician and neuroscientist,  Paul D. McClean. (See Here and Here )  This model of the evolution of the brain is very useful in psychiatry and psychothery as it lends itself well to a holistic philosophical psychology of the mind or to a humane theory of the mind.

Journal of a Soul 35

As if People Mattered

People who matter: Teachers and Students in my School

In the Comment and Analysis section of today's Sunday Business Post the prophetic economist, commentator and author David McWilliams maintains that "(W)here the nuns and priests led, Irish business should follow." He argues that the trends in the poorest parts of the world are strikingly positive and that "Africa is going to be a major economic growth region in the very near future." (p. n19) These words evoked the following thoughts:

Economy

We definitely lost our way as a nation during the years of the Celtic Tiger.  Greed became the chief deadly sin of which most Irish people became both consciously and unconsciously perpetrators. A friend of mine says that this greed was, in part, an unconscious reaction to the sufferings and many losses we underwent as a people during the Great Famine era.  Poor Paddy was no longer depicted as an ape-like creature who was either inevitably drunk or wielding a shillelagh to knock the brains out of the next person to cross his path, but rather a world-recognized entrepreneur with vision, power and newly gained wealth.  

Many years ago I read, as all idealist young people did at the time, that wonderful little classic Small is Beautiful (1973) by by the British economist E.F. Schumacher.  The title "Small Is Beautiful" became a catch-cry for idealists and romantics rather than for entrepreneurs who always subscribed to words like "maximum", "big", "huge" and "great," especially when coupled with the noun "profit."  The catch-cry "Small is beautiful" is often used to champion small, appropriate technologies that are believed to empower people more, in contrast with phrases such as "bigger is better".  The subtitle appealed further to the humanitarian and Romantic in me:  "A study of Economics as if People mattered."  The "as if" has always stuck in my mind as an idealist who saw that entrepreneurs and those in power invariable did not put people first; that they didn't really believe that people mattered despite their many loud declarations that they did; they merely acted "as if."

As a teacher of secondary pupils who are on the Autistic Spectrum and as a Learning Support Teacher for the less intellectually able student, I see the effects of the recent cutbacks on my students.  Not alone are students not getting adequate supports, but many simply cannot afford to pay for their books.  As we now are monitored so closely by the troika of EU, IMF and ECB and are asked to cut ever more meat more from the "national joint" despite the fact that we are practically down to bare bone." "Economics as if people mattered" indeed.  Why, indeed, are we not convinced that year after year of further austerity will work.  You don't have to be a mathematician to see that the figures will never add up.  So who's fooling whom?  Why play such an obviously disingenuous game? Why even believe all these obvious lies we are told?

Tradition 

Old Black and White pictures from the "Old Days" - Tradition

Tradition is something vibrant and living.  It is never stagnant.  It is not something that we solely inherit from some isolated period in the past.  Rather it is something which advances and grows naturally and organically.  For sure, the nuns and priests who went out to Africa and other far-flung missionary territories were imbued with Christian fervour and a desire to help the less fortunate.  Modern missionaries are more attuned to the cultures among whom they work and realize the importance both of inculturation and of working collaboratively with other Christian and non-Christian religions.  The old concern with converting the multitudes is long since dead and gone.  Now the emphasis is on working collaboratively to create a better world under the Christian vision.  I remember, in a recent televised documentary, one wonderful religious sister in the heart of some African country insisting that even if God did not exist she could not leave the work she was doing as she felt she had a duty to help others.  So religious motivation can also be human motivation.  And in the words of the Angelic Doctor St Thomas Aquinas, "grace builds on nature."  Even though I'm quoting this medieval theologian, I am going to take my own meaning out of his words. Now, I do realize that I am reading a meaning into his words which he could never agree with way back in the thirteenth century.  What I am getting at is that deep down our ordinary human experience can lead onward or deeper into religious experience, that in that sense "grace builds on nature."  And yet, if one loses one's belief in this or that idea of what or who God may be, you might fall back on the common denominator, i.e., that humanity in its essence and in its existential manifestation really matters and that it confers its own dignity upon itself from within, not from without.  In other words, in a world of many and various systems of belief and indeed of none, the human being matters, really matters, and is its own conferral of meaning. 

We in Ireland have a wonderful spiritual tradition based on the twin principles of (i) hospitality and (ii) welcome.  A visitor who came to the door was always to be seen as an "alter Christus" or "another Christ."  The Celtic Christian, therefore, welcomed the stranger into his/her house and shared whatever little they had with them.  Both hospitality and welcome are still cherished widely among the Irish.  No wonder Ireland is also known as "Ireland of the Welcomes." 

David McWilliams article is good and the editor has illustrated it with a wonderfully large coloured picture of planet Earth, of great Gaia herself.  The picture speaks of wonder, hope, beauty, truth, stillness, purity, lack of pollution and defilement, of a fitting home for humans and indeed of animal life of all kinds.  It presents a fitting contrast to the underlying greed of economics hinted at in the main article.

Maybe someday, as children of Mother Gaia, we can muster the courage to promote an economics as if people and animals and the earth really did matter.

Journal of a Soul 15

The Transitoriness of Life

All things are passing.  The twelfth century Persian and Sufi poet, Attar of Nishapur, is reputed to have told his followers the fable of a powerful king who asked the assembled wise men of his court to create a ring that would make him happy when he was sad, and sad when he was happy.  After much deliberation the sages procured for him a simple ring inscribed with the words "This too will pass."  Needless to relate, the ring had the desired effect.

Abraham Lincoln in a speech delivered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 30, 1859, a year before he was inaugurated as president of America, ended his speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society with the words:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! -- how consoling in the depths of affliction! "And this, too, shall pass away." And yet let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

Pondering on the transitoriness of life is something that chastens us all too well and all too effectively as Abraham Lincoln so wisely points out.  We poor sad souls often try to make the  achievements of this life somewhat permanent.  Indeed, we possibly need to imagine and to hope that there is meaning in our little lives; that some sort of heaven exists; that there is some comfort even in culture and civilisation which we believe will outlive us for many thousands of years to come.  (And yet civilisations and cultures have come and gone, have ascended to the seeming pinnacle of human achievement only to end in disaster of dusty extinction.)

We try to capture the passing moments in this or that picture or video we may choose to take of special occasions as our families grow up; in this or that picture or video we may choose to take on our holidays in this, that or other exotic or less exotic place which we are wont to visit.  Just recently, I ended up for some reason deleting all the photographs of Italy I had painstakingly taken over the past four or five years.  On reflection, I just did something stupid, having uploaded them to Dropbox.  Be that as it may, the lesson was a good one for me.  I simply cannot hang on to the past, whether I record it on digital camera or video or not.  Those shots were mere images, mere dim representations of life as it passes.  Truly we cannot hang onto our experiences.  The past flits away and the future lies ever beyond us.  The now is all we have.  The NOW.  Let us write it in capitals to emphasise the point.   The first century BC Latin poet Horace was surely correct when he declared in one of his famous Odes which some of us learned at school that we should "carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero" or "seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next."    Or again, I think of poor John Keats, that wonderfully talented poet of the English Romantic Era who perished all too young at age 25 and whose epitaph reads somewhat depressingly:  "Here lies one whose name was writ on water."  He understood all too well the transitoriness of life.  Indeed, he knew he was going to die when he began coughing arterial blood on his pillow some few years before his demise.  (He had also studied medicine before becoming a full time poet)   In other words our little lives are inexorably swallowed up by the great maw of passing time.   

Arranmore cliffs, July 2010 - there from the beginning...

And yet the Easterns are right.  It is our attachments to the things and, indeed, the people of this world that ensnares us, that captivates us, that enchants us, that tricks us into believing in their seeming permanence and imperishability. This was the essential teaching of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, that all our suffering in this world is caused by our attachments to the impermanence or temporariness of everything and everybody around us.  Hence we suffer much and indeed grievously when we lose them to either misfortune or inevitable death.  The Buddhists teach us that meditation on our own dying and death is very effective as it teaches us to value our very living; to value every breath we breathe; to seize the day as Horace so poetically puts it; to live in the freedom of the NOW and not to be enslaved by regrets from the past or fears of the future.

THIS, TOO, WILL PASS!!  

SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI!!                                                                               

Journal of a Soul 7

The universal call to be Mindful: The Bell

It is said well that the longest journey is from the Head to the Heart.  In making our slow way through life we have to engage both, otherwise we are in danger of doing damage to both the Self and to the Other.  The philosopher in me tells me that there is also the faculty of the Will to be engaged also.  Thinking and Feeling alone will not bring me safe and sustained along the road of being and becoming.  There is also the ethical drive in me to will to do the right thing.

When literature really speaks to me is when the author either consciously or unconsciously engages at least two of the three faculties of Head, Heart and Will.  I have just recently finished reading John McGahern’s wonderful book That They May Face The Rising Sun, and therein the author writes with a lightness of touch that can only come after much practice at his craft and after a deep melding of Head and Heart and Will.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said that the signs of a great style of writing in any author were simply the right words in the right places.

Now, to get the right words in the right places is no easy task orally, let alone in its written format.  How often do we “put out foot in it” with others by insensitively using the wrong words?  In short we often don’t engage heart and head in unison. 

Indeed, in the old days a lot of people who made it to the top were often what the MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) called high Ts or high Thinkers.  Nowadays all Business and Administrative courses use many different indicators to train their students so that those who get into any position of power will know more about what makes us humans tick.  Heart and Head have to be deployed in unison for the better (I won’t say best) decisions to be made by any of us in any human encounter.

Then, there is the classic quotation from T.S.Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral which deals with the assassination of Saint Thomas a Becket which our author places in Thomas’s mouth: “It is far better to do the right thing for the right reason, than merely doing the right thing for the wrong reason.”  Now, the words I have quoted here are not verbatim, but they capture the essence of what Eliot had in mind.  It is easy, and indeed right to give money to charity.  It is perhaps easier to give it if you know that others will be impressed.  However, we all know that in this latter case the person’s motivation is selfish and ego-centric.  He or she is doing the right thing for the wrong reason.  There are, then, those who give to charity and they do so quietly – these are doing the right thing for the right reason.  Those who belong to the existentialist school speak of the second of these actions being authentic and the first inauthentic.

To travel the road to Selfhood is no easy task.  When one questions one’s motivation from time to time one often finds that we are a cauldron of contradictions.  We are a mix of motivations, and have not really sorted out what the Self is at all. 

Even the art of grafitti can call us to Meditation!

Meditation, I find, is a good tool to help the Self reach some sort of equilibrium, but it has its high points and its low points.  Let me explain.  There are some people who literally cannot sit still – they have to be up and doing all the time.  This is more than likely because sitting still will cause them to look inside to face the abyss within.  Slowing down, then, is a far too costly thing to do if it means facing what they cannot accept about themselves.  It is often crises in their lives like a heart attack, a bout of cancer, or the sickness or death of a loved one which makes them stop in no uncertain manner to face the real Self within.

Even for those of us who have looked inside and faced the abyss, all is not a garden of roses either.  Sometimes within I find a sense of a very fragile and brittle Self, a Self that can be buffeted way too much and way too easily by the winds of change.  Now, indeed, at other times I find a stronger and more solid sense of Self, too.  But, I can never guarantee which Self I shall encounter.  As I say, even though I have been meditating for years, and possibly not as often and as regularly as I should over those years is no guarantee that I still don’t have to wrestle with “my inner demons.”  That’s why meditation is no panacea, no quick cure for a troubled soul. Meditation brings us down into the abyss of the Self and we will find many frightening things below in the unconscious level of the Self.

However, that’s where the practice of literally concentrating on one thing only, say the breath can bring a stillness or, in the title of a previous blog I wrote, a Still Point – the method of concentration or still-pointedness, if you like. The other main method of meditation – that of awareness – can lead, I find to a dissipation or separation or scattering of the Self as there may be too much going on to be aware of.  Hence, to return to the method of concentration can draw the dissipated, separated and scattered parts of the Self somewhat together.

There is nothing as bad as when I am scattered or “all over the place” or confused or pulled in many directions at any one time.  It is at these times that meditation can help.  It is also at these times that I attempt to engage the Heart as well as the Head, and, indeed the Will.