Yoga

Flow.  I started this yoga practice looking for flow, and while I’ve had moments where I could sense flow in my  movements, in my breath, but on the whole flow has eluded me.  Today I found what I was looking for.  And I’m not surprised in the slightest that [...]]]>

Yoga

Flow.  I started this yoga practice looking for flow, and while I’ve had moments where I could sense flow in my  movements, in my breath, but on the whole flow has eluded me.  Today I found what I was looking for.  And I’m not surprised in the slightest that it arrived on the day when I chose to practice with the intention of gratitude.

Writing

Whereas the yoga flowed, the writing did not.  Every word felt like a wrench, as though I had to tug it from my heart to get it to speak, to sing.  I think it was worth it though.  What do you think?

The last of the day’s sunshine is glancing off the flaking white paint of the old lighthouse that stands just outside my window. At the very edge of the land, it is falling into silent decay. The glass from the windows is broken or missing. The doors are boarded up. The lamp is missing. Around all four sides, it is surrounded by high fencing designed to keep out the curious. All day long the gulls and terns swoop over its flat roof and turret, and the ships pass by its extinguished beacon.

And yet, it is still completely beautiful to me. I don’t care that the light no longer pours through thick glass, an intensified beam that cuts through the miles and the darkness. For me, its very presence is a source of light in the world. As I look out at it now, I can see the sunset reflected on the interior walls, turning the drab and dusty turret bright orange. I close my eyes and imagine what it must be like inside that turret, the pure amber light flooding my senses. Tiny dust motes dance on faint zephyrs, and the distant call of seabirds floats in across the waves that gently lap at the breakwater.

There are some places where the division between the earthly and the divine seems less definite. The Celts called these “thin places”: places where you sense the sacred, places where, if you were to reach out your hand, reach it right out in front of you, then you just might feel the touch of an angel’s wing. When you find yourself in one of these places, you enter a state of sublime consciousness, where the very edges of your ego begin to dissipate and you dissolve into the in between.

In these thin places you can bathe in gratitude, you can let your wishes dance from your heart out into the ineffable, you can just be you and know that this is enough. There lies an invitation to just let go, to release your fears, your pettiness, your smallness, your worries, your sadness, your regrets out into the sunlight where they can evaporate like dew in the heat of an early summer sun. Take this invite; take it and feel grace enter into the thin space between now and always. Take it and feel yourself melt into the moment.

I remember another thin place I once visited. It was also a lighthouse. This one was called Rua Reidh and it sits out past Gairloch, on the far western coastline of Scotland. Standing in its grounds, looking out to sea, there is nothing between you and America other than miles and miles of bluegrey waves, their white crests punctuating the Atlantic vista. As I stared out at the enormity of ocean, the sun began to sink beneath the wide, steady horizon, and the sky turned from blue to peach to burnt orange to deep ruby before ending in a black velvet sprinkled with a million tiny stars. Diamond dust strewn across the heavens.

Except this descent into darkness was momentarily disrupted by the rhythmic revolutions of the lighthouse beam, as it cut through the night sky, sending out a long line of light across the cold black waters. Standing so close to this light, with my love standing behind me, his arms entwined around my waist, my head resting against his chest, we are dazzled by the brightness. The cold night begins to settle all around us, but we are entranced by the rotations of the lighthouse beam, and we stay standing there for a long time.

It is possible to fall so deeply, irrevocably in love in these places that the love found there shines throughout a lifetime. It illuminates the days when the sun refuses to rise, and sorrow and confusion reign. It chases away the shadows brought by money worries, parenting woes, work stress and domestic fatigue. It calls you home when you’re lost in the dark. It carries you through the good times too: the birthdays, the Sunday lie-ins, the champagne fizz and the sweet understanding that you find in one another’s arms when you’re reunited after a long day’s work.

I think of all this and more as I stare out of the window at dimly outlined shape of the dilapidated lighthouse. The sun is now journeying around the globe, and night has fallen across the river Forth. Unmanned lighthouses, automated pulses of light, strike a beat in the deepening blue. I stare out and feel profound gratitude for the thin places. They’ve brought me more riches than one person could ever hope for in a single lifetime. A solitary gull cries as it soars up passed my window and out of view, trawling the twilight behind it. I breathe, reach my hand out in front of me, and touch…

Have you visited a thin place?  What did you find there?

Well, first off, I should probably make some kind of mention of the fact that I didn’t post yesterday.  The day started off as I had planned with my full 40 minute yoga practice.  I was still feeling fairly full of the cold, but the yoga seemed to help and I [...]]]>

Well, first off, I should probably make some kind of mention of the fact that I didn’t post yesterday.  The day started off as I had planned with my full 40 minute yoga practice.  I was still feeling fairly full of the cold, but the yoga seemed to help and I felt not fabulous, but good enough.

By mid-morning I felt awful.  My sinuses ached, my face became swollen, my cough barked and my head ached.  I crawled off to bed, waking only for dinner, before crawling back to bed rising only at 9am this morning.  In other words, I missed my writing target.  However, I’m refusing to beat myself up about it.  To be honest, I wouldn’t have the energy to do that anyway – lol!  Instead, I’m being gentle with myself.  I’m being kind, and I’m accepting that when you’re sick, you’re sick, and there’s no point in soldiering on pretending that you’re not.  That’s just a sure-fire recipe to feeling sicker.

So, that was yesterday accounted for – what about today…

Yoga

Today I woke up feeling a bit better than yesterday.  I’m not in as much pain from my head and sinuses, but I have developed dizziness.  Have determined that my yoga practice is probably not the best activity for someone who is exhibiting difficulty walking from bed to sofa!  So instead, I will be practicing savasana today.

For those of you who don’t know what savasana is, Bindu has a beautiful post explaining it, in which she calls it the quintessential restorative pose… a pose of letting go and non-clinging.  This sounds like the perfect pose to adopt for a day like today.  A pose to bring sweet restoration.

Writing

Well, like I said, yesterday was a non-starter for my writing target of 800 words.  Today, however, I’ve propped myself up in bed, and this is what I’ve come up with…

The swans are flying again.  Their great wings are beating in time to their own inner rhythm, moving through the blue like white sails tacking their way across open water.  Long necks outstretched, creating a line from tail to bill that speaks of an elegant focus, undeniable yet inscrutable.  They fly past my window, these three large swans, circling the trio of little lochs that skirt the edge of land and river, before arching their wings back and throwing their wide webbed feet forward.  The water sprays up on either side, some droplets falling on long ivory feathers, others falling back to rejoin the collective.

And then there they are: picture postcard perfect.  Three swans gliding out across the smooth glass surface of the lochan, one following the other, each serpentine neck the exact copy of the others, each sweep of wing feather, each deep ochre of bill.  One rises up slightly, raises both wings, and spreading them fully wide, begins to flap them against the prevailing breeze; the noise admonishes a troupe of squabbling gulls plundering the lochside bins, and then the swan settles once again into graceful poise.

Before long, they take to the skies once again.  Their wide wings extend to full width, their powerful pinions moving in synchronous motion pulling their large white forms skywards.  It all looks so improbable.  How can these white giants pull themselves free from the suck and drag of the water and ascend so assuredly?  How can these birds of the water make the transition from loch to sky look so damn effortless, while I am left grounded, both feet solidly connected to the floor beneath?

It was while running these questions through my head, lamenting my flightless state, that I remembered a quote by J.M. Barrie, author of the book that inspired the flight of so many children’s imaginations, Peter Pan.  He once stated that, “The reason birds can fly and we can’t is simply that they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.”  Perfect faith – what is it to have perfect faith?  And is it so wholly unachievable for humankind to find this state of perfect faith within themselves?

I’ve always been quite resistant to the word ‘faith’.  For me it conjured up too much of an organised religion’s insistence on blind obedience.  Obedience has never been something I aspired to.  But lately I’ve been giving ‘faith’ some more thought, trying to recognise it when it presents itself, allowing it expression when I would formerly repress it, allowing myself to touch it, taste it – hesitantly at first, but now with a growing confidence.  It now seems conceivable to me that it is possible to place trust in the intangible, the indefinite, the invisible.  After all, it is so often the invisible that makes life worth living in the first place.

And I’m beginning to find that faith isn’t something intrinsically antithetical to my way of being.  My need to be autonomous.  My need to be one unto myself.  That I can, perhaps, have both.  That I can accept the unity and the duality of what it means to be alive on this earth, in this skin.  In fact, I would go further and say if I cannot first experience one then I cannot ever hope to know the other.  To recognize oneness, the interconnectedness of all life, then I must also embrace my separation, that sense of individuation, as Jung puts it.

But, of course, it is within that separateness that faith erodes.  We forget that we are a part of a whole and begin to think we are alone.  Isolated individuals shipwrecked on an island of rational absolutism.  Faith, even of the imperfect kind, the kind that means we cannot take to the skies with our feathered brethren, allows us to sense the connections between our tangible existence and our intangible belief in something ineffable, something infinite, something that resides in the essential selves of all living things on this planet.

And I think this brings me to the crux of my uneasiness with the concept of faith: we have been taught that the divine, the numinous, is outside.  In fact, not only outside, but upwards and at a great distance.  Something that needs to be mediated and interpreted.  Something that is too great for just ordinary living souls to appreciate and connect with.  For me, having faith would require that I give up some part of myself to some other who, as an initiate, had attained some form of spiritual superiority.  I’m questioning this now.  Perhaps faith doesn’t require the trappings with which is has traditionally been bedecked.  Perhaps one could have faith, without forsaking their belief in the divine spark that belongs in each and every beating heart.

I stand, both feet firmly on the ground, arms outstretched, open to the breeze, that salt sea tang tingling across my tongue as I inhale deep gulps of fresh air.  The swans are flying again.  But it is not for me to fly too.  James Barrie may have blessed his Peter with the ability to fly, but even he recognised that it is not within us to practice such perfect faith.  It remains an aspiration.  A sweet target that the swans with their outstretched necks may reach, but for me, I remain upon the earth.  My heart, however, my heart knows what it is to defy gravity, what it is to take flight, what it is to soar above lochs and land.

The swans are flying again.  And this time, my heart flies too.

What does the word ‘faith’ bring to your mind?  Have you managed to reclaim it and make it your own?  Or do you prefer to practice your faith in accordance with an established belief system?  I would love to hear your thoughts on this, so please to feel free to share them by leaving a comment.

Do you know, I used to feel worried that I would start to bore people with my flower photography.  I used to think that I should look for other subjects to turn my lens to.  But, to be perfectly honest with you, very few things [...]]]>

Do you know, I used to feel worried that I would start to bore people with my flower photography.  I used to think that I should look for other subjects to turn my lens to.  But, to be perfectly honest with you, very few things make me swoon quite so much as capturing the transient beauty of a blooming flower.

Every flower is different, unique, special.  Every flower has its own brand of beauty.  Their stamens, pollen, stems… the arrangement of their leaves, the configuration of their petals… all conspire to leave me breathless from the very fact that they exisit and I can share in appreciating their presence.

The rhododendrons in the above photos are so common in Scotland at this time of year.  So common, in fact, that they are often overlooked.  We grow accustomed to their annual firework display of colour in the same way that we grow accustomed to the song of the blackbird, or the smell of the sea, or the breeze softly caressing our skin.

How sad.  How sad that a show like this is performed only to be ignored.

So let these pictures stand as testimony that this specific beauty existed at that specific time and it was glorious.  Simply glorious.

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

Don’t let the beauty that surrounds you pass unnoticed.

I’ve decided not to add any words to this collection of photos, other than to say that it’s a study of the sacred space that I’ve created in my home.

I’m happy [...]]]>

I’ve decided not to add any words to this collection of photos, other than to say that it’s a study of the sacred space that I’ve created in my home.

I’m happy to answer any questions you may have about the creation of this space, or about any of the items within it in the comments

These ‘trees of gestures’ are in movement everywhere.  Their forests walk through the streets.  They transform the scene, but they cannot be fixed in a certain place by images.  If in spite of that an illustration were required, we could mention the fleeting images, yellowish-green and metallic blue calligraphies that howl [...]]]>

These ‘trees of gestures’ are in movement everywhere.  Their forests walk through the streets.  They transform the scene, but they cannot be fixed in a certain place by images.  If in spite of that an illustration were required, we could mention the fleeting images, yellowish-green and metallic blue calligraphies that howl without raising their voices and emblazons themselves on the subterranean passages of the city, ‘embroideries’ composed of letters and numbers, perfect gestures of violence painted with a pistol, Shivas made of written characters, dancing graphics whose fleeting apparitions are accompanied by the rumble of subway trains: New York graffiti. ~ Michel De Certeau

I was reminded of De Certeau’s ‘trees of gestures’ when I spotted this graffiti through the autumnal turning leaves, as I walked along the Water of Leith on Sunday.  I’m always so transported by this rural riverway stretching through the city of Edinburgh.  Every now and then you get reminders that there does actually exist a city on either side of this vein of green, and one such reminder is graffiti such as in the photograph above.

While society generally abhors these spray-painted creations, I must admit to having a bit of a soft spot for them.  I love the curving lines, the contrasting colours, the urban tang of anarchy.  I love the idea that this ‘wandering of the semantic produced by the masses… make[s] some parts of the city disappear and exagerate[s] others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order’.

An amorphous, fragmented narrative writ large across the red-fired bricks.

This week I shared a poem called Inchcailloch.  It is a departure from my usual [...]]]> Every Sunday the gently encouraging Hiro Boga hosts a poetry circle on her blog The Flourishing Muse.  I’ve participated in it for a few weeks now, and am discovering a new freedom in sharing words which I had hitherto kept private.

This week I shared a poem called Inchcailloch.  It is a departure from my usual style as it’s much more focused on rhythm and repetition than the poems I usual write.  It’s a poem which is more suited to being read out loud, I thought, and so I decided to record it as a voice thread:

Inchcailloch

Before my face,
white butterflies,
dancing between sunshine and sunshade,
share in the joy of each step.
soar in the rise of each dawn.
sway in the breath of each breeze.
As I am drawn onwards and inwards
to the heart of the myth.
to the heart of the isle.
to the heart of myself.

Beneath bare feet,
the rich dark earth,
malleable with persistent mists,
responds to the shape of each sole.
replies to the depth of each print.
relates to the height of each hope.
As I am drawn onwards and inwards
to the heart of the myth.
to the heart of the isle.
to the heart of myself.

Beyond my flaws,
Kentigerna,
offering sweet, serene sanctuary,
bestirs in the sleep of my soul.
begins in the breadth of my being.
belongs in the flame of my love.
As I am drawn onwards and inwards
to the heart of the myth.
to the heart of the isle.
to the heart of myself.

I always feel deeply moved while visiting this beautifully quiet, green island.  It’s a special place which I frequently visit in my dreams and which often calls to me during my waking hours.  What I wanted to capture in the poem was a sense of that continual returning, and an insight into a journey which, while it repeats and maintains similarities in each repetition, is quintessentially altered upon each undertaking.  It’s a poem which tells of a journey experienced both in a physical sense and in a spiritual sense.

Are there places that you visit that maintain this attraction to your soul?  Where were you last when you felt you made a spiritual connection with your environment?  Have you tried to express this connection, and if so, how?

Sometimes you come across something that is just so perfect, so beautiful, so utterly breath-taking in its natural glory, that words fail.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ~ Anais Nin

Tightly held, the confines of the structures which have contained me, protected me, hidden me, now feel restrictive.  I now recognize the bindings that surround me.  I [...]]]>

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ~ Anais Nin

Tightly held, the confines of the structures which have contained me, protected me, hidden me, now feel restrictive.  I now recognize the bindings that surround me.  I now perceive the limitations they impose.  I now desire release.

And yet, it’s a risk.  It’s scary to move out of the comfort zone and into the unknown.  Nothing is assured.  Nothing is safe.  There are no guarantees that it will all work out.  There are no fail-safe plans.

Do I dare disturb the universe?

These words from Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock reverberate in my head.  Do I dare? Do I dare?  And the simple answer is yes.  Yes I do, because as Anais Nin discovered, staying in the bud is too painful. It is too painful to remain arrested in stasis.  It is too painful not to blossom.

And it’s only from that realisation that I can admit that the bud is of my own making.  It kept me safe and secure, and allowed me to define myself according to its limits.  Limits that I imposed upon myself.  But now… but now, it has served its purpose.  It is time to push through, break out, move past and… blossom.

Nervously, at first, I shake loose a few petals.  They unfurl from their captive state, tentative and more than a little awkward.  They fan outwards from the centre and offer thanks to the rays of sun that bathe their brilliant hue in sweet warmth.  A few more petals escape, and then a few more until… until…

There I stand.  Renewed and grateful.  Open and aware. Transformed and blessed. Unapologetically, quintessentially, honestly me.  Just me. And it is enough.

This post is a contribution to Robert Hruzek’s group writing project at Middle Zone Musings: What I Learned From the Plant World.