by Pat Schneider

An invitation to notice and appreciate the world around us and look for its goodness. From this poem, as well as some others by her I came across, it seems clear that the American poet and author Pat Schneider found it in many places, before she died not long ago at the ripe old age of 86. Her website (which now appears offline) offered her range of books, but also a little video of her and her husband reading their poetry and talking about how they met, which gave me a little window into their life that spoke of goodness too…

Easy to overlook the steady presence of the ordinary things around us, but a wonderful source of quiet joy when we wake up to it. As Pema Chodron said: mindfulness is loving the details of our lives… and how wonderful to feel they love us back!

PS. Settling the mind helps us surf the waves of life and be awake to the many ordinary sources of goodness in it. If you’d like to practice together with others, you’re very welcome to join the free daily sits!

Photo by Orlova Maria on Unsplash

by Martha Postlethwaite

Reassuring and wise words by Martha Postlethwaite. It sounds like she’s been on quite a journey, which lead to writing a book called Addiction and Recovery: A Spiritual Pilgrimage and now sees her work as the pastor of The Recovery Church in Minnesota. This poem has been shared many times and has even inspired Allie Weigh to compose a choral piece around it… I guess it struck a chord! 😉

To me it speaks of the importance of pausing, taking time to practice, going on retreat. This is where I find moments of clearing in my often full life, and they are so important! It is in the spaces in between getting caught up in thinking that insights have a chance to arise and get noticed, that ‘turning in a different direction‘ becomes possible. As I’m writing this, I can feel longing for a retreat space arising, I know how much that helps me ‘to give myself to this world so worthy of rescue’… Luckily, there are opportunities for retreating coming up in the dark days between Christmas and New Year that offer space for ‘waiting there, patiently’… and seeing what gifts land ‘into your own cupped hands’.

Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash

But the miracle had come simply
from allowing yourself to know
that you had found it, that this time
someone walking out into the clear air
from far inside you had decided not to walk
past it any more; the miracle had come
at the roadside in the kneeling to drink
and the prayer you said, and the tears you shed
and the memory you held and the realization
that in this silence you no longer had to keep
your eyes and ears averted from the place
that could save you, that you had been given
the strength to let go of the thirsty dust laden
pilgrim-self that brought you here, walking
with her bent back, her bowed head
and her careful explanations.

No, the miracle had already happened
when you stood up, shook off the dust
and walked along the road from the well,
out of the desert toward the mountain,
as if already home again, as if you deserved
what you loved all along, as if just
remembering the taste of that clear cool
spring could lift up your face and set you free.

by David Whyte

This poem found me, rather than the other way around, on the day after I came back from a deeply nourishing retreat with Alistair Appleton on Holy Isle. It spoke exactly to my experience of deeply drinking from the well of embodied heart practice, where I felt ‘you no longer had to keep your eyes and ears averted from the place that could save you’.

It’s curious how this path of mind-fulness practice seems to lead me – and many others – more and more to the body, to the heart. And when resting in the rich and textured awareness of the body, our ‘careful explanations’ are no longer necessary because there is the direct experience of true “knowing what is happening while it’s happening, no matter what it is” (as Rob Nairn would say it).

During this retreat, it was particularly the intimate re-acquainting with my own heart that felt like ‘the taste of that clear cool spring’ which could ‘lift up your face and set you free’. And yes, I am deeply thankful for it.

I’m aware that this poem connected very directly to this particular retreat experience, that it was the silence, the people, the meditations and the teachings on the island which brought me to this well from which I drank deeply. I wonder what experience led David Whyte to write it, or how it speaks to others. Do you feel you’re walking ‘out of the desert toward the mountain, as if already home again, as if you deserved what you loved all along’? Or are you feeling ‘the thirst that caught in your throat’, the ‘hard pilgrimage’ that the poem speaks of? And if so, what is it you need to allow yourself to know that you had found that well and to not ‘walk past it any more’?

There may be tears. And prayers, and memories, and a long and hard pilgrimage. But right now, I know this well is here, right here, welcoming us to drink as soon as we’re ready. Let’s drink deep.

by Denise Levertov

A short and simple, but to me very recognisable poem by Denise Levertov this week. Having just stayed in the midst of tree-covered, mountainous Norway, it feels easy to relate to the mountain as the vast ancient beingness that can feel so close and present one moment, and inaccessible and hidden the next. Curious to notice patterns of when and how that happens…

And completely ok. In mindfulness, we’re training our ability to return, to ‘reconfirm that witnessing presence’, to come back again and again into connection and presence. Nothing has gone wrong when we lose it, when we ‘forget or refuse’ to turn to it – it’s the human condition to be lost in thought as Eckard Tolle says, or in the words of Rob Nairn: to be addicted to distraction.

The good news is that the mountain is always there. We didn’t create it, we don’t have to manufacture it into being, we just turn to it and notice – and forgive ourselves readily when we forget and lose it. No big deal. But what a joy when the veils lift and we’re right there, in witnessing presence.

How is it… now?

Photo by Edwin Haspels

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and to try to love the questions themselves
like locked rooms and like books that are written
in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers,
which cannot be given you
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live along some distant day
into the answer.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

It can be so tempting to approach mindfulness and insight from the realm of the intellect, and to think that if only I understand what’s going on, if only I know, then all will fall into place. And yes, it may, but again and again I find the answers need to have their ripening time, and if I try to fast forward they just don’t actually land.

And then, one day, I hear the same thing yet another time, and suddenly it’s crystal clear. “Have I been deaf, all these years?!” a fellow practitioner asked out loud when a penny finally dropped. Rilke reminds me that it’s ok not to know, that “living the questions” is a very alive and fruitful place in itself…

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash