by Rolf Jacobsen translated by Robert Bly

When I read this poem by Norwegian poet Rolf Jacobsen and receive it into embodied presence, I initially notice something unnameable in my heart. Is it longing, heartbreak, love? Sitting with the feeling a little longer, I know that I’ve recognised a deep truth in the poem; a truth that is hollowing out all the dross from my heart to make room for love.

The primordial wild of the phenomenal world – the Ocean – speaks to me in the poem and reminds me how small I am and how humility is really the only position to take. This puts me in my place, but not in a way that feels harsh or unwelcome. It’s a gentle return to honouring the Greater Intelligence of Life (or whatever you would like to call it – God, Buddha, the Universe…) via the bridge of humility. This position is desperately necessary in our crazy world.

The suggestion is that our violent, haughty, self-aggrandising tendencies may be worn away by the constant Sssh of the waves. It’s not a pounding or thrashing of breakers, but a persistent, almost soothing Sssh which also suggests a stilling and quietening. And a taming of ego. Knowing that Jacobsen was Norwegian adds to the atmosphere around the poem for me – moody, elemental coastlines hover in my mind’s eye, the feeling of being tussled by wind and awed by magnificent vistas of sea, rock, clouds, sun.

I happily sink into this humble, quiet place and find my heart bursts with love to be there. How strange that from the point of view of the day-to-day hussle of life we might resist this humbling, when actually it is such a beautiful place to land up at! It feels like deep belonging and soft opening. It even has a tinge of romance to it. Perhaps this is the longing that the mystics-of-old wrote of (Rumi, Hafiz), the longing and devotion for the Beloved. Perhaps the ocean is like the Beloved, a Vast Powerful Awakener, inviting us home to union with all Life.

Ps. Join us at the end of May for the next Mindfulness Meets Mystical Poetry course where we’ll reflect from embodied presence, on a diverse range of poems that connect us to our humanity, our deep intelligence and to something altogether vaster. Are you curious get to know your own particular responses to poems and where they might transport you to?

Photo by Bernhard on Unsplash

The second goal is to see each individual thing
as unified, as one, with all the other
ten thousand things.
In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.

The third goal is to grasp the first and the second goals,
to see the universal and the particular,
simultaneously.
Regarding this one, call me when you get it.

by David Budbill

Wow, what a clear setting out of the human endeavour to live wisely! So simply and concisely stated – and yet as the last sentence indicates, anything but straightforward and worth knowing about when it’s achieved. I loved the combination of sage instruction with the down-to-earth commentary, the dry humour and the teacher-student familiarity I felt in it. This was not an aloof wise one diseminating wisdom – here is an friendly and encouraging fellow human who knows his way around the great endeavours and their challenge.

As so often happens, reading this poem made me curious about the person who the words travelled through, and the life that led to this expression. It came from one of the eight books of poetry written by David Budbill (1940-2016) with a title that intrigued me: ‘Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse’. His life was summarised on his website as ‘humble, engaged, and passionate’, and he brought his poetry into the world with others in musical collaborations reaching diverse audiences. Diving a bit more into the traces he’s left on the great web made me feel this almost childlike excitement: the world is full with wonderful people living what Lama Yeshe would call a ‘joyful and useful’ life, I only know of such a small fraction of them and yet they’re everywhere and here is another one!

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them
Did not board ship with grief among their maps?
Till it seemed men never go somewhere, they only leave
Wherever they are, when the dying begins.

For myself, I find my wanting life
Implores no novelty and no disguise of distance:
Where, in what country, might I put down these thoughts,
Who still am citizen of this fallen city?

On a cot by an open window, I lie and remember
While the birds in the trees sing of the circle of time.
Let the dying go on, and let me, if I can
Inherit from disaster before I move.

O, I go to see the great ships ride from harbor,
And my wounds leap with impatience; yet I turn back
To sort the weeping ruins of my house:
Here or nowhere I will make peace with the fact.

by Mary Oliver

Against the backdrop of spring, we accompany American poet Mary Oliver on her cot by the open window. Lying there, listening to birdsong, she – and we through her – connect with the infinite; to the countless moments since time immemorial, when one human or another has meditated in the sweet company of the birds.
Lying there Mary entertains the mind’s antics, contemplating the human compulsion to try to escape from grief, disaster and dying. With remarkable surety she is not swayed. She has enough insight to know that what Tara Brach calls ‘True Refuge’ can only be found by staying present and making ‘peace with the fact’; allowing the truths of life to be just that, true.

So much of the time, at the first twinge of discomfort we head straight to the harbour and jump on a boat heading for the horizon. We each have a repertoire of ways to not remain here when the going gets tough. When we ricochet into ‘False Refuges’ – addictions, technology or any habit that promises something nice initially but drains or disconnects us in the long run, we abandon the moment, ourselves, others we love or would like to respect, and reality as it is.

Mary Oliver recognises this deeply. She is resolved to stay to ‘sort the weeping ruins of her house’ even though her ‘wounds are leaping with impatience’. ‘Wherever you go, there you are’ says the grandfather of mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn or in Mary’s words ‘Where, in what country, might I put down these thoughts?’ Having the insight, tenacity and compassion to do this is no small feat, but the rewards are great.

What can we inherit from disaster? I find I’m often able to ask this question in the midst of the disaster! Standing there even in the thick of it, I already know and trust that there’s a gift somewhere hidden in this apparent wreckage. This doesn’t sugarcoat anything, and it doesn’t make life nicer. But it does feel real, and in my experience feeling real, is often better than feeling nice. Feeling nice can have a fragility to it, you somehow know it’s shaky ground, somewhere you are twisting yourself out of shape in order to resist the truth. Feeling real is connection. It is alignment with truth, and it brings resilience. You are with life rather than against it.

And this, of course, is the promise of mindfulness training and practice.

Ps. Do you feel inspired to develop the skill of ‘being real’ in order to find true resilience? Come along to our free live guided twice daily meditations on Zoom to start your journey, or sign up for an in-depth progressive training in mindfulness here.

Deep in the mountains the road I’m lost on

by Ron C. Moss

I stumbled across the work of Ron C. Moss, a visual artist and poet from Tasmania, Australia who practices the Japanese art form of haiga, where a visual image is combined with a haiku. He is featured on The Awakened Eye website (“a sanctuary where the oft-overlooked relationship between creative expression and the unknown/unknowable can be openly explored and celebrated”) as one of their artisans – and if you are interested in a meeting place between visual art and the ‘intimate unknowable’, there is much to discover here.

I was moved by a number of his haiku’s and images, but this one stood out in its simple but evocative seeming paradox. Lost in the deep mountains, and yet on the road, which much lead from somewhere to somewhere else. I’m familiar with that layeredness of experience: feeling quite lost on some level, while at the same time a deep trust – or maybe you could even call it faith – that this feeling of lostness is included in being on the right path.

This encouragement to trust is also in Teddy Macker’s long and multifaceted ‘Poem for my Daughter‘, where one of the verses reads:

No matter what you do, no matter what happens,
it is impossible to leave the path.

Let me say that one more time:
No matter what you do, no matter what happens,
it is impossible to leave the path.

In other words, however lost you may feel, you are still on the path… May that be an encouragement in unsure times, so that we may move through ups and downs, times of feeling lost and found, with steady equanimity.

PS Keeping in touch with trust even when feeling lost, is helped by the powerful quality of equanimity. If you’d like to explore that further, there’s a weekend workshop on just that topic coming up…

For designs by Rob C. Moss, head over to his shop here.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won’t even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.

by William Stafford

Many of the poems that we feature here in this blog, that feel mindful, take us from the busy distracted mind towards moments of space, peace and presence. We need to be taken through this door, and poems are little doorways. This poem however, by Twentieth Century American poet William Stafford, begins in the luxuriation of a moment fully embraced – a ‘piece of heaven’, and then seems to concede to the inevitability of going back through the doorway into the melee of a busy mind and life.

Yet even though that necessity to return exists, because the fulsome early morning moment was deeply absorbed, might the day ahead feel just slightly different? The piece of heaven that was not ‘left lying around’ and was instead taken to heart may well live on clandestinely in the body as the poet gets up off the couch.

There’s something so particularly enticing about the way Stafford makes these moments feel contraband. Quiet little rebellions of mindfulness that are intimately secret. He encourages us to swim against the pervasive tide of doing, monitoring progress and conforming. He seems to be saying ‘Claim this moment as yours to enjoy, don’t give a care to what ‘they’ think. Let taking joy in the moment matter.’

Throughout the day I’m aware of many forks in the road. I can continue full pelt through the to do list and end the day frowning and rung out, or I can claim moments of appreciation for just being in between tasks and stay loyal to a human timescale, rather than a mechanical one. Might time be elastic? If I rebel against the urgency of getting on with it all, will I really end up regretting it and failing to keep up? I’ve been entering into the stealthy experiment of claiming these ‘little corners’ as gifts to myself for a couple of days now, and I feel enriched! There’s a gentle mirthful joy about it, like a serene smile with a wink. And my world hasn’t fallen apart yet.

Will you join in the experiment?

PS if you’d like to practice pausing and claiming ‘little corners’ of time and space alongside others, there’s a new Mindfulness level 1 course starting soon…

Photo by Laurence BL on Unsplash