Available Light

    When a photo appears capture it. Don't think you will come back later and get it, because it will be gone and that particular pattern of cloud and sea and rocks and sand will never be repeated. And don't think that something as limited and primitive as a camera is going to reveal  the coldness of the damp sand beneath your bare feet; or the sound of the oystercatchers warning each other that you might want to make an omelette out of their eggs; or the liminal stillness of the morning air before the wind rises. And that redness in the sky and the breadth of it - don't delude yourself that you are going to show that to anyone. All you can ever do is suggest.  **** Heraclitus was a philosopher who lived about 500 BC in Greece. He thought that the universe was not so much a thing as a process. We, and all the stuff we see about us are in a state of becoming. Nothing is constant and the apparent solidity of things is an illusion caused by the comparative slowness of s...

William Blake's earliest works include his short book of poems Songs of Innocence and Experience . These were originally printed separately ( Songs of Innocence 1789 and Songs of Experience 1794) and contain illustrations made using Blake's innovative printing methods.   The two short books were combined because they belong together, illuminating as they do two states of human consciousness. In writing them, Blake was reacting to the mythical dualism of Milton's Paradise Lost , which Blake greatly admired. Rather than following the pattern of Creation and Fall , Blake perceived the human condition to be a tension between two states, Innocence and Experience which worked in a dynamic tension in each human soul. The two states are portrayed in the book by pairs of contrasting poems. So, in the Book of Innocence we have the poem, The Lamb : Little Lamb who made thee           Dost thou know who made thee  Gave...

When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone, no part of the world can find you. Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love. The dark will be your home tonight. The night will give you a horizon further than you can see. You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive Is too small for you - “Sweet Darkness” by David Whyte

Nikon D7100, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G, 1/400 f8, iso200 A couple of weeks ago Clemency and I drove to Queenstown to hear the poet David Whyte. I think that people resonate with writers when they articulate for us the doings of our soul, and David Whyte has done that for me several times, as I have mentioned here and here and here and here .  I had seen that he was in New Zealand to conduct one of his famous, week long walking tours, which I would dearly love to have joined, but my budget didn't stretch to the $US5,000 a head ticket price. But I saw  A Day With David Whyte advertised and decided that whatever the cost, I was going. Turns out it was only $95 a head, so Clemency, despite the fact that she was only vaguely aware of who he was,  came too. We left home in the dark and arrived in plenty of time for the 10.00 am start. The venue was a kind of back packer type place on the shore of Lake Wakatipu. About 60 or so people were there, mostly women, all of them...

Last hour Last set of minutes Last fill of the tank Last gasp Last call Last cab off the rank Last synod Last Christmas Last year Last Easter in a few days Last time under the pointy hat Last time I'm Last in the procession Last smile Last glance Last straw Last chance Last toss of the dice Last night Last time to be Last one out Last time to switch off the light Last book Last chapter Last page Last word Z Last thing I heard Last thing I knew Last thing I thought of Last thing I do Last will Last testament Last resting place Last seen Last time with you was the Last at Last. Nothing Lasts forever

The conversation today turned to poetry and I was introduced to some poems new to me. One by Seamus Heaney who I was familiar with and several by Malcolm Guite who I was not. The Rain Stick - Seamus Heaney   Upend the rain stick and what happens next Is a music that you never would have known To listen for. In a cactus stalk Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe Being played by water, you shake it again lightly And a diminuendo runs through all its scales Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves, The subtle little wets off grass and daisies; Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air. Upend the stick again. What happens next Is undiminished for having happened once, Twice, ten, a thousand times before. Who cares if all the music that transpires Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus? You are like a rich man entering heaven Through the ear of a ra...

Song: My Love Came Through The City My love came through the city And they did not know him With his beard and his eyes and his gentle hands For he was a working man My love stood on the lakeshore And spoke to the people there And the fish in the water forgot to swim And the birds were quiet in the air. ‘Truth’ - he said, and - ‘Love’ - he said, But his purest word was - ‘Mercy’ - And the fishermen left their boats and came To share his poverty. My love was taken before the judge And they nailed him on a tree With his strong face and his long brown hair And the whiteness of his body. ‘Truth’ - he said, and - ‘Love’ - he said, But his purest word was - ‘Mercy’ - And the blood ran down and the sun grew dark For the lack of his company. My love was only a working man And now he is God on high; I have left my books and my bed and my house, To follow him till I die. ‘Truth’ - he said, and - ‘Love’ - he said, But his purest word was - ‘Mercy’ - Flower...

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front By Wendell Berry Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias. Sa...

Gerard Manley Hopkins was an ineffectual parish priest and a hardworking but unappreciated teacher who, during his lifetime, wrote a small body of obscure and ignored poetry. After his death his work was edited and published by Robert Bridges and is now regarded as some of the most important poetry of the Victorian era; indeed it is some of the most important religious poetry of all time. His work was technically revolutionary. He devised a new form of metre which he called sprung rhythm. Instead of lines constructed of words with a set number of variously stressed syllables, as was customary in English poetry, he constructed his lines of a number of feet - each with a varying number of syllables - but with the stress always falling on the first syllable of the foot. In this way he pioneered a freer rhythmic structure and paved the way for the later development of free verse. But his great innovation was religious, or philosophical or cosmological. He was fascin...

Lately I have been listening to an Indie Christian band called Future of Forestry . The band is led by multi instrumentalist, singer, composer and all round mega talent Eric Owyoung. The music is clever and rich, but I'm always a sucker for someone with a clever turn of phrase, so it's the lyrics which have captured me more than anything. And then there's the name. The group call themselves after a poem by C S Lewis which I had heretofore (and who these days uses a word like heretofore? ) never heard of. But that was my loss. It sums up much of Lewis' passion about the spiritual worth of landscape and wildness. And much of what Eric Owyoung and his friends are on about. The Future of Forestry  How will the legend of the age of trees Feel, when the last tree falls in England? When the concrete spreads and the town conquers The country’s heart; when contraceptive Tarmac’s laid where farm has faded, Tramline flows where slept a hamlet, And shop-fronts, blazin...

David Whyte I awoke this morning in the gold light turning this way and that thinking for a moment it was one day like any other. But the veil had gone from my darkened heart and I thought it must have been the quiet candlelight that filled my room, it must have been the first easy rhythm with which I breathed myself to sleep, it must have been the prayer I said speaking to the otherness of the night. And I thought this is the good day you could meet your love, this is the black day someone close to you could die. This is the day you realize how easily the thread is broken between this world and the next and I found myself sitting up in the quiet pathway of light, the tawny close grained cedar burning round me like fire and all the angels of this housely heaven ascending through the first roof of light the sun has made. This is the bright home in which I live, this is where I ask my friends to come, this is where I ...

David Whyte speaks in his audio series What To Remember When Waking of the myth of the Tuatha De Danann. They were a mythical race from Ireland's past who were tall, magical, mystical people devoted to beauty and artistry. When another more brutal people, the Milesians invaded Ireland the Tuatha De Danann fought them off in two battles, but were faced with a third, decisive battle against overwhelming odds. So, lined up in battle formation and facing almost certain defeat, the Tuatha De Danann turned sideways into the light and disappeared. Whyte's retelling is, to put it mildly, a gloss, but I am quite taken with the phrase and with the phenomenon it describes. Turning sideways into the light is the realisation that there are some encounters that are damaging to all involved in them: no one wins a war. Faced with such an exchange, to turn sideways into the light is to seek another, more whole form of relationship. It is to reject the ground rules of the conversation as they...

David Whyte recites  his poem The Opening of Eyes No matter how much you like a particular song there are only so many times you can listen to it before it begins to grate a bit. I've found this to be true of the almost 2000 tracks on my iPod; they were OK for the first 30,000km of driving, but after that.. well... So lately I've made the switch to podcasts. It's wonderful to drive through some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet listening to some of the most interesting and intelligent and wise people on the planet. Richard Rohr, Robert Johnson and Father Thomas Keating have been profound of late, but the one who has really inspired and moved me is the English/American poet David Whyte. Perhaps it's because he is a fellow admirer of Meister Eckhart. Mostly its because he manages to wrap words around things I have been struggling to articulate for years now. Anyway, if you're interested, log into iTunes, search the podcast section and see what you can find....

A couple of times recently I have used this poem in a sermon, and some people have asked me for the text. So here it is: Song: My Love Came Through The City My love came through the city And they did not know him With his beard and his eyes and his gentle hands For he was a working man  My love stood on the lakeshore And spoke to the people there And the fish in the water forgot to swim And the birds were quiet in the air. ‘Truth’ - he said, and - ‘Love’ - he said, But his purest word was - ‘Mercy’ - And the fishermen left their boats and came To share his poverty. My love was taken before the judge And they nailed him on a tree With his strong face and his long brown hair And the whiteness of his body. ‘Truth’ - he said, and - ‘Love’ - he said, But his purest word was - ‘Mercy’ - And the blood ran down and the sun grew dark For the lack of his company. My love was only a working man And now he is God on high; I have left my books a...

Someone gave me a book of poems for Christmas. Apparently, a survey was done asking New Zealanders about their favourite poems and this book contains the top 100. It's an eclectic mix. Lots of James K Baxter, and all the stuff we learned by rote at school, and some nice little whimsies by people like Margaret Mahy; all of The Lady of Shallot and and bits of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ; Fern Hill and Ode to a Grecian Urn and The Tyger and all the usual suspects, including this one from dear old racist, sexist, imperialist Rudyard Kipling. I know it's not very PC but out of all of them, it spoke to my present circumstances the most. If... If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you But make allowance for their doubting too, If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look ...

What is it with this sudden Cohen revival going on in our household? I went to bed last night and Clemency was sitting up under the covers with 40 year old sheet music scattered all around her, going over the tablature for Suzanne and The Stranger . I only have to play a few bars of Hallelujah ( any version will do, but Jeff Buckley works best ) and she's speechless - drifting around the room with a dreamy look on her face. It's very handy, but also puzzling in a woman whose usual taste runs to Teleman Beethoven and Rachmaninov. Why is it that I woke this morning with a burning desire to listen to Rufus Wainwright singing Chelsea Hotel ? Why is it that since about 5 I have been awake with the song - well, actually, not the song, but one line from the song - running through my brain? It happens doesn't it? A catchy phrase or a haunting bit of melody gets stuck in the gray matter like a piece of gristle between the teeth and no amount of mental licking and pushing can dislo...

AAhhh.. the early seventies. Bell bottomed cords and paisley. Going to the Victoria Coffee lounge where they served Nescafe in earthenware cups and lit the place with candles jammed into the necks of old wine bottles. Sitting around til dawn having D&Ms. And the soundtrack to it all was Leonard Cohen . His dark eyes glowered soulfully out from the cover of Songs Of Leonard Cohen propped against the side of the sofa as the needle cracked and popped its way across the LP: Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river, you can hear the boats go by you can spend the night beside her ... I wish. I haven't listened to him in years. He caught absolutely the angst and self absorption of early adulthood; he gave it all meaning and set it in a bigger context. The last album I bought was Death Of A Ladies' Man , and then I sort of lost track of him. I'd found another even bigger context. But a couple of weeks ago I was given a DVD called I'm Your Man , a film ce...

When I was growing up we had plenty books in our house but not a lot of poetry. In fact, I doubt if we had any. At school, poetry was the rhyming stuff you had to learn off by heart about the boy standing on the burning deck when all around had fled and the highwayman who came riding, riding, riding. I have the sort of memory which could get the poem pretty much off perfectly with one or two readings on the day before the teacher asked for a recital, but which let the RAM get overwritten by next Tuesday, so none stuck around for long. This meant poetry never meant much to me through all my childhood and teen years. One man changed all that. Roger McGough, the first poet I ever read for the sheer pleasure of it. In my late teens I discovered him. He was (is), one of the Liverpool poets . He was a little older than me, but definitely of my generation. He was in a band called The Scaffold, whose other members counted among themselves Paul McCartney's brother. He wrote about family lif...

The Universe seems to me to be a giant consciousness making machine. It throws up ever more complex organisations of matter and ever more complex and self aware ways of being. The Universe does this by evolution; the complex forms arise out of the less complex; they don't just appear. One place where this is seen is in the most complex single thing known to humankind: the human brain. This wonderful instrument of being didn't just arrive fully formed but developed from less complex brains, and they in turn from less. It seems that God doesn't go back to the drawing board and redesign from scratch. God develops by adding things on, and changing what is already there ('redemption', we call it, in Christian jargon). This growth is seen in the structure of the brain itself which has "layers". At the core, in the physical centre, is a brain stem which is similar to the brain of a reptile and is responsible for those functions we share with animals of about sim...