Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape, meditation, offering, Poetry, prayer, Wales on June 2, 2019| Leave a Comment »
OFFERING OF THE MANDALA
Mountain breathes out.
I breathe in.
Still air.
Sky turning slowly blue.
A wood pigeon sings its call to prayer.
An offering of hawthorn blossom sprinkles the valley.
There is nothing that cannot be healed.
Nothing that cannot be lost and found.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Celtic Otherworld, landscape, Llyn Carrig Bach, messenger, offering, Poetry, sacrifice, transformation, votive, Wales on June 19, 2018| 3 Comments »
OFFERING AT LLYN CARRIG BACH
Down through green waters
holding on to nothing
but one gift and that is
not a name given me
nor any weight accrued.
A lightness of purpose
bows my spine, the familiar
flickers and fades.
Down through brown waters
summers deep. I am peeled
reflected transparent
becoming triple, a tongue only,
a dance chained to eloquence,
a swift blade and its ghost only.
Sunlight and its memory
sprout seeds. Bright rolling hills.
Down now the black black tides
too deep to know how deep,
the glue of space and time slivers.
Cloaked I am now in a
thousand, thousand names.
A single word transfixes all.
A cauldron, a chalice, a pot suspended.
Gentle enough is the heat of that breath,
Slow slow and smooth the strokes of air.
Down through self-luminous waters
beyond all monsters and their messages.
Beyond all thresholds, all territories.
Suspended, all that I was, poured out
as a haul of fish slithering from its nets,
silver and glistening moment forgotten.
Hatching, there are pinions unfurled,
a cry rising up into a long throat.
Down through star-filled waters.
Bubbling up: the names of rivers and sea deities,
and warriors of watched misty islands
and cold air, spray-filled, and cries of gulls.
The hiss of sand blown through marram dunes.
Mistaken for a notion who is now a god,
footprints elide, pooling perfect syllables:
a sprinkle of star-flowers, the promise of dusk.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, art, consciousness, dawn, distinction, elucidation, gayatri, inner voices, inspiration, interpretation, magic, muses, nature, ocean, offering, Poetry, purpose, river on February 21, 2013| 2 Comments »
GAYATRI
They are there again-
Whispering voices
Measuring word against feeling,
Shaping edges, building coastlines,
Collecting drift for rafts,
A vehicle for mind,
A conveyance to elsewhere.
In the grey flow,
The river before dawn,
(Accompanying the purposeful padding
Of cats seeking a perfect
Place to curl or watch),
There they stand midstream,
Upright, silent upon silent,
Chant snaking over the water’s lap.
I shall go to that ocean’s edge:
Hiss of sand grains stinging
The dry marram grasses.
Listen to the wide waves roll in,
Their deep rumble of the miles
Through the soles of my feet.
Watch the cloud build and fade,
The cry of gulls, tasting salt.
In cold dawn
For whom does the blackbird find
Its mellifluous river?
For whom does the raven call
Across the wild moors?
And for whom,
On his columned tower of air,
Nearly beyond sight,
Does the eagle send out
His long, descending cry?
To reveal the truth:
Nothing but the interior,
Masked by, revealed by.
A prison of the recognised,
Of memory, of habit
And well-trod pathways
Reinforcing a clutch of clues.
To reveal the truth:
Nothing but an exterior,
A view devoid of viewer,
A shaped, echoing chamber
Of what is not elsewhere.
Emissaries of the void,
Mediators of re-orientation,
Skilled in gematria,
Consulting tables of correspondences,
The magical hours of day and night,
Sigils of the planetary spirits,
The magic squares, tablets
Of the Thrice Great.
Translators and interpreters,
Riding the words spluttered
By the depths, by the flocks
Of wild thought scattered
By an eye upon a lituus.
Measurers of geomantic force –
The will of the interior dragons
Of elemental necessity.
This they are.
(Or so the child, over-tired, set to sleep on chairs,
Believes, mishearing the backroom boys at their
Smoky, affable, night-long poker game:
A wash of rising, falling stories, subdued bluff
And laughter, silence and staccato curse.)
Through that long, slow flow,
The grey river, never ceasing.
The memory of ice-fields, ancestral shrines,
Ghosts of prayer flags, squalls of chant.
Bone thin fingers, urgent, prising apart
To get one more view, to reveal
A fall of trigrams, a cipher, or
A terma, space-hidden.
My own dear companions:
Weather-wizards,
Shepherds of storm and lightning,
Weavers of reeds and grasses,
Compounders of root and petal.
If it is you, then blessings and apologies.
Out of step, out of time,
The world waits no more
For eloquence or art
That weaves mind and matter
By the fireside.
We are blackbirds
In the cold dawn;
Ravens crying out fierce joy
And ineffable sorrow to empty hills;
Eagles beyond sight,
Forgotten by the grass-eaters,
Turning upon an exhalation of air,
A gesture of word,
An alchemy of heart and breath.
A pinch of insignificance,
A deja vu,
A rusted key
To a forgotten door
Within a buried ivy cave
In a twilit,
Twilit world.
For no-one but ourselves,
Ourselves to ourselves,
We raise cupped hands,
Let the clear water fall sparkling
In sunlight,
Let the hymns rise and fall
To the sun, the world,
The watcher within,
Purified, cleaned, emptied,
Made silent once more.
Silent in mid-stream.
The lapping waters.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Buddhism, Chöd, dance, dimensions, distraction, letting go, Machig Labdron, offering, roads, silence, ways.paths, Winter, words on February 4, 2013| 5 Comments »
CHÖD
There is no artifice to the morning,
No allegory, no metaphor.
It is a clear road, known,
Never before travelled:
A cold wind streams from the North,
A dissolving moon sliding slowly down.
My purpose for existing,
Maybe only to be a friend
Of this little cat (future Buddha)
And to offer comfort where I can,
Watching the light grow and spread.
A flood of fast despair boiling tragically,
The collapse of possibilities, the revealing of wounds.
A world that is not enough, cast away.
The wonderful gods we have chosen,
Radiant with omnipotence, turn out to be
Exaggerated parodies of our own neuroses,
Given all power and now driving sanctioned insanities,
Mitigating circumstances for all atrocities,
All excuses sinless and shining.
In a high field the ice winds
Flow around a young girl dancing,
Naked, spinning a drum.
She has no possession, nothing of value
That she has not given away.
Her breath, her flesh, her voice, given away,
Her dance, to feed the ever hungry,
To clothe the ever despairing,
The hungry ghosts and tragic gods,
The parasitic demons, the lost children,
The bright feathered ones.
Within a vessel of silence,
With words of silence,
With melodies of silence,
She gives it all away
Until she has everything and nothing.
Drum like a heart at the heart of reasons,
At the heart of reasons not to,
At the heart of simply no other options,
At the heart of no choice.
Giving it all away.
All the language, all the fabulations.
Here,
This is yours, this is yours,
Feed and be satisfied.
There are no paths here to this field,
Nor are there any roads that lead away.
A road is an excuse not to stay where you are.
No future has ever been laid down by a road:
They simply return us
To where we have already trodden –
Debris of an old campfire, burnt cans,
Strewn plastic, shredded in tatters on black branches,
Whiff of ordure and wet ashes.
Do not follow the ones that say follow,
The bright parasites, shining destroyers of choice.
Pioneers of novel disaster, slaves to habit,
Recycled, irrefutible logics.
Step off the road, just step off the road.
If it is a new destination you seek,
Step off the road.
Return to the silent grasses, wordless whispers,
Mycelial clusters of small symbiosis
That feed the hungry ghosts
The roots and white fingers of dirt and dark.
Step off the bright road
That heads for war,
The bright road to a bright future.
Step off, sink down, be silent.
Refuse to be moved by impatient passions,
Goaded by entrepreneurs of stolen honesty.
Give away all the excuses that tell the reason why not,
Feed them to the subtle beasts.
Open to the cold north air, itself of itself.
A hollow, ringing emptiness:
Words that are of less value
Than last autumn’s torn, sliding, burnt brown leaves.
Heard only by those already listening,
Maps to those already on that path,
Validation of shared insanities.
Chanted the chanted spells,
To wake the world with word and song.
I shall sink to silence,
Sink to silence
Where the spinning drum
Calls the hungry demons,
Who, satisfied will turn flakes of laughter,
Sink to earth and dissolve.
A word to silence,
A thought to breath,
A soul to the winds,
The cold north winds.
Chöd is the Tibetan Buddhist/Bon practice of offering oneself as sustenance to all beings, a stripping away of owned existence, owned energy, owned thoughts, owned beliefs. This piece emerged from a pre-dawn slushing of phrases and ideas. It started as one thing but changed in the focusing upon it to something else. Machig Labdron is a popular figure, portrayed as a naked young woman with long, flowing hair, chöd drum in hand, dancing. She was an influential yogini.
simonhlilly 