Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, awareness, definition, landscape, language, metaphysics, mind, night, objective -subjective, peace, Philosophy, photography, separate-entangled, silence, sky gazing on January 5, 2016| 7 Comments »
THE ART OF SILENCE
folded breath
a volume of murmurs
that is all
an understanding
discarding options
so as to mimic peace
to sleep, dream or wake.
to turn away from friction –
a wishful free flow
to harmonise, to disappear.
the River of Milk,
our mother’s beneficence
for this dream
the old man, the prince,
the returning journeyman,
rise quietly in the night
to gaze at the moon
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Ancient Welsh poetry, art, black and white, inactivity, landscape, Llym awel, pen and ink drawing, Poetry, printmaking, silence, Wales.Cymraig, Winter, withdrawing on November 25, 2015| Leave a Comment »
LLYM AWEL verse 12 Improvisations
(Part One)
Gvenin igogaur, guan gaur adar;
Dit diulith….
Kassulwin kewin brin, coch gwaur.
“Bees shelter in winter quarters, the weak noise of birds;
A bitter day….
The ridge hill cloaked in white, a red dawn.”
The hives silent.
Bees shut up in winter.
So too, the thin voice
Of birds.
A bitter day of it,
So, too, words fail.
Gagged, gaunt,
All declines to murmur.
The hill ridge
Is cloaked in white.
A red dawn.
—
The hunters for gold
In their hollow halls
Gather murmured dreaming.
Summer is far away.
The dawn flowers red,
But still the birds are silent.
—
The beauty of it:
A silent red dawn.
River murmurs under ice.
—
Their laboured breath:
A cold wind sighing
Through bare branches.
The gold of victory
Keeps not cold
From the heart.
They will dream of
Summer and a summer sky,
And the dance of victory
And the boasts of heroes.
—
This verse has the second half of the second line missing. Rather ironic, as one of its main themes is silence, or comparative silence. The inactivity of the hive I have taken to be a metaphor or parallelism for the host of warriors, inactive, in their lord’s hall. Hence, the imagery of hunting for gold, the warrior’s prize, and bees in summer hunting for pollen.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Autumn, calligraphy, contemplation, creativity, equanimity, flow, landscape, mind, monastic, Poetry, rain, scribe, scriptorium, silence, thought, Wales, writing on November 2, 2015| Leave a Comment »
The long rain, grey,
Has dissolved a fragile distance.
With the wind, it comes and goes.
A silent room, a flutter of words.
A curl of incense, a bitter tea, warms and dries.
Perched above joy and sorrow
A ribbon road turns endless,
With only two steps,
Left and right.
A monk dips his quill.
He has become half-uncial.
A steady curve delights,
One syllable at a time.
A river of knowing
And forgetting.
Though the skin he writes upon
Is his own,
A compassed scratch,
A foliate curl,
Heroditas, Avicenna, Merlin.
A history of mirrors,
A rotated wheel.
A willowed sigh,
This river ink.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, hills, islands, landscape photography, Poetry, sea, silence, space, Wester Ross, Western Isles on August 9, 2015| 2 Comments »
WESTER COAST
These hills, this silence-
Silent enough to hear each sound,
Its beginning, its flight, its echoed end.
Silence as balm,
As high tide harbour wave,
Silence that lifts up, that sustains.
Where weight becomes weightless,
Where distance has a taste.
Where rain curves in
And burnishes the light.
Where breath is more
Than breath, is food.
Where night clothes slow,
And owls name space
And the wind across the grasses,
Across the bracken,
Across the rock,
Across the years.
Named,
Whispered forever.
Whispered names rolled,
Remembered.
Stone,
The music of stone,
The certainty of it,
Of its voice
Across the waters.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged distance, landscape, mist, mountains, Poetry, silence, spring, thought, Wales on March 25, 2015| Leave a Comment »
GLORY PASSES
All the mountains have walked away.
The hills, stirred themselves and flown.
Nothing remains but clouds and mist.
Rivers fall straight from heaven.
Forests, hushed and silent now, listen.
Distance is the well of Time.
I sit without words, empty,
(Though words themselves
Are hollow flocks).
They graze and move on,
Ineluctable patterns,
A partial view of constellations:
Midnight cloud.
It is a virtue to forget,
To remember and to forget oneself.
A virtue to see what is without compare.
Unremarked, glory passes
As sun and storm on a Spring day.
Jewelled with light the bare branches,
Silver and dark the upland roads.
The sky laughs at the invention of morning,
Rises up as mountains return
Refeshed and glistening,
World without end.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, drawing, night, Poetry, silence, Wales, Winter on January 12, 2015| 2 Comments »
1
In motionless dark shivered with starlight
A low roar not from road nor wind.
Ten thousand firs in stillness stirring,
Twined convocation a thousand valley oaks
Or little river Dulais its rippled bed piled up
Become two miles accumulated rush.
Or whispered leaving souls rising, losing weight,
Drawn towards new light, free, tumbling
Between branch and bough and cold airs
2
Scoured hollow the heart, diminished in each small death.
Close by the hedge an old dog lain below frosted ground
The weight of winter, time worn thin.
3
Night sky frozen cold
Stuttered shivered stars
Worn thin, restless
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, art, change, landscape, movement, nature, placement, Poetry, searching, silence, Sound on April 5, 2014| Leave a Comment »
PERCEPT
Moving towards silence
A step of attenuation
A lessening and an expansion
As when
Rain begins
At the edges of woodland:
A green cooling,
A descent of,
A coalescence.
The slowing breath
An evaporation of thought,
Of need,
A taste of solicitous solitude,
Space to merge
Within and without.
A new flame lit,
Passing from, out of,
Into, transparency,
Veils parted, reformed.
Lands laid out
Slowly travelled,
A shadow of sunlight
And cloud.
The sound of a small stream
Hidden amongst grassesPERCEPT
Moving towards silence
A step of attenuation
A lessening and an expansion
As when
Rain begins
At the edges of woodland:
A green cooling,
A descent of,
A coalescence.
The slowing breath
An evaporation of thought,
Of need,
A taste of solicitous solitude,
Space to merge
Within and without.
A new flame lit,
Passing from, out of,
Into, transparency,
Veils parted, reformed.
Lands laid out
Slowly travelled,
A shadow of sunlight
And cloud.
The sound of a small stream
Hidden amongst grasses.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged before dawn, birds, coincidence, dawn, dawn chorus, expansion into space, frost patterns, landscape, mind, moon, nature, Poetry, silence, Sound, unity, Winter on January 27, 2014| 6 Comments »
DAWN CHORUS AND MOMENTS OF FROST
As if this feather, slow-turning, falls,
One breath of ice, branching blades
Arcing ghosts of fern, arced ghost of forests.
Pinioned cold, eager, aware, edge fractured.
Fingertips feeling for pattern, the familiar
Stretched pale, translucent.
As the scattered, sprinkled pierce of sound,
Woven between moonlit pale dawn wind,
Tumbling, cascades and choirs,
A flurry of beak and breast-soft down.
As all life joined up by song,
No less, no more meaning than this.
Small hearts full and pouring,
The vessel, vehicle, of the world.
No more and no less than this:
The opening of small mouths,
The fast tremble of accepting hearts.
Light now, and slow revolutions through space.
This place, placement, placid, pellucid.
Transcendent fingers frosting fine feathers,
Growing, though not grasping,
Water flowers framed in ice.
Small time, halted, crystalline.
Slow arcs of how things are,
How they happen.
Seen, unseen, diverted, amalgamated.
Dawn chorus and the moments of frost.
Suspended breath, then
Light and song.
No more, nor no less
Than this.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged action, aphorism, art, books, dream stream, frenzy, oracle, passivity, Poetry, publishing, seeking, silence, The Sunlight Sutras, value, worth on November 22, 2013| 2 Comments »
COMMENTARY ON A SUNLIGHT SUTRA
All language
Is a commentary on the
Nature of silence.
All movement,
A desire
To return to stillness.
(In the still, clear cold of almost dawn, the phurba of a cock pheasant’s call melts divisions, ripples out air to the small, bright horizon.)
Time is dead,
Slain by measurement
And subdivision.
Space
Stutters directionless.
Holding too close to sense, we have turned senseless.
Grasping the meaning too fast, we make mockery of Mind.
We have huddled and gathered in
By enslaving and subduing.
We run from paradox, who are maintained
By its pretty dance.
( upon the water a million suns corruscate. They are not there. There is no movement, except the edge of one, and the edge of other.)
Let me say this in another way, let me translate, let me interpret. I shall press out, express, and it shall all run: the juice of, the wine of, the seed of, flow out gushing to water still roots.
The stupid, placid ones
( those who uphold all motion),
The silent, remaining ones
( they who found and maintain),
The unentertaining, unremarkable ones
( they who tie the fabric of everything),
The ones who do not require victory,
Who do not mock the broken,
Who do not sweep away unmitigated failure,
Who do not defile the future,
Who do not despise the past,
Who appear to be voiceless,
Lacking argument, with blank, bright stares: the green, the feathered, the soft-pawed, the disinherited, the awkward, the displaced. All these, all these: eloquent, an ornament and a recompense.
(On the blank tree
This crow
Mouths a call
The wind disguises.
A scattering of runes from Odin’s spear. No fuss in this universe as the sun flips over, turns to face jaded prophecy, a certain arrogant science, a philosophy of endings.)
Now it settles and fades,
Now it whispers subdued,
Explaining nothing.
It has found its place,
Existing, flung together,
Til its release
In deeper silence.
—-
“The Sunlight Sutras” are a collection of aphorisms and mnemonics I published recently as a little, as it were, unilluminated manuscript. Things fed to me by the world, regurgitated, a green vision blurred. ( if interested head to the Blurb bookshop ( http://blurb.com ) and check out the first 15 pages….). This dream stream inspired by one or two sutras, versions and elaborations of which begin the piece off.
—–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Autumn, blackbird, clouds, harvest festival, hills, landscape, mist, Poetry, rain, seaons, silence, song, time, valleys on October 6, 2013| 4 Comments »
HARVEST FESTIVAL
Cloud rests, winged.
Feathered, these upland mists.
Green grey the day along
Swathed and shrouded hills.
The still, one prayer, arcs
The scooped valleys.
(Pitted the stones,
Time-pocked).
A bell, a peal:
A gathered fruitfulness,
A hymnal of sunlit days.
In sainted, beached ship,
Sails of praise turn tides.
We become indwelling,
Folded,
The promise of rain,
The blackbird’s quiver-
Heart arrowed, liquid.
——
simonhlilly 