Uplift

and then there is nothing like action to lift a drooping spirit to be up and doing because such action brings us beyond that microscopic looking at self that magnification of everything out of all proportion and like a strange and powerful medicine it transforms us through the sweat of our brows and so i cut the grass and prune the hedges and in so doing to an extent i prune away at myself i cut off all those decaying bits of self-pity and shake free all those ripe fruit and beyond ripe fruit which must needs fall to the ground and in a sense that is what we are doing when we exercise or go to the gym or perform any physical activity as these bodies that we possess are stone age ones and they need to be exercised as too much living in the mind can bring a person down down down and a balance is needed between the spiritual the intellectual and the physical and we need to be rooted in our bodies which after all are all that we have got and we can only dismiss the body at our peril and as i age i am beginning to become more comfortable with this body and realise with st francis that it is brother body it is all that i have and soul or soul is just not contained therein like a fluid in a container oh no oh no there is a unity of being between body and mind between body and soul and so i like the formulation body-mind or body-soul because these two realities which we separate for convenience are really not two realities at all they are ONE ONE ONE calling to the universe in a ONENESS in a oneness in a oneness and we feel that we are whole and this writer needs to feel whole needs to take stock needs to sit with and listen to what the body can tell him and not to get lost in the mind or intellect for that really is often an escapism and escape from the reality of the material body and yes the body is material and yet and yet it is more because i am not just a material body i am in fact a body-soul a body which feels and thinks and moves and cries for joy and sorrow and so i am a body-soul or a soul-body and never again the cartesian dualism for me which divided the reality that we are and left us with nothing but a soul or spirit inhabiting the husk of a body the shell and that and that is all in the past and i write and i write and i let the stream of consciousness flow because i need to comfort myself by allowing my unconscious my great unconscious to speak and to go on speaking and i want to listen because i know that i know so much so much more than i am actually aware of and so like freud i want to make my unconscious conscious i want to be open to all nooks and crannies to all the corners to all the shadows to all the demons as well as to the spaces of my unconscious that have a little more light i want to take out all the dusty ornaments that are lying in the dark corners of my mind i want to accept all the creepy crawlies all the mess and sweat of life all those ants that live under all those un-upturned rocks and yes i want to go around the labyrinth and dungeon of my mind and upturn those rocks and let all the shadowy parts of myself all the neglected parts of my self all the suppressed and oppressed parts of myself let them all out and let them dry off in the sum and become that dried and lifeless fruit they really are for then all my fears will be dried up and lifeless and will not be crawling around and frightening me in my dreams and yes we are just that a unity a strange unity gathered up from bits of this and bits of that within us and i am many selves seeking a union in a greater or basic self if only i could find it and i am left with this with this with this and i repeat it because i need it to sound like a chorus calling to my soul indeed more properly to my body-soul to gather together all the bits and pieces of this ageing self and let it bloom until it is time for the fruit to fall until it is time until it is time to go back to the earth from which i came... 

Undone, Undone and yet again Undone

A Picture of my 94 year old demented mother

...and it's difficult to understand always difficult how those random juxtapositions happen from this death to that and to the other and thoughts and dreams and images always fleeting of faces long since departed come to this mind unbidden and still the world goes on from losing this bank card to the other to losing one's way in a new city or in some other strange place to breaking a rib being mugged failing or passing or honouring an exam and all this juxtaposed randomly always randomly always randomly and then the passion of the little man who will be president that little man with the big voice and the bigger vision that big vision of what we can be as a nation of what we can be as a people if only we have the courage of our convictions the congruence to be true to self like old Polonius recommended to his dear departing son: yea yea yea and this above all to thine own self be true and all that follows yea yea yea all that follows that one in that case can never be false to another to another to any other human being or even any being as i remember my childhood dog my childhood dog still licking my wounded or cut knees ah yes and the randomness of it all and now there are keys on our calculators to generate numbers at random and all and still as a thinking mind and as a hurting soul i long for an order to the chaos of these thoughts and yet in the seeming chaos of this uncensored stream of consciousness i write on and on and on in order to plumb the depths of my being in order to be true to my self whatever or whoever that may be and i am aware so well aware that even in the randomness of these words there is a thrust to order there is a thrust to meaning there is a thrust to authenticity and to the truth that lies buried like gold in the caverns and caves and passage ways of my being and so that little man our new president with his big voice and greater dream and greater vision is leading me leading this little thinking being this little insignificant mind typing these little random words always random but always in a randomness seeking order ever seeking order and meaning and i think and and i meditate now on the slow death of the wife of a work colleague random death for me but a bitter painful soul-searing one for the poor colleague and his two soon-to-be-orphaned children and this randomness and the suddenness of it all like a shower unexpected pelting down seemingly out of nowhere on a fine day such a fine day and yet little lives are ending ending ending in big and greater pain and it is not you or i at least not yet and as i type i meditate like Sogyal Rinpoche on the Tibetan book of the Living and the Dead on this coming death which is a little death for me and on the coming death of another colleague trying valiantly to struggle on and not to give in i praise his courage and yet i cannot let go some of the injuries he has inflicted on me and on other friends of mine but i know that as i go on and on and on those injuries are getting less and less as they are all about ego all about ego-ego-ego-ego which goes on and on unless vanquished and so these words are stuttering and halting and random and seeking order and meaning and they are not behaving as well as i should wish and yet the little unseasonal daisy in my lawn half-way through an unusually warn November is too random too unusual and yet that is life so random and that is what the great professor Stephen Hawking says that all is random that living and dying is all a matter of luck all a game of chance which we are invited to play and yes that is where some personal philosophy or wisdom comes into play we must learn to play as creatively as possible whatever random hand of cards we get in life and press on and on and dress ourselves appropriately or as appropriately as possible for whatever weather we encounter for whatever winds lash against the canvas of our earthly tent we call our body-soul or soul-body or whatever or whoever we as named are in all our humanity and animal-ness in all our weaknesses and strengths in all our littlenesses and greatnesses in all our brittleness or leochaileacht as a Gaelic poet put it and so and so the sheer randomness and juxtaposition of a drunken man slobbering over a half-eaten dinner and the silliness of two dogs copulating or two teenagers screwing on a settee or or or and these words fade into nothing and trail away away away into nothing nothing nothing...

The Eternal Now

Sculpture at the American Military Cemetery, Normandy

Sculpture at German Military Cemetery.

and all spiritualities talk about living in the now the eternal now because it alone is all we have as the past is already gone and is merely a somewhat cloudy memory while the future has not yet come and is merely a fleeting vision if we are lucky and that's it my soul-friend the future and the past are illusory leaving us only to dwell in the eternal now that now that goes on forever leaving us with the mystery of time which we know only by the changes wrought on and in our very bodies and that is what ageing and growing old for me is yes that's what it is a coming to terms with the body-soul or soul-body as a unity ah yes that is what growing old is for me yes it is a coming to terms with my body an acknowledgement of its weaknesses and failings with all its bumps and lumps and imperfections exacerbated by the weathering of the years and my spirituality is a growing of my soul-into-body and my body-into-soul a growing beyond all atomization a growing beyond all splitting of the self because my self is so intimately bound up with my body that i know of no separation and ageing is carrying me beyond old certainties and old categories one reads of in dusty old books a going beyond the dualisms and dualities a going beyond cartesian categories of body and soul and yet those old rationalists knew a lot but they kept mathematically dividing reality and even Self whereas the modern thrust of psyche and of Self and of body-soul is to unity union and unification and to live in the now is to hear my stomach growl after the light meal i have eaten as it sucks in through osmosis whatever nourishment was in the food i ate and this is the now of my body and of my body-soul as it feels these keys and taps this flow of consciousness on this screen in front of me the nowness of it all and the dog barking somewhere at the back of my house and i acknowledge its presence as I do the feel and gentle rattle of the keys that give shape and form to these emanations of the Self or of body-soul or of soul-body and all the while i am becoming an Observer or Witness of all about me as well as all within me and i am becoming a Listener to Self as well as to Others and this is the way i can be in this world and a i type i feel like e e cummings who wrote without any punctuation becoming as it were part of what he was writing rather than the creator or objectively ordering person-writer-narrator as the ordering mind begins to notice and observe rather than to order and predict and determine or pre-determine and ageing for me is becoming a letting go a going beyond a wanting to control a going beyond a logical or rational ordering of things to meet my ideas of how things are or should be it's as if i was becoming a more neutral screen or plate letting all those stimuli from outside and even from inside register on it and meditation is teaching me to listen and in listening to accept to accept to accept to accept a small word worth repeating but its denoted and connoted meanings are so hard to achieve and yet i am painfully and gradually doing it and i love the fact that my mind now is teeming onto this page without control of my consciousness and i feel like i have dived into an ocean and am learning to swim learning to let go the Ego learning learning learning to knock it into shape to take away its desire for control dreadful control which has led to Hitlerian destruction and devastation ah my soul ah my body ah my body-soul ah my soul-body my oneness and unity of being i delight in you that delights in others and that brings some lightness to this world weighed down with the madness of manic capitalism which is gobbling us up like an ever hungry monster and so many of us are prey to our desires and the ads on t.v. and radio and magazines and Internet all yes all are purposely composed to lure the desires of the id of the id that cesspit primordially rooted in our being... now now now NOW...  that's all i need all i need as the i diminishes  

As This Thaw Sets In ....



I took this picture on Howth Head

...as this thaw sets in I sit and listen to whatever it is I am inside call it soul or self or mind or psyche or spirit or heart or whatever energy forces me to write these lines these lines that will come out in an effort to express whatever it is that I am inside and I press on because I have rested enough and waited long enough like a Beckettian diminished hero even anti-hero who fills the space about him with words that do not connect with words that further do not connect with those words of others and all I've got is these words here because the expression of what I wish to say is so so hard so far beyond me as I struggle to make these words behave upon this page ah they are recalcitrant troops indeed and somehow it is a lack of connection I feel tonight as I write these cyphers in search of words in search of sentences in search of paragraphs in search of articles in search of short stories in search of novels in search of some meaning and somehow somehow it has long since hit home it has long since been accepted by my mind or heart or soul or self or psyche call it what you will long long since accepted that the menacing lies in the search not in the destination that the real pleasure lies in the carving of the sculpture in the painting of the portrait in the composing of the sonata and I still reel somewhat from this gradual ageing of my body from this gradual getting to know this BODY-SOUL or is it SOUL-BODY this being this oneness or wholeness of being or self that I am this grappling  with this attempt to come to terms with what is breaking down in me with what is growing up in me with what I am putting together like a surreal crossword puzzle or even a surreal jigsaw puzzle and sometimes I regret I was not born with greater skill in writing with deeper depths to plumb and then I take heart from the sonnets of the great Bard of Avon from great great Shakespeare with his wonderful and wondrously magical language ah those words
ah all those iambic pentameters unrhyming ah and all those soliloquies and all those poems and poems those Shakespearean sonnets and how that great man was often in awe of this man's or that man's gift or talent that so great a genius as he could have envied the talent of others is mind blowing and yet he tells us that in one of his sonnets sonnet 29 it is how he desired all these things because When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,//I all alone beweep my outcast state,//And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,//And look upon myself and curse my fate,//Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,//Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,//Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,//With what I most enjoy contented least.// all of this, yea all of this heartens me because if even the great bard himself could be full of self-doubt then we lesser mortals can be too and I will write on and I will type these keys till my neck pains me and my fingers begin to trip themselves up in pursuit of even a few insights into this life heavy as it is with unthawed snow with unthawed sorrows seeking a thaw seeking to run away in rivulets and drain drain into the dry earth and begin to irrigate it begin to bring it the balm of healing begin to bring it the dew of pity for a deathly thirst and bring that soil to life to let the soil be dampened with compassion and then to allow the shoots of hope crawl slowly to the air and stab its stems upward towards the blinding sun and that is what my poor soul needs and like Gerard Manley Hopkins 

Howth Harbour at Night

I write my prayer in his words in his words send my soil rain yea yea yea send my soul rain ah I think it was this last the priest-poet or poet-priest said and I have long ago emptied my anger from the Wells of my soul and I am thankful for these small mercies that no anger lingers now no anger lingers now and I type on and all the neuronal connections come to life as synapses leap to life like engines in the metaphorical car of my imagination and I want these words to sing I want them to sing like Shakespeare's words did once and still do sing when great actors give them voice upon the stage or even when the poor drooling schoolboy gives them voice in a stuffy classroom on a wet and rainy day and I want these words to give voice to my soul just the way Gerard Manley Hopkins sang forth his joys and sorrows in musical words upon the page in inscape in instress and in all his sprung rhythm springing forth like strange characters or Jacks from boxes catching us off guard or like a Robert Frost busy with the actuality of living and yet giving that actuality of everyday-ness life in words as saws leaped up and cut off arms or like the snows that fell silently and how he lingered and stopped by the woods where they fell and contemplated the slow miracle of it all the slow miracle of life and I am needing slow miracle and snowfalls in my heart of hearts and in my soul and in my Body-Soul or Soul-Body and I need the frosts of cares to come like they did to the short-lived mind and heart and soul and psyche and spirit of the great poet Chidiock Tichborne before he lost his life in the Tower of London and then to have those care melt away in the thaw run away in rivulets that tickle the grass and the ground and the concrete as they disappear down gulleys and drains and run away to the sea and yes I want to write and yes I want to let my heart go and spread itself across the pages of my second book and to let my soul sing and louder sing as the great W.B. Yeats great Nobel Laureate of Literature said let my soul louder and louder sing for every tatter of its mortal dress and these words linger in my heart where the centre will hold oh yes the centre will hold because there is a Still Point which the heart or mind or soul can achieve there is a Still Point there is a zazen there is a sitting there is a sitting a place where the Body-Soul will sit cross legged in thanks for being alive in thanks for being alive in thanks for these poor words upon a page in search of a prayer to speak its simple beauty...