stream before bedtime

ah and the sitting here in the silence of the spacious room that is my mind and i sit and listen to my heart beat in silence silence silence and in the background there is a leonard cohen song playing on my sound system lulling me ever deeper into the stillpoint the stillpoint where i long to be this night as the tears trickle from my eyelids as life ticks away away as memories of ann whom once i loved is now just a fading memory and it was a love that was meant to die die die as we all are dying and yet i am not too sad because there is a peace of acceptance beginning to drop like the dew on the grass in the cold of the early morning and i type these words and wonder at their healing power and i will never dwell in the valley of self-pity never never never because it is a selfish waste of precious time no no no i will climb to the mountain from which i can get a viewing point where i shall rest a while and look back at my climb at my slow and winding climb ever upwards ever upwards towards the acceptance of self the only truth the very centre of self the very centre of gravity of all life and this is all we have that journey to the centre or core of self that centre which alone will hold in this mystifying universe this universe ever expanding expanding expanding and i type and listen to the healing words of the lyrics of a song and these words are healing me as they pour like a balm over my soul ah these words are the sweet waters that heal heal and heal ever more deeply and cohen sings on dancing me ever deeper into my soul ever ever deeper like a caver of the cavernous labyrinthine soul and these words are lighting the way down down down and dance me deeper deeper to the end of love and in that end i will surely find a beginning and these are the words that sound out my heart and then the music ah yes the music that enchants my soul that brings a tear with every stroke and caress of string for i need this music to play on and on for i need more healing that once i thought i never needed i need to be cherished and cuddled and comforted in the arms of mother earth in the arms of mother earth in the peace of mother earth in the peace in the peace of mother earth at her bosom at her bosom and i need more more more than a thousand kisses to heal my wounded heart and yet my soul is light for it courts the beauty of the imagination the imagination oh yes the beauty of the wondrous imagination that can enchant the soul to sing its song oh so strong oh so strong and i listen on not alone to cohen and his songs but to my own soul song that sings as these words will out as the truth of self will out as congruence and authenticity play the strings of my heart and they play them sound they play them sound they play them sweet and what a music those strings make what a music what a beautiful music and the truth it lies in the spacious room that is my mind and it is a room that has some seats and chairs and loads of lovely bookcases with those sacred books of knowledge that once my mother bought in the poverty of my youth in the poverty of my youth in those far away times those days almost forgotten when little or so little was such a lot and sometimes when the night is slow i sit and listen to cohen singing a thousand kisses deep and let those words lull me to sleep to sleep perchance to dream and in that dream of death what sleep may come and thus ends this and thus ends this and the rest as they say is silence... and the fading words... a thousand kisses deep...

Diving Down

... all too often I am brought further and further down into those dreamy spaces of the unconscious those places that never cease to amuse that never cease to enlighten and less often now to scare the waking mind and I need these dreams to come and to come and to come ever clearer to hearten me to bring me back to a sense of a full and thriving self and yet these journeys down and up are ever spiralling ever spiralling up and down and up and down somehow circular and spiralling spiralling and circular and always it seems as if I have throdden these paths before have come this way before and yet it is strangely new yet the same and nothing in these depths is ever new and yet it seems a little different just a little ... and I will let this stream of consciousness flow like a river at full flow bringing the struggling swimmer ever onward with its tidal flood where snippets of last night's dreams come ... there I am on some sort of strange mystical rollercoaster on its way through huge buildings and I am with my mother and my two brothers Pat and Ger and a colleague from work Gerard B. and suddenly the roller coaster comes to a sudden stop and I secrete a stone from my stomach something like a kidney stone and it is very definitely formed from my body and when it is spat forth I throw it out a window and it break a lamp which falls on a passer-by by accident and I can barely see the victim's feet behind a garden tub ... and yet I know I am not responsible for this action in that the stone somehow produced itself and somehow I had not decided on anything to throw it at - it became just a missile which propelled itself from my hand out the window to smash the light that hurt the individual beneath it and yet somehow I began feeling guilty very guilty in this dream that I had done something horribly wrong and then there emerged that old Catholic guilt-tripping that horribly debilitating guilt-tripping that weapon wielded about by our traditional Catholic clerical guardians that guilt-tripping that worried my father so that brought him so psychically and spiritually low before he died and woe to those generations of power-hungry individuals in the Roman Catholic Church who crucified many with too weighty a load of guilt and I remember you Dad with love with love now as I enter the final half of my life and I am now beginning to understand what you said to me once all those years ago that someday I would understand and how true how true for now for now for now I am beginning to understand and my dreams are teaching me and the great unconscious is teaching me and in  that dream from some nights ago and in that dream on the roller-coaster Gerry B was warning me that at Mass the following day the priest would call my name from the altar for having thrown that kidney stone which broke the light that injured the man all unintentional so unintentional and in the dream the saving mother in the person of my own mother Mary came and said not to worry because this threat was so below the belt and so unnecessarily guilt-riddenly and guilt-bidningly so and indeed in the dream I did so for I determined within that dream within that deep-and-dark-seeking-light dream oh yes it was seeking light and in the dream I followed towards the light as I determined to seek my accuser out and face him down and say no you are wrong you are purposely setting me out on a guilt trip and I will not be guilt-tripped by anyone for I will face both the light and the dark equally in myself I will dive deep and in diving deep I know I have to go into those murky places those dark hairy horrible places where strange fish swim down into those caverns of the psyche and I will I will I will I will definitely surface even if a little breathless and swim as best I can and finally lie panting on the shores of knowledge in the healing sun...